by James Yaffe
“How come I wasn’t curious enough to stay all the way through? Well, let’s just say I satisfied my curiosity with that first scene. I wanted to see if Osborn was going to fall on his ass playing my part and make a fucking fool of himself. Okay, I was hoping that’s what he’d do.”
“And what did he do?”
“He played the guts out of the part! The son of a bitch was great! He acted everybody else off the stage, including that pathetic old ham he shipped in from New York. I couldn’t stand it any longer, so I got the hell out of there.”
“Did you make a lot of noise when you left?”
“I sure as hell hope not. I slipped out of my seat as quietly as I could and practically tiptoed out. What was I going to do, call attention to myself, make people think I was a sorehead? Which, in fact, I am, but I didn’t want people thinking it.”
“Where did you go after you got out of the theatre?”
“To the Watering Hole on Rocky Mountain Avenue. It’s a couple of blocks away from the theatre, a lot of the actors and the crew drop in there when we’re rehearsing.”
I knew the place. It was a working stiff’s saloon, clean enough, no hookers or topless waitresses, but not in any way elegant.
“How come you didn’t go home?”
“First, because I didn’t feel like making domestic chatter to Lucille and the kids. The mood I was in, I would’ve snapped their heads off, and felt rotten about it in the morning. What I had to do was digest a few stiff ones till I calmed down and got back my cool.”
“And second?”
“Excuse me?”
“You implied there’s more than one reason why you stopped for a drink at the Watering Hole.”
“Right. The second reason was, I wanted to get back to the theatre in time for intermission and mingle with the crowd to listen to what people were saying about the show.” He gave another laugh. “Okay, okay, pretty childish, right? I’m hoping the audience doesn’t like it, I’m hoping it’s going to be a big flop. Right, I admit it. You see, it’s honesty time.”
“Did anybody see you while you were in the Watering Hole?”
“Frankie, the bartender. He saw me when I came in. And Agnes, the waitress. I sat in one of the back booths, and she brought me my gin and soda. Maybe some of the regulars noticed me too, I’m pretty well known in there.”
I made a mental note that this was something Roger would have to check. There had to be some weakness in Cunningham’s alibi, or Grantley wouldn’t have included him on the list.
“And when did you leave the Watering Hole?”
“Well, the first half of the play usually took about an hour and a half in rehearsals, and they started on time, around seven, so when my watch said eight thirty I left the saloon and headed back to the theatre. I was half a block away when I saw the police cars lined up at the curb, and a crowd was forming. I asked somebody what was up, and he told me he heard somebody got killed. So I hotfooted it in the other direction, picked up my car from where I’d parked it down the block, and went straight home. Lucille can tell you what time I got there, and my oldest kid, my boy Lloyd, Junior, was still up too.”
Another piece of information for Roger to check. “You weren’t curious to find out who got killed in the theatre? You’ve been working with those people for years, some of them must be your friends—”
“I figured I’d find out fast enough from the late news on TV. I didn’t want any cops picking me up.”
“Why not?”
“Because a lot of people knew I’d got into a fight with Osborn and wasn’t on such good terms with the Players. If there was some kind of trouble at the theatre, and if the cops caught me hanging around, they might jump to some wrong conclusions.”
“It never occurred to you that they might jump to those conclusions even quicker if you ran away?”
“I was mixed up. Maybe I had too much to drink.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “So what do you think about all this, Lloyd? Does it make any sense to you that Sally should’ve killed him?”
Cunningham scratched his chin. “That’s a tough one. Poor Sally, the perennial sucker, right? Wiggle your little finger at her, and she’s so grateful she’ll jump right into bed with you. Lucille says she’s a whore, it’s a disgrace they’ve let her teach in the public schools all these years. Lucille won’t be happy till they strap her into that chair in the gas chamber. Even if she didn’t commit a murder.”
“You don’t share Lucille’s opinion, I take it?”
“It’s been a long time since Lucille and I shared an opinion. Or much of anything else, for that matter.” He gave his head a shake. “I think of Sally as being into love, not murder. On the other hand, a woman scorned, and so forth and so on?”
“You know about her affair with Osborn, do you?”
“For Christ’s sake, who didn’t know? Well, maybe Roger Meyer, the boy investigator, didn’t. He’s living in a dreamworld, with all those old Hollywood movies where women are pure and noble. But the rest of us knew exactly what was going on. And knew exactly when Marty dumped her too. And knew who he dumped her for. That Franz kid, she’s another one with stars in her eyes, she could’ve got herself real hurt if it had gone on for a while.
“But we’re talking about Sally, right? And what I’m saying is, she may have reached the point these days where sex is a bigger issue for her than acting.”
“I don’t know exactly what you mean by that.”
“What I mean is, since the acting is slipping further and further away from her all the time—”
“What makes you say that?”
