Murder in the Hearse Degree (12 page)

“A little bit this summer, yes.”

“Did she say what the call was about?”

“No. And I didn’t ask. I just gave her the number.”

“He’s not in the phone book?”

“Tom has a roommate,” Faith said. “The phone’s under the roommate’s name.”

“Give me a thumbnail on Tom,” I said.

Stephanie and Faith shared another look. “That one’s yours,” Stephanie said.

Faith took her fingers to her chin and gave me an appraising look. “Well, let’s see. Tom Cushman. Tall, but not quite as tall as you. Good-looking.” She smiled. “But not as good-looking as you.”

Stephanie chimed in. “He’s no Cary Grant.”

“Any idea why she’d be wanting to call him?” When neither Stephanie nor Faith could come up with a reason, I asked, “Well, how’s this? What are the chances that the two of them were mixing it up while they were working together?”

Faith was shaking her head. “Not a chance.”

“You say that with conviction.”

“That’s because I know,” she said. “It didn’t happen.”

“How can you be so sure?” I asked.

Faith checked me out one eye at a time. An amused vapor was whipping about her face. “Trust me. I know.”

I looked over at Stephanie, who was trying to keep a leash on her laughter.

“I see.”

Even with the tan, the blush came up in Faith’s cheeks. The blue in her eyes deepened. They looked like a pair of deep watering holes into which someone had thrown a couple of rocks. I could almost feel their splash.

 

I went ahead and popped into the Naval Academy chapel before I left the campus. I have to say they do like their blue. John Paul Jones is ensconced in the basement level. As we say so hilariously in the trade, he was still dead. The chapel was crawling with visitors. The stained-glass windows were dominated—no surprise—by nautical imagery. Near the altar a young mother and father were trying in vain to placate their baby, whose wailings were offering an impressive display of the chapel’s acoustics.

I left the chapel and meandered the narrow streets until I found a pay phone. I made a few calls. One was to the local theater. They were running
The Seagull
by Chekov. I asked the box-office person to run down the cast list for me, and when he read out the name Tom Cushman I told him I wanted a ticket for the evening’s performance. No problem. Curtain at eight, don’t be late.

I caught up with Lee Cromwell for an early dinner. The club where she worked, downstairs at the George Washington Inn, was called the Wine Cellar. We ate upstairs in the bar. Lee looked great. At forty-seven Lee was in the midst of a new blooming. She had dumped the two-timing husband, dumped the booze, put the statuesque body back into great shape and was up onstage behind the microphone after a twenty-year detour. Lee still smoked. She handled cigarettes like the sex objects they once were. Full head of auburn hair. A laugh like Rita Hayworth’s. Her dinner was a spinach salad. Every few bites she would grimace at me so I could tell her whether she had spinach in her teeth.

“How’s Peter?” she finally asked.

I shrugged. “You know Pete. There are a dozen answers to that question.”

“He’s a shit.”

“I guess that’s one of them.”

“I miss him,” Lee said. “Would it kill him to pick up the phone?”

“Lee, you know he’s completely hell-bent on trying to work things out with Susan.”

“I know that. I’m not trying to interfere, believe me. Peter has to work all that out. But am I a pariah? The man can’t talk to me?”

“Maybe he can’t, Lee. It’s not easy for him. Maybe that’s the problem.”

Lee stirred her salad absently with her fork. “He’s just an irascible old bear, anyway.” She looked up from her plate. Her eyes were glistening. “Well, say hi for me.”

 

 

The Seagull.
It goes
like this:

