Soap Opera Slaughters Read online

  “Making a note of that?” Hilary murmured for my ears only. I ignored her.

  Thanking me for the use of the phone, Lara told me to let her know how much she owed when my bill came. Magnanimously, I told her to forget it, duties of a host and all, and instantly felt like kicking myself for passing up a chance to get her phone number.

  She gave me a parting peck on the cheek and left. I held the door open for Hilary and, as she walked through, I said, “Tell Harry hello for me.”

  Back on the other side of the looking-glass, I latched the door, put the glasses in the sink, and fished Lara’s photo from the wastebasket.

  Dinner was listless, TV was dull. I had a few routine jobs to do on Monday for The Old Man, and frankly looked forward to the petty detail work they’d involve me in. I turned in early, but couldn’t fall asleep for a long time. The day and all its questions reran through my mind like videotape.

  Shortly past midnight, the telephone roused me from restless slumber. “Gene?” The voice was sweet, soft, hushed. “Did I wake you?” In a voice husky from sleep, I asked who it was. “Lara?” The voice lost its gentle edge. “No, it’s her cousin. I got the message you left for me on my machine.”

  This time, I wasn’t fast enough. The sound of Hilary’s receiver being slammed down nearly broke my eardrum.

  WHEN LARA CALLED ME the next evening, I was a little suspicious at first. I thought it was Hilary trying to get even.

  Monday was busy. I was out of the office most of the day, and she only crossed my mind once or twice. A minute. Shortly after six, I arrived home and was fumbling with my keys when I heard the ringing of the telephone. I kicked open the door, dropped the groceries on the kitchen counter and hurried into the bedroom to take the call.

  I heard a familiar voice on the other end, but didn’t take it for granted this time. “Gene,” the caller said, “I tried to reach you at your office, but you were out. I’ve got a big favor to ask.”

  “Who’s calling? Hilary?”

  “No, it’s Lara.” She sounded surprised. “I thought you would recognize my voice.”

  I didn’t know if I’d just wounded her actor’s vanity, or if she were leaning a little too literally on the fact that I had her picture on my wall.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Hilary claims I’ve got a lousy ear for music. What’s the favor?”

  “Can you drive up to New York and meet me?”

  I caught myself before saying yes and hopping straight into my car. “When? Where?”

  “Tonight. At Florence’s.”

  Dream girls don’t just call and ask you to drive two hours for a rendezvous. The thing sounded fishy: a sudden summons to travel more than a hundred miles to an unlikely meeting in the home of a woman who turns strangers from her door. I began to wonder whether I was really talking to Hilary trying to get even. “This is awfully short notice,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Florence is really deep-ending Ed’s death.”

  “Okay, but what does that have to do with me?”

  “She insists on hiring a detective.”

  “From another state?”

  “Don’t you have a New York license?”

  “Yes, but that’s not the—”

  “Hold on, Gene, I’ll be right back.” I was practically convinced the call was a trick of Hilary’s, but as I waited impatiently, I heard a second voice talking on the other end to Lara. Damned if it didn’t sound like Florence McKinley.

  “Gene,” Lara said in a low voice, “I can’t explain now, she’s listening. Look, I know it’s expecting an awful lot, but will you come?”

  “Seeing it’s you asking, the answer is yes. Give me the address.”

  She did, then wondered how long it’d take me to get there. I estimated a little less than three hours.

  Brooklyn Heights, just across the East River from Manhattan, is a sedate, expensive place to live, populated by many of the financial and municipal workers of Wall Street and the City Hall district on the other side of the river. The section extends from the waterfront to its main business area along Montague Street, which boasts enough craft shops and exotic restaurants to rival parts of Greenwich Village.

  Most of the streets of “the Heights” are venerable tree-lined affairs with little in the way of commerce. The houses include sidewalk-flush apartment buildings as well as lofty, older residences reachable only by climbing many steps. Starting out near the decayed elegance of the once-famous Prince George Hotel (now a chilly husk surmounting a grimy subway depot), walking west, one passes a profusion of subdued century-old-and-more homes subdivided into flats facing quaintly named streets like Orange, Cranberry, and Pineapple. Suddenly, the river appears hard by a stretch of costly real estate terraced above a long pedestrian promenade. From it, strollers contemplate the great sweep of Manhattan skyline curving south to the harbor where ferries and steamships sail past the Statue of Liberty.

