“The cat that ate the canary.”
“Yellow feathers in both corners of his mouth,” Lacroix agreed. “And Rita Colby insisting he be in her next play.”
“I see what you mean.”
He grinned, shook his head, and looked at his empty bottle. “Well,” he said, “I don’t have to interview anybody today, I’m giving myself another beer. Sure you won’t?”
“No, thanks.”
Getting to his feet, crossing the tiny room, he said, “Of course, I’m just a rube from the sticks of downtown Dallas, could be I’ve just got a dirty mind. Could be, what Dale and Rita Colby had in common was Scrabble.” He paused, a fresh Dos Equis in his hand, and grinned over at me. “What do you think?”
29
There were still cheerful cliquey conversational groups in the waiting room at Kay Henry’s offices. And the icy Miss Colinville still manned the Chippendale. “Hi, there, beautiful,” I said, with my stupidest grin, leaning again on her table. “Remember me?”
“Vividly,” she said. “Do have a seat.”
My former place was now in the middle of one of the campfires, so I sat on the other side, near the door to the offices, facing the opposite direction from before. I’d used up all the ancient Varietys and Billboards in here, and in any event I now had Tom Lacroix’s comments to brood on, so I did; particularly his assumption that Sam Holt was guilty of murder.
Just how prevalent was that assumption, in the great world? If this was the common belief, would I ever live it down? To have trouble getting on with my career because I’d been typecast in a single role was one thing; to be unemployable because I was considered an unindicted murderer was something very different and far worse. I’d never seen myself as the Fatty Arbuckle of my generation.
In my new position in this room the offices were all behind me, and now I gradually became aware that the mutedly paneled wall ahead of me, beyond Miss Colinville and the chatterers, contained a modest and barely noticeable door. It wasn’t hidden, exactly, but its lack of ornament and the placement of the pictures and furniture around it made it virtually disappear.
I had nothing much else to think about, beyond the unsolvable problem of Tom Lacroix’s beliefs, so I spent a while looking at that door, wondering what was beyond it. All the offices were the other way, leading back to Kay Henry’s room, with its view toward the rear of buildings on the next block. This waiting room was windowless, so beyond that door must be a front room of some sort, overlooking the street. Not more offices. Storage? A small screening room, maybe, except he’d be unlikely to pick one of the few rooms with windows for such a purpose.
I was rather fuzzily staring at that door, trying to guess what lay beyond it, when it opened, and Rita Colby came out, in dark wool skirt and linen blouse. Our eyes met, and she looked startled; probably because she hadn’t expected to open the door into somebody’s distracted stare. I was too surprised myself to politely and immediately break contact, so she looked away first, sketching a quick smile onto her face as she said a word to the gathered regulars. Her manner of noblesse oblige was perfectly matched by their gushed greetings, the peasants hallooing the lady of the manor. She accepted their obeisances, crossed the room, nodded briskly to Miss Colinville, and went through the other door toward the offices, without glancing my way again.
It was ten minutes more before I was called; then Miss Colinville turned to me with almost a hint of thaw in her expression as she said, “You can go on in now. You remember the way, don’t you?”
“Sure do, beautiful,” I said, getting to my feet. I winked at her. “I’ll miss you.”
Her lips curled with scorn, and she turned back to her duties. Still grinning, I went through the doorway and down the hall to Kay Henry’s room, where Henry was pacing back and forth and Rita Colby was seated on one of the gray sofas, legs crossed, top leg fretfully moving.
At first, I was too interested in my own performance to really pay much attention to anybody else in the room. How would Ed Dante—this Ed Dante—react to the presence of Rita Colby? I decided he’d be awed, but that he’d try to cover it by clumsy joking mixed with overelaborate compliments. So, upon seeing the woman seated there, I immediately crossed to her, went down on one knee like a medieval knight, pressed both hands to my heart, and said, “Miss Colby, I’m your biggest fan. It’s an honor to breathe the air in the same room with you.”
