The Role Players Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  The Role Players

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  The Role Players: A Dick Hardesty Mystery

  By Dorien Grey

  Copyright 2016 by Gary Brown, Executor of the Roger Margason/Dorien Grey Estate

  Cover Copyright 2016 by Untreed Reads Publishing

  Cover Design by Ginny Glass

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  Previously published in print, 2004.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Also by Dorien Grey and Untreed Reads Publishing

  A World Ago: A Navy Man’s Letters Home (1954–1956)

  Short Circuits: A Life in Blogs (Volume 1)

  The Butcher’s Son

  The Ninth Man

  The Bar Watcher

  The Hired Man

  The Good Cop

  The Bottle Ghosts

  The Dirt Peddler

  www.untreedreads.com

  The Role Players

  A Dick Hardesty Mystery

  Dorien Grey

  To those who know life is a dialogue, not a monologue

  CHAPTER 1

  “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players….” Shakespeare said that, of course, and you’ve got to admit the guy had a way with words. If you doubt him, just go to any bar on a Saturday night. As we go through life we all tend, consciously or not, to pick out some sort of role for ourselves as our way of dealing with the world—how well we play it varies from person to person.

  I guess what Willie meant was that very few people, if any, are exactly who they appear to be on the outside; it doesn’t take a private investigator to figure that one out. But maybe that’s why people tend to be so fascinated with actors, who are people who are not who they seem to be pretending to be people who are not who they seem to be…well, it gets a tad confusing. How they can possibly keep track of who they’re supposed to be at any given time is beyond me.

  Being in the company of someone who is really or has aspirations to be an actor is interesting enough, but when you’re surrounded by an entire theater troupe full of them, well, it’s really hard to pick out exactly who really are The Role Players.

  *

  “Wow,” Jonathan said softly to himself for about the thirtieth time, as he took yet another photo of the huge mounds of whipped-cream clouds surrounding us. This was his first time on a commercial flight—and first time in an airplane, as a matter of fact—and he, whom I often think of as a sensory sponge, was taking it all in with his usual enthusiasm.

  Though I could tell he was a little nervous on takeoff, he was trying very hard to appear cool. But when I reached over to hold his hand as the plane began moving down the runway, he grabbed it tightly and gave me a quick smile of thanks. This elicited a stern look of disapproval from the business-suit type sitting in the aisle seat next to me. I merely stared at him until he gave a small “harumph” and turned his eyes back to his copy of Business Week. Jonathan was totally unaware, concentrating on listening to the roar of the engines (not that he could have avoided it) and watching the terminal and hangars passing by with increasing speed until the whole front of the airplane rose up, pushing us slightly back into our seats and the ground dropped away beneath us. Jonathan watched, transfixed, as we climbed out over the city and the hills that circled it to the north.

  Whenever I flew, I always asked for a window seat and felt cheated if I couldn’t get one because, reluctant as I might be to admit it, I was always as fascinated with soaring through the sky as Jonathan was now. But this time I gladly deferred to Jonathan having the choice seat.

  As always, I was secretly delighted by his ability to become so totally and unapologetically enthusiastic over things that pleased him. No halfway with Jonathan.

  We were, in case you were wondering, on our way to New York (Jonathan insisted on adding “City” whenever he mentioned it, probably lest someone think we were planning a vacation in Poughkeepsie) to visit Chris, my long-time ex, and his partner Max. They’d come out to visit us a while before, and invited us to come see them in return. The actual dates had been left open.

  And then we got a call from Chris telling us that Max, who worked for a brokerage firm on Wall Street by day, was going to be stage-managing a new play for a small but rather well-known predominantly gay theater group he’d occasionally worked with before he met Chris. The company’s set designer had recently died of AIDS, and Max had agreed to do the stage-managing only if Chris could apply for the set designer’s job. Since Chris was assistant to the head window designer for the flagship store of the Barton & Banks Department Store chain, he was asked to submit a few sketches and was hired. Chris’s excitement reminded me very much of Jonathan's.

  They’d insisted we come out for opening night and we could hardly refuse. Besides, I’d not had a real vacation in far, far too long, and Jonathan had never been to New York. While I was perhaps a little better able than Jonathan to control my enthusiasm, I was looking forward to it.

  I’d been lucky enough to have been working almost steadily for the past month or so—nothing particularly exciting, but at least I was paid promptly and fully for what work I did, which was something of a rarity for me, given my penchant for getting involved in cases for which I was neither hired nor paid.

  And Jonathan had completed a full year at Evergreens, the landscape nursery where he worked, and got a week’s vacation with pay. He asked for and got a second week (no pay) to give us a little more flexibility in our length of stay. Chris and Max had timed their own vacations to include the week before the show’s opening and the week after. Because I knew that things would be pretty hectic for them both right up to opening night, we originally had planned to go for just one week, arriving the day before the opening. But they urged us to come for the same two weeks of their time off. Max especially, as stage manager, would be busy with the show nearly every night. Chris would be largely free, since the sets would already have been completed before the final week of rehearsals, and Max invited us to sit in on rehearsals any time we wanted.

