The Apostrophe Thief

by Barbara Paul

  She stared at him in astonishment. “How did you know I was going to resign? The only one I told was Kelly!”

  “It’s written all over you. Do you have anything planned?”

  She shook her head. “I’m taking a couple of days off, just to think.” She made a face. “Right now I’m looking for a way to thumb my nose at Captain DiFalco when I walk.”

  “Ah, yes. Go out with a bang, not a whimper. But after you’ve made your nose-thumbing gesture, you might consider going into business with me.”

  That surprised her. “Doing what?”

  He raised a hand. “Private investigation. It’s what we’re best suited for.”

  She was surprised again; surely he didn’t think … “You can’t just open an office and declare yourself a private investigator. Your FBI time could fill the three-year apprenticeship requirement, but you still have to take the exam.…” She stopped when Holland waved a hand dismissively.

  “I already took care of that,” he said, “years ago.” When she looked skeptical, he pulled out his billfold.

  Marian examined a current New York private investigator’s license in the name of Curt Holland. “That’s legit, all right. You kept your private license up-to-date all the time you were in the FBI?”

  Wry smile. “You never know what might come in handy. So, what do you think about opening an office together? I can handle the computer fraud cases, and you can do the hard work.”

  She smiled. “Tell me how that’s an improvement.”

  “We choose our own clients. We charge a great deal of money. We control our working environment. And if you find me impossible to work with—well, we’ll orchestrate something we both can live with. Just tell me you’ll think about it.”

  “All right, I’ll think about it.” She looked at her watch.

  “What time is Kelly supposed to be here?”

  “Right now. She’s usually prompt.”

  Holland finished his drink. “Want another? No? How long have you and Kelly known each other?”

  “A little over three years, but it seems longer.”

  His eyes narrowed. “How much does she know about last night?”

  Marian looked at those narrowed eyes, the defensive body posture. “I told her nothing. She knows nothing about either of the two things that happened last night.”

  Holland’s face relaxed. “I’m sorry. I should have known without asking.” He moved one foot under the table, closer to hers.

  “It was the hardest thing I had to do all day, lying to Kelly. Internal Affairs and the FBI were a piece of cake compared to that.”

  He nodded. “And you say I don’t owe you.”

  Feeling perverse, she said, “I may just tell her you spent the night.”

  He smiled his mocking smile. “I think the usual response is, ‘Are you bragging or complaining?’”

  Marian wasn’t about to touch that one. “Relax. Kelly and I don’t gossip about men.”

  “Hm. What does a Broadway star gossip about? I know very few show people.”

  “The business, most of the time. Show biz people, backstage stuff.”

  “What’s the name of her play again?”

  “The Apostrophe Thief.”

  “Right. You know, they say the depth of performers’ insecurities can be measured by the size of their entourages. The more people they keep around them, the more precarious they feel their position to be—ah, here’s your friend now.”

  Kelly had come alone.

  Marian waved an arm to catch her attention. The bar was crowded, but, as usual, the crowds parted to let Kelly Ingram pass—a trick that always left Marian open-mouthed. Kelly didn’t say a word but wrapped both arms around Marian in a big hug. It should have been awkward, with hugger standing and huggee seated, but Kelly brought it off with her usual grace. “You are all right, aren’t you?” Kelly asked. “I can tell.”

  “Of course I am,” Marian said. “I told you not to worry.”

  “Sit here,” Holland said, offering Kelly his seat. “I’ll find another chair.” He went off in search of one.

  “Whoo, these tables are little,” Kelly said as she sat down. “You and Holland must have been playing kneesies. Is he having dinner with us?”

  “No, he just came for a drink.”

  Kelly reached out and took Marian’s hands. “When you first told me you were through being a cop, I thought you were out of your mind. But now I think it’s a damned good idea. Quit. Right now.”

  Marian had to smile. “This is my last week.”

