“I don’t know. It isn’t tapped by me, if that’s what you mean. It’s possible that the man in those pictures has tapped it already, although it is not probable. What is, is that he’ll tap it soon.”
“I was thinking of your pet cop,” Cassie said.
“He may have, though I doubt it. I think it’s much more likely that he talked to Sharon Bench — or that Sharon talked to him.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.” Small white teeth nibbled at Cassie’s lower lip. “I didn’t know she knew him.”
“He’s a detective lieutenant and she’s a reporter. It would be surprising if they did not know each other. You called Sharon and asked about me. Didn’t it occur to you that when you had hung up Sharon might call others to try to get more information for you?”
“No. It should have. How did you get him to pick me up for you?”
“By telling him the truth. I told him that I thought I knew who had committed a crime he’s investigating. I named the man, and said that I was trying to locate him. As I am. I asked him to help me, promising to help him in return, as I have in the past. Do you want his name? I’m afraid I haven’t memorized his badge number.”
“No. I want — are you going to tell me the truth?”
Gideon nodded. “If I can, yes.”
“Good. Where are you taking me?”
“Back to your apartment.”
Cassie glanced at her watch. “I’ll need to get a cab to the theater before long.”
“I may be able to drive you. There’s something in your apartment I need to show you. After I do, you and I will have to talk a little more.”
“We won’t have much time. I hope you realize that our romance is going to be all over town after five o’clock.”
For a moment, Gideon’s eyes left the traffic ahead. “As fast as that? In a newspaper?”
“Not in the Sun-Trib. That won’t hit the streets till tomorrow, but Sharon does a gossip spot on Channel Three. It’s the same company that owns her paper. Want to watch in my apartment?”
“I do indeed.” Gideon was smiling.
“You want everybody talking about us?”
“Correct.” He nodded emphatically. “Fundamentally, there are two ways to find a man, Miss Casey. One is to go looking for him. The other is to have him come looking for you.”
“Okay...”
“I’ve tried the first, and failed. Now you and I are trying the second.”
“This is the man that cop wants, isn’t it? And it’s the man in those pictures.”
Gideon nodded.
In the elevator he said, “I want you to go into your apartment. Shut the door, but don’t lock it. When I knock in a minute or two, let me in.”
“What are you up to, Dr. Chase?”
“I want to see whether your neighbors have come home, that’s all.”
“They’re on vacation.”
The elevator stopped, its doors sliding open. He motioned urgently, and Cassie stepped out and unlocked the door of her apartment, entered, and shut it behind her. A moment later, she heard his loud knock at the door of 3B.
JIMMY’S smile fairly glowed as he opened the stage door for her. Jimmy was at least sixty, probably nearer seventy; he always smiled, but Cassie had never seen him smile quite so warmly.
She smiled back. “Everything all right, Jimmy?”
His smile widened. “Everything’s fine now that you’re here, Miss Casey.”
Her tiny dressing room seemed to be exactly as it had been the night before. Was the phone tapped? Was the room bugged? Cassie decided that the answers were no and yes. No, because there was no phone. Yes, because there were roaches.
Quite a lot of them, really; but everybody knew that it was the fly on the wall that spied on you. The roaches hid till you went to sleep, so they could raid your peanut butter.
By the middle of the first act, she had been in the wings for ten minutes at least, peering out at the audience (the lack thereof, really) through the spy hole and more than prepared to make her entrance as Veronica’s dearest friend, Mildred. The usual lines spoken in response to the usual cues from the usual people.
Except that when she stepped out onstage something was very different...
A lot of things, really. The theater was the same and the play was the same, but...
For one thing, Alexis Cabana was looking daggers at her. The eyes above that mocking smile wanted to kill, and that was utterly and completely new.
For another, Bruce Sandoz’s eyes were devouring her alive. He was (his eyes declared) a famished lion. She was a strawberry ice cream cone. When he licked his lips, Cassie wrote and underlined a mental sticky to lock her dressing-room door.
For a third, the play had become far more serious and real, a real life — hers — watched not at all strangely by several hundred people sitting in the dark. A real life (still hers) in which she herself was the center of every silent watcher’s attention.
Brad Kingsley was determined that he and Jane Simmons would tour the moons of Jupiter in his new hopper on their honeymoon; while she, knowing all they risked, was equally determined to stop them. Sorrow, fear, and determination poured from her lips unbidden, a triple stream that filled the theater with wailing ghosts and the echoing threats of drums.
She stole a glance at the audience while Brad was arguing and stamping around. A second-row seat that had been empty a minute before was occupied now — occupied by a big soft-faced man who wore glasses.
A man she knew at once.
When she had exited, she used the peephole again. Reis was no longer in the audience. Had she imagined him?
SEURAT strangled her — Act Two, Scene Two — and she lay gasping and trembling on the darkened stage until he helped her rise and supported her as he led her into the wings. In real life, Donny Duke was small and swishy and reeked of Nuit de Marseilles; but Cassie clung to him until he had to leave to take his bow.
There was a scattering of polite applause.
Hers came after his. “And now,” India Dempster’s voice echoed from the walls, “Mildred Norcott, Kingsport’s own Cassie Casey!” The applause rose as surf rises when a storm races toward the coast. In less than half a minute it was thunder. A man stood up, and another, and another. Women were rising as well, smiling and clapping. Someone was slamming something hard against the back of a seat. Somewhere a woman with a fine, strong contralto called, “Brava! Oh, brava!”
Cassie bowed and bowed again, and fled to the wings, only to be grappled by Mickey, the stage manager, and thrust out onstage once more.
At last it was over. Bruce Sandoz came out, the roar subsided, and the audience resumed its seats. By the time Alexis took her bow, the theater seemed almost silent.
The tiny, dirty dressing room that Cassie had always detested had become a place of refuge. She shut and bolted the door and sat down before the smeared mirror, ignoring both burned-out bulbs.
The woman who stared back at her was herself — was her true self, and not the foreign and slightly shoddy knockoff who had looked at her from a thousand other mirrors. “I am me,” she said, and only afterward realized she had spoken aloud. Before the mirror, she removed her stage makeup and combed and brushed her hair. That done, she stripped and practically bathed in her favorite cologne, a baptism of the new self by the new self: a ritual cleansing in Lily Delight performed while someone tapped very softly at her door.
When it was complete she called, “Just a minute! I have to put on a robe.”
With the robe in place and securely tied, she opened the door.
“Miss Casey.” A small, gray woman smiled hesitantly, bobbing her head. “You don’t know me, but I’m — ”
“You’re Margaret, Alexis’s dresser.”