The Fourth Wall (26 page)

Lieutenant Goodlow was staring as his atlas again. “Look at all these little Arkansas towns with German names! Stuttgart, Hamburg, Altheimer …”

We left the Lieutenant to his map reading. In the outer office, two plain-clothes men inconspicuously fell in behind Ian as we left. “So he's survived,” said Ian when we reached the street.

“We should have known he would,” I smiled. “John's a born survivor if ever there was one.”

“What about you, Abby? Are you surviving?”

“Yes, I am, Ian. I've started the rebuilding process. Just as you told me to.”

Then Ian did something I thought I'd never see. Right there in public, with the two plain-clothes men and other strangers watching, this reserved, undemonstrative man gave me a Leo Gunn-type hug. “It's good to hear that. I was worrying about you.”

Ian was probably down as the next victim, but he'd been worrying about
me
. His gesture touched me enormously.

I was back home. The place was as sparsely furnished as a newly-weds' apartment, but I could live there. Bars and all.

My living room contained only a new carpet, a new sofa (which I liked better than the old one), and the one survivor of the wreckage—the television set. I turned on the tin-cup channel and watched the latest BBC import.

Life was gradually resuming its regular rhythms. The
Foxfire
touring company ended its tour. The box-office receipts had been good, and my royalty check helped take the sting out of the stinginess my ex-insurance company had shown. The touring company would go out again in the fall, after all the summer theaters around the country had had their fling.

According to Leo Gunn, Vivian Frank was now toeing the mark. She was no longer inventing stage business for herself or changing the lines. Gene Ramsay had put the fear of unemployment into her, and Griselda Gold had rehearsed the cast back to its original performance level. Also, Armand de Whoosit, Vivian's joy boy, had faded from the scene. So all was quiet on the home front.

And then the
Foxfire
company did a lovely thing: they all chipped in and re-equipped my workroom. Worktables, two chairs, about a mile of bookshelves, filing cabinets, lamps—everything except the typewriter, which I'd already bought. They even got me a small cabinet to keep supplies in.

Carla Banner showed up with the supplies. Typing paper, carbon sets, pens, pencils, envelopes, twenty empty notebooks, paper clips, Scotch tape, index cards, pencil sharpener, ruler, letter opener, two rolls of stamps, little jars and boxes to put things in, correction fluid, stapler, rubber bands, scratch pads, and a magnifying glass.

“What's the magnifying glass for?” I asked.

“I dunno,” said Carla. “I just thought it looked like something you might like to have.”

“Did you pick out all this stuff yourself?”

“Vivian Frank and I did.”

Vivian Frank. Well. An apology?

Now I was ready to get back to work. It had been a near-fruitless winter as far as writing was concerned. I'd meant to have a new play by spring, but here it was May and I was still in the roughest of rough-draft stages. I sat in my new chair at my new worktable and spread out The New Play and read everything I'd written so far.

And ended up tearing my hair. The New Play was garbage, sheer garbage. Decaying leftovers from a dozen other things I'd written, forced into an unsuitable mold in a pretentious attempt to say something profound about vengeance. What had I thought I was doing? The writing was sloppy, undisciplined, self-indulgent. It was just a series of scenes that all said the same thing:
Feel sorry for me
. I swept the pages into an empty file drawer, where they could stay until I'd cooled down enough to decide whether any of it was salvageable or not.

In the middle of May the Tony Award nominations were announced.
Foxfire
was one of the best play nominees. John Reddick, Ian Cavanaugh, and Hugh Odell were nominated. And the biggest surprise: both Sylvia Markey
and
Vivian Frank got the nod. Two actresses nominated for the same role—I wondered if that had ever happened before. John and Sylvia had won Tonys in the past, but none of the rest of us had.

I threw out The New Play and started over. I still wanted to write about vengeance and I wanted to keep the form of a series of short scenes in nonrealistic settings; but this time writing the play would have to be more than therapy for the writer. I got to it, cutting almost as much as I wrote.