  Florence McKinley’s apartment was in a steep, narrow building at the end of a walnut-clustered lane perpendicular to and overhanging the promenade. The last house on the corner, it was tall and dark and its rear windows sullenly surveyed the public walkway as if disapproving of its nearness.

  Long before I began watching her on “Riverday,” I knew about Florence McKinley. Her career began during TV’s so-called “golden years,” when she performed a specialty dance on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour. She was nine years old. Several other bookings followed (I especially remember seeing her on the old Abe Burrows program), and she soon graduated from variety entertainer to panelist on one of the first quiz shows.

  She grew along with the industry, but at eighteen, her mother pushed her into modeling and then dragged her to Hollywood, where Florence made a succession of mercifully obscure beach-blanket-and-bikini movies that did nothing to advance her status as an actress. By the time she was twenty, she’d disappeared into the wilderness of touring national companies, community summer stock and regional dinner theatres. As far as the television industry was concerned, she might never have existed.

  Yet nostalgia became fashionable rather soon in the TV medium, perhaps because of the profligacy of airing early shows only once or twice before retiring them to the musty stockpiles of history. Twelve years after her career ended, Florence McKinley returned from the hinterlands and won an Emmy for Best Supporting Actress in “Proud Beauty,” a WBS dramatic special. William Morris signed her up, she began doing guest shots on established weekly series, and her popped up frequently on both late-night and early A.M. talk shows. I saw her on one of the latter just after she’d turned down an offer to be second banana on a new primetime sitcom. The host wanted to know why. She wouldn’t give her reason, but did say that her priorities had shifted over the years. Security was now much more important to her than stardom.

  It soon became evident what she meant when the news appeared in TV Guide that she’d signed an unusually generous contract with Colson-Ames to play the role of a middle-aged matriarch on an as-yet-untitled daytime drama in preparation for WBS. Her decision elicited a certain amount of criticism for rejecting a costarring spot in primetime for the questionable honor of appearing in a lead on a soap opera in a part she was too young to play. Surprisingly, the usually acidulous Jess Brass rallied to her defense—“Give Florence McKinley credit for having the courage and foresight to deliberately choose a more challenging mature role when everyone’s telling her to capitalize on her good looks while she’s still got them.”

  The rumors began to circulate that the actress preferred more money to a bigger audience, that she was tightfisted and made extortionate demands of Colson-Ames, the producers of the new soap, “Riverday.”

  Maybe. It didn’t surprise me that she might elect to take a chance on a soap instead of a sitcom, the longevity probability was greater for the former kind of program. And even if she was hard-nosed with respect to fiscal matters, hadn’t more than a decade of shabby dressing rooms, low income, substandard fare, and the endless riding th
at comes with playing thin Broadway rejects in the heartland of America given her the right to cash in while she could? Suffering for the Muse appeals to adolescents, but winters are colder when you pass the three-decade marker and your circulation slows down.

  Time vindicated her. The sitcom died unlamented after half a season. “Riverday” continues five days a week, fifty-two lucrative weeks a year.

  I got out of my car and saw Lara standing in the doorway of the high old house, the porchlight silhouetting her against the darkness, her golden hair shimmering in and out of shadow.

  I waved and started across the street. She walked down the long, narrow flight of stone steps leading from front door to pavement I reached her when she was still a step above me. Our eyes met, she smiled and held out her hand and our fingertips too briefly brushed.

  “Gene,” she said, “I kept expecting you to call back and tell me you’d changed your mind. I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”

  “No chance. Damsels in distress are my favorite hobby. Besides, I don’t have Florence’s number. Now what’s this all about?”

  “It’s called calming down the star. I promised Ames she’d be in shape to tape tomorrow.”

