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“You wouldn’t want to hear it too often.”
“I guess not,” I said. She picked up the phone book and I told her she’d want the Yellow Pages. “I thought of that,” I said. “Call one of those film rental places and see if they can come up with a print of the picture. But they’ll be closed at this hour, won’t they?”
She gave me a fu
“Cha
“Is that WPIX?”
“WOR.”
“Right.” She closed the phone book, dialed a number. “You weren’t serious about renting the film just so we could see who was in it, were you?”
“Well, sort of.”
“Someone at the cha
“Oh.”
“Is there any coffee, Bernie?”
“I’ll get you some.”
It took more than one call. Evidently the people at WOR were used to getting nutty calls from movie buffs, and since such buffs constituted the greater portion of their audience they were prepared to cater to them. But it seemed that the cast list which accompanied the film only concerned itself with featured performers. Our Typical New York Cabdriver, with his half-dozen typical lines, did not come under that heading.
They kept Ruth on the phone for a long time anyway because the fellow she talked to was certain that an associate of his would be sure to know who played the cabdriver in Man in the Middle. The associate in question was evidently a goldmine of such information. But this associate was out grabbing a sandwich, and Ruth was understandably reluctant to supply a callback number, and so they chatted and killed time until the guy came back and got on the line. Of course he didn’t remember who played the cabdriver, although he did remember some bit taking place in a cab, and then Ruth tried to describe the pear-shaped man, which I felt was slightly nervy, since she’d never seen him, either live or on film. But she echoed my description accurately enough and the conversation went on for a bit and she thanked him very much and hung up.
“He says he knows exactly who I mean,” she reported, “but he can’t remember his name.”
“Sensational.”
“But he found out the film was a Paramount release.”
“So?”
Los Angeles Information gave her the number for Paramount Pictures. It was three hours earlier out there so that people were still at their desks, except for the ones who hadn’t come back from lunch yet. Ruth went through cha
“He’s looking it up,” she told me, covering the mouthpiece with her hand.
“I thought you never lie.”
“I occasionally tell an expeditious untruth.”
“How does that differ from a barefaced lie?”
“It’s a subtle distinction.” She started to add something to that but someone on the other side of the continent began talking and she said things like yes and uh-huh and scribbled furiously on the cover of the phone book. Then she conveyed Mr. Merrick’s thanks and replaced the receiver.
To me she said, “Which cabdriver?”
“Huh?”
“There are two cabdrivers listed in the complete cast list. There’s one called Cabby and another called Second Cabby.” She looked at the notes she had made. “Paul Couhig is Cabby and Wesley Brill is Second Cabby. Which one do you suppose we want?”
“Wesley Brill.”
“You recognize the name?”
“No, but he was the last cabby in the picture. That would put him second rather than first, wouldn’t it?”
“Unless when you saw him he was coming back for an encore.”
I grabbed the directory. There were no Couhigs in Manhattan, Paul or otherwise. There were plenty of Brills but no Wesley.
“It could be a stage name,” she suggested.
“Would a bit player bother with a stage name?”
“Nobody sets out to be a bit player, not at the begi
“Or he might have an unlisted phone. Or live in Queens, or-”
“We’re wasting time.” She picked up the phone again. “SAG’ll have addresses for both of them. Couhig and Brill.” She asked the Information operator for the number of the Screen Actors Guild, which saved me from having to ask what SAG was. Then she dialed another ten numbers and asked someone how to get in touch with our two actor friends. She wasn’t bothering to be David Merrick’s secretary this time. Evidently it wasn’t necessary. She waited a few minutes, then made circles in the air with her pen. I gave the phone book back to her and she scribbled some more on its cover. “It’s Brill,” she said. “You were right.”
“Don’t tell me they described him for you.”
“He has a New York agent. That’s all they would do is give me the agents’ names and numbers, and Couhig’s represented by the West Coast William Morris office and Brill has an agent named Peter Alan Martin.”
“And Martin’s here in New York?”
“Uh-huh. He has an Oregon 5 telephone number.”
“I suppose actors would tend to be on the same coast as their agents.”
“It does sound logical,” she agreed. She began dialing, listened for a few minutes, then blew a raspberry into the phone and hung up. “He’s gone for the day,” she said. “I got one of those answering machines. I hate the damn things.”
“Everyone does.”
“If my agent had a machine instead of a service I’d get a new agent.”
“I didn’t know you had an agent.”
She colored. “If I had one. If we had some ham we could have ham and eggs if we had some eggs.”
“We’ve still got some eggs. In the fridge.”
“Bernie-”
“I know.” I looked again in the phone book. No Wesley Brill, but there were a couple of Brill, W’s. The first two numbers answered and reported that there was no Wesley there. The third and last went unanswered, but it was in Harlem and it seemed unlikely that he’d live there. And telephone listings with initials are almost always women trying to avoid obscene calls.
“We can find out if he has an unlisted number,” Ruth suggested. “Information’ll tell you that.”
“An actor with an unlisted number? I suppose it’s possible. But even if we find out that he does, what good will it do us?”
“None, I suppose.”
“Then the hell with it.”
“Right.”
“We know who he is,” I said. “That’s the important thing. In the morning we can call his agent and find out where he lives. What’s really significant is that we’ve found a place to start. That’s the one thing we didn’t have before. If the police kick the door in an hour from now it’d be a slightly different story from if they’d kicked it in two hours ago. I wouldn’t be at a complete dead end, see. I’d have more than a cockeyed story about a round-shouldered fat man with brown eyes. I’d have a name to go with the description.”
“And then what would happen?”
“They’d put me in jail and throw the key away,” I said. “But nobody’s going to kick the door in. Don’t worry about a thing, Ruth.”
She went around the corner to a deli and picked up sandwiches and beer, stopped at a liquor store for a bottle of Teacher’s. I’d asked her to pick up the booze, but by the time she came back with everything I’d decided not to have any. I had one beer with di
Afterward we sat on the couch and drank coffee. She had a little Scotch in hers. I didn’t. She asked to see my burglar tools and I showed them to her, and she asked the name and function of each item.