Nineteen years old if she was a day, lean and coltish, her long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail held with an elasticized band the same color as her precarious purple top, she stood at once, extended her hand, told Kling she was sorry if she’d sounded distracted on the phone, but she’d been studying her new lines, Freddie had put in a whole new scene, would he like a cup of coffee or something, there was a big coffeemaker on the table near the stage door where Torey stayed. All of this in a breathless rush that made her sound even younger than she was.

  “I thought you’d be coming alone, Mr. Kling,” she said, making the focus of her interest immediately apparent, and flashing him a brown-eyed glance and a radiant smile that in tandem could have melted granite. She then turned her chair so that her back was almost to Carella, who understood body language about as well as any other detective in this city. He felt suddenly useless. In fact, he felt invisible.

  Kling explained that they were here because they’d been told that she and Michelle had shared a dressing room here in this small rehearsal theater …

  “Yes, that’s true. Well, now Josie and I do.”

  … and they were wondering if Michelle might have mentioned anything to her that could possibly throw some light on her murder.

  “Confidential girl talk, huh?” she said, and smiled again at Kling.

  “Anything she might have said about anything that was troubling her, or annoying her, or … ”

  “Everything annoyed her,” Andrea said.

  “How do you mean?” Carella asked.

  “Well …”

  They waited.

  Carella moved around in front of her so that he could see her face and her eyes. Outmaneuvered, she sat in the chair before the dressing-table mirror, her hands spread on her thighs, and looked up into their faces. In a tiny little girlish voice, she said, “I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead,” and lowered her eyes.

  “We know how difficult it must be for you,” Carella said, bullshitting her.

  “I’m sure you do, sir,” she said, bullshitting him right back, and then raising her eyes to meet Kling’s, excluding Carella as effectively as if she’d again turned her back to him. “The thing is,” she said, “and I’m not the only one who felt this way, Michelle was a total pain in the ass with an ego out of all proportion to her talent. Well, look what she put him up to doing. Johnny, I mean.”

  “What was that, Miss Packer?” Kling asked.

  “Stabbing her in the alley,” Andrea said.

  From the stage, Kling could hear the other actors running a scene over and over again. In high school, he had played Christian in Cyrano. He had fallen madly in love with the girl playing Roxanne, but she’d had eyes only for the guy playing the lead, a kid named Cliff Mercer who almost didn’t need the fake nose they stuck on his face every night. Kling had once thought seriously of becoming an actor. That was before the war. That was before he saw friends getting killed. After that, acting seemed a frivolous occupation.

  “Was there any prior indication that she and Mr. Milton were planning to stage a stabbing incident?” Carella asked.

  Without looking at him, she said, “If you mean did she tell me Hey, guess what, Johnny’s gonna stab me tomorrow night so I’ll get a lot of publicity and become a big movie star, no. Would you advertise it in advance?” she asked Kling.

  “Did she tell you she wanted to be a movie star?”

  “Everybody wants to be a movie star.”

  Not me, Carella thought.

  “As you probably know,” Kling said, “Mr. Milton has admitted stabbing her … ”

  “Yes, it’s all over the papers, all over everything, I’m sick of it already. This is a good play. We don’t need cheap publicity to guarantee its success.”

  But it couldn’t hurt, Carella thought.

  “I guess you also know,” Kling said, “that Mr. Milton denies having killed her.”

  Andrea shrugged. The tube top slipped a bit lower on her breasts. Automatically, she grabbed it in both hands and yanked it up.

  “What does that mean, Miss Packer?” Carella asked.

  “What does what mean?”

  “The shrug.”

  “It means I don’t know who killed her. It could’ve been Johnny, it could’ve been anybody. What I was trying to say before is that nobody liked her. That’s a plain and simple fact. Ask anybody in the show, ask anybody working the show, nobody liked her. She was an arrogant, ambitious, untalented little bitch, excuse me, with delusions of grandeur.”

  But tell us how you really feel, Carella thought.

