Corkscrew by Donald E. Westlake Read Free Book Online

directly to Jill's place, up on Riverside Drive, and they'd go to dinner from there.
    The invitation to
Low Fidelity
had come in Tuesday's mail, and it had said there would be a cocktail buffet following the performance. The opening night would begin an hour earlier than usual, at seven, so Wayne fed himself left-overs out of the refrigerator at six. 'There's good and bad in everybody,' he told himself, as he paced the kitchen. 'What's
my
grudge against her?
That's
the problem.' He felt more and more tense, and had one glass of white wine to calm himself, but was afraid to drink more.
    It was a cool night in early November, not cold enough to need a topcoat. He wore his blazer, a blue shirt, and a red tie, and walked down to Grove Street, arriving at ten to seven, to see the usual cluster of people on the sidewalk out front. He didn't know any of them, and was the only singleton there. He recognized Lucie at once, from her picture in
People.
She stood talking and laughing with two other women, all three of them fortyish and very good-looking, in a Don't Touch The Merchandise way. The other two women were smoking, Lucie was not.
    The only reasons to stand outside were to smoke or chat or wait for friends. Wayne had none of those reasons, so he went on inside and showed his invitation to a girl at a folding table set up just to the right of the door. She checked him off on a list, and gave him his ticket and the program.
    He went on into the auditorium, which was small, under a very high black ceiling, with steeply-raked seating up to the right from the entrance, the stage to the left. There was no curtain fronting the stage, and the set was a busy one, a living room and a kitchen and a staircase, lots of furniture and lots of doors. The stage lights were off, so that the set was faintly mysterious and faintly threatening.
    The theater was less than a quarter full, and he saw that in here there were a few other loners like himself. His seat was the last one on the far side, two-thirds of the way up. He crossed between the seats and the stage, aware of people who glanced at him and then away when they didn't know him. Would it matter, later on, if people remembered he'd been here tonight? No, it couldn't.
    The program was the off-Broadway version of
Playbill,
full of chatty news about a world very different from his own. The writers he knew were novelists or short-story writers, or they had moved to California to be screenwriters and would occasionally come back to tell their horror stories. Theater people lived in a parallel universe.
    The
Playbill
contained the usual pocket biographies, so he read the one about Jack Wagner, the playwright. This was his first play, it seemed. He was a journalist by profession, came from Missouri, had graduated from Antioch, lived near Rhinebeck with his wife, Cindy, and two sons. He had been nominated three times for journalism awards Wayne had never heard of.
    More people came in, the theater filling, and then a cheerful older couple claimed the seats to his left. They wore lots of coats and scarves, and she carried a big black leather clunky purse, so it took them some while to get settled, during which Wayne read the list of individuals and organizations that helped support this theater, and then read the biography of the director, Janet Higgins, a native Floridian, who had directed half a dozen off-Broadway plays Wayne had never heard of and had considerable experience as well in 'regional theater.'
    'Good evening.'
    It was the woman to his left. Her husband was next to Wayne, so she had leaned forward to smile past him.
    'Evening,' Wayne said.
    'Isn't this wonderful for Jack?'
    'From journalism to playwriting,' Wayne said, with admiration, as though describing some difficult acrobatic performance. 'Quite a leap.'
    'No one deserves it more,' she said, which Wayne thought a non sequitur, but he agreed anyway. 'You're right.'
    'Fred Gustav,' the man said. 'My wife, Molly.'
    'Wayne