Dead Heat

by Linda Barnes

  “Yes?”

  “And how would it look if people knew Ed and I were friends? If he supported Brian on the air, the audience would say that he was biased because of me.”

  “But he doesn’t support your husband, does he?”

  “He tries for a balanced viewpoint,” she said, no inflection in her voice.

  “Maybe,” Spraggue said, “he’s biased against your husband because of you.”

  “That’s exactly the kind of thing people would say.”

  Conversation waned when the main course, bluefish with ginger sauce, was served. From Lila’s enthusiastic inroads on the fish, he diagnosed her silence as hunger rather than reticence, and soon she started talking again.

  “I hope I’ve curbed your suspicions about my fidelity. It was childish, I suppose, not to want Brian to know about Ed.”

  “Romantic.”

  “Let’s not use that word. Brian will have to know, I assume.”

  “It depends.”

  “On? Are you working directly for Brian or did Murray Eichenhorn pay the freight?”

  “I still have a few more questions.”

  “Oh.”

  She handled silence well. She swallowed another sip of Chardonnay.

  He monitored her alcohol consumption. Much as he had wanted a drink in front of her when he’d joined her, he’d been uneasy about ordering liquor for a woman his aunt had labeled a chronic alcoholic. He’d warned the waiter to give her a wide choice: Would she care for a drink, a cup of coffee, a glass of juice? She’d selected a Scotch on the rocks, taken an interest in the wine.… Could a chronic alcoholic drink socially? Had Mary gotten some inaccurate gossip?

  “I wanted to know about Pete Collatos,” he said quietly.

  “Pete? Does Brian think I fool around with every man in town? Do you have a list of names to interrogate me about?”

  “Just tell me about Pete.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “That’s all you’ve got to say?”

  “Look, what is this? I’ve explained about Ed. More than I should have. What does Brian want? I know he doesn’t want a divorce. Good God, not now. Not with a Senate race in the offing. There’s no reason for him to—”

  The bluefish had been grilled over charcoal, crisp and hot on the outside, moist and buttery within. The sauce was piquant enough to cut the oiliness.

  Mrs. Donagher tilted her knife and fork across her plate, carefully, one inch apart, their handles touching the white tablecloth. She said: “I think I’ve behaved like a fool.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. I was talking to myself. I should do more of that, less talking to other people. You never said my husband hired you. You never did.”

  “Right.”

  “You never said anyone from his office hired you. And I went ahead and talked to you—Are you working for some gossipy newspaper?”

  “No.”

  “Who else would care about my friendship with some local reporter?”

  “I’ll be honest with you—”

  “That’ll be a change.”

  “I haven’t lied.”

  “Go on.”

  “I’m more interested in Pete Collatos than I am in Ed Heineman.”

  “Dead is dead. There’s nothing you can do about Pete.”

  “You’re not a seeker after justice?”

  “Justice is so seldom tempered with mercy these days.”

  “How much mercy does the person who murdered Pete Collatos deserve?”

  “Isn’t murder a strong word?” she said. “There are other explanations besides murder.”

  “But dead is dead, regardless of the explanation.”

  “Yes.” Her eyes darted everywhere, looking at everything but him. Her hands played with packets of sugar, twisted her wedding band, picked at bitten fingernails.

  “What if the man or woman responsible for Pete’s death were of, let’s say, diminished responsibility?”

  “A crazy person?” For once, she sounded defiant, as if she expected to be accused.

  “Or a child,” he said. Donagher had reacted to the suggestion that one of his boys might have been the absent water giver. Would Lila do the same?

  “A child?” she repeated, almost inaudibly.

  “Yes.”

  She stared hard at the table, poked a forkful of fish around her plate. “A child wouldn’t have access to amphetamines.”

  “A teenager might.”

  “What are you getting at?” she said. She abandoned all pretense of eating. Her knife slid off the edge of the table and fell with a soft plop on the carpeting, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  “I spoke to your husband the day before yesterday.”

