The Hearse You Came in On (40 page)

This rehearsal had proved to be Chinese Sue’s farewell appearance. At the conclusion of the run-through she had approached Gil to suggest a lastminute alteration in the script. She told him that instead of dying of natural causes, as Thornton Wilder had penned it, she felt that Emily should kill herself. She argued that decisive action was more in keeping with the character. And she made her arguments in single syllables. The look the director gave to Sue in response indicated that perhaps Gil would consider going so far as to have the entire population of Grover’s Corners simply stone the sullen girl to death. But Gil held his temper. “It’s a little late for suicide,” he said. Then he added, “But I’ll think about it.” And I’m sure he did.

No matter. Julia had a talk with Sue at the gallery the next day and the Emily switch was made. Professionally speaking, Gil was thrilled to have Julia back in the show. On a personal level, he soon enough saw that he would be no match for my ex-wife as concerned Michael Goldfarb. When Julia showed up that evening for the rehearsal Michael Goldfarb was more the puppy than ever. Julia would have no trouble whatsoever clicking her leash onto him. Sit. Speak. Beg. Lie down … He would heed his mistress’s voice.

When we spoke about
my
fiasco, Julia was as tender as could be.

“I’m sorry about Kate, Hitch. The whole thing is a goddamn mess, isn’t it?”

I had to agree with her.

“She might come back around,” Julia said hopefully. “She’s seen more than her share of bad men. She knows you’re a good one. Give her time.”

I asked Julia to explain more specifically what had happened out at Peter Morgan’s.

“What did Kate tell you?”

“Very little. She said that she went there to confront Morgan about his role in the contract killing of her husband. Once she saw Morgan’s sister’s name listed as a board member of Epoch, she went straight to Morgan’s place. She said that Bowman was standing at the front door when she arrived and that when she got out of her car he shot at her. She shot back.”

Julia added simply, “That’s how it happened.”

“And you were at the front door?”

“I was passing by it on my way to the den when Bowman knocked. I opened the door just as Kate was getting out of her car.”

“Did you hear Kate say anything to him before he shot her?”

Julia picked up my Teddy Roosevelt glasses from the lectern. Her eyes locked on mine, she parted her lips and very methodically huffed on each of the lenses, then tugged out a corner of my shirttail and wiped them clean. She handed the glasses back to me.

“You want to know?” she said finally.

“That’s why I’m asking.”

“Yes. She did say something. She yelled out, I believe it was, ‘Hey! You bastard!’ ”

“I see.”

We fell silent. Onstage a piece of scenery fell over. The church, I believe.

Julia finally asked, “Any other questions?”

“Just two.”

I looked up at the black ceiling. It was easier for me to reconstruct the scene there.

“Was Kate’s gun already drawn when she yelled out at him?” I asked.

“It was out and it was aimed right at him.”

“I see.”

“What was your other question?”

I put the glasses on. They weren’t plain glass but were in fact a very weak prescription. I could see perfectly, everything just looked very flat. Even Julia’s scrumptious body looked as if I could have slipped it under my arm like a cardboard cut-out and walked it out of the building.

“My other question was, did you tell that part to the police? That Kate was out of her car, aiming her pistol at the guy before she said ‘boo’? That she provoked him. That
he
was shooting in self-defense? Did you tell the police all that?”

Julia drew in her lower lip for consultation. “I seem to recall that I missed that part.”

“Remind me to buy you a drink sometime,” I said.

“You don’t have to thank me, Hitch. I didn’t like the way that guy looked at me anyway when I opened the door.”

“Yeah, well. I don’t think that’s why Kate shot him.”

Julia’s eyebrows rose. “Hitch, have you ever seen Kate handle a pistol?”

I told her that I hadn’t. She rolled her eyes.

“Wow.”

I didn’t hear at all from Kate for the next week. I left several messages on her answering machine and once I
even drove by her place at night but saw no lights on in the windows. Possibly Kate had taken my suggestion and skedaddled out of town for a while. Her name and photograph were in the papers and on the news again. Anywhere but Baltimore would seem like a smart place for her to be.

