DAMON STARED THOUGHTFULLY ACROSS the bar. Along the wall behind the bar there was a long mirror that reflected his image. The mirror was old and cracked and dark, almost iron-colored. To Damon his face looked distant and insubstantial, as though it wavered in a shifting somber mist. If I must drink, he thought, I should go to a more congenial saloon. But he had barely touched his last drink. I must not waste the money, he thought, I may have need of every cent I have soon.
The notebook was still open before him and he looked down and saw the right-hand page, blank except for the heading at the top of the page—Possible enemies—personal.
It had never occurred to him that he had personal enemies. Machendorf was a different matter, but even so, Damon hadn’t even thought of him in over a year. Memory was a tricky thing and forgetting often was the means by which the mind defended itself against past pain and regret for lost opportunities.
Personal enemies. Now that he was forcing himself to remember he put down two names—Frank Eisner and in parentheses Melanie Deal.
He had met Melanie Deal about a year and a half before. She was a secretary for a theatrical producer by the name of Proctor and she had come to the office with some contracts that the producer had had drawn up by his lawyer for a play entitled An Apple for Helen, written by one of Damon’s clients. It was late in the afternoon and Oliver Gabrielsen and Miss Walton had left for the day. Damon himself was just putting on his coat to leave when the girl came in. She was young and pretty, twenty-two, -three, Damon guessed, with thick brown hair streaked blond in front, as though she spent long hours lying on a beach in the sun. Her eyes were brown, too, but with a glint of some other color that made her seem a little strange, out of the ordinary, ready to laugh inwardly at some continuing joke that only she would understand. Damon had seen her once before, when he and Oliver had gone to Proctor’s office to discuss the terms of the contract for the play. When the two men had gone out together, Oliver had said, “Whew! Did you see that girl? There’s trouble there.”
“She seemed to be okay to me. And her boss told me she’s very efficient.”
Oliver laughed. “Roger,” he said, “you’re getting old. Her boss couldn’t take his eyes off her all the time she was in the room and when she stood up and went back to her own office his look practically undressed her right there and then. His tongue was almost literally hanging out of his mouth and he looked like a terminal case of frustration. Miss Deal may be efficient in the office, but I’ll bet she’s a lot more efficient in bed. If you want to know the truth, after about five minutes I was pretty frustrated myself.”
“I must really be getting old, as you say.” Damon smiled. “I didn’t notice anything in particular about her.”
That was the girl who came into the office while Damon was putting on his coat to leave. Because of what Oliver had said about her and out of old habit, which he had thought he had broken since the Iberian lady, after whom he had subsided into uncomplicated monogamy, Damon looked at her with more interest than he had shown the first time he had seen her and decided Oliver had been right in being so disturbed by her. Lusts of the mind as well as those of the flesh. Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.
They went down in the elevator together after Damon had locked the office and Damon said, “I usually stop for a drink on my way home in the evening. Would you like to join me?”
She looked at him with a glint of knowing amusement in her eyes, no stranger to men’s overtures. “That would be very nice, Mr. Damon,” she said, demurely. “I was hoping you’d ask me.” Her voice was a little husky and fitted her appearance and Damon guessed that she had worked at it, either in acting school or with a singing teacher.
In the lounge of the Algonquin, where he had taken her, although that was not the place he usually patronized for his post-workday first drink, it turned out he had been correct in his guess.
“The reason I hoped you’d ask me for a drink,” she said, sipping at her glass of white wine, “is I wanted to talk to you about Apple.”
He smiled a little at her quick assumption that they were professionals together, with theatre people’s universal trick of abbreviating the titles of plays. “I’m not really a secretary,” she said. “I work with Mr. Proctor only when I’m between plays.” She spoke in small, rapid bursts, as though the words were bubbling up irresistibly in her throat.
“Have you been in any?”
“A few. Off-Broadway. Off-off-Broadway. Equity Library. Summer theatre. Drama school productions. Podunk.” Her voice mocked herself. “The usual rocky road to stardom. Have you ever seen me?”
“I don’t think so,” Damon said. “In fact, I’m sure. If I’d seen you on the stage I’m certain I’d have remembered you.” He was too gallant a man to say otherwise.
“They ought to put up a monument outside Sardi’s. With an eternal flame. To the unknown actress.” She laughed, without bitterness. “The last play I was in was downtown. Man Plus Man.”
