The matinee performance Saturday afternoon went smoothly: The sound level for the storm had been corrected and other adjustments made, and as a result, the Saturday evening performance was our best so far. Afterwards, the cast wanted to go out for a drink; usually I went with them, but tonight I begged off, saying that with all that had gone on this week I was exhausted. In fact, I wasn’t going home, but took the number 1 subway up to Columbia University area, hoping to track down Roger Morehead, the young druggie who had confronted Dorothy in her office. I knew the chances of finding him were slim, but I had to try. Monaghan had given me the address where Roger was supposed to be staying and without too much trouble I found the place: a six-story apartment house just west of Broadway, no doubt with reasonable rents that suited Columbia students as well as those attending nearby Union Theological Seminary.
I flashed a guard—half-asleep in the lobby—an NYPD detective’s card, a fake one I had been given when I was on Law & Order and had kept for just such situations. A gunmetal gray elevator took me to the fifth floor, where I walked down a long corridor to an apartment at the end. From all the noise, it was clear there was a party in progress, and I felt I just might be in luck.
Not surprisingly, it took a series of knocks on the door to get someone to answer. “Yes?” the person inquired, seeing someone who obviously did not belong. When the door opened, even a crack, there was the raucous sound of rock music, complete with indistinguishable lyrics; a heavy drum and bass guitar beat; the sight of writhing bodies, not really moving together or even to the music, beer cans in virtually every hand; and the pungent smell of marijuana and God knows what else.
“Roger Morehead,” I said. “Is he here?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Johanssen, is the name. Matt Johanssen.”
“Is there a problem?”
“No problem. I have a message for him.”
“From whom?”
“Someone he knows, an old friend.”
“I’ll see if I can find him.” He didn’t invite me in, but then, I didn’t want to go in. I did, however, place a firm foot in the door so I would not be locked out. After quite a few minutes, Roger appeared. Rail-thin, he had greasy black hair pulled back in a ponytail, with stray hairs shooting out in places. Below a sharp nose, there was almost no chin, but he did have large ears. Also, there remained on his face traces of adolescent acne. My first thought was that, if I looked like Roger, I might very well have taken to dope myself.
“Do I know you?”
“A friend of Warren Tremayne.”
“Is this about Dorothy?”
“Not really.”
“The police already talked to me.”
“It wasn’t the police I wanted to ask about.”
“What then? Look, this is an odd time for any kind of interrogation.” He started to turn and leave.
I called him back. “Just a couple of questions and I’m gone.” Before he could object further, I plowed on. “Warren has been reaching out to a number of people recently; I just wondered if he’s been in touch with you.”
He paused a moment. “As a matter of fact, he was. What of it?”
“Was he asking you to do something?”
“I thought he was going to; he acted like he was. Said he would pay me. But then changed his mind.”
“Oh?”
“He didn’t explain, but he did give me a couple of hundred bucks.”
“That was nice of him.”
“I always liked Warren.”
“Better than Dorothy?”
“Never speak ill of the dead. Isn’t that what they say?”
“Last question: When was this?”
“What?”
“When he spoke to you?”
“Two weeks ago, give or take a few days.”
“Thanks. Sorry I interrupted the festivities. Go back to your party.”
“I thought maybe you were fuzz.”
“Not me.” And I went on my way.
• • •
It’s strange, the quirky connections the mind can make. Riding home on the subway, a fairly longish ride from Columbia to the lower Village, my thoughts jumped from the raucous, youth-oriented party I had just observed to another party two decades earlier, a party standing in stark contrast to this one: a wedding reception for two young people, both from old money, on the roof of the St. Regis Hotel. I had stepped out onto a small terrace to get a breath of air when someone came up beside me, a girl a few years younger than I, which is to say, in her late twenties.
“This is it,” she said, “The last hurrah.”
“I thought it was just the beginning,” I said.
“I don’t mean the bride and groom. The whole affair. The final frolic of the WASP world. Surely you’ve noticed the crowd: a few Catholics, three blacks, and a couple of Asians, but essentially this is WASP country. Laughing, mingling, dancing to Gershwin and Cole Porter—as if there were no tomorrow. But of course there is, and they don’t know it, or possibly they do know it and don’t want to face it. Better to live in ignorant bliss than be aware and scared to death.” After a slight pause she continued, “You’re the actor, aren’t you?”
“And you’re the designer.”
“Assistant designer, actually, second assistant designer.”
Her name was Sophie van Deventer, and everyone knew who she was, at least everyone in the crowd at the reception. From Minneapolis, she had a classic look, not that of the wholesome, pink-cheeked lass, but more continental than mid-American. Reasonably tall, just under six feet, she had dark chestnut hair, piercing blue eyes, high cheekbones, a beautifully proportioned nose and chin, and flawless skin. Clearly as beautiful as any model, she would never be mistaken for one because of her animation, not to say her intelligence. Her face seemed infinitely mobile, breaking out in a wide smile one moment, a serious mien the next, followed by a sly smile, and then arched eyebrows when skeptical. Men swarmed all over her—stockbrokers, lawyers, investment bankers, real estate deal makers—but so far she had resisted them all.
