Body on the Stage

by Bev Robitai

“No.”

  They went in rather reluctantly, anxious in case their incursion might be contaminating a possible crime scene. Dennis sniffed cautiously. The air was faintly stuffy but there was no hint of anything unpleasant. They stood side by side, looking around Vincenzo’s living room.

  “What are we looking for?” whispered Cathy.

  “Clues, I suppose,” he whispered back. He went over to a desk in the corner where there was a stack of paperwork and began to leaf through it. Cathy prowled around opening drawers and feeling through the contents.

  “Don’t forget to check the undersides of the drawers,” Dennis told her. The crims are always taping envelopes with the vital clues there. Or behind the back edges, out of sight. Cathy raised her eyebrows.

  “Hey, you’re good at this. Are you sure you don’t work for the Secret Service?”

  “I can neither confirm nor deny that,” he said solemnly. “If we’re done here, let’s check the rest of the place.” He pretended to draw a gun and took up station on one side of the doorway. “Cover me, I’m going in.”

  Cathy giggled and took the other side, leaning around the corner and ducking back quickly. “Clear!” she whispered.

  Dennis wished he was agile enough to try a forward roll into the passageway but decided the sound of his weight crashing to the floor might draw unwanted attention from the neighbours. He slid along the passage with his back against the wall and entered the bedroom in a crouch. Cathy moved past him quickly, pointing her ‘gun’ around the room until she was sure it was empty. She lifted the black linen bedspread and peered underneath but the base was solid wood. No room for bodies or attackers there. She slid open the bedside drawer and made a sound of disgust.

  “Eeeeuuwww! Six tubes of lube and a stack of hand towels. That’s nasty! Far more than I wanted to know. Oh my God, there are handcuffs as well!”

  “Check out the wardrobe door,” Dennis indicated with a nod. “Bet he watched himself in the mirror.”

  They looked at their reflections in the floor-to-ceiling mirrored doors and saw matching expressions of distaste.

  “Let’s just finish looking around and get the hell out of here, eh?” said Dennis. “I feel like I need a shower already.”

  He moved across to a bulky wooden tallboy and began checking the drawers. The sock drawer held a surprise in the form of a passport and birth certificate in a dark blue plastic folder from an Italian travel company.

  “Well that’s odd. He can’t be living it up overseas if his passport is still here, can he?”

  “Sure he can,” said Cathy confidently. “He’ll be travelling on a false passport. Bound to be, so that we can’t track him down. He’ll know the heat will be on when we discover the missing money, and he’ll have made arrangements to get false papers ahead of time so he can skip the country undetected. It’s standard procedure.”

  “Of coursh it ish, Moneypenny. I forgot how exshpert you are at eshpionage.”

  “You better believe it, James baby.” She gave him a sexy wink and flicked her hair seductively. “But seriously, I don’t suppose there are convenient ticket stubs or itineraries tucked away in that folder to tell us where he’s gone, are there?”

  Dennis flicked through the papers. “Afraid not. Looks like we’ve drawn a blank, sorry.”

  “Oh well, it was worth a try. Thanks so much, Dennis. You can’t imagine how much it helps, having you along for the ride. I suppose we’d better put everything back how we found it and make our escape.”

  She went to give him a grateful kiss on the cheek just as he turned towards the tallboy and her lips landed on his mouth instead. Neither of them pulled away. For a long minute they held each other, lost in the moment. Dennis allowed his mind to entertain the wild fantasy that they might actually do more than kiss. He held her face in his hands and looked into her eyes. To his amazement he saw the same thought there. They turned towards the large king-size bed with its shiny black satin sheets and took two steps towards it before both of them remembered the lube and the hand towels. The moment evaporated instantly.

  “You’re right Cathy, we’d better get out of here before somebody comes asking awkward questions about what we’re doing in Vincenzo’s apartment.”

  “Of course, it’d be silly to get caught. Come on, let’s get back to the gym, shall we?”