“I saw the play,” Damon said, “but I walked out after the first ten minutes.” He remembered it well. It had opened and closed just after the opening which was the night he and Sheila had gone to see it. He did not tell the girl why he had walked out. “You must have come on after that.”
“Second act,” she said. “You didn’t miss anything. I had a big scene in the second act. No reviews, though. The critics all left at intermission.” She laughed gaily. “So did my mother and father. I would have, too, if I hadn’t signed a contract.”
“I remember the evening,” Damon said. He had been invited by the producer, a man named Guilder, whom he didn’t know, except by reputation, which was not good. He was a very rich young man from a family which owned mines in Colorado and had backed a few shows, all failures. His reputation came neither from his wealth or his career in the theatre. He had been arrested for felonious assault, with intent to kill, after he had picked up a young man in a bar and then had beaten him terribly when they got to his apartment. His plea was that the young man had made homosexual advances to him and in a rage he had struck the fellow. He had adroit and highly paid lawyers and although just about everyone in the courtroom knew that Guilder had homosexual leanings himself, to say the least, with a taste for rough trade, he was acquitted.
In an interview for the newspapers Guilder had berated the producers of the New York theatre indiscriminately for their timidity and their choice of material and its staging, and announced that from now on he would produce plays himself, without partners. Man Plus Man was his first independent production, off-Broadway in a theatre near the Damons’ apartment, and having nothing else much to do on the evening of the opening they used their gift tickets at the last minute, more out of curiosity than any hope that the production would yield them much pleasure.
But they were not prepared for what they saw. The play was about a transvestite and his friends and while Damon, in the fashion of the time, was neutral on the subject of homosexuals and often invited clients of his who were gay to his house for dinner, the scatological language and the snickering display of nudity were too much for him. He stood up in the middle of the first scene and said to Sheila, knowing what he was doing, “Come on, let’s go. I’ve had enough. It’s pure filth.”
They had been sitting up front of the theatre and Damon spoke loudly and clearly and strode up the aisle with Sheila behind him. Before he and Sheila had reached the exit, other couples followed their example, some of them shouting at the stage.
Guilder was standing at the back of the theatre as the Damons passed him. Damon recognized the man from photographs in the newspapers and in a poetic pose on the cover of the program, but went by without saying anything.
The play closed that night, having given only the one performance.
“I never saw a man so furious,” Melanie Deal was saying. “He told the cast you had deliberately wrecked the play, knowing that everybody or practically everybody in the opening night audience knew who you were and the influence you had. There wasn’t even a critic left for the second act. The reason you’d done it, he said, was that you were a closet queen and that you couldn’t stand to see the truth on the stage and he promised the cast he was going to ruin you in the theatre and send you back to digging ditches where you belonged.” She giggled. “Has he ruined you?”
“As you see,” Damon said, smiling, “I can still afford to buy drinks for a pretty young lady in the Algonquin. Although I did hear some rumors that he was bad-mouthing me all over town and twice he outbid producers who wanted to do plays I represented and then never put them on.” Damon shrugged. “You’ve got to expect spoiled rich kids in the theatre. Nobody takes him seriously and if I really was responsible for closing the play I ought to get a medal for public service for it. Mr. Guilder doesn’t interest me. He’s of no consequence. Let’s change the subject, shall we, to something more pertinent? What did you want to talk to me about Apple?”
“When you were talking about casting in the office … You described what Helen should look like. How she should do the part …” She spoke in short gasps. “Well, I thought, That nice man is describing me.”
Damon smiled again. “Perhaps I was … ah … subconsciously influenced.” He was enjoying the small flirtation. “Have you talked to Mr. Proctor about a test for the part?”
She shook her head vigorously, her thick, gleaming hair whipping around her face. “Mr. Proctor regards me in only two ways—as a secretary and sex object.” There was malicious glee reflected in her small, fine face. “He can only imagine me at the typewriter or in bed.” She laughed coarsely, her laughter a little out of control. “No hope, New Jersey. Tell him, if he happens to ask.”
“What does that mean?”
“I played in summer stock at New Hope, New Jersey,” she said. “Everything went wrong. Every time we started rehearsals on a new play somebody would say, No hope, New Jersey. It became our way of saying not a chance in a million.”
Damon began to feel the first electric tingle of desire and he wished he had left the office earlier and told Oliver to close up. Tomorrow he had to tell Oliver that his boss was not as old as he seemed.