She stuck out her hand. “I’m Sophie.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m Matt.”
“So here we are: the last of the Mohicans.”
“I hope not.”
“But, darling, we are. Of course, the clubs, the out-of-town watering holes, the Upper East Side, they will go on, but the clock is ticking.”
“Did you come with someone?” I asked.
“Inky Lawrence.”
“Don’t know Inky.”
“No reason you should. And you, are you alone?”
“No. Teeky Walters.”
“Don’t know Teeky.”
“No reason you should.” After a slight pause I continued, “Shouldn’t we get together some time? Soon, from what you were saying. We could hold a wake or perform last rites for all those people in there.” I indicated the dance floor.
She reached into a small purse. “Here’s my card,” she said. “Do you have a pen?”
I handed her one. She wrote on the back. “The number to call is this one.”
• • •
That’s where it began: my three-year affair with Sophie. I’d never met anyone like her, and I haven’t since. She had come east and gone to Brown, and while in Providence attended classes at the Rhode Island School of Design. In New York, she quickly landed a job with a fabric house in the D & D building, then within two years joined Barbara Acorn. Called Babs by everyone, Acorn was known as the decorator for Old Money, though, as Sophie pointed out, there was a lot of new money in the mix as well. Babs specialized in understated elegance that included masterful recreations of faux English and faux French. Sophie’s forte was color. With the naked eye, she could distinguish eight or nine shades of yellow, twelve or more of green, and no telling how many of red or blue. But she also became a whiz at fabrics, wallpaper, and furniture.
We were both tentative at first. As glamorous as she was, I was fearful that I might be in over my head. On her part, having fended off men for so long, she was not sure she could break the habit. I think my being an actor helped: I was not a cookie-cutter man with a briefcase. On the other hand, it was also a help that I wasn’t some off-the-wall beatnik character. In any case, we became a regular item, so regular that within six months we had bought an apartment on Riverside Drive overlooking the Hudson. It was large enough for each of us to have our own “space,” as it was put in those days. Naturally, she decorated it.
Sophie was extraordinary: adventurous, impulsive, improvisational. We would take the ferry to Governor’s Island one week, visit the Brooklyn Museum the next, travel to Long Island—not to Southampton or East Hampton, but all the way to the end, to Montauk. She seemed always to know the latest, small, unknown but soon to be discovered restaurant. As an actor, I alternated periods of intense activity with days when I was relatively free, and she seemed to have the knack of being free at the same time. I taught her about theatre, and she taught me about art. A trip to a museum with Sophie—the Metropolitan, the Guggenheim, MOMA, the Whitney—became a course in art history, not to say art appreciation.
As if all this were not enough, there was the sex. In many ways I found this the most miraculous part of all. I had been involved from time to time with young women—some of them actresses, some not—who were willing partners, and with a couple of them I felt the sex was about as good as it could get. But always, even with the most willing and experimental bedmate, the tension never went completely away. Invariably there was something in the air: a hesitancy, an uncertainty, a question mark whether my performance would be acceptable. Of course, when things worked out, the tension was dissipated, but there was no denying it had been there at the start.
With Sophie, it was never there at all. Whether foreplay or fulfillment, the experience was amazingly relaxed, at the same time that it was as intense and exciting as anything I had known. She was as adventurous in bed as she was in our other escapades. Everything was up for grabs: time, place, positions, whatever. It could be at any moment: after a leisurely breakfast on a Saturday or Sunday, or following a walk on the beach in Montauk, one never knew.
We were together three years. Toward the end several things happened. She had passed the thirty-year mark, and those were the days when the term “biological clock” was very much in vogue. Women began to consider the possibility that time might be running out. I think one of the things that worked so well for Sophie and me is that neither one of us ever raised the notion of marriage. We were as close as any married couple could be; ironically, one thing that allowed that to happen was that we were so evenly balanced, each one wanting what we had and nothing more. Unconsciously, we probably realized that there was a time limit on such a relationship.
The split, about which there had already been a few hints, came when I went out of town on a lengthy tour, playing Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls. She had decided that she wanted to go out on her own as a designer, and had begun moving in that direction. While I was on tour, I would come back over a Sunday night and a Monday, but we both sensed that we were turning a page and beginning a new chapter. During my absences she began seeing a doctor, an up-and-coming neurosurgeon, who loved her madly and wanted to get married. He turned out to be just what she needed at that point. And so our affair ended—amicably and with a vow to remain good friends, which we did, and continue to do to this day. They, by the way, had three children, each one by the looks of things headed toward becoming a notable success in his or her chosen field.
By the time my subway ride ended, my reverie was over, but it accomplished one thing. For the previous seventy-two hours, I had thought of only two things: the play, and finding Dorothy’s killer. My reminiscence let me forget for a time what had been so uppermost in my mind, and I had the first good night’s sleep I had had all week.
• • •
Sunday morning I slept in. I had turned off my phone and deliberately did not check my emails. Instead I fixed a leisurely breakfast, made my way slowly through the Sunday Times, and did a little laundry. At noon I checked my phone messages. Most could wait. But one, I thought, could not. Beginning at 9:00, and then every twenty minutes or so, I had had calls from Sonny Beaufort: he had to see me. So the one call I returned was to Sonny.