She gave me a look of amused disbelief. “Well, that's baroque,” she said.
“And I want you to know,” I went on, twinkling Ed Dante’s personality at her like mad, “when I dream of you, I’m always respectful.”
Laughing, but at the same time making a graceful brushing-away gesture in my direction, she looked up at Henry and said, “Make him stand up. I want a look at him.”
Immediately, I popped to my feet, swept off an imaginary musketeer’s cap, and performed a broad low bow, saying, “Ed Dante at your service, Madame.”
“Yes, fine, just stand there,” she said, sounding a bit impatient with me.
So I just stood there. I never wanted to take this character so far as to get him—and me with him— thrown out of anywhere. I stood, and Rita Colby looked me up and down, critically, studying me as though I were a piece of furniture she might add to the guest room. She made a waggly circling gesture with one down-pointing finger, so I turned in a slow circle, ploddingly, putting it on a little too broadly so she’d have to know this was another tiresome joke. When I faced her again, she said (to Henry, not to me), “Well, the moustache will have to go.”
“Oh!” I said, in pain, and put one hand up to touch three protective fingertips to that narrow line of hair above my lip. (An impish desire came over me to yank the thing off and hand it to her, saying, “Well, if you don’t like it, we’ll get rid of it.” Which would have been very foolish and very dangerous, so I didn’t do it.)
Meanwhile, Kay Henry was saying, “I know what you mean. But let’s not redesign the man until we know what we’re doing.”
“And whether or not,” she commented, “we want to do it at all.” Then, more irritably, she said, “You know, we don’t have to cast that part this early. The circumstances aren’t the same any more.”
I listened intently, frozen there with my fingers against my moustache, feeling myself invisible inside this other personality, listening to them, waiting for them to say more, and thinking that Rita Colby didn’t sound like a person referring to a part that had been given to a lover.
“I know, dear, I know,” Henry said, soothing her, sounding well practiced at soothing her. “But Ed’s here, and Julie Kaplan told him about the role, so why not look him over.”
“Fine,” she said, brisk and impatient. “We’ll look him over.” And she looked at me, making a business of it (more subtly than my bits), and said, “Well, he’s tall enough. How tall are you?”
“Six foot six, Mum,” I said, and released my moustache to tug a forelock. “Up a half.”
She ignored that. “Have you ever played Nazis?” she aked me.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nazi soldiers,” she explained. “Gestapo men, that sort of thing. They usually cast big boys like you in that kind of part.”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” I said. And it was true; before PACKARD, the occasional one-shot small television roles I’d landed had included a couple of German soldiers in World War II stories.
“Good,” she said, and pointed at Henry. “Go arrest him.”
Very clever. It was a simple little exercise, a twodimensional character I already knew, a scene I should have no trouble improvising. If awkward, jokey, pushy
Ed Dante showed through the character, that would be the end of it; she’d have no further use for me.
So now what? It seemed to me I’d better play the part as well as I knew how, that being the only way I could prolong this conversation. So I stepped back, lowered my head to think about it and to get all this other extraneous stuff out of the way, smoo
thed my jacket and tie to a better semblance of neatness, lifted my head, and looked over at Henry. I was aware of Rita Colby, of course, out of the comer of my eye, but I paid no attention to her. “Herr Henry,” I said. I was doing just the faintest hint of an accent, no music hall stuff.
Henry played along fairly well, though with a distracting little grin: “Yes, officer?”
I stepped toward him, arms bent, hands out in front of me, turning palms up to indicate my helplessness as I said, with a touch of sympathy, “I am afraid, Herr Henry, they have sent me to bring you in.”
His eyes widened. Overacting, he hunched up his shoulders—amateurs always do too much—saying, “But why? What have I done?”
“You know, Herr Henry,” I said. “And they sent me, you see, because we know each other.” Again I did the gesture of helplessness. “They know that, you see. They know everything.”
