“Because then maybe—no, make that definitely—Rick Crouse will want to talk to you,” Bernie told Marvin.
“He’ll want to talk about his acting career,” Marvin said. “That’s what he’s going to want to talk to me about.”
Bernie grinned. “Right. And then you can ask him about some personal background. You know, get him talking about himself.”
Marvin took a deep breath and let it out. “What if he recognizes me?”
“He won’t,” Bernie assured him. “According to the program, he lives in the city. So if he’s buried anyone recently, it hasn’t been through your place.”
Marvin was not persuaded. “Maybe he’s come up for a friend’s funeral,” he said.
Libby patted Marvin’s hand. “Don’t worry. Sam may not even have told Rick Crouse.”
Bernie thought back to Sam’s expression when she’d told her about the agent in the audience. “No,” she replied. “She told him. I’d bet anything on it.”
“Great,” Marvin muttered.
“Just think Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire and you’ll do fine,” Bernie told him.
Marvin barely managed to keep himself from laughing out loud at the absurdity of Bernie’s suggestion. He was many things, but Tom Cruise wasn’t one of them.
“Okay,” he said as he opened his vehicle’s door. He was now resigned to his fate. “If we’re going to do this let’s go.”
The sooner he got this done the sooner he could go home. He just really, really hoped that no one in the play had had cause to use the funeral home in the recent past. He should have paid more attention to the cast names. In hindsight, keeping the program wouldn’t have been a bad idea either.
But perhaps he was being overly cautious, he reminded himself as he slammed the car door shut. He did have a tendency to do that. After all, most people in times of bereavement didn’t notice him standing there. He was like the beige wallpaper: necessary, but unobtrusive.
A blast of stale beer and old cigarette smoke hit Bernie as she opened the door to Leon’s. The place was as dark as ever. Two televisions, one set to a sports station, the other to the news, were going full blast. It was so loud it was difficult to talk unless you were very close to the person you were talking to, but, Bernie reflected, maybe that was the general idea.
Bernie noticed that the same pool table with a tear in the green felt was shoved up against the back wall. The same matched set of deer antlers hung on either side of the dusty mirror in back of the bar. Crookedly hung pictures of local soccer and baseball teams dotted the walls in no particular order. The outside had looked the same and so did the inside. Nothing seemed to have changed. Except the bartender. When Bernie had come here, he’d been a short, fat, bearded guy called Carl. Now the bartender was a tall, fat, bearded guy whose name Bernie didn’t know.
“Didn’t you come here back in the day?” Libby shouted at her sister as the three of them walked toward the bar.
“With Dwight,” Bernie yelled back.
“Whatever happened to him?”
Bernie shrugged. “Last I heard he was in jail for robbing a convenience store,” she told Libby as she looked around.
There were four guys at the bar drinking, none of them cast members. She looked at her watch. They were early. If Sam was right, the cast members of Cat would start trickling in in another twenty minutes or so.
“Mom hated him,” Libby said.
Bernie switched her shoulder bag from her left to her right side. “For once, she was right,” she mouthed.
“Of course,” Libby reflected, “she hated pretty much everyone you went out with.”
“The same could be said of you,” Bernie commented. “I mean, Mom wasn’t exactly fond of Orion.”
“No, she wasn’t,” Libby allowed. “She was right about that too.”
“She was right about most things,” Bernie conceded, not that she had thought so when she was younger. This, she thought, must be a sign of her age.
Bernie pointed with her chin to the line of booths over by the far wall. You could see everyone at the bar from there and the people at the bar couldn’t see you, she told her sister. And it was quieter there because it was away from the televisions. No small thing, considering.
The noise had never bothered Bernie before. That it did now was just another indication of her advancing age. Well, she was getting old. Everyone got old. But old, old. In a few months she was going to be thirty-three. That was only two years away from thirty-five, and after that—well, she didn’t want to think about forty. It was too scary. She really did have to start thinking about Botox. And soon.
