Lively Game of Death (16 page)

If the loveliness of the structure was my first surprise, the second was my initial glimpse of Harry Whelan. Or, to be exact, Whelan’s undraped buttocks. A young girl sitting in the back row of the audience identified him for me; I tried to ask her the meaning of his more-than-casual state of “dress,” but, pointing to the promptbook she was following with a pencil flashlight, she raised a finger to her lips.

I sat down in an end seat to watch the proceedings. There were four men on stage, but only Whelan was naked. One of the others, bedecked like a Maypole, was sitting on a raised prominence, while the remaining pair, flanking the bare actor, wore yellow pantaloons that came to closed balloons of material below the knee and particolored jackets ending in large V-scalloped points hanging over the fantastic trousers.

The performer on the prominence was just saying, “Alas, alas!” and I silently seconded the sentiment.

They exchanged a few lines, then Claudius—for it was obviously supposed to be the Danish king perched on high—dispatched one of the other men, who I deduced, by process of elimination, to be either Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. The exiter, on his errand to discover Polonius’ rotting guts, actually executed an
entrechat
as he departed!

The scene continued for another ten or twelve lines, then Hamlet/Whelan exited, and after a brief soliloquy, Claudius also made to depart. But, instead of a blackout, the actor playing the king stepped down unceremoniously from the throne, caught his foot in the material of his costume, stumbled, righted himself, and—uttering an unregal expletive—vanished behind the arras.

“How all occasions do inform against me,” said Hamlet, alone on stage a moment later, “and spur my dull revenge!” Whelan wasn’t a bad actor, though it seemed to me he was playing the meditative character a bit too angrily. But the rest of the cast was no credit to the Bard.

My reverie on the production, barely begun, was interrupted—with relevancy—by Whelan, whose voice soared to a summit of anger as he swore “from this time forth, my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” As soon as he said it, a purportedly dramatic tympani thump resounded through the theater and all the lights went out. There was another dull thud, then the houselights flooded on with eye-dazzling celerity.

A scruffy-looking youth in dungarees and a poncho rose from the front row and called hoarsely, “Curtain forty-four. End Act Two. Take ten!”

At the magic words, the actors streamed from behind the curtain and began various little personal chores and queries: ordering coffee, consulting the prompt girl for “blown” lines, checking with the director for makeup notes. Whelan reappeared in a dressing gown and, while flicking a comb through long, curly hair, got involved in a lengthy colloquy with the scruffy-looking youth, who happened to be the director. Whelan towered over the other, and I judged the thespian to be at least six-foot-four.

When the two were done, it was just about time for the last act, but I managed to nab the salesman-
alias
-actor before he disappeared into the wings.

It was too close to Hilary’s deadline to dissemble, so I told Whelan I wanted to see him about Goetz’s death. His face lit up. Taking me by the arm, he steered me through the theatrical hangings and propelled me backstage.

“We’re starting in a minute,” he explained, “and actors aren’t allowed to sit and watch this late in rehearsal period. Come on, we’ll sit in the dressing room.”

His choice of article was precise: there was one dressing area for men and women alike, and it was in radical contrast to the rest of the theater. Other than a pair of makeup tables, divided down their lengths by wooden frames in which light-ringed mirrors were set, the room held no other furniture except for a few folding chairs and an iron-pipe costume rack, the kind rolled through the Garment District in the West Thirties. There was no radiator, and despite old pieces of velvet stuffed in the window cracks, it was bitterly cold.

Someone yelled “Places, please!” and the other actors in the room moved out to the warmer waiting area behind stage. A girl, previously hidden from view, rounded the clothing rack. She, too, was naked.

“That’s Ophelia,” Whelan explained, plopping into a folding chair and draping his woolen dressing gown about his legs. “The rest of the play, she only goes topless, but this is when she’s supposed to be completely open and truthful, during the mad scene.”

“So that’s why everybody else is dressed?” I asked.

“All except me and Horatio, we’re supposed to be guileless. So we both play everything nude.”

“But what about Hamlet’s madness? Isn’t that a kind of duplicity for both?”

