“That’ll never happen, Merilee. And you’ll get their full attention. They’re professionals. How is Marty behaving?”
“Marty’s, well, Marty. Late for rehearsals, hungover. And, for some reason, he always smells like curried mutton. But he’s totally locked in and ready. And he’s the one I was worried about.”
Marty Miller, who listed his name in credits as Martin Jacob Miller so as to avoid confusion with Martin Milner of Route 66 and Adam-12 fame, had an on-again, off-again problem with drugs, alcohol and binge eating. He was also a relentless womanizer.
“It never occurred to me that Greg would be the one who’d drive me bonkers,” she went on. “Who knows, maybe looking out across the footlights tomorrow night and seeing Kate Hepburn sitting there will wake him up. I don’t seem to be able to. I guess I’m just not cut out to be a director.”
“I don’t believe that for one second. You’re Merilee Nash. You’re good at everything you do.”
“Bless you for that, darling.” Her gaze fell on the latest issue of People magazine, which lay on the kitchen table. The cover story was all about Hollywood’s hottest, unlikeliest new lovebirds—Ted Danson and Whoopi Goldberg. “Do you think they’re for real?”
“Of course they are. They’re on the cover of People. We were on the cover of People and we were for real, weren’t we?”
“You know we were.”
“What I don’t know is why you gave R. J. Romero ten thousand dollars and why he now expects me to give him twenty-five thousand more. Merilee, what’s this all about?”
Her face tightened. “Brace yourself. You’re not going to like it.”
“I already don’t like it.”
She raised her chin at me, hands folded before her on the table. “Out of all of us at Yale, R.J. was the one who had it,” she began quietly. “He was incredibly handsome, with so much raw animal intensity that when he walked out onstage you couldn’t take your eyes off of him. He grew up in the Federal Hill section of Providence with small-time wiseguys and hustlers. He was authentically street. Greg had zero charisma compared to R.J., who had total contempt for Greg. Still does. He thinks the only reason Greg has become such a big star is that he knows how to suck up to the right people. Greg’s a nice guy. He gets along well with people. That was R.J.’s big problem at Yale. He argued with everyone. It was always about staying ‘authentic’ to his Federal Hill roots. Dini was hot for him right away. It was mutual. They paired off long before she got involved with Greg. After she and R.J. broke up, she lived with Marty for a semester. But it turned out they weren’t a good match, so then she moved on to Greg.”
“Sounds as if she worked her way through the whole class.”
Merilee’s lips broke into a smile. “It wasn’t like that. Dini was a romantic. She still is.”
“And R.J.?”
“Honestly, I thought he’d be the next De Niro. We all did. Every woman in the drama school got weak in the knees around him. And every man hated him. You wouldn’t believe the envy.”
“Yeah, I would.”
“Me, I wanted to tame him. I couldn’t, of course. He was unreliable, unfaithful, stoned half of the time and in way over his head when it came to gambling. He’d bet money he didn’t have on long shots that never came in. He always owed some rough character money, which he’d pay back by borrowing it from me. He never paid me back, but I didn’t care. I was madly in love with him. He was so talented and beautiful and . . .” She broke off, her jaw clenching. “Now I’m about to tell you something that I’ve never told anyone. Not a living soul. One night, a faculty member threw a party for everyone at her place out in Stony Creek. R.J. had borrowed his cousin Richie’s Porsche so we could go. It was a wonderful evening. We all laughed a lot, drank a lot of wine. It was very late by the time he and I started back to New Haven, and I quickly realized he was in no condition to drive. He’d snorted a ton of coke in the bathroom, which I hadn’t been aware of until he started flying down those narrow, twisting country roads in the pitch-black, going faster and faster. I begged him to pull over and let me drive. He just laughed and went even faster—until we went screeching around a bend and he . . . we hit a man, Hoagy. A fellow who was out walking his dog along the shoulder of the road. I-I’ll never forget the sound that it . . .” She broke off, shuddering at the memory. “R.J. cursed and floored it out of there. I screamed at him to go back. He wouldn’t. He was coked to the gills and it turned out he hadn’t exactly borrowed his cousin Richie’s Porsche. He’d stolen it. I remember I kept screaming at him to stop the car. He finally pulled over, called me a ‘crazy whore’ and shoved me out of the car in the middle of nowhere. I walked the rest of the way home to my apartment, weeping. Ten miles at least. My feet bled.”