  “You can get killed in a week.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen—I’ll not be taking any new cases. Kelly, the danger … that was always part of the job.”

  “Yeah, and you’re so cool and above it all you make me ill. Knowing about the danger and seeing it so close to home are two different things. I don’t understand how anyone can live with so much tension all the time!”

  “Oh, I got used to that long—”

  “I’m not talking about you, noodnik, I’m talking about me! I’m the one who can’t stand the pressure!”

  Marian was laughing when Holland came back with a chair. “Well, you made her laugh,” he said to Kelly. “That’s more than I was able to do.” He sat sideways at the small table.

  A young couple came up to the table and asked Kelly for her autograph. When they’d left, Kelly turned to Holland. “So, Holland,” she said, “how are you holding up?”

  “Tolerably well.”

  “Tolerably, huh? No nightmares about what would have happened last night if Marian had missed? No shakes, no tremors?”

  “None.”

  “No regrets?”

  “Thousands.”

  Kelly obviously took his recalcitrance as a challenge; the two had known each other only a short while, and Kelly didn’t yet realize that his speech patterns were not like other people’s. “Holland, I don’t know your first name. What is it?”

  “Curt.”

  Marian watched Kelly biting back the obvious retort. “Okay, I’ll call you Curt. And you can call me Your Majesty. I’ve always wanted somebody to call me Your Majesty.”

  He smiled at that. “Then I beg Your Majesty for leave to withdraw. Your dinner undoubtedly awaits.”

  “Permission granted. Although you’re perfectly welcome to join us.”

  “Not this time.” His eyes locked on to Marian’s for a second, and then he was gone.

  “Strange man,” Kelly said. “And good-looking.”

  Marian’s eyebrows rose. “Good-looking?”

  Kelly’s eyebrows did the same. “You don’t think so?”

  Marian shook her head. “I think he might have been good-looking some years back.”

  Kelly considered. “No, some years back he’d have been pretty. Now he’s good-looking.”

  “Ah, me. And I just told him you and I never gossip about men.”

  “Then let’s not. I’m starving! Is our table ready?”

  It was.

  3

  Marian spent the night at Kelly’s place, glad of the strange bed devoid of all emotional connection. She didn’t know if Holland had tried to reach her late last night at her own apartment, and she didn’t want to know. If he had, he was likely to take her absence as a rejection. She wasn’t sure she meant it as such—but then she wasn’t sure she didn’t.

  Both she and Kelly slept late, and it was close to noon by the time Marian got back to her own apartment. The first thing she did was change the bed sheets. The second thing she did was start a pot of coffee. She couldn’t think without coffee.

  As it turned out, she couldn’t think with coffee, either. It seemed to her that somehow within the past twenty-four hours, her disgust with the entire law enforcement system had degenerated into a petty desire to get even with Captain DiFalco. Marian knew how that would go, if past experience was any indicator: that petty desire would dwindle even more and shame her by its very smallness, until the whole thing woul
d slip away with nothing done about it.

  Not good enough! She wanted the whole damned bureaucracy to understand why she was leaving … as if that would make any difference. The NYPD was not exactly waiting with bated breath to hear what Sergeant Marian Larch was going to do next. DiFalco’s superiors were probably every bit as self-serving as he was, and they sure as hell weren’t going to take action against him on her say-so. But something should be done about a man in a position of police authority whose interest in stopping crime could be measured by the degree it generated more of that authority for himself. A man who would ignore or deliberately misinterpret evidence if the results made him look good.

  But maybe the entire hierarchy of police officialdom from the level of captain on up was populated by just such men as DiFalco. Career cops, not openly corrupt, but loving their power, jockeying for position among themselves. And she was going to change all that by pointing her finger at her captain when she left?

  “God, what a child,” Marian said to herself.

  There, it had started already. The slipping-away.

  She decided she needed a distraction, something unrelated to her problem that would demand her full concentration for a while. A play? Tuesday afternoon; no matinee. She went to a movie.

