JM03 - Red Cat (6 page)

“I know nine-one-one, and unless you leave now, I’m calling it.”

I took a card from my wallet. “I’m going,” I said, “but do me a favor, will you: give me a call the next time you see Holly around.” I slipped the card under the door and almost instantly it came sliding back.

“Get away from me with this— I don’t want anything to do with it or you.”

“You don’t have to be involved in anything,” I said. “Just give me a call. I can make it worth your while.”

“Nine-one-one, mister. I’m not telling you again.”

I held up my hands. “All right, all right, I’m going.”

“Then go.”

I took my time down the stairs and saw no sign of Babyface. I stopped in the vestibule and buzzed 3-G again, and again got no answer. The name next to the button for 3-F was Arrua; I copied it down and left. It was still cold outside but not as windy, and the burnt-garbage smell had subsided under a blanket of new snow.

6

The cold air tasted good after the reek of Holly Cade’s building, and the snow helped numb my aching face, and so I walked over to Broadway and kept on walking, north and west, deep into the hipster heart of Williamsburg. Block by block the neighborhood changed, from mostly Latino to Hasidic to well-heeled bohemian. By the time I got to Bedford Avenue my hair was white with snow and I might as well have been in TriBeCa.

I found a coffee bar with Citizen Cope playing at low volume and some fat chairs by a window and a pretty Asian girl with a gold ring through her nose behind the counter. I brushed myself off and ordered a double espresso and sipped at it slowly while I scratched down some notes about my visit to Holly’s place.

I got a good description of Babyface on paper and some questions about him too: Who was he? What was he doing in Holly’s apartment? What was his relationship to her? But I had no answers for any of them. All I knew for certain was that he was strong and fast, and that if I ran into him again I would watch out for his right and for his very short fuse. I finished writing and drank some more coffee and flipped back through the pages of my notepad.

Holly Cade was so far my only line on the mysterious Wren, but I still knew precious little about the woman, and I had yet to actually lay eyes on her. Knowing where she lived was progress, but until I had a photograph and a positive ID from David, she would remain just my best guess. I could, if I had to, hire some freelancers to set up outside her building and wait until she came home, but I hadn’t quite gotten to that point yet. That approach was neither cheap nor subtle, and I still had a bread crumb or two left to work with. I read through another few pages of notes and wondered if I might eke something more out of my trip to Brooklyn than a shot in the head and a pricey cup of coffee.

* * *

Null Space was south and west of the coffee bar, off Bedford Avenue, in a gray brick building that long ago had been a tea warehouse. It shared the ground floor with an art gallery and a Chinese fusion restaurant, and it was the venue, three years back, where the Gimlet Players had staged a production of Holly Cade’s play, Liars Club. It was a large, chilly space with black walls and a dense array of lights and speakers hanging from the high ceiling. Any lingering fragrance of tea was obscured by the odors of paint and cement, and by the smell of lemongrass from next door.

The manager was a sturdy, fortyish woman with dark, messy hair, a pleasant gap between her teeth, and a plaid flannel shirt. Her voice was flat and Midwestern and her name was Lisa. Besides a squad of underfed guys stacking chairs, she was the only one at home when I knocked on the big metal doors. She’d worked at Null Space for six years, remembered the Gimlets well enough, and didn’t ask what business it was of mine. It made for a near-perfect interview.

“They did three or four one-acts here, over the course of eighteen months or so,” she said. “Liars Club was the last of them.” We walked into what passed for the office, a gray, square room that almost had a view of an alley through a window black with dirt. The furniture was mismatched metal, too ugly for government work. Lisa took a seat behind the desk and placed her can of Diet Coke before her. I sat in a banged-up beige guest chair that was even less comfortable than it looked.

“Were they any good?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I remember the plays being very heavy, in a theater-class kind of way. A lot of disjointed dialogue and fucked-up families. And I remember the Gimlets being kind of a pain in the ass.”

“How so?” I asked.

Lisa drank some soda and ran a hand through her hair. “They were always complaining about something— the seating, the lights, publicity, the audience or lack thereof. And they were always in the midst of some crisis or another.”

“Such as?”

“Amateurish crap, like actors not showing up on time, or at all, or losing props, or just bickering.”

“Any idea about what?”

