Chapter 6
Kenneth, who had been watching the performance from the back of the theater, ran up to the booth and ordered his two technical assistants to lower the curtain. The audience was confused as to why Claire didn’t get up to make her curtain call, but nevertheless filed out of the theater, completely oblivious to the shocking and horrible truth.
An ambulance arrived within minutes. But despite the best efforts of the paramedics to revive her, Claire Richards was declared dead. We were all asked to return to our dressing rooms until the police could question everyone. Although the cause of death was still to be determined, the police wanted to at least conduct a preliminary round of questioning in the event that they might have a homicide on their hands.
As I sat alone waiting for them to get to me, I choked back tears. I just couldn’t believe it. My theatrical hero, my drinking buddy, my staunchest ally, Claire Richards was dead. The thought of it was devastating. My head swirled with theories as to what happened. Claire Richards was perfectly healthy before the show, full of energy and vigor and ready to conquer the London critics. And by the end of the play, she was a corpse. This didn’t make any sense.
The prop gun had been checked and did indeed fire blanks. So Claire did not die of a bullet wound. Maybe it was a heart attack or stroke. She was a big drinker, just like her bitter rival Dame Sylvia. But because Claire’s death was so mysterious and I am, after all, an admitted conspiracy theorist, I instantly jumped to the conclusion that foul play had to somehow be involved. She certainly didn’t lack enemies with a motive. Almost everyone in the company despised her. Her Irish bully lover, Liam, could have discovered the same secret dalliance I had stumbled upon earlier when I tried delivering flowers to her dressing room and exacted his own brand of revenge. Then there was our director, Kenneth. Claire had pretty much emasculated the guy throughout the entire rehearsal process, which might have pushed him to a point where he decided to strike back. Minx the understudy, of course, had very clear reasons to want Claire out of the way. The stage-diva rivalry between Claire and Dame Sylvia might have finally reached an ugly head. Neither Akshay nor Sir Anthony displayed any overt hostilities toward Claire, but that didn’t prove their innocence.
I had all night to mull over the possibilities because the police questioned me last. It was six-thirty the following morning and I was fighting to keep my eyes open. The severe detective inspector, a blond woman in her fifties who had no time for any smiles or pleasantries, sat me down in my dressing room and hovered over me in a blatant attempt to intimidate me into cooperating fully and spilling everything I knew.
“I’m Detective Inspector Sally Bowles,” she said.
“You’re kidding me,” I said, followed by a quick burst of laughter.
Her eyes narrowed. The joke was lost on her at first. “Yes,” she said.
“Like Liza Minelli’s character in Cabaret?”
She sighed. “Yes.”
Bowles gave a withering glance to her partner, a pudgy man in his mid-forties too small for his suit, who stood steadfast at the door to the dressing room in the event I might try to bolt. He nodded and then jotted something on a notepad. I presumed he was writing, “Suspect is gayer than a picnic basket.”
“I suppose you get that a lot,” I said.
“Only in certain circles,” she said and then abruptly turned her back to me and said something to her partner that I couldn’t hear. He grunted and wrote some more on his pad.
“Could you describe your relationship with Ms. Richards?” Sally said, her back still to me.
“Good. Very good,” I said. “We got along quite well.”
“How well? Did you share intimate relations?”
I let out another quick burst of laughter. “I’m gay.”
One more nod to her pudgy partner. Suspicions confirmed. She locked eyes with me. “You still didn’t answer my question.”
“No. I did not sleep with her.”
“Someone claims you did.”
I shook my head, irritated. “That would be Liam. He assumed we were. But nothing ever happened between us. Ever.”
“He said he walked in on the two of you having sex.”
“He’s wrong.”
“He said you were on top of her, your shirt was open, and you were kissing.”
“She was on top of me. But she was the one who ripped my shirt open, and yes, she was kissing me. But I was trying to pull away. Claire said she wanted to make love, and I explicitly told her I was gay. That didn’t seem to deter her and that’s when Liam walked in.”