“Look,” said Whelan, lowering his voice, “this kid that’s directing knows nothing! I’m surprised he didn’t cast a black Hamlet, to suggest the mourning clothes.
I
know that Hamlet isn’t all that innocent—he even says so to Ophelia. But it’s a job, and how many actors actually get a chance to play this part, huh?”

Nodding understandingly, I asked if we could talk about Sid Goetz.

“Sure,” said Whelan. “This is the only time in the whole show that I get five minutes to myself. Let’s see—mad scene, Claudius and Laertes—uh, there’s three scenes while I’m supposed to be in England. There’s plenty of time.” He laughed briefly. “So old man Goetz plopped over! Best news all week! What was it, heart attack?”

I told him what it was. That upset him, of course, but I assured him I wasn’t from the police and only wanted some information. When I explained I was with Trim-Tram, he looked very relieved.

“What I’d like to know, Harry, is why you disappeared right on Toy Fair morning. The timing, you have to admit, looks suspicious.”

“Christ, I’ll say it does! But I was planning to stick Sid for quite a while. I was rehearsing the play evenings, and it was getting to be a drag for everyone, and, anyway, I figured the hell with it, I wanted to stick that crud and stick him good!”

I said it still looked fishy, walking out on a man just before his busiest season. Whelan, agitated, rose and paced the dressing room.

“So it was childish of me! Too goddamned bad! You know what Sid did to me?” He stopped by the door to the room, stuck out his head to see where the rest of the players were, then turned back to face me. “Maybe you’ve heard the word ‘synergism’ used in the toy trade,” he said. “It’s very popular these days—”

“Means something like ‘more than the sum of the parts,’ right?”

“Not to Sid!” Whelan said. “He thought it meant stealing the ideas of several products and combining them. It was his new approach to R&D, I guess, because he was getting worried about all the cases in court his direct copies were racking up. Anyway, Sid was working on a new game idea, trying to combine—God knows how, don’t ask!—Scrabble, Twister, and Monopoly.”

That was interesting. I’d wondered what that Scrabble set was doing in the showroom in the first place.

“You see,” the actor continued, “Sid knew how to play Monopoly and Twister, but Scrabble? Too intellectual for him. And he couldn’t spell worth a damn, either! Yet he had to understand the game well enough to steal its concept. So
I
had to play him—and the bastard cheated! Put down incorrectly spelled words and got away with them!”

“You couldn’t challenge him?”

“And last another payday?”

I said I didn’t see anything so terrible about Goetz’s crime. But then Whelan pointed out that they’d been playing penny ante, and I expressed full sympathy, well aware that the loss of a penny or two is a major calamity for a striving actor.

I brought up the subject of the preceding evening, the night—according to Hilary—of the murder.

“Well, I wasn’t working too late,” Whelan said, “because it would have involved paying me overtime. I was there till a little after nine-thirty.”

“Did anything unusual happen during that time?”

“Not much,” he shrugged, “the usual arguments. Sid never passed a day when he wasn’t yelling or getting screamed at.”

“Who did he argue with yesterday?”

“Phone customers, mostly. Oh, once he was out in the hall with the fellow across the hall, what’s-his-name? Bell. Then, late in the day, Pete Jensen came in ready to fight with Sid, but there were customers in our showroom, so nothing came of it.”

I asked if he knew what the fight was about, and he said Jensen stuck his head in the door and asked him to stay by his phone. “Pete had to go to the John, and he wanted me to watch his office just till he got back. I told Pete OK, and he left after seeing that I was in his showroom. But Sid followed me in there and yelled at me because he wasn’t paying me to wait on the competition, that kind of crap. I told him I was just doing Pete a little favor, and Sid told me to get back to the showroom and
he’d
watch Jensen’s place.”

“And he did?”

“Uh-huh. In a few minutes, he returned, Jensen right behind him, pulling at his jacket. But the whole thing blew over when Pete saw our customers.”

I asked whether anything else important took place that night.

“Yeah, about twenty minutes or so before I took off, he got into another big fight, but as I say, that was normal for him. It took place in his office, and he slammed the door, so I couldn’t hear it.”

“Was he on the phone?”

“No. He was yelling at his wife.”

“His wife?! When did
she
show up?”

“Around nine o’clock,” he answered.

“Was she alone?”

“No. There was a guy with her.”

