Romance, p.8
Romance, page 8
“When did he make this estimate for you?”
“Yesterday. Right after Michelle got stabbed.”
“I see.”
“Yeah. If you want a copy of it, I’ll give it to you before you leave.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“My pleasure,” Morgenstern said.
“So what does your business manager estimate the profits will be if you move to the Stem?”
“In a five-hundred-seat house? At capacity? Seventy grand a week.”
“In other words, Mr. Morgenstern, if this show is a hit, you’ll be taking home quite a bit of money.”
“Quite a bit, yes.”
“How long do you figure it’ll take to recoup?”
“At capacity? Thirteen weeks.”
“After which you start getting your fifty-percent share of the profits.”
“Yes.”
“Who gets the other fifty percent?”
“My investors.”
“How many of those are there?”
“Twenty. I’ll give you a list of them, too, if you like.”
“How much does your playwright get?”
“Freddie? Six points.”
“Before or after recoupment?”
“Pre and post, all the way through. A straight six percent of the gross.”
“Nice business,” Carella said.
“Except that for every play that makes it, you’ve got a dozen that flop. Frankly, you’re better off putting your money in mutual funds.”
“I’ll remember that,” Carella said.
“Have another piece of toast.”
“Thanks. Few more questions and I’ll get out of your hair.”
“Here comes the rubber hose,” Morgenstern said, and smiled again.
“As I understand this,” Carella said, “last night …”
“See? What’d I tell you?
Carella smiled. He picked up another piece of toast, buttered it, put jam on it, bit into it. Chewing, he said, “Last night, Michelle was delayed at the theater some fifteen, twenty minutes. The others all broke for dinner, but she …”
“Yes, that’s my understanding, too.”
“You weren’t there?”
“No. Who says I was there?”
“I thought …”
“Earlier maybe. But not when they …”
“I thought you were there during the rehearsal.”
“I got there at five and left around six, six-fifteen. Right after the fight.”
“Oh? What fight?” Carella asked.
“The usual bullshit.”
“What usual bullshit is that?”
“The actress wanting to know why she’s. doing this or that, the director telling her to just do it.”
“Then this fight was between Michelle and Kendall, is that it?”
“Yes. Anyway, it wasn’t a fight, it was just the usual bullshit. You know the famous story about the phone ringing, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“There’s this scene in a play where the phone is ringing, and the actor is supposed to answer it and have a conversation with the person on the other end. So this Method actor wants to know what his motivation is, why does he answer the phone? The director tells him, `Because it’s ringing, goddamn it!’ This goes on all the time, the bullshit between the actors and the director. It doesn’t mean a thing.”
“Who else was there? Was Freddie Corbin there?”
“No. Just the actors and the crew.”
“Were they all still there when you left?”
“Yes.”
“But they left the theater before Michelle did, is that right?”
“Yes, she had a costume fitting. The costume designer needed her for fifteen, twenty minutes.”
“So the others all. broke for dinner at six-thirty …”
“I think that’s what Ashley was planning. Yes, I’m sure he said six-thirty.”
“Which left just Michelle and the costume designer alone in the theater.”
“Well, Torey would’ve been there, too.”
“Torey?”
“Our security guard. At the stage door.”
“That’s his name? Torey?”
“Well, it’s Salvatore Andrucci, actually. But he used to fight under the name Torey Andrews. Do you remember Torey Andrews? Good middleweight some twenty, twenty-five years ago. That’s Torey.”
“Know where I can reach him?”
“At the theater. You want some more coffee? I’ll get the shwartzer to bring some.”
“Thank you no,” Carella said. “I’ve taken enough of your time.”
“Then let me get that estimate for you. If you still want it.”
“I still want it,” Carella said.
Gillian Peck lived in a doorman building on the city’s upper south side. Kling had called ahead, and when he was announced over the intercom, he could hear a British voice answering, “Yes, do send him up, please.”
The woman who opened the door seemed to be in her mid-fifties, a petite, mop-topped brunette wearing a green silk-brocade tunic over matching bell-bottomed pajama pants and green slippers with a gold crest. She told him at once that she had a meeting downtown at noon—this was now ten past eleven—and she hoped this would be short. Kling promised that it would.
She led him into a living room hung with framed drawings of the costumes she’d done for what appeared to be a hundred different shows, but which she explained had been only ten. “My favorite was the Twelfth Night I did for Marvin,” she said, beaming, and walked Kling past a series of framed sketches of figures in brightly colored costumes, the name of each character penciled in at the bottom of the drawing: Sir Toby Belch. Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Malvolio. Olivia. Viola …
“I love the names he gave them,” she said. “Do you know what the full title of the play is?”
“No,” Kling said.
“Shakespeare called it Twelfth Night; Or What You Will. I took that as a cue for the costumes. I went for an uninhibited, anything-goes look.”
“I think you succeeded,” Kling said.
“Yes, quite,” Gillian said pensively, studying the drawings. “Well, then,” she said, turning away abruptly and walking toward a seating group that consisted of a sofa done in red velvet and two side chairs done in black. She sat in one of the black chairs, perhaps because she didn’t wish to appear too Christmasy in a green costume against a red background. Kling suddenly wondered if she designed her own clothes.