A half-talent young playwright spends too much time in a tree house writing tortured melodramas that nobody in their right mind wants to screw their fannies down in a chair and actually sit through. He is smitten by a pretty young thing—an actress named Nina—who hasn’t a clue in her pretty little head that this fellow—his name is Constantin—is completely ga-ga for her, even though his plays are all written with her in mind. Constantin’s mother is a celebrated stage actress who is approaching the apex of her beauty and celebrity. The mother’s amour du jour is a famous writer of whom Constantin, naturally enough, is envious. The first big scene of the play is when Constantin comes down from his tree house and puts on one of his plays—featuring Nina—and it is met with howls. And no, it is not a comedy. Constantin bitches and fumes and condemns everyone else as crass and incapable of recognizing “true art” when they see it. Which of course they haven’t seen from Constantin. Eventually the famous writer leaves Constantin’s mother and runs off with Nina, who becomes a star herself while Constantin and Mother remain home and lick their wounds. Nina eventually ditches the guy, who comes bounding back to Constantin’s mother. Nina returns as well, no longer the unsoiled crystal that once stirred Constantin’s loins and poetry, but now a part of the crass world that Constantin cannot abide. And so he shoots himself.

The End.

Tom Cushman played the role of Constantin, the anguished half-talent playwright. It would be too easy for me to state that Tom Cushman was a half-talent actor, so I won’t. Maybe it was an off night. Or maybe he was doing such a convincing job of portraying the half talent of Constantin that the overall glow of half talent simply encased him. That is, if “glow” can encase. Or for that matter, if half talent can glow. Whatever the case, I really don’t think that what Chekov had in mind was for the audience to applaud when Constantin shoots himself at the end of the play.

As it happened I played this role once myself. I’m a Gypsy Player, which doesn’t mean that I wear dye-running scarves and travel about on donkey carts, but that I throw my hand in now and again with the local amateur theater troupe in my neighborhood who mount extravagant fiascos and the occasional gem at the Gypsy Playhouse, a few doors down from Julia’s place. In fact, Julia appeared in the Gypsy’s
Seagull
as well. She found Nina to be an insufferably clueless child and so she finagled the role of Constantin’s mother. We played beautifully opposite each other (we always do), even with the idiotic conceit that we were mother and son.

I asked at the box office how I could get backstage after the show and was told to go outside and around to the back of the building, down a short flight of stairs, along a hallway, through a couple of doors and to watch out for the low-hanging pipes. Being an amateur ham myself, the atmosphere backstage was all too familiar to me. Clusters of people stood waiting for their thespian friends to emerge from their dressing areas. Members of the stage crew crisscrossed swiftly, carrying props and pieces of costumes along with an urgency to wrap it up quick and get the hell home or off to the nearest bar. There was a large bulletin board with schedules pinned to it, notes, cartoons, a few reviews, a comic collage made up from magazine pages, the usual backstage flotsam. The green room was a pale blue. I shared it with several people who stood there gazing at the ceiling.

The first actor to emerge was the one who had played Nina. Onstage she had seemed to have it in her head that Nina should move about like a ballerina. In my view, Nina is ditsy enough already without giving to her character the additional weightlessness of someone who does all their emoting while up on the balls of their feet. But then who paid me to judge? In her role as a human being, the actress was a lot more solidly attached to the ground. She appeared from her dressing room in a sleeveless T-shirt, baggy capri pants and a sweatband snapped tight around her head, her hair pulled back into a bronze ponytail. On her shoulder she carried a black bag large enough to contain a small automobile. She was slender, but her biceps betrayed—perhaps “ballyhooed” would be a better way of putting it—hours spent in the gym carving away with weights and machines. Her name was Shannon. The couple who were there for Shannon let out a little cry. The woman was holding a bouquet of flowers, and as Shannon widened her arms and came forward for the hugs and kudos, the woman handed the flowers over to her boyfriend or husband or whatever he was, who stuck his nose into the flowers while he stood waiting his turn for the hug.

The rest of the cast was emerging. I had seen in the program where the fellow who portrayed the famous writer had been doing plays at this theater since before the lightbulb was invented. The actor emerged from the hallway, a fedora pulled down low over his nose and trailing a scarf that might nearly have tripped him. He was followed by Constantin’s mother, who in my view had been the best actor of the lot. She was pulling on a cigarette and making a beeline for the door. Tom Cushman appeared next. Shannon called him over and introduced him to her friends, who heaped all sorts of praise on the actor, to his obvious delight.

I stepped over.

“Excuse me. Tom?”

The actor turned my way with the expectant smile of a happy puppy.

“Nice work,” I said. “Very nice.”

“Oh, thank you!”

