The Fourth Wall (36 page)

“Certainly,” I smiled at him. I have momentary lapses, but I'm not fragile.

I drove slowly, taking side streets, waiting for the night to get good and dark. Ian and Leo and I let Hugh know what his future was going to be, talking casually among ourselves as if he weren't there.

That expensive apartment Hugh had on East Thirty-seventh Street—we speculated as to how long it would take three people to reduce it to ruins. And we could all make a trip to California—where we could take Hugh's asthma medicine away from him and leave him stranded in some small desert town. And Tony Fisher—ah, yes, Tony Fisher. Tony Fisher could be lured away from his middle-aged lover: pampered young men weren't known for their fidelity. It could be arranged.

But these were all minor matters, little surprises to vary the tempo of Hugh's future life. They would cause him some inconvenience and even pain. But they wouldn't incapacitate him. They were temporary setbacks that in time Hugh could overcome. They did not strike at the very core of his being. So the question became: What was the most important thing in Hugh Odell's life? The answer was easy.

Acting, of course.

Hugh was always acting. On the stage, in front of a camera, in real life. Hugh needed an audience the way a fish needs water. His entire adult life had been spent playing one role or another, sometimes several simultaneously: successful actor, secret lover, adoring husband, ruthless avenger. Would a Hugh Odell exist without roles to play? Or was he like Peer Gynt's onion, empty at the center after the outer layers had been peeled away? What we were going to do, we let Hugh know, was make sure that he never acted professionally again. We were going to do to his career what he had done to Loren Keith's and Sylvia Markey's.

At a well-lighted street corner where I stopped for a red light, I twisted around and looked at Hugh. He'd turned into an old man. His eyes were glassy, his head moved in what was almost a parody of senile tremors. Acting again? No. Not this time. I drove on.

I got us lost a couple of times—I didn't know my way around Queens. But we were in no hurry. Eventually we crossed the Queensboro Bridge back into Manhattan. I headed toward the West Side and drove along below Riverside Drive until we found one of those dark, semiconcealed underpasses you always avoid in New York. I stopped the car. Hugh was in such shock we had to lift him out physically.

Then we cut out his tongue.

Four days later, Hugh Odell climbed out of his hospital bed, filled the bathtub with hot water, and slit his wrists.

7

So in the end we were cheated of our long-term revenge.

We had wanted Hugh to live with it, to face up to the reality of the suffering he had caused, to understand
in his bones
the enormity of what he'd done. We wanted him to know fully the meaning of the word “victim.” In short, we wanted him to join the club. But instead of living with the horror for the rest of his life, he'd endured the suffering for only four days before ending it forever. The man had a glass psyche: he could dish it out but he couldn't take it.

I suppose we should have anticipated the possibility of suicide, but somehow we didn't. We should have known that a man who could do the things Hugh had done in the first place would never admit his guilt and take his punishment. Of the three of us, only Leo Gunn seemed unperturbed by this turn of events. He'd wanted Hugh dead all along.

August came, and the city was turned over to the tourists. Ian was in California, filming his TV movie. Leo was with the out-of-town tryout of a new musical he was working. The new play was finished and at last had a title:
Point of Balance
.

The first thing Gene Ramsay had said when he read the play was, “You wrote it for Cavanaugh, didn't you?” Not
I like it
or
It stinks
, but—
You wrote it for Cavanaugh
. Rehearsals were tentatively scheduled to begin in November, almost a full year to the day from the time I'd stood backstage at the Martin Beck Theatre staring at Sylvia Markey holding her cat's head in her hands.

But it wasn't finished yet. John Reddick and Loren and Dorothy Keith were still in hiding; they had no way of knowing the reign of terror was over. I'd recently placed an ad in
Variety
asking them to get in touch with me, but so far no response. I'd asked Gene Ramsay to hold off engaging a director for
Point of Balance
just a little while longer, and he'd reluctantly agreed.