“Who knows; stars on the dressing room door, maybe. I tried not to pay attention. Whatever it was, it seemed like they could never get their shit together.”

“I’d guess you get a fair amount of that in this line of work.”

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” Lisa said, smiling. “And the bands are usually the worst. But it gives you an idea of how whiny the Gimlets were that they stand out three years later.”

I smiled back. “How many of them were there?”

She thought for a moment. “Four or five, maybe.”

“And all of them complainers?”

“Not all of them; it was mainly the two who kind of ran things.”

“Was Holly Cade one of them?”

She nodded again. “Holly, yeah, the redhead, a very pretty girl. Her boyfriend was the director and she was the writer.”

“What was the boyfriend’s name?”

Lisa drained her soda can and dropped it in the trash basket with a bang. “Now you’re asking the hard questions,” she said. “For that I need to dig.”

The digging was done in a closet stacked almost to the ceiling with cardboard file boxes. There was evidently some method to their stacking and Lisa knew what it was. With only a modicum of shifting and shoving she brought out a box and heaved it onto the desk. A cloud of dust swirled up and Lisa coughed. She took off the lid, flicked through some files at the back of the box, and came out with a green folder.

She shuffled through the contents and pulled out some paper. “Ta-dah! It’s the program we did for The Nest—another of their one-acts.” She read the sheet and looked up at me. “Gene Werner, that was his name. Truth be told, he was the bigger pain in the ass.”

“Can I see that?” I asked. She passed it over.

I scanned down the short list of cast and crew. Besides being director and playwright respectively, Gene Werner and Holly Cade were also in the cast. Gene played someone named Fredrick; Holly played a character named Wren. I read it twice more to be sure, and heard blood pounding in my ears. Wren.

“You mind if I keep this?” I asked.

Lisa shrugged. “Okay.”

I looked at the program and thought some more. “You remember what Gene Werner looked like?”

She chewed her lower lip and thought it over. “Not that well. Dark hair and tall, good-looking— a male model type.”

“A bodybuilder?”

“You mean all bulked up?” she asked. I nodded. “No, he was more like you— kind of lean.”

Not Babyface. I pointed at the file box. “Any photos of the Gimlets in there?”

“I can check,” she said, but my luck went only so far. Lisa rifled through the files from back to front and found no pictures— but she didn’t come up empty-handed. She pulled out programs for the other two plays the Gimlets had performed at Null Space, and scripts for The Nest and Liars Club. She let me take them along when I stepped out into the snow and headed back to Manhattan.

* * *

It was two-thirty when I got home. I ran a towel through my hair, pulled on a pair of dry socks, and made a tuna sandwich, then spent the rest of the afternoon on my laptop and on the telephone, tracking down former members of the Gimlet Players. Which turned out to be easier said than done. Lisa was right about there having been four or five people in the troupe. Unfortunately, it wasn’t always the same four or five people. Counting Gene Werner, there were seven names on my list. By dusk I’d left messages for three of them, including Werner, failed to find any trace of three others, and actually managed to speak with the remaining one.

Moira Neal told me that the Gimlets had never been a close-knit group, and that she hadn’t kept in touch with any of them after the breakup. She had acted with the troupe for just a year, and the experience had helped to drive her out of theater altogether and into website design.

“And let me tell you, the personalities are a whole lot easier to deal with.” She laughed. Her voice was smart and pleasant, and as empty of accent as a newscaster’s.

“The Gimlets were a difficult bunch?”

“Holly and Gene were, and it was all their show.”

“Difficult how?”

“Gene was a prima donna and a bully— which, let me tell you, is not a winning combo. He thought he was another Mike Nichols or something, but he didn’t have the chops to back it up. And he took great pleasure in being a Grade A prick, a real nasty son of a bitch. Holly was a little easier to take; she was just on another planet most of the time.”

“Meaning…?”

“Meaning she was very serious about her work, very…intense. I don’t know how much the real world ever penetrated when she was working on a play.”

“Was she any good?”

“As a playwright, not very— at least, I didn’t think so. Her stuff was really autobiographical, and there was a big part you just couldn’t get if you weren’t Holly. The part you could get was kind of juvenile: lots of evil-parent stuff and lots of proclamations.”

“How was she as an actress?”