The eyes of Shannon were upon me. “You, too,” I said to her.

The actress took a beat to see if I had anything more to add. My praise hadn’t exactly knocked the thespian on her rear end. Seeing that I was only handing out scraps, she turned to her friends.

Tom had a bag not unlike Shannon’s. He was rifling through it. He found what he was looking for. Lip balm. He uncapped it and ran an invisible smear over his lips.

“I was wondering if I could talk to you,” I said to him.

“Sure. Are you a critic?”

Well, I am. But not the kind he meant. I lowered my voice. “It’s about Sophie Potts.”

Even at my reduced volume, the name caught Shannon’s ear. She skipped only half a beat, shooting a sharp look at Tom, which she then attempted to cover with a flourish of the bouquet and a controlled laugh. Tom wasn’t quite as skilled. His eyebrows collapsed in a frown, and for a moment he looked as if I’d tossed him a calculus question. He feigned an indifference that he clearly didn’t feel.

“Sophie? Um. Yeah. What about her?”

“Can we talk someplace else?” I asked, adding, “You probably want to get out of here.”

“Yeah. Uh . . .” He looked over at Shannon. “McGarvey’s?”

The voice said “Yes.” The look was considerably less positive. We left the theater and trudged up the street to McGarvey’s. A few of the stagehands were already there and had commandeered a booth. Shannon and her friends joined them. Tom and I settled in at the bar and ordered a couple of beers. Tom was fidgety so I sought to settle him down first. While we waited for our beers I complimented him again on his performance.

“You really found Constanin’s heart,” I told him, which was effectively saying nothing, but I suspected the actor wouldn’t notice.

“Oh God, though,” he said. “What about those hiccups? I couldn’t believe that. I thought I was going to die.”

In the early scene where Constantin is railing against the others for their insensitivity to his artistic efforts, Tom had suffered a walloping case of hiccups. Personally, I felt that they underscored the excitable nature of this tragic boob who holes up in a tree house and I told Tom so. He got that calculus-question look again.

“You think Constantin is a boob?” He sounded crestfallen. “You don’t think he’s Chekov’s stand-in? The true artist?”

“I think Constantin’s a boob,” I repeated.

“But that would take the importance out of everything he does in the play.”

“There is no importance in what Constantin does,” I said. “He is a dreamer and a fruitcake and he needs to get a life. I blame his mother. She should have slapped him years ago and told him to get on with it.”

Tom was fascinated. “You think so?”

“Absolutely. She has made her way in the theater world because she is brassy and she knows what the public wants. Constantin hasn’t got a clue. I think Chekov is laughing at him. Look at it. He put him in a
tree house
.”

The actor looked perplexed. Our beers arrived and he picked his up by the neck.

“So you don’t think the tree house was to signify purity and innocence?”

“Pathetic immaturity,” I said. “The guy couldn’t cut it in the real world.”

“But that’s purity and innocence.”

“That’s being a baby well past the diaper stage.”

Tom took a thoughtful sip of his beer. “I think I hate you,” he said despondently. “I think you just ruined the play for me.”

I shrugged. “Hey, it’s just my opinion. But for what it’s worth, I think you did a great job. Constantin really came across.”

The actor was happy to hear that. They’re always happy to hear that. He took a long pull from his bottle then set it on the bar and began picking at the label.

“Okay,” he said, after running a tear halfway down the label. “So what’s up with Sophie?”

I told him. “What’s up is that she’s dead.”

It’s possible that he looked as if he’d just been hit in the head with a sack of cow manure. I’ve never actually seen this happen to anyone and of course I had only known Tom Cushman for a matter of minutes, so who am I to judge how he’d react to such a blow? But his head literally jerked and his face opened up in a mixture of disbelief and unquestioned queasiness. So sure . . . sack of manure.

“You’re kidding.”

“I make jokes,” I said. “But not like that. No. She’s dead. She was pulled out of the Severn River a few days ago. So I take it you hadn’t heard?”

He said he hadn’t and I tended to believe him. I knew for a fact he wasn’t a good enough actor to fake it. His face had gone slack.