by Barbara Paul
“What’s the magnifying glass for?” I asked.
“I dunno,” said Carla. “I just thought it looked like something you might like to have.”
“Did you pick out all this stuff yourself?”
“Vivian Frank and I did.”
Vivian Frank. Well. An apology?
Now I was ready to get back to work. It had been a near-fruitless winter as far as writing was concerned. I’d meant to have a new play by spring, but here it was May and I was still in the roughest of rough-draft stages. I sat in my new chair at my new worktable and spread out The New Play and read everything I’d written so far.
And ended up tearing my hair. The New Play was garbage, sheer garbage. Decaying leftovers from a dozen other things I’d written, forced into an unsuitable mold in a pretentious attempt to say something profound about vengeance. What had I thought I was doing? The writing was sloppy, undisciplined, self-indulgent. It was just a series of scenes that all said the same thing: Feel sorry for me. I swept the pages into an empty file drawer, where they could stay until I’d cooled down enough to decide whether any of it was salvageable or not.
In the middle of May the Tony Award nominations were announced. Foxfire was one of the best play nominees. John Reddick, Ian Cavanaugh, and Hugh Odell were nominated. And the biggest surprise: both Sylvia Markey and Vivian Frank got the nod. Two actresses nominated for the same role—I wondered if that had ever happened before. John and Sylvia had won Tonys in the past, but none of the rest of us had.
I threw out The New Play and started over. I still wanted to write about vengeance and I wanted to keep the form of a series of short scenes in nonrealistic settings; but this time writing the play would have to be more than therapy for the writer. I got to it, cutting almost as much as I wrote.
After several attempts, I got hold of Lieutenant Goodlow on the phone and asked him what he’d found out about the deaths of Manhattan Rep’s director and business manager.
“Nothing conclusive,” the Lieutenant said. “Which is the hallmark of this entire goddamned case. Hints, possibilities, intimations—but no sure fact.” He paused a minute—I could hear him taking a deep breath. “Preston Scott may have been murdered, but there’s no way to be sure. The medical examiner says there are a hundred kinds of death that look like heart attacks. Scott’s own physician saw no cause for suspicion—not with a patient who was overweight, smoked too much, worked twelve hours a day, and had a past history of heart trouble.”
“Wait a minute—what past history of heart trouble?”
“He’d had two mild attacks before. Didn’t you know?”
“No, I didn’t.” My God, the things people keep secret! “He never said a word.”
“Well, you can see why it looks like heart attack. But there’s no hard evidence. And the same thing’s true of Alfred Heath’s auto accident. The official report says he fell asleep at the wheel. An examination of the car revealed nothing out of the ordinary—but then, they had no reason to suspect the car might have been tampered with. That affects the way you conduct an investigation. Again, nothing really conclusive.”
I mulled this over. “But you don’t really believe they were accidents, do you?”
“Unofficially, no. It’s just too coincidental.”
I thanked him for his time and hung up. There was something about this whole thing that didn’t quite jibe. Had Preston Scott and Alfred Heath been murdered? There was nothing about either death that said Look, I’m getting even with you for something you did. The fact of murder, if indeed it was murder, had been concealed. All the attacks on the Foxfire people had been open, almost boastful.
And another thing. Killing two of Manhattan Rep’s governing committee was not consistent with the theory that our enemy wanted to keep us alive and suffering. Why had the two men themselves been killed instead of, say, their wives? It didn’t fit, it didn’t make sense.
Unless our enemy had changed his mind.
Say he had started out to kill us all, all nine members of the governing committee. He somehow engineered the deaths of Preston Scott and Alfred Heath, but then found the results didn’t satisfy him. Nobody knew why they’d died—and the killer realized, too late, how important that was in exacting vengeance. The two men were dead, out of pain, beyond his reach. Perhaps the killer had looked around and seen that the people who were really suffering were not the men he’d killed but the people close to them. I never met Mrs. Heath, but Preston Scott’s wife Pat had gone to pieces when her husband died. The killer could have taken a long, hard look at Pat Scott and realized he was going about it the wrong way.
