Mission accomplished.
“Why, of course you can!” she said, brown eyes beaming with vanity and pride. Her mood had turned on a dime. “Got anything to write with?”
I opened my purse and shuffled through the contents, deliberately ignoring the pad and pencil I carry with me always. “Oh, no!” I wailed, doing a swell imitation of Anna Karenina right before she throws herself in front of a train. “I must have left my pen at home!”
“Oh, that’s okay, sweetie,” Rhonda cooed. “We have one in the lounge. Some paper, too.” She turned and wiggled her happy, ivory satin-sheathed hips back through the door she’d just exited, motioning for us to follow.
THE “LOUNGE,” AS RHONDA HAD CALLED it, was nothing but a windowless room furnished with one dressing table, a few chairs, and three folding cots. One of the cots was open and sloppily covered with a white sheet; the other two were closed and rolled against one wall. There were several floor lamps in the room, but only one was turned on, giving off a dim yellow light that made everything look murky. Clothes, underwear, towels, magazines, full ashtrays, and dirty coffee cups were scattered all over the place. The room was cool, praise the Lord (or, rather, the saint who invented air-conditioning), yet the smell of sweat was strong.
Rhonda walked over to the dressing table and started rummaging through the stuff that littered its surface. “Cripes! There was a pen here just this morning,” she said, sweeping makeup sponges, eyebrow pencils, combs, brushes, lipsticks, and dirty Q-Tips from one place to another. “Where the hell did it disappear to? I used it to write down a slew of phone messages for Gray, and I… Oh, here it is!” she squeaked, “hiding behind the cold cream!”
She snatched up the pen, then bent over and grabbed a tablet of paper off the floor. “What’s your name, honey?” she asked, walking toward the middle of the room where I was standing, flipping over several pages of scribbles (
Gray’s phone messages? I wondered) to get to a clean sheet. “You want this made out to you, right?”
“Uh… yes… that would be nice, please.” I was so focused on watching the action unfold I almost forgot what I was supposed to be there for. “You can make it out to Phoebe Starr,” I said, dredging up an old alias I’d used several times before. (My ridiculous real name was hardly well-known, but it was entirely too memorable to mention. And I was in no mood to be laughed at.) “That’s Starr,” I repeated, “with two r’s.”
“Got it,” Rhonda said, sticking the tip of her tongue between (and quite a bit beyond) her lips as she wrote. Then she signed her name with a flourish, ripped the whole sheet off the pad, and handed it to me. “And what about you, sister?” she said to Abby. “You want one, too?”
I froze. What would Abby do now? Would she be a good girl and accept Rhonda’s offer of an autograph, or would her true personality break loose and blow our carefully planned cover to smithereens?
“Yes, please,” Abby said, fluttering her lashes and panting like an overheated sheepdog. “I’d simply love to have your signature. Just your name will do. It would make my pitiful, lonely, and hopeless life complete.”
I cringed. Would Rhonda pick up on the contempt in Abby’s voice? Would Abby’s belligerent, legs-apart, arms-folded posture lead Rhonda to realize that we were both just blowing air up her skirt?
Nope. Looking as satisfied as a cat with a saucer of cream, Rhonda blithely signed her name to the paper, tore the sheet off the tablet, and handed it over it to Abby. “It’s all yours, sis,” she said, tossing the pen and the pad down on the mattress of the open cot. “Better keep it in a safe place. It’ll be worth big money someday.”
“Oh, I know right where I’m going to put it,” Abby said, curling her lips in a nasty smile. She didn’t actually say the words “trash can,” but you could tell that was what she was thinking.
“Thank you so much, Rhonda!” I jumped in, hoping she wouldn’t notice Abby’s scornful expression. (She didn’t. Instead of looking at Abby, she was looking at herself in the mirror.) “We really do appreciate this! And we can’t wait to tell Gray we met you. Is he here now? Can you tell us where to find him? We want to congratulate him on his fab performance last night.”
“Yeah, you and everybody else, honey,” she grumbled, sitting down at the dressing table and looking at me in the mirror’s reflection. “The phone at the end of the hall’s been ringing off the hook all day. And I had to go out and answer it, and take down all of Gray’s messages, because he never bothered to show up! If you don’t believe me, take a look in the men’s lounge next door. He’s not there! He didn’t even call in. Can you believe that? One stupid night on stage and he’s acting like a freaking superstar!” Rhonda snatched up a hairbrush and started yanking it through her platinum fluff.
“You know what else?” she rattled on. “He didn’t come in for Thursday’s show, either. And that was before his goddamn dazzling debut. I had to take down a bunch of messages for him that night, too. What am I, his freaking secretary?”
“Well, it’s very nice of you to do that for Gray,” I said, just to keep the ball rolling. “I’m sure he’s very grateful.”
“Ha!” she scoffed. “That’s a laugh and a half. He was so busy taking bows last night, he never even looked at the messages to see who called. That’s how grateful he is!” She angrily tossed the hairbrush back down on the cluttered table. “And I’ll tell you something else. If our director, Mr. Kazan, ever finds out Gray wasn’t here Thursday or for the matinee today, he’ll fire him on the spot. An understudy has to be in the house for every single performance, no matter what!”
Even if he’s dead? I muttered to myself.
“Gray better show up for tonight’s show,” Rhonda went on, “or I’m going to report him myself. He can’t disappear whenever he feels like it. It’s not fair!” She spun around on her stool and then suddenly, out of the blue, took a long, cold, appraising look at both Abby and me. “Hey, what are you two pretending to be? What’s with the makeup and the sporty little outfits? Is your acting class working on a scene from
Picnic?”
“Good guess,” I replied, “but actually we’re crowd scene extras in
Bus Stop. It’s playing right across the street. We dashed over here the minute the matinee ended, hoping to catch Gray before he left the theater. That’s why we’re still in costume-we didn’t have time to change.”
“What a crock!” Rhonda said. “You’re really asking for it, you know!”
“For what?” I asked, getting nervous.
“For trouble, sister. And I mean big trouble.”
“Why? What are you talking about?” I was on the verge of panic now. Had Rhonda heard me and Abby arguing-and discussing the murder-out in the hall before? Did she know that everything we’d said and done since then had been a big fat act? Had she guessed our real reason for being there, and then put on a big fat act of her own?
“Don’t play the ingenue with me, honey!” Rhonda exclaimed. “You know darn well that all cast members of all Broadway shows are forbidden to wear their costumes in the street. That’s totally against the rules! And don’t say you didn’t have time to change, either. That’s a complete crock. You’re supposed to make the time, no matter what. So, you know what I say? I say you and your sour-faced sidekick over there have broken one of the most basic laws of Broadway-and you ought to be fired for it!”
Whew. Is that all? For a lowly understudy, Rhonda sure took her job (and everybody else’s!) seriously. I was staring at the floor, trying to think up a good excuse for Abby’s and my bad Broadway behavior, when a very soft, muted tinkling sound seeped into the lounge and captured my attention.