The Show Goes On, page 16
Candy nodded. “That can get you through a lot of hard times,” she agreed. “You’re doing a good job with the publicity for this play though, they’re lucky to have you.”
Gail smiled at her friend and nodded. “She’s more creative than the University Information office would have been,” Gail agreed. “The department is considering a contract with her for future events.”
“Good idea,” Candy agreed. “You all do a lot. Speaking of your department? What the hell?”
Gail started laughing. She tried to stop and then she caught the expression on Angie’s face, and laughed harder. “That’s my theme song,” Gail agreed. “And the answer? I have no clue. To be honest, most of the faculty have been great. George Trainor is really stepping up as the interim chair. But as for Bill? No clue.”
Candy regarded her for a moment. “So, you should know,” she said slowly. “I went down to the cop shop and pulled all the files. Got Carl Anderson cornered, and he coughed it all up — public records only, but there’s a lot.”
Gail nodded.
“And we’ve had bits and pieces of it in the blotter,” Candy continued. “But it’s a bigger story than that.”
“And you’re going to do it,” Gail asked, resigned.
“I think we have to,” Candy responded. “A reporter will call you for an interview.”
“Any way we can drag this out until after the play is finished?” Angie asked practically. “It’s been a story since mid-August. Can it wait?”
Candy considered that. She nodded. “I’ll think about that,” she promised. “You don’t want it to distract from the play?”
Gail shook her head. “No,” she said. “The play deserves to be the center of attention. Not me. That’s been a battle since the beginning. Andrew Blake wanted to make it about me. Or about him. And that’s not fair. Jake Abbott won the competition, and the prize is for the play to be produced. And we’re going to give that play the production it deserves.”
“Rumor has it, you and Jake Abbott have a thing,” Candy observed.
Gail shrugged. “Not during the competition,” she said firmly. “And he’s a student now, and it would be wrong.”
Candy’s eyes narrowed for a moment. “That’s not the unequivocal denial I’d expect,” she said.
Gail sighed. “I’m up for tenure, Candy,” she said tiredly. “Everyone is scrutinizing me. Everyone. And they’ll hone in on a potential conflict of interest and ignore the fact that I had to get a restraining order against the department chair’s wife for her stalking and possible role in the vandalism of my house. Or that Call actually proposed that Andrew Blake direct the play he plagiarized from me years ago next year. The whole situation is fucked up, and I’m doing the best I can.”
Gail felt ashamed. The woman didn’t deserve that outburst.
Candy just nodded and patted her hand. “I shouldn’t have pried,” she said. “In my defense? That young man is a very attractive young man. It’s not hard to see why rumors are flying.”
Gail laughed at that. “And then he interrupted Blake when he was holding me at gunpoint and probably saved my life. So yes, it’s movie material.”
Candy waved at Maggie. “Another glass of wine for Gail,” she said. “On my tab.”
Gail started to protest.
“No, it’s an apology,” she said. “Us reporters sometimes forget that just because we think of a question, we don’t have to ask it.”
Gail laughed. She liked this woman, she decided, and she started eating again, feeling better about lunch than she had expected to.
As they were leaving, Gail asked Angie if she’d be willing to take her grocery shopping. “The least those bastards could have done is given me a heads up so I could stock up before they blew up my car,” she complained.
Angie laughed. “I think that last glass of wine might have been one too many,” she observed. “Sure. Rosauers work?”
Gail nodded, and she leaned back in the seat in Angie’s car and closed her eyes. “I don’t want to talk to a reporter about all this.”
Angie shrugged. “Then don’t,” she said. “Just say no comment. If we can get it postponed until after the play is over, you can do what you want. The only problem is that means you have no say in how the story develops. And that might be a mistake. Doesn’t seem like Andrew Blake has a problem going public with his version of it all.”
Gail was silent. True, she thought. And why was that?
Chapter 26
Gail sat at her desk in her home office. She really did like having a place for all of her Day of the Dead memorabilia even if it seemed a little macabre. Although these days, it just seemed an appropriate commentary on her work life.
But something Jake had said, about who was behind this, kept nagging at her. That and Ron’s comment about the promise of an internship might gain Andrew Blake some willing hands. Was there some young man — Jake had been sure it was a guy — who was doing Andrew’s work for him? Either because he was promised something, or because he felt resentment?
Gail called up her files from the Other Voices competition and looked at the ten finalists. She’d been focused on the plays back then, not the playwrights. Now she looked at the people who wrote those plays that made the finalist list. As important as it all had seemed then, now she had a hard time recalling the plays much less the playwrights.
Well, four of the final plays were written by women. She supposed that the person Blake was using could be a woman — look at Susan Call — but she’d go with Jake’s gut feelings. So six people.
She jotted down their names, and tapped her fingers. It would have to be someone who decided to stay here for school, wouldn’t it? Or at least decided to stay in Moscow. She grimaced. Let’s assume stayed for school.
She logged into the university database, and typed in the six names. Three of them stayed, in spite of not winning. About right. She expected 50 percent of those competing would stay. She should have Becca pull those stats. They’d be good for writing grants.