That would account for the two-year time lapse between Scott’s and Heath’s deaths and the concentrated attacks that had started about ten months ago. Our enemy would have had to investigate, find out how he could hurt us most, make plans. How he must have exulted when he learned so many of us would be working on Foxfire! He could choose his moments.
The more I thought about Michael Crown’s lover, the more unreal he seemed. First of all, I had trouble believing that anyone could keep a homosexual relationship secret for fifteen years. The killer was banking everything on our understanding why we were being punished without knowing the identity of the man doing the punishing. He’d have to be awfully confident that no one had ever known he was Michael Crown’s lover.
But then I remembered reading in The Newgate Calendar about a woman in eighteenth-century London who had passed herself off as a male for many years. She had married thirteen or fourteen times, each time successfully concealing the fact that she was a woman. She’d abandoned her “wives” in turn whenever a hankering for new flesh overtook her. Only her last wife suspected anything amiss and eventually blew the whistle on her. Now if that could be kept secret for years, I suppose concealing a more conventional homosexual relationship wouldn’t be all that difficult.
So maybe it was possible after all. I tried to imagine what it would be like, sitting down and deciding to murder nine people. And then deciding that killing wasn’t enough. And then doing something about it. I couldn’t imagine any of it. I was a professional imaginer, but this was beyond me, way out of my league.
One thing that wasn’t beyond me was The New Play, Second Version. It was going well. I worked steadily at it, taking my time and thinking it out this time before I started putting anything on paper. I’d once read that Charlotte Brontë never wrote a sentence down until it was complete and polished in her head. I wasn’t able to do that, but it was a good goal to aim for. I was beginning to feel the excitement that comes when a new play starts to take its own unique shape.
Then our enemy struck again. This time he chopped off Leo Gunn’s right hand.
11
Hugh Odell was on the verge of collapse. He’d had a breakdown once before, and I was alarmed the same thing was happening again. His hands and mouth were trembling, he stammered when he tried to talk, his face had a gray, haunted look.
“It’s m-m-my fault, Abby,” he said. “If it hadn’t b-been for me, L-L-Leo wouldn’t … he’d b-b-be all right.…”
“Don’t blame yourself, Hugh,” I said as soothingly as I could. “If the police couldn’t protect him, you—”
“B-but that’s just it! If I hadn’t s-s-separated his g-guards …”
“Hugh, stop this. It’s not your fault. It’s his fault. That … madman.” I’d almost said murderer. I’d thought Hugh had been coping with the murder of Rosemary as well as could be expected, but now his sense of guilt for what happened to Leo was breaking down all his defenses. I took him by the elbow and steered him back to his dressing room. We were on the break between Saturday matinee and the evening performance.
The two officers assigned to protect Leo Gunn had stuck with him closely. Whenever Leo had to leave his station off-stage right, they’d trailed along with him. They tried to keep out of the way, but in the cramped quarters backstage this wasn’t always possible. But Leo hadn’t complained; he wanted them there.
They shared elbow room with Ian’s two guards, who followed him everywhere except on stage when he was performing. In addition, the two security guards Gene Ramsay had hired were still prowling around checking for booby traps. So all in all there were six men backstage who were supposed to prevent further mayhem.
After Friday night’s performance Hugh Odell’s sentimental attachment to a symbol of his past marital bliss had directly triggered a chain of events that made possible the behanding of Leo Gunn. Ever since he and Rosemary had said “I do,” Hugh had never removed his wedding ring. Since he played an unmarried man in Foxfire, each night he would cover his ring with flesh-colored tape and remove it again after the performance. Since Rosemary’s murder, Hugh had lost a lot of weight—all his costumes had had to be altered, and even his fingers were thinner. So last night when he pulled off the tape, he pulled off the wedding ring too—the first time ever. The ring rolled under an old-fashioned wardrobe cabinet, the kind that stands on legs. Hugh got down on his knees and felt around, but he couldn’t find the ring. He tried to move the wardrobe out from the wall, but it was too heavy for him. So he went out and asked Leo Gunn for help.