  That cinched it for Jonathan, who of course needed very little cinching.

  We arranged for our friends Tim and Phil to come over and feed Jonathan’s fish and water the 14,000 plants he had salvaged from the trash bins at his work and lovingly nursed back to health.

  *

  The other shoe dropped the night before our flight. We’d called Chris to confirm that they’d meet us at LaGuardia when our plane got in. I
could tell in his voice that something was wrong, and when I asked, he said that one of the play’s two leading men had been found dead early that morning, apparently mugged and shot the night before while on his way home from the theater. The police were already beginning to question everyone who had been at the rehearsal the night before. Other than the natural shock of having someone you know murdered, it of course was a terrific blow for the entire show. The understudy could and would step in—there was, after all, a week of rehearsal time left before opening night—but the murdered man had been the production’s single best-known actor, who’d had a minor career in Hollywood and did frequent guest appearances on TV. And to complicate things even further, he was also, apparently, the lover of the play’s author.

  Aside from the blow to the company’s morale, it wasn’t a direct problem for Chris since, again, the sets were already designed and up, but it put tremendous additional pressure on Max’s responsibilities for riding herd on just about every detail of the production. A new leading man meant an entire new set of things to keep track of.

  I of course asked if we should cancel our trip, but Chris was adamant—as, he insisted, was Max—that we come out as scheduled.

  “We’ll do our best not to let all this interfere with you guys’ vacation,” Chris said. “And we’ve been waiting too long to see you as it is.”

  I suggested that we could at least find our way into the city by ourselves, but again Chris insisted that they would be at the airport to meet us.

  And so there we were, on an airplane beginning its descent for its final approach to New York’s LaGuardia Airport where the temperature, the captain informed us over the intercom, was 78. We fastened our seatbelts and Jonathan watched intently as we descended below the clouds and over the sprawling city. When the engines changed pitch and the cabin shuddered briefly with the thunk of the lowering landing gears locking into place, Jonathan again reached for my hand. I glanced quickly at the business type on the other side of me, who had not said a single word during the entire flight other than to order three Bloody Marys from the flight attendant. He was studiously avoiding looking at us so I was not obliged to tell him to go fuck himself.

  By looking past Jonathan, I could see the ground rushing up to meet us, followed by the gentle jolt of landing and the quick screech of the tires as they made contact with the runway, then the roar of the engines going into braking mode. And then relative quiet as the plane moved smoothly down the taxiway to the terminal.

  As usual, despite the “Please remain seated until the captain has brought the plane to a complete stop” caution, several people began getting out of their seats to reach into the overhead bins for their belongings.

  The minute the Remain Seated lights went out, the business type unbuckled his seatbelt, stood up to open the overhead, pulled out a large briefcase and, after a momentary pause to glare quickly at Jonathan and me, his lip curling into a slight sneer, he disappeared into the crowd heading toward the front of the plane and the exit.

  Jonathan, too, was like a racehorse at the gate, his seatbelt undone and sitting forward and sideways in his seat, one hand on the seatback in front of him, eager to get up and get going. He was clearly impatient with me as I remained seated to allow those who apparently believed the plane was about to explode at any moment pushed and jostled their way to the front.

  “They’re going to think we missed the plane!” Jonathan said, plaintively.

  I grinned at him. “I doubt it,” I said, and was treated to what I have come to think of as “The Martyr’s Sigh.” He didn’t use them often, but they were quite effective when he did.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, getting up only to be hit in the ass with a large makeup kit being wielded by a lady who looked as though she desperately needed its contents.

  No “excuse me,” just a quick scowl for my having dared to get in her way as she swept imperiously up the aisle.

  Jonathan grinned. “Nice try,” he said.

  Looking carefully behind me, I opened the overhead and took out Jonathan’s book bag, which he’d crammed full of extra clothes that he couldn’t squeeze into our two regular-sized bags.

  We were indeed among the last to get off the plane, and as we left the causeway and entered the main part of the terminal, Jonathan grabbed my arm and said, “There they are!”

  Sure enough, Chris and Max, grinning broadly, hurried up for an exchange of back-pat hugs, and—after a quick dash to a concession stand for film—photographs all around.

  Although we took our time getting to the baggage area, when we found the carousel for our flight, the first bags were just starting to come off the conveyor and the feeding frenzy of passengers scrambling to retrieve their luggage and get the hell out of the airport had just begun.

  “Give me the tags, Dick,” Jonathan said. “I’ll go get our suitcases. I know what to do, and no sense all of us getting caught up in that crowd.”