The only other way I could think to signal them that it was safe to come back was to reopen
Foxfire
. But I couldn't figure out how to talk Ramsay into it without giving away what I knew about Hugh Odell—and thus revealing the part I'd played in his death. I'd have to think of something soon.

There was another thing I wanted to talk Ramsay into, and that was finding backers for a production of
À vil prix—
the play by Étienne Quilliot that Michael Crown had tried to pass off as his own. One of Quilliot's comedies had brought his plagiarist short-lived fame and fortune, but there'd never been a big production of one of his plays under his own name. I felt we owed him that. It was a good play and I wanted people to see it.

I knew these things had to be taken care of, but I was having trouble doing them. My part of the brownstone seemed so empty with both the men gone. Leo had moved back to his own place the day after Hugh died, and I kind of missed seeing him around. I missed Ian a lot more.

That was one more thing. I was going to have to decide what to do about Ian. Before he left for California, he'd said something about our looking for a better place to live uptown when he got back. I didn't know whether we ought to take that step or not. I'd made him the gift of a play, but beyond that I wasn't sure I was ready to go. Another decision.

Part of my problem was that I was suffering from the postpartum blahs, that
down
that comes every time I finish a play. I wanted to get out of the city for a while, maybe even out of the country. But I couldn't seem to make the effort. It was certainly no time for decision making. When the doorbell rang, I considered not answering it.

The peephole in the door showed me Lieutenant Goodlow standing outside. I surprised myself: I was glad to see him. I opened the door. “Come in, Lieutenant.”

“It's been a while,” the Lieutenant said with his usual unsmiling seriousness. “I thought I'd stop by and see how you're doing.”

“I'm doing fine. Just finished a new play—it's ready to go into the planning stages as soon as we have a director.”

He still didn't smile, but he seemed to frown less. “That's wonderful—you don't know how pleased I am to hear that. What's it called? And when does it open?”

“It's called
Point of Balance
, and when it opens depends upon when a theater becomes available.”

“Do I know you well enough to ask for tickets?”

“Certainly,” I laughed. “I'll send you a couple as soon as they're printed up.”

“Thank you—I'd like that. Thank you very much.”

“And what about you, Lieutenant? Are you back on our case?”

“No, Captain Mitchell is still taking the heat from upstairs, not me. This is just an off-duty call. And speaking of off-duty, once when I was
on
-duty, you gave me a beer. D'you suppose I could have another one?”

He followed me into the kitchen and I opened two beers. We sat across the table from each other, and the Lieutenant drank off half his beer at once. Like a thirsty man on a hot day.

“Beer tastes better in August than any other month of the year,” he said, looking around. “I do like this big kitchen.”

“So do I,” I said, thinking I might be leaving it soon.

Lieutenant Goodlow took off his glasses and laid them on the table. “Really rotten about Hugh Odell.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Odell was a close friend of yours, wasn't he?”

Was I imagining it, or was he watching me more closely than usual?
Tell as much of the truth as possible
. “Not really. Hugh was one of those people you know so long, you start thinking you know them
well
. But he was a part of my life, and I'm sorry as hell he died the way he did.” And I was.

“Strange man,” the Lieutenant mused. “I never felt as if I'd
got
him—d'you know what I mean? There was always some part of him I felt I never saw.”

I tried to look mildly interested. “That's true of a lot of people, isn't it?”

“True of everybody to a certain extent. But Odell more than others. Why was his tongue cut out?”

“What?”

“Why cut out his tongue? A messy, ugly job. Why not just throw acid in his face? His career would be just as effectively ended that way. This tongue business—it's more intimate than the other attacks. Forcing a man's mouth open, taking hold of his tongue, and …” He turned his hand over in lieu of finishing the sentence.

“Gruesome.” I shuddered convincingly. I hoped.

The Lieutenant said nothing for a moment. Then: “Cavanaugh's in California?”

“Mm. Making a TV movie.”

“What about Leo Gunn?”

I had the feeling he knew the answer. “Philadelphia. Trying out a new musical. A dying tradition, out-of-town tryouts.”