At the time Leo was on stage, with his two police guards, working on a chair one of the cast had said was on the verge of collapse. Leo had just glued in a wooden brace and was applying a vise when Hugh appeared with his tale of woe. One of Leo’s guards—bored, I suppose, with watching other people work—offered to help. Hugh and the guard went back and moved the wardrobe and recovered the ring. When the guard returned to the stage, Leo and the other guard were no longer there.
So the guard started looking for them. He poked around backstage and asked people where Leo was. He asked all the cast, checking each dressing room in turn. He asked Griselda Gold, who was busy flattering Vivian Frank at the time. He asked Tiny, who was washing the wine glasses used in the play. He asked Carla Banner, who was listening to the wardrobe mistress complain about something. He asked the doorkeeper. Gene Ramsay’s two guards were elsewhere in the theater, checking doors and the like.
Still the police guard wasn’t especially worried. He’d been on this duty long enough to become used to the comings and goings that precede and follow each performance, sandwiching the backstage quiet that reigns during the performance. Leo could be anywhere, doing anything, only three steps away. So the guard started checking the storage areas when he heard a muffled pounding sound. He traced the sound to the prop room. The door was locked.
Now the guard began to get worried. The room could be locked by simply pulling the door shut, but it couldn’t be unlocked except with a key. The guard dragged Tiny away from his cleaning-up chores and got him to unlock the prop room. The other police guard burst out yelling, “Where’s Gunn?”
It seems he’d followed Leo into the prop room. Once there, the guard had become intrigued by a couple of props left behind from an earlier production and hadn’t noticed when Leo left. When he did notice, he found he’d been locked in. A helpful gesture from one guard and a moment of inattention from the other—that’s all our enemy needed.
A full-scale search was quickly mounted, and it was only a matter of minutes until Leo was found. He was lying in a stairwell leading down to the storage area under the stage. His right hand had been hacked off, and a bloody-bladed fire ax was lying on the step beside him. The hand itself was nowhere to be found. And get this: a tourniquet had been tied around Leo’s arm to keep him from bleeding to death.
Leo was rushed to the hospital, accompanied by his guilt-stricken guards. He was in shock and he suffered from concussion as well: he’d been hit from behind with the flat side of the ax blade before the maiming. But he’d live—a stage manager without his good right hand.
As Griselda Gold told it to me, Lieutenant Goodlow and his men had arrived almost immediately. He ordered another search which had turned up one of the wardrobe mistress’s smocks and a pair of cotton work gloves. Both smock and gloves were bloodspattered.
The wardrobe mistress??
No way, said Carla Banner. The wardrobe mistress had grabbed her (Carla) the minute the final curtain had closed and had pounded her ear right up to the time she left. Carla had been with the wardrobe mistress until the moment the latter had walked out the stage door, about a minute before the police guards raised the alarm that Leo was missing. Thus the wardrobe mistress was in the clear—and so, incidentally, was Carla Banner.
The smock had been taken, obviously to protect the wearer’s clothes from Leo’s blood. Which meant that our enemy had planned long ago what he was going to do and had simply bided his time until the opportunity arose to do it. The first guard, the one who had gone to Hugh Odell’s dressing room, had spent about ten minutes looking for Leo before he heard his partner pounding on the prop-room door. Only ten minutes—our enemy clearly had nerves of steel. Ten minutes to notice that Leo came out of the prop room alone, to lock the door, to don the smock and gloves, to attack Leo. And to do it all without being seen. Nerves of steel, damn him.
So who could have done it? Visitors were no longer permitted backstage at Foxfire; one of Gene Ramsay’s guards met all unauthorized personnel at the stage door and turned them away. According to the doorkeeper’s check-out list, the electrician and the stagehands had left while Leo was still on the stage working on the chair. The front-of-house people had left. And a little later, the wardrobe mistress. No one was discovered hiding in the auditorium or any other place in the theater. Still in the theater were the entire cast of Foxfire, all in their dressing rooms getting out of costume and make-up. Griselda Gold. Tiny. Carla Banner. The night watchman. The doorkeeper.
