The Fourth Wall

by Barbara Paul

  “So you married Rosemary just to provide yourself with a victim. To cover yourself.”

  He leaned toward me and spoke intensely. “Abby, you’ve always underestimated me as an actor. Everyone has. Well, if you’d looked more closely you’d have seen how good an actor I am. I went on working and holding it in—and not one of you ever suspected how I hated you!”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “As for Rosemary,” he smirked, “you watched me giving the greatest performance of my life—and you didn’t even know I was acting! That role of doting husband ran for one solid year and I was on all the time. Twenty-four hours a day! A year of living with stinking female smells and acting like a love-sick fool every time somebody looked at me. I hadn’t planned to kill that bitch so early in the game, you know. But it got to the point where I just couldn’t spend one more night with her. So I killed her. The stupid stinking bitch never suspected a thing.”

  Hugh laughed when he saw he had shaken me; I’d never encountered sexual hatred that strong before.

  “And afterwards,” he went on, “do you remember how much weight I lost afterwards? Grieving for my lost love.” His nostrils widened in distaste. “I practically lived on vitamin pills, almost no food at all. How’s that for discipline? Do you have any idea of the kind of self-control that took?” He snorted contemptuously. “Of course you don’t. You’ll never understand.”

  “California,” I said faintly. “Loren. Asthma.”

  “Filter mask,” Hugh said. “I can go three or four days with one of those. Gave me the idea for the ski mask, as a matter of fact. A mask masking a mask. The ski mask worked so well in California that I used it again in the steam bath.” He laughed loudly. “You should have seen John Reddick! He was crying! Just like some spoiled little brat losing his favorite toy. Crying like a baby.” Hugh laughed again. “He should have come out years ago.”

  “Oh, Hugh,” I said, shaking my head. “The cold cream. Was that meant for Ian?”

  “Of course it was,” he snapped, jerking his head in disgust. “Pretty Boy couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag, but he got the lead in Foxfire because of that face and I had to support him. I had to support him!” His face darkened. “Even Michael thought he was bee-you-ti-ful. That time Cavanaugh acted in Michael’s play—all Michael could talk about was how graceful Cavanaugh was, how handsome. Finally I had to tell him I never wanted to hear the name of Ian Cavanaugh again. But it worked out all right. It put her out of action—she was next anyway.”

  It took me a second to realize he’d switched back to the cold cream, that “she” was Sylvia Markey.

  Hugh turned his dark gaze back on me. “I wasn’t finished with you, Abby, you know that? You’re the one who started it all. If you’d just kept your big mouth shut about that play, nothing would have happened. But no, you had to go running to the governing committee screaming plagiarism! Don’t tell me you never borrowed from another playwright. All writers are thieves, you all are. Well, do you know something? I was going to see to it that you never had another successful production again. I was going to bomb every theater that dared put on one of your plays. How long do you think Gene Ramsay would stick by you when that started to happen? Hah?”

  I was feeling dizzy. I wanted to put my head down but there wasn’t room in the cramped little Fiat.

  “That little mess I made in your place—that was just a taste of things to come.” He grinned and used the inhaler again. “Your place was a challenge, I’ll give you that. Wrecking the Foxfire set was child’s play compared to Abigail James’s books and papers. You missed your calling, Abby. You should never have become a writer. You have the soul of a librarian.”

  He smiled. “And you were so concerned about me! So solicitous. You remember giving me your sandwich right before the final performance of Foxfire? I had you all fooled, every one of you. Poor Leo Gunn.” Again, that snort of contempt. “I could tell you some things about poor Leo Gunn that would curl your ears. Leo Gunn’s not the saint you like to think he is.

  “You know what you did, Abby? You closed your own play. I was going to let it run a little longer, a few weeks, maybe a month. But then you gave me that little pep talk about how we shouldn’t let ourselves be made to feel guilty, how we should all resist. You needed a lesson, Abby. So I pushed the button. Closed the play and got Cavanaugh at the same time. You’ve nobody to blame for that but yourself, bitch.”

