They were not yet lovers, Hawes and Krissie, and perhaps they'd never be. But they were learning each other. This was the difficult time. You met someone, and you liked what you saw, and then you hoped that what you learned about him or her would make sense, would mysteriously jibe with whatever person you happened to be at this particular stage of yo life. The way Hawes figured it, everything on where you were and who you were at any time. If he'd met Krissie a year ago, he'd have too occupied with Annie Rawles to have and pursued any other relationship. Five years ten years ago, he found it difficult to which women had figured largely in his life at given time. Once there had been another Krissie well, Christine, actually, close but no ci Christine Maxwell. Who'd owned a be Hadn't she? May was the month for Or forgetting.
"How'd you happen to start working uptown?" asked.
"There was an ad in the paper," she said. "I looking for something part time and the job at church sounded better than waitressing.”
"Why part time?”
"Well, because I have classes, you know, and I have to make rounds...”
Oh, Jesus, he thought, an actress.
"What kind of classes?" he asked hopefully.
"Acting, voice, dance...”
Of course, he thought.
"And I work out three times a week at the gym...”
Certainly, he thought.
"So the job at the church is just to keep me going, you know...”
"Uh-huh," he said out loud.
"Till I get a part in something...”
"Right, a part," he said.
Every actress he'd ever met in his life had been a totally egotistical, thoroughly self-centered airhead looking for a part in something.
"Which is why I came here, of course," she said.
"I mean, we've got the Guthrie out there and all, but that's still regional theater, isn't it?”
"I guess you could call it that," Hawes said.
"Yes, well, it is, actually," Krissie said.
He had once dated an actress who was working in a little theater downtown in a musical revue called Goofballs written by a man who reviewed books while he was learning to become Stephen Sondheim.
If he reviewed books as well as he wrote musical revues, the writers of the world were in serious trouble. The actress's name was Holly Tree, and she SWORE this was her real name even though her driver's license (which Hawes ... big detective that he was - happened to peek at while she was still asleep naked in his apartment the morning after they'd met) read Marie Trenotte, which he later learned meant Three Nights, the Trenotte not the Marie. Three nights was the exact amount of time she spent with him before moving on to bigger better things, like the reviewer who had the show.
He had known another actress who'd been with a heroin dealer he'd arrested this was cocaine and then crack became the drugs of and who told him she was up for the part of a cop on Hill Street and would he mind very much she moved in with him while her man was away she could do some firsthand research, who she know was dealing drugs anyway. Her name Alyce (with a y) Chambers and she was a red-head who mentioned that if they had children their hair would be red since both parents had red hair, did he ever notice that a lot actresses and especially strippers had who were cops? He had never noticed. She did get the part on Hill Street. Nor any other part ever tried out for, it was that son of a bitch in she informed Hawes, pulling strings from all the upstate. In all the while she lived with him, she once talked about anything but herself. He began: feel like a mirror.
Then one day she met a man with a Santa beard and twinkling blue eyes and a diamond ring the size of Antigua and he told her he producing a little show out in Los Angeles and cared to accompany him out there she could with him temporarily at a little house he owned on the beach at Malibu... not the Colony, but close to it... just south of it, in fact.., closer to Santa Monica, in fact.., if that's what she would like to do. She moved out the very next day. She still sent Hawes a card every Christmas, but somehow she seemed to think his name was Corry Hawes.
And he'd known another actress who washed out her panties in... "Penny for your thoughts," Krissie said.
"I was just thinking how nice, an actress," Hawes said.
"Actually," she said, "it's not very nice at all.”
He braced himself for an Actress Atrocity Story.
Producer asking her to strip for a nude scene in a film that turns out to be a porn flick. Actor soul-kissing her while they're auditioning together for a theaterful of potential back... "In fact," she said, and her voice caught, "I'm beginning to think I'm not so hot, you know what I me an?”
He looked at her, surprised.
"No," he said. "What do you mean?”
"Not such a good actress, you know?" she said, and smiled somewhat pallidly. "No talent, you know?”
He kept looking at her.
"But I don't want to spend the rest of the night talking about me," she said, and took his hand. "Tell rne how you got into police work.”
She had tried to get the blood stains out of the carpet, but Willis was a cop and he could spot a worked-over stain from a mile away. She similarly tried to soak the blood out of th monogrammed hand towel from the master bedroom, a much more difficult job in that it was white whereas the carpet was a Persian with lots red in it. She'd used Clorox on the towel and had taken it downstairs to the washing machine the kitchen on the second floor, thrown it in with lot of other towels, but the stain was still just visible, blood was tough. He'd known who'd worked for days trying to get blood stains of a wooden knife handle or even the blade of hatchet, witness Lizzie Borden, whom he had known personally. Blood was blood. Blood told.
And now, so did Marilyn.
It was five minutes past eleven, i Saturday night was still with them.
Across town and downtown, Cotton Hawes w about to ask Krissie if she'd care to stop by his for a nightcap.
Closer to home, at the Church of the Bomless on Ninth and North End, Schuyler Lutherson fastening a black silk cord about the waist of black cotton robe, rehearsing aloud the words Introit which he would say at the beginning of midnight mass.
She told Willis about the first approach the two men had made.
Ramon Castaneda and Carlos Ortega.
"They gave you their names?" he said.
"Not then," she said. "This afternoon." She told him everything that had happened here in this bedroom this afternoon. Everything. He had found the window they'd jimmied on the third floor, and now he listened intently, his heart beating wildly, she could have been killed. But no, he agreed with her, they could not kill her if they expected to get money from her, you can't collect from someone who's dead.
"Give them what they want," he said at once.
"Get rid of them.”
"How?" she said.
"Sell the house, I don't care how. Get the money and give it to them, send them back to Argentina.”
"In a minute, right? Put a house worth seven-fifty on the market, and hope to sell it in a minute.”
"Then borrow against it. Mortgage it to the hilt.
Liquidate whatever other assets you have, call your broker...”
"There isn't that much, Hal.”
"You left Buenos Aires with two million dollars!”
"I put five hundred of that down on the house, and spent another three hundred furnishing it. I made Some bad investments, a gold-mining operation in Papua New Guinea, an electronics firm in Dallas, some big loans to friends who never paid me back...”