Gil’s final instructions to the
Our Town
cast on opening night were as follows:

“I want to thank each and every one of you for the enthusiasm that you’ve all shown in exploring the depths of this wonderful play. And now I want you all to knock it off. Hitchcock is your Stage Manager. He is your pilot. He is your god. Hitch, I’m putting it all on you. The moment you think any of your fellow cast members are getting out of line—or especially
inventing
a new line—step in. Just start talking. Does everyone understand that? No unscripted soliloquies tonight. This is not the Improvisational Playhouse, it is the Gypsy Playhouse. You are Gypsy Players. Now go out there and act like it!”

And because Gil is snippy, and lonely, and only human after all, he turned on Michael Goldfarb, who was staring down at his delicate fingers. “That goes for you too!”

I was barely listening. I was preoccupied. Among the several opening-night cards and flowers that I had received had been a tissue-thin Western Union telegram. It had been sent from Las Vegas.

Hitch—I’m still thinking. I wish I would stop already. I miss you. Break a leg, if you must. Love—Kate.

I took the telegram with me onstage and stuck it on the lectern next to my script. Several times during the evening I missed my cue due to my split attention.
There really wasn’t much deconstruction I could perform with Kate’s message, but I went ahead and tried anyway. The only truly ambiguous portion of the telegram was its point of origin. Las Vegas. The test tubes of my imagination sputtered and smoked in trying to figure out what the hell Kate would be doing in Las Vegas. As far as the message itself, it was cautious but hopeful; I couldn’t squeeze any more than that out of it.

As I said, I missed a few of my cues on account of my three hundred glances at the telegram. I also failed to perform the Higher Authority task that Gil had assigned to me. I interrupted on occasion, but, generally speaking, I stood by—looking like an idiot in my pith helmet, wire rims and whip mustache—as the cast of
Our Town
frolicked like an untrained modern dance troupe through the ashes of Thornton Wilder’s Grover’s Corners.

Julia especially enjoyed herself, having waited until this evening to acknowledge the very existence of Michael Goldfarb. And not just acknowledge it. Suddenly he was bread and bad-girl Julia was white-hot butter. Others seemed to follow Julia’s lead, albeit less effectively, and by the end of the evening it almost seemed as if a pheromone gas attack had been launched on the sleepy burg. It was one hopped-up bunch of citizens up there onstage, that’s for sure. At one point I lowered my wire-rim specs to the tip of my nose and took in the full spectacle being wrought.
Our Town
meets
Peyton Place.
Gil Vance had himself a peach of a concept, whether he wanted it or not. Personally, I thought it worked pretty well.

Goldfarb and Julia showed up about an hour into the
cast party. I call him “Goldfarb” now instead of “Michael” for the simple reason that whatever it was that transpired between the two between the final curtain and their entrance at Julia’s gallery—where the cast party was being thrown—had forever altered the somber young boy. He sauntered into that gallery like a big-balled bull fresh from his Pasture of Dreams. As for Julia, her face was lit up like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. She and I passed a few quick words, in code. Starting with me.

“Pedestal?”

“Brute.”

“Happy?”

“Yippee!”

A tipsy Libby Maslin made a pass at me at one point. It fell short. I wouldn’t have caught it anyway. I noticed as I was slipping away early from the soiree that Libby was wiping some wine off the shirt of one of the Gypsy board members, who was already backed up against the wall.

I headed down to the pier that runs alongside the Screaming Oyster. I went out to the end and looked out over the inky water. The R had gone out of the neon Domino sugar sign across the harbor, giving it a somewhat funky new look: DOMINO SUGA. Other than that, it was the same old harbor that I knew like the back of my heart.

But there was something about the big neon sign being even so slightly altered that seemed to match my feelings. I was feeling restless. I was feeling out of sorts, or rather, out of synch, as if something was just not right. It was the feeling of the other shoe not having yet dropped, even though you are staring at two shoes
that have already come crashing down to earth and are sitting right there side by side. There they are. They’ve dropped. So what’s the problem?

The problem began to come to me. I had thought as I stood there gazing out over the black water that I was clearing my mind, that I wasn’t really thinking of anything in particular. And maybe that’s so. Or at least on the conscious level that was so. But down deeper, that second shoe that had dropped must have begun to come into clearer focus. And as it did, the source of my restlessness began to come into focus with it. It was the wrong goddamn shoe. It didn’t match the first one. The
real
other shoe hadn’t dropped at all.

