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DeeDee Adler promised Gareth Cameron was a downer. Even in D.C., sometimes promises come true.
The playwright agreed to meet her in the lobby of the K Street building where his plastics association was located. She assumed he didn’t want to be seen in his office in some lowly day job, but he left her cooling her heels for nearly half an hour. Portentous things must be popping in plastics, she decided. It gave her time to write most of today’s Fashion BITE in her notebook. She tried out a couple of headlines: D.C. Street Style in the Sizzling Summertime. Or maybe, Keep Cool! Seersuckers Rule!
In between sentences, Lacey admired the building’s décor. The lobby was grand in an old-school kind of way, with leather couches and coffee tables settled around an abstract rug. WPA art decorated the walls, brawny working men and women with sinuous arms and chiseled jaws, all with a look of noble purpose in their visage.
Lacey shivered. She’d strolled from the steamy sunshine into subzero air conditioning, but even with the shivers the chilly air felt good. Until that shiver turns into a dreaded summer cold.
When Cameron finally appeared, his misery was palpable. Lacey found him instantly comical in his gloom, as if he carried his own private raincloud around with him, shedding thunder and lightning as he went. Every furrowed line in his forehead reflected an artist’s anguish: a badge of honor, like his pilled brown sweater vest on this miserably hot day. The vest was paired with a tan shirt and khaki slacks, and his shaggy hair, which he kept sweeping off his forehead with one hand, was as brown as his eyes.
After the preliminaries, wherein his hopes were dashed—she was not writing a piece on him—Cameron asked, “Let me get this straight. You’re not a theatre reporter?”
Gareth Cameron was attractive in a shaggy, poetic, even-featured way, and in his mid-thirties. He spoke with a slight New England accent with a twinge of preppy. In his hand was a bottle of kombucha. It looked revolting. He didn’t offer Lacey any of it. Just as well.
“No, but as I mentioned on the phone, I’m researching the Kinetic production of The Masque of the Red Death,” Lacey said. “I understand you wrote the script.”
“The adaptation, yes.”
“There were some very impressive reviews.” A little butter can’t hurt.
“Thank you. First time out of the gate.” He smiled ever so slightly. “It was so long ago. Before I got my master’s in playwriting. Yale School of Drama.” This was clearly meant to impress. Lacey knew Yale Drama was a major force in the theatre world, but she wasn’t about to let it show. “After Yale I worked in New York theatre for a while, then back to D.C. Frankly, I don’t know why I came back here. But of course there’s Kinetic.” Cameron settled his lanky frame into the faux-modern sofa angled next to Lacey’s.
“That must have been a great opportunity. Yale, I mean.” Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, William and Mary, those had all been unattainable dreams for her.
“It was. I was lucky enough not to need financial aid,” he said.
Lacey admired Cameron’s ability to casually drop such credentials into the conversation. He might have said, I’m rich enough to pay for Yale and you are not, but this was so much classier.
Lacey’s journalism degree was from a giant public university that later abolished its Journalism School and replaced it with a “School of Communications,” whatever that meant, which was reported to have become a safe haven for football-team mouth breathers. Lacey suspected her J School degree was now invalid. She was glad she already had a reporting job and didn’t have to produce her worthless diploma.
“My degree impresses no one,” she said.
“There’s no place like Yale,” Cameron said, successfully achieving the dramatic rule of three repetitions of his theme, the importance of Yale and an Ivy League education. He smiled, a slightly superior-yet-sorrowful smile. “Though I expected more from Yale, to be frank. And these days, theatres prefer younger playwrights. I’m thirty-five. I might have missed my window of opportunity.”
“Surely not,” she said, thinking that anyone thirty-six or older would find this ridiculous. Flatter, remember to flatter! “And you look so young.”
“You’re too kind. You’re a writer too, of a sort,” he acknowledged grudgingly. “Are you working on a book, or anything important?”
“Depends what you call important.”
Unless you count investigating seven possible deaths related to poison needles hidden inside KGB medals.
“I thought every D.C. reporter was working on a book.”
“Maybe someday.” If I live that long. “Let’s talk about you, Gareth. You’re a produced playwright. You wrote the script for Kinetic’s Masque, and now you’ve done their new Turn of the Screw. That’s quite an accomplishment.”
He dismissed the compliment with a shrug. “Adaptations. I’m currently working on a new play, a new original work.”
“Can you tell me about it?”
“It won’t be produced here in D.C. I’m talking to a major New York theatre. But I really can’t talk about it yet.”
But he can talk about Yale Drama. “I appreciate your seeing me. I’m writing about the costumes from The Masque of the Red Death, one costume in particular. Could you tell me what it was like to work with Saige Russell?”
Gareth Cameron wrinkled his nose and mouth into a sneer. “Not to speak ill of the dead, but—” He let a dramatic pause hang in the air.
“But?”
“It was so long ago.” And every moment enshrined in memory, Lacey was willing to bet. “It’s hard to remember. It was a challenging production. We got through it.” He ran his hands through his hair.
