could see right through the floodlights. One summer in Maine, in a barn-literally a barn-I saw a woman with glorious red hair, fifth row center. Three nights in a row she came. We were doing Long Day's Journey into Night.'
'I can picture you as James Tyrone.'
He laughed, a low rich chuckle. Thirty years ago. I was Edmund, the younger son.'
The sickly one.'
'Yes, and quite a challenging role for a young stag. I was robust, brimming with vitality. And virility, if I might say so. I had never tasted a drop of whiskey and had to play some scenes as if drunk.'
'And the red-haired woman?'
'She thought I was smashing. The first of many such women in many such towns. I remember the scent of the pine trees around her cottage. Isn't that strange? Chilly nights, a fireplace, and the smell of the woods.'
He drained the gin and smoothly signaled the waiter for another. The steaks hadn't yet arrived.
'Edmund Tyrone,' he said wistfully, 'walks from the beach to the house through the late-night fog. He's been drinking, and his father sits, quite drunk himself, playing solitaire.'
Prince let his eyes glaze over and rocked a bit in his chair. ''It was like walking on the bottom of the sea,'' he recited, his voice carrying across the noisy restaurant. ''As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea.''
He paused and seemed to await the applause. 'You have some memory for lines,' I complimented him.
'I was an actor! I was good. Not brilliant, perhaps, but with potential. I played the Old Vic when I was twenty-one. I could have-'
'Been a contender.'
He smiled. 'Brando was always a tad animalistic for my tastes.'
'Today, in class, you said something about the 'drench of cathode-ray.' I don't remember that from Who's Afraid- '
''I'll give him the good normal world where we're tethered beside them, blinking our nights away in a nonstop drench of cathode-ray over our shriveling heads.''
'Now I know,' I said, and I did. The tethered gave it away. 'The psychiatrist in Equus.'
'Very good. Exceptionally fine for a lawyer. Most are so…so…untutored except in their torts and contracts.'
'I had a crib sheet,' I confessed, and slid Mary Rosedahl's computer printout next to the glass of disappearing gin.
Prince put on rimless glasses and examined it. 'It's from Equus, but of course you know that.' He took off his glasses and looked at me through the pale gray eyes. 'So very bleak there in print, don't you think? How pathetic, a man so bereft of emotions he conjures up the words of others.'
'So you admit sending this message to Mary Rosedahl, Flying Bird?'
'As you lawyers might say, I have no present recollection of that event. But who else could it have been?'
'Why the talk of death?'
'Ask Peter Shaffer. He wrote-'
'I know. I don't care about the play. I want to know why somebody types death notes to a woman two hours before she's murdered.'
'And I want to know who wrote Shakespeare's sonnets.'
I narrowed my eyes. 'We're going to watch you, Prince.'
He laughed. They never do that to Clint Eastwood, but I couldn't rattle a half-potted professor. He ordered another drink on my tab and gleefully asked, 'Aren't you supposed to say, 'Make it easy on yourself, buddy, and tell us what happened.' And I say, 'Okay, officer, I been wanting to get it off my chest.''
'Maybe it's funny to you, but some boys downtown think you're the number-one suspect in a double homicide.'
'Tell the boys downtown I plead guilty to plagiarism and innocent to murder.'
It was a good line, and best I could tell, it was his own. I had nothing to lose, so I tried again. 'Okay, then help me out. Two women are dead, and you may be the last person to talk to each of them.'
He seemed to think about it. 'My lectures might be deathly dull, but don't be ridiculous. I assure you I have neither gouged out the eyes of horses nor strangled young women…'
'Who said they were strangled?'
He paused a moment, took a sip of the clear cold gin. 'Your friend, Roderigo.'
I studied him. 'Where were you between eleven and midnight on the night of June twenty-five?'
'In a drunken stupor, no doubt.'
'And July two?'
'That night it could well have been a stunken drupor. I try to alternate, you know.'
'And who can corroborate that?'
'As I told your policeman chum…'
'No one.'
'Except my old polluted liver.'
'Tell me about Marsha Diamond. TV Gal?'
'We chatted.'
'On the night she was killed?'
'I suppose so, if your records so reveal. But we never met. In fact, I never met any of the women. They were all so…'
'Normal?'
'Vacant.'
'Vacant?'
He smiled an actor's smile. He was enjoying this a little too much for my taste. 'As well as vapid, vacuous, and void. And several other 'V' words I cannot quite wrap my tongue around at the present time. Vampish. Vain. Vexatious, but need I add, neither virtuous nor virginal?'
'So why do it? Why waste your precious time?'
'You are being sarcastic, aren't you? Saying my time isn't precious at all. That I've neither parts to play nor plays to write. That I'm an old gasbag run out of gas. And you sit there, sturdy and handsome like some leading man, your contempt for me written across your unlined face.'
'My contempt for you, as you put it, stems only from your treating this as a game.'
'Life is a game, my friend. Or is it a cabaret?'
'Prince. You're getting on my nerves. Why did you waste your time with the computer game?'
'Oral sex.'
'What?'
'Talking about it. Safer than a Second Avenue hooker, don't you think?'
'So you never intended to get together with TV Gal or Flying Bird?'
'I didn't say that. I'm sure that somewhere, deep in the bowels of my mind…Gracious, what a metaphor.'
'Sort of makes you a shithead, doesn't it?'
He grimaced. 'You're really no good at this, Mister…'
'Lassiter.'
'Now, where was I? Yes, somewhere, deep in the recesses of my psyche, I must have believed that a beautiful, literate young woman would take me into her arms and crush me with her ample bosoms. 'I always think there's a band, kid.''
'A band?'
'Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man. To the little boy, explaining his illusions of greatness. Do not underestimate the musical theater. Its homilies and visions of bucolic Americana are often quite revealing, but that, I'm afraid, is another course.'
He downed his drink, his eyes a little hazier. 'Are we done with the interrogation, counselor?'
'For now.'
'Good. But let's do it again, shall we? You may sit in on my class anytime you wish. We're doing Death of a