After several attempts, I got hold of Lieutenant Goodlow on the phone and asked him what he'd found out about the deaths of Manhattan Rep's director and business manager.

“Nothing conclusive,” the Lieutenant said. “Which is the hallmark of this entire goddamned case. Hints, possibilities, intimations—but no sure fact.” He paused a minute—I could hear him taking a deep breath. “Preston Scott may have been murdered, but there's no way to be sure. The medical examiner says there are a hundred kinds of death that look like heart attacks. Scott's own physician saw no cause for suspicion—not with a patient who was overweight, smoked too much, worked twelve hours a day, and had a past history of heart trouble.”

“Wait a minute—what past history of heart trouble?”

“He'd had two mild attacks before. Didn't you know?”

“No, I didn't.” My God, the things people keep secret! “He never said a word.”

“Well, you can see why it looks like heart attack. But there's no hard evidence. And the same thing's true of Alfred Heath's auto accident. The official report says he fell asleep at the wheel. An examination of the car revealed nothing out of the ordinary—but then, they had no reason to suspect the car might have been tampered with. That affects the way you conduct an investigation. Again, nothing really conclusive.”

I mulled this over. “But you don't really believe they were accidents, do you?”

“Unofficially, no. It's just too coincidental.”

I thanked him for his time and hung up. There was something about this whole thing that didn't quite jibe. Had Preston Scott and Alfred Heath been murdered? There was nothing about either death that said
Look, I'm getting even with you for something you did
. The fact of murder, if indeed it was murder, had been concealed. All the attacks on the
Foxfire
people had been open, almost boastful.

And another thing. Killing two of Manhattan Rep's governing committee was not consistent with the theory that our enemy wanted to keep us alive and suffering. Why had the two men themselves been killed instead of, say, their wives? It didn't fit, it didn't make sense.

Unless our enemy had changed his mind.

Say he had started out to kill us all, all nine members of the governing committee. He somehow engineered the deaths of Preston Scott and Alfred Heath, but then found the results didn't satisfy him. Nobody knew
why
they'd died—and the killer realized, too late, how important that was in exacting vengeance. The two men were dead, out of pain, beyond his reach. Perhaps the killer had looked around and seen that the people who were really suffering were not the men he'd killed but the people close to them. I never met Mrs. Heath, but Preston Scott's wife Pat had gone to pieces when her husband died. The killer could have taken a long, hard look at Pat Scott and realized he was going about it the wrong way.

That would account for the two-year time lapse between Scott's and Heath's deaths and the concentrated attacks that had started about ten months ago. Our enemy would have had to investigate, find out how he could hurt us most, make plans. How he must have exulted when he learned so many of us would be working on
Foxfire
! He could choose his moments.

The more I thought about Michael Crown's lover, the more unreal he seemed. First of all, I had trouble believing that anyone could keep a homosexual relationship secret for fifteen years. The killer was banking everything on our understanding why we were being punished without knowing the identity of the man doing the punishing. He'd have to be awfully confident that no one had ever known he was Michael Crown's lover.

But then I remembered reading in
The Newgate Calendar
about a woman in eighteenth-century London who had passed herself off as a male for many years. She had married thirteen or fourteen times, each time successfully concealing the fact that she was a woman. She'd abandoned her “wives” in turn whenever a hankering for new flesh overtook her. Only her last wife suspected anything amiss and eventually blew the whistle on her. Now if
that
could be kept secret for years, I suppose concealing a more conventional homosexual relationship wouldn't be all that difficult.

So maybe it was possible after all. I tried to imagine what it would be like, sitting down and deciding to murder nine people. And then deciding that killing wasn't enough. And then doing something about it. I couldn't imagine any of it. I was a professional imaginer, but this was beyond me, way out of my league.

One thing that wasn't beyond me was The New Play, Second Version. It was going well. I worked steadily at it, taking my time and thinking it out this time before I started putting anything on paper. I'd once read that Charlotte Brontë never wrote a sentence down until it was complete and polished in her head. I wasn't able to do that, but it was a good goal to aim for. I was beginning to feel the excitement that comes when a new play starts to take its own unique shape.

