Something Wicked (3 page)

“I do not like mimes,” she said stiffly.

He shook his head and repeated the movements.

“What are you doing?” she demanded suspiciously.

“Lifting the weight of the world from your bowed shoulders.”

The corners of her mouth twitched. “So okay. Point taken. I’ll lighten up. And you’re right, I guess. I’m not the director. I’m not president of the players. So—”

“That’s my girl. Come on, let’s go to rehearsal and wow ’em. And who knows? Maybe everything will go great today.”

The Porsche swept into the lot behind the high school. Designed and built in the fifties, the dingy, orange-brick building had the ramshackle look of a once avant-garde structure whose glory days have passed. The endless facade of slanted windows, with a later addition of a blue tint to shade the subtropical sun, looked cheerless and tacky. Even the palmettos had a ragged air, and the untended yard was hummocky.

It wasn’t Broadway. It wasn’t the Helen Hayes. It wasn’t even a real theater, but the high school auditorium had it all over a storefront or the local Moose Lodge, so the players needed to be duly appreciative of the loan of the premises from the Broward’s Rock School Board (for a set percentage of the gross, of course). Without the auditorium, the players would have no stage at all. Ever since a January fire left the Broward’s Rock Playhouse a blackened shell, it had been
touch and go whether the summer season could be mounted. And this summer season had to succeed, or the campaign to rebuild the playhouse, the ruins of which Annie could see from the front windows of Death on Demand, would founder and fail. The insurance coverage wasn’t nearly enough to meet present-day construction costs.

The players faced enormous obstacles, from overt and legal maneuvers to underhanded and deceitful sabotage.

Max suspected Harley Edward Jenkins III of engineering the setbacks which had dogged the company since rehearsals began.

Of course, Annie knew Max was prejudiced, to say the least. He’d despised Harley ever since the businessman had attempted to hire Max and his problem-solving agency, Confidential Commissions, to take some compromising photos of a competitor. (South Carolina statutes made it tough to establish a detective agency; Max insisted no law prohibited an energetic entrepreneur from solving assorted problems.) As for the photos, Harley wanted to use them for leverage in a business deal. Max had made it very clear that Confidential Commissions didn’t stoop to that kind of snoop.

So it was no surprise to Max when civic appeal left Harley unmoved, and that Harley, as CEO of Halcyon Development, creator of the resort community on the island, was vigorously opposed to rebuilding the theater on the choice location overlooking the sound. Instead, Jenkins wanted to open another retail shop there. The playhouse had never brought in as much as a business would at the site, but the original bylaws, offered by Halcyon Development and agreed to by property owners, provided for the continued support of a theater there “so long as the theater company meets its own expenses.” No one foresaw the burning of the theater and the subsequent cost of rebuilding. The Broward’s Rock Players insisted the clause mandated that the theater be rebuilt by Halcyon Development. The corporation disagreed, and claimed, moreover, that if the players didn’t have a successful (i.e., debt-free) summer season Halcyon Development would be free of any further responsibility for the theater, and could build and lease the site to any business of its choice.

At this point, Sunday, May 31, the players were determined to mount a successful summer season to maintain their
claim to the harbor-front site and, hopefully, to force Halcyon Development to rebuild in the fall.

As the Porsche jolted to a stop, gray dust rose in dispirited swirls in the unpaved lot.

Max surveyed the skipping dust-devils. “We’d better remind Burt to have somebody wet down the lot before opening night.”

Annie was hopping out. “Let’s hurry. It looks like almost everyone’s here.” She noted the half dozen cars, and the two bikes, Henny Brawley’s bright red ten-speed and director Haznine’s cheaply rented bent and battered old-fashioned no-speed.

She moved eagerly toward the school. Despite the problems with the production—and God knows there were many, ranging from the miscasting as Teddy of a California surfer running to fat to the series of odd tricks that had plagued the play since rehearsals began—she still looked forward to rehearsals. She loved
Arsenic and Old Lace.
She loved the dear old sisters so busily dispatching lonely old men to, they were certain, a finer world. She loved nervous, alcoholic Dr. Einstein with his plaintive “No, Chonny, no!” And she adored Max as Mortimer. There was something about Max in a double-breasted suit and a snap-brim felt hat that melted her bones. She picked up speed. She heard a soft chuckle behind her as she pulled open the faded red door.