  “When you said earlier that everything annoyed her …”

  “Everything, everything,” she said, and rolled her eyes at Kling. “The play, the scenes in the play, the lines in the play, her costumes, her motivation, the sun coming up in the morning, everything. She kept wanting to know who stabbed her! As if that mattered. Freddie’s play surmounts cheap suspense. It supersedes the genre, it subverts it, in fact. If Michelle had understood her part in the slightest, she’d have realized that. This isn’t a mystery we’re doing here, this is a drama about a woman’s triumph of will, an epiphany brought about through a chance stabbing, an almost casual stabbing, accidental, random, totally meaningless in the larger scheme of things. So Michelle kept wanting to know who stabbed her. Is it the waiter, is it the butler, is it the upstairs maid? I swear to God, if I’d heard her ask one more time who stabbed her, I’d have stabbed her, right in front of everybody.”

  “You seem to have a good understanding of the character she was playing,” Carella said.

  “You have to understand the conceit of the play,” Andrea said to Kling, smiling, “its internal machinations. Michelle was playing a character listed in the program only as the Actress. That’s the part Josie is doing now. It’s the starring role. I’m playing someone called the Understudy. Well, an understudy is supposed to know all the lines and moves of the person she may have to replace one night, because of illness, or accident or … ”

  Or death, both detectives were thinking.

  “So whereas I wasn’t Michelle’s real understudy, I was her understudy in the play, and knowing all of her lines and moves was part of my preparation for the role.”

  “Of Understudy.”

  “In the play.”

  “In the play, yes.”

  “Josie was her understudy in real life. Which is why she took over the part when Michelle got killed.”

  “Did you ever think you might get the part?” Carella asked.

  She turned to him. Looked him dead in the eye.

  “Me?” she asked.

  “Since you knew all her lines and moves?”

  “Surely not as well as Josie does.”

  “But did it ever occur to you, once Michelle was dead, that you might get the starring role? Since you knew all the lines and moves?”

  “It occurred to me, yes. But not because I knew all her lines and moves?”

  “Then why did it?”

  “Because I’m a better actress than Josie is.”

  “Do you feel any resentment about Josie getting the part? An understudy? Taking over the starring role? While you—an actress in an important supporting role … ”

  “Of course,” Andrea said.

  “You resent it,” Carella said, and nodded.

  “Sure, wouldn’t you?” she asked Kling.

  “I guess,” he said. “Miss Packer,” he said, “there are questions we have to ask, I hope you understand this doesn’t mean we suspect you in any way of having killed Michelle Cassidy. But there are certain routine questions …”

  “You sound like Mark.”

  “Who’s Mark?”

  “Riganti. He plays the Detective. In the play. That’s the sort of thing he would say.”

  “Well, it’s the sort of thing we do say.”

  “I understand,” she said softly, and lowered her eyes again.

  “So maybe you’d like to tell us where you were on Tuesday night between seven and eight o’clock,” Carella said.

  “I was wondering when you’d get to that,” she said, the brown eyes snapping up to his face. “All that business about knowing the part, and resenting Josie … .”

  “As my partner explained …”

  “I know, I’m not a suspect. Especially when I tell you where I was.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Aerobics class.”

  “Where?” Kling asked.

  “Which one of you is Mutt?” she asked. “In the play, Freddie writes all about Good Cop, Bad Cop. Mutt and Jeff, isn’t that what you call them?”

  “Where’s your aerobics class?” Kling asked.

  “You must be Jeff.”

  “I’m Bert. Can you tell us … ?”

  “Hello, Bert. It’s on Swift. I’ll give you a card. Would you like a card?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “I was there on Tuesday night from six-thirty to seven forty-five. Then I went home. Check it out.”

  She turned toward the dressing-table mirror, reached for her handbag where it sat among a dozen or more makeup jars and powder puffs and brushes and liner pencils, snapped open the bag, rummaged in it for a moment, and handed Kling a card.