  “Okay,” I said, exchanging the claim checks for his book bag so he could wend his way more easily through the mob. Smiling broadly, he dove into the pack and expertly sidestepped and swerved and wriggled his way to the carousel.

  As he disappeared momentarily into the crowd, Chris smiled and said, “Think he’s having a good time so far?”

  I nodded. “He hides it well, doesn’t he?”

  Since ours had been a nonstop flight, I was fairly sure there wasn’t much chance that our bags had gotten misdirected to Lisbon, and I was right. Less than five minutes later we saw Jonathan retrieve one bag and set it at his feet between himself and the carousel. He reached for another, looked at the tags, and pulled it off the carousel. I handed the book bag to Chris and moved forward to meet Jonathan as he wended his way back through the crowd.

  “Ah, the luck o’ the Quinlans,” I said as I reached to take one of the bags. Rejoining Chris and Max, we followed them to the exit.

  A friend in their building had lent him his car—like many New Yorkers, Chris and Max didn’t feel the need to own one themselves—and soon we were headed into the city, catching increasingly frequent glimpses of the impressive skyline across the river. As a special concession to Jonathan’s first trip to New York, Max took us over the Queensborough Bridge, which brought us onto Manhattan at the bottom of Central Park. Max turned up Park Avenue to 96th, then through the park to Central Park West. Chris acted as tour guide, pointing out various landmarks and points of interest as we drove by.

  By the time we’d turned left on Broadway and were approaching Times Square—something I know few New Yorkers in their right mind would ever do in their own car if they could avoid it—I was beginning to think Jonathan might be close to sensory overload. He’d been silent most of the trip (a pretty strong indication right there), and he just kept staring in apparent disbelief that we were actually there.

  While we weren’t exactly from Hicksville Junction ourselves, it surely wasn’t New York, either, and for a kid who was originally from a small town in Wisconsin and who’d never been on an airplane until today, it was all pretty overwhelming.

  *

  As we entered Greenwich Village, Jonathan pointed to a street sign and said happily, “Christopher Street! The Christopher Street?”

  “Yep,” Max said.

  Jonathan turned his head to keep the sign in sight as long as possible, then turned back in his seat.

  “Wow! You’re so lucky to live in Greenwich Village!”

  “Actually, we’re in the West Village,” Chris said. “But close enough.”

  Max and Chris lived on a narrow, tree-lined street less than ten blocks from Washington Square. Max pulled up in front of a very attractive four-story building that blended in perfectly with its three- and four-story neighbors. Chris, Jonathan and I got out and retrieved our suitcases from the trunk, after which Max drove off to find a parking space. Jonathan slung his book bag over one shoulder and picked up one of the suitcases as I took the other.

  Chris led the way up the steps to the bright
-blue front door, taking out his keys as we climbed. Like every other building on the block, the front entrance was raised above the street, allowing what might have been a basement in most buildings back home to in fact be a sunken apartment with its own few steps leading down from a wrought iron gate.

  The hall, when we entered, was neat, clean, and well lit. A stairway to the left led up, and we followed Chris to the second floor. We walked back past the stairs to a door close to the window overlooking the street. He took another key, unlocked the door, pushed it open, and waved us in.

  “Wow, Chris!” Jonathan exclaimed, looking around the high-ceilinged, cream-colored room, brightly lit from the large front windows. “This is fantastic! Look, Dick! They’ve got a fireplace!”

  I had to admit, Jonathan was right about the apartment. Chris’s decorating skills were clearly in evidence, and I thought back to the apartment we’d shared when we were lovers fresh out of college and with very little money. Even then, Chris had done a great job with it. We’d actually built our first couch out of plywood and Styrofoam, and we haunted Goodwill for most of our other furniture, which we refinished ourselves.

  Nothing Goodwill here.

  “You like it?” Chris asked, smiling.

  “I’m impressed.” I said. “You’ve really done very well for yourself.”

  I noticed several small pieces of artwork, a couple sculptures, a crystal cigarette lighter and ashtray, and some other things I recognized immediately from our days together. An odd feeling, in a way. And I’m sure Chris must have felt the same way when he and Max visited us. Though I’d moved from the apartment we’d shared, many of the things were the same.

  Noticing we were still holding onto our suitcases, Chris said, “Come on; I’ll show you your room and the rest of the place, what little of it there is. I’m afraid the living room’s as big as the rest of the apartment.”

  We followed him to and down a short hall. To the left was a very small kitchen, across from which was an open bedroom door.

  “Our room,” Chris said with a nod of his head as we passed it. Next to it, on the same side of the hall, was a bathroom with a claw-foot, bright white cast iron tub that had been retrofitted for use as a shower. Across from the bathroom, and behind the kitchen, was another small room with a comfortable looking couch, a desk, and several bookcases.