“My God, just look at what she did in this little Shakespearean turkey! The first Lady Macbeth in history who plays every damn scene as if she were sleepwalking! Take the scene where she tries to get Macbeth to commit murder, for instance. She builds up to this big speech where she whips him into it—the one that ends with ‘the poor cat i’ the adage’—and what happens? That cat, and everything leading up to him, goes out of her head completely! She jumps forward to the next speech, so that poor sap Randy Le Sage never gets to look noble and talk about how manly he is. The point I’m making is, if she can’t act any more, she has to latch on to something for emotional kicks and ego building. So suddenly all that male flesh she’s been rolling around in for years starts to get important.” Cunningham sighed, and a touch of seriousness came into his voice. “That’s always the worst mistake an actor can make.”
“What mistake?”
“To mix up his outside with his inside. To let himself get carried away by his emotions. That’s where I and the Studio part company. All that Stanislavsky bullshit about getting in touch with your feelings, using the memory of what you’ve personally been through. An actor can’t use his personal feelings, all they’ll do for him is make him sloppy. An actor has to project feelings, not feel them.”
“Meaning that a good actor can look you straight in the eye and tell you something and make you believe it, even though he’s feeling exactly the opposite underneath?”
“Sure he can. A good actor does it every day.”
“You’re a good actor. You could tell me you didn’t kill Osborn and I’d never believe for a minute that you were lying.”
“Thanks for the compliment. Being accused of murder is a small price to pay for a rave review. But I have to disappoint you, Dave. I’d like to help you get Sally off the hook, but I didn’t kill that goddamned thief.”
“Why do you call him a thief?”
“That’s what he was. First he stole the Players from me, then he stole Macbeth from me, then he topped it off by stealing Banquo from me.”
“You felt like killing him for that, right?” I put this in very gently. I’m not the browbeating type of questioner, at least not when I don’t have to be. Usually I put my paw on the mouse as gently as any cat, in or out of the adage.
Cunningham threw back his head and gave his booming laugh. “Pretty good, Dave. Tricky. Yeah, I
felt like killing him for those things. I could’ve killed him for the first one all by itself. Suppose somebody was trying to steal your home and family away from you, don’t you think you’d feel like committing murder if that was the only way you could keep from losing them? And for me the Players … Come on, you know my situation. What other home and family have I got?”
Cunningham lowered his head suddenly. For a second or two neither of us broke the silence.
Then Cunningham’s head was up, and he was laughing again. “Strike that, will you. I didn’t mean it the way it came out. Trashing Lucille, after all she’s done for me! The guys she could’ve married. Rich, successful guys, who haven’t wasted their lives dreaming about things that are long gone and you never could’ve had anyway. Her father was always telling me how grateful I should be to her, and he was fucking right.
“So anyway, where were we? Did I feel like killing Osborn because he robbed me? Sure I did—right afterward. But a few hours later it’s over with, I’ve cooled down. What do you think, I’m a fucking psycho? People don’t kill people because they lost a part in a play.”
Agreed, I thought. But on the other hand, were actors like people?
“No offense intended, Lloyd,” I said. “Just doing my job.”
“No offense taken,” he said with a grin. “Now, if you’re finished with me, the customers are muttering restlessly out there.”
He started to move to the door, then turned back to me. “Oh, by the way, I have to ask you a favor. In a week or two, especially if the charges get dropped against Sally, I’m going to open Macbeth again. I’ll have to redirect a little, work on some of the spots where Marty missed his opportunities, but with all this free publicity we’re getting, everybody in town will rush down to see it. The Murder Play! We’ll pack them in. So I hope you’ll still let that assistant of yours take his nights off for the performances.”
“I’ll let him if he wants to,” I said.
Cunningham’s grin broadened, then he started to the door again.
In the nick of time, I remembered the question Mom had told me to ask him. “Just one more thing, Lloyd,” I said. “Last week you walked out on the show because Allan Franz told you your Banquo was too soft and sympathetic—”
“That wasn’t why I walked out, for Christ’s sake. It was because Marty agreed with Franz. That cowardly ass-licking son of a bitch couldn’t stand up to the great Hollywood director—”
“But my question is, was Franz right or wrong? Do you think you weren’t making Banquo tough enough?”
“That’s a crock,” Cunningham said. “My Banquo has this nice-guy manner, butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, but underneath he’s as ambitious and hardheaded as his buddy Macbeth. That’s how I was playing him, and Franz should’ve seen it. Makes me wonder how he’s been getting such great performances out of his actors all these years.”
Cunningham gave me a quick nod and went back to his customers.
I left his store and headed for the nearest phone booth and told Roger, back at the office, that after he finished typing his report he should do some checking up on Cunningham: talk to his family and find out when he got home Thursday night, talk to the people at the Watering Hole and find out what time he got there and what time he left. I also asked the kid if he’d wait for me, and we could have a quick lunch together.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Dave,” he said. “I’ve already got a lunch date.”
And that was it. Not a word about with whom. What the hell was up with him today?
10
Roger’s Narrative
When I got out of my car in front of Dave’s mother’s house, I looked in both directions before I walked up to the front door. As if I was worrying that Dave had tailed me there! Pure paranoia.
I rang the bell, and a few seconds later she was grabbing me by the hand, kissing me on the cheek, and leading me inside. “We’ll go straight to the kitchen, I’ve got matzo-ball soup,” she said.