Then she pulled up short, stopped by a frazzled voice climbing until it neared falsetto.

Sam Haznine, his pudgy shoulders tightly hunched, stood with his back to them, clutching the receiver of the pay phone in the lobby. “I
know
it’s hot. Goddamn, I’ve been hot ever since we hit this godforsaken outpost, but, sweetie, it’s gonna get better. Stick with me, honey lamb. We’re going to bust out of this swamp right back to Broadway.
Please,
sweetie, don’t go. It’s just one more week and we open and then it will all be gravy, I swear to God.” He paused, pulled a wilted handkerchief from a hip pocket, and mopped the back of his neck. The director’s seersucker pants hung limply on his pear-shaped frame.

Annie held a finger to her lips and began to tiptoe across the scuffed tile to the double doors at the, center aisle. One door sagged from its hinges. Once she and Max were safely
out of the foyer, she said softly, “Poor Sam.” Then, a little wearily, “Poor us. What’ll you bet it will be some rehearsal today?”

But Max was looking toward the stage. “Not all the fireworks are going to come from Sam.”

She looked down the aisle and saw Hugo Wolf rising from his seat as Burt Conroy darted out on stage.

Even in the somewhat dingy auditorium, Hugo commanded attention. As he stalked with measured tread toward the stage, every eye turned toward him.

What was it that distinguished Hugo? Not his size, although he was over six feet and solidly built. Not even his looks, although he had a dark, twisted countenance that made her think of a Borgia contemplating a dinner partner. Hugo had presence, that mysterious quality that makes men stand out from their fellows. You
knew
when you looked at him that he was a heavy hitter, and, if the set of his shoulders meant anything, and she was quite certain it did, he was ready to unload this afternoon.

It was easy to understand, when Hugo reached the stage, why he was cast as Jonathan, the menacing, saturnine older brother who has returned to terrorize his screwball family. Hugo’s thick, silvery eyebrows tufted in a grim frown as he glared down at Burt Conroy.

“Dump Shane.” His hard-featured, broken-nosed face was implacable.

To Annie’s surprise, Burt Conroy didn’t crumple on the spot.

Feeling a little as though she was intruding in a death scene, Annie slipped into the third row. She cringed as her chair squeaked. Max quietly joined her.

But every eye was focused on Hugo and Burt.

Standing in the center of the stage, the president of the Broward’s Rock Players and stage manager of
Arsenic and Old Lace
pleated his hands nervously against the trousers of his pale blue leisure suit, but his reedy voice was firm. “I am surprised at you, Hugo,” he chided. “You are experienced enough to know that the director makes all casting decisions and—”

“I’m experienced enough to know this play’s a disaster.” Hugo’s gravelly baritone carried from the first seat to the last.
Everyone watched, mesmerized, because there was no mistaking the icy fury in his voice.

Serving as president of the players, despite the customary internecine squabbles among its members, hadn’t prepared Burt Conroy for this confrontation. Nor had his years as a successful owner and manager of Stuff ’N Such, a knick-knack shop on the waterfront that carried everything from memorabilia to quite old and valuable wooden duck decoys. Burt’s normally grayish face flushed a dull saffron and he took a deep breath, but Hugo plowed right ahead, his deep voice and superb diction flooding the auditorium.

He had an audience, all right. Of course, not all the cast members were there. Only Act II was on this afternoon’s schedule and several of the characters didn’t appear in it. But those present hung on every word.

Carla Fontaine, the set designer and chief carpenter, rocked back on her heels and looked up tensely. Her shining long black hair shadowed her patrician face, but her hands gripped a hammer so tightly that her knuckles blanched. Normally, she was remote and aloof, immersed in her work on the set, not even accepting graciously the compliments that had been showered over her superb creation: the Victorian stairs that dominated upstage right and were so essential to a successful production of
Arsenic and Old Lace.
Now her worried eyes showed just how much the production meant to her.

Arthur Killeen, the local druggist who played Dr. Einstein with raffish charm, stood at stage left, waggling his hands in helpless dismay. Brushing back a strand of thin black hair, he tried to break in, “Now, Hugo, it’s too late to make changes.” Hugo ignored him, increasing his volume just a little.

