The Roar of the Crowd Page 20

  It made for an awkward conversation, and I came away with only two bits of information. Taryn was a climber, not a jogger, and I should try to take in Belinda Cornish’s play about Wallis Simpson’s first marriage.

  I had been hoping to eliminate Taryn completely from the list of suspects, since I liked her, but because I like Denise even more, I was relieved to see more than one name on the list.

  Denise had suggested that Kieran was planning to apply for Oren’s vacated position, too. While I hadn’t sensed that from any of my dealings with him, I was willing to believe her. She knew him more intimately, after all.

  So, we had three names: Denise, Taryn, and Kieran. Two of them knew Eleanor. Two of them were directors. Two of them were women. This was like one of those logic puzzles.

  It occurred to me that I had turned it into a puzzle. I plumbed my emotions and realized I couldn’t summon up much sadness for the death of Eleanor. I just hadn’t known her well enough to really care. While I did care about Denise, I couldn’t in my heart of hearts believe that an innocent person would be incarcerated, even though I knew it did happen from time to time. So, I was treating this like a logic game. If not Denise, then who?

  Games like this are paradoxically always easier when there are more characters involved on the grid. I needed more suspects. And so did the police. If I could just give them a few more names, maybe they’d get motivated to look beyond Denise. That kind of opening was all I really needed.

  I have great faith in the Edmonton Police Force. I just wanted them to keep on keeping on in this case, rather than settling for the answer they thought they already had.

  So, more suspects. Denise had given me more names, directors of theatre companies even smaller than Black Box, and freshly minted MFAs. I wasn’t so sure about the new recruits. I had a feeling they were probably still idealistic and egotistical to think that they could create something from nothing.

  A couple of the actors from the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, like Christian, might be contenders for my list, too. They might not have the credentials, but they didn’t lack for ego, as far as I could see.

  Steve dutifully took my thoughts to Iain, but I could tell from his lack of enthusiasm that Iain wasn’t receiving any of my offered help with good grace. I couldn’t let that stop me, though.

  One nice thing was that because Steve wasn’t working the case, I felt I could discuss it with him. Not that we discussed it much. He was busy with his write-up on the Scandanavian trip, to deliver the group’s findings in early September. We were still dealing with a bit of a barrier, but at least I didn’t have to worry about imagining a budding relationship between him and Detective Gladue. Whatever free time he had, Steve spent with me.

  I was glad, because pretty soon my free time was going to be taken up with teaching again, if there was any justice. I had the last couple of weeks of August to play, Fringe and relax, and then, if the gods and chair of the English department were smiling, I would be assigned enough classes to pay rent and feel like a contributing citizen of the world come September.

  I looked again at my list of suspects, all except Denise predicated on wanting a solid position in their field of endeavour. Maybe I could knock off one of the full-time lecturers and guarantee me some courses. If I timed it right and, say, pushed one of them over the railing of the High Level Bridge on August 25, then my curriculum vitae could look like the answer to a department head’s prayer.

  What was I even thinking?

  I looked at my suspect list again, this time with a more realistic eye. No one killed for something as pedestrian as a paycheque, did they?

  But maybe being artistic director was more than a paycheque. Maybe it fulfilled a dream. A dream worth killing for.

  31.

  As soon as the Shakespeare festival wraps up, with the Teatro la Quindicina’s season already in full swing, everything starts to gear up for the Fringe Festival. Started more than thirty years ago by the musings of a director who had become enamoured of the unjuried mayhem that was the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Edmonton Fringe had sprung up so successfully that it had sparked a whole circuit of Fringe festivals across the continent. Nowadays, a canny company could start in Orlando, Florida, work their way up the eastern seaboard and skip across Canada from Fringe to Fringe, ending on Vancouver Island along with the good weather.

