An Evil Guest (8 page)

“Yes, Miss Casey. Sweetener, no cream. Hot pastrami on rye.”

“Good. Let me have ’em. There’ll be food at the party, but I’ll be talking to people and it’s . . . an hour and twenty minutes. Besides, we don’t want to be there when it starts. Half an hour late should do it. You’re coming?” Cassie had opened the white bag and was looking over her sandwich.

“Thousand island,” Margaret told her. “It’s what you said, Miss Casey.”

“Right. They should’ve used more. Tell them next time, if you’re working for me. What about the party?”

“I don’t think I’m invited, Miss Casey.”

“Phooey. They didn’t give you a straw?”

Margaret shook her head.

“You should have asked for one. Preserves the makeup. I don’t have lots of money, Margaret. If I hire you, we may hit a place where I can’t keep paying you. You’ll be free to split, of course. But that may not be long. I don’t know.”

Margaret smiled. It was a very small smile but a smile just the same, a tiny candle lit in her colorless face. “I know how it is in show business, Miss Casey. I’ve been doing this quite a time.”

“Good. I’ll pay you eight hundred a week. That’s firm. Do a good job, and you’ll get raises. But eight hundred to start. Want it?”

Margaret hesitated. “I wasn’t . . . Miss Cabana owes me back pay, Miss Casey. It’s over three thousand dollars.”

“I don’t know how I could put the arm on her.” Cassie gave it a few seconds’ thought. “But I’ll do it if I can figure a way.”

“If you could just let me have the first week in advance . . . ?”

“Like that, huh?”

Margaret nodded.

“Are you going to cry on me?”

“No, Miss Casey.”

“Good. Don’t. I hate criers. I do it way too much myself. If I had the money on me, I’d give it to you. I don’t, and you probably can’t take a card.”

“No, Miss Casey. I can’t.”

“I didn’t think so. I’ll give you the eight hundred tomorrow. It’ll mean you’ll have to wait two weeks for another payday. That’s firm. No more advances.”

“I understand, Miss Casey.”

“And I’ll get you into that party, if I can. It’ll be a good test, and I think we’re going to pass. Now go find Mickey for me. Tell him I need to get out of the building without being seen. Not the stage door and not the front. Something else. Scoot.”

The Red Spot
party was at Rusterman’s, upstairs. “Cast only!” announced a Teutonically uniformed attendant at the door. “Cast
and
guests,” Cassie snapped, and sailed into the room with head high and Margaret bobbing in her wake.

India was nowhere in sight. Ebony, her assistant, was loading a plate with beautiful brown fritters and terrine de lièvre. “Don’t get fat,” Cassie warned her. “What are you going to wear when you can’t fit into a size four?”

Ebony grinned. “I never get fat. You tasted these?”

“Not often enough. How’s life in India?”

“Ha, ha. Listen, Cassie, you got a new gig?”

“Right now?” Cassie shrugged. “Yes and no. Let’s just say I don’t want one.”

“India’s got an angel.” Ebony’s voice fell. “This’s humongous stuff—try it out here and maybe Springfield and open on Broadway.”

“So I heard.” Cassie selected an oyster wrapped in something that might have been prosciutto but probably was not. She twirled it on its toothpick, studied it with a dietician’s eye, and set it back down.

“Okay if I ask what Alexis’s dresser’s doing here?”

Almost inaudibly, Margaret said, “I’m Miss Casey’s dresser now, Miss White.”

Brian Kean appeared at Cassie’s elbow. “Can I get you something? Champagne? Highball?”

Cassie smiled. “Just a glass of Chablis, please. Would you like anything, Margaret?”

Margaret shook her head.

“I’ll fetch my own,” Ebony announced. Brian appeared not to have heard her.

At Cassie’s other elbow, Tabbi Merce whispered, “You were devastating tonight, Cassie. Absolutely devastating! They were throwing flowers at the stage.”

“They weren’t!”

“Oh, yes, they were! Boutonnieres and corsages. Orchids and carnations. You were seeing—I don’t know what. Counting the empty seats or something while the audience went bananas.”

Cassie smiled. “If you’re trying to make me feel good, you’re succeeding.”