“How about we get some beers and sit over there,” she suggested, forcing herself to think about something other than the crow’s feet she was developing.
“I think I’ll have a soda,” Libby replied as they walked over and put their order in at the bar.
Ten minutes later the three of them were seated in a booth debating the merits of using Splenda in baking when Richard’s assistant, Joanna, walked through the door.
Libby tugged on Bernie’s sleeve. “Is that who I think it is?” she whispered.
“Looks like it to me,” Bernie whispered back as she slouched down in her seat before she remembered there was no need to.
It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if Joanna saw them, Bernie reflected. But it would be better if she didn’t. More educational. For them. When Bernie turned her head she noticed that Libby and Marvin had followed her lead and were slouched down in their seats as well.
Joanna turned and looked in their direction. Bernie held her breath. For a moment, she could have sworn there was an awareness in Joanna’s eyes that she was being watched. But then that vanished and she turned back to the bar. Bernie, Libby, and Marvin let out a sigh of relief. Obviously she hadn’t seen them. As long as they didn’t do anything that attracted attention to themselves she wouldn’t.
“Guess you were right about the seeing-but-not-being-seen thing,” Libby told her sister.
“Of course I’m right,” Bernie said indignantly.
She knew this from experience. She’d been here with one of her friends and watched Dwight making out with one of his new chickies, as he had liked to call them. To her infinite satisfaction she’d gotten both of them with the beer she’d thrown in their faces. Sometimes the old moves are still the best.
Libby turned to Marvin. “What do you think?” she asked.
But Marvin didn’t answer. Libby didn’t think he even heard her. He was too busy staring at Joanna.
“Quite a set of boobs she has on her,” Libby observed dryly.
Marvin startled. Then he blushed and turned his head away.
“It’s okay,” Libby reassured him. “It’s hard to stop looking at them.”
“They’re not real, are they?”
Bernie laughed. “Not unless women are born with the potential to grow rocket cones.”
“That’s what I thought,” Marvin said as he ran a finger around the collar band of his shirt. “I wonder why someone would do something like that to themselves?”
Libby smiled sweetly. “So people like you can stare at them.”
Marvin looked even more uncomfortable, if that was possible.
“Do you think I should get a pair like that?” Libby continued. “I mean, I could if I saved up enough money.”
Marvin hemmed and hawed.
“Listen,” Bernie went on. “The hell with her boobs. The bigger question is: What is Joanna doing here? I mean, this isn’t exactly her type of place. The Four Seasons, yes. Leon’s, no.”
Libby took a sip of her soda. “It’s another fish-out-of-water deal. Like Denny’s.”
“That’s certainly so,” Bernie commented. “And what is it Dad always says about broken patterns?”
“That they’re significant,” Libby said. “A change is a signifier. Whether it’s a signifier of something large or small is what a detective has to find out,” she said, paraphrasing
her dad as she fiddled with her straw. “If I had to guess, I’d say that Joanna is here to see Rick Crouse.”
“Why Crouse?” Marvin asked. “I don’t get the connection.”
“It’s a little tenuous,” Libby admitted.
“Yeah,” Bernie chimed in. “And I have a feeling that the relationship you’re referring to in this case isn’t the incorporeal kind, if you get my meaning.”
“You mean you think they’re sleeping with each other?” Marvin asked Bernie. He wished that she’d stick to five-cent words instead of the dollar ones.
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Libby replied for her sister. “Of course, I thought Richard and Joanna were an item.”
“They probably are. One thing doesn’t negate the other,” Bernie observed.
“True,” Libby said. She was slightly ashamed to admit she hadn’t even thought of that possibility.
Marvin looked from sister to sister. “Well, if Rick Crouse and Annabel had something going on, that would give Joanna a good reason to kill Annabel, wouldn’t it?” he asked.
“One of the oldest reasons in the book,” Bernie said. She ticked them off on her fingers as she said, “There’s money, sex, and revenge. Take your choice.”
“So which one do you think is operating here?” Marvin asked.
