You Have the Right to Remain Silent

by Barbara Paul

  It got more depressing by the minute.

  Marian pushed the button to play back yesterday’s phone messages. The first three were from telephone solicitors, but the next was from a friend. “Marian, this is Kelly. I left your name with the doorkeeper but you haven’t shown up once! Previews start on Sunday and we’re nowhere near ready and I’m going crazy here! This whole place is insane. Look, tomorrow is Saturday and I know you’re not working so you don’t have any excuse not to come. We’re starting rehearsal at eleven in the morning and we’ll probably be here until midnight and don’t tell me there isn’t one hour in all that time when you can’t get away long enough to succor a frantic friend! You like that word ‘succor’? It’s in the play. Anyway, I desperately need someone sane to talk to … you are still sane, aren’t you? See you tomorrow—don’t let me down.”

  Marian had to smile. She hadn’t seen Kelly Ingram for over a month; but even if it had been a year, her friend would still just pick up their conversation wherever they’d left off. Kelly was rehearsing for her first Broadway role and was scared out of her skull. Marian would make a point of finding time to go to the theater, perhaps during the afternoon.

  But first, chores. She put in a load of laundry and had just gotten out the vacuum cleaner when the phone rang. It was Brian. Their conversation was brief. Did she want to do anything tonight? No, she thought it better if they both took a few days to cool off. Fine with me, Brian said. Goodbye.

  Kelly’s phone call had lightened Marian’s blackening mood somewhat, but Brian’s quite effectively darkened it again. There’d been a time when just the sound of his voice on the phone had given her a lift. The sheer joy of “learning” another person who was simpatico had buoyed Marian along for weeks; but now it was getting harder and harder even to remember the good times. There had been good times, lots of them. With an effort of will Marian concentrated on one of them: Brian had agonized with her while she was studying for the rarely given Lieutenants Exam, and he’d celebrated with her when she passed. At that moment, the world had never looked better.

  But then, with all the subtlety of a volcano erupting, everything had started changing. Marian was passed over for promotion. A man who was promoted to lieutenant was no better qualified than she and perhaps less; she’d have been a fool not to suspect sexual discrimination. Absolutely impossible to prove, of course; she’d had to eat it. And it was about then that Brian had started to cool toward her—no, to be fair, it probably began a little before that, when she’d not rushed to move in with him when he asked her to. But it was pretty obvious that her failure to be promoted had dimmed her luster somewhat in his eyes. Then came the unexpected and denigrating transfer to the Ninth Precinct, and Brian withdrew even further.

  Brian ran his life the same way he ran his art gallery, she thought; he was a collector. She admitted now he’d “collected” Marian the way he collected the other people around him. His friends all had something unusual or even unique to recommend them—an art style, an eccentric way of living, a high adventure or two. The thought of having a police detective for his lover must have promised him new kicks; he’d displayed unglamorous, unornamented Marian Larch as a new discovery he’d made that he expected the world—his world—to acknowledge with a certain degree of awe and/or amusement. Nothing wrong with my hindsight, Marian thought sourly.

  But her welcome in that world seemed to be wearing thin, now that her image was tarnished a bit, and the novelty of the relationship had long since worn off. Yet they’d been too close for either simply to dump the other; that would not have fit Brian’s image of himself as a civilized man, and Marian had hung on (too long) out of sheer stubbornness. Brian began to show his disaffection in more subtle ways, subtle and a trifle sadistic, such as putting her on the spot and then proclaiming his innocence. Once he’d taken her to a party on Long Island where the guest of honor turned out to be the subject of a Grand Jury investigation for which Marian was a police witness. She’d refused to stay, of course, thus providing Brian with an excuse to act hurt and put-upon. They’d had their first full-out row over that. His motives may have been petty and spiteful, but the consequences could have been quite serious; Marian’s presence there would have compromised the investigation. He couldn’t seem to understand that. Or didn’t want to.