She looked at the three names. Matched them back with their plays. And then she called the plays up and settled in to read.
One of them was the comedy that had left a bad taste in her mouth. She wasn’t sure how it had even made it into the Other Voices competition. Someone had missed the cruelty that underlaid some of the jokes and humor. Well, that was easy enough to do when you read a play on paper. She remembered the reaction, though, of those scoring the plays. Most of them had seen it when they heard it read, and by the time they were selecting the winner, no one had been advocating for it.
No one except Andrew Blake. He’d thrown a hissy fit, said their objections were PC, about political correctness, not what he called marketability. Well, in this day, offensive plays, even comedies, weren’t marketable either. No one wanted to go to all the money and trouble of producing a play that would be scathingly reviewed because it was offensive.
That play hadn’t gotten all the way to offensive, Gail thought. It was just... snide? And always at the expense of women or people of color. She hadn’t liked it. Would never have named it the winner. In fact, she was pretty sure that she’d ranked it number 10.
She wondered how Andrew Blake had ranked it. She tapped her fingers on the desk, and she called Becca.
“Hey there,” she said.
“Gail! Oh my God! Are you OK?” Becca said, worry in her voice.
Gail was briefly puzzled. Oh, she thought. Last night. Car bomb? That. “I’m fine. Jake was there. He heard a sound, and he pulled us out of the car before it caught fire. He said they did it wrong.” She started laughing. She couldn’t help it. That line struck her funny.
There was silence. “You’re so weird,” Becca muttered, and Gail laughed harder.
“Look, something Jake said. Well actually Ron Carroll said it too.” She took a deep breath and started over. “There’s someone else in this,” she said. “I can’t see Andrew Blake setting down his cane and sliding under the car, can you?”
“Well, no,” Becca admitted.
“So, Jake said think of a young man with a grudge,” Gail went on. “Either against me, or against the play. Ron suggested a young man who would be persuadable if Andrew Blake dangled an internship in New York City in front of them.”
She paused, think about that. Wouldn’t Blake have to be in New York to make that work? She set it aside.
“Go on,” Becca said.
“So I thought about the other finalists — the ones who didn’t win against Jake. And there are three names that of young men who were finalists and who stayed in Moscow. And I was wondering, do you remember how Andrew Blake voted on the finalists?”
She paused and then added reluctantly. “And Bill Call.”
“Interesting,” Becca said. “Let me go find the score sheets, and call you back.”
Gail spent the time while she waited trying to recall the discussion of those two awful deliberations — the first one narrowed the competition plays to the ten finalists. It had been tense among the faculty, visiting artists, and graduate teaching assistants who had participated in running the competition. Andrew Blake had called Jake a boytoy — or was that second meeting? She’d been horrified, and so had everyone else. Blake didn’t understand university culture at all. And he most certainly didn’t understand the under-30 crowd. The GTAs had uniformly loathed the man.
She thought they had, at least. Had someone just remained quiet? Who agreed with Blake, but didn’t feel they could say so?
She hated this! This doubt about her GTAs, who she liked and thought liked her. This suspicion of students. Of her colleagues, for that matter. Damn Andrew Blake for all of this.
So the first meeting had been tense as they argued for their favorite plays. Jake’s had been on everyone’s top ten list, one of four to have that distinction. What were the other three? Did she even know?
Well, she didn’t know now, she must have known then. They were on her list after all.
They never did reach consensus on all ten plays — even when they reluctantly included the snide comedy that Blake had championed. And it hadn’t gone over well with the competition participants, she remembered now. Several had mentioned it in their evaluations of the competition, wondering why it had made it to finalist — in a competition called Other Voices no less.
She’d finally thanked the committee for their recommendations and chose the tenth play herself, an innocuous play that no one hated and no one loved. Sometimes that was all you could ask for. In hindsight, after reading the evaluations, she probably should have done that instead of the snide comedy. But it had been a sop to Andrew, as Bill Call’s Artist in Residence. It wasn’t the first year she’d done that. And this year, she’d expected to have to work alongside Andrew Blake all fall. A sop seemed in order.
She shrugged.
Her phone rang and she picked it up.
“OK,” Becca said. “I’m up at the office, and I have the files. What were you asking?”
“I’ve got even more questions now,” Gail said with a laugh. “So, can you tell which of the finalist rankings came from Blake?”
“Yes,” she said. “He punched a hole in his, he was so angry about the discussion. I noticed when he turned it in. So, I have that one.”
“I’m looking at the plays by Emilio Sanchez, Roger Carlson, and Peter Mason,” she said. “Did he rank any of those three high?”
“Wait,” she said. “I have to figure out which play those three wrote first.”
Gail studied the dancing skeletons on the shelf across from her desk. They were about 18 inches tall, and were dressed up. She had a black skirt that flared out and a bustier. He was wearing snug gray pants, a white shirt, and a large sombrero. She thought they were doing a salsa dance. Skeletons in all kinds of poses and representing all kinds of professions were available in Mexico. It spoke of a different way of thinking about death, she thought. It had taken her a while to appreciate them.