“Good question,” Bernie replied. “Don’t know. Could be any of the three.”
“Or none,” Libby said. “Maybe Joanna being here really is totally random. We could be absolutely wrong.”
“Maybe,” Bernie conceded. But she didn’t really believe that and she was pretty sure that Libby didn’t either, that she’d just said it for the sake of argument.
She and her sister weren’t big believers in coincidence or random events. Neither was her dad. He subscribed to the old theory that if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck.
“Maybe Rick Crouse was involved in Annabel’s death,” Marvin suggested.
Bernie brushed her bangs out of her eyes with the tips of her fingers while she thought about Marvin’s suggestion. “Could be,” she conceded. “Although I don’t see how. He wasn’t there when Annabel got poisoned.”
“True. But he could have come in earlier and put the poison in the wine,” Marvin said.
“Anyone could have, for that matter,” Libby said. “The wine was sitting out,” she observed. “Anyone could have come along, put something in the bottle, and then resealed it.”
“How could they have resealed it?” Bernie asked.
“I don’t think it’s that difficult,” Libby said. “But you do need special equipment and time to do it.” She mused, “Of course, most actors do spend most of their working lives as waiters or bartenders. Still, I think it’s a long shot.”
“Maybe Rick and Richard were in cahoots,” Marvin said.
Bernie wrinkled her nose. “Rick and Richard? Sounds like a bad TV show. Why would they be in cahoots?”
“I don’t know,” Marvin said. “I guess Richard could have paid him.”
“Why? Especially because Richard could have done it himself,” Bernie said. “In my humble opinion, this is not the kind of task you want to turf out if you don’t have to. At least, I wouldn’t want to.”
“True,” Marvin agreed.
Libby rubbed her hands. There was a draft blowing in on her feet and it was making her cold all over. She picked a spot of pumpkin pie filling off her sweater. How she’d gotten it on there she didn’t know.
“I agree with Bernie,” Libby said. “First of all, Richard just doesn’t strike me as the delegating type. Second of all, I don’t see Richard and Rick Crouse doing anything together. They’re both way too egotistical. On the other hand, I can see Rick Crouse and Joanna getting together.”
“Now, I’m totally confused,” Marvin complained. “That makes no sense.”
“Yes, it does,” Libby argued. “Think about it. Let’s suppose Bernie is right and Rick Crouse is sleeping with both women….”
“I didn’t say he was,” Bernie objected. “I suggested it.”
Libby waved her objection away. “Fine. Let’s say hypothetically speaking, if that makes you happy. As I was saying, Joanna wants to get rid of Annabel because she’s jealous, so she gets Rick to help.”
“That’s certainly a plausible scenario. The problem is that there are too many plausible scenarios, way too many,” Bernie said. She took a sip of her beer and made a face. How she had drunk this swill when she was in college was beyond her. “In any case, we should still definitely talk to Rick Crouse. One way or another I’m betting he’s involved.”
“Because of what that girl Sam said she saw?” Marvin asked.
Bernie nodded. “That and the fact that Kevin O’Malley pointed us in his direction.”
And they settled down to wait for the cast to come in.
Chapter 13
At eleven-thirty the cast and some of the crew of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof straggled through Leon’s door. There were Brick and Maggie, Big Momma and Big Daddy, the brother and sister-in-law, and some of the running crew. The doctor, the “no-neck monsters,” and Samantha were missing from the group.
As Bernie watched them come in, she reflected that she was glad her father hadn’t gone to the play. The performances the actors had given were mediocre at best, the staging was clumsy, and the miking made it difficult to understand what the actors were saying in several key scenes. For the next several months, her dad would have been complaining about being made to sit through the play.
By now Joanna had been sitting at the bar for a little over ten minutes alternately looking at her watch, tapping her fingers on the counter, and taking perfunctory sips of the beer she’d ordered.