Brian pressed a glass of white wine into her hand, and someone else handed her a midget’s plate heaped with food. She smiled again. “What are these fritters, anyway?” It was a general question, directed to the group around her. Norma Peiper, perhaps the heaper of the plate, said, “Wild mushroom. Delicious!”

“I’d like an anchovy fritter. This place is famous for them, and I’ve never had one.”

“I’ll tell them,” Brian said, and hurried away.

Ebony asked, “Want to sit down?”

Cassie nodded. “See if you can’t find us a table, Margaret.”

Norma touched her arm. “Come on. I’ve got one already.”

“So do I,” Tabbi protested. “Cassie can sit with us.”

“She certainly can.” It was Bruce Sandoz. In a tone only slightly lower he added, “We featured players should cleave together, Cassie.”

“I’d better sit with Ebony,” Cassie decided. “India will be coming, and I promised we’d talk here.” She called Margaret back.

Porter Penniman was seated there already, apparently holding the table. With a smile as broad as a piano’s, he raised his exceedingly impressive four hundred pounds and indicated the chair on his right. Like all of Rusterman’s chairs, it was massive and looked medieval.

Cassie managed to drag it back while Margaret squirmed into the chair on Cassie’s right.

“De-lighted. Ah’m mos’ surely de-lighted, Miz Casey.” Porter Penniman’s voice belonged in Walker’s, blackstrap molasses drowning a cinnamon waffle.

Cassie smiled. “You know, Mr. Penniman, you’ve always seemed a little sinister to me, onstage and off. You’ve changed now, and I like the new you.”

He raised a hand that looked as large as a dinner plate. “Ah mos’ solemnly swears, Miz Casey, that Ah shall never agin enlist no smelly li’l foreigners to wring your pretty li’l neck.”

“Friends forever.” Cassie offered her hand. “And call me Cassie, please.”

He took it, grasping it rather as an ogre of unusual size might have held a dove. “An’ you mus’ call me Tiny, which all mah other fren’s already does.”

A waiter leaned between them, proffering a platter of smoking fritters. At Cassie’s other elbow Brian Kean said, “Anchovy fritters, made fresh for you. I haven’t sampled them. They’re very hot.”

The waiter added, “Rusterman’s best,” and set his platter in the center of the table.

“ ’Til I come heah,” Tiny intoned, “Ah had believed this place heah to be solely in Noo Yahk.”

Margaret whispered, “It’s a chain now.”

Brian had taken the chair to her right. “Speaking of chains, I understand that India wants to enlist people for a new show.”

“It seems to me like it’s way too early for anybody to commit to anything,” Cassie said. She turned to Ebony, who was sitting to Porter Penniman’s left. “How long has India had this angel? Do you know?”

“No,” Ebony told her. “I don’t. But not long. Or I don’t think so.”

“I can always make a good living doing commercials,” Brian declared. “Still, there’s nothing like the stage, is there? Live audiences and reviews next morning.”

Ebony grinned. “The roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd.”

Porter Penniman had picked up a fritter. He popped it into his mouth as he might have eaten a peanut.

Cassie sipped Chablis.

Ebony rose, waving. “Over here, India!”

From behind Ebony, Tabbi murmured, “I thought she was bringing the angel.”

India pulled out a chair and dropped triumphantly into it. “Wallace Rosenquist will be along shortly, kids. I’ve made firm arrangements for them to let him in, and Bruce is waiting there to raise holy hell if they don’t. He saw our show tonight, and he’s eager to meet all of you.”

She turned to Cassie. “How were the utility tunnels?”

“You heard, huh?”

India nodded. “Mickey told me. Unwelcome company?”

“If you want to call it that.” Cassie picked up a red something on a toothpick, conveyed it to her mouth, chewed—and swallowed before she realized she did not know what she had eaten. “I saw a man I knew in the audience. After the show, Jimmy came around to tell me somebody was waiting for me in the alley. Waiting to give me something, okay?”

Ebony said, “Careful time.”

“Right. I’m not saying I don’t want to see this guy. I’d like to talk to him as a matter of fact. But there are very few people I want to meet in dark alleys, and he’s not one of them.”