“Mr. Proctor,” the girl went on, “thinks highly of your taste and experience. Whenever you send in a play he reads it right away, no matter what else is on his desk. If you put in a word for me, he’d listen.” The words kept tumbling out breathlessly and she was leaning forward so that he couldn’t help but notice the enticing shape of her breasts under the tight cashmere sweater she was wearing, with no brassiere underneath. Generous offerings, he thought sadly, remembering his young manhood, on a ritual platter. He now understood Proctor’s rapt gaze while he tried to talk contracts with Melanie Deal in view.
Troubled, he ordered another drink, to keep the evening from getting out of hand. The girl gulped her wine down and he ordered another glass for her. She was flushed with the wine and the speed and vehemence with which she had been talking. “Well,” he said, looking around the hotel lounge to see if there was anybody there who knew him who would spread the word that old Roger Damon was now robbing cradles. There was no one he recognized and he relaxed a little. “Well,” he said, “the casting is a long way in the future. And there’s no director yet. And the author has to rewrite the whole first act.”
“I know all that,” she said impatiently. “But if you put the bug in Mr. Proctor’s ear, I’d wait.”
“I’d advise you, Miss Deal, to …”
“Melanie.”
“I’d advise you, Melanie,” he said, trying to sound paternal, “not to give up any parts that you’re likely to be offered while we’re waiting to get into production.”
“All I want is a chance to try out.” She was speaking earnestly now, leaning across and gripping his forearm, her hand surprisingly strong. “All you’d have to do is suggest.” She swept her hair back from her pale, high white forehead. “Look,” she said challengingly, throwing her head back, her eyes glittering, “am I or am I not the girl you described in the office.”
“You’re beautiful,” he said softly, then tried to recover himself and make the compliment sound banal with a fatherly, “my dear.” He heard a clock chime somewhere. “Oh, it’s getting late. My wife will be worried.” Sheila never worried about what time he came home from the office as long as it was before eight o’clock or he had called her if he was going to be delayed for an hour or two, but he wanted to sound uxorious before this tempting girl, who was young enough to be his daughter. And then some.
“I live near you,” she said. “I looked you up in the telephone book after you came into the office the other day.” She laughed. Again there was something wild and out of control in her laughter. “We can go together. I live on West Twenty-third Street.”
“Well,” he said, not knowing by now whether he was glad or sorry he had invited her to join him in a drink, “I usually walk.”
“I’m a great walker,” she said, grinning, pinning him down. “I’m one of the most notorious walkers in New York. And I don’t wear high heels to work.”
“All right,” he said. He felt the need for fresh air. And he doubted that she would try anything outlandish on a public thoroughfare at six-thirty in the evening.
“If that’s what you want,” he said, “we’ll go downtown together.”
“That’s what I want. I’m a persistent cuss, aren’t I?” she said triumphantly. She grinned, her perfect teeth gleaming in the youthful face.
“You’ll go a long way, Melanie,” he said as he paid the waiter. “In the theatre and out of it.”
“You bet your ass,” she said. She helped him on with his coat, patting his shoulder as she did so and they went out of the hotel, she with her hand possessively on his elbow.
The evening had turned nasty and a fine drizzle was coming down. Damon thought it would be the act of a sadist to make a girl like that, with her lovely hair uncovered, and the pretty moccasins and the sheer stockings on the beautiful long legs to walk more than a mile in the rain. He waited for a moment at the entrance to the hotel and said, “This is no night for walking.”
“I don’t mind,” she said. “Let the north wind blow, let the heavens come down.”
“Do you have a scarf or anything?”
She shook her head. “It was sunny when I went to work this morning.”
“We’ll take a taxi,” he said. “If we can ever find one.”
Just then a taxi drove up and stopped in front of the hotel and a couple stepped out. Melanie let go of Damon’s arm and dashed across the sidewalk and held the door open defiantly before the man who had just gotten out could close it and before a woman who had seen the taxi as it turned the corner onto Forty-fourth Street and had run after it waving and shouting, “Taxi! Taxi!” could reach it. “Tough shit, Lady,” Melanie said, grimly victorious, as the woman came panting up. Melanie gestured impatiently at Damon to get moving. He shambled across the sidewalk and said, shamefacedly, to the woman as he climbed into the taxi, “I’m sorry, Ma’am.”
“Young people these days,” the woman said, gasping. “Barbarians. The language.”
Melanie got into the taxi and gave her address to the driver. She settled cozily next to Damon and put her hand on his thigh. “It’s an omen,” she said.
“What’s an omen?”
