Murder on the Potomac (3 page)

Despite Tierney’s infusion of steady money into Potomac Players, Seymour Fletcher, Madelon St. Cere, and other guiding lights were unhappy on his payroll. The Tri-S productions did not constitute theater as they defined it, preferring Mamet, Albee, Shepherd.

But money talked, and art walked. Tierney’s subsidy was generous and didn’t demand full-time commitment. Once the historic murders had been performed for their adoring public, the players were free to perform other, less distasteful productions.

“Monty, please,” Fletcher yelled from the stage.

Professor Jamison, a heavyset man whose front bowed out like the Hitchcock caricature, pushed himself up from his cramped seat and waddled down the aisle. He wore what was his “uniform”—heavy tan twill pants, blue button-down shirt, Paisley vest, brown Harris-tweed jacket, and one of hundreds of bow ties from a proud collection. His white beard and fringe of white hair were trimmed short. Tortoiseshell glasses were thick.

Jamison cleared his throat before speaking, as he always did. It was as though a tiny pump needed to be primed before each sentence. “I’ve done some additional reading on the Sickles-Key case, and I must admit, Seymour, that the body of evidence grows heavier in favor of ‘house.’ In his 1976 book, Kelly has Sickles saying, ‘Key, you scoundrel, you have dishonored my bed—you must die.’ But in Nat Brandt’s excellent re-creation of the sordid affair, he has Sickles saying, ‘Key, you scoundrel, you have dishonored my house—you must die.’ Other trustworthy sources favor the use
of ‘house,’ rather than ‘bed.’ I can cite these other sources if you’d like.”

“
Please
, no,” Fletcher said.

“What the hell does it matter?” St. Cere said haughtily. “The dishonoring took place in Teresa’s hot bed. ‘Bed’ and ‘sex’ are synonymous. ‘House’ can be the little house on the prairie, for Christsake.”

Fletcher gritted his teeth and clenched his hands at his sides as he glared at Stuart. “I can’t get this excuse for an actor to say house
or
bed. All he wants to do is call everybody bastards.”

“I’ve had enough,” said Stuart. He slammed his script to the floor and walked away.

Fletcher now directed his wrath to Carl, who played Philip Barton Key. “And when Sickles shoots you,” Fletcher said, “look as though you’re in
pain
instead of dumb and confused.” Then, salt for the wound: “And be bloody careful when grabbing the tree for support. It’s as shaky as your performance.”

Carl, too, disappeared into the wings.

“Please, please,” Jamison said after a false start. “We had already decided that ‘house’ would suffice.”

“What would suffice,” said Fletcher, “is for this cast to say anything that even approximates Madelon’s script.”

“Maybe we should take a break to calm down,” the assistant director suggested.

“We already have,” Fletcher said disgustedly. He vaulted the stage and fled into the auditorium.

Everyone scattered, leaving Monty Jamison with Suzanne Tierney, the actress playing the adulteress Teresa Sickles.

“Much ado about nothing,” she said lightly.

They were joined by Chip Tierney, Terri Pete, and Sun Ben Cheong. “Chip knows everybody’s lines,” Suzanne said. “He’s been here for every rehearsal.”

Which was true. What Chip hadn’t told his sister was that their father asked him to be there. His eyes and ears on how things were progressing.

“How can you put up with these prima donnas?” Chip asked Suzanne.

“They’re not prima donnas,” Suzanne said. “They’re actors.”

“And directors, I might say,” Jamison said. “Volatile chap, isn’t he?”

“Insufferable is more like it,” Chip Tierney said. He turned to Sun Ben and said, “As opposed to inscrutable.”

Cheong shook his head. “It’s good none of you handle large sums of money,” he said.

“Why?” Suzanne asked.

“Because money and emotions don’t mix.”

Cheong had been brought to America through the efforts of the Chinese-American Connection, a nonprofit, altruistic group to which Wendell Tierney lent his name and money. Its predecessor had been the Chinese Educational Mission, an organization funded by an indemnity reluctantly paid by the Chinese government after the United States had helped quell the Boxer Rebellion.

President Teddy Roosevelt decreed that the money be used to educate promising Chinese students, and the mission began bringing them to America. Although it ended in bloody scandal in the early 1920s, the Chinese-American Connection picked up on its spirit. Sun Ben Cheong was one of many recipients of its generosity.