Margaret whispered in Cassie’s ear, and she added, “He’d scared the heck out of Jimmy, and I didn’t like that. He’d also given Jimmy a hundred, but Jimmy was scared just the same.”

India said, “So?”

“So the utility tunnels. They run from building to building and there are electric wires in them. Pipes and all kinds of stuff. Mickey showed me how to get down in there. Then he took me on through when he saw how scared I was. We came out in the basement of the Marcus Building.”

Cassie stood. “I don’t mean to be impolite or anything, but where’s the Jane?”

Ebony said, “I’ll show you,” and Cassie followed her, hoping that Margaret was following as well.

She was. When they were alone, Cassie opened her purse. “I said I’d give you a raise if you did a good job, remember? You can earn that raise right now. Here’s ten bucks.”

Margaret accepted it, pushing it into her sleeve.

“Maybe you’ve heard of Gideon Chase. He’s a friend of mine, and he’s got an apartment someplace in the city—I don’t know where. He teaches close to Providence, so he’s probably got another one around there. Got it?”

Margaret nodded.

“Get on the phone—directory assistance, the Babybell Search Engine, all that stuff. Find him. Tell him who you are, and tell him I’m here and I’m scared. Tell him to get himself over here quick.”

When Margaret had gone, Cassie held the door open to watch her hurry away. The party at Ebony’s table seemed unchanged. Ebony had resumed her seat, and India was holding forth. It occurred to Cassie that she need not rejoin it. Other tables dotted the tapestried room; there was even a crowd around the bar. After washing her hands twice, she slipped out of the restroom.

She was halfway to the bar when Palma pounced. “You were marvelous tonight, Cassiopeia Fiona Casey. Truly and absolutely marvelous! It was a privilege and an honor to tread the boards in your distinguished company. You made my poor scheming detective look very poor indeed, and that was all to the good. I know that the audience, God bless ’em!, made bold to let you know how
merveilleux
you were; but none of these hams will, so I intuit that I should do it myself. One strives, one endeavors, you know, to leave our poor old Earth a better place, eh? You have, and I do my own threadbare trifle by telling you how greatly you dazzled us. Come sit by me, and I’ll tell you much, much more.”

Palma had been steering her as a tall and unusually cruel tomcat might steer a captive mouse. They had nearly reached a table at which Donny Duke sat sipping something green, and at which Norma was in the act of sitting. “I was going to the bar,” Cassie protested weakly.

“Donny will fetch it for you, Cassiopeia. Be seated, tell him your desires, and it shall be done.”

Tempted to ask for a beach cottage, Cassie refrained. “I don’t care what you get me, Donny, as long as it knocks my panty hose off. If you and Vince have to carry me out of here and pour me into a cab, you’ll have done your job.”

Borne up by half a smile, Donny floated from his chair and drifted toward the bar.

“I take it you’re celebrating,” Norma said.

“Try taking it that I’m scared.”

“Cassie shall prophesy evil,” Palma intoned, “but she shall not be believed. Save by me. Alone.”

“Tell us,” Norma said.

“There’s nothing to tell.” Cassie looked around for the Chablis she had left on Ebony’s table, and failing to find it took a healthy swallow from Donny’s glass. It was like drinking toothpaste.

“The Irish,” Norma remarked, “are rarely afraid of nothing.”

Palma smiled, and brushed an invisible yellow feather from his lips with a manicured and be-ringed paw. “She has heard the banshee.”

“Seen it,” Cassie said, “and I think I’m going to be going out with it in a day or two.”

“Why Cassie!” Norma was grinning. “You always seemed so hetro.”

“English speakers,” Palma lectured her smoothly, “are invariably deceived by the second syllable. It merely conveys that banshees are to be numbered amongst the Grey Neighbors.”

“I’ll be damned if I’ve the foggiest idea what that’s supposed to mean,” Norma said, “but doesn’t Cassie have a gray neighbor right now?”

“She’s talking about me,” Margaret whispered.

Turning, Cassie caught her arm. “Did you get him?”

Margaret shook her head. “I tried all those things. I talked to answering machines at both his apartments. I left a voice mail—”

Cassie raised at hand. “That’s plenty for now. You can tell me the rest later. Find a chair, sit down, and talk about something else if you want to talk.”