  There was something I had to say. “Hugh, do you realize you’ve said almost nothing about Michael Crown? He’s supposed to be the reason you’re doing all this, isn’t he? But you’ve barely mentioned him. Do you see what’s happened to you? You’ve found out you can destroy people’s lives and get away with it—and it’s made you a king! Don’t you see what’s happened?”

  He laughed in my face. “Oh, yes, you do love those big moral questions, don’t you, bitch? But only in the abstract—mustn’t look into particulars too closely.” He spoke slowly and deliberately. “You were quick enough to jump into bed with Ian Cavanaugh once I’d got rid of his wife for you. You’re no different from those silly housewives at matinees who fantasize over Cavanaugh and go home leaving the theater seats wet. And you judge me? Look in the mirror, bitch. You’re dirtier than I am.”

  The sheer ugliness of what he was saying beat me down. What answer could I possibly make? What point was there in arguing with a man who saw my sleeping with Ian as worse than murdering seven people? “You’re scum, Hugh,” I finally said. “You’re not even human any more. You’ve abdicated your humanity. What happens to you now, you’ve earned it.”

  “Is something going to happen to me?” he asked, feigning alarm. “Oh, do tell me about it. You’re going to rush off and tell the police, right?” He reached out and placed a hand casually on my arm. “Abby, dear, you don’t think you’re going to walk away from here, do you?”

  “Ian knows,” I said quickly.

  “Sure he does,” Hugh grinned crookedly. “And he let you come all the way up here by yourself. Sure.”

  “No,” I said softly, “he didn’t.”

  We both heard the car door open. We both heard two sets of footsteps approach the Fiat, taking their time. But neither Hugh nor I turned our heads to look. I watched Hugh closely as it sank in on him that this time—this time, somebody else was running the show. The muscles in his face grew slack and his eyes slipped out of focus. Spittle appeared in the corners of his mouth as fear made him salivate. That look on his face was something I’ll remember the rest of my life. I have never known anything more gratifying.

  Ian and Leo were standing by the Fiat. “It’s over, Odell,” said Ian. “We’ve got it all on tape.”

  “On tape?” Hugh whispered.

  I lifted my lapel and showed him the microphone.

  Leo tapped him on the shoulder with his metal claw. “Get out.”

  They put Hugh between them in the back seat of our rented Chrysler. I was to drive, but I had to lean against the front fender for a minute to pull myself together.

  Leo got out of the car and came up to put an arm around me. “You mustn’t let yourself listen to him,” he said. “He said some ugly things. But he’s warped, Abby. He’s twisted himself out of shape. And he says twisted things.”

  “I know.”

  “You just can’t listen to it. Any of it. Put it out of your mind.”

  I gave Leo a quick hug and we both got into the car. Ian leaned forward and touched my neck. “Are you all right?”

  “Certainly,” I smiled at him. I have momentary lapses, but I’m not fragile.

  I drove slowly, taking side streets, waiting for the night to get good and dark. Ian and Leo and I let Hugh know what his future was going to be, talking casually among ourselves as if he weren’t there.

  That expensive apartment Hugh had on East Thirty-seventh Street—we speculated as to how long it would take three people to reduce it to ruins. And we could all make a trip to California—where we could take Hug
h’s asthma medicine away from him and leave him stranded in some small desert town. And Tony Fisher—ah, yes, Tony Fisher. Tony Fisher could be lured away from his middle-aged lover: pampered young men weren’t known for their fidelity. It could be arranged.

  But these were all minor matters, little surprises to vary the tempo of Hugh’s future life. They would cause him some inconvenience and even pain. But they wouldn’t incapacitate him. They were temporary setbacks that in time Hugh could overcome. They did not strike at the very core of his being. So the question became: What was the most important thing in Hugh Odell’s life? The answer was easy.

  Acting, of course.

  Hugh was always acting. On the stage, in front of a camera, in real life. Hugh needed an audience the way a fish needs water. His entire adult life had been spent playing one role or another, sometimes several simultaneously: successful actor, secret lover, adoring husband, ruthless avenger. Would a Hugh Odell exist without roles to play? Or was he like Peer Gynt’s onion, empty at the center after the outer layers had been peeled away? What we were going to do, we let Hugh know, was make sure that he never acted professionally again. We were going to do to his career what he had done to Loren Keith’s and Sylvia Markey’s.

