Stuart Kaminsky - Show Business is Murder

“Thought you’d never ask,” the playwright said. He got to his feet, picked up his script.

“Don’t you know the lines?” the director said ironically.

“I’m familiar with them. I haven’t memorized them. Or the blocking.”

The playwright scampered up the steps on the side of the stage, took his place with the other actors.

“All right, Mr. Hastings. What are you doing?”

“I’m alone on stage, waiting for Emily to enter.”

The cop hopped down from the stage, turned to the director, said, “It’s all yours.”

The director seemed slightly disconcerted to find himself running the show. I guess he’d assumed the cop was going to do it. But after a moment he said, “All right. Let’s treat this as a real rehearsal. We can certainly use it. Stanley, Charlotte has just exited stage left, you watch her go out, and…”

I watched her go out, whistled to myself, then strolled over to the mantlepiece and adjusted the trophies on it. This being nowhere near the dress rehearsal, the mantle and trophies were yet to come. I pantomimed them, then turned at the sound of footsteps, expecting to see Emily.

Instead it was the playwright, with his script, reading the Fletcher Greengrass part.

“Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Things come full cycle. More often than not. Or so it seems. And what’s she to you but a casual fling.”

He put his hand on my shoulder. I brushed it off.

“Do you recall those words?” he went on. “Uttered many times, I’m sure. On many occasions, about many different women. Like those trophies you were perusing. Chalk up one more.”

He snatched the samovar, our one lone prop, from the downstage table. “And the award for the most ignominious, self-serving, egotistical, manipulative matinee idol, goes to…”

He turned and handed me the silver samovar.

It was time for my big speech. The one the dead Fletcher Greengrass had dorked me out of. The one I’d feared I’d never get a chance to play.

I was getting another crack at it now.

I didn’t take it.

“Hold on,” I said. “That’s not what happened.”

The cop turned to the director. “Is that true?”

“It’s basically what happened.” The director looked up at me. “What are you getting at?”

“Yeah, what do you mean?” the cop asked.

“That’s not when he gave me the samovar. It’s not the same line.”

“It’s the line in the script,” the director said. “Did you give it to him on, ‘manipulative matinee idol goes to…’?” he asked the playwright.

“Yes, I did.”

“Yes, you did,” I said. “But Fletcher Greengrass didn’t. He said something else entirely.”

“Right,” the playwright said. “He was paraphrasing his lines because he wasn’t using his script.”

I shook my head. “He was paraphrasing his lines, all right. But it had nothing to do with his script. He’d been paraphrasing them from the first day of rehearsal. Even when he was using his script. What he said today was a lot closer to what he’d been saying in rehearsal than to what you just read.

“Which had to be very frustrating. You finally get your first play produced. It’s only community theater with amateur actors, but even so. People will see it. People will hear your words.

“Only they won’t. Because all those nice verbal constructions, that must have been a labor of love, that had to be the reason you wrote the play in the first place, they’re never gonna be heard. Because Fletcher Greengrass is gonna say any damn thing he feels like right up to and including performance.

“The director can’t do anything. He won’t take direction. He’s a loose cannon, wrecking your play.

“He must be stopped.

“Lucky for you, Fletcher Greengrass is the type of man people hate. He’s involved with the two women in the production, he’s belittling my acting ability, you can bet he dumped on Dean. So if you can just kill him onstage during rehearsal, in the midst of all those actors, while you’re out in the audience, it would be the perfect crime.

“So, how’d you do it?

“Easy.

“Fletcher Greengrass was stuck with a poison pin. Where’d the pin stick him? According to the doc, right in the hand. Yes, where I could have easily done it during the scene, but I didn’t. Nor was he stuck by anyone backstage before he came on.

“No, he delivered his line and grabbed the samovar. The pin was wedged in the handle, sticking out. He pricked himself with the poison, handed the samovar to me, and fell over dead. The pin fell to the floor, where it was discovered later by the detective processing the crime scene.”

I shook my head pityingly at the playwright. “You’re going down for murder. But if it’s any consolation, you got to play your scene. Just now, in front of all of us. And you were good. You did a good reading. With all the right lines. The way it should be done.”

The playwright stood there, on stage, tears streaming down his cheeks. He offered no resistence when the detective handcuffed him and led him away.

“YOU MIGHT HAVEtold me it was him,” the cop complained.

“I didn’t know for sure until we ran the scene.”

“How’d you know then?”

“Easy. He may not look the part, but his line reading was right on the money. Those were the words he wanted said, in the manner he wanted to say them. I’d never heard them before, and I never would while Fletcher Greengrass played the part.”

“He really killed him for a bad performance?”

“Basically. I’m sure Fletcher being an arrogant creep didn’t hurt.”

“I suppose it made it easier.” The cop grimaced. “Even so, I’m going to have trouble selling this to the prosecutor. Some motive. I’m mean, killing a guy for changing the lines he wrote. Can you imagine someone doing that?”

I chuckled ironically. I’ve done some writing myself, and I once had a screenplay produced. So I had no problem answering the question.

“Oh, yeah.”

I WILL BURYCameron at the top of the hill. Under his favorite elm tree. Solid bronze hardware on a casket that costs almost as much as the candy-apple-red Jaguar he lusted over before settling for the Volvo and the minivan.

His partners will litigate right up till the moment the service starts over who should deliver the eulogy. Agonize over the script until the words achieve perfection.

Hardly a secret what the winner dares not mention. Not a whisper of how Cameron slept with each and every partner’s wife except Henrietta. Not even her very own husband did that except maybe once. The boy looks exactly like him.

There won’t be bragging about how Cameron racked up more billable hours than the rest of the partners combined and still managed to play golf three afternoons a week. Not a word about the late nights and nearly dawn sessions trying to keep the firm’s most famous clients out of the headlines. Cameron was a master at cleaning up, covering up, making sure witnesses never dared sell their stories to the tabloids.

The Entertainment Tonight crew will walk away without the prize soundbites. Not a word about Cameron’s collection of conquests. No mention of the aging beauty queen with the face of a twenty-year-old whose body made Cameron laugh as he tortured me with details of their weekend together. The tiny blonde with braces is perfectly safe. She can go right on playing the innocent teen on her weekly series. Nobody will ever know what she and all the cookie-cutter starlets like her did with Cameron. Nobody but me.

Will the triumphant partner say Cameron was a good husband, a loving father? Lie with words as well as silence?