  “He’s in Washington.”

  “He’s protecting someone.”

  She twisted the gold chain around her neck.

  “Someone close to him, someone he cares about … maybe his older son.”

  The color left her cheeks so rapidly he felt guilty at using the son to make the mother talk. “What did he say that made you think of Tommy?” she said. Her tongue moistened dry lips.

  “It’s just a conclusion I jumped to, based on some ideas that the police will probably hit on sooner or later.”

  “Like?”

  “Like who was your husband looking for when he came up Heartbreak Hill? When the police review videotapes of the race, that will be as clear to them as it is to me. I saw him.”

  She said nothing.

  “Like who would your husband lie to protect? Who would have access to amphetamines? Who might contemplate a ‘joke’ using speed? Who might feel a little left out in the thick of the campaign, a little in need of attention—”

  “Tommy doesn’t take drugs. He goes to a Catholic school, a very strict school.”

  “I never said he took drugs. And he needn’t have bought them in school. If you’re the right age, you can be approached in broad daylight in the middle of Boston Common. He’s the right age; too young to be an undercover cop, too old to go running to his folks with the tale.”

  The waiter cleared their dishes.

  “Coffee?”

  “Yes.”

  They didn’t exchange a single word waiting for the coffee. When it came, Mrs. Donagher raised the steaming cup immediately to her lips, burned her tongue, set the cup down quickly with a rattle of china.

  “Have you mentioned this theory of yours to anyone?” she said after a while.

  “Not yet. I thought I’d get your reaction first.”

  She sipped from her water glass, tentatively tried the coffee again, didn’t speak until she’d drained the cup. “There’s no need to spread that tale any further. It isn’t true.”

  “You’ll have to convince me.”

  “Oh, hell,” she said, “I was the one who was supposed to hand Brian his stupid water at the top of Heartbreak Hill.”

  NINETEEN

  Usually he left his dressing room door ajar. He liked to hear the actors clatter down the stairs, relished their overblown, dramatic words of greeting. The colorful clothing his colleagues selected as the badge of their profession, the costumes they chose for the street, intrigued and often delighted him. One plump character actor was a font of information on the latest Hollywood casting poop; one aging ingenue had a sister who kept her up-to-date on New York auditions. The sense of belonging that the acting company provided, albeit temporarily, in his life was a gift he ordinarily treasured.

  “And imagine,” he heard the ingenue say, “after he’d called her back to read three times and made her do all those nasty improvs, then he had the nerve to …”

  He shut the door. It wasn’t heavy, not the noise-blocking oak slabs of the Chestnut Hill mansion, but it blurred the piercing sopranos, the preening tenors, the rush of tap water, into a faraway hum that could be easily ignored.

  Automatically, his fingers aligned the evening’s makeup on the table in front of him. As You Like It tonight. From Oliver to anonymous c
ourtier back to Oliver … One beard, two different base coats, three camel’s hair brushes … Four changes of character in a single day, counting his impersonation of Edward Heineman, newscaster.

  The skilled actor, by relentless study or special talent, could make every word, each economical gesture, a truthful image. Lila Donagher hadn’t the gift. She couldn’t answer to the ages of her children without worrying her lower lip with her teeth. Every other word she uttered sounded false, a trait the most accomplished liar might envy.

  If she spoke the truth, she was the one Donagher was protecting. She had offered her tale only under pressure, and seemed genuinely afraid that her son would be blamed if she failed to own up.

  It was tawdry; it was vulgar: The morning of the marathon the senator and his wife had indulged in a domestic quarrel. He had been guilty of some husbandly assuming, namely that Lila would tow the kids to the race in order to demonstrate to the press what a loving family man Donagher was. There she would stand at the top of Heartbreak Hill, the last of the senator’s faithful crew of cup-bearers, well within scope of the TV cameras, and present him with his water flask and, perhaps, a photogenic wifely kiss. The kids would flash toothpaste-perfect smiles on cue.