Sally wasn’t satisfied. She frowned as she stared at me, trying to read my eyes to see if they flickered from her gaze, a sure sign I was lying. They didn’t.
“Are you saying Claire’s death wasn’t from natural causes?” I asked Bowles.
“We don’t know yet,” she said.
Bowles decided to batter me with more questions. An hour’s worth, in fact. Questions about my career, my life with Charlie, my history with Wallace and Katrina, my relationships with Kenneth and the rest of the cast. She had me recount the timeline of activities leading up to the performance. I didn’t hold anything back. I confessed all the backstage minidramas that went on during the rehearsal process. Sally listened with rapt attention as if engrossed in the latest episode of England’s classic soap opera Coronation Street.
She was thorough and determined, and by the end of the questioning, I had a newfound respect for Detective Inspector Sally Bowles. She reminded me of the glorious Helen Mirren, who played a kick-ass, flawed but brilliant detective in the Prime Suspect detective series. Cold, distant, but fabulously British. As we wrapped up, I could sense she was slowly beginning to warm up to me. She even smiled slightly as she shook my hand and thanked me for my cooperation.
“So, do you think Claire was murdered?” I said.
“Like I said, we don’t know at this point,” Sally said. “Autopsy’s going to be conducted tomorrow. We’ll have more information then. We just wanted to talk to everyone while the events are still fresh in everyone’s mind. Just in case.”
If this had been anyone else, the police would have undoubtedly waited for the autopsy results before interrupting their suppers and dashing over to talk to everyone. But this was Claire Richards. A national treasure. They were doing their homework early.
Sally nodded to her partner and they were halfway out the door when it dawned on me that I had forgotten the juiciest detail of all.
“There is one thing I think you should know,” I said.
Sally spun back around, her interest piqued.
“I believe Claire was sleeping with someone else connected to the play.”
“Who?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t see him. But I heard them going at it when I stopped by her dressing room before the performance. I assumed it was Liam, but then I saw him hanging around backstage right after that. So it couldn’t have been him in there with her.”
She made a note of it, thanked me again, and then left.
At last I was free to go. All I could think about was finding my way back to the Savoy and crashing into bed for some much-needed sleep. Kenneth had announced that the show would go dark for the following few nights until all the facts surrounding Claire’s mysterious death could be sorted out.
As I wandered through Covent Garden towards the Strand, still distraught over Claire’s untimely passing, I stopped at a newsstand. The morning editions were out. I snapped up copies of all of them, grabbed some Starbucks coffee, and hustled back to my room to see what the critics had said about the world-premiere performance of Wallace Goodwin’s Murder Can Be Civilized.
The first headline read, “Murder May Be Civilized but Sitting Through This Play Is Most Certainly Not.” It got worse. “The Only Murder in This Disaster Worth Championing Is the Audience Offing the Playwright.” None of us escaped the wrath of the critics. I was described as “relying on my situation-comedy bag of tricks to muddle my way through.” Maybe Kenneth had been right. Sir Anthony was blasted for being the most effeminate military figure this side of Gomer Pyle. Akshay was described as startlingly sexy but hopelessly stiff. And in the most ironic review of the batch, one critic cried, “Claire Richards, though bursting with talent, alas died unconvincingly in the final moments of the play.” Boy, would that reviewer feel stupid when word got out.
Only Dame Sylvia escaped the knives of the critics unscathed. No one dared to touch her. Whatever she did was breathtaking, spellbinding, riveting, and always a tour de force. One critic damned the play but praised Dame Sylvia for being a real trouper for putting up with it all. The production was a cataclysmic failure. I was actually starting to believe during the performance that we had a hit on our hands. How could I have been so wrong? But the real issue was not how long we were going to squeak by before audience apathy shut us down. The big question was what the hell were we going to do now? Our leading lady was dead. Would Minx take over? Would the producers just cut their losses and get out?
Although the morning papers didn’t have time to print the announcement of Claire’s death, the Internet and television news programs were all abuzz. Clips of all of Claire’s movies were played on every breakfast chatter show. Big stars like Michael Caine and Anthony Hopkins were roused from their beds and forced to show us their stunned though still-sleepy reactions.