“That was a different story altogether: Holly was great. It helped that she was gorgeous and you couldn’t take your eyes off her, of course, but it was more than that. She was totally committed to every part she played, and she could transform herself completely. It was a little scary, to be honest. I always wondered if she could do it in a part she hadn’t written.”

“And she and Werner were romantically involved?”

“They slept together, on and off, if that’s what you mean. As for ‘involved’— that I don’t know. I’m not sure how involved Holly could be with anyone but Holly.”

“I heard that besides the writing and acting, Holly made videos too.”

“Not while I knew her, but it wouldn’t surprise me. She tried her hand at lots of things— painting, photography, even woodworking, I think.” Moira Neal paused and a little smile entered her voice. “You really need to know all this for an accident case?”

I smiled back. “You never know what you’ll need to know,” I said. “Speaking of which, did you happen to know someone named Wren when you were with the Gimlets?”

She thought about it. “That was one of Holly’s characters, wasn’t it— one of the nut-job roles she played.”

“But no real person by that name?”

“No,” she said, “no real person.”

7

Clare’s hair was spread like a fan on her naked back, and her breathing was slow and silent. I pulled the blanket to her shoulders and pulled on my robe and went into the living room. Sleep, I knew, was impossible, and I drank a glass of water and looked out the window. The midnight streets were empty, and a sliver of moon wandered over the skyline, drained of color by the city lights and lonely as a wedding ring in a pawnshop. I refilled my water glass and picked up the scripts to Liars Club and The Nest.

Two readings later, neither play made much sense. Both Lisa, at Null Space, and Moira Neal, the former Gimlet Player, had been spot-on in their critiques. The plays were dense with family psychodrama, incoherent speechifying, and abrupt and confusing changes of time and place, and they depended heavily on a set of symbols and references so personal and hermetic as to be impenetrable.

As far as I could tell, The Nest took place on a spaceship in the distant future, and Liars Club was set in contemporary suburban Connecticut. And while it was difficult to tease a sensible narrative out of either piece, they both seemed mostly about a vain and tyrannical father, his flagrant and chronic infidelities, and the devastating effect that these had on his wife and daughters.

As self-conscious and opaque as the plays often were, they were not entirely laughable. There was real emotion in the dialogues between the cruel fathers and the daughters, and their exchanges were wrenching and sad— sometimes frightening. And, I realized on my second readings, they were frighteningly reminiscent of the telephone messages that Wren had left for David.

I was tired and my eyes slid off the pages and drifted to the window, and to the sky that was brightening over the city. My mind stumbled over scraps of Holly Cade’s life— her luckless Gimlet Players, her sister’s harsh voice and suspicious eyes, Babyface looming in her apartment doorway, the nosy, frightened man in 3-F. I put the scripts down and thought about going for a run. I put on some coffee instead.

* * *

It was ten o’clock when Clare arose, and the loft was filled with hard winter glare. She padded across the living room wearing a scowl and little else. I was at the table, drinking coffee and reading the Times, and she squinted at me with shadowed eyes.

“There more of that?” she whispered, and cocked her head at my mug.

“You want some?” She nodded and I went to the kitchen and poured her a black one.

“God bless,” she said, and she took the mug and her overnight bag into the bathroom. Thirty minutes later she returned, smelling of soap and wearing jeans and a short Norton Motorcycles T-shirt. Her hair was in a loose, shiny braid and her feet were bare. Her coffee mug was empty.

“Refill?” I asked. Clare nodded. I poured her another and she took a couple of sections of the paper and headed for the sofa. I picked up the scripts again.

I understood them less the third time through, and began to find them irritating. Having extracted what I could from the dialogue, I paid more attention to the character names. In The Nest, besides Wren and Fredrick, there was the mother, Lark, and the older sister, Robin. In Liars Club, the father was again named Fredrick— Fredrick Zero— and the daughters were Cassandra and Medea. The mother was Helen. Birds and Greeks. Was there anything to that? Buried on my shelves were some yellowed paperbacks of Aristophanes and Euripides. I hadn’t looked at them since college and wondered if they might be the keys to Holly’s work, or if, like so much else in her plays, the classical allusions had been encrypted for Holly’s eyes only. I sighed and tossed the scripts on the table.