  “Ames? Of Colson hyphen?”

  “Yes. Colson is dead. Joseph T. Ames is our sole producer.”

  “Well, what’s wrong with Florence? She still think someone is trying to frame her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anyone specific?”

  “She won’t say.” Lara touched my arm lightly. “It’s a nice night. Let’s walk down to the end of the street and look at the river.”

  We descended to the sidewalk and strolled beneath the gentle glow of the streetlamps. Walking beside Lara, I thought of other summer nights when I was younger, watching couples walking quiet roads sharing secrets I wished I had the courage to fathom, telling myself it’d all be easier when I was older. But it never was.

  “Hilary was right,” Lara said as we neared the promenade. “The police came this morning and questioned everyone, especially Florence. By the time they were through with her, Flo was too upset to work, so our shooting schedule is now a mess, and that’s one of the cardinal no-nos in our business.”

  “What makes her think she’s being set up to take the blame for Niven’s death?”

  “She hasn’t told me, Gene. Maybe she’ll go into that with you. My job is just to get her relaxed enough so she can go to sleep and report tomorrow morning on set Think you can help me with it?”

  “I’ll try. I still can’t figure why me, though.”

  “Because you’re the only detective I know. She wouldn’t let me call someone from the Yellow Pages.”

  “What would you have done if we hadn’t met? Get Hilary over here?”

  “Hardly. Florence distrusts most other women on principle. She and Hilary have met, and neither much cared for the experience. Even when I told Florence about you, I had to pretend we’d been friends for years.”

  “I see now. I’m a desperation measure.”

  “You certainly are not. And please, love, I have enough temperament upstairs to deal with.”

  “I wasn’t being serious. I was fishing for compliments.”

  She looked at me quizzically. “Ah? Such as?”

  “Such as you called me because I’ve been on your mind. I’ve certainly been thinking about you.”

  “You shouldn’t be.” Said softly with her eyes averted, her hand touching my sleeve. Behind Lara, the clustered globes of lights across the water hung suspended in space. A boat mourned its passage from the river into Upper Bay and far down the walkway the strains of “Weeping Willow” lilted sadly through an open window. Near us on the promenade, arm in arm, a young couple dressed in faded jeans strolled in the semigloom, ignoring all scenery but each other. An old man with that vaguely familiar look often encountered in elderly indigents huddled forlornly on a bench with his back to the river and owlishly watched the winking saffron lights of Brooklyn Heights. Close to me, Lara’s pupils glinted with the reflected glow of the distant shore. Her breath smelled sweet.

  “Gene,” she said, taking her hand away from my arm, “we’d better go inside.”

  She pushed the apartment door open and a fat tawny cat squeezed past and trotted into the hall. Lara put the key back in her pocket and smiled as the animal rubbed against my trouser legs. “That’s Rathbone. If he accepts you, Florence probably will.”

  I shook Rathbone’s paw and gently escorted him back into the apartment. Lara led me across a dark foyer to a large, disorderly, empty living room. “I’ll go tell milady you’re here.” Lara left me alone to examine the chaos that was home to Florence McKinley.

  Everywhere I turned I saw enormous clutter. Tattered manuscripts teetered precariously on two flimsy card tables, sheet music dangled from a black metal stand, one wall of bookshelves was mostly filled with dog-eared paperbacks and saddle-stapled Dramatists Play Service scripts. An old lace shawl hung neglectfully over the back of a dusty overstuffed gray sofa. LP albums—musicals, operas, masses, oratorios, spoken word discs and plays—lined one long baseboard; above them, innumerable stacked cassette cartridges barricaded a combination phonograph/FM/cassette tape recorder. Its dust cover was littered with loose file cards, a pen, a pair of scissors, a roll of Scotch tape and an FM program guide.

  The machine was on. A cassette revolved within. From the speakers sounded the nervous scherzo of the Brahms piano trio in B, its vaguely sinister motif echoing again and again, fragmented and recombined by frenetic strings that filled the empty room with an air of ominous anticipation.