Watching her, Bernie couldn’t help but think that Libby was correct in her assessment. Joanna had to have a compelling reason for being here. This was a woman who drank pomegranate martinis, not Bud Light out of a can, glasses being considered an unnecessary frill at Leon’s. And if Libby was correct, Joanna had a good reason for getting rid of Annabel.
Nothing like a little rivalry to get someone’s homicidal juices going. Or maybe Joanna killed Annabel because Annabel had found out about Rick Crouse and was going to tell Richard, thereby cutting short Joanna’s employment. Or maybe…as she had said to Libby, there were simply too many maybes. Until she had some facts, there was no point in jumping to conclusions. As some Shakespearian somebody had said, “That way madness lies.” Or words to that effect.
And then Bernie stopped thinking about Joanna and concentrated on watching Rick Crouse walking through the door. She had to admit he had something. He’d gotten two women to meet him in places where they didn’t usually go. But maybe that was part of the attraction. Maybe Annabel and Joanna had been looking for a change.
At the moment, he was chatting with the actress who played Maggie the Cat. She was looking up at him with adoring eyes. He really is handsome, Bernie decided. He had the cleft chin and the blue, blue eyes going for him. She wondered if his eye color was real or if it was courtesy of contact lenses. She was betting on contact lenses.
Rick was all smiles until he saw Joanna. Then the smiling stopped. One thing Bernie was sure of as she watched him: Judging from the expression of anger on his face, this was not a man who, in Marvin’s words, had colluded with Joanna about anything. In fact, it looked as if he’d like to wring her neck. And take a long time doing it.
“He doesn’t look happy to see her,” Libby observed as they watched Rick stride over to where Joanna was seated.
“That’s for sure,” Marvin replied. “I wonder what they’re saying?”
“Whatever it is, it isn’t good,” Bernie commented.
Even though Bernie couldn’t hear the conversation, it was obvious to her from their body language that Rick and Joanna were “having words,” as her mom had liked to say. Rick was shaking his head from side to side and holding his hands out in the air as if he was denying everything. Meanwhile, Joanna was jabb
ing her finger at him accusingly, stopping just short of poking him in the chest. Bernie thought that if she did do that Rick would probably snap her finger off.
The whole interchange between them took about a minute. Bernie thought Rick told Joanna to go screw herself, but she couldn’t be sure. In any case, it was enough to make Joanna practically run out the door. Bernie noted that her hands were clenched at her side.
Rick started to go after her, but the woman who played Maggie took hold of Rick’s arm. He spun around with his arm raised, his hand in a fist, then realized what he was doing and dropped his arm back down to his side. He could have shaken the woman off if he had really wanted to, but he allowed himself to be pulled back. The woman started talking to Rick really fast. Bernie wondered what she was saying because his face cleared and she could see the tension flowing out of his body.
“Hey,” Bernie said to Libby and Marvin. “You stay here and talk to Rick Crouse. I’m going to see what I can find out from Joanna.”
“Talk to Rick Crouse how?” Libby asked.
Bernie watched as Rick went over and talked to each of the four men sitting at the bar. They all shook their heads. He turned and studied the rest of the room. She was willing to bet he was looking for them.
“Wave,” she told Marvin, “so he can see you.”
“I don’t want to wave.”
“You have to,” Bernie insisted.
Marvin looked at Libby. She gave a reluctant nod. Marvin waved. Rick kept looking around.
“Wave again,” Bernie told Marvin, “and make it more enthusiastic.”
This time Rick caught sight of Marvin. His eyes lit up. I’m right, Bernie thought. Sam told Rick about Marvin being an agent.
“I don’t think you’re going to have to worry about making conversation,” Bernie said as Rick started toward them. “I think he’s going to do all the talking. Just remember you’re with…”
“I know,” Marvin said. “ICBM.”
Bernie groaned. “No. ICBM means intercontinental ballistic missile. You’re with ICM,” Bernie told him. “That’s International Creative Management. You’re from their New York office.” And with that she took off after Joanna.
A Catered Birthday Party Page 9