  Marian realized she’d been vacuuming the same place in the rug for five minutes. She turned off the cleaner and left it sitting where it was while she collapsed into the nearest chair and stared at the wall. Brian was an aggravation, true; but he wasn’t the problem, he was only the excuse. She was blaming him for what was really bothering her. Not for the first time she wondered why she had chosen a profession in which success inevitably meant a debilitating bout of depression.

  This always happened to her, this feeling of disappointment in the human race whenever she had to point a finger and name someone a killer. She’d thought she’d grow hardened to it in time, but it hadn’t happened; if anything, her perpetual feeling of letdown was getting worse. And yesterday hadn’t helped. She played over the scene in her head: Carmen, Don-nice, Encarnaçion, the rest of the gang. Arresting one person for an act of murder was disheartening enough, but fourteen at once … that had to be the Queen of downers.

  “You’re the lady cop,” said the doorkeeper at the Broadhurst Theatre.

  Marian ground her teeth. “I’m a police detective, yes. Sergeant Larch.”

  “That’s quite a shiner you’ve got,” he said with a grin. “Well, you just go right in, Sergeant. Miss Ingram said if you showed up I wasn’t to let you get away. I think they’re taking a break now—she’s around someplace.”

  Marian hadn’t made it to the theater in the afternoon; it was almost ten that night before she was able to drag herself out of her lethargy and make the trip to West Forty-fourth Street. She’d waited for Kelly Ingram on television sets before, but this was the first time she’d come looking for her friend in a real honest-to-god theater. The backstage area wasn’t any too well lighted; Marian had to pick her way carefully among the cables and the other obstacles that might have been strewn about by some careless giant. A number of people were doing the same thing, looking determined and a bit grim; no one spared her a glance. Someone—the stage manager?—was reading the riot act to a couple of stagehands, who seemed more bored than intimidated; Marian was surprised to see the former had a hook in place of one hand. Just at that moment A Presence moved among them; Marian recognized stage star Ian Cavanaugh, now pushing fifty but still handsome enough to turn heads.

  A young woman struggling with an armful of costumes told Marian she thought Kelly was out front talking to Abby.

  “Out front?”

  “The auditorium. You know—where the seats are?”

  Marian smiled. “Yes, I know where the seats are. Thank you.”

  She edged her way onto the stage, feeling like an intruder, and looked out toward the audience seats. Kelly was standing in the aisle talking to a short, dark-haired woman who listened but said very little—“Abby,” the costume woman had said. It must be Abigail James, the playwright responsible for bringing all these people together. The play was called The Apostrophe Thief; Marian didn’t have the foggiest notion what it was about.

  Kelly was getting more and more animated, to the point of waving her arms while she talked. In contrast, Abigail James folded her own arms and stood stolidly, once in a while shaking her head. Then Kelly happened to glance toward the stage. “Marian!” she shrieked, in a voice loud enough to carry to the last row of the balcony.

  Every eye in the threater was on Marian. Self-consciously she lifted one hand in a weak wave.

  Kelly abandoned her argument with Abigail James and rushed toward the stage, graceful as a dancer. “Marian! You’ve got a black eye!”

  “I know.”

  “Does it hurt? What happened?”

  “A twelve-year-old girl gave it to me. I was in no danger.”

  Kelly clucked over her a minute and
then said, “I thought you were never coming. I’ve got a few minutes before we start again—let’s go to my dressing room. You won’t believe—oh, Ian, wait a minute, I want you to meet my friend Marian Larch. Marian, this is Ian Cavanaugh.”

  The big, good-looking actor didn’t offer to shake hands but his smile was cordial. He didn’t mention her black eye. “Not the infamous Sergeant Marian Larch?”

  Marian blinked. “Did you say ‘infamous’?”

  “The police sergeant who’s going to put us all in jail if we don’t stop hassling Kelly?”

  Kelly didn’t look the least embarrassed. “I may have said that once.”