“Sit down, won’t you?” she said, and gestured to the sofa.
He sat.
She looked at her watch.
“About Miss Cassidy,” he said.
“Oh dear, that poor child,” Gillian said.
“You were with her last night, I understand. Just before she got stabbed.”
“Yes. I fitted her for one of her costumes.”
“How many are there?”
“She has three changes. This was for the one in the first act. It’s white, very virginal, it’s when she’s supposed to be a young girl, when she first becomes infatuated with the theater. Do you know the play?”
“Not really.”
“It’s a dreadful stinker,” Gillian said. “Quite frankly, Marvin should be grateful for all this publicity.”
“I’m sure he is,” Kling said.
She looked at him.
“Mm,” she said. “Well, yes, I shouldn’t wonder. In any case, there are three changes, the virgin white one, and then the gray one, when she sort of loses her innocence … it’s all such rot, really … and then the red one after she’s been stabbed, when God knows who or what she’s supposed to be. Or even who’s stabbed her, for that matter. It’s rather a matter of life imitating art, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so, yes.”
“Do you have any idea who did it?”
“Not yet.”
“Life imitating art exactly,” she said. “In the play, nobody knows who stabbed her, either.”
“Well, we’re still investigating.”
“It’s frightening to think the person who stabbed her is still loose, isn’t it? And may remain loose. Which wouldn’t be too uncommon in this city, would it?”
“Well,” Kling said.
“No offense meant.”
“Where did this fitting take place, Miss Peck?”
“In Michelle’s dressing room.”
“At what time?”
“Six-thirty. Six thirty-five.”
“How long did it last?”
“Oh, ten minutes at most.”
“Till twenty to seven?”
“I’d say a quarter to.”
“Then what?”
“What do you mean?”
“What did you do after the fitting?”
“Well, we left.“
“The theater?”
“No, the dressing room.”
“Together?”
“No. I went to the wardrobe room to hang the costume up again, and Michelle went to the loo.”
“Did you see her again that night?”
“Yes, just before I left the theater.”
“Where’d you see her?”
“There’s a phone just inside the stage door, on the wall there. A pay phone. She was standing there as I was leaving the theater.”
“Talking?”
“No. She was just dialing a number, in fact.”
“What time would this have been?”
“Oh … ten to seven?”
“What happened then?”
“I said goodnight to Torey, and went out.”
“Who’s Torey?”
“The security guard.”
“Where was he?”
“Sitting just inside the stage door. Where he always sits. There’s a stool there.”
“How far from the phone?”
“Five feet? Six feet? I really couldn’t say.”
“Did you see anyone in the alley when you came out?”
“No one.”
“You weren’t still in the alley when Michelle left the theater, were you?”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Then you didn’t see her actually leaving?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“And I’m sure you didn’t see anyone stab her.”
“That’s correct.”
“Where’d you go after you left the theater?”
“To meet a gentleman friend of mine.”
“Where would that have been?”
“A restaurant downtown. I caught a cab just outside the theater.”
“At what time would that have been?”
“At five minutes to seven.”
“You know the exact time, do you?”
“Yes, I looked at my watch. I was supposed to meet my friend at seven-thirty, and I was wondering if I’d be late. The restaurant is all the way downtown.”
“Which restaurant is that, Miss Peck?”
“Da Luigi. On Mersey Street.”
“Were you late?”
“No, I got there right on the Dorothy.”
Kling looked at her.
“The dot,” she said.
Torey Andrews né Salvatore Andrucci studied the shield in the palm of Carella’s hand, and then looked at his ID card again, and then said, “Is this about Michelle?”
“Yes, it is,“ Carella said.
“I was hoping you caught the guy by now.”
“We’re still investigating.”
“Long as I ain’t a suspect, huh?” Torey said, and grinned, showing a mouthful of missing teeth.
He was perhaps five feet ten inches tall, weighing in at two-forty or thereabouts these days, no longer the middle-weight he’d once been. His left eye was partially closed by scar tissue, and his nose roamed all over the center of his face, and he sounded like any of the punch-drunk pugs Carella had ever met. But there was intelligence in his lively green eyes and Carella figured he’d quit the ring before they’d managed to scramble his brains.
He was wearing what Carella had always called a “bakery-shop sweater,” because this was the kind of sweater Carella’s father had worn to work each morning. In Torey’s case, the sweater was a collarless brown cardigan, a bit frayed at the cuffs, one of the buttons missing. He wore this with thick-waled corduroy trousers and brown loafers. He was sitting on his stool just inside the stage door. The pay phone on the brick wall painted black was some seven or eight feet away from the stool. From the stage, Carella could hear what sounded like two or three actors rehearsing a scene. The clock on the wall read twelve-thirty.
“Torey, can you tell me anything about what happened last night?” Carella asked.
“Oh, sure. It was me who called the police. I heard her screaming, I ran out there, she was laying on the ground, screaming.”
“You didn’t see anyone else in the alley, did you?”
