Rehearsal for Murder (Maggie Ryan) (6 page)

Larry’s hard glare burned across the room at him. “Why the hell didn’t you stay with her?”

“Guess I forgot to consult Madame Astra yesterday,” snapped Nick. Larry’s words rankled. It was not the first time that he had found himself standing by, helpless to prevent tragedy. Last night had brought back old nightmares of his first wife limp and cold in a dressing room, of a teenager machine-gunned by the Berlin wall.

“Hey, he did what he could,” Edith was saying. Short, bosomy, thick-waisted, she viewed herself as peacemaker. “None of the rest of us would have gone anywhere near her, the mood she was in yesterday.”

“Did you say it was a robbery?” Daphne’s fingers jabbed at her Afro, mushrooming it away from her slender neck.

Nick said, “A witness told us she was pulled into the building. I saw that the things in her bag had been dumped out, but there was no sign of her billfold.”

“But God, why not just snatch the bag? Why shoot her?” asked Daphne.

“I know. We wondered about that too. We thought maybe she was struggling.”

“She wouldn’t have resisted if there was a gun!” Edith objected. “We were talking about it just last week. Remember, Jaymie? When we all left together? She’d gotten herself a little pistol and was telling us we should get one too. She said she was ready for anybody now. And I said, what if a mugger already had his gun out? And she said of course she’d be sensible then. She wasn’t pretending to be the fastest draw in the West.”

“Did she keep this gun in her bag?” asked Nick.

“That’s where it was when she showed it to us. Why?”

“Well, there was no gun in the stuff he’d dumped.”

“You think he took it too?”

“I think you should tell the police it might have been there. If there’s a record of it somewhere, it might help trace the guy eventually.” He didn’t add the grim corollary: when it was used on another victim.

“You mentioned a witness,” said Larry.

“Yes, did someone see it?” asked Jaymie. She tapped her cigarette into the battered brown wastebasket by the piano.

“A woman walking a short distance behind her. She said she saw Ramona pause, then step closer to the gutted building. There’s a temporary plywood wall with a missing piece. She said a black kid pulled Ramona into the shadows. The woman panicked and was running away even before the shots were fired.”

“So maybe she can identify him!” exclaimed Edith.

“She claims she didn’t see much. But maybe in a lineup ...” Nick shrugged.

“What happened next?” asked Daphne.

“Maggie and I came blundering back, and the police and ambulance got there soon and took over. We told the officers what we knew and they sent us away. I called Derek, and he found out the rest.”

“God, why couldn’t you have walked her just that one block farther?” demanded Larry.

Derek cut off Nick’s angry response. “Steady, mates, no use now playing what-if.”

“Right,” agreed Daphne hastily. She stretched and added, “Well, Derek, what do we do now?”

“I got through to Ken Martin this morning. Ramona’s partner in the production company. He’s a lawyer and said he’d check into the contract. His first response was to let you people go immediately, and ...”

A din of objections drowned him out. Derek nodded and raised his palms for silence. “I know, I know. I suggested we continue working for a few days until we know more certainly how long she’ll be recuperating. He said to go ahead till the weekend and he’d let us know.”

“Anyway, he can’t fire us!” exclaimed Jaymie. “Ramona told her husband there was no backing out! Or—do you mean the contract is tied to her being able to perform? I mean, she’ll be back!”

“Martin’s checking on the legal bits. And of course he agreed that if she was going to be back soon, it would be silly to disband the cast even if he legally could. And you know Ramona will tell him the same thing when she wakes up.”

“Still,” said Edith, “it’ll be hard to work without her. She’s in most of the numbers.”

“We’ve got Jaymie,” said Daphne. Jaymie flashed her a trembly smile.

“Ramona will never agree to do things Jaymie’s way,” said Larry.

“Well, we can at least do the rough blocking,” insisted Daphne. “Work on the choruses. And if you think about it, she usually doesn’t object to the concepts. She just adjusts details sometimes.”

“Yeah. Details like cutting a whole solo,” griped Larry.

Nick said, “I don’t think we should take her complaints yesterday too seriously.”

“You didn’t have a number cut!”

