“Right. A real shame, Eric. You should have met her.”
Ken Forrest came in promptly. He looked to be in his middle twenties, about six feet tall, with crew-cut black hair and a solemn expression. Sondgard motioned at the chair across the table, and Forrest silently sat down. Sondgard switched on the tape recorder and intoned, “Preliminary questioning of Ken Forrest. Is that Kenneth?”
“Yes, sir.” His voice was soft, almost inaudible. He watched Sondgard intently, his eyes never shifting for a second.
“Speak a little louder, please.”
“I’m sorry, sir. Yes, my name is Kenneth.”
“And your permanent address?”
“Three Ninety-two West Fifteenth Street, New York City. Apartment Three-B.”
“This is your first year at this theater, is it not?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Could you give me a brief history of yourself up till this year? You understand, I don’t know you yet. Most of the people here I do know, and the rest of you I want to know.”
“Yes, sir. You think it was one of us.”
“I think that’s possible, yes.”
“A brief history, you say, sir. I was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, and lived there till I was nineteen. Then I enlisted in the Army and spent three years there, mostly in Japan. After my discharge I went to New York. Three years ago, that was. I’ve worked at a number of jobs, mostly clerical work, and I’ve attended drama classes. I’ve had small parts in two off-Broadway productions, and I was in the national touring company of Love Among the Falling Stars. Last summer I was with the Keelsville Players in Maine. I got my Equity card there, and that’s how I happened to be eligible for the touring company.”
“Why didn’t you go back to the theater in Maine this summer?”
“They went bankrupt last year, sir.”
“I see. Have you ever been in any trouble with the police of any kind? I mean, besides parking tickets, things like that.”
Forrest’s lips stretched in a small tight smile. “Not even parking tickets, sir. I’ve never been in trouble of any kind.”
“All right. Now, this afternoon. You were in the rehearsal room, is that right?”
“Yes, sir, I was.”
“Did you leave the room at any time?”
“Yes, sir. Around three o’clock, I think, I went upstairs to the bathroom.”
“How long were you gone?”
“Five or ten minutes.”
“This was around three o’clock.”
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry, I can’t pinpoint it exactly.”
“That’s all right. Did you notice, did anyone else leave the room at any time?”
“Oh, yes, sir. Most of us did, in fact. But if you want to know who left at what time, I’m afraid I couldn’t be of much help. I was watching Mr. Schoen, most of the time. The director is vitally important in any sort of theatrical undertaking. He and he alone determines whether it will be a good production with well-behaved actors and a feeling of high morale within the group, or a bad production with ill-behaved actors and a feeling of low morale with warring cliques. So I was watching Mr. Schoen, to see what sort of summer I could expect.”
“Oh? And what did you decide?”
“I really don’t think it will be a particularly good summer, sir.”
That was all he had to offer. Sondgard asked him a few more questions, but with no result. He had seen no strangers hanging around the area, he had seen no one take a particular interest in Cissie Walker, he had not noticed any apprehension in Cissie Walker’s manner the last time he saw her alive, this morning at breakfast.
Will Henley was next. He was a stocky man who looked to be about thirty, five foot, ten inches tall, with a heavy face that could become Shakespeare’s Falstaff or Hammett’s Casper Gutman with equal aptitude. He was wearing brown slacks and tan polo shirt, the shirt stretched tight across heavy chest and heavier stomach. He sat down, and Sondgard announced the normal preliminary statement, then asked, “Your permanent address?”
“One Ninety-two West Seventy-second Street, New York.”
“This is your first season here?”
“If there is a season here, yes.” There was a note of heavy irritation in Henley’s voice; at the moment he was being more Gutman than Falstaff.
“What do you mean by that?”
“This— All right if I smoke?”
“Go ahead.”
Sondgard waited while Henley took his time lighting a cigarette. He wondered if this was Henley’s normal manner, or was he trying to be offensive because Sondgard was a cop, or was he just regretting his choice of summer job.
When Henley finally got the cigarette going and still didn’t say anything, Sondgard repeated his question: “What do you mean, if there’s a season?”
“We’re supposed to open in a week and a half. If you don’t solve this killing by then, will you let us open?”
“Why not?”
Henley shrugged. “All right,” he said, as though tabling that subject for the moment. “What if there’s more killings?”
“Do you think there will be?”
Henley nodded his head toward the front of the house. “They think so.”
“Why?”
“A maniac doesn’t just kill once. You think it’s one of us, don’t you?”
“Not necessarily.”
“They think it is.”
“Do you?”
Henley shrugged again, tabling another topic. “Besides,” he said, “they’re already talking about getting away from here.”
“The other actors?”
“The whole crowd. Nobody wants to be next.”
Sondgard found himself getting irritated. There was in Henley’s manner some sort of implication that Sondgard couldn’t be relied upon to do much in this case, that the people here were pretty much on their own. Sondgard was constantly reminding himself of his lack of competence and experience in something like this, but he didn’t like the same sort of reminder coming from someone else.
He failed to hide his own irritation as he said, “We’ll do our best to see that nobody is next. To begin with, I’d like to get back to the interview.”
As usual, Henley’s answer was a shrug. His whole manner seemed to be that he didn’t expect to be disappointed by Sondgard since he wasn’t looking for much from Sondgard anyway.
Sondgard said, “First, I want you to give me a brief autobiography. Jobs you’ve had, places you’ve lived.”
“Of course.” And even in that brief phrase, there was something vaguely insulting. Henley reached out and flicked ashes from his cigarette, then leaned back in the chair and gazed at the ceiling as he recited: “I was born in Boston, and grew up here and there around the world. My father’s an Army officer. He wanted me to go to West Point, but one childhood on Army bases is enough. On my eighteenth birthday, I enlisted, and that took care of that. My father will never forgive me for having been an enlisted man. When I got out, on my twenty-first birthday, I went to LA. I got my discharge in Texas, and it didn’t matter where I went, so I went to LA. I hung around there for a year, and met a few actors, and got interested in acting. But the big goal out there is to get your own Western series, and that’s just the Army all over again. So I went to New York. I’ve been in four plays, all off-Broadway and three small television parts, one of them in a soap opera, and I was in a crowd scene in a movie, and I had a small part in a commercial. I was one member of a football team, running around throwing this box of cereal to each other. Summer before last, I was at Tent Theater in Pillicoke, Pennsylvania. Last summer, I was with the Dark Horse Players in Estes Park, Colorado. That’s near Denver. And this summer I’m here.”
“You never spend more than one summer at the same theater?”