Romance, page 18
A fat tub of shit, Riganti was tempted to say, but didn’t.
“You look like an actor playing a cop,” he said.
“No kidding?” Ollie said. “Is there any more of this beer?”
“Sure, let me get you another one.”
“An actor, huh?” Ollie said. “I wished I was.”
“It’s not as easy as you think,” Riganti said, and carried another bottle of beer to the table. He uncapped it, slid it across the table to Ollie, and then sat down at the table and picked up his own unfinished glass again.
“Thank you,” Ollie said, and tilted the bottle to his mouth, and took a long swallow. Wiping his lips with the back of his hand, he said, “You think she was cheatin on him?”
“Not from what I could gather.”
“Then why’d he kill her?”
“Well, that’s your assumption. I’m not sure he did.”
“One cop to another,” Ollie said, and winked, “why do you think he killed her?”
“One actor to another,” Riganti said, “why do you think he killed her?”
“Cause he’s a fuckin liar,” Ollie said.
“How do you know that?”
“I was there when they were questioning him.”
“I do a lot of questioning, too,” Riganti said.
“Me, too,” Ollie said.
“What’s your technique? During a questioning?”
“I ask questions, the perp answers them. What do you mean, technique?”
“Well, do you prepare for a questioning in any way?”
“Prepare?”
“Yes. The way I use a fake gun to … ”
“I almost blew your fuckin brains out.”
“… put me in a detective’s frame of mind. I carry that gun with me everywhere I go. On the subway, in a restaurant, wherever. Because a gun is a vital part of being a detective, isn’t it?”
“Oh sure.”
“Take away a detective’s gun, you take away his penis.”
“Well … sure.”
“Carrying the gun helps me live the part, do you see?”
“Sure.”
“It’s my way of preparing for the role.”
“Sure.”
“So how do you prepare?”
“Prepare?”
“Yes. For questioning someone.”
“I don’t.”
“You don’t?”
“I just go in, I say Where the fuck were you last Tuesday night, you little shit? He don’t answer me, I keep at him I keep tellin him this can go easy, it can go hard, it can go however he wants. You help me, I’ll help you. You want a local jail, you want a state pen, you want niggers fucking you in the ass? Tell me where you were, you dumb shit!”
“Uh-huh.”
“Like that,” Ollie said, and picked up his bottle, drank, set it down again, belched, and said, “Sorry.”
“For example,” Riganti said, “suppose you were questioning this girl who … well, here, take a look,” he said, and picked up the Romance script in its binder, pulled his chair closer, and said, “This scene here. How would you approach it? The scene I have with the girl.”
“What girl?” Ollie asked.
“Her understudy.”
“Whose understudy?”
“The girl who got killed.”
“The Cassidy girl?”
“Well, no, this is in the play.”
“I hear it’s a dumb fuckin play.”
“It is.”
Ollie picked up the script. Squinting at it, he asked, “Why are these pages blue?”
“They’re new pages. They’re blue to differentiate them from the original pages. We can have blue, yellow, pink, green, sometimes even purple pages before all the revisions are done.”
“These are hard to read, blue fuckin pages.”
“They are.”
Ollie kept squinting at the script. At last, reluctantly, he reached into his jacket pocket and took out an eyeglass case. The glasses he pulled from it were little Ben Franklin glasses. He suddenly looked like a fat scholar.
“For reading,” he explained apologetically.
“I wear contacts myself.” Riganti said consolingly.
Adjusting the glasses on his nose, Ollie cleared his throat as if he were about to read aloud, but then didn’t. Silently, he read the page. Turned it. Read another one.
“You’re right,” he said, shaking his head, “this is a dumb fuckin play.”
“I told you. But … just for the hell of it … how would you conduct this questioning?”
“This questioning right here?”
“Yeah. Where he wants to know whether she’s ever thought of … ”
“Yeah, I sec it,” Ollie said. “What I’d do, I’d say `Look, miss, let’s be realistic here, okay?’ This is a girl I’m talkin’ to, right?”
