Soap Opera Slaughters

by Marvin Kaye

  “Where’d his men uncover the things?”

  “In Joanne Carpenter’s dressing room.”

  I put down my chopsticks. I was upset So that was where Flo hid Niven’s clothing.

  I said, “Then I imagine Joanne is now Lou’s prime suspect.”

  Hilary nodded. “He told Harry he was having her tailed. Lou was curious where you and Harry and she rode off to when she was wearing nothing but briefs and a hospital gown.”

  Uh-oh. Trouble. I’d told Lou I wasn’t in New York, and he already knew I was lying. But how? A plainclothesman watching Joanne wouldn’t necessarily have recognized me. Then I remembered the young “fan” with the camera slung around his neck who’d been waiting in front of WBS at an astonishingly early hour. He took a photo of me and Lara, and I signed ‘Tom Mason’ in his autograph book. That’s what Fat Lou must’ve meant when he called me “T.M.” on the phone.

  “What’s the matter?” Hilary asked. “You looked worried.”

  “I am. I just realized I could lose my license.”

  She didn’t comment just served the Scallops and Straw Mushrooms—bland, delicious and light enough to keep us from feeling bloated all evening. Pushing away the empty carton, she rested a hand on mine for a moment.

  “Gene, what can I do to help?”

  “Short of solving this mess, nothing much. I lied to Lou, and now I have to come up with something for him, or else. Trouble is, the only things I can hand him are exactly what I’m trying to find alternatives for, but can’t.”

  She looked as if she might say something, but changed her mind. Lowering her eyes, she paid attention to her dinner. I ate some, drank beer, thought things over yet again. I wanted to lay out what I’d uncovered for Hilary, see what her opinion was, but I was afraid she’d concur on the obvious. Also, I wasn’t positive whether I really wanted Hilary’s help, or just sought an excuse to close the gap between the two of us, and if that was the case, forget it, it wasn’t fair to Lara. On the other hand, my inclination to bring her into it might be nothing more than force of habit.

  I chewed on the problem along with my dinner, decided at length that there was no harm, at least, in telling her about the most recent development. She’d get wind of it at WBS, anyway.

  “Do you know what happened to Ames after I saw you?”

  “No.”

  I told her.

  “There does seem to be an epidemic of violence around WBS,” Hilary remarked. “How badly is he hurt?”

  “He’ll pull through.”

  “Figures. Producers have thick skulls.”

  A touch of vintage Hilary. I knew she couldn’t keep up the act forever. I told her I was with Ames up to the time he was put in the limo for Polyclinic. “He came around for a few minutes. Says he walked into his office, bent down to tie his shoe when someone crouching behind his desk tipped it over on him. Before he could get free, he was knocked behind the ear with his Emmy.”

  “I’d call it poetic justice,” she said, “except that dramatic justice seems more appropriate.”

  Hilary was sounding more and more like her old self. Good. When she turned on me, I was all ready to bring up “Galahad in galoshes.”

  “Did you find Ames, Gene?”

  “No, Micki Lipscomb did. I arrived right afterwards and caught her when she collapsed.” The latter detail frankly was to set her up; I was sure Hilary couldn’t resist such a gambit. But she didn’t utter a syllable. (I wondered whether she realized how effectively she was getting on my nerves by not getting on my nerves.) “Anyway,” I added, “Ames is recuperating now at Polyclinic.”

  “Any theories, Gene?”

  “Why he was attacked? Yes. Remember the proposed ’Bible’ Tommy Franklin handed him earlier? Last I saw of it, Ames had it spread out on his desk, but after they took him to the hospital I made Micki root through his things, and guess what?”

  “No ’Bible.’”

  “Correct.”

  “Well” Hilary shrugged, “that in itself doesn’t prove much, though—”

  Lara’s intercom interrupted her. I went to the button, pressed and told the doorman to send up the man in the lobby. Hilary raised an eyebrow, but I’d allowed her to play her own pregnant pause, so now it was her turn to wait.

  A moment later, the doorbell rang. I opened it. In came Willie Frost, Hilary’s personal attorney. A short, slightly paunchy man in his forties, Willie had on his usual three-piece ensemble, despite the warm weather. His brown hair, once crew cut, now was stylishly long, and he’d given up his old clean-shaven appearance for a mustache, close-trimmed beard and side whiskers.

