There’s nothing else to do but march out of that stall and face my fate.
Kimberly’s blue eyes bulge when she sees me. Other than that, she looks like her usual self, her blond hair restrained by a headband and messy bun, her petite body encased in a blue plaid shirt belted over leggings. “You!” she cries.
“I’m sorry, Kimberly. I should have made my presence known—”
“Yes, you should have!” She shakes her head as if she can’t believe what she’s seeing. “You were listening in on a private conversation.”
“Well, that’s true, but to be fair this isn’t exactly your private dressing room. And your Uncle Jerry really shouldn’t have been in here.”
“Still.” She harrumphs. “You of all people. And after I brought you and your friends onto this show.”
Which I am more curious about than ever. “After hearing what your uncle said, I have to wonder why you did that.”
Kimberly looks stunned that I’m asking. And she’s silent for so long that I toss out a theory. “Did you do it so you could make some sort of point with Jason?”
She’s unable to come up with a response to that query, which makes me think I hit the nail on the head. Finally: “I did it as a favor to you,” she asserts. “And also because, as I told my uncle, Lisette needed help with all the beauty-queen stuff.”
I doubt that’s the whole story. “It just sounds like it was a very unusual suggestion coming from you.”
“Look, I don’t care to get into it. This day is already bad enough.” Then she stomps out of the ladies room without another word.
Darn. I didn’t get a chance to ask who Damian is.
I find Trixie and Shanelle in a rear row of the theater nursing coffees from the backstage coffeepot. They’re posed like the other cast and crew: with a wooden plank across their seats so their laptops can perch on top for easy note-taking. The house lights are on and there is action onstage: crew members moving props, a couple of techs on ladders tweaking lights, actors huddling with Oliver.
“They rolled away the stage staircase,” Shanelle tells me. “I bet they’re going to renovate it something fierce.”
“They better,” Trixie says, “if they keep it at all. By the way, they’re just about to rehearse the fifth scene in the first act. I think Enzo rewrote it in a big way. How did it go with him?”
“Fine. But that’s not what I want to talk about,” and I launch into a spiel about my restroom interlude with Kimberly and her Uncle Jerry. “So,” I conclude, “apparently there was a giant brouhaha between Kimberly and Lisette about some mystery man named Damian, whom Lisette was seeing. And that created a conflict of interest that Kimberly’s Uncle Jerry wishes he’d known about before.”
“And we care about this for what reason?” Shanelle wants to know.
Her question flummoxes me. “Well, aren’t you curious about everything that has to do with Lisette?”
“Girl, I love you and all, but to be honest I am not that interested in Lisette. And I don’t think Trixie is, either.”
Trixie shakes her head with obvious regret. “I’m sorry, Happy, but Shanelle’s right. Although I do feel terrible about what happened to Lisette. Anyhoo, we’ll find out more about her tomorrow. Her father is hosting a celebration of her life. Oliver says we all have to go.”
There’s no way I’d miss it, even if it weren’t a command performance. But right now I can’t resist pressing my point. “Don’t you find it at least somewhat intriguing that Uncle Jerry says Kimberly and Lisette were, and I quote, ‘at each other’s throats’?”
“I think you’d be hard-pressed to find an individual whose throat Lisette was not at,” Shanelle says.
Trixie rubs my arm. She’s looking at me as if I were sort of pathetic, which perhaps I am. “You’re not still thinking Lisette was murdered, are you, Happy?”
“You best not be thinking Kimberly murdered her,” Shanelle mutters.
The thought had crossed my mind, preposterous though it might seem.
Shanelle pipes up again before I come up with an answer. “You’re justified in being darn curious about Kimberly, though. That requires no further explanation.”
“That is part of it.” I’m relieved there’s at least one thing on which we can agree. “I wonder if she had a broken childhood. Her uncle said something about how he and her grandmother raised her.” It’s sad if Kimberly had a rough upbringing, though it’ll take more than that to give me the warm fuzzies about her.
Onstage the actors begin their rehearsal. Oliver positions himself in the front row to observe. I relax in my seat, half watching and half allowing my mind to wander. So did Kimberly think she’d earn Jason’s admiration by getting his wife and her friends a Broadway consulting gig? If so, her strategy worked. Jason told me he was impressed that Kimberly was so thoughtful and that she had that kind of yank.
Of course, I must also wonder why Kimberly would want to impress Jason. What can he do for her? I suppose he can help her professionally if the calendars are a big success. Unfortunately, I’m concerned her interest is mostly personal.
By that I mean romantic.