“Yes.”
“Cause you have to clean up the act a little with a girl. I mean, you can’t talk to a girl the way you can talk to a fuckin thief, you understand me? You got to be more gentle. So what I’d say … what’s her name?”
“She doesn’t have a name.”
“What do you mean she doesn’t have a name?”
“She doesn’t. She’s just called the Understudy.”
“So what do you call her, if she doesn’t have a name?”
“I don’t call her anything.”
“That makes it harder.”
“How so?”
“Because say her name is Jean, you can start by tellin her ’Look, Jeannie, let’s be realistic here, okay?’ You use the diminative, you understand, You say Jeannie, instead of Jean. You put yourself on personal terms with her right away. Unless she don’t even have a fuckin name, which makes it difficult.”
“That’s a good point.”
“Nobody in the world doesn’t have a name.”
“Except in this play.”
“Yeah,” Ollie said, shaking his head, and looking at the script again, and then saying, “But even without a name, what I’d say is ’Look, miss, let’s be realistic here, okay? Do you expect me to believe you’re understudyin the starring role in this play, and the girl gets killed and you never even once think Gee, maybe I’ll get to go on in her place? Don’t you ever go to the fuckin movies, miss? Didn’t you ever see a movie where the star breaks her leg and the understudy has to go on for her? And all these fuckin workmen are sittin up on these little catwalks, high above the stage where the lights are hangin, and they all catch their fuckin breaths when she starts singin? And this old guy who pulls the curtain is standin there with his fuckin mouth open in surprise and a little old lady with costumes in her hands and pins stickin in her dress is standin there like she got struck blind, too, and all over the fuckin theater they’re amazed by what this understudy is doin, you mean to tell me you never saw that movie, miss? Let’s be realistic, miss.’ Is what I would say to her.”
“Wonderful,” Riganti whispered. “Thank you.”
“You ever get to kiss a girl in any of these plays you’re in?” Ollie asked.
“Oh sure.”
“What does a gay guy do when he has to kiss a girl in one of these plays?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“I’m not sayin you’re gay, you understand. I’m just wonderin how they’d feel about something like that. You think they go home afterwards and wash out their mouths with soap?”
“I’m sure they don’t.”
“I was just wonderin. You ever throw yourself into any of these scenes? Where you have to kiss a girl in one of these plays?”
“Oh sure.”
“But somebody’s gotta do it, I guess, huh?” Ollie said, and grinned like a shark.
“Still, it’s not as easy as you think.”
“Hey. It must be very difficult, soul-kissin some strange girl in front of ten thousand people.”
“It is.”
“I’ll bet. You ever have to play a nude scene with one of these girls?”
“Oh sure.”
“What do they tell these girls when they want them to take off their clothes?”
“Who do you mean?”
“Whoever it is that tells them to take off their clothes.”
“The director, you mean?”
“Yeah, what does he tell them?”
“Well, if the scene calls for it …”
“Yeah, let’s say the scene calls for it.”
“He’ll just say, ’People, we’ll be doing the scene now.’ Something like that.”
“And she just takes off her clothes, right?”
“If the scene calls for it.”
“Are there any scenes in this play where they have to take off their clothes?”
“No.”
“Michelle Cassidy didn’t have to take off her clothes anyplace in this play, did she?”
“No.”
“So her boyfriend couldn’ta been annoyed by anything like that, huh?”
“No.”
“So what got him mad enough to stab her twenty-two times?”
“If he did it,” Riganti said.
“Oh, he did it, all right,” Ollie said.
“Maybe Andy did it.”
“Who’s he?”
“She. Andrea Packer. She plays the Understudy. Remember the scene you just read … ?”
“Yeah, right,”
Ollie was thoughtful for a moment
Then he said, “No, it couldn’ta been her. Nor the other actress, either.”
“Why not?”
