The questions came at once. “Are you saying you’ve never been unfaithful to your wife?”
Jane Abingdon lost her smile a little, but Paul actually chuckled. “My wife and I have always been quite satisfied with each other,” he said. He put his arm around her shoulders.
The reporter tried to ask the question again, but it was drowned out by others.
“Do you have any information about Mayforth Kendrick’s death?”
“None whatsoever,” said Abingdon. “I never knew the man.”
“Have you been in touch with the police?”
“Yes. I told them exactly what I’ve told you.”
“Do you think this will hurt your campaign?”
He let his wife go, spread his arms, grinned. “Look, it’s not gonna help, but it’s untrue, and I feel certain it’ll die down.”
“How do you feel about this, Mrs. Abingdon?”
Jane kept smiling. Her eyes kept beaming. Her voice rang out high and hard and chill as a Maine morning. She even sounded like Katharine Hepburn.
“I have lived with my husband for, oh, some dozen years now.” She took hold of his arm. “I haven’t let him get away yet, and I don’t plan to. All I want for him, for myself, and for this country, is to see Paul Abingdon in the Senate.”
That stopped them for a split second. No one could think of a follow-up. She pretty well had it covered.
So they turned back to the candidate again. And someone—a man not far from me—shouted:
“Congressman—do you think John Wells lied?”
The other reporters listened. They wanted the answer to this one. Abingdon had to think for a second, but they were more than willing to wait. The candidate gazed over our heads looking inspired while he figured out what he wanted to say. I watched him. I sweat. I was getting very tired of sweating today.
“I paid close attention to what the police told me,” Abingdon said. “And I can confirm your reports that these stories came from the reporter at the Star. Now, I don’t know Mr. Wells personally, but I can only imagine that either he has been—uh—duped in some way, or that he has a reason of his own to make up a story like this.”
A few reporters shouted questions together, drowning each other out. It was at that moment that Molly Caldwell got a bright idea. I don’t think she’d liked my little trick with the thirty-five cents. There was a thin, wicked little smile on her red lips when she said: “Would you like to ask Mr. Wells what that reason was, Congressman? He’s right here.”
My heart jumped. I felt Lancer’s hand on my arm. Fortunately, though, I saw my fear reflected in Abingdon’s eyes. He wanted no part of a confrontation like that. It could only be messy.
He grinned, as if he hadn’t heard the question. He lifted his hand in a wave.
“Well,” he said, “thank you very much for coming. That’s all I have time for right now. Back to the race!”
He turned away from the chorus of shouted questions. The two bodyguards closed ranks in front of him. This time, Abingdon barely had the patience to hold the door for his wife. He opened it just a crack, and she slipped in past him. The shouted questions followed, but Abingdon was quickly gone. The bodyguards stood there together for another moment, their shoulders touching, their hands folded in front of them. Then they followed the candidate inside.
When the door shut, it seemed to cut the questions off dead. For a long moment, there was silence as the reporters finished scribbling their notes or turning off their equipment.
Lansing put her pad in her purse. We turned away. We were about to start down the hill.
“Do you have any comment now, Mr. Wells? Any comment on the congressman’s remarks?”
It was Molly. She stuck her microphone at me again. Her cameraman stood behind her, taping me. That thin wicked smile still played on her lips.
“Horseshit,” I said. “And you can quote me.”
10
I sat at my desk. I pounded at my typewriter. The afternoon had almost become evening now, and I wanted to get my story finished fast. I was writing up my meeting with Mayforth Kendrick. It wasn’t exactly what you’d call a scoop, but it was a Star exclusive, anyway. It would keep us on top of things for today, at least, if nothing bigger broke.
So I pounded away. I sat in the midst of my papers and trash. I hunched forward over the typewriter. I kept a cigarette clamped between my teeth. I squinted through the smoke at the unrolling page. I pounded away and the noise clattered back and forth off the walls of my cubicle. It rose and spread over the city room.