  Back on familiar ground it was easier to pretend everything was normal. Cathy disappeared into the yoga room, while Dennis put extra effort into his workout, lifting heavier weights and taking shorter breaks between sets. In the back of his mind, he hoped to speed his transformation from flab to fab just in case another opportunity to be alone with Cathy presented itself. He might only get the one shot and he wanted to erase her memory of his pale, soft, shirtless body from when she’d done his initial measuring session. Thinking of that made him realise he was almost due for his halfway measurements. He gasped and redoubled his efforts.

  After his workout and her class, they met up in her office to check on the insurance policy. She spread the papers on her desk and started to read, frowning more and more as she went. “God, this stuff is hard to read! Help me out here. Can you translate it into plain English for me?”

  He turned the papers around and started from the beginning, concentrating so hard his head began to ache. He looked up as he turned the final page. “OK, here’s the situation as I see it. You have cover for liability – if somebody gets hurt as a result of your actions. You have cover for material damage – if there’s an accident or break-in and you suffer loss or damage. But I don’t think you have cover for fidelity, covering loss by the actions of an employee legitimately on the premises. Vincenzo was committing theft as a servant and you’re not covered for that. At least, that’s my interpretation. You need to call your insurance company as soon as possible to let them know what has happened and get the full story of what they can or can’t do for you. I’m so sorry.” He braced himself for her tears, wondering if he had a clean hanky in his pocket, but she surprised him.

  “Oh well, at least I know the worst now. Thanks, I really appreciate your help with deciphering that jargon. I’ll just have to buckle down and earn back the money I need and that’s all there is to it. I feel better now I have a goal.” She took the papers from his hand and put them back in the filing cabinet. “Come on, let’s go for a drink. There’s no point in moping, is there?”

  They left the office and headed to the nearest wine bar.

  Two days later Cathy called him into the cubicle and asked him to step on the scales for his progress report. He looked down at the figure in surprise. He’d lost another kilo in the last five days. Cathy smiled.

  “You’re looking good! You must have been really disciplined with your eating and your exercise over the last week or so, well done. Let’s take your measurements…” she hesitated, “unless that seems a bit awkward?”

  “Not at all,” he assured her, lying valiantly. “Let’s do it.”

  She ran the tape measure around his waist, chest and hips, noting the figures on his chart. “You’ve done well there too. I’ll just do the pinch test and you’ll be all finished for now.” It seemed to be more difficult for her to raise a fold of skin to pinch in the callipers than it had been the first time, which Dennis took as a good sign. As her fingers touched his thigh he steeled himself not to react, breathing a quiet sigh of relief when she’d finished.

  “So,” she said, smiling at him shyly, “do I owe you another dinner for that intrusion?”

  “Well yes, I rather think you do. And we’d better make it soon because from next week there are rehearsals nearly every night, and somehow I seem to have been co-opted as stage crew even though I only signed up for construction.”

  “Right then, let’s make it this Saturday, and it’s your turn to pick the restaurant.” She went to close his file but stopped. “Do you want to look at your ‘before’ photo now, to see how much you’ve changed?”

  He thought for a moment. “Actually, no,
not really. It would gross us both out, and who needs that? Let’s keep it hidden away for now, shall we?”

  “Fair enough. You’ll have even more to celebrate when you finally see it and compare it with your new photo. I think you’ll be impressed.”

  “I admire your faith.”

  “I know my job, sweetie.”

  “Of course you do. Hey, how did you get on with checking around the gym for any clues about Vincenzo? Did he leave a convenient address book lying around or anything like that?”

  ‘Couldn’t find anything helpful at all. He’d left a bit of gear here in his locker, but that could have been to make us assume he was coming back so we wouldn’t raise the alarm.” She wrinkled her nose. “I had to throw the clothes in the washing machine or they would have grown legs and walked out of here.”

  “And did you search right through the place?”

  “Well, a quick look round, yes. I didn’t deflate all the exercise balls and look inside them, if you want to be pedantic about it. I’ve been a bit busy here what with being shorthanded, remember?” Her blue eyes flashed and he could see the red hair was living up to its reputation.