“Cause they’re actresses,” he said.
“What does that … ?”
“They both had to’ve seen the movie,” he said.
10
THE MOMENT CARELLA GOT OUT OF BED, HE CALLED RIGANTI hoping to set up an interview for later that Friday. Riganti told him a detective had already interviewed him last night.
“What detective?” Carella asked.
“Ollie Weeks,” Riganti said. “He was very valuable.”
Carella wondered what that meant.
“If you have a few minutes later on,” he said, “maybe we can …”
“Oh, sure, but I’ll he rehearsing from nine to … ”
“Few other people I want to talk to at the theater, anyway.”
“Well, sure, come on down,” Riganti said. “Happy to talk to you.”
Valuable how? Carella wondered, and hurried into the shower.
A traffic jam on the Farley Expressway delayed him for a good forty minutes. He did not get to the theater till ten past nine. He scanned it quickly, relieved to see that Ollie hadn’t beat him to the punch again.
Riganti, in jeans, Italian loafers without socks, and a loose-fitting cotton sweater, was already onstage with Andrea Packer. This morning, she was wearing a moss-green wraparound mini, orange-colored sneakers and an orange-colored T-shirt with no bra. Her long blond hair was stacked on top of her head like a small sheaf of wheat.
Riganti was trying to explain something to their director and their playwright, who both sat in what Carella now realized were their customary seats out front. Carella stood at the back of the theater, his eyes adjusting to the dark, trying to see if anyone else was sitting out there.
“… a more realistic approach,” Riganti was saying. “To the scene.”
“Let me understand this,” Kendall said. “Are you saying that you and Andy got here early this morning … ”
“Eight o’clock,” Andrea said.
Carella had called Riganti at seven-thirty.
“… to read this scene we’re about to rehearse?” Kendall asked.
“To go over it,” Riganti said.
“To do an improv on it, actually,” Andrea said.
“An improv?” Corbin asked.
“Well, yeah. Actually,” Riganti said.
“On the new scene?” Corbin asked.
“Just to see if we could get a handle on it,” Riganti said.
“Find a way into it,” Andrea said.
“Find a realistic approach to it,” Riganti said,
“My new scene?” Corbin asked.
“Well … yes. Your … uh … new scene.”
“Which is terrific, by the way,” Andrea said.
“Really terrific,” Riganti said. “We were just trying to get a handle on it, is all.”
“By doing an improv?” Corbin asked.
“By trying … ”
“An improvisation? On my new scene?”
“Just to try for a little added reality,” Riganti said, and turned to Andrea for assistance.
“To go for that additional touch of realism,” she said, and smiled helpfully.
“I think it’s quite real enough, thank you,” Corbin said. “And by the way, improvs arc for acting classes, and this happens to be a play in rehearsal. So let’s just run the new scene, if you don’t mind. The way I wrote it, please. My words, please.”
“I’m curious to see what they’ve come up with,” Kendall said casually. “How long will this take?” he called to the stage.
“Ten minutes,” Riganti said.
“Why don’t we see it, Freddie?” Kendall said. “What possible harm can it do?”
“What possible good can it do?” Corbin asked. “We’ve got eight new pages to … ”
“It’s just an exercise,” Kendall said. “Loosens them up.”
“Ashley … ”
“If it’s good for them. it might be good for the scene. Let’s see it, Mark!” he called to the stage.
“Ashley … ”
“What we tried to do … ” Riganti started.
“Don’t tell it, show it,” Kendall said.
“Thank you.” Riganti said, and nodded to Andrea, who immediately sat in a straight-backed wooden chair, and folded her hands in her lap, and lowered her head. The stage and the theater went silent. There were just the two actors on stage with a work light and a chair, getting ready to do an improvisation for a director, a playwright and a detective in a hushed darkened theater. Riganti started circling the chair. Carella watched intently. Riganti didn’t say a word, just kept circling the chair.
