File M For Murder

I started down the sloping aisle toward the stage, a skittish Diesel at my side. Laura might believe Lawton was a physical coward, but I didn’t intend to give him the opportunity to prove her wrong. If he laid one finger on her, I’d break his scrawny neck. I halted midway, however, when I heard another voice.

“This has gone far enough.” Ralph Johnston, head of the department, emerged from the wings and made a beeline for the embattled couple. “You will stop this embarrassing display now, do you hear me?”

Johnston’s words would have had more force had they been delivered in a voice with more conviction, instead of in his quivering tenor. His hands flapped like metronomes out of control, and he skidded to a stop so suddenly that I thought he might knock both Lawton and my daughter off their feet. To steady himself, Johnston stuck his right hand on Lawton’s shoulder.

The playwright shrugged off the hand and stepped back from Laura. “This is what happens when I work with freak-in’ amateurs. You know why I’m rewriting those pages, babydoll. You of all people in this hayseed town ought to understand.” Neither he nor my daughter appeared to be paying any attention to Johnston, despite his proximity.

Laura groaned, a sound of mingled exasperation and impatience. “You can’t write and direct anymore. You should let someone else direct the play. Right now you keep erupting like Vesuvius every five minutes and still expect us to make progress.”

“Excellent idea.” Johnston bobbed up and down on the balls of his feet, his face alight with excitement. “I think it’s a mistake for the playwright to direct his own work. I’m going to take over directing the production. You’re too emotional, Lawton, to do a proper job.”

Lawton cursed, loudly and fluently, and Johnston tensed, like someone bracing for a collision. Laura stepped back, taking herself out of the picture. I resumed progress toward the stage, in case I needed to intervene between the two men. Diesel came with me, though I could feel resistance on the leash. He didn’t care for confrontations any more than I did.

“What do you know about directing a play?” Lawton glared at the other man. He was two inches shorter than Johnston but much more muscular than the reedy department head. “You sure as hell don’t know anything about writing them. That piece of garbage you submitted to the American Academy of Drama prize committee was a total waste of my time. You’re nuts if you think I’m going to let you have anything to do with my work.”

Johnston’s face paled. He sputtered, but no intelligible words emerged from the sounds. I heard a few titters, quickly hushed, from the crowd of students.

I reached the stage, then, and ran up the stairs stage left. Laura saw me coming and met me at the head. I handed Diesel’s leash to her, and she took it. “Be careful,” she whispered.

Johnston still seemed unable to articulate, but he drew back his right arm and punched at Lawton’s head. The playwright’s reflexes were too good, however. He ducked, and Johnston’s fist sailed past Lawton’s face. The momentum caused Johnston to teeter backward and stumble.

Before Lawton could react, I motioned to a tall, muscular youth a few feet from the other side of the combatants. He responded immediately and stepped forward to grab Ralph Johnston and pull him further away. I stepped in front of Lawton and glared at him.

“Enough.” My temper flared, and I knew if the playwright attempted to attack me, I’d knock him back so fast he wouldn’t know what hit him. He was much younger than I, but I outweighed him by at least fifty pounds and was several inches taller.

Lawton took one look at my face and apparently read my intent. He stepped back, his hands coming up in a gesture of surrender.

“You should be ashamed of yourself.” A new, but familiar, voice startled both the playwright and me. I glanced aside to see Sarabeth Conley, Johnston’s administrative assistant, her expression one of grim determination, striding toward us.

Lawton glanced at her and paled. He took two more steps back, almost to the edge of the stage. Sarabeth, tall and heavyset, was a formidable sight, like Boudicca defying the Romans. She stopped a couple of feet away and raked Lawton with a glance of disgust. “You were raised better than this. How long do you think you can get away with treating people like idiots before someone teaches you a lesson you won’t recover from?”