  Cavanaugh laughed. “Once a day.”

  Marian went along. “And are you hassling Kelly?”

  “Never,” he said, just as Kelly exclaimed, “Constantly!”

  “Seems to be a slight difference of opinion here,” Marian said, wondering if they were really joking or whether there was tension between them; they seemed friendly enough. She asked how rehearsal was going and got answers like Could be better and Still needs work. Cavanaugh caught sight of Abigail James gesturing to him and excused himself.

  Marian watched him walk away. “Attractive man.”

  “And a nice one too, I think,” Kelly said. “He keeps to himself a lot—not very outgoing. About the only ones he talks to are Abby James and the stage manager.”

  “That’s Abby James?”

  “Yep, that’s her. An absolutely terrifying woman. Demanding, inflexible, and with a heart of stone. She comes up only to my shoulder, but I’m afraid of her!”

  Just then Cavanaugh casually put his hand on Abby James’s shoulder; the gesture was unexpectedly intimate. “He doesn’t look afraid of her,” Marian observed.

  Kelly made a rude noise. “Those two have been living together for centuries.” She grinned. “He won’t even look at me. Come on.”

  Marian followed her, right past a pretty girl in her late teens that Kelly pretended not to see. In the dressing room, Kelly plopped down and stared at herself in a mirror. “Who was that girl we just passed?” Marian asked.

  Kelly made a face. “Oh, that was Xandria. Not Alexandria, but Xandria. Did you ever hear such a phony name?”

  “She’s in the play?”

  “My kid sister, can you imagine? We don’t look anything alike. She’s a little too young for the role, if you ask me. But nobody did.”

  Oh-oh, Kelly was feeling her age, all thirty-two years of it; change the subject. “When did you start wearing your hair like that? I haven’t seen that kind of hairdo since Joan Crawford. Is it for the play?”

  “No, I just thought I’d try it out,” Kelly answered, patting the sides of her hair. “I don’t like it much either. Actually, it doesn’t matter how you wear your hair these days,” she snickered, “so long as it looks as if you paid someone a lot of money to fix it that way for you.” Then in a completely different tone: “God, Marian, I’m glad you came!”

  That sounded bad. “Kelly, what’s wrong?”

  Her friend made a keening sound. “I’m going to blow it! My big chance to prove I can act and I’m going to blow it! It’s so much harder acting on the stage! If you goof, you have to cover it up the best you can and get on with the next part—you can’t stop and redo it for the camera. And I’ve been goofing a lot, Marian. I’m going to ruin this play. I’m going to spoil it for everybody! I thought I was ready for something like this but I’m not!”

  “Oh, don’t say that! Somebody must have thought you were ready or you wouldn’t have gotten the role in the first place, right?”

  “That’s the strange part. It was Abby who picked me for this role. She saw a TV movie I did and thought I’d be right for the role of Sheila and here I am! I’ve been trying to get away from those glamour-girl roles I’ve been stuck in for so long that I practically slobbered on the woman the first time she spoke to me about it. But now …”

  “Well, then, that should count for a lot—she’s never picked a TV star before, has she?”

  “No, and she never will again after The Apostrophe Thief.”

  Marian smiled. “Sorry, I just don’t believe you’re that awful. What you’ve got is nothing more than good old-fashioned stage fright. What I hear, lots of actors suffer from that all their lives.”

  “Oh, thanks a lot!”

  “What I mean is, there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just one of the hazards of the profession, isn’t it?”

  Kelly made a noise that might have been assent. “You’d think Abby’d be willing to help me out, since she picked me. But she’s barely spoken to me since rehearsals began.”

  “Well, maybe that’s just her manner.”

  Kelly sighed. “I suppose. She and Ian Cavanaugh are both like that—kind of stand-offish.”

  “What do you mean, she should have been willing to help you out?” Marian asked. “What were you arguing with her about?”