  At a well-lighted street corner where I stopped for a red light, I twisted around and looked at Hugh. He’d turned into an old man. His eyes were glassy, his head moved in what was almost a parody of senile tremors. Acting again? No. Not this time. I drove on.

  I got us lost a couple of times—I didn’t know my way around Queens. But we were in no hurry. Eventually we crossed the Queensboro Bridge back into Manhattan. I headed toward the West Side and drove along below Riverside Drive until we found one of those dark, semiconcealed underpasses you always avoid in New York. I stopped the car. Hugh was in such shock we had to lift him out physically.

  Then we cut out his tongue.

  Four days later, Hugh Odell climbed out of his hospital bed, filled the bathtub with hot water, and slit his wrists.

  7

  So in the end we were cheated of our long-term revenge.

  We had wanted Hugh to live with it, to face up to the reality of the suffering he had caused, to understand in his bones the enormity of what he’d done. We wanted him to know fully the meaning of the word “victim.” In short, we wanted him to join the club. But instead of living with the horror for the rest of his life, he’d endured the suffering for only four days before ending it forever. The man had a glass psyche: he could dish it out but he couldn’t take it.

  I suppose we should have anticipated the possibility of suicide, but somehow we didn’t. We should have known that a man who could do the things Hugh had done in the first place would never admit his guilt and take his punishment. Of the three of us, only Leo Gunn seemed unperturbed by this turn of events. He’d wanted Hugh dead all along.

  August came, and the city was turned over to the tourists. Ian was in California, filming his TV movie. Leo was with the out-of-town tryout of a new musical he was working. The new play was finished and at last had a title: Point of Balance.

  The first thing Gene Ramsay had said when he read the play was, “You wrote it for Cavanaugh, didn’t you?” Not I like it or It stinks, but—You wrote it for Cavanaugh. Rehearsals were tentatively scheduled to begin in November, almost a full year to the day from the time I’d stood backstage at the Martin Beck Theatre staring at Sylvia Markey holding her cat’s head in her hands.

  But it wasn’t finished yet. John Reddick and Loren and Dorothy Keith were still in hiding; they had no way of knowing the reign of terror was over. I’d recently placed an ad in Variety asking them to get in touch with me, but so far no response. I’d asked Gene Ramsay to hold off engaging a director for Point of Balance just a little while longer, and he’d reluctantly agreed.

  The only other way I could think to signal them that it was safe to come back was to reopen Foxfire. But I couldn’t figure out how to talk Ramsay into it without giving away what I knew about Hugh Odell—and thus revealing the part I’d played in his death. I’d have to think of something soon.

  There was another thing I wanted to talk Ramsay into, and that was finding backers for a production of À vil prix—the play by Étienne Quilliot that Michael Crown had tried to pass off as his own. One of Quilliot’s comedies had brought his plagiarist short-lived fame and fortune, but there’d never been a big production of one of his plays under his own name. I felt we owed him that. It was a good play and I wanted people to see it.

  I knew these things had to be taken care of, but I was having trouble doing them. My part of the brownstone seemed so empty with both the men gone. Leo had moved back to his own place the day after Hugh died, and I kind of missed seeing him around. I missed Ian a lot more.

  That was one more thing. I was going to have to decide what to do about Ian. Before he left for California, he’d said something about our looking for a better place to live uptown when he got back. I didn’t know whether we ought to take that step or not. I’d made him the gift of a play, but beyond that I wasn’t sure I was ready to go. Another decision.

  Part of my problem was that I was suffering from the postpartum blahs, that down that comes every time I finish a play. I wanted to get out of the city for a while, maybe even out of the country. But I couldn’t seem to make the effort. It was certainly no time for decision making. When the doorbell rang, I considered not answering it.

  The peephole in the door showed me Lieutenant Goodlow standing outside. I surprised myself: I was glad to see him. I opened the door. “Come in, Lieutenant.”