  “Gene, Hilary, good to see you both again.”

  “It’s been a while,” I said. “Still making it hot for Ma Bell?” Willie had a personal vendetta against the telephone company, and did lots of little things to drive its people crazy.

  “I’m taking it easy on them lately,” he replied, smiling like a slightly bored Olympian. “It’s such an unfair fight” His lofty tone left no doubt whose side held the short odds.

  “Willie, hello,” said Hilary, rising to shake his hand. “What brings you here?”

  “I did,” I told her, deliberately dangling insult bait.

  Her mouth opened, but shut again. A two-beat pause before she trusted herself to ask me, a bit too sweetly, whether I’d care to enlighten her. I could practically taste the sardonic “brightness” she swallowed unspoken.

  “Willie’s a kind of favor to Lara,” I stated. “I’ve got to take him to Brooklyn Heights now. Care to come along?”

  Hilary nodded her head grimly.

  WE TOOK MY CAR. I drove slowly, since we were early. On the way, I gave Willie the details. Hilary occasionally asked me a question, but mostly she remained silent.

  It was too early to visit Florence. Lara wouldn’t arrive till after nine, and her presence was a precondition, so we parked on a side street near Montague and walked to the business thoroughfare of “the Heights.” The three of us spent about thirty minutes in a bistro with brandy and coffee. Willie entertained us with tales of his early exploits as an insurance attorney, and Hilary told about the time she investigated an alleged case of arson in the Christmas decorations industry, an exploit that took place before I’d begun working for her.

  After we’d been gabbing for a while, I remembered that Donald Bannister’s bookshop was on Montague Street. I got out the card he gave me and checked. He was open that evening. I mentioned it and Hilary immediately was interested, which came as no surprise. No matter what else she might be doing, Ms. Quayle never can resist a secondhand bookstore.

  The Night Owl was two blocks away, a street-level establishment with an overhead sign of a bespectacled owl poring over a book with the title, “I Don’t Give a Hoot!” There was an outside table loaded with miscellaneous volumes, all priced at 50¢ each. The inside of the shop was narrow, dimly lit and crammed with warped, canted bookshelves, some fashioned from orange crates. Books of varying sizes and thicknesses, hardbound, paperback, were assorted by subject, but otherwise followed no consistent arrangement. The optimum browsing mode, according to Hilary. The back wall, partly visible down the uneven aisles, was entirely devoted to the lively arts. This was also good form, so far as Hilary thought A good used book dealer always has a specialty.

  At the moment, there were no customers. Donald Bannister sat alone at the front of the store, eyes half-closed, pipe in mouth. The frantic day at the studio took its toll. His jowls seemed deeper, his forehead more severely creased with worry lines. But when he saw us, his grew more animated. He waved at us to come in.

  “Laddie,” the elder statesman of “Riverday” hailed me, “I didn’t suppose you’d come this soon! Welcome! Help yourself to some mulled wine.”

  Bannister shook hands with Willie, whom I introduced, and also greeted Hilary. They were already acquainted with each other from time she’d spent at WBS conferring with her client and cousin. He gestured for us to gather round the check-out
table. Next to the cash register on top of a hot plate was a metal pot with a ladle in it steeped in a scarlet liquid redolent of cinnamon, cloves and apples. Willie declined a drink and wandered off to examine the nonfiction, but Hilary and I accepted the paper cups the actor filled for us.

  “Very nice,” Hilary said, “but isn’t it a bit early in the season? I usually associate hot wine punch with autumn.”

  “True, true,” Bannister laughed, “but at my age, lass, it sometimes pays to rush things.” He sat down again behind the counter and, running a hand through his gray hair, regarded me with a rueful smile. “Quite a day you picked to get a behind-the-scenes glimpse, eh? The plot in the Jennett kitchen was thickening, but in the hospital, it was sickening.” He intoned the latter melodramatically.

  “Well, taking all that into account, I was generally impressed with the way ‘Riverday’ is put together,” I said, sipping at the wine before adding, “and also disappointed.”

