Ed McBain_87th Precinct 47 by Romance Read Free Book Online

get shot if they’re even
around
me. I take that disability pension… ”
    He stopped, shook his head.
    “I’m a good cop,” he said again.
    “You go another eight months with chest pains nobody can find, you’ll be looking at an Article Four …”
    “Yeah, but if I
quit
… ”
    “Yeah?”
    “If I grab the pension and run… ”
    “Yeah?”
    “They’ll say the nigguh’s got no balls.”
    “Neither have I,” Sharyn said.
    They stood looking at each other. The phone rang, startling them both. She picked up the receiver.
    “Chief Cooke,” she said.
    “Sharyn? It’s me.”
    Bert Kling?
    Now
what the hell?
    “Just a second,” she said, and covered the mouthpiece. “Promise me you’ll make that appointment,” she said.
    “Give me the fuckin card,” he said, and snatched it from her hand.
    The rehearsal had resumed at five P.M. that Monday and it was now a little past six. All four actors in the leading roles had been on the stage together for the
     past hour in three of the play’s most difficult scenes. Tempers were beginning to fray.
    Freddie Corbin had named his four major characters the Actress, the Understudy, the Detective, and the Director. Michelle
     found this pretentious, but then again she found the whole damn
play
pretentious. The other four actors in it played about ten thousand people, half of them black, half of them white, none of
     them with speaking roles, all of them intended to convey “a sense of time and place,” as Freddie himself had written in one
     of his interminably long stage directions.
    The two male extras played detectives, thieves, doormen, restaurant patrons, ushers, librarians, cabdrivers, waiters, politicians,
     hot dog vendors, salesmen, newspaper reporters and television journalists. The two female extras played prostitutes, police
     officers, telephone operators, secretaries, waitresses, cashiers, saleswomen, token takers, newspaper reporters and television
     journalists. All four, male or female, were also responsible for quickly moving furniture and props during the brief blackouts
     between scenes.
    There were two acts in the play and forty-seven scenes. The sets for each scene were “suggestive rather than literal,” as
     Freddie had also written in one of his stage directions. A table and two chairs, for example, represented a restaurant. A
     bench and a section of railing represented the boardwalk in Atlantic City, where the Actress wins the Miss America beauty
     pageant that is the true start of her career.
    The scene they were rehearsing this afternoon was the one in which someone stabs…
    “Do we ever find out for
sure
who stabbed her?” Michelle called to the sixth row, where she knew their esteemed director was sitting with Marvin Morgenstern,
     the show’s producer, affectionately called either “Mr. Morningstar” after the Herman Wouk character, or else “Mr. Money-bags”
     after his occupation. Michelle had shaded her eyes with one hand and was peering past the lights into the darkness. She felt
     this was a key question. How the hell was an actress supposed to portray
a stabbing
victim if she didn’t know who the hell had stabbed her?
    “That’s not germane to the scene,” Kendall called from somewhere in the dark, she wished she could
see
where, she’d go out there and stab
him
.
    “It’s germane to
me,
Ash,” she called, whatever the hell germane meant, still shading her eyes, still seeing nothing but the glare of the lights
     and the blackened theater beyond.
    “Can we just get on with the scene?” he said. “We’ll go over who done what to whom when we do notes.”
    “Excuse me, Ash,” she said, “but the
scene
happens to be what I’m talking about. And the
whom
who gets the
what
done to her happens to be
meem.
I come out of the restaurant and I’m walking toward the bus stop, and this
person
steps out of the shadows … ”
    “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Meesh, let’s just do the fucking thing, okay?”
    Mark Riganti,