“I’m guessing there’s more.”
“To be perfectly honest, Ms. Smithsonian—”
“Call me Lacey.”
“To be honest, Lacey, Saige was a dreadful, dreadful actress. DeeDee Adler and the rest of the crew started calling her ‘Parsnips’ and it stuck. It suited her. Parsnips. Pretentious little bitch.”
“Dare I ask for an example?”
He swigged some kombucha. “Saige couldn’t learn lines. Pretty basic requirement for an actor, wouldn’t you think?”
“The most basic,” Lacey agreed.
“Every time Parsnips went up on a line, she’d blame me, or the script. It was never her fault. I wrote it all wrong, or the line doesn’t make sense, or nobody talks that way, or whatever. And I had to explain very carefully that even a slow child could learn these lines. They were easy, it was rhythmic, it was blank verse. The cadence was essential. She couldn’t do that. She’d simply stand there looking blanker than the verse.”
“Sounds like you should have replaced her.”
“I would have, but I wasn’t the director. Yuri Volkov said no. And Katya would have been great. Katya Pritchard. Understudy. She had the lines down cold. She was a better dancer. Unfortunately, Yuri said we were too far into rehearsals for that. Frankly, I don’t know what Parsnips had on him.” Lacey was about to ask a follow-up, but Cameron was just getting started. “Maybe she was sleeping with him too, as well as Nikolai. I don’t know. For God’s sake, she only had a handful of lines! I mean, really. She must have had a learning disability or something. And temperamental too.” Cameron’s kombucha must be kicking in. “There was this one time, she refused to go on because she didn’t have the right false eyelashes. False effing eyelashes! They had to hold curtain while someone ran to the drugstore to buy her more eyelashes, in five different sizes. For the love of God, she was wearing a mask! Nobody could even see her eyelashes! She simply shouldn’t have been an actor. I don’t know what she thought she was doing, but it wasn’t acting.”
“I heard she was a dancer.”
“Mediocre at best. She was a better dancer than an actor.”
“She wasn’t either one for very long,” Lacey pointed out.
“No. That’s true. The theatre world dodged that bullet.”
That’s cold. But Saige was beginning to sound like a nightmare you wouldn’t want to wake up to. “Here’s another question, Gareth. Do you think Saige’s death was an accident?”
He studied his kombucha. “I don’t know. I don’t actually care. You shouldn’t play the diva when you haven’t got the chops. You’re suggesting something else? Murder?” He looked interested in the dramatic potential of murder.
“Just a question,” Lacey said. “She doesn’t seem to have had a lot of fans.”
“I’ve never really thought about it.” That sounds like a lie, she thought. “If someone pushed her, at least whoever it was waited until the run of the show was over.”
“What happened after the last performance? What do you remember after she was found on the stage floor?”
“I didn’t find out until the next day. Of course the press went crazy. FINAL CURTAIN FOR ACTRESS WHO PLAYED DEATH, stuff like that. Her death took away any attention my play would have had. To be honest, it felt very unfair.”
Life is so unfair to us wealthy graduates of Yale Drama: I went to Yale but I’m not on Broadway! I’m so old at thirty-five! A woman’s death inconvenienced me! Lacey wondered if she could hold back the tears: Yup, I can.
“What about Amy Keaton’s death?”
“Amy. The stage manager. Yes, that was terrible news.” He looked slightly distressed. “I heard it was an accident.”
“Did you know her well?”
“Not really. She was very efficient and kept things moving, and that is something I appreciate. I mostly stayed out of her way so she could get her work done.”
“Was she ever temperamental?”
“More bristly, like a brush. She could rub people the wrong way.’”
“Worse than anyone else?”
“This is the theatre we’re talking about, Lacey. Everyone can be—prickly. Amy Keaton would have to take her place in line.”
“What’s the cast of this show like?”
“Mostly young. Well, you’d have to be, the show is so physical. They’re eager, and good-looking, and they’re willing to learn their lines as written. Not as forgotten. Not as improvised, not ad-libbed. Not rewritten on the fly. I told Yuri that was my bottom line. Now, Anastasia is wonderful in the part, for example.”
“And who is Anastasia?”
“Our leading lady. A wonderful dancer. She had the script down cold the first week of rehearsal. Off-book, just like that.”
“I can see how that would be attractive. How’s it going?”
He preened, finally a dark cloud of gloom no more. “Not to be immodest, but it’s brilliant. Henry James, now that’s material you can sink your teeth into. And Yuri’s choreography is impeccable as usual.”
“And the actors?”
“They know their lines.”
At least there’s no cause to murder anyone this time around, Lacey decided. Not yet, anyway. Could Gareth Cameron be a little too self-involved to be a murderer? Or is “too self-involved” the definition of a murderer?
I really need to see this show, she thought. It might even be good. Lacey wondered if Tamsin Kerr might actually have an extra ticket to Kinetic’s press night preview this evening. Maybe I can slip quietly in at the back of the house with her.
And the costumes for The Turn of the Screw might be to die for.
