“I’ll tell you, Johnny, if they come here asking questions, I’m gonna say I don’t know a fucking thing about it.”
“Good, that’s exactly what you should say.”
“No, you’re not hearing me.”
“What am I not hearing?”
“I’m going to say I didn’t know anything about it.”
“Right.”
“I’ll tell them you must’ve dreamt it all up on your own.”
“On my…?”
“Without my knowledge.”
There was a silence on the line.
“I’m not going down with you, Johnny…”
“You helped…”
“I’m gonna be a star, Johnny.”
“You helped me plan id” he shouted.
“Prove it,” she said, and hung up.
She had double-locked the door, and put the chain on, and angled the Fox-lock bar firmly in place, but she was still scared he might come in through the window or whatever, one of the heating vents even, he could be a crazy bastard when he wanted to. The moment she’d hung up she’d realized how stupid it had been to tell him in advance what she would do if push ever came to shove. Now she sat here wondering whether she ought to get out of the apartment altogether, go crash with any one of a hundred unemployed actresses she knew in this city, even take a hotel room someplace till the cops arrested him, which she guessed should be any minute now, the way they were closing in on him.
How could he have been such a jackass, telling them he was someplace he couldn’t possibly have been at the time of the stabbing? Didn’t he realize they’d time the distance from the theater to O’Leary’s? Didn’t he know they’d check his alibi? Even if they didn’t for a minute suspect there was some kind of conspiracy here, even if they never once imagined this was all planned to call attention to her as the star of a show about to go down the drain, even if they were every bit as stupid as all the other cops in this city, didn’t he know they’d suspect him if only because he was the significant other? Didn’t he read the newspapers?
What’d he think? That everything he saw on television and in the movies was the way it was in real life? All those complicated murder plots? All those shrewd schemes that would net millions and millions of dollars for the person clever enough to hatch them and execute them? Baloney. If you read the papers, you knew that most murders had nothing to do with brilliant planning. Most murders these days were either murders committed during the commission of some other crime, or else they were murders between people who knew each other. A little while ago, it used to be random killings, strangers knocking off strangers for no apparent reason. But now, the pendulum had swung back to the family circle again, and people who loved each other were busy slitting each other’s throats. Husbands and wives, sweethearts and lovers, brothers and sisters, mothers and sons and fathers and uncles, these were the people who were killing each other these days. She knew because she’d done a lot of research for this dumb play she was in.
One of the things that had to’ve occurred to the police was that the guy making threatening calls in a Jack Nicholson voice might have been none other than the guy who was currently sleeping with the victim, who by the way had been the same guy sleeping with her for the past seven years, give or take, and not counting the times his hands were up under her skirt when she was twelve or thirteen. If Michelle Cassidy gets stabbed in a dark alley coming out of a theater, who are the cops going to think did it, some crazed Puerto Rican drug dealer named Ricardo Mendez or whoever? No, they are going to think Boyfriend, they are going to think Johnny Milton, they are going to think there’s something wrong with that relationship there, be-cause that’s the way they’re trained to think. They’re trained to think mother father son daughter boyfriend girlfriend goldfish. Even if they never once think it’s a scheme to put my name up in lights, they’ll look to Johnny.
He should’ve realized that, and he should’ve been ready for whatever they’d thrown at him, instead of giving them an alibi that wouldn’t wash. The weak son of a bitch would probably begin sniveling the minute they went back and began turning the screws on him. They’d come here pounding on her door next, wanting to know what part she’d had in the scheme. Me, Officers? Moi? Why, I don’t know what you’re talking about, sirs. She knew all about interrogations because of this dumb play she was in.
She looked at her wristwatch.
Seven-thirty, dark outside already. Maybe he didn’t plan on coming home at all, maybe she’d scared him into running for China or Colorado, wherever. Maybe she could relax. No Johnny Milton, no cops, just her name up above the title of the play in big blazing lights,
Speaking of which.
She turned back to the blue-bindered script in her lap.
While perspiring over whether that lunatic would come break down the door or something, she’d been trying to go over her lines in the scene where the Detective takes her aside — takes the Actress aside — and talks to her confidentially about what he thinks is going on, a very difficult scene to play in that no one in the play knew what was going on because their genius playwright, Frederick Peter Corbin III, hadn’t bothered to mention anywhere in the entire script who it was that stabbed the girl, excuse me, the goddamn Actress. So the scene was like two people talking underwater. Or sinking in quicksand. The Detective doesn’t know what’s going on, and the Actress doesn’t know what’s going on, either, and neither would the audience. Which is why it had become necessary in the first place to stab her in the alley, not the Actress in the play, but the actress in real life, Michelle Cassidy, if she was ever going to get anywhere in this fucking business.
She hated it when a playwright—any playwright and not just their genius playwright, Frederick Peter Corbin III — underlined words in a script to show his actors exactly which word or words he wanted stressed. Whenever she read a line like “But I love you, Anthony,” with the word love underlined for indicated emphasis, she automatically and perversely read it every which way but what the playwright had heard in his head, how dare he intrude upon her creativity that way? Sitting around a table at a first reading, she would say, “But I love you, Anthony,” or “But I love you, Anthony,” or “But I love you, Anthony,” or even “But I love you, Anthony!“
All those fucking underlined words.
What a dumb fucking play, she thought, and was about to put the script down when the doorbell sounded, startling her. She hesitated a moment, not saying anything, sitting quite still in the easy chair with its flower-patterned slipcovers, the open blue-bindered script in her lap, the lamp behind her casting light over her shoulder and onto the script and spilling over onto the floor.
The doorbell sounded again.
Still, she said nothing.
From outside the door, a voice called, “Michelle?”
“Who is it?” she asked.
Her heart was pounding.
“Me,” the voice said. “Open the door.”
“Who’s me?” she said, and rose from the easy chair and placed the script down on its seat, and then walked to the door and looked through the peephole flap, and said in relief, “Oh, hi, just a sec,” and took off the chain, and released the Fox lock, and then unlocked the dead bolt and the Medeco lock and opened the door wide and saw the knife coming at her.