  The film was advertised as a “psychological chiller”; what Marian was hoping for was an intricate plot with lots of complicated dialogue that would force her to pay attention. What she got was a succession of mood visuals, constantly flickering shadows, close-ups of nontalking heads, lingering shots of emblematic (and enigmatic) images—a dripping faucet, a horse’s flaring nostrils, a withered flower stuck into a pencil sharpener. Marian left.

  She stopped in a deli. The place was noisy; she tried eavesdropping on the other customers’ conversations while she ate but quickly got bored. After a bit the noise began to bother her. She paid her bill and started walking aimlessly through the streets, even though the weather was chilly and a bit damp. After a block or so she stopped fighting it and let her mind wander.

  But it wasn’t Captain DiFalco who forced his way into her thoughts; it was Curt Holland. Marian relived their brief time in bed with a pleasure that astonished her; she still didn’t understand why she was so attracted to a man about whom she knew so little. Yes, she did understand: it was glands calling to glands, nothing else.

  Holland was what used to be called a computer “whiz”; at one time he’d used his considerable talents to collect otherwise uncollectable debts, on commission, by manipulating the electronic transfer of funds. The money he’d collected was all legitimately owed, but his manner of collecting was anything but legitimate. He could get into any bank record in the world; he could have stolen the country blind if he’d wanted to. The fact that he had not meant more to Marian than his strong-arm methods of collection. But that didn’t quite eradicate her anger at knowing every bit of information about her on record—credit history, information about social security, her driving record, tax returns, purchases she’d made, anything at all—it was all there for the viewing, available to anyone with enough knowhow to access it.

  The FBI had eventually caught on to Holland’s lucrative-but-illicit debt-collection business. But instead of prosecuting, they’d pretty much shanghaied him into joining their ranks—because they’d needed his expertise. But now Holland was free of the Bureau and too smart to go back to his old line of work. He was thinking of setting up as a private investigator? Marian didn’t know if he was serious about that, or even about his asking her to join him. He probably was; Holland wasn’t given to joking around. They had worked well together on the case they’d just finished, in spite of some initial dislike and distrust—not all of which was totally dispelled.

  But that was all she knew about the man. She didn’t know where he was born, or when. She didn’t know where he lived, or how to reach him. And she had no idea of what he’d done with his life before the FBI got interested in his sub rosa collection enterprise. He appeared to be in his early- to mid-forties but was probably younger; his was a face that looked aged by experience. But most of his life was a blank to her. Her instincts told her he was basically a decent man. But Marian was not as trusting of her instincts as once she’d been, especially when it came to choosing men. She’d made a couple of bad mistakes, and that still rankled. Now she was gun-shy.

  She sniggered at her own double entendre. Or maybe I’m finally learning from experience—yep, that’s more like it! “Gun-shy, hell!” she said out loud.

  “You tell ’em, bébé!” a Milli Vanilli look-alike said with a grin.

  Startled, Marian laughed and lifted a hand in acknowledgment as he passed. Talking to herself now. And where the hell was she? She stopped walking and looked around to get her bearings. Bloomingdale’s was across the street; she’d no idea she’d walked so far. A cold drizzle had started coming down; time to catch a bus and go home.

  Back in her apartment, she checked her answering machine for messages. There was one. Holland’s voice spoke the seven digits of a telephone number, which he followed with exactly four words: “If you want me.”

  Well, well. So now she did have a way to reach him. Marian wrote the number down on a Rolodex card.

  If you want me.

  A book she’d been meaning to read didn’t do the trick, and Marian had nodded off. At 6:30 the phone woke her. “Wha’?”

  “Marian, it’s me,” said Kelly’s excited voice. “We’ve been robbed! All sorts of stuff is gone! Can you come? Right now?”

  “Wait a minute.” Marian wasn’t fully awake. “Who’s been robbed? Where?”