I sat on the bed in my room at the Savoy and watched the coverage as if I hadn’t actually been there, as if I was a mere spectator like the rest of the world. Hours went by when I should have been resting. But I couldn’t tear my eyes off the television.
My phone rang, shaking me free of my TV news overdose. It had to be Charlie. He must have just heard the news. I picked up the receiver.
“Charlie?”
I heard a man’s wailing voice. He was sobbing, obviously wracked with grief. I was still hoping it was Charlie and that he was calling to beg and plead with me to come home. He missed me more than he ever imagined he would and didn’t want so much distance to ever separate us again. But sadly, it wasn’t Charlie.
“Jarrod, this is so awful, so incomprehensible.”
It was Wallace Goodwin.
“I know. I’m just kind of numb over the whole thing.”
“How could this happen?” He broke down, sobbing.
“They’re going to conduct an autopsy. The police will find out how Claire died soon enough.”
“No, I mean the reviews,” Wallace said. “They’re so vicious, so mean-spirited.”
How silly of me to assume Wallace was devastated over Claire’s death and not over the universal pan of his first theatrical effort.
“I don’t know, Wallace.”
“It’s like they saw a different play. I thought it went pretty good . . . Well, except for Claire dying and all. Katrina thinks we should file a lawsuit against the critics for gross misconduct—”
I hung up. I couldn’t help myself. Wallace was a reminder of the rampant self-absorption in show business, and I simply couldn’t handle it at the moment. I would call back later and apologize, say we were somehow disconnected. But now was not the time to commiserate over some lousy reviews.
I ordered up a roast beef sandwich from room service, unplugged the phone, took a long, hot bath, and then curled up in bed and slept for what felt like days. By the time I was ready to face the world again, I received a note to report to the theater. Some decisions had been made.
I dressed quickly and headed out the door. I passed the newsstand and stopped suddenly. The London Times was reporting on its front page that Claire Richards’s death had been caused by a massive stroke. So it wasn’t a murder. I felt a wave of relief wash over me. During the two days I had stayed in my room sleeping off the past month of stress and nervous tension, I had a series of unsettling dreams that someone in the cast was a murderer and that I would eventually be the killer’s target. This wasn’t so farfetched, considering my history. I had played amateur detective on several homicide cases, much to the chagrin of Charlie. But at least this time it was a death from natural causes. I bought the paper to absorb more of the details as I headed toward the Apollo Theatre on Shaftsbury. The autopsy appeared to be very conclusive. It didn’t make losing Claire any easier. Funeral services were being arranged. More stars were commenting on their absolute shock and devastation over their fellow artist’s demise.
I entered the Apollo through the backstage entrance. It was eerily quiet. No one was milling about. There were no lights on. I looked at the note slipped under my door and noticed I had misread the time of the cast call. It was nine-thirty, not nine o’clock. Now I had a half hour to kill before everyone else arrived for the meeting. I lumbered down the hallway to my dressing room when I heard some rustling. At first I thought it might be Sir Anthony entertaining yet another one of his young male acting students with a swimmer’s build from the Royal Academy, but his door was shut. The commotion was coming from inside Claire’s dressing room next door. I debated on whether I should just ignore whoever it was and use my time to call home and check in with Charlie. But my curiosity, as usual, got the best of me. I quietly tiptoed over to the door, which was open. Pushing it open, I saw a figure in a leather jacket and jeans and wearing a red ski mask rifling through Claire’s belongings.
Every instinct told me to run. It’s never a good idea to confront a thief. I had guest-starred on too many detective shows where someone stupidly calls attention to themselves by saying something like, “What are you doing here?” panicking the bad guy and then getting knocked out or something. Anyone with half a brain would just get the hell out of there.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
Surprised, the red-masked thief bolted upright and stared at me. Then he rushed me, shoving his hands against my chest, knocking me over. My head hit the floor with a sickening thud. And I felt the boots of my assailant stomp over my chest as he raced out the door. Then everything went black.