“Yes, it is,“ Carella said.
“I was hoping you caught the guy by now.”
“We’re still investigating.”
“Long as I ain’t a suspect, huh?” Torey said, and grinned, showing a mouthful of missing teeth.
He was perhaps five feet ten inches tall, weighing in at two-forty or thereabouts these days, no longer the middle-weight he’d once been. His left eye was partially closed by scar tissue, and his nose roamed all over the center of his face, and he sounded like any of the punch-drunk pugs Carella had ever met. But there was intelligence in his lively green eyes and Carella figured he’d quit the ring before they’d managed to scramble his brains.
He was wearing what Carella had always called a “bakery-shop sweater,” because this was the kind of sweater Carella’s father had worn to work each morning. In Torey’s case, the sweater was a collarless brown cardigan, a bit frayed at the cuffs, one of the buttons missing. He wore this with thick-waled corduroy trousers and brown loafers. He was sitting on his stool just inside the stage door. The pay phone on the brick wall painted black was some seven or eight feet away from the stool. From the stage, Carella could hear what sounded like two or three actors rehearsing a scene. The clock on the wall read twelve-thirty.
“Torey, can you tell me anything about what happened last night?” Carella asked.
“Oh, sure. It was me who called the police. I heard her screaming, I ran out there, she was laying on the ground, screaming.”
“You didn’t see anyone else in the alley, did you?”
“No. Just her. You mean the one who stabbed her? No. I wished I did.”
“What’d you do?”
“I left her laying there. You ain’t supposed to move anybody’s hurt. I learned that when I was still in the ring. Somebody gets hit bad, you move him, it could make him worse. So I left her out there, and I come inside again and called nine-one-one. From the phone right there. They got here right away. Which is a miracle, this city.”
“Can you remember seeing anyone suspicious before Miss Cassidy left the theater?”
“I wasn’t outside.”
“I meant inside the theater. After everyone else left.”
“You mean after Miss Peck went out, too.”
“Yes. You didn’t see anyone suspicious in the theater, did you? Anyone who shouldn’t have been here?”
“No, I didn’t. Miss Peck left, and a few minutes later Michelle came up to use the phone, and…”
“Miss Cassidy made a phone call?”
“Yeah. From the phone right on the wall there.”
“Did you hear what she said while she was on the phone?”
“Well, it was a very quick call.”
“But did you hear it?”
“Yes, I did.”
“What did she say?”
“She said… well, you want this exact? Because I’m not sure I can remember it exact.”
“As close as you can remember.”
“Well… she said like uh This is me, I’m just about to leave, something like that. And then she listened, and I guess she just said Okay, and hung up.”
“Did she mention anyone’s name?”
“No.”
“What did she do then?”
“She came over here and we talked for a while.”
“How long a while?”
“Five minutes? She kept looking at her watch… I figured she had to go meet somebody. But we talked for a few minutes, and then she looked at her watch again, and said, `Well, so long, Torey,’ something like that, and off she went.”
“What time was this?”
“Few minutes after seven.”
“How do you know?”
“Clock hanging right there on the wall,” he said, and gestured with his head. “I look at it all the time. It’s funny,” he said. “You’re in the round three minutes, it seems like forever. But here, in the theater here, I sit on my stool, I look at the clock, and I remember the old days, and it’s like a movie going by too fast. Sometimes I think I won’t have enough time to play all the movies inside my head. You think I’ll have time to play them all?”
“I hope so,” Carella said gently.
The clock on the squadroom wall read twenty minutes past one. They had sent out for lunch, and now, as they ate, they recapped what each of them had separately learned.
“Who’d she call?” Kling asked.
“Big question.”
“Let me see that estimate Morgenstern gave you,” he said, and Carella shoved it across the desk to him.
“Scale actors get a big one a week, huh?”
“Wanna be an actor?”
“Nope.”
“What’s A.E.A.?”
“Don’t know.”
“T. W.A. U.?”
“Some kind of union, I’ll bet.”
“MU? HS?”
“Don’t know.”
“Guess they don’t believe in the power of the tube, huh?”
“Guess not.”
“What’s a three-sheet?”
“Beats me.”
“As the monkey said while peeing into the till…”
“This is running into a lot of money,” Carella said, and both men began giggling like schoolboys.
“You can skip over the rest of the administrative and general expenses,” Carella said. “Look down to the next section.”
Kling looked:
“Michelle isn’t getting a piece of the action, I see.”
“None of the actors are.”
“Big winner is the author.”
“Bigger winner is Morgenstern.”
“Not according to this.”
“He also gets fifty percent of the profits.”
“Nice. Does he own the theater, too?”
“I don’t think so.”
“So what’ve we got here?”
“Add it up.”
“Morgenstern gets half of that,” Carella said. “Plus his two percent and his office expenses.”
“You think he did it?”
“No.”
“Then who did?”
“Whoever Michelle phoned before she left the theater
5
THE SECRETARY IN THE SMALL WAITING ROOM OF JOHNNY Milton’s office on Stemmler Avenue and Locust Street was on the telephone when the detectives arrived at three o’clock that Tuesday afternoon. She glanced up briefly, signaled to the bench on the wall opposite her desk, listened for another moment, and then said, “I can understand how you feel, Mike, but he really is on a conference call, and I don’t know how long he’ll be.”
She listened again, rolled her eyes, and said, “Well, that isn’t true, Mike, he talks to you all the time. When? What do you mean when?” she said, and rolled her eyes again. “Whenever there’s anything to report, he calls you. Well, that’s not true, either. He’s always got things to report to you. Mike, you just got back from a dinner club date in Boston, who do you suppose got that for you, if not Johnny. What? No, I’m sure that wasn’t two months ago. February? Really? Was it in February? Then I guess it was two months ago. Gee. Even so, he’s working for you all the time, Mike, I promise you. Ooops, there goes the other phone,” she said, although nothing else in the office was ringing. “I’ll tell him you called, he’ll get right back to you. Nice talking to you,” she said, and hung up, and expelled her breath in exasperation.