  And, Lila had said defiantly, maybe she would have done it, except that he had neglected to ask. He knew how she hated campaigning, knew how much she resented the invasion of her privacy. And, in spite of that, her participation in an event she dreaded had been guaranteed without her consent. She had been understandably furious.

  While representatives of the press had lurked outside Donagher’s front door, waiting for the first glimpse of the senator in his running shorts, hushed angry words had been exchanged inside. Why didn’t Donagher get another one of his aides to hand him water on the hilltop? While he was at it, why didn’t he get one of them to go to church with him, sleep with him, bear his kids? And Lila, who Spraggue suspected never got the last word in an argument with her more loquacious husband, had given up talking, smiled and nodded politely, and decided not to show up. She hadn’t told her husband of her planned truancy.

  She had gone to visit Ed Heineman instead.

  Ed Heineman, a man who might have an interest in giving Lila Donagher an alibi … A man who might be in need of an alibi himself …

  Someone knocked on Spraggue’s door and swung it open before he had a chance to say keep out.

  He’d seen Kathleen Farrell since their never consummated Friday night date, acted opposite her both before and after Collatos’ death. But now he realized that it had been a long time since he’d really looked.

  She was certainly theatrical, a red cape swirled across her shoulders, blonde hair windswept into a tangle of curls. She leaned over and left the imprint of her lips on his forehead. He twisted to look up at her, changed tactics, and stared into the mirror instead. Her hands came to rest on his shoulders.

  “You’ve become a stranger,” she said, with a teasing pout.

  “It’s been a tough week.”

  “We could improve it.”

  Spraggue tried to generate enthusiasm. She waited, shook her head sadly.

  “You puzzle me,” she said.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Hot and then cold. First, the come on, then you back off so far I’m not sure we’re acting on the same stage.”

  “I have a one-track mind.”

  “And for a while it was on me, but …”

  “It may get back on the track yet.”

  “But you wouldn’t want to push it?”

  Her eyes were almost the same shade as Sharon Collatos’ eyes. What, he wondered, would Sharon’s eyes be like when she smiled, when they melted into pools of chocolate velvet glittered with pinpoint pricks of light …

  “I’m preoccupied,” he said. “This Collatos business.”

  “You told me you hadn’t seen the guy for two years before you met him at the reservoir.”

  “Yeah, but …”

  “Yeah, but what? Dead people are more important than live people?”

  “I have to finish my makeup. Ten minutes to curtain and you’re not even started.”

  Her face was ready for makeup, just washed and glowing, dusted with tiny pores and a sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of her nose.

  “It wouldn’t do me any good to invite you out after the show?” she said.

  “Tonight?”

  “No, next year. Of course, tonight. I assume you’re busy?”

  “Not necessarily,” he said slowly, seduced by the scent of soap, the light hands on his shoulders.

  “The Harvest serves until …” she began.

  “Not the Harvest.” He hoped the place wouldn’t always remind him of Ed Heineman’s embarrassed half grin, of Lila Donagher’s hand-wringing confidences.

  “My place?”

  “You are direct.”

  “I am.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Don’t sound so enthusiastic. I may change my mind,” she said on the way out.

  So may I, he wanted to call after her.

  After the first scene, he got safely into As You Like It. Escape from reality, that’s what the audience sought; escape from self, that’s what the actor got. Contentedly, he let Michael Spraggue go, let his problems stay behind in the dressing room, less important, momentarily, than the torment of a belittled brother, the plight of a banished duke.

  He hadn’t locked his concerns away tightly enough; they surfaced in the oddest way.