It was the loudest sound in the joint. All the other typewriters had been replaced by terminal keyboards that barely clacked. The rollicking wire machines had been replaced by computers that booped politely. Most of the loudmouthed old hacks like me had been replaced by trim, neat, quiet executive-types with advanced degrees in journalism.
Those executive-types would be exchanging glances now. I knew that for a fact. They’d hear the rattle of my Olympia and they’d look at each other and roll their eyes. Wells is writing again, they would mutter. That’s what they always muttered and usually I didn’t mind. Usually, I figured: They can mutter all they want. They can snicker all the way to the newsstands where they’ll see my story on page one again. All that muttering and snickering didn’t stop them from coming to me when they needed help on a story. It didn’t stop them from speaking my name with a measure of respect. Not usually.
But this time was different. This time, the old machine even sounded noisy to me. It sounded old and out of place. Not up with the times. A dinosaur. Today, when they glanced at each other, those sleek, slick, suited-up postgraduates, I imagined they’d be thinking: He’s slowing down, old Wells. Losing the touch. He’s not what he used to be. He’s through.
Or maybe that’s just what I was thinking myself.
I was pretty down on old Wells, all right. I’d pretty well had it with him. It’s not that I’d been scooped. I’d been scooped before, more times than I wanted to count. It’s not that I thought I should have bought Kendrick’s photos to beat the competition. The story stank and, as far as I was concerned, the competition could have it.
Hell no: it’s not that I’d been scooped on the story. It’s that I’d been stuck with it.
Because now I had no options. My reputation was on the line. Bush was calling me an incompetent. Abingdon was calling me a liar or a dupe. Whoever had those pictures wasn’t going to step forward waving them in the air like a confession of murder: If I wanted to prove I was telling the truth, if I wanted to prove I could still get at the truth, I was going to have to find them—them or the girl in them. I was going to have to cover this dirty little tale like a blanket.
After twenty-six years in the business, I was about to become everything I hated in the business. I was about to become relatable.
So I pounded away. The pages of the story coiled up out of the Olympia. When each one reached the end, I ripped it out and tossed it amidst the litter on the desk. I tipped the ash off my cigarette. I shot another page into the typewriter. I pounded away.
Then it was done. I packed the pages together. I didn’t reread it. I didn’t have the stomach for it. I carried it across the room to the city desk and dumped it in Rafferty’s lap. He didn’t even look down.
“Seeya,” he murmured.
I held up my hand to him as I kept walking. I went out the glass doors, out into the city to find Georgia Stuart.
The sun was gone, but not the heat. The last summer light was still lingering, and so was the swamp gas that had passed for air these last few days. By the time I climbed into the Artful Dodge, I was dragging my sleeve over my forehead again. I switched on the engine and the air conditioner. I drove off through the gloaming.
I went straight along Forty-second Street, west. West, past the last liquid mass of commuters flowing toward Grand Central Terminal. Past the white headlights coming down Fifth Avenue, and the red taillights pulling away through the heat. Past the coo
l, sleepy gazes of the library’s stone lions. Down past Broadway, where the street fans out like a deck of cards and becomes the towering billboards and flashing lights of Times Square. And on past that, where the bright Broadway lights grow sad and stone-faced and gaudy on the ads for porno shows.
Finally, those lights also fell away. At either window, there were small restaurants interspersed with small marquees. There were small groups of young people walking together, talking, gesturing with their hands. There were strips of neon and strips of darkness. This was Theater Row.
I started at a place called the Walden. It was on the ground floor of an ancient tower of white brick. I walked inside, into a cube of a room, and found a girl sitting behind a sawed-off door. A sign above her said BOX OFFICE. I flashed my press card at her. She pointed me back through a curtain.
I came into the auditorium. There were maybe fifty seats dropping sharply down toward a little stage. On the stage was a cluttered set that looked like some poor farmer’s kitchen. An old fridge, a battered table, a few chairs, a general mess on the countertops. I came down the aisle, climbed up on the stage. One spotlight was on me there. I paused under its light a second. I had the eerie feeling of having stepped through a door into Kansas.
