I put up a hand to silence him. “Trust me,” I said. “There won’t be any trouble. Now take me to see that carpenter guy—what’s his name?”
“Dale. Alan Dale.”
Osgood led me through a rabbit warren of stairs and hallways, getting us back to the theater without ever leaving the building or having to walk past the crabby lady in the ticket booth. We entered through a door just off stage right.
The Fifth Avenue was originally one of those huge old movie houses that flourished in the days of studio-held theaters. Over the years it had fallen into disrepair and had been scheduled for demolition until a group of civic- and arts-minded types had gotten together under the banner of saving and refurbishing it. The interior is done in a garish Chinese style complete with huge gilt dragons, equally huge crystal chandeliers, and plush red carpets and seats. If I had gone to all that trouble to decorate in such an overblown, nostalgic style, I wouldn’t have wanted to book a show that remotely resembled a rock concert either.
All the theater except the stage itself was shrouded in darkness. On stage, an almost transparent piece of material with a cityscape painted on it hung halfway to the floor. A man stood underneath, peering up into the cavern above and behind the heavy red curtain, shading his eyes from the bare bulb glare of overhead stage lights. At the front of the stage, several people were busy working on what seemed to be a raised platform built over the stage itself, covering the front of it with pieces of gold foil material.
“Can you get it?” The man in the middle of the stage was speaking into the air above him to someone we couldn’t see.
“Almost. Almost. Give me a break,” a voice answered.
As we stepped up onto the stage, I, too, peered through the glare of lights to see where the voice was coming from. A man clung to a truss some twenty feet above us. With one hand he held himself in place while with the other he struggled with a complex rope connection of some kind.
“That’s Ray Holman, the flyman,” Osgood explained to me, pointing to the man on the truss. All the word “flyman” did for me was give rise to a whole series of visions of low-grade science-fiction movies. My blank stare must have registered. “He flies whatever parts of the set have to go up and down,” Osgood added.
He turned to the man on the stage. “Alan, this is Detective Beaumont from Seattle P.D. He wants to talk to you.”
“People in hell want ice water too,” Alan Dale replied without looking away from the man above us.
Osgood glanced fitfully at my card, which he still held. “He’s with Homicide. He only wants to talk with you for a few minutes.”
Alan Dale turned on him then. Jasmine’s head carpenter wasn’t a big man, but he was tough. Standing on that undressed, empty stage, he was in his element. This was his territory.
“I don’t give a shit where he’s from or what he wants. I’ve got a curtain in a little over five hours. I’m not talking to Saint Peter himself until this son of a bitch of a scrim goes up and down like clockwork. We’ve still got to reweld the track on the revolve.”
With that, his focus returned to the man on the truss. “You got it now, Ray?”
“Close,” Ray called down. “Almost.”
Dan Osgood stuck his tail between his legs and began to slink away across the stage, but I held my ground. When Alan Dale lowered his eyes to the stage, I was still standing there.
“Look,” I said, “you’ve got a job to do and so do I. One of the stagehands who worked here yesterday was murdered last night. I have to ask you a couple of questions about him, that’s all.”
“Murdered?” Alan Dale appeared mildly interested. “Which one?”
“His name was Morris.”
“Rick Morris, that little creep?”
I nodded. “That’s the one.”
“He’s worked for us before. I felt like murdering him myself,” Alan Dale said. “I caught the little shit going through one of the trunks instead of unloading it. I fired his ass on the spot. Gave him his check and told him to hit the road.”
“Hey, Alan,” Ray called down from up above us. “Stop your jawing and try pulling the rope. I think I finally got ’er.”
Alan Dale strode away from me to a wall covered with a mass of block-and-tackle gear. He chose one rope seemingly at random, released it, then gave it a long, hard pull. The transparent curtain rose soundlessly into the air until it stopped smoothly at the bottom of the truss.
“Hot dog! Now if we can just get the worm gear working on that goddamned turntable, we’ll be in great shape.”