  Edmonton’s Fringe was centred in Old Strathcona, a neighbourhood that was rediscovered at about the same time as the Fringe began. The Edmonton Transit bus barns were being evacuated, and into them moved a Saturday farmers’ market and several theatre spaces. Beside the market in a former fire hall was Walterdale Theatre, a long-running amateur theatre company, and across the way was the Varscona Theatre, home of several small professional theatre companies. The Varscona had also been a newer former fire hall. If you vacated a largish space in Edmonton for more than five minutes, it was likely to turn into a theatre.

  Several former movie theatres were now live theatre spaces, as was the movie space in the Citadel Theatre complex. Another couple of spaces had eventually turned into nightclubs, but for the most part, Edmontonians out for an evening seemed to want to see others strut their stuff.

  Our Fringe had a special theme for its advertising every year, based on old movie or book titles or popular culture memes, ever since the second year’s poster was unveiled as “The Return of the Fringe.” The entire neighbourhood had embraced the festival, which brought the whole city to Old Strathcona. Several boutiques and bistros survived the entire year on what they made in two weeks’ worth of Fringe sales. Until it had burned down in 2002, Uncle Albert’s, the popular old pancake restaurant that had long stood on the corner of Whyte Avenue and the Calgary Trail, proudly displayed framed Fringe posters along its walls. The career waitresses, who looked like they should all be named Flo and Wanda, had been very up-to-date on which shows to see.

  More than just theatre happens around Whyte Avenue, of course. Every Saturday, people are lured there after their visit to the Strathcona Farmers’ Market or their shuffle through one of the nearby antique malls.

  There is an annual art walk, when painters set up outdoor mini-galleries all along the sidewalks of six or seven blocks. In between admittedly bizarre purple portraits of celebrities, you can snaffle prints and small acrylics while meeting the artist at the same time.

  Pop-up designer stores happen on Whyte more often than anywhere else, and at Christmas, several stores reach back into nostalgia and produce animated story windows worth braving a cold trek to smile at.

  But it’s the Fringe that brings the party to the neighbourhood, and there’s no arguing with that. The ten-day event makes driving crazy and parking almost impossible, but if you don’t mind a bit of a crowd, being at the Fringe can satisfy your craving for mini-doughnuts and walking on hot tarmac without having to deal with carnies. The people are a mixture of theatregoers, hipsters, teens hanging out, older guys who like drinking beer outdoors, families enjoying the sun and buskers, and a couple of creepy old clowns who make balloon animals and suggestive remarks.

  I braved the crowds to get through to the second beer tent, tucked in the shade behind the Arts Barns. That was where Denise said she’d be. It was where the CBC drive-home show broadcast from, but they didn’t start till 3:00 p.m., so we had figured it would be a safe bet as a rendezvous.

  We were planning to see the Teatro show running during the Fringe, which we had seasons’ tickets to, anyhow, and then risk a couple of unknowns. It was still early enough in the festival to pick a show and grab a ticket. Once the reviewers began to publish their starred summaries, though, there would be a run on remaining tickets to the high-buzz shows.

  It was getting pricier each year to experiment. When the Fringe had first begun, and even twenty years ago when I began attending it, tickets were in the neighbourhood of $4 to $8 apiece, and the shows ran half an hour to ninety minutes. You would line up for tickets as soon as the line for the previous show at the
venue was let in. It was arduous, but some of the best parts of the adventure came from chatting in line with the friends you’d arrived with or the new friends you’d meet.

  Now, the Fringe was more organized, more expensive, and a little more regimented. It was also expanding all over the city. There were various “bring your own venue” shows, some even downtown across the river. I couldn’t imagine any of those did as much business as the ones located within roaming distance of Gazebo Park in the centre of the action.

  I found Denise poring over her Fringe program. She had flagged several pages, and by the time I got back to the table with two pints of Big Rock Warthog Ale, she had flagged at least three more. Being questioned in a murder investigation, losing her boyfriend, and being shunned by local actors and drama academics didn’t seem to dim Denise’s love of theatre. She looked up at me with the excitement of kids in toy stores.