  “Naturally. Gods don’t look good up close. Unquote.” He gestured with his pipe stem like a professor stressing some obscure point “Soap opera fantasy is meant for the living room. It’s practically impossible for the fans to understand that, but even some of the kids we get on the show have a hard time with it.”

  “In what way?” Hillary asked. “You mean the younger actors?”

  He nodded. “They haven’t yet learned how to distance themselves from their roles. See, there’s hardly enough time to get the lines down, let alone polish. The plot is unpredictable, anyway, so the tendency is to mine your own emotional memories...and that can draw blood.”

  “How?”

  “A common example, lass, is when a new cast member has to pretend to be in love with some actress he’s just met, and maybe doesn’t even like. There’s never time on a soap for intensive rehearsing, so he’ll probably just invest her with an ‘as-if affection he really feels for his wife or girl friend or lover. He plays love scenes with the actress. It goes on for weeks or maybe even months, and then the head writer decides to bring in a new man to steal away his ersatz love. Bang! All of a sudden, he actually feels threatened, sexually inadequate.”

  “What happens then?” I asked.

  “If he’s lucky enough to be paired with a mature actress, she’ll see the symptoms and spend a little time with him between scenes. Nothing significant, understand, just a few human fellow-actor chats to remind him that, after all, the show is only make-believe.”

  Hilary refilled her cup. “Lara’s told me she often has to sit with Florence to ‘talk her down’ from some attack of Jennett family anxiety.”

  “Well, that’s understandable,” said Bannister, “though you’d think Ms. McKinley is old enough to know better. But the role of Martha is her hiding place, don’t y’ see? She’s become the mother she never had herself. Don’t know what she’d do if they ever tried to kill off Martha.”

  Hilary and I exchanged glances, but said nothing.

  The conversation passed on to the topic of “Riverday’s” fans. The actor pinched the bridge of his nose with index finger and thumb, closed his eyes. He looked worn out. “The letters we get,” he soliloquized. “They send presents and propositions to the heroes and poisoned candy to the villains. Two or three months ago, a woman wrote inviting me to spend a weekend with her. Among other things, I was supposed to escort her to her husband’s annual company dinner. She said he’d given her full permission to do whatever she and I wished. She confided that she goes to bed every night with my picture under her pillow.”

  “Did you accommodate her?” Hilary asked drily.

  “Oh, I said no with great difficulty,” he replied in an ironic tone. “It was quite a test, too. As an added inducement, she included a photo of herself. Three hundred pounds, I do not exaggerate, and dressed in a strapless evening gown.”

  Hilary and I chuckled, but it was hollow laughter. I wondered how many years of suffering that man and woman endured before reaching their unusual agreement. A grotesque example, perhaps, but not all that different from millions of Americans with no one to rejoice or cry with except strangers performing improbable morality dramas five days a week, same time, same channel.

  “It’s an inescapable paradox,” Donald Bannister asserted, knocking the dottle from his pipe into an ashtray. “You see flesh-and-blood people moving and speaking on TV and you can’t help but think the puppets are the characters you fall in love with. It’s like that Fred Brown science-fiction story where a man conceives a passion for a woman telepathically conjured up by an intelligent cockroach. It’s not so different with soap actors. I mean, you might just as well try to share the soul of a Chopin étude by going to bed with the piano tuner.”

  The door opened and a customer entered, seeking information from Bannister. The actor excused himself, and Hilary used the opportunity to begin browsing through the shop. I did the same, choosing another aisle. I saw Willie. He pointed to his watch.

  “Ten more minutes tops, Gene.”

  “Fine. I leave you the task of prying Hilary loose.”

  The attorney smirked. “How many favors do you think I owe?”

  I walked to the back of the store, my eyes automatically running swiftly along the spines of faded bindings here and there interrupted by a newer volume’s garish dust jacket. It was hard to break the habit of looking, Hilary had trained me well.

  My breath caught as my eye stopped on a tall blue book enclosed in a slipcase of the same hue. Impossible! The only other copy I’d ever seen was in the now nonexistent reading room of the old Lambs club. I practically leaped on it, looked for the price, couldn’t find any. I carried it up front, keeping an aisle between me and Hilary.

