Murder at Ford's Theatre - Margaret Truman [1]
He rolled his sticky body out of bed at seven and stood in front of an oscillating table fan, raising his arms to allow the moving air to wash over his nakedness. Understandably, his mood was palpably foul; his mutterings were mostly four-lettered as he poured orange juice, washed down a handful of vitamins, and entered the shower. The weather was bad enough, and you couldn’t do anything about that. But Bancroft’s early crew call at Ford’s was arbitrary. What was the big deal? he wondered as he readjusted the faucets to add cooler water to the mix. It was only a teenage drama workshop production.
As he moved about getting ready in his room above an army-navy store on Ninth Street, not far from the Capitol City Brewing Company, the final stop on last night’s toot, and only a few blocks from Ford’s Theatre, where he’d been employed as a stagehand for the past two years, his size—six feet four inches tall and 220 pounds—made the cramped studio apartment seem smaller. He pulled on a faded pair of blue jeans, Washington Redskins T-shirt, slipped tan deck shoes over bare feet, attached a black fanny pack to his waist, and checked himself in the mirror. Building and erecting stage sets hadn’t been his ambition when graduating from the University of Wisconsin seven years ago. He’d been a leading man in university productions, a big, handsome guy who might make it in Hollywood one day if the chips fell right. He’d tried that for a year, but left Tinseltown weary of failure and wary of tinsel and followed a girlfriend to Washington, where his stagecraft courses at Wisconsin landed him after a while membership in the union and a job at the theatre. It wasn’t acting, but at least it was showbiz: No jokes about following circus elephants with shovels, thank you.
He stopped at a Starbucks, eschewing an effete latte at scandalous prices for a large coffee light and sweet, and walked through the stage entrance of Ford’s Theatre at precisely eight. His pique at having to be there early was eased by the welcome blast of AC. A uniformed park ranger stood backstage with some of Wales’s fellow stagehands, drinking coffee and laughing about something. The ranger in the drab brown uniform was one of many who would conduct hourly, fifteen-minute lectures for tourists later that day as they wandered into America’s most infamous theatre, the three-storey, solid brick building where, not playacting, Abe Lincoln had been shot to death by the actor John Wilkes Booth.
“Hey, big guy, good weekend?”
“Yeah,” Wales said, leaning against a piece of stage furniture and sipping his coffee. “Over too soon.” A pulsating headache had developed between leaving the apartment and arriving at the theatre. No sense mentioning it; he wouldn’t get any sympathy anyway. “Where’s Sydney?”
“Who cares?”
“I care,” said Wales. “He called this stupid meeting.”
“Don’t speak ill of the famous Bancroft,” someone said.
“Screw the famous Sydney Bancroft,” Wales said, pressing fingertips to his temple. “Besides, he’s not famous anymore. He was famous.”
“I sense a hangover, Johnny.”
Wales laughed. “You sense it, I feel it.”
“Snap to. Our leader has arrived.”
Attention turned to an open yellow door linking the theatre to the adjacent attached building in which the Ford’s Theatre Society offices were housed. While the National Park Service maintained the theatre as an historic site, it was the nongovernmental Ford’s Theatre Society that used the venue to mount its ambitious schedule of theatrical productions. Heading that society, and coming through the door, was the theatre’s producing director, Clarise Emerson, a former Hollywood TV producer who’d been recruited three years earlier to replace the departing Frankie Hewitt. Hewitt had been brought in almost thirty-five years before by then Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall to help develop a plan for the theatre following its most recent renovations, and to choreograph fund-raising efforts.