I walked across the kitchen to the front door. I opened it and walked out. I was in a tight space formed by the stage behind me and a curtain in front. I walked through the middle of the curtain. I did not think I was in Kansas anymore.
I had entered a broad dark expanse, hung with wires, littered with stacked chairs. It was crowded with people, loud with their noise. Two young men and two women in leotards were shifting a sofa here and there. Setting it down. Pausing to debate. Shifting it again. Two older men, both bearded, were arguing in each other’s faces. A young man walked by with his thumbs hooked in old-fashioned farm suspenders. He looked about twenty, but heavy lines had been painted on his brow and around his mouth.
I stopped him as he passed. I showed him my press card. His back straightened. “What’s this for?” He had a deep soft voice that ran along like a stream.
“It’s for a story I’m doing.”
“On the theater? On the play?”
“On her.” I took the Xeroxed photo of Georgia out of my pocket. I unfolded it, held it under his nose.
He stared down at her, his thumbs hooked in his suspender straps. I looked away from him as a pretty young woman in her underwear sort of skipped by me, calling, “Charlie!” The others were moving the couch again.
“Yeah,” said the young farm boy. “I’ve seen her. I’ve seen her around at auditions. But, you know.” He shrugged. “You see everyone there.”
“Don’t know her name?”
“Nah. Check in the dressing room.” He gestured with his head toward the space behind me. He really did look like a farmer when he did that. He never let his suspenders go.
I thanked him. Wandered away. I skirted the moving sofa, came around a partition. There was a doorway, lighted brightly in the general gloom of the place. I walked through, into a thin room. A corridor nearly. There was a long mirror running the length of one wall. Clothes hanging sloppily from hooks on the other. In the cramped space between were three men, four women and a row of stools. The women all had black tights on. Two wore sweatshirts, one wore a bra. The one just near me was bare-breasted. She was sitting on a stool, leaning toward the mirror, clipping long, purple earrings on her ears. She was chewing gum. She was breathtaking. Two of the guys were in nothing but bikini briefs. The third had overalls on.
I cleared my throat. The actors looked up. The lady with the earrings quietly, unhurriedly, reached for a T-shirt and slipped it over her head.
I told them who I was. None of them seemed to recognize the name. They gathered around me. I showed them the picture. They hovered over it, shouldering each other in the small space.
“Yeah,” said one of the guys in briefs. “I’ve seen her around.”
“Another guy was just looking for her,” said a different guy in a different pair of briefs. “This gigantic cracker asked me about her.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” said the woman in the bra. “I told him: I’ve seen her in auditions. I remember her ‘cause she was so good.”
An attractive middle-aged woman in a sweatshirt smiled sharply. “Was the other guy a reporter too? She’s gotta be good to rate all this press.”
“He wasn’t press, he was a friend,” I said. “No one seems to be able to find her, so I thought I’d see if there was a missing person story in it. You know: country girl comes to the big city and vanishes.”
The woman with the earrings was close to me. Her shoulder was rubbing mine. She smelled of talcum powder. It made my head light. She snapped her gum.
“Georgia something. Stuart,” she said. “We got a callback on an Ibsen play about, I don’t know, four months ago. We read together. She was real focused—intense. It was nice stuff. I thought she’d get the part. We talked a little while we waited.”
“Did she mention where she was staying?”
Earrings looked up at me. She had a complexion like porcelain. She had rich, pale lips. She had eyes a foggy, purple color. She studied me for a long moment, chewing her gum.
She broke the glance. I felt it snap. “Okay, let me think,” she said. She shook her head. “I don’t remember anything like that. We just talked the business. Bitched, basically.”
The other six actors had moved away. They were bumping into each other as they resumed their stations before the mirror.