“Our getting this taxi on a rainy night,” she said.
“With one million people running after them on the streets of New York.”
“A good omen or a bad one?”
“Good, silly.”
“Not so good for that poor woman.”
“Old fat bag,” Melanie said coldly, disregarding the fact that the man at her side had at least twenty years of age on the old bag. “Wherever she’s going, nobody’s waiting for her. Are you superstitious? About omens and things like that?”
“Yes. I always put my left shoe on first when I get dressed in the morning and get out of the left side of the bed.” He laughed. “At my age.”
“You’re not so old.”
“My dear young lady,” Damon said, “if you woke up just one morning and felt your bones creaking like mine, you wouldn’t say that.”
“I’ll tell you something, Mr. Damon,” she said, stroking his thigh. “You’re one of the most attractive men in New York, whatever your age is.”
“Good God!”
“Would you like to hear what several other ladies you’ve known told me about you?”
“Absolutely not.” The tingle he had felt in the office when he really had looked at her for the first time had now grown to an alarming voltage.
“I’m going to tell you just the same.” She laughed with evil, gleeful mischief. “Ladies in my acting class. Mature ladies. Been around. Know what they’re talking about. Three of them. Well preserved. We were having coffee together during a recess from class. The talk turned to sex. Ladies’ locker room talk.” She laughed that slightly wild laugh again.
“I’d prefer it if you stopped right now, Melanie,” Damon said with all the dignity he could muster.
“Don’t pretend to be a prude.” She lifted her hand from his thigh, then jabbed at his leg sharply with one finger. “After what I heard about you the performance doesn’t wash. It so happens that all three ladies had affairs with you.”
“You’re impossible, my dear girl,” he said flustered. “I don’t want to know what they said or who they are.” He was lying. From the way she was speaking he knew that what she was going to tell him would be flattering and would remind him of agreeable moments in the past.
“All the girls,” Melanie said, “were rating their various lovers. Who was the best, who was the worst. That sort of thing. If I told you the names of the ladies you’d know they had plenty of comparisons to go by. The vote was unanimous for the top of list. You turned out to be the best lay in town by a landslide.” She laughed again. “The worst lays they’d encountered were their own husbands.”
He couldn’t help joining in her laughter. When he stopped laughing he said, “That was long ago.” He guessed who the ladies were. “I was younger and more active then.”
“Not so long ago,” she said. “And stop talking about age. My present lover is fifty years old. He’s a broker down in Wall Street and he has a platinum plate in his head. They knocked the top off his head in Korea. He was a big hero there. He’s got a chest full of medals and he’s got guns all over the house he brought back with him. Well, he’s not a big hero anymore and nobody would pin a medal on him now for anything and every once in a while he thinks he’s in a foxhole or whatever he had in Korea and he thinks I’m a Chinaman creeping in on him and he’s grayer than you are and we have great times together.”
“He sounds like a young girl’s dream,” Damon said dryly.
“I have a father fixation,” Melanie said, “and I love it.”
“Well,” said Damon, “I don’t have a daughter and I haven’t a daughter fixation and I love it.” He tried, without success, to sound irritated. “I haven’t touched anybody but my wife in God knows how long.”
The girl ignored what he had said and ran her hand under his coat high up his leg. “I’m making a pass at you, Mr. Damon,” she said flatly, without emotion.
He put his own hand out and clasped her arm firmly so that she couldn’t go all the way up. He was both charmed and annoyed by her brusque directness, annoyed because there was a chance, more than a chance, that she was offering herself to him not for his reputation with the ladies in the acting class but as a lever to move him to suggest her for the part in the play to Proctor.
“In my day,” he said, “ladies waited to be asked.”
She didn’t try to move her hand any farther but said, “This isn’t your day anymore, Mr. Damon,” she said, “and I’m not a lady. I like to choose, not be chosen. What I would like would be for us to have a long languorous, romantic affair, starting tonight. Sneaky afternoons, slipping off to country inns on weekends …”
“That’s quite romantic—sneaky afternoons,” he said ironically.
She ignored the irony. “Climate of the times. You can be pragmatic and romantic at the same time,” she said calmly. “Don’t fight it. And don’t tell me you haven’t been chosen before.”
He remembered Julia Larch. “Maybe,” he said, but did not volunteer any information about the hotel on Thirty-ninth Street. “But the ladies kept it to themselves. Rules of the game. They had the grace to allow me to make the first move. And the second and the third.”