  “Sorry, I wasn’t meaning to imply you hadn’t done a good job. I’m sure you did everything you could,” he soothed her. “I’ll go and do my workout now and leave you in peace. See you later.”

  To his relief she smiled back and waved him on his way.

  Dennis walked thoughtfully into the main exercise room. If Cathy hadn’t had a chance to do a proper search, perhaps he could help out by doing it now. Nobody would pay any attention to a guy in exercise gear walking around a gym, as long as he looked purposeful. He headed for the furthest part of the room and began to walk along the back wall, looking carefully at the carpet, fixtures and moveable equipment as he passed by.

  He shook his head as he saw two dumbbells missing from the rack. People were hopeless about putting them back in the right place after using them. He’d pick them up when he found them and tidy them away.

  He came to the storeroom door and pushed it open. The room seemed clean and tidy, but as he looked around he saw some indentations in the carpet at the end of a long wooden storage box. The box was nearly the width of the room and easily big enough for a person to fit into. He walked slowly towards the box and raised the lid, his heart suddenly pounding. Inside were two large sports bags, bigger than any he’d seen before. Cautiously, he reached down and pulled on the zip of the top one, revealing, to his great relief, nothing more sinister than a set of hockey sticks and body padding. He pulled it out of the way, sniffing the air but detecting only stale sweat and dusty plastic. The second bag was larger and quite lumpy. He leaned right over the box and pulled the zipper open slowly. The bag contained several sets of inline skates and some goal nets. Dennis blew out a gusty sigh and closed the box, wiping his sweaty hands on his T-shirt. Then he took a closer look at the indentations in the carpet. It looked as if the box had been moved from its original position, one it had plainly occupied for quite some time. This was an anomaly that required further investigation. Feeling like a genuine CSI, he knelt down at the far end of the box and pushed it back towards the marks so it stood where it used to. He bent forward to get his face close to the floor. A faint reddish-brown mark stained the grey carpeting. Dennis reared back with a stifled exclamation.

  A dozen thoughts ran through his mind. Rust. It was probably rust. If only he had a proper CSI test kit and could check whether it was blood or not. He could use a damp corner of his handkerchief and rub the stain gently – no! If this was really a crime scene he shouldn’t be touching it at all! No convenient little pink-tinted cotton buds for him, no Luminol and UV light to show up the blood spatter. It was probably rust. After all, there were lots of iron bits and pieces around a gym. Weight bars, springs, that sort of thing. Even if it was blood, it might just be from somebody who’d cut their finger or something. There didn’t have to be a sinister reason for it.

  He stood up. If he told Cathy about this, she’d probably feel obliged to tell the police so they could check it out. If it did turn out to be blood, they might seal off the room and close the gym until their investigations were completed. That would be a disaster for Cathy in her precarious financial position. She could only cover her tax bill if she kept trading, even assuming the tax department gave her some leeway to make up the lost money. But if he didn’t tell her, it might mean a vital piece of evidence went undiscovered.

  He weighed up the facts and his conscience. He pushed the box back across to where he’d found it and firmly closed the door.

  At the next construction session Denis was surprised to find the crew in the foyer when he came into the theatre. Tony and Gazza were wandering round with tape measures while Nick and Fenton wrote down figures and made sketches.

  “What’s going on out here?” asked Dennis.

  “Aw, gidday Doc,” said Gazza. “We’ve got the happy task of constructing a bar for our lucky patrons to purchase items of an alcoholic nature.”

  “I can’t imagine why we didn’t think of this before,” said Tony. “The sweet shop always does well. In fact they usually make more profit than the shows, so why haven’t we had a proper bar before now? I’d have thought Howard would have suggested it. No doubt he’s making good use of the bar right now on that bloody cruise he’s on.”

  “It was probably the last committee,” said Nick. “They were a bit conservative. And over the last few years they got so tired of running the place that new ideas were just too hard to put into practice. You can’t blame them, really. But now we’ve got fresh young blood on board, the sky’s the limit!” He adopted a manly stance as one destined to achieve greatness.

