"We prefer the term 'great potential,"

" the real-estate lady said.

"I bet you do," I said.

"In this price range. In a lower price range we would prefer the term 'handyman's special,"

" she said.

"You like this kind of work," Susan said to me.

"At my own pace," I said.

"Of course," Susan said and smiled at me.

I smiled back. I didn't believe her for a moment, but her smile was worth any servitude. Which is how I found myself, an hour later, the co-owner of a very large house, with a jumbo mortgage, on a street where other home owners raised cows and rode horses and drove Volvo station wagons.

If I weren't so heroic, I would have been nervous.

CHAPTER 9

I felt like a college recruiter. All day I had been sitting in the back row of the empty theater interviewing people about Craig Sampson. I had begun at eight in the morning with Leonard O, himself, in to audition for Craig Sampson's replacement. The first thing I noticed was that Leonard had no beard. It wasn't that he was clean-shaven; he appeared never to have needed a shave. His blond hair was shoulder-length and lank. He had a small voice like the bleat of a goat, and he chewed gum very rapidly. I trow he were a gelding or a mare.

We shook hands. His eyes seemed not to register me, and his handshake was a limp squeeze with the tips of his fingers.

"I don't have much time," he said.

"I have a full day of listening to actors botch my lines."

He didn't look at me when he spoke. His gaze flitted without apparent purpose.

"I'm looking into Sampson's murder," I said.

"Murder is the bloodiest of the creative arts," he said.

"I kind of figured it was a destructive art," I said.

"The death of the individual may be destructive," O said.

"But the act itself, its conception and performance, may be quite artful."

"Encores are hard."

O was scornful.

"Like so many people you conceive of art in the narrowest possible terms," he said.

"Museum art."

"I love that Norman Rockwell, don't you?" I said.

"Don't be ridiculous," O said.

"Any reasons you can think of why someone would kill Craig Sampson?" I said.

O's gaze nickered past me. His eyes were never still, and he never looked at me except in passing.

"Of course, dozens of reasons: unrequited love, passion, jealousy, vengeance, lust expressed through violence, political zeal, money, greed…"

O shrugged as if to indicate that he had but scratched the surface.

"Pride, lust, envy, anger, covetousness, gluttony, and sloth," I said.

"I thought of those too. Anything less general?"

"I knew him only as an actor in my play. He was inadequate.

But all the other candidates were even more so."

"What was his greatest failing?" I said.

"Passion. He mouthed the words like a player piano. He did not feel the emotive rhythms that stirred beneath the language."

"I noticed that too," I said.

O's eyes moved rapidly. He chewed his gum.

"It is the greatest frustration of any playwright, that his art emerges only through the instrumentation of actors. Almost by definition the soul that wishes to act is far too narrow to carry the burden of an artist's vision."

"Bummer," I said.

O's glance jittered past me as it moved from one blank wall to another. His eyes were pale blue, and as flat as the bottom of a pie plate.

"Is there anything in the play that I might have missed, that would cause a murder?" I said.

"Almost certainly," O said.

"My play speaks to the deepest impulses of humanity, and challenges its most profoundly held beliefs. To the small part of humanity capable of full response, the challenge is very threatening, and a cleansing rage is one possible response."

"In addition to pity and terror," I said.

It almost made O look at me for a minute. But he caught himself and slid his look onto a wall and chewed his gum very swiftly.

"Have you ever been threatened?" I said.

"To be human is to be threatened," O said.

His neck was thin and would wring easily if someone were of a mind.

"Could you tell me about it?" I said.

"The threat of humanity?" O shook his head sadly.

"I have been telling you about it for my whole theatrical life."

"Any specific threats from a specific human?"

O shrugged and shook his head as if the question were tedious.

"Have you ever been followed?"

O rocked back a little in mock amazement.

"Excuse me?" he said.

"Followed, stalked, shadowed?"

O almost smiled.

"By the angel of death, perhaps."

"Besides him," I said.

"Or her."

"What an odd question, why do you ask?"

"I'm an odd guy, have you?"

"Of course not."

We sat for a moment looking at each other. O was working on the gum as if he had only a few more minutes to subdue it.

"I have a question for you, Spenser," he said.

"Did you understand anything in my play when you saw it?"

"Actually I did, O the Tiresias stuff you stole from Eliot."

A startling flush of red blossomed suddenly on O's smooth white face. He stood up.

"I do not steal," he said.

"That was homage."

"Of course," I said.

"It always is."

CHAPTER 10

Deirdre's chest was no less aggressive than it had been at the reception, and neither was she.

"Alone at last," she said when she sat down.

She might have been twenty-five, with wide blue eyes, and a lot of auburn hair, worn big. Her dark green spandex health club gear was iridescent. An oversized gray sweatshirt reached nearly to her knees. It had a New York Giants logo on the front.

"Craig Sampson's loss is our gain," I said.

"Oh, I'm sorry," she said.

"I don't mean to be frivolous about something so awful."

"I doubt that it makes much difference to Sampson," I said.

"What can you tell me about him?"

"He was fun," Deirdre said.

"He'd been around, you know, and he knew the score."

"Which was what?"

"Excuse me?"

"The score? What was it?"

"Oh, you know what I mean. He was older. He knew the whole downtown theater scene in New York. He'd done cruise ships and dinner theaters. He was good to talk to about the business."

"He ever in any trouble you know of?"

"Craig? No. He was too smart. He kept his nose clean and his mouth shut and went about his business."

"Love life?"

"He wasn't gay. I'm pretty sure. In the theater it's not that big a deal, you know? And besides, I could tell. He was straight."

"Did he have a girlfriend?"

"Nobody in the company. I don't know why. He had plenty of chances, but he didn't seem interested."

"Outside the company?"

Deirdre was sitting sideways on the chair with her legs tucked under her. It was hard to figure how she'd achieved that position, but it made her look good, so I assumed it wasn't accidental.

"Oh, I don't know," she said.