“Look, miss,” he said at last, “let’s he realistic here, okay? Do you expect me to believe … ?”
“Those aren’t my words,” Corbin said in a whisper that carried clear to where Carella was standing at the back of the theater.
“It’s an improv,” Kendall said in an equally loud whisper.
“I won’t have them changing …”
“For Christ’s sake, let’s just hear the thing!”
The theater went silent again.
On the stage, the two actors looked out into the darkness, puzzled, waiting for instructions.
“Again, please,” Kendall said softly.
Riganti hesitated a moment. Then he nodded to Andrea, who struck the same pose she had earlier, hands folded in her lap, head bent. Riganti began circling the chair again. Carella thought he did that very well, circling the chair. “Miss,” he said at last in a voice that sounded gruffly familiar, “let’s be realistic here, okay? Do you expect me to believe you’re understudyin the starring role in this play, and the girl gets killed and you never even once think Gee, maybe I’ll get to go on in her place?”
“I never once thought that, no,” Andrea said.
“Don’t you ever go to the fuckin movies, miss?”
“Of course I go to the …”
“Didn’t you ever see a movie where the star breaks her leg and the understudy has to go on for her?”
“These are not my words!” Corbin whispered.
“Shhh!” Kendall whispered.
“... and all these fuckin workmen are sittin up on these little catwalks,” Riganti said, “high above the stage where the lights are hangin, and they all catch their fuckin breaths when she starts singin? And this old guy who pulls the curtain is standin there with his fuckin mouth open in surprise,” Riganti said, circling the chair like a shark closing in for the kill, “and a little old lady with costumes in her hands and pins stickin in her dress is standin there like she got struck blind, too, and all over the fuckin theater they’re amazed by what this understudy is doin,” Riganti said, and stopped dead in front of Andrea and pointed his finger into her face and shouted, “You mean to tell me you never saw that scene, miss?”
“Yes, I saw that ...”
“... you never saw that movie, miss?”
“I saw that movie, but ...”
“Then let’s be realistic here!” Riganti shouted, and suddenly turned off the character he was playing, suddenly stopped being this raging detective in the scene he was improvising, becoming in the wink of an eye simply the self-effacing actor Mark Riganti again, standing there in jeans and a floppy sweater and Italian loafers without socks, smiling weakly and turning for approval to where Kendall and Corbin were sitting in the sixth row center in the dark.
“Bravo,” Kendall whispered.
“Bravo, my ass!“ Corbin shouted, and stormed out of the theater.
“If there is one thing I absolutely despise,” Kendall said, “it’s writers. I would truly be the happiest person on earth if I could direct the telephone book. Give me a handful of trained actors and I could make a hit out of the telephone book, i promise you.”
They were sitting in the delicatessen alongside the theater alley where Michelle Cassidy was first stabbed. Kendall had called a half-hour break after calming down his actors and promising them their playwright would be back after he’d got over his little fit of pique.
“Which I’m not sure he really will, by the way—unless he’s a better actor than anyone in the cast.
““How do you mean?” Carella asked.
Both men were drinking coffee. Carella didn’t really give a damn about writers or telephone books, although he guessed somebody wrote even telephone books. But he let Kendall talk. When a person talked, you learned a little something about him. And sometimes, incidentally, about the person who’d been killed.
“Well, this was a monumental explosion, this was rage of heretofore unseen proportions!” Kendall said, and rolled his eyes. “How dare they this, how dare they that, I’m going directly to the DGA, I’ll have their heads ...”
“The what?”
“What?” Kendall said. “Oh. The DGA. The Dramatists Guild. Of America, that is. Where else, Poland? Freddie threatened to go there and have all the actors fired, have me fired for encouraging them to subvert his play ... his exact word, by the way, subvert … went out of the theater in high dudgeon. Now either this was the performance of the century, designed to let everyone know exactly who’s in charge here and don’t fuck with me, mister, or else he really was enjoying a totally childish temper tantrum unproductive to the collaborative theatrical effort.”
