The Fourth Wall

by Barbara Paul

  He paused to drink some beer. “I want you to make out a list of everyone connected with Foxfire—cast, crew, the backers, the people in the box office—what do you call them?”

  “Front-of-house. House manager, ticket sellers, secretary, ushers.”

  “Everybody. The janitors, the watchmen, and the doorkeeper. Then go through the list one name at a time and try to remember if each one had any connection, any connection whatsoever, with Manhattan Repertory. Only when you’re absolutely certain there’s no connection, then cross that name off your list. Will you do that?”

  “If you think it’ll help,” I said without enthusiasm.

  “I think it’s essential,” he said shortly. “I’m going to ask the others to do the same thing—Hugh Odell, Ian Cavanaugh, Vivian Frank. What about Leo Gunn? Could he help? I imagine he did most of his work backstage, didn’t he?”

  “Oh no, not at all. Leo was on the governing committee.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, we didn’t have a producer per se. We hired a business manager, but we acted as our own producers. That’s what the committee was for. It was made up of representatives from the various groups that work on a play—directors, actors, designers. Leo represented the backstage crews. He was in on all the decisions we made—what plays to produce, whom to cast, how much money to spend on each production.”

  “Then I’ll definitely want a list from him. How well did your committee work together?”

  “About as well as any committee can be expected to. Perhaps a little better than most. We were all basically agreed about what we wanted or we wouldn’t have been there in the first place.”

  The Lieutenant finished his beer. “There’s one other thing I want you to do. You have three locks on your front door. Buy two more. Then leave one unlocked every day. To fool anybody with a set of picks who might be trying to get in.”

  I told him I’d see to it; I’d heard of the trick. Before he left he checked my back door and advised two more locks there as well. On his way out he said, “Try not to worry about your friend. I’m sure Reddick’s all right.”

  “But what if you can’t find him?”

  “If we can’t find him, the murderer certainly won’t. He doesn’t have the resources we have. But I think the worst part is over, for Reddick. Keep your door locked.”

  And on that cautionary note, he departed.

  4

  Griselda Gold accompanied the Foxfire tour company to Cleveland, where they opened Thursday night to lukewarm reviews. I thought I was prepared for that, but I wasn’t. But in spite of the critics, the run was completely sold out, as was the next week’s run in Chicago. Rosemary Odell’s murder had made the name of the play familiar to the entire country. What a shitty way to make it big.

  I called a locksmith and had the new locks installed, as Lieutenant Goodlow had suggested. Most of my time was spent working on The New Play. It was going fast, faster than I usually wrote. Short, cinematic scenes; multileveled stage with a minimum of props and stage furniture; all scenery projected. If I had a scene that could go three different ways, instead of deciding which would be best I’d write it all three ways and then leave it to decide upon later.

  Lieutenant Goodlow called and wanted to know if I had his list of Foxfire people who’d also been associated with Manhattan Rep. I lied and said I hadn’t quite finished; in truth, I hadn’t even begun. But I couldn’t put it off forever, so I got down to it.

  Right away I was in trouble. Lieutenant Goodlow had asked me to consider everybody, and I realized I didn’t know the name of a single one of the ushers. I knew the doorkeeper, and the night watchman’s first name was Howard; but I didn’t remember the name of the day watchman, the old man who’d been chloroformed when the set was wrecked. He might not even be working there any longer. And the guards Gene Ramsay had hired—what were their names? I’m sure I must have known their names at one time. But I was fairly certain none of these people had had anything to do with Manhattan Rep.

  Allowing for all those question marks, I came up with the following names: John Reddick, Sylvia Markey, Ian Cavanaugh, Hugh Odell, Vivian Frank, Leo Gunn, Abigail James. I called Lieutenant Goodlow and read him my list.

  “Similar to Cavanaugh’s list—but with one exception,” said the Lieutenant. “He included a name you didn’t. Jerry Rosen.”

  Blank. “Who’s Jerry Rosen?”

  “Your former properties manager. Before, er, Tiny.”

  “Oh, that Jerry. But he wasn’t with Manhattan Rep.”