I followed her, thinking that she was looking kind of tired. There were shadows under her eyes, and it occurred to me for the first time that she must have problems of her own on her mind. It was selfish of me to assume she’d stop everything to take care of mine.
She sat me down at the kitchen table and put a bowl of total deliciousness in front of me. Her matzo balls were exactly the way such things ought to be: firm to your lips, but tender and juicy as they went down your throat. I can’t say they were just like mother used to make, because frankly my mother has never been much of a cook and her matzo-ball soup comes strictly from the can.
“It’s really nice of you to have me for lunch,” I started in. “I wasn’t angling for an invitation when I called.”
“Naturally not. It’s my pleasure to feed people. What I’m always saying is, eating alone is like making love alone. And since making love is a pleasure I don’t have no more … not so often anyway.”
She cleared away the soup and brought in some chopped liver with crackers. The chopped liver had the usual hard-boiled egg and onions in it, but also another flavor I couldn’t identify that put it in the category of heavenly.
“I feel funny bothering you,” I said. “I just couldn’t think of anybody else to talk this over with. If it’s inconvenient for you, if you aren’t feeling up to it today—”
“I’m feeling fine,” she said. “I just didn’t sleep so good last night, I’m having a touch from insomnia, but you’ll wake me up when you start telling me what’s bothering you.”
I took a deep breath and jumped in. “You remember, the last time we talked about this Osborn murder, you tried to get me to come up with something that I’d forgotten, you almost pulled it up from my subconscious mind.”
“Certainly I remember. So?”
“Well, last night it suddenly came to me. I couldn’t believe I’d ever forgotten it.”
“And what was it?”
“A ring! The Third Murderer, when he grabbed hold of me, was wearing a ring!”
“And you can also say who that ring belonged to, isn’t that right?”
I blinked at her. “How did you know that?”
“You’d go to Davie if you wanted only to describe it. You came here to me because you recognized that ring, and your problem is, should you tell somebody or should you keep your mouth shut?”
“I suppose you’ll be telling me next who the ring does belong to.”
The old lady gave a little shrug. “This is obvious. It can only be one person, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You came here today because, whoever it is that owns the ring, it’s somebody you care about, somebody you got a reason for being interested in, and you don’t want you should be responsible for getting this somebody executed for murder. So I’m asking myself, who could this somebody be? In the collection of people who could’ve done the murder, who is it you care about enough so it gives you a problem to admit the murderer was wearing her ring?
“My first thought was, it’s the little Franz girl. She’s attractive to you, so you’re trying to protect her—”
“I never said I was attracted to Laurie Franz!”
“Does the cat say he’s attracted to the mouse? All you need is one look at his face when somebody mentions the mouse’s name. But this we don’t have to argue about, because the Franz girl isn’t the one you’re protecting.”
“That’s true. But I don’t see—”
“If you thought she was the murderer, you wouldn’t be asking for advice now, not even from me. You’d be suffering inside yourself, your conscience would be doing flip-flops in your stomach, but you wouldn’t take the risk she should get arrested. With young people love is bigger than obeying the law.”
It made me fidget, all this talk about love, but I couldn’t find anything wrong with the old lady’s reasoning, so I kept quiet.
“So I’m asking myself,” she went on, “who else could you care about so much you’d have
a problem telling the truth about this ring? And there’s one answer only. Sally Michaels. Am I right or wrong?”
“You’re right. It’s a big red stone in the shape of a grinning face. She picked it out especially for Lady Macbeth, and she wore it at all the rehearsals. I couldn’t be wrong about whose it is.”
“So let me get this straight, why you’re coming to me for advice. Now that you’ve remembered seeing this ring on the murderer’s finger, you’re afraid to tell Davie and Ann Swenson about it. You’re afraid this ring could be a piece evidence against Sally Michaels. Davie and Ann Swenson will have to send you to the district attorney—that’s the law, what else could they do?—and you’ll have to testify for the prosecution. So you’re thinking maybe it’s better if you keep your mouth shut.”
She had it all figured out, there was no way I could be cagey about it anymore. So I let my feelings come pouring out, just like a little kid when he finally confesses some terrible crime to his mother. “I’d be responsible for ruining our client’s defense! How could Dave and Ann keep me around after that? I wouldn’t blame them at all if they fired me!”
The old lady looked at me for a while, a soft smile on her face. She didn’t seem to be condemning me or even feeling sorry for me. If anything, she seemed sort of amused. “And what happens if you don’t come out with the truth about this ring?”
“Nobody finds out about it, I won’t have to give evidence against Sally.”
“And if she gets off free, you’ll feel good about what you did?”
She had me there. It’s difficult talking to people who see things you don’t want them to see. I was reduced to taking sips of coffee, though there was practically nothing left in the cup.
“You want my advice?” she said. “Is it your fault you recognized that ring on the murderer’s finger? No. So are Davie and Ann Swenson going to get mad at you for it? Positively not. What it all boils away to is, do you think they’re people without any fairness?”
“Of course they’re not.”
“So if you’re sure of that, you’ve got only one thing you can do. You’ll tell them about this ring as soon as you see them, and you’ll let them decide what happens next.”
