least it had been his real name, Auntie Lil thought sourly.
"Adelle knew him, didn't you?" an otherwise quiet actress said. They all turned and stared at her, perhaps surprised that she had finally spoken up. "I thought Adelle went out with him first," she exclaimed, feeling a need to defend herself against the stares of her colleagues. "He was a quite handsome man…” Her voice trailed off.
"Perhaps I did." Adelle shrugged. "It's so hard to remember when one has had so very many liaisons through the years." She sighed, as if begrudging the effort those liaisons had required.
"You told me you could learn a script in three readings flat," Auntie Lil pointed out. "And you can't even remember this man's name?"
Adelle was not fazed. "Men were never important to me. Only my characters meant anything."
Auntie Lil sighed. The information wasn't helping her much. "When did you begin to run into Emily again?" she asked the women.
"I recognized her about three years ago at a matinee of Les Miserables," Adelle explained. "Or rather, she recognized me. I guess I do look pretty much the same. Emily was much, much older, of course. But she still wore her hair in the same old roll and her cheekbones were unmistakable." She sighed with envy. "She really had the most marvelous cheekbones. She would have looked grand on screen."
"Obviously she didn't," Eva said nastily. "Or Mr. Zanuck would have put her under contract."
"That's right," Adelle admitted, and explained to Auntie Lil. "She was asked to go out to 20th Century in the early forties for a screen test. Right after our show together. They were scouring Broadway night and day for stars back then. But her speaking voice was her weakness."
"She sounded like a mouse," Eva put in. "A sick mouse."
"After that, the war interrupted everything just long enough to ruin what little chance she might have had," Adelle continued. "It was just bad timing more than anything else, really. Emily never had my sense of timing, poor thing. She came back to New York for a few more years of trying, not knowing, of course, that the war would throw Hollywood into a golden era. She really should have stayed on in Los Angeles. She was pretty enough. She could easily have been an extra. But by the time she figured it out, I think she had already married this man and moved away. I never saw or heard from her again until that matinee three years ago."
"And over the past three years," Auntie Lil asked, "you've learned nothing more of substance about her private life than that?"
"No," the table chorused in apology.
"She was very private about her life," someone explained. "Secretive, really."
"She didn't want us to know anything about her," another actress added.
"I think it's because she was poor and too proud to let us know," Eva insisted.
Adelle stared at her in warning. "Actually," she said in her even, well-modulated voice, "I think it was because she was rather well-off, compared to us, and didn't want us to know."
Auntie Lil was inclined to agree with Adelle. "I found out where she lived," she told the women, filling in only some of the details. "She had a rather nice little apartment on Forty-Sixth Street. It was filled with Playbills and ticket stubs. She certainly had enough money to go to the theater."
"That does take money these days," Adelle said. "Most of us sneak in. We know the usherettes and if there's an empty seat, who gets hurt?"
"But Emily would always buy orchestra seats," another lady remembered suddenly. "Does that help at all?"
"That's true. She was very fond of telling us so," Eva sniffed in disgust. "Of course, she was probably not eating or not buying shoes or something, just so she could lord it over us."
"That's not so," Adelle corrected her gently. "You were the one who always had to pull it out of her. What had she seen? Where had she sat? You were intent on torturing yourself, I believe."
"I'm not quite clear what the problem was between the two of you," Auntie Lil told Eva firmly. "But I think you had better tell me about it."
"That's right," someone else pointed out. "You'd better tell her, Eva. Or else you'll be a suspect."
Several old ladies found the prospect funny. Auntie Lil did not. Eva, in fact, was a suspect in her book. And Auntie Lil did not find it amusing to contemplate one old actress killing another. She found it perfectly plausible.