  “Evidently he was. Both Cavanaugh and Leo Gunn put him on their lists.”

  I tried to think. People had come and gone in the backstage crews at Manhattan Rep; it was hard to remember all of them. When I’d been introduced to Jerry during the Foxfire rehearsals, I’d spoken to him as to a new acquaintance and he hadn’t corrected me. But maybe he’d forgotten me too, or had been too polite to remind me we’d met before.

  “I’m sorry, Lieutenant, I just don’t remember him.”

  “Leo Gunn says he came in during the third year. Does that help?”

  Then something clicked. The last two plays before we shut our doors forever. A big-eyed, skinny kid who looked as if he should still be in high school. “Yes,” I sighed, “Leo’s right. Jerry was still a boy then—I didn’t make the connection.”

  “See how easy it is to overlook someone? Will you give it some more thought? There might be someone else.”

  I promised I would.

  “By the way, Jerry Rosen is in the clear. At the time Rosemary Odell was killed, he was in Beth Israel Hospital having a polyp removed from his nose. One more thing. Do you think you could nudge Vivian Frank a little? I still don’t have her list.”

  I said I would, and we both hung up. I still had my hand on the phone when it rang.

  “Abby? This is Ian. Can you meet me for lunch? There’s something we need to talk about.”

  “Yes, certainly. What is it?”

  “I’d rather tell you when I see you.” He named Paone’s on East Thirty-fourth, and an hour later I was seated in the roomy restaurant worrying about fatting myself to death.

  “It’s John Reddick’s apartment,” said Ian. “I’d assumed his parents would come to New York and close the apartment, but Goodlow says no.”

  “Should it be closed?” I said.

  “That’s what I was wondering. What if John needs the place? He could still be in New York.”

  “I doubt that. Goodlow says he didn’t leave the country, but that still leaves a lot of space out there to hide in. Still, I think you’re right—the apartment should be kept available. Just in case.”

  “Will his parents pay the rent?”

  “I’ve never met John’s parents. But from what he’s said about them, I don’t think they can be counted on for much of anything.”

  In the end we decided to take care of it ourselves—both of us hoping against hope that John might come out of hiding at any time. Ian would pay the rent and I’d take care of the utilities and the answering service, which we decided to continue for at least another month. It was a fair division of responsibility; Ian made a lot more money than I did.

  “What do you think of Lieutenant Goodlow?” asked Ian.

  “I like him,” I said. “And I think he’s probably a good cop. But I don’t expect any miracles. Have you ever seen him smile? I don’t think I have.”

  Ian toyed with his fish Malandrino. “I went to a private investigator, Abby. He wouldn’t touch the case. Said there was nothing he could do that the police hadn’t already done.”

  I stopped eating.

  “I’m next, you know,” Ian said calmly. “He missed me once, but that doesn’t mean I’m off the hook. Sylvia took the cold cream that was meant for me, but he’ll come up with something else. The private investigator advised me to leave town.”

  “You’re not going to, are you?”

  “I’ve thought about it. Maybe John has the right ide
a. But one person can hide a lot easier than three. And I can’t run away and leave my family here alone. I hate like hell the idea of going back to a bodyguard, but maybe that’s the answer.”

  I swallowed a little wine. “It seems to be working at the theater. Gene Ramsay’s round-the-clock guard, I mean. It wouldn’t hurt, Ian. I know you don’t like the idea of a stranger in your home, but surely this can’t go on forever.”

  Ian gave a slow, sad smile. “Do you really believe that?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Abby. We’re going to have to tell Goodlow about Michael Crown.”

  Coming at me like that, out of the blue, it caught me off guard. Ian was evoking an ugly episode from our shared past that I’d thought was buried and done with. “I haven’t thought of Michael Crown for years,” I said. “Why bring him up now? The man’s dead. So is that whole episode. What can it possibly have to do with what’s happening now?”

  “I don’t know. But Goodlow keeps hammering away at the idea that Manhattan Rep must have done something. Abby, we lived in a state of constant crisis the whole three years we were in operation—but there was nothing unusual about that. The only unusual thing that happened to us—the only thing—was Michael Crown.”