And then it did. Nearly beaned me.

Kate had told me that immediately upon hearing of Carolyn James’s suicide she had entered the woman’s apartment and located Carolyn’s copy of the nefarious videotape featuring Amanda Stuart. The assumption was that whoever it was who killed Guy Fellows a few days later—Lou Bowman—had taken Fellows’s copy of the tape, perhaps as a future bargaining chip, perhaps simply to while away the hours counting the number of freckles on Amanda Stuart’s bare bum. It made perfect sense to me that someone like Bowman would think to pocket the notorious tape after killing Guy Fellows. Forget even the boredom of those lonely Heayhauge nights when mean-looking Molly was being especially pissy. Consider the flexibility that would be Bowman’s to enjoy by having possession of the tape. Especially since once Alan Stuart had announced for governor, the value of the tape had certainly gone up. Was it possible that the extra three
thousand dollars a month that was being stuffed into Bowman’s FedEx package had in fact been the result of
Bowman’s
blackmailing Alan Stuart? Essentially picking up where Guy Fellows was forced—at serrated knife point—to leave off?

No. That made no sense. It was already determined that Bowman’s extra bonus was his payment for killing Guy Fellows in the first place. That being the case, of what practical value was the videotape? For
that
matter, wouldn’t one of Alan Stuart’s instructions to Bowman have been to locate the tape after killing Guy Fellows and to deliver it to him? Of course it would. That would also explain why Bowman used a knife instead of a gun to kill Fellows. He would need time to search for the video, time he would not have had were the neighbors to have reported hearing a gunshot coming from Guy Fellows’s apartment.

I must have been standing out on the end of the pier longer than I realized. Or was so lost in thought that I simply hadn’t noticed a fog coming in over the harbor. As I came out of my own haze, I saw that the Domino Suga sign was surrounded by a silver and pink mist. I felt the dampness on my own skin as the mist tumble weeded right over me. Halos formed around the streetlights. The more distant lights and buildings disappeared altogether. Those in the middle distance lost some of their edges. The night sky was gone, replaced by a low cloud cover, as black and gray as a nun with a dirty habit, so to speak. A distant rumbling of thunder sounded… and then another, not so distant. Within a minute, I was standing in the pouring rain.

And down came the shoe.

Kate Zabriskie had killed Guy Fellows. Not Lou Bowman. Lou Bowman would have brought along his own knife, not relied on finding a knife in Fellows’s kitchen. I’m no detective, but murder by kitchen knife does not denote—at least in this instance—premeditated murder. Certainly not a contract killing. It denotes crime of passion. Or self-defense. Or both.

Kate’s killing of Lou Bowman, especially as outlined for me by Julia, had been both. She had provoked Bowman into firing first. Kate’s
first
shot, then, might well qualify as self-defense. But shots two, three, four, five? Ripping through Bowman’s lung, kidney, throat and, finally, his heart? I’ll let you judge that for yourself.

It wasn’t my speculation about the kitchen knife, however, that led me to my conclusion. It was that mismatched shoe that had dropped. But I should stop talking about shoes, and talk instead about videotapes. Kate’s videotape, lifted from Carolyn James’s apartment, was disguised as a
Pinocchio
video. The tape in Bowman’s house was a Disney match.
Fantasia.

But neither Guy Fellows nor Carolyn James had hidden the tape in Carolyn’s apartment in a
Pinocchio
box or with a
Pinocchio
label. The night that Kate showed the tape to me she had taken credit for the simple yet effective disguise. It had been her extra measure of security, a way of hiding the evidence in plain sight.

As the night sky unloaded on me, I saw how simply it had all taken place. I couldn’t piece together the scenario of the actual killing, of course, but the rest of it came into an all-too-clear focus. Knowing the lengths to which Kate had considered going to get Carolyn
James out of the abusive clutches of Guy Fellows—the harebrained scheme to arrange a fake funeral for her—I can well imagine that Carolyn’s suicide had not exactly set well with Kate. Maybe Fellows mouthed off about the suicide and Kate’s temper snapped. Or maybe it was Fellows whose temper had snapped. It’s possible that he had learned that Kate was sleeping with him on the direct orders of Alan Stuart, and had then gone after her.