He’d been scheduled to return to China following his education in America. But after receiving a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, Tierney placed him in a job with his close friend, investment banker Sam Tankloff. It took Cheong less than a year to establish himself as Tankloff’s financial wizard. “I don’t make a money move without him,” Tankloff often said. “He knows ways to make money that haven’t been invented yet.”

Not only did Tierney arrange for Cheong to stay in America, he legally adopted him. Cheong had told his rich benefactor that he had little reason to return to China. His only living relative there, he claimed, was an older brother, John, whose business was precious gems. They hadn’t seen each other in years.

Jamison observed the two brothers and their sister. Chip and Suzanne shared few features to visually link them to the same family. Chip had his father’s fine features, the aquiline nose, resolute mouth, and lean, supple six-foot body. Although Suzanne was tall, only a few inches shy of Chip’s height, her body was angular in a masculine sense. Her features tended to the coarse—mouth too small for her broad face, heavy, dark eyebrows, and large, watery green eyes. Not wholly unattractive, simply lacking the refinement of Tierney genes.

Cheong, of course, had not been born to Wendell and Marilyn Tierney. But, Jamison decided, he looked more comfortable as a Tierney than did Suzanne. He was Chip’s height but more solidly built. He wore his clothing well; the deft hand of a Tierney tailor helped. His ebony hair was combed straight back on top and at the sides. Pitted remnants of teenage acne on his full cheeks were visible in the right light.

As Jamison watched them, he wondered at the relationship between Sun Ben and Suzanne. They sometimes looked at each other in a way that led him to speculate whether there might be more between them than simply sister and adopted brother. Nothing tangible to fuel his speculation. But Monty Jamison considered himself astute in picking up on subtleties. He’d never expressed such thoughts to anyone, even to close friends. But these and other observations would be dutifully recorded each night in one of many diaries he hoped to publish one day in the tradition of his literary idol, Edmund Wilson.

“Can we go?” Terri said to Chip. She was a pretty little thing with breasts and hips better fitted to a larger woman. Jamison had noted in his diary that she represented this generation’s brooder, pondering anything and everything but, in reality, lacking spark.
She appeals to those young men who savor sour sucking candies rather than sweet chocolate
, he’d written, pleased with his metaphor.

“In a minute,” Chip replied. Terri pouted and sighed, something at which she was thoroughly rehearsed.

Director Seymour Fletcher returned to the stage, clapped his hands, and resumed the dramatization of the murder of Philip Barton Key by Congressman Daniel Sickles on February 3, 1859.

“Before we begin,” Clarence, the actor depicting Sam Butterworth, said, “could we discuss my motivation in this scene?”

“What about it?” Fletcher said.

“Well, I’m not quite certain what my motivation is. I mean, there I was with Sickles when he looked out the window and saw Key waving his handkerchief as a signal
to Teresa. Was I dispatched by Sickles to detain Key long enough for Sickles to get his revolver and confront him? Or was it purely chance?”

“What difference does it make?” Fletcher asked.

“It makes a great deal of difference to me,” Clarence said. “You told me to act apprehensive, nervous when speaking with Key.
Why
would I act that way unless I knew Sickles was about to kill him? If I know that, it certainly will color the way I speak, hold my body, everything about my performance.”

“We’ll discuss it later,” Fletcher said. “Places, everyone. Let’s go over the murder scene again.” He pointed to Carl, who played Key. “Please don’t act as though Sickles has gunned you down with a machine gun. He grazes your shoulder, then shoots you in the ribs. Grimace all you wish, but stop flailing your arms like an insect in its death throes.” He turned to Stuart. “Remember, you say when you approach him, ‘Key, you scoundrel, you have dishonored my bed—you must die.’ ”

“House!” the assistant director yelled, her face buried in the script.

“House. Yes, house. Can we p-l-e-a-s-e get on with it?”

They rehearsed the murder scene twice more. Then Fletcher decided to go over the trial scene in which Teresa, forced to testify, was ripped apart by eight prominent defense attorneys retained by Sickles. In order to keep the cast numbers down, only one attorney was represented in the production. He was played by an older man, Brent Norris, an accomplished Shakespearean actor who’d had a modicum of success on Broadway and returned to Washington to bask in that glory.
The rest of the cast watched as Norris attacked the young Teresa, played by Suzanne Tierney, with assurance and professional bearing. But Suzanne constantly flubbed her lines and seemed capable of only two emotions—tearful hand-wringing and comic indignation.