“You look like an actor playing a cop,” he said.
“No kidding?” Ollie said. “Is there any more of this beer?”
“Sure, let me get you another one.”
“An actor, huh?” Ollie said. “I wished I was.”
“It’s not as easy as you think,” Riganti said, and carried another bottle of beer to the table. He uncapped it, slid it across the table to Ollie, and then sat down at the table and picked up his own unfinished glass again.
“Thank you,” Ollie said, and tilted the bottle to his mouth, and took a long swallow. Wiping his lips with the back of his hand, he said, “You think she was cheatin on him?”
“Not from what I could gather.”
“Then why’d he kill her?”
“Well, that’s your assumption. I’m not sure he did.”
“One cop to another,” Ollie said, and winked, “why do you think he killed her?”
“One actor to another,” Riganti said, “why do you think he killed her?”
“Cause he’s a fuckin liar,” Ollie said.
“How do you know that?”
“I was there when they were questioning him.”
“I do a lot of questioning, too,” Riganti said.
“Me, too,” Ollie said.
“What’s your technique? During a questioning?”
“I ask questions, the perp answers them. What do you mean, technique?”
“Well, do you prepare for a questioning in any way?”
“Prepare?”
“Yes. The way I use a fake gun to … ”
“I almost blew your fuckin brains out.”
“… put me in a detective’s frame of mind. I carry that gun with me everywhere I go. On the subway, in a restaurant, wherever. Because a gun is a vital part of being a detective, isn’t it?”
“Oh sure.”
“Take away a detective’s gun, you take away his penis.”
“Well … sure.”
“Carrying the gun helps me live the part, do you see?”
“Sure.”
“It’s my way of preparing for the role.”
“Sure.”
“So how do you prepare?”
“Prepare?”
“Yes. For questioning someone.”
“I don’t.”
“You don’t?”
“I just go in, I say Where the fuck were you last Tuesday night, you little shit? He don’t answer me, I keep at him I keep tellin him this can go easy, it can go hard, it can go however he wants. You help me, I’ll help you. You want a local jail, you want a state pen, you want niggers fucking you in the ass? Tell me where you were, you dumb shit!”
“Uh-huh.”
“Like that,” Ollie said, and picked up his bottle, drank, set it down again, belched, and said, “Sorry.”
“For example,” Riganti said, “suppose you were questioning this girl who … well, here, take a look,” he said, and picked up the Romance script in its binder, pulled his chair closer, and said, “This scene here. How would you approach it? The scene I have with the girl.”
“What girl?” Ollie asked.
“Her understudy.”
“Whose understudy?”
“The girl who got killed.”
“The Cassidy girl?”
“Well, no, this is in the play.”
“I hear it’s a dumb fuckin play.”
“It is.”
Ollie picked up the script. Squinting at it, he asked, “Why are these pages blue?”
“They’re new pages. They’re blue to differentiate them from the original pages. We can have blue, yellow, pink, green, sometimes even purple pages before all the revisions are done.”
“These are hard to read, blue fuckin pages.”
“They are.”
Ollie kept squinting at the script. At last, reluctantly, he reached into his jacket pocket and took out an eyeglass case. The glasses he pulled from it were little Ben Franklin glasses. He suddenly looked like a fat scholar.
“For reading,” he explained apologetically.
“I wear contacts myself.” Riganti said consolingly.
Adjusting the glasses on his nose, Ollie cleared his throat as if he were about to read aloud, but then didn’t. Silently, he read the page. Turned it. Read another one.
“You’re right,” he said, shaking his head, “this is a dumb fuckin play.”
“I told you. But … just for the hell of it … how would you conduct this questioning?”
“This questioning right here?”
“Yeah. Where he wants to know whether she’s ever thought of … ”
“Yeah, I sec it,” Ollie said. “What I’d do, I’d say `Look, miss, let’s be realistic here, okay?’ This is a girl I’m talkin’ to, right?”
