Strange Embrace Read Free Page A

lived alone. She was friendly enough with everybody in the show but none of them were close friends by any means. She hadn’t known them long enough for that.”
    “Was she sleeping with anybody?”
    “Not that I know of. I had a feeling she might be a virgin.”
    “Any reason to think so?”
    “Just a hunch.”
    “I didn’t think there were any virgins left in the world,” Haig said. “Well, we’ll find that out by morning when the Medical Examiner’s report comes in. That and other things. If she was raped. If she was pregnant. Anything like that, we’ll find out. You get yourself murdered and you don’t have any privacy at all. It’s one hell of a thing.”
    The big cop picked up a letter opener and began to clean his nails with it. “Let’s take the rest of the cast,” he suggested. “Maybe one of them had it in for her.”
    Johnny frowned. “That’s pretty hard to believe.”
    “Is it? If you know as much about them as you know about the James girl, they could all be orangutans and you wouldn’t know the difference. Who’s in the show?”
    “Carter Tracy is her co-star. Was her co-star. Hell, it’s wrong either way. How do you say it when it’s like this?”
    “Death fouls up tenses,” Haig said.
    “He’s the leading man. That does it. You know who he is?”
    “I’ve seen him in the movies, if that’s what you mean. Mostly late movies on television. Isn’t he a little old for our girl?”
    Johnny nodded. “He’s about fifty, I think. Admits to forty-two, which is impossible. See, the age difference was the point of it. The plot of the play spins around an ingenue type who falls for a smooth old bastard. Tracy plays the bastard and Elaine was supposed to play the sweet young thing.”
    “Sounds like typecasting. Tracy really is a bastard, isn’t he?”
    “He’s all wrapped up in his own ego,” Johnny said. “It amounts to almost the same thing. But he’s one hell of a good actor, and good actors are all egotistical. It’s an occupational disease. Besides, his ego hasn’t been up so high lately. He’s slumped. Hollywood doesn’t seem to think he’s a leading man anymore. He was ready to crawl for this part, figuring that it could make all the difference in the world to him. It’s an older part and a romantic role all at once, a handy bridge between two camps.”
    “Who else?”
    Johnny looked at Haig. He was taking brief but careful notes on a legal-sized pad of ruled yellow paper. “I suppose Jan Vernon is next,” Johnny said. “Know her?”
    “Name rings a bell.”
    “She hasn’t made any movies recently. She was a starlet in Hollywood for a while, then switched to Broadway. She had the lead in The Levantine Factor and good supporting roles in Under Black Skies and Last Thursday.”
    “What is she? The prim and proper type?”
    Johnny laughed. He pictured Jan in his mind, thought of the sleepily voluptuous figure, the pouting mouth, the lay-me look that never left her eyes, not even when she was doing something as prosaic as counting her lines.
    “Not exactly,” he said. “Not quite prim and proper. In our play she’s cast as Elaine’s older cousin. The one who’s been around until she’s a little frayed at the edges. Carter Tracy bangs her while he’s making the pitch for Elaine. Get the picture?”
    “Uh-huh. Tracy banging her off-stage as well as on?”
    “Damned if I know. If he isn’t, he can’t be trying.”
    “Another case of typecasting?”
    Johnny shrugged. “Who knows? You never know what to believe in this business. Everything is a rumor. She’s supposed to have figured in a few choice parties out on the Coast. The orgy set, you know. A little marijuana and a little juice and away we go. There was an arrest, according to this rumor, but she was under contract at the time and her studio managed to put the lid on it. The rumor routine may be so much nonsense, but if she’s got more morals than an alley cat then I’m Jack the