“Different times, different customs. Haven’t you heard about the Sexual Revolution?” A street lamp threw a hard light on her face, but she looked young and lovely and vulnerable in it.
“Let the old man go in peace,” he said gently.
“I will give you no peace.” Once more she laughed, refusing sentimentality. She looked out the window. “Oh, God, I’m nearly home.” As if this were a signal she threw herself across his legs and pulled his head down and kissed him. Her lips were soft and active and she smelled marvelous. It was a long kiss and she only released him when the taxi stopped in front of the house in which she lived. She sat up and straightened her coat, looked at him, her face full of the mischief that lay just under the surface at all times. “Last chance,” she said. “Want to come up?”
He shook his head sadly.
“You’ll regret it,” she said.
“I’m sure I will.”
She shrugged. “Have a merry domestic evening with your wife,” she said. “You don’t have to tell her you’re a good man. I’m sure she knows it.” She jumped out of the cab and ran up the outside steps of the house, lithe, graceful, swift, product of the private climate of her times. His own climate was a different one.
Damon watched her go, a wave of sadness coming over him, then gave his address to the driver and lay back against the imitation leather seat reeking of years of cigarette smoke and closed his eyes, trying to remember the names of the three ladies he had guessed had shared the recess coffee with Melanie Deal.
The next time he saw her, she was standing in the lobby of his office building when he came down after work. It was a week later.
She had a scarf over her head and her face looked drawn and worried. This time, he thought, if Oliver were to see her he wouldn’t be tempted to exclaim, “God, did you see that girl?”
“I have to talk to you, Mr. Damon,” she said, without preliminaries. “Alone. You’re in trouble. Can I walk a way with you?”
“Of course.” He took her arm and they went out into the street. Automatically he started toward Fifth Avenue. It was a fine spring evening, with the last glow of the sun in the western sky and the people around them, released from the day’s labors, seemed all to be bubbling with some secret joy as they savored their freedom and the prospect of the evening ahead of them.
They walked in silence awhile, the girl withdrawn, gnawing at her lips. “Why am I in trouble?” Damon asked quietly.
“I did an awful thing. Unforgivable, but I hope you’ll forgive me.” She sounded like a frightened child.
“What awful thing?”
“I told you about my lover, the fifty-year-old one … the stockbroker. In Wall Street.”
“Yes.”
“His name is Eisner.”
“I don’t know the man,” Damon said sharply. “What has he got to do with me?”
“He says he’s going to kill you,” she said. “That’s what he’s got to do with you.”
Damon stopped walking and faced the girl. “You’re joking, aren’t you?”
She shook her head. “Not on your life,” she said.
“Why does a man I’ve never seen want to kill me?” Damon asked incredulously.
“He’s crazy jealous. That platinum plate he got in his head in Korea, maybe.”
“I never … I mean with you …” Damon stuttered.
“I told him you did. I told him I was wild about you and you were wild about me.”
“What in God’s name did you do that for?” Damon was icily angry and was pleased to see that his voice and the look on his face made the girl try to cringe away from him. He pulled her to him roughly.
“He slapped my face at a party.” She was weeping now. “He thought I was flirting with somebody. In front of more than twenty people.” Then her voice turned defiant and hard. “I don’t let people get away with things like that. Not anybody. I wanted to hurt him and I did. You were the first one who came to my mind, and he knows who you are and that you’re a lot older than he is. That turned the knife.”
“Well done,” Damon said sardonically. “Well, what you’re going to do is go back to that idiot and explain everything, that you were lying, that we’ve had nothing to do with each other and that I for one am damn sure we’re never going to. He can put away his goddamn gun and go back to Wall Street and stop being a damn fool.”
“It won’t do any good,” she said, snuffing back her tears, looking more like a distraught little girl than ever. “I told him all that last night, that I was lying. He didn’t believe me. He just sat there in his living room oiling the automatic he brought back from Korea.”
Damon took a deep breath. “All right,” he said grimly, “if he’s so goddamn set on it, you tell him tonight that I’ll be walking north on the block in front of Saks, unarmed, at exactly noon tomorrow. Let the soldiers shoot and be done with it. And now,” he said with frozen fury, “leave me alone and never come near me again.” He let go of her arm and strode down the avenue in the direction of home.
He had arrived at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-ninth Street promptly at noon the next day. The weather was mild and sunny and the girls from the neighboring office buildings out on their lunch hour and the women going in and out of the glittering stores seemed all to have put on bright colors to confirm the advent of spring. It was not the place or the hour for a man to be waiting with a gun or for another man to await execution.