  “It’s been a while,” the Lieutenant said with his usual unsmiling seriousness. “I thought I’d stop by and see how you’re doing.”

  “I’m doing fine. Just finished a new play—it’s ready to go into the planning stages as soon as we have a director.”

  He still didn’t smile, but he seemed to frown less. “That’s wonderful—you don’t know how pleased I am to hear that. What’s it called? And when does it open?”

  “It’s called Point of Balance, and when it opens depends upon when a theater becomes available.”

  “Do I know you well enough to ask for tickets?”

  “Certainly,” I laughed. “I’ll send you a couple as soon as they’re printed up.”

  “Thank you—I’d like that. Thank you very much.”

  “And what about you, Lieutenant? Are you back on our case?”

  “No, Captain Mitchell is still taking the heat from upstairs, not me. This is just an off-duty call. And speaking of off-duty, once when I was on-duty, you gave me a beer. D’you suppose I could have another one?”

  He followed me into the kitchen and I opened two beers. We sat across the table from each other, and the Lieutenant drank off half his beer at once. Like a thirsty man on a hot day.

  “Beer tastes better in August than any other month of the year,” he said, looking around. “I do like this big kitchen.”

  “So do I,” I said, thinking I might be leaving it soon.

  Lieutenant Goodlow took off his glasses and laid them on the table. “Really rotten about Hugh Odell.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Odell was a close friend of yours, wasn’t he?”

  Was I imagining it, or was he watching me more closely than usual? Tell as much of the truth as possible. “Not really. Hugh was one of those people you know so long, you start thinking you know them well. But he was a part of my life, and I’m sorry as hell he died the way he did.” And I was.

  “Strange man,” the Lieutenant mused. “I never felt as if I’d got him—d’you know what I mean? There was always some part of him I felt I never saw.”

  I tried to look mildly interested. “That’s true of a lot of people, isn’t it?”

  “True of everybody to a certain extent. But Odell more than others. Why was his tongue cut out?”

  “What?”

  “Why cut out his tongue? A messy, ugly job. Why not just throw acid in his face
? His career would be just as effectively ended that way. This tongue business—it’s more intimate than the other attacks. Forcing a man’s mouth open, taking hold of his tongue, and …” He turned his hand over in lieu of finishing the sentence.

  “Gruesome.” I shuddered convincingly. I hoped.

  The Lieutenant said nothing for a moment. Then: “Cavanaugh’s in California?”

  “Mm. Making a TV movie.”

  “What about Leo Gunn?”

  I had the feeling he knew the answer. “Philadelphia. Trying out a new musical. A dying tradition, out-of-town tryouts.”

  “Is he going to stage-manage your new play?”

  “Not unless the musical folds. We won’t be needing a stage manager for a couple of months yet.”

  Lieutenant Goodlow paused to finish his beer. “Interesting the way you three drew together for protection,” he said casually. Too casually. “Then Odell suicides, Gunn moves back home the next day, and not much later Cavanaugh takes off for California. Almost as if you three weren’t afraid any more.”

  Oh, careful, careful! What was he up to? I took a deep breath and spoke slowly. “We had to get on with our own lives,” I said. “We tried sticking together, safety in numbers—but it turned out to be impractical. So we had to give it up, that’s all.”

  “Is it?”

  Offense is the best defense? “Look here, Lieutenant, I thought you said you weren’t back on this case?”

  “Oh, I’m not, I’m not. But you can understand my interest, surely?”

  “I understand you’re having us watched.”

  “Not me. Part of Captain Mitchell’s routine. I just read the reports.”

  “Are we being watched now?”

  He nodded slowly, eyebrows raised.

  So. We had relaxed too soon.

  Lieutenant Goodlow said, “Cutting a man’s tongue out—must take a strong stomach. Lots of blood, I imagine. Hospital report says Odell was constious at the time it happened, and there were no rope burns or other evidence that he’d been bound up. A man would have to have six arms to restrain his victim, hold his mouth open, and cut out his tongue. So maybe there were three men. Or two men and a woman.”