Since I will not allow myself to dwell on that distressing possibility, I focus on the rehearsal. Before long I find myself lost in it. The rewritten scene is wildly improved and for the first time includes some of the feedback we beauty queens provided. If Enzo and Oliver work this kind of magic on the rest of the libretto, it’s just possible that the poster for Dream Angel won’t land on Joe Allen’s redbrick wall after all.
The rehearsal breaks and Trixie consults her watch, a casual Timex with a fabric band featuring white dots on a navy background. “It’s already six,” she says. “Lord, I need more coffee to get through the next two hours.”
“You may not want it,” I tell her, “if you hear the story Enzo told me today. He swears it’s true.”
We head backstage and I begin the tale. “This was during a Broadway run of Les Misérables.”
“One of the longest-running musicals of all time,” Shanelle says. “I always call it Les Miz.”
“I do, too. Anyway, as you know, it has lots of child actors and their contracts include appearance clauses.”
“All performers must have that,” Trixie says.
“They do. Enzo told me there are all kinds of rules, about tanning and tattoos and weight and you name it. He said he’s worked on productions where the female performers are weighed every week.”
“And not the men?” Shanelle cries. “That would get on my last nerve.”
We arrive backstage and sneak into a corner. I keep my voice low. “The production went on for so long that one of the girls had a growth spurt and outgrew her part, according to the specs in her contract. So she got fired.”
Trixie’s face falls. “Oh, how sad for that poor child.”
“It’s a lesson in real life,” Shanelle says, “not just a lesson in show business. Anyway, what happened?”
I can’t help chuckling. Nervy girl: I’ll give her that. “She peed in the backstage coffeepot.”
“What?” Trixie squeals.
“Yup. People were drinking the coffee and saying, wow, this tastes tinny.”
“Oh, my Lord, can you imagine!” Trixie shudders. “Everybody must’ve wanted to skin her alive after that.”
“Apparently the girl’s mother didn’t want to believe her daughter did it, which got all the mothers accusing each other’s children. It got so bad that two moms got into a fistfight at the stage door. The cops had to be called.” I pause before I deliver the punch line. “So after that, what do you think they called the production? Les Wizz.”
After that cautionary tale, we approach the backstage coffeepot with trepidation. But with at least two more hours before we can call it quits for the day, caffeine is called for.
Tonya Shepherds, the platinum blond onetime beauty queen who plays the lead in Dream Angel—and darn well, too—sidles close to me as I’m loading my java with low-fat cream. She looks cute in raw edge skinny jeans and a flowy green utility shirt partially tucked in. “I love the rewritten scenes,” she whispers. “Was it you who fed Enzo that line about rhinestones and roses?”
“That was Trixie. How much rewriting is Enzo doing?”
“A lot. I don’t know how I’m going to nail it all by Sunday.”
“Are you saying—”
“We’re back into previews on Sunday,” Tonya tells me.
Wow. Only 48 hours from now.
“Between you and me”—Tonya lowers her voice even further—“Oliver wants to take advantage of all the publicity we’re getting because of Lisette.”
That would be cynical of Oliver, but I wouldn’t put it past him. “He’s not worried that Lisette’s family would think restarting Dream Angel so soon is disrespectful to her?”
“Go online and read the update in the Times. There’s a quote from her father that Dream Angel is his daughter’s legacy and the best way to honor her is to resume production. You know the story of Rent, right?”
Since I don’t, she tells me.
“The creator, who wrote not only every single word but also composed the music, died the night of the final dress rehearsal. I think it was a heart problem that two different ERs didn’t diagnose. Anyway, Jonathan Larson was his name. He was only thirty-five.”
“How tragic,” I murmur.
“They skipped only one preview before they started up again. And of course Rent became a huge megahit. I gotta go,” she finishes, and whirls away.
I relay the Dream Angel 411 to Trixie and Shanelle as I retake my seat in the audience.
“What do you want to bet,” Shanelle murmurs, “that Oliver will use this as an opportunity to raise ticket prices, too?”
We’re waiting for rehearsal to resume when I realize this is an excellent opportunity to review my photos of Lisette’s call log. Finally. I pull out my cell phone and what name do I quickly spy? That of Damian Paganos. It wouldn’t have meant much to me earlier today, but it sure does now.
So this is the man Lisette was seeing. I squint at his photo, wishing I could see it more clearly. All I can ascertain is that he’s got dark hair and looks to be about thirty. His phone number begins with the Manhattan area code 212.
I check my photos of Lisette’s texts, by now feeling a surge of sleuthing adrenaline. Yes, Damian’s name appears on that list, too, not surprisingly. It does not show up among her emails.
“What are you doing, Happy?” Trixie wants to know. She’s to my left, with Shanelle to her left, and I see she’s playing Blendoku on her phone. That sort of thing is common around here. A couple rows ahead of us, two actors are playing poker on their laptops. There’s a lot of waiting around putting together a Broadway show. You have to pack your patience.