Then our enemy struck again. This time he chopped off Leo Gunn's right hand.

11

Hugh Odell was on the verge of collapse. He'd had a breakdown once before, and I was alarmed the same thing was happening again. His hands and mouth were trembling, he stammered when he tried to talk, his face had a gray, haunted look.

“It's m-m-my fault, Abby,” he said. “If it hadn't b-been for me, L-L-Leo wouldn't … he'd b-b-be all right.…”

“Don't blame yourself, Hugh,” I said as soothingly as I could. “If the police couldn't protect him, you—”

“B-but that's just it! If I hadn't s-s-separated his g-guards …”

“Hugh, stop this.
It's not your fault
. It's his fault. That … madman.” I'd almost said murderer. I'd thought Hugh had been coping with the murder of Rosemary as well as could be expected, but now his sense of guilt for what happened to Leo was breaking down all his defenses. I took him by the elbow and steered him back to his dressing room. We were on the break between Saturday matinee and the evening performance.

The two officers assigned to protect Leo Gunn had stuck with him closely. Whenever Leo had to leave his station off-stage right, they'd trailed along with him. They tried to keep out of the way, but in the cramped quarters backstage this wasn't always possible. But Leo hadn't complained; he wanted them there. They shared elbow room with Ian's two guards, who followed him everywhere except on stage when he was performing. In addition, the two security guards Gene Ramsay had hired were still prowling around checking for booby traps. So all in all there were six men backstage who were supposed to prevent further mayhem.

After Friday night's performance Hugh Odell's sentimental attachment to a symbol of his past marital bliss had directly triggered a chain of events that made possible the behanding of Leo Gunn. Ever since he and Rosemary had said “I do,” Hugh had never removed his wedding ring. Since he played an unmarried man in
Foxfire
, each night he would cover his ring with flesh-colored tape and remove it again after the performance. Since Rosemary's murder, Hugh had lost a lot of weight—all his costumes had had to be altered, and even his fingers were thinner. So last night when he pulled off the tape, he pulled off the wedding ring too—the first time ever. The ring rolled under an old-fashioned wardrobe cabinet, the kind that stands on legs. Hugh got down on his knees and felt around, but he couldn't find the ring. He tried to move the wardrobe out from the wall, but it was too heavy for him. So he went out and asked Leo Gunn for help.

At the time Leo was on stage, with his two police guards, working on a chair one of the cast had said was on the verge of collapse. Leo had just glued in a wooden brace and was applying a vise when Hugh appeared with his tale of woe. One of Leo's guards—bored, I suppose, with watching other people work—offered to help. Hugh and the guard went back and moved the wardrobe and recovered the ring. When the guard returned to the stage, Leo and the other guard were no longer there.

So the guard started looking for them. He poked around backstage and asked people where Leo was. He asked all the cast, checking each dressing room in turn. He asked Griselda Gold, who was busy flattering Vivian Frank at the time. He asked Tiny, who was washing the wine glasses used in the play. He asked Carla Banner, who was listening to the wardrobe mistress complain about something. He asked the doorkeeper. Gene Ramsay's two guards were elsewhere in the theater, checking doors and the like.

Still the police guard wasn't especially worried. He'd been on this duty long enough to become used to the comings and goings that precede and follow each performance, sandwiching the backstage quiet that reigns during the performance. Leo could be anywhere, doing anything, only three steps away. So the guard started checking the storage areas when he heard a muffled pounding sound. He traced the sound to the prop room. The door was locked.

Now the guard began to get worried. The room could be locked by simply pulling the door shut, but it couldn't be unlocked except with a key. The guard dragged Tiny away from his cleaning-up chores and got him to unlock the prop room. The other police guard burst out yelling, “Where's Gunn?”

It seems he'd followed Leo into the prop room. Once there, the guard had become intrigued by a couple of props left behind from an earlier production and hadn't noticed when Leo left. When he did notice, he found he'd been locked in. A helpful gesture from one guard and a moment of inattention from the other—that's all our enemy needed.