  He viewed Act Four, scene one, from behind the false proscenium, stage right, watched it closely because of all the As You Lie It Act Fours he had enjoyed or suffered through, this one pleased him most by its staging. He’d seen better acting, notably at The Old Vic, but this director, unlike most American directors, trusted his actors with Shakespeare. The American approach to Shakespeare was to jazz it up. Convinced that American audiences had no true love of the music of Shakespeare’s language, that American actors were incapable of handling the magic words, most directors moved their actors with a vengeance, cartwheels during soliloquys, no less. But Howard Desmond let Jaques do ‘The Seven Ages of Man’ simply, seated on a bench, not waggling so much as a finger for emphasis. He let Rosalind and Orlando court each other with the ancient words, not with modern skittish movement.

  “Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”

  Comforting thought.

  “Come sister,” the actress playing Rosalind took Kathleen’s hand in great good humor, “you shall be the priest and marry us.”

  How must it have looked in Shakespeare’s day, when the woman playing the man was actually played by a boy? He tried to see the scene with the eyes of a Globe groundling circa 1600. Somewhere inside himself he could hear a bell resonate, a warning klaxon, but nothing more.

  Onstage, during Act Four, scene three, he paused so long before a line, that Kathleen peered up at him, startled.

  Maybe it was the sight of Rosalind swooning at the bloodied handkerchief. He stared at her as she fell. Did something in that fall remind him of Collatos’ unseen fall? The thought would not surface. And he couldn’t urge it upward, not there, on stage. He fought to keep his concentration on his role, his next action, his next line, until the feeling faded.

  It came back stronger in the last act, when he kissed Kathleen, placed his rough cheek against her smooth one, studied her face with the delight of a lover in the beloved.

  Her heavy creamy makeup … so different from the clear, translucent skin he’d noticed earlier in the mirror. What was there about a heavy, creamy complexion that tugged so naggingly at one corner of his mind?

  He was grateful he had no more lines to muff, nothing left to do but dance in the final wedding.

  Kathleen steered him through the moves.

  They took a cab to the place she’d leased for the duration of the Harvard Rep’s season, a flat in a gray, paint-peeling two-family, close to Cambridge, but with a Somerville ad
dress that knocked down the rent. She sat in the middle of the back seat, her thigh a scant inch from his, her hand lightly caressing the fabric of his pants, teasingly near, never quite close enough. When he groaned and reached for her, she laughed and slid across the seat, her skirt artfully hiked, her long, bare legs tilted away from him, slightly, consciously spread. The cabbie spent a lot of time staring in the rearview mirror. Her honey-colored hair brushed against Spraggue’s right shoulder, releasing a cloud of scent that reminded him of other women in other cabs, and flipped his stomach over with desire. The ride seemed long enough to take them across state lines, the cab oppressively hot, the journey up the shadowed walk to her door a half-mile trek through a steamy, fragrant jungle.

  She didn’t seem to notice the dusty wooden floors, the sprung, faded sofa and chairs, the dingy, bleeding wallpaper. She hadn’t brought him home for the ambiance.

  The bed was unmade, yellowed sheets tumbled on the saggy mattress.

  She stripped with all the lights on, pleased with and conscious of the effect. She was stunning, willing, practiced. He couldn’t help contrasting her lush body; her pornographer’s-idea-of-a-woman’s body, with Kate Holloway’s spare, sculptured beauty.

  When he told her he’d expected to discover that her blonde hair was dyed, she giggled and confessed that it was—all over.

  She faked an early orgasm; he was almost certain of it, and pushed harder into her, determined to get past accomplished actress into woman. But she wriggled and postured as if she were staring up past his shoulder into some invisible ceiling mirror, rating her own performance, making love to her own spectacular body, using him as some incidental instrument.

  When they were finished, hot and breathless and sheet-entangled, she stretched diagonally across the bed, smiling in seeming contentment. Maybe there wasn’t any more; maybe the surface was all.

  She still had a trace of greasepaint in her hair. It smelled as sweet and phoney as cotton candy.

  The realization hit him so suddenly that his entire body shook, with the kind of tremor that sometimes woke him sweating in the night.

  “I have to leave,” he said, sliding out from under Kathleen’s encompassing, sleep-heavy arm.