“Yes.”
“Cause you have to clean up the act a little with a girl. I mean, you can’t talk to a girl the way you can talk to a fuckin thief, you understand me? You got to be more gentle. So what I’d say … what’s her name?”
“She doesn’t have a name.”
“What do you mean she doesn’t have a name?”
“She doesn’t. She’s just called the Understudy.”
“So what do you call her, if she doesn’t have a name?”
“I don’t call her anything.”
“That makes it harder.”
“How so?”
“Because say her name is Jean, you can start by tellin her ’Look, Jeannie, let’s be realistic here, okay?’ You use the diminative, you understand, You say Jeannie, instead of Jean. You put yourself on personal terms with her right away. Unless she don’t even have a fuckin name, which makes it difficult.”
“That’s a good point.”
“Nobody in the world doesn’t have a name.”
“Except in this play.”
“Yeah,” Ollie said, shaking his head, and looking at the script again, and then saying, “But even without a name, what I’d say is ’Look, miss, let’s be realistic here, okay? Do you expect me to believe you’re understudyin the starring role in this play, and the girl gets killed and you never even once think Gee, maybe I’ll get to go on in her place? Don’t you ever go to the fuckin movies, miss? Didn’t you ever see a movie where the star breaks her leg and the understudy has to go on for her? And all these fuckin workmen are sittin up on these little catwalks, high above the stage where the lights are hangin, and they all catch their fuckin breaths when she starts singin? And this old guy who pulls the curtain is standin there with his fuckin mouth open in surprise and a little old lady with costumes in her hands and pins stickin in her dress is standin there like she got struck blind, too, and all over the fuckin theater they’re amazed by what this understudy is doin, you mean to tell me you never saw that movie, miss? Let’s be realistic, miss.’ Is what I would say to her.”
“Wonderful,” Riganti whispered. “Thank you.”
“You ever get to kiss a girl in any of these plays you’re in?” Ollie asked.
“Oh sure.”
“What does a gay guy do when he has to kiss a girl in one of these plays?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“I’m not sayin you’re gay, you understand. I’m just wonderin how they’d feel about something like that. You think they go home afterwards and wash out their mouths with soap?”
“I’m sure they don’t.”
“I was just wonderin. You ever throw yourself into any of these scenes? Where you have to kiss a girl in one of these plays?”
“Oh sure.”
“But somebody’s gotta do it, I guess, huh?” Ollie said, and grinned like a shark.
“Still, it’s not as easy as you think.”
“Hey. It must be very difficult, soul-kissin some strange girl in front of ten thousand people.”
“It is.”
“I’ll bet. You ever have to play a nude scene with one of these girls?”
“Oh sure.”
“What do they tell these girls when they want them to take off their clothes?”
“Who do you mean?”
“Whoever it is that tells them to take off their clothes.”
“The director, you mean?”
“Yeah, what does he tell them?”
“Well, if the scene calls for it …”
“Yeah, let’s say the scene calls for it.”
“He’ll just say, ’People, we’ll be doing the scene now.’ Something like that.”
“And she just takes off her clothes, right?”
“If the scene calls for it.”
“Are there any scenes in this play where they have to take off their clothes?”
“No.”
“Michelle Cassidy didn’t have to take off her clothes anyplace in this play, did she?”
“No.”
“So her boyfriend couldn’ta been annoyed by anything like that, huh?”
“No.”
“So what got him mad enough to stab her twenty-two times?”
“If he did it,” Riganti said.
“Oh, he did it, all right,” Ollie said.
“Maybe Andy did it.”
“Who’s he?”
“She. Andrea Packer. She plays the Understudy. Remember the scene you just read … ?”
“Yeah, right,”
Ollie was thoughtful for a moment
Then he said, “No, it couldn’ta been her. Nor the other actress, either.”
“Why not?”
“Cause they’re actresses,” he said.