  “There’s a limit to our patience,” muttered Gazza. “Get out of the way, will you?” He ran a tape from one wooden pillar to the next. “Twelve point one, Fenton. Got that?”

  With the sketches all annotated with measurements, the guys headed off to the timber bay in the workshop to select their materials. Dennis tagged along behind, pausing for a moment to watch what was happening on stage.

  Cathy had the five actors who’d be learning the strip routines lined up facing her.

  “Now then, you know the scene in the play where Glenda tells the boys to sort out their grooming? The ‘bum fluff – get rid of it!’ line?” They grinned and nodded. “Well it’s all true. You guys are going to be more man-scaped than you’ve ever been in your lives. It’s your choice whether you shave or wax or use a cream, but all that body hair has to disappear for the length of the season.”

  “What, arms and legs as well?” asked Ricky. “Don’t women want us to look manly? We’ll look like teenagers if we have no body hair at all.”

  “That’s why you’ve been working out, dear, so you’ve got a manly shape. Believe me, those well-muscled arms and legs are a lot more inviting to touch when they’re smooth and silky.”

  “Touch?” said Warwick, frowning. “Who’s going to be touching us? Surely the audience isn’t allowed to get that up close and personal, are they?”

  “You’ll be in amongst them, won’t you? It’s only natural they’ll try to grab a feel here and there. Don’t look so worried, there are techniques I’ll teach you for dealing with all that.”

  Dennis grinned to himself. That was a side of performing in public he hadn’t considered. Those actors were going to be very, very exposed – and at close quarters, too. He shuddered and made his way through to the safer environment of the timber bay where ordinary blokes faced normal problems, like selecting knot-free wood or finding the right type of screwdriver bit.

  “Oh dear, they are a bunch of show ponies, aren’t they?” said Gazza, on hearing about the actors’ grooming directives. “Wonder if they’ll get implants and liposuction to achieve the perfect body.”

  “I’ve never had any complaints about mine,” said Tony staunchly. He looked down at his belly. “The missus says she likes something to grab hold of. That’s why they call
them ‘love handles’, isn’t it?” He slapped at the solid fat. “It took me years to break her habit of trying to feed me salad but she finally caved in. Now there’s always ice-cream in the freezer and plenty of sausages ready for a barbecue. Life’s too short to worry about what you eat.”

  Dennis bit his tongue to keep from making a comment. He’d come to realise the value of healthy eating but he didn’t want to lose his place as one of the guys. He smiled to himself, thinking it was almost like getting religion or becoming an insurance salesman – if you showed too much zeal nobody wanted to risk talking to you.

  “Of course if you worked a bit harder instead of sitting at a desk from nine to five you’d be able to eat all that and still be a lean machine like me,” said Gazza. “You desk jockeys’ll be keeling over with a coronary while I’m still running up and down ladders all day.” He hefted a length of timber towards Tony. “Here, think quick!” Tony caught it easily and added it to the stack on the floor.

  “So Doc, how are things at the gym? You still being whipped into shape by your very own personal trainer? Does he sit beside you sipping decaf soy lattes while you do a hundred push-ups? Must be bloody annoying.”

  “Actually, the guy who did most of our training has disappeared. It looks as if he was fiddling the accounts then just took off a couple of weeks ago – I guess he thought he’d be found out.”

  “Any idea where he’s gone? Sounds like he needs to be tracked down and stomped on heavily,” said Gazza. “Do you think he’s round town still?”

  “Unlikely. We found his passport when we searched his apartment, but I reckon he’ll be travelling on a false one and will probably be in another country by now.”

  “Ah, but that’s what he wants you to think,” said Tony. “It’s a classic double bluff. He knows you expect him to leave town so you won’t be looking nearby. He’s lying low round here somewhere until the heat dies down.”

  “It’s a point of view, certainly,” said Dennis, thinking that Tony had been watching too many bad movies. “Seems unlikely though. If he’s dishonest enough to rig the accounts then he’d have no qualms about using a false passport, would he?”