  “I wanted her to rewrite a line—it’s too hard to say without twisting it up. One line. But no, nobody meddles with Abigail James’s peerless prose! Even the director has asked her to cut it, but she won’t. She just keeps telling me to get it right.”

  “What’s the line?”

  Kelly thrust a script at her. “This speech here.” She pointed. “I absolutely, positively, cannot say it.”

  Marian looked at the line. “‘People mean no more to you than a watch battery,’” she read. “‘Useful for about a year, then it’s time for a replacement.’” She frowned. “What’s so hard about that?”

  Kelly’s face had fallen. “You too? Everybody in the whole world can say that line except me! I can say ‘Better buy better rubber baby buggy bumpers’ and ‘He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts’—but I cannot say ‘People mean no more to you than a batch watery.’ There, you see? I always do that—batch watery. Read it again.”

  Marian read the line again. “Try building up to the word ‘watch’,” she said. “Don’t think about ‘battery.’” And immediately felt foolish for giving acting advice to a professional.

  But it did the trick. After a couple of tries Kelly got the line out the way it was supposed to be said and did a little dance of triumph to celebrate. She tried it again; and while her delivery wasn’t smooth, at least she was no longer spoonerizing. “Ah, thank you, Marian! You’ve saved my life!”

  “Didn’t your director tell you to do it that way?”

  Her friend looked sheepish. “He probably did. John’s a good director, but I’ve been so rattled I don’t always remember what he’s told me. I don’t see how these people do it—remember everything, I mean. In television, you finish a day’s work and go home and forget those lines because they’re over, done, finished, goodbye! But here you’ve got to remember a whole play’s worth of lines and you have to remember them all the time. Plus about a zillion stage directions. And do you know I’m responsible for remembering to check out my props before each act?”

  Marian murmured sympathetically. Kelly practiced the line until she could say it without stumbling, beaming broadly the whole time. An intercom on the wall announced Miss Ingram was wanted on stage “immejutly.”

  “What about you?” Kelly asked as they left the dressing room. “Working on a big case?”

  “Just wrapping one up. I made the arrest yesterday.”

  “Oh … was it a murder?”

  Marian nodded.

  Immediately Kelly looked stricken. “That means you’re in one of your notorious blue funks! Oh, I’m sorry, Marian! Here I’ve been rattling on about my own problems while you—”

  “It’s all right,” Marian stopped her. And, strangely enough, it was; Kelly always managed to cheer her up, even when she didn’t know she was doing it. “I’m feeling better already. You’re such a good distraction.”

  Kelly laughed. “I’m going to give that the best possible interpretation I can. Do you want to watch from back here? Or from out front?”

&n
bsp; “Back here, I think.”

  “Okay. I’ve got to go on.”

  Marian watched as Kelly took her place on the stage as the rehearsal started. Her friend didn’t seem nervous, and when the scene started she was quite good at pitching her voice so it could be heard at the rear of the auditorium without benefit of a microphone.

  Marian noticed Ian Cavanaugh waiting for his entrance cue. Since he didn’t seem to be doing anything Stanislavskian to get himself into the proper mood, she went up and spoke to him. “I wonder if you would tell me something. Truthfully.”

  He smiled, a little. “I wonder too.”

  “Kelly’s been saying she’s going to ruin this play.”

  “Oh, tush. She exaggerates.”

  Marian let out a sigh of relief. “That’s the truth? I thought she might be overstating, but since this is her first venture in live theater—”

  “She’s about as insecure as all television actors are their first time on the legitimate stage. No more, no less. Kelly has spurts of brilliance, times when she shows enormous stage presence. Her problem is that she has difficulty sustaining it.”

  “Nerves?”

  “More likely it’s that she’s used to working in shorter units of time. Television scenes run only fifteen lines or so, and here of course we go on much longer than that. What Kelly needs is an audience. Once she starts getting feedback from the people watching, she’ll find it easier to sustain.”