  “Ah-hah,” Bannister said, his wreathed in smiles when he saw my selection. “A man of rarefied tastes! There’s a wonderful story that goes with this volume. For twenty years—”

  “Shh,” I hushed him, “tell me it another time, I want to make this a surprise. How much?”

  He adopted my conspiratorial whisper. “I’ll give it to you for cost. Sixty dollars.”

  “Thanks...but I don’t have that much money with me. Will you put it aside?”

  Pressing it into my hands, Bannister said, “Go on and take it with you, lad. I trust you.”

  I thanked him again, but explained the book was so huge, I’d look pretty conspicuous trying to leave with it. “But I can come back tomorrow.”

  “Done,” he said, winking, and hid it under the counter.

  Farewell my own,

  Light of my life, farewell,

  For crime unknown

  I go to a dungeon cell.

  WHEN THE APARTMENT DOOR opened, the strains of the second act octette of H. M. S. Pinafore reached our ears. I introduced Florence to the attorney, Hilary remaining out of sight in the hallway till Willie and I entered, then she joined the procession. The actress opened her mouth to object, but I distracted her by thrusting a dollar bill into her hand.

  She frowned at the money. “What’s this for?”

  “To give to him,” I said, indicating Willie.

  “Why don’t you just hand it to him yourself?”

  “Because,” I replied with some pique, “you’re the one who needs him, and I figured I never could get you to part with a dollar of your own to ensure his discretion.”

  My insult earned me a nasty look and a buck for Willie. He put it in his wallet and took out the receipt he’d prepared at the bistro. As soon as Florence accepted it, the lawyer told her, “Ms. McKinley, so far as I’m concerned, you are now my client and anything I hear tonight will be regarded as a privileged communication. May I have a few words with you in private?”

  “I don’t intend to say a thing until my friend Lara arrives,” she stated in her haughtiest manner.

  “A very good idea,” he agreed, nodding sagely and stroking the thing he called a beard. “You needn’t speak, I’ll do all the talking. Call it advice, if you wish, or perhaps rules of procedure.”

  She
hesitated long enough for me to make a crack about her getting my dollar’s worth. “And while you two are in conference,” I said, “I’ve got a telephone call to make. Don’t worry, it’s local.”

  That was the last straw. As I’d meant it to be. Drawing herself erect—her ankle-length midnight blue dressing gown adding to her appearance of height—she told me I could use the kitchen phone. “Down that hallway. And you needn’t leave a dime.”

  “Thanks. While I’m there, may I bring you some tea?”

  “No!” Then she made an awkward attempt at a gracious smile. “I suppose someone else may want some.”

  Hillary declined, and so did I, but Willie said he wouldn’t mind a scotch. A bit nervy, perhaps, but then he was on a one-buck retainer.

  Looking like she might have a stroke any minute, Scrooge McKinley said, “I’m not sure I have any in the kitchen.”

  “Oh, as long as I’m there,” I volunteered helpfully, I’ll try to find some.”

  “Thank you,” she euphemized.

  Hold! Ere upon your loss

  You lay much stress,

  A long-concealèd crime

  I would confess.

  As Buttercup sang her dire secret to the assembled Pinafore cast, I went to the kitchen, which was closer to the living room than my first visit led me to believe. As I entered, Florence’s tubby tawny cat, Rathbone, sleepily gazed at me through half-shut eyelids. He lay comfortably ensconced in a straw basket next to the gas range, swathed in a downy blanket, and with a pillow yet.

  I dialed Fat Lou’s home number and gave him a down payment. He took the information without asking questions—he was on his own time. The call took us less than a minute.

  Hanging up the phone, I checked the drawers and cabinet doors till I found the McKinley liquor stock. I almost burst out laughing. One shelf was crammed full of innumerable tiny flasks of every imaginable variety of whisky, cordial and liqueur, all of them miniatures.

  I removed a pair of Johnny Walker Blacks, poured them over ice and brought the drink to Willie. He was standing by the picture window overlooking the river promenade talking in a low voice to Florence. I gave him the glass and joined Hilary by the aquarium.