Rikki Wu raised her hand. She looked about forty, wearing a tight little black dress, sapphire earrings, a sapphire and diamond necklace, and a wedding ring with a diamond as big as the Ritz.

She was expertly made up. Her mouth was wide. She had big, dark eyes. And she appeared to take excellent care of herself.

"Yes, Ma'am."

"Are any of the rest of us in danger?"

"I don't know," I said.

"What are you going to do about that?"

"Try to catch the killer."

"How can we help?" she said.

"Tell me what you know," I said.

"I don't know anything."

I smiled at her.

"Don't be so hard on yourself," I said.

"Was there any love interest in Craig Sampson's life?"

"I wouldn't know," she said.

I looked at Christopholous. He shook his head.

"Girlfriend?"

Christopholous shook his head.

"Boyfriend?"

"I don't know," Christopholous said.

Rikki Wu frowned. Things were moving too fast for her.

"I don't see why you're asking these questions. Are you implying that Craig was gay?"

"I'm asking," I said.

"Well, why are you asking? What has that to do with his death?"

"I don't know," I said.

"I don't know if he's gay. I don't know if his sexuality had anything to do with his death. If he has a boyfriend or a girlfriend they might be someone I should talk to.

If he has neither, why not?"

Rikki Wu was spirited.

"Well, I think it's none of your damned business," she said.

"Yeah, actually, it is. This is a murder investigation. We don't know anything but the fact of the murder. We have to find out everything else, and the way to find it out is to ask questions. I have no facts. I'm looking for facts. So I ask questions. Eighty, ninety percent of the facts you get by asking questions are probably useless, but there's no way to know that except to ask."

"Well, I think you are going about it very crudely."

"After you talk to DeSpain, you'll think I was Jascha Heifetz," I said.

"How about money? He in debt? He have a lot?"

Nobody had anything to say.

"Dope?"

Rikki Wu had had enough.

"This is indecent," she said. Her face was flushed and her eyebrows were drawn down into the kind of pretty frown that had doubtless gotten her the diamond.

"Poor Craig is the victim. You act as if he were the guilty party."

"Oh, for cris sake Rikki," Susan said.

"People are usually killed for reasons. Those reasons often have to do with sex and money."

"Well, I don't like it," Rikki said.

Her shiny lower lip was pushed out slightly, which meant I was supposed to jump across the table and lie on the floor at her feet.

I assessed the table and decided it was too wide.

Susan said, "This is not about you, Rikki."

Rikki looked startled.

"I don't wish to talk about it," Rikki said.

"Jimmy?"

Christopholous had been gazing off into the middle distance, probably thinking about the late plays of the Wakefield Master. He refocused slowly and smiled lovingly at Rikki Wu.

"Darling," he said.

"You should do whatever you want to do."

"I'm leaving," she said.

"Oh, Rikki," Christopholous said, "don't do that. We'll all be devastated. Somebody, get Rikki a lovely glass of champagne."

Somebody offered her a glass. The storm passed. Rikki smiled at Christopholous, accepted her lovely glass of champagne, and tacitly agreed to stay through the meeting. The red-faced guy who had been resting his eyes let out a sort of blubbery snort and his head jerked and he looked a little puzzled for a moment about where he was. He spotted his champagne glass, still partially full, and picked it up and drained it, then he settled back in his chair and tried to look as if he knew what was going on. It was a look I had often worked on myself.

"Okay," I said.

"Here's another question. What the hell was the play about?"

There was the usual silence.

"It's not a frivolous question," I said.

"The killing could be connected to the play."

"That's ridiculous." It was Lou Montana, the Director, portly and red, wearing a safari jacket.

"An actor getting shot on stage while wearing motley and singing "Lucky in Love' is ridiculous," I said.

"Well, what was your response to the play?" Lou Montana said, and his voice was ominous. He must have scared hell out of the apprentice actors.

"I thought it a pretentious mishmash about appearance and reality."

"Art is not 'about' anything," Lou said tiredly, putting large verbal quotation marks around the about.

"It is movement and speech in space and time."

"Thank you," I said.

"I didn't expect you to understand," Lou said.

"Me either."

It went like that for the rest of the evening. The board was important. And it was determined to prove it to me. Mercifully, the wine ran out before I did, and the meeting ended. I didn't know anything I hadn't known before. Maybe less.

We held hands as we walked to our car. The wet-empty street was implacably seedy in the unforgiving glare of the mercury street lamps. Susan glanced up at me with a smile.

"You don't want to take the security bus up the hill?" Susan said.

"I'm armed," I said.

"Let's risk it to the car."

As we walked, Susan bumped her head gently on my shoulder.

I heard her laugh a little.

"What's funny," I said.

"Jascha Heifetz?" she said.

I shrugged.

"Sometimes I say Yehudi Menuhin."

CHAPTER 6

Christopholous' office was mostly blond wood and exposed red brick. The laminated ceiling beams, the window casements, and the wide-board yellow pine floor were all stained about the color of a palomino horse. Christopholous sat behind a mission oak desk that matched the rest of the room. He was wearing a tweed jacket, and his wide, round face above the graying beard was tanned and healthy-looking.

"First let me apologize for the board," Christopholous said.

"Being smart isn't always the primary function of a board," I said.

Christopholous smiled.

"Quite true," he said.

"Willingness to raise or donate money counts for a lot."

"Counts for approximately everything, I would think."

Christopholous kept his smile but made it wry.

"The arts are a very precarious proposition these days. Reagan and Bush killed us. And dear Jesse Helms, who suspects Little Women of having a lesbian agenda."

"Grants dried up, have they?"

"In the name of thrift," Christopholous said.

"They still subsidize fucking tobacco, which is a fucking poison, excuse my French, but they save money by cutting back on the arts."

"That's 'cause they don't grow arts in North Carolina," I said.

"Sure, I know that. But they pretend to believe that theater and other performing arts should be self-supporting. For cris sake Shakespeare was subsidized. If the performing and visual arts must support themselves, then they will be required to be popular.

Television is what you get when you try for commercial art. Plays like Handy Dandy would never be put up."