“Did you call nine-one-one?”
Merilee closed her eyes before she slowly shook her head. “I intended to, I swear. I-I even dialed the number from the first pay phone I came to. Only, I panicked and hung up. Next morning, it was on the local news that a prominent professor at the School of Architecture had been the victim of a late-night hit-and-run driver. A neighbor heard it happen and called the police.”
“Did the man survive?”
“He did not,” she replied, her green eyes filling with tears. “R.J. killed him. We killed him.”
“You weren’t driving.”
“I was there. I knew who was responsible. I could have given his family some comfort. Seen that justice was done. But I didn’t. I was too afraid of what would happen to me. So I kept quiet. And I’ve stayed quiet all of these years. Never told anyone.”
“You could have told me.”
“No, I couldn’t. I was too ashamed. I was also hoping it was behind me. That R.J. was behind me.”
“What happened to him?”
“He started getting work off-Broadway right away, but kept blowing it. Didn’t know his lines. Fought with his directors. He got himself fired from three or four shows. Still, he was so gifted that Marty Scorsese gave him a plum role in Raging Bull. Yet he managed to get himself fired from that, too. Drugs were involved, apparently, and I heard he actually punched Marty, who’s the size of a flea. After that, he was done. R. J. Romero destroyed a can’t-miss career, Hoagy. Single greatest waste of talent I’ve ever seen. The last I heard, he’d drifted back to the world of small-time Federal Hill hoods that he came from.”
“Except now he’s back in your life.”
“And still betting the house on impossible long shots. Would you believe he asked me if I’d let him read for Private Lives? I said, there’s no role for you. Besides, the man hasn’t been within ten miles of a workshop in God knows how long. Plus he’s strung out on heroin and looks awful.”
“I’m surprised you can even concentrate on Private Lives right now.”
“It’s the only thing keeping me sane. That and having you and Lulu here.”
“Has he been hanging around rehearsals?”
“There’s a gazebo on the town green right near the playhouse. I’ve spotted him there. He just sits there, watching and waiting.”
“Do your cast mates know about this?”
“No,” she said sharply. “He hasn’t had the nerve to speak to any of them. And I doubt they’d recognize him if they saw him. I barely did.”
“Why has he shown up now after all these years?”
“Because he’s desperate. Because he thinks I’m the last bargaining chip he has left. He said if I didn’t pay him the ten thousand dollars he’d tell the police that I was driving the Porsche that night.”
“They’d never believe him.”
“Doesn’t matter. He’ll run straight to the media and the story will be all over Entertainment Tonight by nightfall. Any charge against someone like me, no matter how frivolous, leaves its mark. And this isn’t frivolous. A man died.” She took a deep breath, letting it out raggedly. “My reputation will be ruined.”
“I wonder why he used my name as a reference on that job application.”
>
“So you’d ask me about him and stir up trouble. Along with all of the rest of his delusions, I’m quite convinced he’s hoping to win me back.”
“He told me he wants to escape to Mexico.”
“R.J. says lots of things. Half the time, he even believes them. But they’re never true. He’ll just keep coming back to us for more money until the police catch him. And when they do, I have no doubt he’ll throw me to the wolves.” She reached over and grabbed my hand, gripping it tightly. “Hoagy, what am I going to do?”