“God, she’s awful,” a cast member whispered.

“Yeah, but look at the way Fletcher coddles her, then gets on Brent’s case. Sy sure as hell knows where his bread is buttered.”

The final scene was one in which Sickles met briefly with President James “Old Buck” Buchanan. Their close friendship was an open secret in Washington. Buchanan promised Sickles to do what he could to squash the case, offered him traveling money to get out of town, and gave him a razor as a gift.

“Great. Terrific,” Fletcher proclaimed when it was over. He took aside the actor playing Buchanan, who was also the church’s pastor, and said, “Maybe you could tone down your voice a little, Reverend. You and your friend Sickles are alone in a room. There’s no congregation.”

“I just want to be heard,” said the reverend.

“Oh, you will. Believe me, you will.” He announced to the rest of the cast, “That’s a wrap.”

“Ride home?” Chip Tierney asked his sister.

“No, thanks. I’m having a drink with Seymour. He has a friend in New York who might have a part for me off-Broadway.”

Sy’s casting couch? Chip wondered. Oh, well, there wasn’t anything he could do about it, any more than his father had been able to dissuade Suzanne from pursuing a theatrical career. But it saddened him. Suzanne’s open
defiance of her father had caused unbearable tension in the household.

“See you then,” Chip said. “Sun and I are out of here.”

“Ginny and Mitch are at Bullfeathers,” Terri said. “I promised to meet them there.”

“Not tonight, sweetie,” Chip said, pulling her close and kissing her ear. “Another time.”

Pout.

Chip and Sun Ben each maintained an apartment in the three-acre Tierney complex high on the Potomac Palisades. Chip’s quarters were in a wing at the rear of the house. Cheong lived in rooms over a six-car garage that had been renovated especially for him.

Suzanne lived by choice in a shabby apartment on Fourth Street, in the shadow of I-395’s overpass. She worked during the day as an assistant to a Washington theatrical booking agent who specialized in providing magic acts, singing telegrams, and strippers for private parties.

“Ready?” Suzanne asked Fletcher after the others had left.

His back was to her. “Have to cancel,” he said. “The Dragon Lady is coming to discuss the budget.”

“When did you find that out?” she asked.

“This morning.”

“But you said we were going out after the rehearsal.”

“Yeah, I know.” He turned. “Go on home.”

“What about the part in New York you wanted to talk to me about?”

“Tomorrow. We’ll discuss it tomorrow. I can’t brush off Juris. You know that.”

“Oh, of course not. The Dragon Lady happens to be
Daddy’s bag lady. You couldn’t possibly offend Pauline Juris, could you, Seymour?”

“Knock it off, Suzanne. You know I hate her as much as you do.”

“But I don’t try to hide it. Ms. Juris knows exactly what I feel about her. Does she know how
you
feel?”

“It doesn’t matter. Look, sorry about breaking our date. We’ll do it tomorrow after rehearsal. Okay?” He kissed her on the cheek.

She spun on a heel and marched from the theater, leaving the director, a failed thespian, standing alone in the harsh, naked light of a single bulb that scrawled his shadow across the scarred floor.

Later That Same Night

“Well, how did it go?” Mac asked Annabel when she returned. “They make you chairperson by proclamation?”

Smith had devoted the evening to reading briefs written by his students while Annabel attended her first meeting of the National Building Museum’s board. Their Great Blue Dane, Rufus, had wedged himself beneath Smith’s desk for most of the time, forcing his master to prop stockinged feet on the beast’s torso. At the sound of Annabel inserting her key, the dog got up quickly, nearly tipping Smith out of his chair.

“Interesting,” Annabel responded, kicking off her shoes and vigorously rubbing Rufus’s sizable ears. “Fill you in soon as I change.”

She emerged from the bedroom wearing Smith’s favorite
frayed blue terry-cloth robe over a shortie nightgown. “Make me a drink?” she said, settling on the couch and tucking her bare feet beneath her.

Smith poured a cognac, picked up his almost empty snifter from the desk, and joined her. They touched crystal rims. “To the new member of the board,” he said, kissing her.

“Thank you.” She sipped and smacked her lips.

“Was that in appreciation of the kiss or the cognac?” Mac said.

“Both were vintage—very smooth and very warm. Wendell Tierney runs a smooth ship.”