I raced through my speech and managed to finish it just as the second-act rehearsal was ending. I told the Kiwanis group they were welcome to come up and watch the third act when they finished discussing my speech and then raced upstairs just in time to greet my cast as they came offstage.
“Did it go all right?” they wanted to know. “How did it look from here?”
“Fine, fine,” I told them. “It was very moving. Keep up the good work.”
“Can’t you make those Boy Scouts stop throwing spit balls at us?” Rusty wanted to know. “It’s disconcerting.”
“They sure didn’t act like Boy Scouts when I came onstage,” Lolly added. “I think they’re a bunch of undersized sex fiends!”
“Boys will be boys,” I answered both of them.
“Shay, Powers, you’re ’sponsible for cleanin’ up them spitballs!” My friend the custodian was back. From the looks of him he’d “confiscated” every last drop of Cass Novak’s liquor. “I ain’t gonna clean that mess,” he added.
“It’ll be taken care of,” I sighed.
“Why the hell didn’t you pick your chin up?” Phil Anders voice was loud and he was glowering at Cleo. “I was supposed to kiss you.” He turned to me. “Did you see that, Vance? I was trying to pry it up with all my strength and I couldn’t budge it.” He turned back to Cleo. “What the hell was the big idea?”
“Be quiet,” she muttered. “I didn’t want you to kiss me, that’s why. Nick’s jealous enough. If I let you kiss me, he might have jumped up onstage and started taking you apart.”
“But it’s part of the play,” Phil protested.
“After that tape, I didn’t want to take any more chances. Now shut up. Here comes Nick again.”
Nick had the tape recorder again and he was bearing down on me angrily. But before he reached me, he was elbowed out of the way by a middle-aged Amazon whose determination was even greater than his. I’m a pretty tall man, but the lady was right up there with me as she started her harangue. *
“I understand your name is Powers and you’re the man in charge here. My name is Mrs. Barker and I represent the Pine Glen Women’s Society for Decent Literature. We’re supposed to be meeting here at ten o’c1ock. How dare you people impose on our time?”
“Powers! That second act doesn’t have anything in it about girdles! How stupid do you think I am?” Nicholas Taurus spluttered.
“You’re interrupting me, my good man!” Mrs. Barker brushed him aside. “Now I want this hall cleared for our meeting, Mr. Powers. I’ll give you five minutes!” She wheeled on her heels and started marching away.
“Just a minute, Mrs. Barker,” I pleaded. “Please. Just hear me out.”
“Very well.”
“Nobody’s gonna pin horns" on me, Powers!”
“Please, Nick, just wait.” I turned back to Mrs. Barker. “Certainly a group such as yours must have a deep interest in culture,” I told her.
“Well, naturally--”
“You ladies, I’m sure, have an appreciation of the arts.”
“We certainly do.”
“I was sure you did, Mrs. Barker. That’s why I was going to suggest that you stay and see the last act of our play.”
“But our meeting—”
“Culture, blah-blah-gobbledygook-blah,” I told Mrs. Barker. “Creativity, babble-babble-doubletalk-blah,” I pointed out earnestly. “Art, mumbo-jumbo-stuff-‘n’-nonsense-blah,” I pleaded earnestly. “Community-blah, tradition-blah, ethnic-blah, awareness-blah, classic-blah, and more blah.” I finally convinced her.
“You’re right, Mr. Powers,” she agreed. “The ladies owe it to themselves to see this work of art in which you’re engaged. I’ll go and tell them to be seated.”
“That was pretty sweet talking, Powers,” Nicholas Taurus piped up when Mrs. Barker had departed. “But you’re not going to put me off that way! Now you sit down and listen to this tape and tell me it has anything to do with your play.”
“All right,” I agreed. “All right. But we’ll have to take it downstairs somewhere. The third act has to go on now. Places everyone,” I called. “Curtain.” I hefted it up and as the actors started delivering their opening lines I allowed Nick Taurus to drag me out the back exit to hear the rest of the tape.
It was an eye-opener all right -- but not the way Nick Taurus meant it to be. First there was a replay of the bit where Cleo and Phil had strayed from the play into the dialogue about girdles and the density of husbands. After that came some more dialogue with Phil pitching hot and strong and Cleo alternately teasing him to egg him on and then fending him off just as it sounded like he was about to score. The most damning thing about the tape from Nick’s point of view was probably the long silences with only the sounds of heavy breathing.
“That’s all there is.” Nicholas switched off the tape. “The rest is just some nonsense Phil was telling her about his business.”
I perked up my ears at that, but I had to cope with first things first. And the first thing was to cool Nick down before he murdered two of my lead players before the show could be put on the boards for a paying audience. It wasn’t easy. He was pretty mad.
“Improvisation,” I told him. “Stanislavsky.” I launched into a long doubletalk improv of my own. I talked earnestly for a long time. “It mostly relates to the third act,” I told him. “And if you weren’t such a hothead, you’d be seeing it for yourself right now. Mind you, I don’t say that’s the actual dialogue. But it is fairly typical of a pair of actors preparing themselves by capturing the mood for the performance.”
He was only half convinced, but finally he went back out front to catch the last part of the third act to see if it really had the relevance I said it had. I knew it didn’t, but the play was so damn obscure anyway that I figured there was a fifty-fifty chance Nick might read the relevance into it for himself. If not, I’d just tell him it must have been the part he missed.
After he’d gone I turned on the tape again. I wanted to hear what Phil had told Cleo about business. This was the portion I mentioned before, the part that opened my eyes.
What happened was that Cleo had managed to turn off Phi1’s ardor by drawing him into a conversational rapport. She’d drawn him out on the sudden windfall his business seemed to be providing, the windfall which-—although it wasn’t mentioned on the tape-—must have been paying for the expensive gifts he’d been buying her. Phil was frank to the point of foolishness.
As Cleo had told me, Phil was an insurance adjustor. His recent riches stemmed from kickbacks he’d been taking from claimants and contractors. In particular, he’d been making deals with an electrical supply house among others. When he was sent out to check claims stemming from fires, Phil would over-figure the electrical fixtures and wiring and then take a kickback from the supply house. And this particular supply house was headed up by none other than Roger Roundheels, Rusty’s husband!
Phil told Cleo he was going to pack Roger in, though, because Roger took too much of a split off the top. Tax-free, Phil told Cleo, it had added up to enough for Roger to supply Rusty with the money to redecorate their home. So now I knew the source of both Phil’s and Rusty’s sudden wealth, and it left me no closer to the CIA’s missing fifty grand than I’d been before.
On the tape Phil even explained why he’d been rifling my desk that night. It seems Cleo had mentioned something to him about my interest in his finances, and that had aroused his suspicion. Phil had become frightened that I might be an investigator assigned by his own company to check on him. He knew I was a lawyer and they frequently used lawyers to investigate fraud. So he’d been looking for some proof of his suspicions the night I’d found him in my house.