“What does that … ?”
“They both had to’ve seen the movie,” he said.
10
THE MOMENT CARELLA GOT OUT OF BED, HE CALLED RIGANTI hoping to set up an interview for later that Friday. Riganti told him a detective had already interviewed him last night.
“What detective?” Carella asked.
“Ollie Weeks,” Riganti said. “He was very valuable.”
Carella wondered what that meant.
“If you have a few minutes later on,” he said, “maybe we can …”
“Oh, sure, but I’ll he rehearsing from nine to … ”
“Few other people I want to talk to at the theater, anyway.”
“Well, sure, come on down,” Riganti said. “Happy to talk to you.”
Valuable how? Carella wondered, and hurried into the shower.
A traffic jam on the Farley Expressway delayed him for a good forty minutes. He did not get to the theater till ten past nine. He scanned it quickly, relieved to see that Ollie hadn’t beat him to the punch again.
Riganti, in jeans, Italian loafers without socks, and a loose-fitting cotton sweater, was already onstage with Andrea Packer. This morning, she was wearing a moss-green wraparound mini, orange-colored sneakers and an orange-colored T-shirt with no bra. Her long blond hair was stacked on top of her head like a small sheaf of wheat.
Riganti was trying to explain something to their director and their playwright, who both sat in what Carella now realized were their customary seats out front. Carella stood at the back of the theater, his eyes adjusting to the dark, trying to see if anyone else was sitting out there.
“… a more realistic approach,” Riganti was saying. “To the scene.”
“Let me understand this,” Kendall said. “Are you saying that you and Andy got here early this morning … ”
“Eight o’clock,” Andrea said.
Carella had called Riganti at seven-thirty.
“… to read this scene we’re about to rehearse?” Kendall asked.
“To go over it,” Riganti said.
“To do an improv on it, actually,” Andrea said.
“An improv?” Corbin asked.
“Well, yeah. Actually,” Riganti said.
“On the new scene?” Corbin asked.
“Just to see if we could get a handle on it,” Riganti said.
“Find a way into it,” Andrea said.
“Find a realistic approach to it,” Riganti said,
“My new scene?” Corbin asked.
“Well … yes. Your … uh … new scene.”
“Which is terrific, by the way,” Andrea said.
“Really terrific,” Riganti said. “We were just trying to get a handle on it, is all.”
“By doing an improv?” Corbin asked.
“By trying … ”
“An improvisation? On my new scene?”
“Just to try for a little added reality,” Riganti said, and turned to Andrea for assistance.
“To go for that additional touch of realism,” she said, and smiled helpfully.
“I think it’s quite real enough, thank you,” Corbin said. “And by the way, improvs arc for acting classes, and this happens to be a play in rehearsal. So let’s just run the new scene, if you don’t mind. The way I wrote it, please. My words, please.”
“I’m curious to see what they’ve come up with,” Kendall said casually. “How long will this take?” he called to the stage.
“Ten minutes,” Riganti said.
“Why don’t we see it, Freddie?” Kendall said. “What possible harm can it do?”
“What possible good can it do?” Corbin asked. “We’ve got eight new pages to … ”
“It’s just an exercise,” Kendall said. “Loosens them up.”
“Ashley … ”
“If it’s good for them. it might be good for the scene. Let’s see it, Mark!” he called to the stage.
“Ashley … ”
“What we tried to do … ” Riganti started.
“Don’t tell it, show it,” Kendall said.
“Thank you.” Riganti said, and nodded to Andrea, who immediately sat in a straight-backed wooden chair, and folded her hands in her lap, and lowered her head. The stage and the theater went silent. There were just the two actors on stage with a work light and a chair, getting ready to do an improvisation for a director, a playwright and a detective in a hushed darkened theater. Riganti started circling the chair. Carella watched intently. Riganti didn’t say a word, just kept circling the chair.
“Look, miss,” he said at last, “let’s he realistic here, okay? Do you expect me to believe … ?”
