Читать книгу Kiss Your Elbow - Alan Handley - Страница 9

I JUST STOOD THERE STARING at her. She was flopped across her desk and had filed herself about as neatly as anything else in that rats’ nest on her old-fashioned country editor-type filing spindle. I could see the heavy wrought-iron base of the spindle jutting out around the edges of her right breast. There wasn’t much blood, which is probably the reason I didn’t start heaving, because in the army I developed sort of a thing about blood.

Nellie alive and kicking is nobody’s dream girl. She’s a chiseler, an agent, a sharpie with a shady buck. She’s fat and sloppy and although she undoubtedly owns another dress, I don’t remember ever seeing her in any but this mottled grayish-green job which bitchy actors are apt to swear stopped being a dress years ago and now just grows on her like moss. But all the same, I was kind of fond of her.

I felt for her pulse, which wasn’t—and that’s all. I’ve done enough of those where-were-you-on-the-night-of bills in summer stock to know better than to start juggling bodies around now.

Lying open and almost hidden under one pudgy arm and doing its bit toward helping her hair sop up the blood was Nellie’s Youth and Beauty Book, which was, besides the phone and spindle, all of Nellie’s office equipment. In it she kept all the names of actors and producers she knew, listed her appointments and stuffed it full of letters and bills. She must have had it refilled every year because it always had the same tooled leather cover.

Falling into the old first-act routine, I slid the book out from under her arm and looked at the page for today. As I figured, my name was down for an eleven o’clock appointment. There were three other entries ahead of mine. One I knew very well: Maggie Lanson. She was to be there at eleven, too. Nellie was supposed to have been at Chez Ernest, the chi-chi dress place at ten. The other name I couldn’t recognize. There were just initials for the last name. It was Bobby LeB. and he had an appointment for ten-thirty. That was all for the morning, but in the afternoon she was to see Henry Frobisher at his office at three-thirty, and she had a dinner date with a little ingenue around town I knew, as who didn’t, named Libby Drew.

Suddenly the phone rang. That was the cue for me to start blowing up in my scene and almost closed me before I opened. I had moved the corpus—at least the arm—when I pulled out the book, and I didn’t want to get in any jam. My name was in that book and there was nobody around to knock some sense into me, and the damned phone kept ringing and ringing and I couldn’t bring myself to answer it. Suddenly I got a load of a scene behind a gauze scrim I didn’t want any part of—me sweating under a lot of blinding lights with all the Irish character actors in town waving rubber hoses at me and shouting, “Who done it, Runch?” and me not being able to tell them. When I play that scene I want to have a few of the toppers.

Then the montage began. You know, lots of presses running and front pages flying at you like bats out of hell and banner heads screaming “Actor Slays Agent” and “Fiend Convicted.” If only the phone had stopped that ringing or I had stopped that nonsense of thinking I was playing the lead in some crappy whodunit at the Rialto and done what I should have done, everything would have been all right. At least for me. But no…Once a ham always a ham. So I picked up the Youth and Beauty Book and stuck it under my coat—still like in reel two—and copped a sneak.

The hall was empty. I had another brain wave and walked back up to the tenth floor and got on the elevator there and rode down. The only stop was the fifth floor where two polo coats got back on.

I did a walk-not-run out onto Forty-fourth and aimed west. I didn’t want to pass Sardi’s or Walgreen’s again because by this time I had worked myself up to such a point that if somebody had said Boo! to me, I’d have waved aside the black mask and asked for that final cigarette.