He looked more honestly worried. He said, “But— What’s going to happen?”
“Bad things,” I told him. “It might be better for you to try to run away. Faster. Cleaner.” More sympathy showed: “I promise I won’t miss.”
“By God,” he said, breaking character, “you’re scaring the shit out of me.” Looking past me at Rita Colby, he said, “Well? Is that enough?”
“It is,” said her voice, cool and thoughtful. I turned toward her, grinning, and she said, “I’m very impressed, Ed.”
“That’s great, coming from you, Miss Colby,” I said. Then I ducked my chin down, and grinned wide-eyed at her, and said, “But I’m better, you know, playing a lover.”
30
She didn’t pick up that cue. In fact, she was all business, and not at all what Tom Lacroix, for instance, would have anticipated. Telling me I shouldn’t think I definitely had the role, that others would have to be consulted—playwright, director, two producers—and that the casting wouldn’t in any event be made until January, she nevertheless sat me down in Henry’s office and described the play and my part in it; or, that is, the part I was being considered for.
Four Square was a suspense romantic comedy about a menage a trois nearly becoming a menage a quatre, and also nearly becoming a murder mystery. The principal characters were a United States senator, his wife and his longtime secretary, with whom he’s been having a longtime affair. Rita Colby would be playing the secretary, who has now fallen in love with a younger man, a television news anchor; once Dale Wormley’s part, now possibly Ed Dante’s. The ‘switch’ in the story was that the wife didn’t want her husband’s affair with the secretary to end; it had provided a stability and safety in their lives, and without the secretary the husband might go off and become involved with women who would lead him into scandal and disgrace and loss of the next election.
Therefore—I suppose they could make this seem fairly reasonable—the senator and his wife proceed to scheme to murder the news anchor. But when the wife meets the news anchor—the character appears only in two brief scenes, of which that was the second—she also falls in love with him. When she tries to stop her husband’s murder scheme, things go wrong, and at first it seems as though the senator has been killed by his own plot, at which point the secretary realizes it was the senator she truly loved all along. So, when the senator turns out to be alive, the couples switch, the senator and his wife amicably divorce, she goes off with the news anchor and the senator marries his secretary.
The plot construction of this trash was based on the known prejudices of the potential audience, which would mostly be middle-aged theater parties from Connecticut. These people liked stories of extramarital titillation, particularly among people of power or glamour—a United States senator, a television news anchor—but they didn’t like stories that doubted the essential correctness of the social order. The situation at the beginning of the story could include adultery and a menage a trois, but by the end the characters must have rearranged themselves into traditional couples. (Since most of the audience would themselves have gone through at least one divorce, the traditional couple no longer needed to be the first-time couple.)
Rita Colby didn’t want me to have a copy of the script, since protocol required the other principals be consulted first, but she described it rather extensively, quoting—very well, in fact—some of her own better lines. Partway through this exercise, Kay Henry plaintively said, “Rita, darling, I really do have other things to do. Must you take over my office like this?”
“Oh, all right,” she agreed, without fuss, and got to her feet, saying, “We’ll go up front, then.” To me, she said, “Do you have time for this?”
“I sure do,” I told her, grinning and grinning. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” And here was a point where Ed Dante and I converged and became one.
After thanking Kay Henry for all his help, shaking his hand a little too fervently and grinning all over him, I followed Rita Colby back down the hall and through the door into the waiting area, where her presence caused a little flurry among the campers and Miss Colinville briefly lifted an ironic eyebrow before deciding to ignore me. It was nearly five by now, so fewer people were hanging around, but the cozy clubby atmosphere remained the same.
We crossed the waiting room, Rita Colby opened the door that had so interested me before, and I followed her into a neat but impersonal studio apartment; with, as I’d guessed, windows overlooking the street. The place looked like an upscale hotel room, with a kitchenette in one comer. A kingsize bed dominated the right side of the room, a seating area with couch and two armchairs grouped around a glass coffee table filled the left. Traffic noise was suddenly audible.
