That done, I headed out for my tardy appointment with Alan Dale.
I found him drinking a solitary cup of coffee in Clippers, the Mayflower Park’s elegant little hotel restaurant. He was sitting next to the window watching a busy remodeling project in the Times Square Building just across the street on Olive.
Clippers was a brightly lit, open room. It’s probably eminently suited to graceful dining, but it wasn’t so hot for my purposes. I needed dark, not light. I needed seclusion. I needed a place where I could ask Alan Dale some pointed questions without having to worry about whether or not someone was listening over my shoulder.
“Sorry I’m late,” I apologized, sitting down at the marble-topped table. “I got tied up.”
He looked up at me as I sat down across from him and nodded without humor. “I’ll bet you did,” he said.
Before, when I had tried to talk to him, Alan had been busy, hurried. His answers had been clipped, but there had been none of the undercurrent of hostility that was distinctly present now. I put myself on guard.
“You said you had questions,” Dale said. “Let’s get ’em over with.”
Obligingly, I pulled out my notebook. “How long have you worked for Westcoast Starlight Productions?” I asked.
Dale shrugged impassively. “Two and a half years, I guess, give or take.”
“And didn’t you tell me that Richard Morris had worked for you before?”
“Three shows that I’ve been on and a couple of other Ray knows about.”
“But you didn’t like him.”
“I don’t have to like any of the local hands. I don’t get paid to like ’em. I just have to get the job done. Morris always seemed to have his head up his ass, like he was really somewhere else. I complained about him, but he had a lot of pull with the local here. Complaints or not, he still got called out every time we brought a show through town.”
“And this time you fired him?”
“That’s right. It was the first time I caught the little sucker red-handed. I told Ed at the time that as far as I was concerned, he’d never work for us again.”
“You told Ed Waverly.”
“That’s right.”
“Would he have gone along with that?”
“You bet.”
“Were any of the other local hands friends of his?”
“Probably, but I don’t know for sure. I’ve had my hands too full with tech problems to worry about my stagehands’ social lives.”
“What about Jasmine Day?”
“What about her?” His clipped question in answer to mine alerted me.
“Did she have any connection with Morris?”
“No.”
Alan Dale had given me a categorical answer. Truth is hardly ever that absolute. I looked at Alan Dale closely, and he met my gaze without wavering.
“Have you ever worked with her before?”
Dale shook his head. “I was doing Broadway-bound bus-and-truck shows on the East Coast when she was into heavy-metal concerts at this end of the world. Those two lines don’t cross very often.”
“So how long have you known her?” I asked.
“A month and a half.”
“Can you tell me anything about her?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“What’s she like to work with? Temperamental? Hard to get along with?”
“When things are going fine, she’s fine, but when there’s trouble…You saw me working on that worm-gear drive, right?”
I nodded. “Well, that son of a bitch stuck on me in Portland. It got all bound up and busted the track right in the middle of the second act, with the orchestra half on and half off the stage.”
“So what happened?”
“We had to stop the whole goddamned show while the tech crew came out and bodily turned the orchestra until it was pointing in the right direction. After that, we went ahead and finished the show. As soon as it was over though, all hell broke loose.”
“Jasmine pitched a fit?”
“Are you kidding? I thought she was going to tear me limb from limb. She could do it, you know. She’s a brown belt.”
“So I’ve heard,” I observed. “Is there anything about her behavior that you’d classify as erratic?”
Dale looked at me. For the first time, a slow grin spread over his face. “You haven’t spent very much time around show people, have you?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“I didn’t think so. They’re mostly erratic. They wouldn’t be in the business if they weren’t.”
“Have you heard any rumors about her, like maybe she might be messing around with drugs again?”