  “Okay, so there is a Coriolanus from Winnipeg that runs eighty minutes in the Orange Hall, a kabuki version of Streetcar Named Desire that sounds interesting, something called Much Ado Ron Ron, and The School of Night who improvise a complete Shakespearian drama with suggestions from the audience, including a sonnet extemporized on the spot. I’ve read about these guys; they’re supposed to be amazingly quick-witted.”

  “What are our times like?”

  “We could manage the kabuki, which is around the corner here at the Cosmopolitan Music Society in an hour, then go to Stewart Lemoine’s play at 3:00 as planned, and as soon as we get out of there, join the line to get back in for The School of Night.”

  “Deal. Let’s go get tickets as soon as we finish these beers.”

  Denise sat back on her rickety plastic folding chair. She was wearing sunglasses, so I couldn’t see the stress lines around her eyes, but she was doing a pretty good job of looking relaxed and at ease. Anyone who didn’t know her well wouldn’t notice the way her shoulders were a bit drawn and how her middle finger and thumb were meeting to tap out a continuous beat without the aid of a castanet.

  It worried me to see her this way, and I was hoping the shows might take her mind off things, but surrounded as we were by the Edmonton theatre crowd, it wasn’t going to be easy. Maybe it would be better just to take the bull by the horns.

  “Have you heard anything more from the police?” I asked.

  Denise’s fingers stopped their tarantella. “No, have you?”

  “Steve said he was trying to draw Iain and Detective Gladue a wider picture of possibilities, but he wasn’t holding out much hope.” Denise slumped a bit, but you’d only notice it if you were really looking. “I think we need to flush the killer out somehow, because if what we think is correct, there is going to be no resolution till you’re arrested and tried, and then we’ll never be able to prove that whoever is the next artistic director of Chautauqua is the killer.”

  “How do you think we could flush them out?”

  “We need to have another director step forward as a contender for the job.”

  “But we’ve already got at least three in the running.”

  “Kieran and Taryn, yes. Who else?”

  “Well, there are the boys from the Cement Productions, and the fellow who’s been directing the touring shows for the schools.”

  “Are you sure about those names or are you just imagining them as contenders?”

  “More the latter, I guess,” sniffed Denise. “But what does it matter? There could be a dozen strong contenders. Any one of them might be the killer.”

  “That can’t be true. First of all, you eliminate the people who lack the senior level of validity. The board of Chautauqua is not going to hand over the reins to someone wet behind the ears. They need a strong and capable person to keep Oren Gentry’s vision going. And they need something more than that, given he was such a persona in the community. I mean, doesn’t he even have a park named after him?”

  “It’s a small green space with a bench, between diverging roads.”

  “It’s still a big deal.”

  “All right. So you are saying the Cement boys don’t have the gravitas. So we’re back to Kieran and Taryn.”

  “And I cannot imagine Taryn killing anyone.”

  “Why? Because you went to school with her? Listen, I was far more intimate than that with Kieran, and you don’t see me pulling him off the list. Fair is fair.”

  “I take your point. But really, don’t we just naturally gravitate to men for violent crime? I don’t think it’s misplaced, either. After all, Kieran is a big lad. He could cart Eleanor up the stairs easily enough, even though she’d be a dead weight.”

  “Why do they call it dead weight? Are you really heavier the minute you’re dead? Maybe they could scare anorexics straight with that sort of campaign. Stay alive, or you’ll end up really heavy!”

  “You’re getting off topic,” I said, putting on my schoolmarm voice. “Anyhow, we should go line up for tickets if we’re going to do this right.”

  Denise hoisted herself up off her chair and stacked our plastic cups for the bussing person to gather. “You’re right. After you, my dear Alphonse.”

  We wended our way out of the beer tent and south to the entrance of the main office of Fringe Theatre Adventures. The cattle pen ropes were set out to deal with a longer line than the one we were joining, so Denise held up the rope halfway along and I scrunched under. She followed and we walked the rest of the line to stand behind about ten people waiting to buy tickets.