Damon squared his shoulders and slowly and deliberately walked the one block. It took him four minutes. No one accosted him. There were no shots. Melodrama, he thought contemptuously. Play-acting. Fantasy love games. The crazy ambitious little young girl pretending to be so modern and grownup. The poor sonofabitch with the plate in his head, ostentatiously oiling his gun for her benefit.
He knew a good restaurant on Sixty-third Street and he walked toward it, enjoying the spring sunshine and the store windows and the bright colors on the women he passed as he made his way at a sauntering pace to the restaurant, where he treated himself to an exquisite and expensive lunch, with a full bottle of wine.
He saw that his glass was empty and he thought, what the hell, and ordered another whiskey. He knew he wasn’t going to work any more that day and if he wanted to get through until evening, the whiskey would help him manage to do it.
He hadn’t seen or heard from Melanie Deal ever since the conversation on Fifth Avenue, and that was more than a year ago. He had never run into Mr. Eisner, the Wall Street broker with the platinum plate, the guns and the chestful of medals. The production of An Apple for Helen had fallen through and the author was still trying to rewrite the first act.
Still, if a man had declared he was going to kill him, even if he hadn’t shown up in front of Saks to carry out his threat, that was no lifetime guarantee of immunity. The stupid, Boy Scout act of bravado had seemed like a victory at the time and Damon had enjoyed his lunch, but an armed man might think twice about gunning down a rival in the noonday sun among the crowd on the main avenue of the city of New York and decide to bide his time, wait for a less public opportunity, lie in wait, nursing his dream of revenge for months, years. Jealousy was the most permanent of emotions and did not flare up and die down in twenty-four hours. Damon was sure Lieutenant Schulter would like to know about him. The broker had earned his place, Damon thought, on the list of personal enemies and maybe Melanie Deal, as flighty and unpredictable as she was, belonged there with him. At any rate, she was worth a telephone call.
He searched in his pocket for change for the telephone, then stopped. Mr. Eisner wasn’t the only man she had mentioned who had threatened him. Damon remembered what Melanie Deal had told him about Guilder’s peroration to the cast at the close of the opening night performance of Man Plus Man. Guilder had promised to ruin him and had done as much harm as money and whispered defamation of character would do toward that end. He had not succeeded and his failure might well have eaten at his soul enough since that time to have driven him into more direct action. Damon had dismissed him as of no consequence. He had been wrong to do so. At the place where he stood now no leads, no matter how flimsy they might seem, were to be ruled out. And the power of a frustrated demented rich young man who had narrowly escaped a long prison term for felonious assault with intent to commit murder and with the wealth to hire paid assassins was not to be ignored.
There was no doubt about it, Damon thought, as he found two dimes in his pocket, Melanie Deal was worth a telephone call.
He left his glass of whiskey on the bar and went to the back of the saloon where there was a telephone booth. He looked up her number in the Manhattan directory, remembering that she lived on Twenty-third Street and also remembering the soft touch of her lips on his in the taxi and her saying, “I have a father fixation and I love it.”
He dialed the number, but a mechanical voice came over the phone, saying “The number you have called is no longer in service.” He retrieved his dime, thought for a moment. He knew he could call Proctor’s office and find out how to reach the girl, but remembering what Oliver had said about Proctor’s practically undressing her in the office with a look, he felt it would be embarrassing to inquire about her in that quarter. God knew what had gone on between them, even though she had said, “No hope, New Jersey,” about the producer’s chances with her.
He thought for a moment, then looked up the number of Equity, the actor’s union. She would be listed with them and when he gave them his name they’d know he was connected with the theatre and that his call was legitimate and give him her number. As he dialed he thought, Well, it’s not as legitimate as all that.
It took some time to get the person who could give him the information he wanted, but finally a woman came on the phone whom he knew. “Sophie,” he said, after the exchange of greetings, “I’d like to get in touch with an actress by the name of Melanie Deal. An author of mine thinks he could use her for a play he’s writing,” he lied.
“Oh …” There was a long pause. “She died three months ago. In Chicago. She was touring with a revival and she was in an automobile accident. A drunken actor at the wheel and the roads were icy. I’m sorry. A pity. She was a bright young thing and she had a future. I’m terribly sorry. Was she a friend of yours?”
“Not really,” Damon said. Chicago, he thought. Add one to my dreams. Then he hung up.