  Michael Crown was a man who’d taken his own life three weeks before Manhattan Rep had officially opened its doors for the first time. Crown had never worked with Manhattan Rep—so I hadn’t thought of him when trying to figure out what the company had done to cause such a rampage of vengeance. “I suppose you’re right. I think I’d sealed Michael Crown off in a separate compartment of my mind. But I still don’t see any connection between a suicide eight years ago and what’s happening now.”

  “Nor do I,” said Ian. “But it’s been nagging at me. Goodlow had better know the whole story.”

  We agreed there was no time like the present and got up to leave. Two gushing fans stopped Ian as we were going out, disturbing Paone’s characteristic decorum. Ian was short with them, almost rude.

  We went straight from the restaurant to Midtown Precinct South. Lieutenant Goodlow was out, so we left a message that we had something to tell him and where we could be reached.

  At my place, I watched Ian prowl through my library for a while and decided to tell him about Sylvia and Jake.

  He was shocked. “Abby, could you be mistaken? Jake Steiner always struck me as being such a, well, comfortable sort of person. No hidden neuroses or the like.”

  “Comfortable, yes,” I agreed, “but there’s no mistake, Ian. Jake is happy, now that Sylvia has been reduced to a state of helplessness. I’m not sure he even realizes it himself—but he’s in his element.”

  “My God.” Ian was silent a moment. “And you say you can’t get in to see her?”

  “I can’t even get her on the phone. Between the doorman downstairs and the nurse upstairs, Sylvia is very effectively cut off from the outside world.”

  Ian’s handsome face was troubled. “Are you thinking the same thing I’m thinking?”

  “That Jake Steiner’s responsible for what’s been happening? No. If he were out to ‘get’ Sylvia, there’d be no reason for the other things that happened afterward.”

  “To cover up? To hide his trail?”

  “Murder to hide a lesser offense? No. Jake’s a monster, but not that kind of monster.”

  Ian nodded. “Yes, it would make sense. But I agree that someone ought to check on Sylvia. I’ll have a try at it. Maybe I’m better at bullying doormen than you are. They live on Central Park South, don’t they? What’s the number?”

  I told him the number and he wrote it down. Then we continued to wait for Lieutenant Goodlow.

  It was four o’clock before he got there. “I see you got the two extra locks,” he said approvingly as he sat down. “Now what was it you wanted to tell me?”

  Ian took the lead. “Have you ever heard of Michael Crown?”

  “The playwright? Yes, I saw one of his plays once. Committed suicide, didn’t he? About five or six years ago?”

  “Eight.” Ian frowned. “Closer to nine, now. You’ve been asking us what Manhattan Rep did that might cause someone to want to hurt us. The only thing we did that was out of the ordinary was, ah, done to Michael Crown. And he’s dead.”

  Now it was the Lieutenant’s turn to frown. “Michael Crown was associated with Manhattan Repertory?”

  “No, but he almost was.”

  “Better start at the beginning.”

  Ian thought a moment and then asked, “Which of his plays did you see, Lieutenant?”

  “Mmm. Something about a phoenix.”

  “The Phoenix Is Grounded, yes. That’s the one that started the whole thing. It was different from his earlier plays, enormously different. Abby …?”

  I picked up the story. “Crown’s plays were superficial and commercial and about as subtle as a heart attack. The characters were flat and almost totally interchangeable—”

  “That’s the truth,” said Ian. “I know, I played one once.”

  “The so-called plots were just flimsy excuses for assembling a bunch of people who stood around swapping one-liners. Crown went for the cheap, easy laugh every time. Good comedy is hard to write, and Crown wrote dialogue better suited to TV sitcoms than the stage. In short, he wrote the very kind of play that Manhattan Rep was founded to avoid.”

  “And then came The Phoenix Is Grounded,” said Ian.

  “Then came The Phoenix Is Grounded,” I agreed, “and we all had our ears pinned back. You saw the play, Lieutenant. It’s good comedy, solid and substantial, with real people acting out a credible story line. But most important, the play has a point to it—none of Crown’s earlier plays had any point at all. The Times man wrote that Michael Crown had suddenly grown up.”

