Killer On A Hot Tin Roof Read Free

America’s most distinguished playwrights, and Howard Burleson wanted them to believe that he had been intimate with that very playwright.
    At the same time, I wanted to shoo the group back into motion. The loudspeakers had already announced that our flight was boarding, and we didn’t have the luxury of standing around gawking at Burleson, no matter how outrageous the claim he had just made.
    And maybe it wasn’t really all that outrageous. Even though most of my knowledge about Tennessee Williams and his life came from the movies based on his plays, I knew that he had been gay and had been involved with a lot of different men in his life. If Burleson was eighty now, he would have been in his twenties during Williams’s heyday as a playwright. He could have been young and good-looking and just the sort that Williams went for. I didn’t know.
    But I knew it would be a big hassle if we missed our flight, so I forced those thoughts out of my head and raised my voiceto say, “We’d better move along, folks. We don’t want that airplane leavin’ without us.”
    Dr. Tamara Paige turned her head toward me and said, “You can’t expect us to just … just …”
    Frasier clamped a hand on the old man’s arm and tugged him toward the gate. “Not another word, Howard,” he warned. “Do you understand me?”
    I didn’t like the browbeating tone that Frasier took with Burleson, but the old man just nodded and said, “All right, Doctor.”
    “What are you up to, Frasier?” Dr. Paige snapped.
    “Be there when I present my paper,” Frasier said. “You’ll see.” He steered Burleson toward the gate, and the others followed along behind them, chattering again now.
    The routine of getting on the plane quieted them down. I spend a lot of time in airports, and even when you’re an experienced traveler like I am, all the rigamarole can’t help but remind you of why the extra precautions are in place. A lot of people still turn solemn when they get on or off a plane.
    I took advantage of the opportunity to lean close to Will Burke as we were waiting to board and ask, “Do you believe that?”
    “You mean do I believe what Mr. Burleson said about being Tennessee Williams’s lover? Or that Frasier would drag him to this conference?”
    “Actually, I was speakin’ more in general, like you might say, ‘Well, what do you know about that?’ But I’d take an answer to either of the questions you asked.”
    “I have no idea whether Mr. Burleson is telling the truth,” Will said. “It’s not like we have a list of everybody Williams was involved with. We know the most significant ones, like Frank Merlo, but there were plenty of others.”
    I looked at the pink flush spreading across Will’s face. “Why, Will Burke, you’re blushin',” I said in surprise.
    “I was raised in a pretty strict environment in a little Georgia town,” he said. “There were more things going on in the world than I really knew about until I got to college.”
    Once I stopped to think about it, I knew what he meant. We get bombarded by so much all the time these days, we forget that there are still plenty of folks walking around who didn’t have the Internet and cable TV when they were growing up. I should know, I’m one of them. Especially in rural areas, there were some things you just didn’t see very often, so you didn’t think about them all that much. Like Will said, you had to get out into the world before you started forming opinions, and even then, it was hard to escape your upbringings.
    “Anyway,” Will went on, “I’m not surprised that Frasier dug him out of the woodwork somewhere, or that he’s taking Burleson to the festival. Like I said, he’s all wrapped up in his work, and if what he says is true, it might be the basis for a good paper.”
    “And that’s important to his career?”
    He nodded. “Really important.”
    “Are you going to, what do you call it, give a paper at the festival?” I hadn’t