So much for Loren Keith’s idea that Michael Crown’s lover was not a member of the Foxfire company.
I’d spent all of Saturday morning at St. Luke’s Hospital waiting to learn about Leo. When I finally got to talk to the doctor, he told me Leo had come out of shock but he was heavily medicated and not permitted visitors yet. The doctor said he saw no reason why Leo could not ultimately be fitted with a prosthetic device. At the moment I was more concerned with the amount of pain Leo was suffering. He wasn’t feeling a thing, the doctor assured me. At the moment.
I left the hospital and headed toward the Martin Beck Theatre. The police had been there all night, searching for Leo’s right hand and anything else they could turn up. They’d still be there, no doubt, filling the backstage area and “protecting” the company. I planned to add myself to the crowd—because of Carla Banner.
The costume mistress and one of the stagehands had quit, and Griselda Gold had had to talk three of the cast members into staying. The defecting crew members had been quickly replaced, but no experienced stage manager had been available. Actors, directors, producers, even writers can all be replaced at an instant’s notice, but good stage managers are hard to find. So Carla Banner was going to have to manage both of Saturday’s performances, and I was uneasy about it. Carla could probably handle the job under normal circumstances, but she was easily intimidated and anyone would be shaken by what had happened. The smart move would be to shut down for a few days, but Gene Ramsay was in Europe and I didn’t have the legal authority to close my own play.
When I got to the theater, I found an atmosphere of near-hysteria. Leo Gunn’s right hand had turned up.
On Ian Cavanaugh’s dressing table.
“Go home,” I told Ian. “This is what we pay understudies for. No one expects you to perform under these conditions.”
He shook his head. “He’s telling me I’m next. I don’t want … if my family … I’m afraid I’ll …”
“Contaminate them?” He nodded. I knew the feeling; it had happened to me when my home had been wrecked. “Then go somewhere else. But get out of here. Look at you! You’re white as a sheet.”
But Ian stubbornly resisted the suggestion—whether out of a feeling of fatalism or the need to have something to do, I don’t know. I argued with him a few minutes and then gave up.
Carla Bann
er was nervous but holding up well. She kept reading through Leo Gunn’s cue sheets as if they were new lines she had to memorize. When the time came for the matinee to begin, she gave her first instruction—“House lights down”—in a tight-throated squeak. But once the curtain was open and she saw the play wasn’t going to collapse because of something she did, she began to relax a little.
I kept myself close by in case she needed help. Griselda Gold patrolled the entire backstage area instructing the army of policemen stationed there that if they really must talk, please not to whisper. Whispers carry, she told them, and a low murmur from backstage was much less distracting to the actors than a whisper. She had a way of saying it that made even the toughest-looking cops fall back on sign language as a way of communicating.
The performance was hardly inspired, but I thought the actors did a creditable job considering what they were really thinking about. It started to drag a few times, but each time it was Vivian Frank who got things moving again. She’d fire up, become more intense, increase her tempo, her volume—anything to animate the other members of the cast and get them back on track again.
“Vivian, you never cease to amaze me,” I told her when she came off the stage at the end of the performance.
Her mouth twisted wryly. “Is that a compliment?”
“Yes, it is,” I said sincerely. “At a time when everyone else is scared half out of their wits, you come through like Superwoman.” Nerves of steel. “Don’t get sick,” I grinned.
“I don’t plan to,” Vivian laughed. “I’ll be here as long as Foxfire is.”
Carla Banner was sitting on a stool, grinning idiotically. I told her four or five times what a good job she’d done. Someone wandered by and asked us if we wanted to order something to eat. Griselda Gold came up and made a point of asking Carla for her permission to tell the police they could use the green room. Carla flushed with pleasure at this evidence of her new authority and said, “Uh, sure.”