“Look, Larry, she had other problems. She told me she’d been taking it out on us and said she’d try to be better about it.”

Edith, dubious, shook her head. “After everything she said yesterday? I don’t know.”

“She meant those things,” agreed Jaymie. Even Derek looked skeptical.

Nick felt he had to defend her. “You all know she’s not usually as difficult as yesterday. She’s got personal problems right now. Under a lot of strain. And she’s opinionated, and around here she gets her way. She should! We’ve all worked in star vehicles before, and that’s the way things are. But Ramona’s been pretty decent. Doesn’t usually hurt people. I think she’ll be reasonable. She even apologized yesterday.”

“Whether we believe all that or not, Nick, it doesn’t solve our problem now.”

“Well, we can’t just quit!” said Jaymie. “She’ll probably be better soon. Doctors fall all over themselves for famous people. Not like most …” She bit her lip, bowed her head.

Daphne reached over to pat her hand and said, “What do you think, Derek?”

“I think we should try. Believe me, mates, as soon as I have any real answers, I’ll let you know. But for now it seems best to assume that she’ll be back in a couple of weeks and rehearse without her as best we can. We’ll lose less time in the long run.”

Larry shrugged. “Well, then, let’s start.”

Everyone nodded, willing to go along with this least unsatisfactory plan. Derek plunked himself onto the piano bench, announcing act two, and Daphne explained, “Kick line comes on from stage left, everyone except the Disraelis and Gladstones. And Victoria of course.” She demonstrated the steps quickly, her lithe dark body flitting impudently through the comic music hall routines. It was basically a repetition of the show opener, called “Sixty-four Years,” the length of Queen Victoria’s reign. The verses were different, but the choreography echoed the opener.

“And at ‘running an Empire alone—all alone’ you all pull back into a vee. Lights up on Victoria’s throne at the apex. Okay, Jaymie?”

“Okay.”

“And then when the Chairman says ‘Two!’ Nick and Larry leap out, one through each side of the vee. Land center stage, maybe five feet apart. Strike a pose, mirror images.”

“Waving top hats,” suggested Larry.

“Yes, something like that. We’ll work out the details later. And we go straight into ‘Dizzy and the Grand Old Man.’”

Rehearsing was hard work. Twenty actor/dancers, years of sacrifice and training behind them, more years of sacrifice and training ahead of them, followed the complex instructions with intense concentration. There were few actual missteps even this first time, but hours of rehearsal would still be required to get knees at precisely the same level, fingers and canes at the correct angles, transitions timed. From behind the line, Nick—who shared their folly—wondered again at the foolish passion that led otherwise normal adults to sacrifice and sweat, beg and lie, for the opportunity to—What? Not make money; they’d all do better driving cabs. Not become famous; Ramona was the only one with a part that might bring fame, and she had it already. He and Larry had a chance of being noticed, especially Larry, if he could keep his solo. But the others were basically chorus members, their brief turns in the spotlight too ephemeral for lasting attention. He watched Jaymie: slim, serious, dark wavy hair pulled into a ponytail, bouncing through the kick-line steps, then hurrying to Ramona’s place on Victoria’s throne and shifting to a stately queen. Once, during a five-minute break, he teased her, “Don’t you think you’re working too hard for scale?”

“Oh, it’s not the money,” she said earnestly between gulps of Sprite. “You know that, Nick. Hell, my mom made me promise I’d never think of the money. She did and regretted it ever since. Married Dad, and he made her quit. And then ran off with someone younger, and by then Mom was in her thirties—Anyway, she must be right. Look at Ramona. How old she is, and people still love her!”

“Not her husband, babe,” observed Daphne cheerfully.

“Yeah, but that’s not what I mean. It’s the energy, Mom said. You give it, you get it back from the audience. She said no amount of money could buy that.”

True. They would all slave in exhausting anonymity, poorly paid, briefly appreciated by an audience that would promptly forget them and leave the theatre discussing Ramona. And when the show closed, even if it had a good run, there would be only an extra line in their résumés to help get the next job with similarly ridiculous working conditions. If there even was a next job.