  “All of us! Here at the theater! Come on, Marian—hurry!”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  She splashed water on her face and made a few passes at her hair with a brush. Then she shrugged into a raincoat and struggled with the buttons on the way down in the elevator.

  No drizzle, praise be. Marian took the subway to Times Square and hurried along West Forty-fourth to the Broadhurst Theatre, where the marquee proclaimed that Broadway’s newest hit, The Apostrophe Thief, was now playing. Marian flashed her badge at the ticket-taker and went inside.

  The stage curtains were closed, but she could hear voices, many voices, all of them angry. She made her way behind the curtains to find pandemonium in full swing. The entire company seemed to be assembled on the stage; they were all talking at the tops of their voices, no one listening to anyone else. And no one paid the least attention to the presence of Sergeant Marian Larch among them.

  Marian cleared her throat. “Could I have your attention, please?” A few people stopped talking and looked at her.

  “Marian!” Kelly came running out from the opposite wing. “I’m so glad you’re here! You’ve got to find him and make him give them back!”

  “Give what back?”

  “The scripts! Every single one of them has been taken! And my Bernhardt jacket! And—”

  “The play scripts? All of them?”

  “All of them! Mine and Ian’s and Leo’s and—”

  “Whoa. When did you notice they were missing?”

  “Just now, when we all got here. The scripts were here last night.”

  “Anything else taken?”

  A male voice said, “My antique shaving mug.”

  “All my make-up,” someone else contributed.

  “Most of the stage props.”

  “And the costumes—they’re gone! What are we going to wear tonight!”

  “Hold it,” Marian said in a commanding voice. “Is someone in charge here?”

  “Leo Gunn, the stage manager,” Kelly told her. “But he’s on the phone right now calling costuming companies. If he can’t get anything over here fast, we’re going to have to go on in our street clothes.”

  “Where is he?” Marian looked where Kelly pointed, just long enough to know Leo Gunn the next time she saw him. “Where were the scripts kept?”

  The cast members all kept their script copies in
their dressing rooms, which were locked each night. Marian inspected one of the dressing room doors; it had been pried open with a crowbar. Not one of the more subtle burglars in town, then.

  “Kelly, why are those scripts so important?” Marian asked. “You know all your lines—”

  “Ah, well, you know. You might forget. And Abby might want to change something later.”

  “Even if I didn’t,” said a new voice, “there’s the question of piracy.”

  Marian turned to see Abigail James approaching; The Apostrophe Thief was her play. Marian had met her once, briefly. “What about piracy?”

  “Pirated copies circulate,” the playwright said, “and other companies mount productions without paying royalties. Not a great deal of money is involved, but it’s just another form of theft.”

  “Someone mentioned an antique shaving mug.”

  “That was Ian’s. It belonged to his grandfather.”

  Ian Cavanaugh, she meant, the play’s leading man. “Sounds more like souvenir-hunters to me,” Marian said. “A star’s personal possession? Just the sort of thing a fan would want. And didn’t someone say that stage props were taken?”

  “Mm, you may be right.” Abigail James looked carefully around the stage. “The place is filled with expensive lighting equipment, but none of that was touched.”

  “But why all the scripts?” Marian mused.

  “Leo had the master script,” Kelly said, “the one with all the blocking written in—”

  “Blocking?”

  “Stage movement. And it had the lighting cues and things like that as well. Leo kept it chained to his desk, so nobody would wander off with it. But they took that one too. Cut right through the chain.”

  “Abby!” Ian Cavanaugh called from across the stage.

  The playwright excused herself and left them. Marian said, “Kelly, you did call the police, didn’t you?”

  Her friend stared at her. “I called you. Oh lord, you didn’t resign today, did you? I thought you were staying out the week!”

  “No, it’s not that. But this isn’t my precinct. The Broadhurst is in Midtown South’s jurisdiction. They’re the ones who’ll handle the investigation.”