Show Business Is Murder by Stuart M. Kaminsky

Author:Stuart M. Kaminsky
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.

Line Reading

PARNELL HALL

FLETCHER GREENGRASS HANDED me the silver samovar and fell over dead.

I must say I resented it. That was the cue for my big speech, I’d been working on it all week, I was really looking forward to it, and I wanted to do it right.

Now, don’t judge me too harshly. You gotta understand. I was nervous about my performance. For one thing, I hadn’t acted in years. When I had it was in summer stock, at an Equity theater, where the actors got paid. I’d also appeared in movies, granted only fleetingly, but still enough to hold a Screen Actors Guild card. All of which made me a professional. And this was community theater. Amateur theater. And as a professional acting in amateur theater, I was expected to be good.

I had a lot to prove.

Which, if the truth be known, I probably wasn’t capable of. Because if I’d been any good as an actor, I’d still be doing it, instead of working as a P.I.

I also didn’t know he was dead. Because Fletcher Greengrass was one of the hammiest actors I’d ever met, and when he fell over on his face, I, like everyone else in the cast, assumed he was pulling another one of his outrageous stunts just to upstage me, and undercut my big speech. So I was justifiably pissed.

It was near the end of act two. I was alone on stage, awaiting the object of my affections, the virginal Emily, when young Mr. Greengrass emerged from her room instead.

“Surprised?” he inquired in an exaggerated mocking tone. “I don’t know why. These thing happen, don’t they? How do you like it? So I got to her first, what’s the big deal?”

He put his hand on my shoulder. I brushed it off.

“Remember what you said? About women being like trophies?” He snatched up the samovar, held it out to me. “Here’s the award for the world’s worst ladies’ man. I think this belongs to you.”

His delivery was so over the top that when he proceeded to take a nose dive, I naturally figured he was clowning.

So did the director. A little man with no hair, except on his chin, he was given to histrionics, whether in an attempt to match Fletcher Greengrass’s tone, or because he had seen a director portrayed that way on TV, I couldn’t say. At any rate, he vaulted up onto the stage, which was at the far end of the Ridgewood High basketball court, to tell Fletcher Greengrass off.

“Fletcher,” he declared. “That’s the last straw. You cooperate, or you’re out of the play. You think I can’t replace you, well I can. I’ll play the part myself, if I have to, rather than put up with this.”

That was a brave boast. Fletcher Greengrass was our leading man, our young love interest, the one enamored of both Emily and Charlotte, the two young women in the piece. I say Emily and Charlotte—that’s their stage names. Emily was actually a young housewife whose name I didn’t know.

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