  Lieutenant Goodlow shifted his weight. “What does all this have to do with Manhattan Repertory?”

  Ian said, “You recall the purpose of the company? We wanted to put on new drama as well as good older plays that sometimes get overlooked. The older plays were no problem—the problem was finding enough good new plays to round out our repertory. We had Abby, of course, but she couldn’t write all the new plays we put on.”

  “I wrote two,” I said.

  “Do you remember Preston Scott, Lieutenant?” Ian asked. “The director, one of the founders of Manhattan Rep?”

  Lieutenant Goodlow nodded.

  “After The Phoenix Is Grounded, Preston went to see Michael Crown,” Ian went on, “and asked him to submit a script to Manhattan Rep. Crown gave us a play called Two for a Penny. We were afraid it might be his usual claptrap, but it wasn’t. It was every bit as good as The Phoenix Is Grounded, and we decided to do it during our second season. This was, oh, maybe a couple of months before we opened for the first time—the schedule was already set for the first year.”

  “Then what?” asked Lieutenant Goodlow. “I think I see what’s coming.”

  “Then Abby found out Michael Crown didn’t write either The Phoenix Is Grounded or Two for a Penny.”

  “By sheer accident,” I said. “A friend in Marseilles had sent me a cheaply printed anthology of plays by a writer named Éitienne Quilliot. My friend said Quilliot had never had much success on the French stage—a few provincial productions, nothing in Paris. But she thought he was good and that I might be interested. Quilliot had recently died, and five of his plays were published by his friends as a sort of memorial. It was a limited edition, several hundred copies—not much circulation. I read French slowly, so it took me a while. But by the time I’d finished a play called Le Cagot, I was certain it was The Phoenix Is Grounded. Even Crown’s title wasn’t original—it’s a line from the play.”

  “So then what?”

  “So then I took a copy of the play Crown had submitted to us—Two for a Penny—and went hunting. Sure enough, there it was. Quilliot had called it À vil prix. Crown had changed the names of the characters and moved the setting from Paris to New York, but Two for a Penny
was definitely À vil prix. So Michael Crown hadn’t suddenly blossomed into a real writer after all. He’d merely turned into a thief.”

  “And so,” said Lieutenant Goodlow, “when you confronted him with it, he killed himself.”

  “Which knocked us all for a loop,” said Ian. “I was sure Crown would just try to brazen it out—he struck me as that kind of man. But he must desperately have wanted to be known as a good writer, even if it meant stealing from a dead playwright.”

  “Of all the kinds of theft there are,” I said slowly, “I think stealing another person’s work is just about the lowest. Michael Crown made a ton of money out of The Phoenix Is Grounded. We told him if he didn’t make immediate restitution to Quilliot’s heirs, we’d call in the police. But he said he couldn’t—the money was all gone.”

  “So he was in debt and threatened with prison as well,” said Lieutenant Goodlow. “Who confronted him? Just you two?”

  “No, the whole committee,” said Ian. “You know about the governing committee?”

  “Ms James told me.”

  “Abby brought the matter to the committee. We asked Crown to come in and then told him we knew he hadn’t written either The Phoenix Is Grounded or Two for a Penny and what did he plan to do about it.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He crumbled. He made no attempt to justify what he’d done—just the accusation was enough to make him break down. He sat there in his chair and cried. God, what an awful day that was.”

  “So what was decided?”

  “Nothing. The man was going to pieces right before our eyes, so we put off making a decision. Two days later he killed himself.”

  Lieutenant Goodlow absent-mindedly took off his glasses and cleaned them with his tie. “And now maybe someone is punishing you for Michael Crown’s death? Who? Did he have a family?”

  “Wife and two daughters,” said Ian. “I think his wife remarried and left New York. I don’t know where she is now.”

  “Do you know her new name?” Neither Ian nor I did. “What about somebody else he was close to? Somebody close enough to nurse a grudge for nine years?” We didn’t know that, either.