  “The instructor on Tuesday was a woman named Carol Gorman. You’d better call first, she’s not there all the time.”

  “We will. Thanks for your … ”

  “Andy?”

  They all turned to where a strapping young man in watch cap and overalls was standing in the doorway.

  “Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t realize … ”

  “Come in, Chuck,” she said. “Have you met Mutt and Jeff?”

  Madden looked puzzled.

  “Good Cop/Bad Cop,” she said. “Detectives Carella and Kling.”

  “Saw you the other day,” Madden said. “How are you?” Turning to Andrea again, he said, “Ash wants to run the Understudy/Detective scene ten minutes from now.”

  “We just ran it,” Andrea said dryly.

  Once upon a time, a detective named Roger Havilland worked out of the Eight-Seven. He abruptly stopped working there when someone tossed him through a plate-glass window. But before his untimely demise, he’d once remarked, “I love this city when the coats come off.”

  He’d been referring to women, of course. Women taking off their coats, hell with the men. He and Carella had been strolling along Hall Avenue in the sunshine, and Havilland had been admiring the girls prancing by. Girls back then, not women. Nobody was quite as ready to take offense back then. Except Havilland, perhaps, who’d been a hater of monumental proportions. No one missed him. Enough police department bigots had risen to take his place. Oddly, though, on a beautiful spring day like today, Carella remembered the one memorable thing Havilland had ever said.

  I love this city when the coats come off

  Today, the women had taken off their coats. Even the women who were only sixteen years old were prancing by in celebration of spring. The skirts were even shorter now than when Havilland had made his immortal remark, and the girls, the women, the persons of contrasting sex were now wearing thigh-high black stockings, some of them exposing garter belts, below the hems of their teeny-weeny skirts. It was a nice time of the year to take the air, especially down here in the Quarter.

  Carella had always felt this part of the city was the most vital, a self-contained enclave of the eccentric and the eclectic, a city within the city proper, honoring its own established morals and mores, its own rules of acceptable behavior, most of it outrageous. A girl walked by wearing …

  Well, she really was a girl, if twelve counted, anymore.

  … what appeared to be a caftan, white with black trim at the hem and the long flowing sleeves. Over this, she wore an assortment of dangling, clanging chains, and a black fez beneath which her blond hair cascaded. She was barefooted, her feet caked with the grime of the city. She smiled at him as she went past. He wondered if his own daughter would one day dress like a camel driver and smile blissfully at every passing stranger.

  The sun felt good on his shoulders and head.

  He did not want to go indoors, he did not want to work on a day like today.

  But Frederick Peter Corbin III was waiting.

  Bodies by Rhoda was on the second floor of a red brick building on Swift Avenue, not far from the old Federal Bank Building. Kling had got there a half hour earlier and had been told by a woman with frizzy black hair and leotard and tights to match that Carol’s Step-and-Stretch class was still in progress and wouldn’t break till eleven. It was now ten minutes to the hour, and he sat patiently on a bench in the reception area, looking through a plate-glass window at a wide variety of women jumping and bouncing in the air. He could not hear any music behind the glass, but he suspected some was being played, otherwise the sight would have been entirely bizarre.

  The women began pouring out of the room at about five past the hour, all of them sweating, all of them looking flushed and invigorated. He asked a somewhat beefy blonde who Carol might be, and she pointed out a trim brunette wearing a shocking-pink leotard and black tights, rewinding a tape at the player across the room. The room smelled vaguely of female perspiration. He caught his own reflection in what seemed a dozen mirrors as he crossed to the far corner.

  “Miss Gorman?” he asked tentatively.

  She turned. Faint surprised look on her freckled face. Green eyes wide. Lips slightly parted. No makeup on her cheeks, eyes or mouth. Fresh-faced kid of twenty-one, twenty-two, he guessed.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Detective Kling,” he said, “Eighty-seventh Squad,” and showed her the shield. She seemed impressed. Nodded. Waited.

  “I wonder if you can give me some information about this past Tuesday night …”

  “Yes?”

