'Poor Craig is the victim. You act as if he were the guilty party.'
'Oh, for cris sake Rikki,' Susan said.
'People are usually killed for reasons. Those reasons often have to do with sex and money.'
'Well, I don't like it,' Rikki said.
Her shiny lower lip was pushed out slightly, which meant I was supposed to jump across the table and lie on the floor at her feet.
I assessed the table and decided it was too wide.
Susan said, 'This is not about you, Rikki.'
Rikki looked startled.
'I don't wish to talk about it,' Rikki said.
'Jimmy?'
Christopholous had been gazing off into the middle distance, probably thinking about the late plays of the Wakefield Master. He refocused slowly and smiled lovingly at Rikki Wu.
'Darling,' he said.
'You should do whatever you want to do.'
'I'm leaving,' she said.
'Oh, Rikki,' Christopholous said, 'don't do that. We'll all be devastated. Somebody, get Rikki a lovely glass of champagne.'
Somebody offered her a glass. The storm passed. Rikki smiled at Christopholous, accepted her lovely glass of champagne, and tacitly agreed to stay through the meeting. The red-faced guy who had been resting his eyes let out a sort of blubbery snort and his head jerked and he looked a little puzzled for a moment about where he was. He spotted his champagne glass, still partially full, and picked it up and drained it, then he settled back in his chair and tried to look as if he knew what was going on. It was a look I had often worked on myself.
'Okay,' I said.
'Here's another question. What the hell was the play about?'
There was the usual silence.
'It's not a frivolous question,' I said.
'The killing could be connected to the play.'
'That's ridiculous.' It was Lou Montana, the Director, portly and red, wearing a safari jacket.
'An actor getting shot on stage while wearing motley and singing 'Lucky in Love' is ridiculous,' I said.
'Well, what was your response to the play?' Lou Montana said, and his voice was ominous. He must have scared hell out of the apprentice actors.
'I thought it a pretentious mishmash about appearance and reality.'
'Art is not 'about' anything,' Lou said tiredly, putting large verbal quotation marks around the about.
'It is movement and speech in space and time.'
'Thank you,' I said.
'I didn't expect you to understand,' Lou said.
'Me either.'
It went like that for the rest of the evening. The board was important. And it was determined to prove it to me. Mercifully, the wine ran out before I did, and the meeting ended. I didn't know anything I hadn't known before. Maybe less.
We held hands as we walked to our car. The wet-empty street was implacably seedy in the unforgiving glare of the mercury street lamps. Susan glanced up at me with a smile.
'You don't want to take the security bus up the hill?' Susan said.
'I'm armed,' I said.
'Let's risk it to the car.'
As we walked, Susan bumped her head gently on my shoulder.
I heard her laugh a little.
'What's funny,' I said.
'Jascha Heifetz?' she said.
I shrugged.
'Sometimes I say Yehudi Menuhin.'
CHAPTER 6
Christopholous' office was mostly blond wood and exposed red brick. The laminated ceiling beams, the window casements, and the wide-board yellow pine floor were all stained about the color of a palomino horse.