Henny Brawley bounced on her sneakered feet at the top of the downstage left steps. Her bright black eyes darted from face to face and her fox-sharp nose quivered with interest. In her brilliant crimson warm-up and with a calico headband holding down her salt-and-pepper hair, Henny looked like a bony geriatric jock, but she could pick up and discard personalities faster than Sherlock Holmes could fashion a disguise. She was a superb Abby. At this moment, she looked torn between being a theater stalwart and jumping ship to join Hugo’s insurrection.

The Horton family stood in a clump at downstage right. Although they were near each other physically, their familial bonds, were, as usual, stretched to the breaking point. Cindy, the nubile teenage daughter who fancied herself the eighties’ answer to Marilyn Monroe, so far forgot her lacquered persona as to permit a scowl to crease her normally unsullied brow and twist a mouth generously fashioned by the wettest-looking lipstick the local drugstore could provide. As a stagehand, she hovered backstage at all hours, but her thoughts were seldom on the play. She was wildly infatuated with Shane Petree, which everyone except her mother recognized.

Her mother, Janet, was no prize in the brains department. At the moment, she was registering ladylike disapproval, with several sad little headshakes at Hugo’s ungentlemanly behavior. A somewhat limp but moderately attractive midforties, Janet played Martha surprisingly well indeed and was an accomplished enough actress to recognize the truth in Hugo’s furious bellows. But women are notoriously blind to flaws in their beloveds, and the whispers around the island made the odds ten to one that Janet was another of Shane’s foolish conquests.

T.K. Horton looked to be odd man out on every front, with his daughter pursuing Shane with the tenacity of an overripe hound in heat, and his wife reverting to giggly, preteen behavior whenever the great lover appeared. T.K. was such an unlikely center for domestic tragedy. As he watched Hugo, his jowly face began to look years younger. Hope flickered in his spaniel eyes. If Shane were kicked out of the play—God, T.K. obviously could taste it!

Another face watched with burgeoning hope, and the sight really made Annie sad. Eugene Ferramond was
born
to play Teddy Roosevelt. He had the same bluff good looks, the same orange brush mustache, even the rimless eyeglasses that hung from a cord. He was burly as a bear, moved with a bouncy swagger, and was as nutty as his hero about history. Until this year, he could always count on playing Teddy whenever the players revived
Arsenic and Old Lace.

But not this summer. Instead, when the cast was announced, Eugene was picked to play Officer O’Hara. Now, to be sure, that was a wonderful role, the cop who desperately wants to be a playwright and is consequently sublimely
oblivious to the presence of a wanted murderer. He concentrates instead on selling his plot outline to the theater critic Mortimer Brewster, who is frantically trying to save his old aunts from incarceration as murderesses and simultaneously foil the deadly plans of his dangerous brother Jonathan and Jonathan’s sidekick, Dr. Einstein. Even as Hugo raised his volume another notch, Annie thought in passing what a
wonderful
Mortimer Max was.

Eugene was a very good Officer O’Hara. But he didn’t want to be Officer O’Hara. He
wanted
to be Teddy.

It was Henny Brawley who had gotten the real scoop and shared it with Annie when she dropped by Death on Demand to pick up her latest batch of books (two by Liza Cody, two by Jim Stinson, and three by Anne Morice). According to Henny, Burt Conroy had forced the director to pick Shane for Teddy because Sheridan Petree, Shane’s wife, had agreed to underwrite all the expenses for the play. And that was too tempting a plum for Burt to refuse. After all, if the play didn’t cost a penny, every cent of ticket sales could go for profits and make it that much more likely that the summer season would turn a profit—and Burt Conroy loved his community theater with a passion that most men reserve for their wives, mistress, or cars.

Hugo reached his dramatic finale. “God knows why Sam picked Shane! It would take a deity to understand that incredible decision. I consider it one of the world’s inexplicable mysteries.”

(But not to Henny,
Annie thought.)

Hugo hit full vocal stride. “Shane’s an unmitigated disaster as Teddy. He’s a disaster as an actor. Although, God knows, it would help just a little bit if he would learn his lines. Is it too much to ask,” and now his voice dripped venom, “that the sorry bastard know his lines five days before we open?”

An ebullient call erupted as Sam pushed through the center aisle doors. “Kids, kids, let’s get ready! Time’s a-wasting.” Sam bounded toward the stage, clapping his hands. “Act Two, that’s the ticket. Everybody ready?”