Evan Hunter: Romance

Johnny Milton — his entire name was John Milton Hicks, but he had shortened it to just plain Johnny Milton, which he thought sounded snappier for an agent — was lying naked in bed beside Michelle on this rainy Sunday night, listening intently to her plight because he was almost a hundred percent certain that the first starring role he’d landed for her since the orphan gig was in a play that would be heading south the night after it opened. The theatrical doomsayers here in this city had already mutated the title from Romance to No Chance, a certain harbinger of failure. Johnny was worried. He became even more worried as Michelle recited some of the lines she had to say in the scene where the squadroom detective gets all excited about having seen her on Law & Order.

“I mean,” Michelle said, “this is supposed to be a precinct in New York’s theater district, Midtown North, Midtown South, what ever the hell they call it. So why is he wetting his pants over meeting a person had a bit part on Law & Order? Also, suppose Law & Order goes off by the time the play opens? If it opens. We make a reference to a TV show isn’t even on anymore, it’ll make us look like ancient history. If you want my honest opinion, Johnny, I think this play stinks on ice. You want to know what this play is? This play is something Freddie should’ve written for television, is what this play is. A movie of the week is what this play is. A piece of shit is what this play is, excuse my French.”

Johnny tended to agree with her.

“I open in this play,” Michelle went on, gathering steam, “I’ll be back doing dinner theater two weeks later. Make it two days later. If you can even book me ever again. I mean, really, John, who cares about the girl in this play, who cares if she gets to perform on opening night? Because you want to know something? The other play stinks, too, the play within the play, whatever the hell Freddie calls it, the play they’re supposed to be rehearsing. It’s even worse than the real play. He’ll get two Tonys for worst play of the year, the one he wrote and the one the playwright in his play wrote. How did I manage to get stuck in two lousy plays is what I’d like to know?”

Johnny was wondering what they could do to salvage this deplorable situation.

“Also, I think you should know Mark’s been playing a little grab-ass backstage,” Michelle said.

Mark Riganti. The actor playing a character named the Detective, who nearly faints with joy when the character named the Actress tells him she’s been on Law & Order. Mark was not a very good actor. Take a lousy play— two lousy plays, as Michelle had pointed out — add a lousy actor and a lousy actress in the leading roles, and what you’ve got is trouble. Though Johnny couldn’t fault Mark for groping Michelle backstage, which he himself was beginning to do at this very moment, albeit in bed.

“I’ll ask Morgenstern to talk to him,” he said.

“Lot of good that’ll do,” Michelle said. “He was there first.”

Johnny sighed heavily.

The trouble with Michelle — aside from her being a not very good actress who never could dance and who no longer possessed a very good singing voice — was that men could not keep their hands off her. Women, too, to hear her tell it. At least in Ohio, one time. The trouble was her looks were too damn distracting. People, men and women, tended to forget that someone who looked the way Michelle did could possibly be a good actress, which she wasn’t, anyway. Being so sumptuously endowed would have been a failing at any time, unless a girl wanted to play bimbos or hookers for the rest of her life, a not insignificant ambition for many actresses Johnny had known and incidentally slept with. But coming out of your dress in a role that called for the actress to recite lines like “This is the world’s noblest calling” could he something of an impediment in a play where the girl’s extraordinary talent is rewarded with stardom due to her courage, dedication and perseverance.

After getting stabbed, that is.

The plot of Freddie’s play revolved around the Actress getting stabbed by some crazy person whose identity is never made entirely clear because Freddie felt that resolving the mystery would cheapen the play. Freddie had more exalted interests in mind. Like exploring the concept of giving one’s all for one’s art, for example. The dedication of the Actress in his play was intended as a sly reference to the play’s title, in that her true romance is with the theater, which she loves from “the very depths of her soul,” as she puts it in a memorable soliloquy premised on the corniest scene in Chorus Line. In his play, Freddie loved to ponder the significance of even the tiniest creative act as opposed to the worthlessness of mundane matters like earning a living or feeding a family. Freddie’s Romance was a “play of ideas,” as he was fond of telling Kendall. Contrarily, Kendall felt the play was far too “mysterious” and not quite “serious” enough.

Neither of them seemed to understand something Johnny had known from the first time he’d ever read a crime novel: there ain’t no way you can turn a murder mystery into a silk purse. That’s because the minute somebody sticks a knife in somebody else, all attention focuses on the victim, and all you want to know is whodunit.

Which isn’t such a bad idea, he thought.

Focusing attention on the victim.

BECAUSE SHE DID A LITTLE DOPE EVERY NOW AND THEN, SHE was never comfortable around cops anyhow. She knew this had to be done, coming here this afternoon, but just approaching a police station made her nervous. Gave her the willies just seeing those big green globes with the numerals 87 on them, one hanging on each side of the tall wooden entrance doors, each one screaming “Cop! Cop!” And sure enough, a real live cop in a blue uniform was standing at the top of the steps just to the right of the doors, looking her over as she climbed the steps, and fumbled with the brass knob, and opened the door. She smiled at him as if she’d just killed her mother with a hatchet.

Where she was when she stepped through the door was inside a big, noisy, high-ceilinged room with a lot of uniformed cops milling around, and a high wooden desk on her right, with a brass rail in front of it about waist high, and a sign on the counter stating ALL VISITORS MUST STATE BUSINESS. There were two more uniformed cops behind the desk, one of them drinking coffee from a cardboard container. A clock behind the desk read ten minutes past four. The rain had stopped, but it was still pretty brisk for April, and the room seemed chillier somehow than it did outside, maybe because there were no windows in it or maybe because it was full of cops. She stepped up to the desk, cleared her throat, and said to the one drinking coffee, “My name is Michelle Cassidy, I’d like to talk to a detective, please.

“Kling wondered if Deputy Chief Surgeon Sharyn Everard Cooke had ever been inside a detective squadroom. You worked here at the Eight-Seven long enough, you began believing everybody in the entire city had been here before, everybody knew precisely what it looked like, down to the tiniest fingernail scraping. But he couldn’t imagine Sharyn’s job taking her anywhere near the outer reaches of the solar system here, which he sometimes felt the 87th Precinct was. A planet devoid of anything but the basest form of animal life, an airless, sunless, apple-green void where nothing ever changed, everything remained always and ever exactly the same.