“No. Just her. You mean the one who stabbed her? No. I wished I did.”
“What’d you do?”
“I left her laying there. You ain’t supposed to move anybody’s hurt. I learned that when I was still in the ring. Somebody gets hit bad, you move him, it could make him worse. So I left her out there, and I come inside again and called nine-one-one. From the phone right there. They got here right away. Which is a miracle, this city.”
“Can you remember seeing anyone suspicious before Miss Cassidy left the theater?”
“I wasn’t outside.”
“I meant inside the theater. After everyone else left.”
“You mean after Miss Peck went out, too.”
“Yes. You didn’t see anyone suspicious in the theater, did you? Anyone who shouldn’t have been here?”
“No, I didn’t. Miss Peck left, and a few minutes later Michelle came up to use the phone, and …”
“Miss Cassidy made a phone call?”
“Yeah. From the phone right on the wall there.”
“Did you hear what she said while she was on the phone?”
“Well, it was a very quick call.”
“But did you hear it?”
“Yes, I did.”
“What did she say?”
“She said … well, you want this exact? Because I’m not sure I can remember it exact.”
“As close as you can remember.”
“Well … she said like uh This is me, I’m just about to leave, something like that. And then she listened, and I guess she just said Okay, and hung up.”
“Did she mention anyone’s name?”
“No.”
“What did she do then?”
“She came over here and we talked for a while.”
“How long a while?”
“Five minutes? She kept looking at her watch … I figured she had to go meet somebody. But we talked for a few minutes, and then she looked at her watch again, and said, `Well, so long, Torey,’ something like that, and off she went.”
“What time was this?”
“Few minutes after seven.”
“How do you know?”
“Clock hanging right there on the wall,” he said, and gestured with his head. “I look at it all the time. It’s funny,” he said. “You’re in the round three minutes, it seems like forever. But here, in the theater here, I sit on my stool, I look at the clock, and I remember the old days, and it’s like a movie going by too fast. Sometimes I think I won’t have enough time to play all the movies inside my head. You think I’ll have time to play them all?”
“I hope so,” Carella said gently.
The clock on the squadroom wall read twenty minutes past one. They had sent out for lunch, and now, as they ate, they recapped what each of them had separately learned.
“Who’d she call?” Kling asked.
“Big question.”
“Let me see that estimate Morgenstern gave you,” he said, and Carella shoved it across the desk to him.
WEEKLY ESTIMATED BUDGET—“ROMANCE“
FOR A 500-SEAT “MIDDLE” THEATER
BASED ON A BREAK-EDEN GROSS OF $100,000
SALARIES
CAST:
MICHELLE CASSIDY $3,000
ANDREA PACKER $2,400
COOPER HAYNES $2,400
MARK RIGANTI $2,400
4 SCALE PLAYERS @$1,000 $4,000
“Scale actors get a big one a week, huh?”
“Wanna be an actor?”
“Nope.”
STAGE MANAGER $1,400
ASSISTANT MANAGER $1,150
A.E.A. VACATION $ SICK PAY ACCRUAL $990
“What’s A.E.A.?”
“Don’t know.”
WARDROBE SUPERVISOR $900
T.W.A.U./;MU & HS VACATION PAY $63
“T. W.A. U.?”
“Some kind of union, I’ll bet.”
“MU? HS?”
“Don’t know.”
GENERAL MANAGER $1,500
COMPANY MANAGER $977
PRESS AGENT $1,085
PRODUCTION ASSISTANT $500
ATTORNEY $350
ACCOUNTANT $250
BOOKKEEPER $200
CASTING DIRECTOR $250
DESIGNERS 2 @ $175 $350
$24,165
THEATER
RENTAL GUARANTEE $6,500
BASIC PERSONNEL & EXPENSES $22,500
ADDITIONAL STAGE CREW $1.195
$30,195
PROMOTION. PUBLICITY AND ADVERTISING
PRINT ADUERTISING $9,000
RADIO ADUERTISING $3,000
TELEVISION ADVERTISING 0
“Guess they don’t believe in the power of the tube, huh?”
“Guess not.”
THREE-SHEET MAINTENANCE $200
BUSES, CABS, PHONE BOOTHS, ETC. $3,000
PRINTING, MAILING 7 PHOTO REPRO $150
“What’s a three-sheet?”
“Beats me.”
PRESS AGENT OFFICE & EXPENSES $250
SPECIAL PROMOTION $400
$16,000
ADMINISTRATIVE AND GENERAL
PROGRAM INSERTS, ETC. $80
LEAGUE DUES FIND FEES $500
“As the monkey said while peeing into the till …”
“This is running into a lot of money,” Carella said, and both men began giggling like schoolboys.
PRODUCER OFFICE EXPENSE $750
GENERAL MANAGER OFFICE EHPENSE $400
“You can skip over the rest of the administrative and general expenses,” Carella said. “Look down to the next section.”
Kling looked:
ROYALTIES AT GROSS OF: $100.000
AUTHOR 6.00% 6,000
STAR. .00% 0
“Michelle isn’t getting a piece of the action, I see.”