  As my eyes ticked off the chamber’s inventory in swift professional reconnaissance, I saw, in a corner by the great picture window overlooking promenade and river, the only neat well-cared-for object in the place besides the cat: a gigantic aquarium, easily one hundred gallons capacity, fitted with a breathtaking miniaturization of a Medieval European village complete with shops, streets and a lofty mountain bridge leading to an ornate baronial manor carved with intricate detailing. But the diorama paled before the magnificence of the goldfish swimming in, around, past and through its nooks and recesses. A gorgeous profusion of colors, patterns, and shapes distinguished the many varieties...comets, ordinaries, fantails, nymphs, veiltails, calicos, shubunkins, and lionheads. One odd breed of piscine acrobat was brand-new to me. Its mode of navigation was so unusual it practically turned the creature into a living hoop. I bent over and squinted to see it more clearly.

  “It’s a tumbler, I had him imported. Please don’t smear the glass.”

  I turned, startled that I hadn’t heard the illustrious Florence McKinley enter the room.

  I’d expected her to be distraught, but she was putting on a good act of being in control. Tall, cool, aloof, she was slim and sleek in a long tan at-home robe that draped her slender figure and fell nearly to the floor, stopping just above tiny feet encased in white slippers. She extended her hand to me, smiling distantly, a queen acknowledging the presence of an ardent commoner. Damned if I didn’t fall into the expected role and raise her fingers to my lips.

  She had the poise and containment of a fashion model. Her brown hair was carefully arranged in an upswept mass of curls, no strand out of place. Dark steady eyes. Her crimson lips, full and slightly parted, had a gloss that diverted my attention from her heavily rouged cheeks. She had Kate Hepburn bone structure and all the planes of her tapered down to a firm chin unparenthesized by jowls. On first glance, she seemed as I remembered her...the glamorous Florence McKinley of early television rather than the homey Martha Jennett of “Riverday.” But as my gaze lingered on her features, my eyes saw more than I wanted: the base coat minimizing tiny lines puckering the skin at her temples, the gray lusterless hair near the roots, the mottling that small blue veins worked beneath her eyes and at the tip of her nose.

  Yet it was still an arresting, scored but not yet effaced by time. Her eyes held mine, studying and evaluating what they saw. Looking down, s
he noticed her tubby cat rubbing against my legs. She smiled more warmly than before.

  “A man who likes goldfish and is liked, in turn, by Rathbone has much to recommend him. Rathbone is very choosy about the company he keeps. Come, sit and talk to me.” She sat on the sofa and patted the cushion next to her. I did as she bid and Lara chose an armchair across from us, an overstuffed green affair that threatened to envelop her like an amoeba.

  We passed a few moments in obligatory politeness. I reinforced the fiction that Lara and I had known each other for years. Our host’s arch looks implied our friendship was more than casual, or was so once.

  We talked of felines and fish. She said her aquarium cost $450 used, her tumbler ran close to $200 new, that she bought all her accessories in lower Manhattan, that her cat adopted her in Indiana while she played a supporting role in a touring version of Ouida Rathbone’s unjustly obscure Sherlock Holmes, written especially for her husband, Basil.

  Lara glanced at her watch more than once. As soon as I could, I brought up the problem of Ed Niven’s death. Florence McKinley’s animation immediately disappeared. Her shoulders slumped, her flood of chatter ebbed away, her pale hands stopped in midgesture and came to rest on her lap. She looked down dully at them. I realized the poise she’d put on to greet me was all pose.

  “I’m sorry I’m going to have to ask things you must have had to deal with this morning, but it’s absolutely essential I know at least as much as the police if I’m going to be of any use.”

  She nodded. “Go ahead. First question?”

  “Where were you when Niven fell?”

  “Here. At home.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “No.”

  “Think hard. Did you leave your house at any time Saturday? Could a neighbor, a local shopkeeper testify you were in the vicinity?”

  She shook her head. “Lately, I’ve had more than the usual number of script pages to learn, they’ve been using me quite heavily on the show. Saturday I was busy all day with my part. I never left the apartment”