I confess what I’m up to.
“Ooh, let me help.” Trixie sets her phone aside. “Who did Lisette call a lot?”
“Well, apart from the mysterious Damian, somebody named Wendy Jackson Rafferty.” Her photo reveals an African-American woman who looks to be in her fifties. Like Damian, she’s a Manhattan local whose name also appears on Lisette’s roster of texts. “Oh, good,” I add, “there’s email traffic, too.” Given that I have only a list of Lisette’s emails, though, all I can access is the beginning of the emails that were sent to her. “Wendy sent one twenty-four hours ago.”
“What does it say?”
“ ‘Lisette,’ ” I read out loud, “ ‘the waiting is almost over. The board will meet tomorrow to make their decision, probably around ...’ That’s all I’ve got.”
Trixie frowns. “That sounds serious, doesn’t it? I wonder what board Wendy is talking about.”
“Let’s see if I can find anything from googling Wendy’s name. Okay, here we go. She works for a Pettigrew Realty.”
“So Wendy is probably a real estate agent. Do you think maybe it’s the board of a homeowners’ association they’re talking about? Maybe Lisette needed to get approved before she could buy.” Trixie lowers her voice. “I hate to be mean, but I’m not sure I would’ve wanted Lisette for a neighbor.”
“What are you two whispering about?” Shanelle leans over to ask.
We’re bringing Shanelle up to speed when I realize that I have a few more photos of Lisette’s emails that I haven’t checked yet. And when I do, I discover another email from Wendy, from two days ago.
“The day Lisette went home sick to her stomach,” Trixie reminds us.
“Thanks to Oliver,” Shanelle mutters. “By the way, I heard that tech over there say that it’s taking so long to get rehearsal started again because Enzo has to lengthen the monologue. Oliver moved up a costume change.”
This is the sort of detail that never occurred to me before I was a Broadway aficionado. Or is it aficionada in my case? Anyway, everything has to time out perfectly. If a performer must make a costume change, the action must continue without him just long enough so he can get that done. All theater is an elaborately choreographed dance, often with as much going on backstage as onstage.
“What does the older email from Wendy say?” Trixie asks.
“ ‘Lisette,’ ” I read, “ ‘I can’t make any guarantees. The Belfer is notorious for board turndowns. That said …’ That’s all I’ve got. So now we need to find out what the Belfer is.”
“I’m on it,” Shanelle says, clicking madly on her cell phone.
I can’t help but smile. Shanelle and Trixie may think I needn’t bother sleuthing, but they’re game to play along.
“Okay,” Shanelle says, “the Belfer is a famous apartment building on Central Park West. It’s a co-op building.”
I’ve heard of co-ops, not that we have many in Cleveland, at least to my knowledge. “So it sounds like the board of the Belfer was going to decide today whether to approve Lisette as an owner. Or as a renter, I guess.”
“Not as a renter,” Shanelle says. “This article says the Belfer doesn’t allow owners to rent out their apartments. It’s very strict about renovations, too, and only last year did it start allowing pets.”
“May I join you?” Tonya asks. She sits down beside me and leans over. “Want to hear the latest?”
“We always want to hear the latest,” Trixie breathes.
“Not only are we resuming previews Sunday,” Tonya whispers, “but Oliver may move opening night up to Wednesday.”
Tonya appears astounded by that prospect, as am I. “Wednesday next week?” I say. “As in five days from today?”
“You got it. And I heard that Lisette’s father is making Oliver put Lisette’s photo on the playbill’s cover. I’m not thrilled about that, if it’s true.”
It must be rare for the book writer’s photo to land on the playbill’s cover. But I suppose that what Warren Longley wants, Warren Longley gets.
We gossip about Dream Angel for a while before we return to the co-op topic. “You can probably answer this question, Tonya,” Trixie says. “What’s the famous co-op building here in Manhattan where John Lennon lived?”
“Oh, that’s the Dakota.”
“I was just reading an article about the Dakota,” Shanelle says. “They describe it as the most famous co-op in the world. Get this. The least expensive apartment available right now is a two-bedroom duplex priced at five point nine five million dollars.”
“Wow,” Trixie and I say in unison.
“Yoko Ono still lives in that building,” Shanelle says. “And I bet not in the least expensive apartment, either.”
It’s hard to fathom sums of money that large. No wonder the lawyers thought my quarter-million-dollar titleholder prize was laughably small.
“The Belfer’s not as expensive as that, is it?” Trixie asks.
“Oh my God, the Belfer.” Tonya clutches my arm. “I would kill to live in the Belfer.”