“Is he going to stage-manage your new play?”

“Not unless the musical folds. We won't be needing a stage manager for a couple of months yet.”

Lieutenant Goodlow paused to finish his beer. “Interesting the way you three drew together for protection,” he said casually. Too casually. “Then Odell suicides, Gunn moves back home the next day, and not much later Cavanaugh takes off for California. Almost as if you three weren't afraid any more.”

Oh, careful, careful! What was he up to?
I took a deep breath and spoke slowly. “We had to get on with our own lives,” I said. “We tried sticking together, safety in numbers—but it turned out to be impractical. So we had to give it up, that's all.”

“Is it?”

Offense is the best defense?
“Look here, Lieutenant, I thought you said you weren't back on this case?”

“Oh, I'm not, I'm not. But you can understand my interest, surely?”

“I understand you're having us watched.”

“Not me. Part of Captain Mitchell's routine. I just read the reports.”

“Are we being watched now?”

He nodded slowly, eyebrows raised.

So. We had relaxed too soon.

Lieutenant Goodlow said, “Cutting a man's tongue out—must take a strong stomach. Lots of blood, I imagine. Hospital report says Odell was constious at the time it happened, and there were no rope burns or other evidence that he'd been bound up. A man would have to have six arms to restrain his victim, hold his mouth open, and cut out his tongue. So maybe there were three men. Or two men and a woman.”

My ears started ringing. I got up to get two more beers, a blatant diversion to keep the Lieutenant from watching my face. My God, how inept we'd been! How clumsy! And … what if Goodlow should see that come-home-John ad I'd placed in
Variety?
Stupid, stupid! I put the beers on the table and sat down.

“Another? Thank you! But you haven't finished your first. Well, cheers.”

What should I say to this man, what response should I adopt? Righteous anger? Puzzlement? But he hadn't asked me any direct questions yet; better just shut up and let him do the talking.

“It was a woman who called the Emergency Police number, you know,” Lieutenant Goodlow said conversationally. “The officer who took the call said she sounded educated and wasn't in the least hysterical. She reported calmly and clearly what had happened and exactly where the victim could be found. And then she hung up. No name, and no woman in the immediate vicinity when the ambulance got there. Now why do you suppose she wouldn't give her name?”

“A bystander who didn't want to get involved.” It didn't sound convincing even to me, but he'd asked me a direct question.

“You may be right. People don't trust the police the way they used to.” He drank some beer. “They blame us, you know, for what the courts do. Or fail to do. There's a child molester we know about walking the streets this very minute. A rapist. We arrested him once, but the courts have decided this upstanding citizen shouldn't be deprived of his freedom.”

I knew a cue when I heard one. “Why?”

“Why, because he's
cured
!” the Lieutenant said sarcastically. “Fourteen months of psychiatric treatment as a guest of the state, and he's cured. And now he's back walking the streets, hanging around schoolyards, parks, wherever children congregate. We have to keep a man on him twenty-four hours a day. We're not supposed to, you know. He's cured.” He looked at me. “Isn't that just wonderful.”

I was beginning, just beginning, to see a flicker of light. “I think it's inexcusable,” I said.

Lieutenant Goodlow leaned back in his chair. “And so do I.” His gaze turned inward. Thinking of … what? “And so do I,” he repeated. “We've grown so afraid of punishing a man for something he can't help, like mental illness, that we're willing to sacrifice any number of innocents to him just to keep our own consciences clean.”

The flicker was growing brighter.

“But that's only half of it,” the Lieutenant went on. “Our revolving-door justice has led to another problem. Vigilante action. More and more people are reaching for a gun instead of a phone to call for help. Do-it-yourself justice. What do we do about those people? They're helping us with our job, sure. But they're breaking the law themselves. What do we do about them?”

He waited; it was my turn to say something. “I hadn't thought about it,” I hedged.

“What worries me,” he said, “is that a pattern of behavior might develop. You play judge and jury once and get away with it, you start thinking that's the only way to handle your problems. You see what I mean?”