And yet they considered themselves lucky. Those instants of communication with the audience, that sense of being an instrument that revealed the spark of divinity in ordinary humanity—even chorus lines had those moments. Jaymie’s mom was right; money couldn’t buy it. And as Ramona had admitted, that was even the reason for wanting success. Fame itself was only a means to that end.

But was it enough? Nick wondered. Was he sacrificing Sarah’s future to the whimsical god of show biz?

“Running an empire alone—all alone,” the chorus was singing.

“Not quite alone,” amended Cab, as Chairman. “Queen Victoria had the help of her prime minister. And not just one prime minister. Two!”

Nick leaped through the wall of the kick line and landed together with Larry, their upstage hands raised with the hats, twin smiles directed at the nonexistent audience.

“Fine,” said Daphne, and showed them the routines for their duet, an almost vaudevillian soft shoe involving lots of high-spirited prancing and spinning together, bent elbows linked. “Okay, give it a try. Let’s just honk through it.”

Nick and Larry waved their hats, gave a preliminary prance to the piano’s rollicking phrases, and began.

“Oh, Gladstone and Disraeli, Victoria’s glorious pair! There’s fame enough for Dizzy and the Grand Old Man to share!”

The Chairman waved a hand from his podium at the side and announced, “Mr. Gladstone, the Grand Old Man!”

Nick stepped forward. Even in his bedraggled rehearsal sweats he radiated the energy and righteous zeal of the famous orator. “I’m William Ewart Gladstone,” he sang. “My talent’s heaven-sent. I try to work God’s purpose in the halls of Parliament! I work for fallen women, for the Irish, for the crowds! My heart is with the people!”

“His head is in the clouds!” sneered Larry, elbowing Nick aside to claim center stage. He exuded a languid cleverness, the perfect foil for Nick’s pompous enthusiasm, as he sang, “I’m Benjamin Disraeli, a Tory with a twist. I’m known as wit, as Jew, as Brit, as great imperialist! I work to find what’s useful in Gladstone’s woolly dreams. I work for Queen and Empire!”

“For selfish Dizzy schemes!” Nick, scornful too, shouldered him aside in turn and began the argumentative refrain: “Extend the vote!”

“The Empire!”

“God’s will!”

“And glory bright!”

“There’s fights enough for Dizzy and the Grand Old Man to fight!” they chorused together, spontaneously flashing their canes in mock swordplay as they skipped around. The other actors were chuckling.

“Both happily married!” announced the Chairman, and Edith and the actress playing Mrs. Disraeli joined them from the chorus.

Nick and Edith held hands in an affectionate but thoroughly proper manner. “A ragamuffin husband and a rantipoling wife, we’ll fiddle it and scrape it through the ups and downs of life!” They two-stepped neatly around the stage; but Disraeli and his wife high-kicked. The contentious prime ministers quarreled on through three more stanzas. Then as Jaymie stepped regally down from the rickety chair that was standing in for a throne, Nick launched the final chorus. “There’s land reform!”

“There’s India!”

“Peace!”

“War!”

“And jubilee!” Jaymie broke in. The prime ministers looked at her, astonished. Increasingly assured, she went on, “And majestee! And dynastee! There’s work enough for Dizzy and the Grand Old Man—and me!”

The three linked elbows and skipped around the stage to the closing chords.

“Super!” Derek enthused. “Funnier than I thought! I’m rather taken with that sword fight with the canes, aren’t you, Daphne?”

“Love it. We’ll keep that. Larry, I like that scarecrow quality you’re giving Disraeli. But tone it down just a little in your choruses with Nick, so it looks like the same dance.”

“Okay. Nick isn’t exactly a scarecrow.”

“Yeah, everybody tells me. Woolly mammoth. Prince of Whales,” grumbled Nick.

“It’s going to be cute. Nice job, Jaymie,” Daphne said, and Jaymie glowed. Then Daphne added almost casually, “Okay, Derek, what’s next?”

A little pulse of tension ran around the room. Everyone knew what was supposed to be next. But Derek, as casually as Daphne, said, “‘Top of the Greasy Pole.’ Disraeli’s solo.”