“Short? Kind of squat?”

“That’s the one,” the actor told me. “Crew cut. Liver lips.”

I pursued the question further, but Whelan couldn’t tell me anything else. I thanked him for his trouble and assured him that the police would hear nothing of his connection with Goetz from me.

As he showed me a side exit I could use without disturbing the progress of the play, I paused long enough to ask him the one question that had really been bugging me.

“Is it your director’s idea that dressing the rest of the cast in
commedia dell’arte
costumes—like a Punch-and-Judy show—makes some kind of vital comment on
Hamlet?”

Whelan, his dressing gown laid aside, slowly shook his head. “Dire necessity, my masters,” he intoned. “Roger just graduated from Hunter College. The department head let him borrow the costumes. Otherwise, we would have had to do it in modern dress.”

“And pantaloons, I suppose, and the like were the only ‘Shakespearean’ costumes available!”

He laughed. “Shakespearean! Yes, that’s right.”

My mouth dropped. “Hey, don’t tell me ...
you
...” I indicated his height.

Whelan nodded vigorously. “Correct! There was no costume to fit me. Or Horatio.
That’s
how Roger got his directorial concept.”

Shaking my head, I said good-bye. As I threaded my way down the dark side passage Whelan had indicated, I could hear the Melancholy Dane sneezing behind me.

F
IVE-TEN. HILARY NEVER TOLD
me how much initiative to take, but, in spite of the time, I knew I had to make fast stop-offs at three places in the building before reporting back to the boss.

It was a wise decision. Willie Frost was just locking up when I got off the elevator at his floor. At my request, he turned the key the other way and led me back to his reception room.

“I’d given up on you,” he said, rubbing his hands briskly. “Now maybe you’ll tell me what Trim-Tram’s angle is.”

“First,” I said, “I want to know why you haven’t gotten in touch with Sid all day.” It may have been an oblique way to get to the meat of the matter, but it did seem odd that Frost, made suspicious by my earlier interrogation, hadn’t stopped up to the 1111 showroom. I was also thinking about the doorknob of Goetz Sales turning earlier that day.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Frost asked. “I tried to contact Sid by phone. No answer.”

“Did you stop by the showroom?”

“With my schedule? Who’s got time?”

“Besides,” I suggested, “Sid might not be too happy to see you after last night, would he?”

Frost’s eyes widened slightly, and he began to say something, then stopped himself. His thick lips compressed as a determined expression set his features in hard lines. “I think,” the lawyer said, “it’s about time you began telling me a few things. Such as who you’re really working for and what you really want.”

In another three-quarters of an hour, the police were going to know everything, anyway, so I told him practically the whole story—the pertinent parts about Goetz—in highly condensed form.

When I was finished, he looked pretty grave. It occurred to me that the Frost I’d met earlier was the private man, and I was, for the first time, getting a glimpse of the professional.

He shook his head. “Now I see the purpose of some your questions this morning. Whether Sid owned a gun, and things like that. Boy, I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes. Or your boss’s ... or Scott Miranda’s. This Hilary gal had better come up with some good answers.”

Under the circumstances, I told him, it might be wise for him to cooperate with us and give us some more information.

“I don’t
have
to tell you anything,” Frost said. “In fact, what I have to do is call the police.”

“Look,” I said, looking at my watch, “Hilary promised she would call in the cops by no later than five-thirty, and it’s practically that now ... barely fifteen minutes away. Nobody’s going to find out you held back information on a murder that long. At this time of day, you’ll never even get a line through to headquarters that fast!” I kept my fingers crossed as I tripped half an hour off our deadline.

“Well,” Frost said, grinning wryly, “there’s truth in what you say—everybody and his cousin is on the phone in New York from five to six.” He shuddered, probably thinking of the exasperation he’d suffer if he tried to buck Ma Bell. “All right,” the lawyer said at last, “I’ll dummy up, but I want to be in on the kill.”

“The kill?”

“I want to know who’s been spying for Sid.”

That surprised me. “I thought you knew!”

“I knew it wasn’t Lasker, but that’s all. And what you suggested is correct—Sid’s silent partner and the spy are one and the same. But beyond that, Sid never told me who the guy was. Which was one hell of a nerve!”