  It might be less bohemian and more expensive, but the central ticket sale concept was much handier. We picked up the kabuki Tennessee Williams but were informed the School of Night tickets would have to be purchased at the Varscona, as they were also a Bring Your Own Venue group. So, on the spur of the moment, Denise got us tickets for the silly-sounding Much Ado Ron Ron the following Tuesday evening at seven.

  “It’s worth a laugh,” she said. “And it will be a good way for you to bury your summer’s work.”

  “Deal,” I said. I counted out $30 to hand to her, since she was putting all the tickets onto her credit card. I’d have to walk past a bank machine on the way home. Even in this age of plastic debit and credit cards, I didn’t feel right if I didn’t have at least forty bucks in cash to cover whatever might happen. My mother called it “mad money,” enough to get you a cab home in an emergency.

  “We should be able to buy the School of Night tickets when we pick up our Lemoine/Teatro tickets,” said Denise, as we left the Fringe box office. “Okay, which is the quickest route to the Cosmopolitan Music Society?”

  We went back the way we had come, circling the beer tent and picking our way along the gravel path near where the historic streetcar tracks came to their terminus. Coming toward us from the other direction were Louise and Sarah. Since it would be utterly awkward to just walk past each other without speaking, and because Louise either didn’t have any idea of the chasm between Sarah and Denise or was possibly happy to stir things up, we stopped to exchange pleasantries, which amounted to agreement that the weather was great and discussion of how many plays each of us was seeing. Sarah was a Sterling judge for the Fringe shows and heading to her twenty-seventh play. Louise was appearing in a David Belke remount that didn’t start till Wednesday, so she was catching as many shows as she could in the meantime and recommended a one-man show called The Quilted Panda. I responded that we were Fringing like crazy today and catching another show on Tuesday evening. Denise just stood there, looking pained and beautiful, like Grace Kelly in The Country Wife. Sarah broke the awkward silence with a bright, “Well, gotta dash,” and we continued on to the Cosmopolitan Music Society.

  The building we were after was the home of several levels of amateur orchestras, the place where school band geeks found each other again and wannabe clarinetists earned their chops. I had only ever been inside for Fringe shows or to meander through an annual hipster craft fair that took place near Christmas. I had bought my mother a trivet made to look like an Etch-a-sketch once. S
he had been bemused. The tie with a photo of a moose on it had pleased my father much more, I thought.

  The kabuki company spent quite a bit of time establishing the concept of Blanche and Stella being sisters, which I guess made sense; without words, it might have been awkward in the later scenes. They also ran the action linearly, running through Blanche’s petty, tragic life and then sending her along to Stella, instead of letting us discover her backstory through an unlayering of her lies and subterfuges.

  As a result, it was more as if we were watching a white-faced version of the Three Little Pigs minus one. The weak pig finds refuge in the home of the stronger pig, and then the wolf huffs and puffs and blows the weaker pig out. Denise laughed the first big honest laugh I’d heard from her in ages at my interpretation as we hurried up Gateway Boulevard to get to the Varscona Theatre.

  “That is too funny, and better than they deserve,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes as we rounded the corner by the farmers’ market. “Sometimes things just shouldn’t be meddled with.”

  We had no trouble getting tickets to the School of Night improvised Shakespeare along with our season’s tickets to The Sparkling Glissando, Stewart Lemoine’s latest play. We got into line, and Denise left me briefly to hold our places while she popped over to buy a plate of green onion cakes and a bag of kettle corn.

  “The specific food groups of the Fringe are now covered,” she said, offering me half the green onion cake. We ate ravenously, tying up the rest of the kettle corn and putting it into Denise’s purse. I squeezed anti-bacterial wash on our hands, and Denise pulled out our tickets as the line began to move.

  The play, like all Lemoine confections, was a delight. Whimsy, intricate wordplay, a few bittersweet reflections on the world, and one or two outrageous leaps of faith all tossed into a hopper and dressed in fabulous forties costumes.

  I went to the washroom while Denise lined up again for the improv show. There were three narrow stalls in a room intended for one spacious experience. I wedged myself into the centre stall as soon as the door came open. In the next stall, I heard a cellphone ring.