  “… that would’ve been the seventh of April.”

  “Yes?”

  “Were you here that night?”

  “I think so. Tuesday? Yes, I’m sure I was. Why? What happened?”

  “Were you teaching a class from six-thirty to seven forty-five that night?”

  “Yes. Well, from six-thirty to seven-thirty, actually. Gee, you sound stern. Something terrible must have happened.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to …”

  “I mean, you don’t look stern, but you sure do sound stern. Very.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  “What is it that happened?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “This is a routine inquiry.”

  “Into what?”

  “Do you know a woman named Andrea Packer?”

  “Yes?”

  “Was she in that class on Tuesday night?”

  “Oh, this is about the actress who got killed, right? Michelle whatever. Someone told me Andy was in the same play with her.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Was Miss Packer in that class?”

  “Yes, she was. Is that what she told you?”

  “That’s what she told me.”

  “Well, she was telling the truth.”

  “I figured she might be,” Kling said, and sighed.

  In fact, even before he’d shlepped away the hell over here, he’d been dead certain she’d been telling the truth. Not once in his entire time on the force, as uniformed officer or detective, had anyone given him an alibi that later turned out to be false. Not once. Well, maybe once, but if so he couldn’t remember when. Well, actually, yes, he could remember some guy telling him he was at a movie when actually he was out chopping up his mother-in-law. But never had anyone told him. This is where I was at such and such a time on such and such a night and—

  Well, wait a minute. How about that jackass Johnny Milton, who’d told them he was at O’Leary’s at seven when he didn’t get there until seven-fifteen, the jackass. A person had to be crazy to tell you he was someplace he wasn’t when there were people who could absolutely state otherwise. Yet each and every goddamn alibi had to be checked out against the likelihood that the person was lying, which he’d have to be an idiot to do, when it was so easy to verify.

  “Why didn’t you simply call?” Carol asked.

  Another good question.

  He hadn’t simply called because then he wouldn’t have been able to ascertain that the person to whom he was speaking on the telephone was not being coerced into saying Yes, Andrea Packer was here bouncing around on Tuesday night. Over the phone, you couldn’t tell if someone was holding a gun to a person’s head. So what you did, you marched all the way over to Swift Avenue and waited on a bench while a lot of women you didn’t know jumped in the air to the accompaniment of unheard music, and then finally you talked to the alibi and got the answer you knew you’d get all along. Sometimes, he thought he might enjoy being a fire fighter.

  “Have you had lunch yet?” Carol asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “Would you like to join me?” she asked. “There’s a very good deli just around the corner.”

  He thought of Sharyn.

  “Thanks,” he said, “but I’ve got to get back to the office.”

  “Where’s that?” she asked.

  “The Eight-Seven? Uptown. Just off the park.”

  “I might stop in sometime.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said.

  “See what a police station looks like.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, thanks for your help, Miss Gorman, I appreciate it.”

  “Thanks for coming by,” she said, and raised one eyebrow.

  * * *

  Freddie Corbin was telling Carella that non-fiction writing wasn’t really writing, anyone could write a non-fiction piece. In fact, all non-fiction writing was just “What I Did Last Summer” over and over again. Carella didn’t think he could write a non-fiction piece; he even had trouble writing detective reports.

  They were sitting in a small sun-washed room Corbin called his study, “Not because I’m affected,” he said, “but because a portrait painter had this apartment before I took it, and he used to paint in this room he called his study. As painters are wont to do,” he added, and smiled.

  Two side-by-side windows were open to a mild April breeze that wafted up from a small garden two stories below. A fire escape crowded with red geraniums in clay pots was just outside the windows. Corbin was sitting in a black leather swivel chair behind his desk. Carella was in a chair across the room. The playwright had been interrupted while rewriting several scenes in his play, but he seemed in no hurry to get back to the work at hand. Carella wanted to know what Corbin knew about Michelle Cassidy. Instead, Corbin wanted to tell him what he knew about writing.

 

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