“OK, I’m back. It’s kind of spooky up here on a Saturday, you know that?” Becca said. “So Sanchez’s play doesn’t make it onto his top ten at all. Roger Carlson was the guy who did that awful comedy, and oddly he’s only number 8 on Blake’s list. I’m comparing his list to Call’s list and to yours, by the way. Peter Mason is number 6 on all three lists. Call ranked Carlson at 9, you didn’t have him in your top ten. You liked Sanchez’s play, ranked it 5, and Call ranked Sanchez’s play at 7.”
“That’s odd,” Gail said, frowning. “I thought Blake almost got into fistfights defending that comedy.”
“He did,” Becca agreed. “But I think that came when he realized James DeWitt and Naomi Ford didn’t like it. And then he pushed for it harder that last meeting. He didn’t turn in his remarks remember? But he sent me his comments for compilation for the playwrights. I didn’t include them.”
“Becca,” Gail scolded.
“They were ugly about Jake, and wrong about some others. Just wrong, Gail,” Becca said, and she didn’t sound guilty about what she’d done. “He did praise Carlson’s comedy then. Let me find the final rankings for the winner, and then I’ll look for what he had to say about the comedy.”
There was a rustling of paper, then Gail heard Becca go, “Hello? Is someone out there?”
“Becca?” Gail said alarmed. There was no response.
She put the call on hold and called campus security directly, and then for good measure she called Jake. “Becca’s at the Other Voices office,” she said. She told him what she’d heard.
“I’m on my way. You call security?”
“Yes,” she said. “Call me back. I’m heading over, but I’m on foot.”
But she was speaking to dead air.
Gail grabbed her keys, her phone and a jacket. She put the jacket on as she went out the door, and she ran.
Chapter 27
Gail got to the building in time to see them wheeling someone out to an ambulance. She spotted the security officer. “Becca?” she said anxiously. “Is she going to be OK?”
The officer, who looked vaguely familiar but who she couldn’t put a name to, nodded his head. “Someone hit her over the head,” he said. “She’s got a concussion, and she’s fades in and out still. But the EMT said he thought she’d be fine. But whoever did it, trashed that office, Professor Tremont. It’s a mess.”
“Not important,” Gail said impatiently. “Becca is. Are they taking her to Gritman?” She held her breath. Because if Becca was in danger, they’d be taking her to Spokane.
But the officer just nodded. “She’s going to be fine,” he repeated.
“Gail!” She turned at the sound of her name. Jake was limping a bit as he came out of the building. He must have run here after she called him.
“Were you the one who found her?” Gail asked. He nodded.
“I think the officer thought he’d caught me in the act at first,” he said ruefully. “But whoever did it, trashed the office and was gone by the time I got there. I was checking out Becca. She came to a bit, and she said, ‘it’s the play, that’s the thing.”
Gail chewed on her lip. “Come on,” she said. “How far is your car? We should go to the hospital.”
“Could you go upstairs first, Professor?” the officer interrupted. “The chief would like you to see if you can see if anything is missing. Seems like an odd office for a burglary.”
“It does,” she agreed. She went into the building, and up to the second floor, Jake walking alongside her. “Your leg?”
He shrugged. “It’ll be fine,” he said impatiently. She didn’t press.
The Campus Security Chief was a trim man in his 40s. She thought he might have seen military service himself — he had that clean-cut look about him. “Chief?” she said politely, and then she looked at the office.
“Holy...,” she stopped before the profanity escaped. The burglar had done a remarkable amount of damage for being there so short a time. He’d toppled the filing cabinet, flinging all the files from five years of play submissions all over the floor. She grimaced. There was no putting that humpty dumpty back together again. Although, really, it didn’t matter. Most everything was computerized. Not just the score sheets of the deciding committees, but the plays themselves, the comments that were sent out to people, all the correspondence.
“Probably what saved her, however,” the security chief said. “He knocked her down and out, and then realizing she had been on the phone, the suspect turned away to do as much damage as he could. But I don’t think this was a regular burglar or he would have taken the computer — or that videocamera. Do you know what he might have been after?”
Gail shook her head. “Chief, nothing has made sense all fall,” she said wearily. “I don’t have a clue. He must have seen Becca headed in here, and followed her, though.”
She tried to visualize it. “And then he stood outside the door, listening to her talk to me on the phone,” she said slowly. She looked around.
“We were talking about the deliberations in the Other Voices competition,” Gail explained. “And she was looking for the sheets that the deciding committee turn in ranking the finalists, when I heard her say, ‘hello? Is someone there?’ She didn’t answer me when I called her name. So, he would have heard her say that. That she was looking for the finalist rankings, and then she was going to look up one person’s emailed comments.” She thought about that. “I don’t think she said emailed,” she corrected. “She didn’t have to, I knew comments were emailed, not written. But the assailant might not have.”
“So he breaks in to intervene?” the chief asked. “And then he tosses paper all over the place so that she can’t find what she was looking for? Professor, I can’t say that makes a whole lot of sense.”
“What did I tell you?” Gail said, she glanced around, and shook her head. “Nothing has made sense all semester.”
The security chief grunted. “Your insurance adjuster came by,” he said. “Speaking of things that don’t make sense — that car bomb didn’t either.”