“For starters, I’m coming to rehearsals with you this morning. That’ll let him know that I’m keeping an eye on you.” I heard a low growl from under the table. “We’re keeping an eye on you. I’m also going to arrange to have lunch with Bruce Landau.” My high-powered New York City lawyer was summering nearby on the shoreline in Guilfoyle.
“What can Bruce do?”
“He has good contacts. He knows people.”
“What about your novel?”
“My novel can wait.” I squeezed her hand. “You should have told me about this before, Merilee.”
“I was taking care of it. Or I thought I was.” She detested clingy females. Was so stubborn about hiding her vulnerabilities that it was almost a sickness. “Besides, it was my own private shame.”
“I wouldn’t call it your own private shame any longer.”
“Why, what would you . . . ?”
“I’d call it blackmail.”
Chapter Two
I’m highly superstitious when it comes to a new manuscript.
There’s only one copy, much of it scribbled by hand in the margins or on the back of its smudged pages, some of which I’ve cut up with scissors so I can move certain paragraphs from one page to another and then piece them back together again with Scotch tape. If the manuscript were to disappear, then whatever I’ve written so far would be gone forever and I’d never be able to re-create it. I live in constant fear of this happening. My crappy old brownstone on West Ninety-Third Street is a total firetrap. The building hasn’t been rewired since Truman was in the White House. The ancient oil-burning furnace in the cellar frequently sends billows of acrid-smelling exhaust up the stairwell. I never leave the apartment for a lengthy period of time without gathering up the manuscript and storing it in the vegetable bin of the refrigerator. You probably think I’m joking but I’m not. I’m also not alone in this. I can think of at least half a dozen very famous authors in New York City whose manuscripts-in-progress smell faintly of rotting onions.
I’m telling you this because as I was getting ready to leave for the Sherbourne Playhouse I glanced around at the chapel and realized that I didn’t feel safe leaving The Sweet Season of Madness sitting there on the writing table. I considered sliding it underneath the mattress but what good would that do me if the chapel caught fire? After careful consideration I ended up tucking it inside the freezer chest in Merilee’s mudroom alongside a leg of venison that her elderly neighbor Mr. MacGowan had given her during hunting season.
Merilee had already taken off for the theater in the Jag by the time R.J. called me back with the when and where for the money drop—nine o’clock tonight at the old cast iron gate to Sherbourne’s abandoned brass mill. After I got off the phone with him I set up a lunch date with my lawyer, Bruce Landau, showered, stropped grandfather’s razor, shaved, powdered my neck with Floris No. 89 talc and dressed in the new white linen suit from Strickland & Sons, a pale blue shirt, polka-dot bow tie, perforated spectator balmorals and my snap brim fedora.
For wheels I had use of the powder blue 1950 Ford Woody wagon that Merilee had bought from the estate of her dear, departed nonagenarian Lyme friend Margaret, an aviatrix who’d been a test pilot during World War I. Solid as a tank, heavy and quiet. And the Woody wasn’t bad either. Had forty-two thousand miles on it, no rust, its original wood and five brand-new wide whites. Merilee also kept an old tan Land Rover around that she used for lugging stuff to the dump, but it shook like crazy if you tried to push it past fifty on the highway. So I took the Woody, with Lulu curled up next to me.
Sherbourne was nestled along the bank of the Sherbourne River between Lyme and New Haven. Many of the old factory towns in Connecticut, towns that had once produced everything from wall clocks to buttons to bullets, had become decaying eyesores. But the attractive ones near the shoreline, like Sherbourne, had managed to survive as quaint weekend getaways for New Yorkers. The three-story Victorian Sherbourne Inn, which overlooked the lush town green with its ornate gazebo, had once been the home of the brass mill’s owner. The town had a smattering of bars, restaurants and art galleries. And it had the Sherbourne Playhouse, which was steeped in so much theatrical history that there was no way that Merilee and her friends were going to let it be torn down.