“Can you remember anything she said?” I asked.
She moved her head back and forth. The long earrings shivered and flashed in the bright mirror light. “Just the usual. She seemed kind of an innocent. She was from the Midwest somewhere, I remember. She’d sort of come here thinking, well, you know, she was real pretty and such a great actress so she should be able to walk on stage and get a job. Now that she’d been here a couple months, been the rounds, she found out it wasn’t so easy. I don’t think she’d landed anything.… Yeah—that was her first callback; that’s what started the conversation. She was talking like, you know, it was unfair. Said she was thinking of taking classes to make some contacts; thinking of going home.” She smiled. It lifted her round cheeks. It made her purple eyes bright. “The usual sad story,” she said.
I tried to think of something else to ask her. I wanted to hear her speak again. I wanted to keep smelling her powder.
I said, “Her friend, the big guy—he didn’t talk to you, I take it.”
“Nope. He must have come by when I was out,” she said. “Look, I’ve got to get dressed.”
“Oh. Yeah. Sure.” I couldn’t think of any way to make her stay. I thanked her. I walked away. A little weight of regret settled in my belly. Down there with all the rest of them.
I was encouraged too, though. One theater, my first try, and’ I’d found several people who’d known her and one who had actually talked to her. It seemed like a good sign.
It was a deceptive sign, it turned out. As Wally had told me, plenty of people had seen Georgia, plenty had seen her at auditions and the like. But no one seemed to know her or to know where she was. I covered every theater I could find. I walked from marquee to marquee in the night-heat. I went to theaters the size of packing crates and tenth-floor theaters in lost and dusty rooms. I went to elegant places with winding staircases under chandeliers, and one or two spots that were no more than a broad floor and a bunch of benches.
At every theater, I passed around the picture. Yeah, said the actors they’d seen her around. They’d auditioned with her. She was pretty. She was good. She complained about how hard it was to get work. They all complained about how hard it was to get work. Some of them had been questioned by Wally. Some of them he’d missed. None of them had the faintest idea of where Georgia lived, or where she’d ever lived. No one had seen her lately.
Around eight o’clock, I came out of a theater called The Actor’s Space. I had
finally run out of steam. The shows were beginning up and down the block. I couldn’t get backstage to question the actors anymore.
I stood still under the marquee. The night heat was stultifying. The gutter stink was heavy in the air. The exhaust from busses rolling by was enough to suffocate me. I rubbed the back of my neck. I puffed my cheeks and blew. I was hot. I was tired. I was hungry.
Across the street from me was Cole’s. It was one of those newfangled restaurants, all windows and wooden tables, with young people leaning toward each other clasping big glasses of wine. A big glass of wine sounded pretty good right now. Almost as good as a big glass of scotch with maybe a steak on the side. I waited for a break in the traffic and headed across Forty-second.
I came into a broad expanse dotted with tables and chairs. At the center of it, on a raised platform, was a long, white bar. There were lots of potted palms by the huge windows. Where the windows gave way to walls, there were bars of neon, red and blue. Under the neon were posters from old Broadway shows. Fifty Million Frenchmen. Dubarry Was A Lady. Anything Goes.
I grabbed a table under the bar platform. I called to a waitress. She brought me a scotch. I looked her over. A would-be actress by the looks of her. A knockout. She had a lion’s mane of. sable hair. She had red, bee-stung lips. She had startling light eyes. She had a perfect shape, full and slim and full again, and it was shown off well by the skirted black leotard she wore.
“Can I take your order?” she said. She had a smooth, velvety voice.
“Yeah,” I said. “A steak, medium rare.”
“We have chateaubriand.”
“Is that anything like a hunk of meat?”
“Only vaguely.”
“I’ll take a club sandwich and fries.”
She was gone. I leaned back. I lit a cigarette. I sipped my drink. The two went well together. I pulled the picture of Georgia Stuart from my pocket. I unfolded it and looked it over.
The Rain Page 8