“You read Friday’s paper?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“I must talk to you.”
“Why?”
“I’ll explain.”
“You can’t tell me now?”
“Can I come down?”
I looked around the loft. “It’s a mess here.”
“This is not about interior design.”
“Is 2:00, 2:30 all right?”
“Fine. See you then.”
• • •
Sonny Beaufort grew up in the family home near Chester, South Carolina. Chester was also the home of Summer Tree Mills, a textile business that had been in Sonny’s family for four generations. His grandfather, Lucius, after whom he was named, had been running the mill during and just after World War II and had expanded the business exponentially, first by becoming one of the major suppliers of parachute cloth to the military during the war and later by being one of the first to get into no-iron fabric for sheets and shirts. When Sonny’s father took over, he kept things going by turning out denim for blue jeans. Summer Tree was booming, and, not surprisingly, it was expected that Sonny would enter the family business, in fact, that he would run the family business.
Sonny was sent to Princeton, the favorite Ivy League school for the sons of Southern gentlemen. Two years behind me, he was an enthusiastic member of the Triangle Club—the group that since 1891 has been presenting musical theatre productions at the university, boasting such well-known alumni as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Booth Tarkington, Josh Logan, and Jimmy Stewart. The highlight, year after year, is a group of male students dressed in drag who form an outrageous kick line.
Sonny proved to be an indifferent singer and dancer but showed genuine talent as a costume and set designer. Early in my senior year, after we had finished the fall production, he sought me out as a sort of mentor, or at least as a sounding board. What he was chewing over was his future—namely, how to avoid returning to South Carolina to take over the family business, a thought that sent shivers through him every time it surfaced, which was all the time. The burden of history weighs heavily on the heir to a long-standing family enterprise, and in Sonny’s case it was particularly distressing because he had discovered at Princeton, if not before, that a career in the arts was where his heart was.
I tried to offer what advice I could, but mostly I listened. The one thing I did counsel was that he try to postpone the inevitable as long as he could. Then, when the point of no return arrived, he would either have to knuckle under or, if he felt fervently enough, fly in the face of family history and go out on his own. He did, in fact, hold off as long as he could, first with a year abroad, and then two years of graduate work at the Pratt Institute of Design. Fortunately for him, just when it looked as if he could delay the decision no longer, fate intervened. Those who ran the textile business had not yet seen the sun setting in the west and rising in China. They had no idea that within fifteen or twenty years hardly a single piece of fabric or furniture would be manufactured in either South or North Carolina. In the boom just before the bust, Cannon Mills and Burlington got into a bidding war over Summer Tree, offering a price no one could sensibly refuse. A deal was struck, and the business passed to Burlington.
For Sonny it was a blessing in more ways than one. Not only was he off the hook, career-wise, but he was a rich young man. He finished up at Pratt, getting an MFA in design, but shortly after getting his degree he realized that his real talent was not for design itself, but in spotting and supporting talent in the visual arts. He started a private foundation, and used its largesse to support painters, sculptors, designers, and the institutions that trained them. Occasionally he would also offer support to struggling theatre and dance companies.
He did a good deal of freelance writing: articles in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere, but he became best known for the monthly magazine he founded, AV, or Arts View. In his magazine, the prime targets of Sonny’s ire were the industrial or financial entrepreneurs who had amassed fortunes by questionable if not downright dishonest means, then made a 180-degree turn, attempting to create the image of a model citizen and erase all traces of their previous careers. This attempted act of redemption was often achieved by becoming prominent in philanthropy, particularly in the arts.
There was a long record of such transformations in American history, the best example, no doubt, being the robber barons of the late nineteenth century—Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Frick—who seemingly would do anything to achieve a monopoly or corner the market in oil, steel, or railroads, often destroying other people’s lives in the process. A classic example of such corporate malfeasance was the Homestead Strike of 1892. The Carnegie steel mill at Homestead, near Pittsburgh, was managed by Carnegie’s partner, Henry Clay Frick. When the workers struck, Carnegie and Frick were determined to break their labor union. To do so, Frick shipped in several hundred Pinkerton guards from Boston to confront the workers. During the showdown, seven workers were killed and many more wounded. Today, however, Carnegie and Frick are not remembered for executing workers but for Carnegie Hall and the pristine Frick Museum on Fifth Avenue.
For Sonny, things have not changed. A hundred years later, history is repeating itself. The particulars are different. Entrepreneurs no longer shut down the steel mills and coal mines of their opposition, but clever financial manipulators outsmart their competition with dubious tactics that amount to the same thing. They corner the market on mercury or basalt with computers, puts, calls, derivatives, IPOs, you name it. They hire the most expensive Washington lobbyists that money can buy to make certain that no government restrictions impede their progress toward ever higher profits for their enterprises, while those same enterprises pay virtually no taxes. And, once they have made their fortunes, they leave all that behind and reinvent themselves as model citizens, often by making large contributions to some institution like the Metropolitan Opera or New York City Ballet, then joining the boards of the same so they can hobnob with old money at galas and opera openings. Sonny had exposed more than his share of such parvenus.