A crew was beginning to raise a huge tent on the green for the champagne bash that was scheduled to take place two hours before the curtain rose tomorrow evening. Inside this tent the three hundred or so New York City stage and society luminaries who were attending the one and only benefit performance of Private Lives would have a chance to chatter and soak up flattering coverage from Entertainment Tonight, Inside Edition, the New York newspapers and local New York and Connecticut TV stations. Trucks were lined up everywhere delivering tables and chairs and lighting and portable generators.
Mimi Whitfield was supervising the entire operation. When it came to event planning Merilee said that Mimi was a wonder. Back in her modeling heyday Mimi had driven a Mustang convertible in a famous TV commercial in which she’d laughed so deliciously while the wind blew through her mane of lustrous blond hair that she’d become an American icon. She still had the mane of blond hair, sky blue eyes and great cheekbones. And for a woman who was two or three years north of forty she still looked plenty desirable in a blue silk tank top and tight jeans, even if she was now sporting a nonsexy pager on her Hermès belt. I knew Mimi from back when Merilee and I would run into her at Elaine’s, where Lulu enjoyed the distinction of being the only dog in New York City who had her own water bowl. In those days Mimi was dating one of the Yankees’ starting pitchers. I knew her to be a climber. It wasn’t long before she traded in her pitcher for the toad-faced real estate baron who was now her ex-husband.
She took a break from barking orders at the tent crew to give me her great big cover girl smile. “Say a prayer for me, Hoagy, if you have any pull with the man upstairs.”
“I haven’t, I’m afraid. Any reason in particular?”
“The weatherman’s predicting a fifty percent chance of thunderstorms and gale-force winds tomorrow evening. If it rains during our performance I’ll have a total disaster on my hands. Our roof is so completely shot that the actors will get drenched standing right there onstage. So will the audience. The dressing rooms will flood—also swarm with the rats that live in the basement under the theater.” I heard a low, unhappy moan and felt Lulu trembling at my feet. She’s terrified of rats. “And if it gets windy enough the tent will break loose from its stakes and go flying across the town green. It can’t rain. It just can’t.”
“Then it won’t. It just won’t. Not to worry, Mimi. The evening’s going to be a smashing success.”
Another delivery truck pulled up outside of the theater. Mimi’s pager promptly beeped. She hustled off to attend to it.
“It’s LULU!” I heard two little girls cry out from behind me.
Lulu let out another low, unhappy moan as Greg and Dini’s seven-year-old twin girls, Durango and Cheyenne, came dashing across the green toward us, looking like miniature Disney pirates in their red bandanna head scarves, sleeveless white T-shirts and blue denim cutoffs. Durango and Cheyenne were thin, snub-nosed, strawberry blondes just like their mom. The twins were eerily identical. I’m talking Diane Arbus identical. The only way to tell them apart was that Durango had recently lost a front tooth. They both adored Lulu. Fell right to their knees on the grass, tugging on her ears, patting her and making a huge fuss.
&n
bsp; “Hey, Lulu!”
“We missed you, Lulu!”
Lulu suffered the indignity of their attention with stoic good grace. She was accustomed to kids going gaga over her. Goes with the territory if you’re a basset hound. Though she did extract payback by letting out a huge yawn.
Durango made a face. “Eew. Hoagy, how come her breath is so bad?”
“She has rather unusual eating habits.”
“What does she eat, boogers?”
“Girls, don’t you make a nuisance of yourselves,” Dini’s mother, Glenda, ordered them fiercely, absolutely determined that her privileged granddaughters not behave like spoiled brats. She was making her way across the grass toward us at a considerably slower pace, puffing in the warm morning air. Glenda, a North Carolina widow in her sixties, was short and heavy. She wore her white hair parted in the middle and cropped at the chin. Or I should say chins. I could make out at least three before they melted into a puddle at the open collar of her short-sleeved magenta print blouse, which she wore with nonmatching magenta slacks and bone-colored walking shoes. Her bare arms jiggled.
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