“Those aren’t my words,” Corbin said in a whisper that carried clear to where Carella was standing at the back of the theater.
“It’s an improv,” Kendall said in an equally loud whisper.
“I won’t have them changing …”
“For Christ’s sake, let’s just hear the thing!”
The theater went silent again.
On the stage, the two actors looked out into the darkness, puzzled, waiting for instructions.
“Again, please,” Kendall said softly.
Riganti hesitated a moment. Then he nodded to Andrea, who struck the same pose she had earlier, hands folded in her lap, head bent. Riganti began circling the chair again. Carella thought he did that very well, circling the chair. “Miss,” he said at last in a voice that sounded gruffly familiar, “let’s be realistic here, okay? Do you expect me to believe you’re understudyin the starring role in this play, and the girl gets killed and you never even once think Gee, maybe I’ll get to go on in her place?”
“I never once thought that, no,” Andrea said.
“Don’t you ever go to the fuckin movies, miss?”
“Of course I go to the …”
“Didn’t you ever see a movie where the star breaks her leg and the understudy has to go on for her?”
“These are not my words!” Corbin whispered.
“Shhh!” Kendall whispered.
“... and all these fuckin workmen are sittin up on these little catwalks,” Riganti said, “high above the stage where the lights are hangin, and they all catch their fuckin breaths when she starts singin? And this old guy who pulls the curtain is standin there with his fuckin mouth open in surprise,” Riganti said, circling the chair like a shark closing in for the kill, “and a little old lady with costumes in her hands and pins stickin in her dress is standin there like she got struck blind, too, and all over the fuckin theater they’re amazed by what this understudy is doin,” Riganti said, and stopped dead in front of Andrea and pointed his finger into her face and shouted, “You mean to tell me you never saw that scene, miss?”
“Yes, I saw that ...”
“... you never saw that movie, miss?”
“I saw that movie, but ...”
“Then let’s be realistic here!” Riganti shouted, and suddenly turned off the character he was playing, suddenly stopped being this raging detective in the scene he was improvising, becoming in the wink of an eye simply the self-effacing actor Mark Riganti again, standing there in jeans and a floppy sweater and Italian loafers without socks, smiling weakly and turning for approval to where Kendall and Corbin were sitting in the sixth row center in the dark.
“Bravo,” Kendall whispered.
“Bravo, my ass!“ Corbin shouted, and stormed out of the theater.
“If there is one thing I absolutely despise,” Kendall said, “it’s writers. I would truly be the happiest person on earth if I could direct the telephone book. Give me a handful of trained actors and I could make a hit out of the telephone book, i promise you.”
They were sitting in the delicatessen alongside the theater alley where Michelle Cassidy was first stabbed. Kendall had called a half-hour break after calming down his actors and promising them their playwright would be back after he’d got over his little fit of pique.
“Which I’m not sure he really will, by the way—unless he’s a better actor than anyone in the cast.
““How do you mean?” Carella asked.
Both men were drinking coffee. Carella didn’t really give a damn about writers or telephone books, although he guessed somebody wrote even telephone books. But he let Kendall talk. When a person talked, you learned a little something about him. And sometimes, incidentally, about the person who’d been killed.
“Well, this was a monumental explosion, this was rage of heretofore unseen proportions!” Kendall said, and rolled his eyes. “How dare they this, how dare they that, I’m going directly to the DGA, I’ll have their heads ...”
“The what?”
“What?” Kendall said. “Oh. The DGA. The Dramatists Guild. Of America, that is. Where else, Poland? Freddie threatened to go there and have all the actors fired, have me fired for encouraging them to subvert his play ... his exact word, by the way, subvert … went out of the theater in high dudgeon. Now either this was the performance of the century, designed to let everyone know exactly who’s in charge here and don’t fuck with me, mister, or else he really was enjoying a totally childish temper tantrum unproductive to the collaborative theatrical effort.”
