Peter Spiegelman - Red Cat

“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.”

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.