Closing the door after us, Rita Colby said, “Do you want a Coke? Perrier?”
“Perrier would be good,” I said, dropping out of character—though not badly—while I looked around the room. “What is this place?”
On her way to the kitchenette, opening the low refrigerator—well-stocked with snack foods and nonalcoholic beverages—she said, “A kind of crash pad, really. Kay lives upstate. If he stays in town, for a show or anything, he’ll sleep over here. And the same thing if one of his clients needs a place.”
I said, “Do all of his clients get that privilege?”
She gave me a knowing smile, neither of us looking toward the door and the chattering fellas and gals outside. “Not all,” she said. “Here’s your Perrier.”
“Thanks.” I took the bottle and glass from her hands. She stood looking at me, a can of Diet Coke now in her hand. “You’re not quite what you seem, are you?” she asked.
Whoops. Time to get back in character: grinning my awful grin, I said, “I’m a man of parts, I am. And a man of mystery. And here’s looking at you, kid.” I clinked my glass against the Diet Coke can and slugged back some of the Perrier, managing to make a little noise while I did it.
When next I looked at Rita Colby, that little moment of interest had come to an end; she was turning away, toward the sofa and chairs. “Come sit down,” she said. “Where was I in the story?”
“The wife has decided to kill me.”
“Oh, yes. Come sit down.”
So then she told me the rest of the story, and explained my part in it: “The thing is, he’s this younger guy that both women fall in love with, so he should be a hunk, and when the audience first sees him they should think that’s all there is to him. But then, for the wife to credibly go off with him at the end, we have to see there’s more to the guy than that. Dale Wormley would have done it very well, he would have brought that edge of his to the part. You didn’t know him, did you?”
“No, I didn’t.” I offered my dopey grin again. “Julie Kaplan thinks he was a terrific guy.”
“Not exactly,” she said. “He was pretty sour, in fact, but he could use that anger in his work, it could make him seem as though there were depths there.” With a small smile and a dismissive shrug, she said, “For all I know, there were depths there.” Then, studying me critically, she said, “You know, you really should get rid of that
moustache.”
“Really?” I made myself sound sad at the prospect. “Some women tell me they like it,” I said, and sparkled a bit.
“Some women like beehive hairdos, Ed.” She shook her head, continuing to study me. “You know, without the moustache, and if you did something about your hair—”
“I’m not gonna shave my head!” I exclaimed, doing a big show of mock-fear.
“We’ll get a makeup man on you, don’t you worry,” she told me. “You know, you look like Dale a bit. You don’t have that anger he had, but the features are rather similar. In fact, with just a few changes, you could look like . . . I’ll tell you who you could look like,” she decided. “Like that television actor Dale did the takeoff on.”
Feeling very nervous, I said, “Sam Holt, you mean?”
“That’s the one.”
“Somebody told me he’s the guy that killed Dale Wormley.”
She reared back, frowning at me in astonishment. “For what earthly reason?”
“I guess, because of those supermarket commercials.”
“Because of a parody?” Rita Colby emphatically shook her head. “That’s ridiculous,” she assured me. “Somebody mugged poor Dale because he was out on the street in the middle of the night, when he had no reason to be out there except that anger of his.”
“So it isn’t a murder mystery.”
She thought about that. “Well, it isn’t solved, ” she said. “But murders in the street don’t get solved, do they?”
In this case, I thought, that would be very bad news; for me at least. Aloud, I said, “I guess they don’t. It was just something that somebody told me.”
“Rumor,” she said, with contempt. “There was probably something in the National Enquirer.” Then she became brisk, saying, “Well, that’s the whole story of Four Square, anyway. Kay knows how to get in touch with you?”
Westlake, Donald E - Sam Holt 04 Page 15