“Don’t worry about that,” Mann said, apparently understanding my concern. “I make sure they don’t rent out the room underneath. I have to exercise every day or I feel like hell. Man can rot on a location like this.Ooph!” He lifted the weights again. “Aaaaaand...uumph!” He got them over his head. “What else did Franklin talk about?”
“Not much,” I said. “Perkins asked whether McDougall was disruptive.”
“Aaah!” The weights slammed to the floor again, and Mann took several deep breaths. He flexed his pectorals and looked at me. “No flab here,” he said. “No flab at all.”
Sally stuck her head around the corner. “Where’s the Rise?”
“The what?” Mann asked.
“The Rise shaving cream. I have to do my legs.”
“Oh. It’s around there someplace. Look in the medicine cabinet.”
She went back into the bathroom. “Found it,” she called a moment later.
I wondered what kind of person doesn’t think to look in the medicine cabinet when something is missing in the bathroom. She started humming some cattle roundup song. Get along little doggies...
“Eee-ach!” Mann said, hefting the weights again. When they were over his head, he said, “How does he seem to you?”
“Who?”
“Perkins.Uumph!” The weights slammed down again.
“He seems okay.”
“You have to do three sets of three, or it doesn’t count.Eee-ach!”
“He seems to be focused, that much I can say.” Even if I wasn’t totally sure what he was focused on yet. He’d been here for a whole day and part of the next and still hadn’t talked to Clete Williams—the most likely suspect—yet.
“Uumph! Okay,” Mann said. “Report to me later.”
I said that I would. I left and shut the door behind me. The last thing I heard as I walked down the hall was a muffled “Eee-ach!” and then a moment later, the floor shook, like a minor earthquake.
* * *
“Now this is the delicate part,” Perkins said, in the breakfast room. He was an incongruous sight, wearing a dark tie and a chalk-stripe suit, looking like a banker in the midst of a bunch of ragged cowboys, and he was frowning at his eggcup. He chopped the top of the soft-boiled egg cleanly. “There,” he said, sitting back. “Perfect. Pass the pepper, please.”
“You sleep well?” I asked, sitting down and nodding to the waitress. I didn’t have to give her my order—I always had the same thing every morning, and she knew by now.
“I didn’t sleep at all,” Perkins said, stirring the egg and tasting a spoonful. “I worked.”
I looked at his face. It was relaxed, rested, composed.
“On what?” I asked.
“The murder,” he said, shaking his head.
He hadn’t said the word out loud all day yesterday, but now here it was, before he had even finished his breakfast.
“So a murder, then,” I said. “Who did it?”
“That,” Perkins said, “is the very thing I am going to find out. Now I want to know about Bobby Venn and Millicent Pink.”
“You thinktheymight have done it?” He was talking about the assistant cameraman and the script supervisor.
“Absolutely not. I was wondering if they were good at their jobs.”
“Sure,” I said, not sure at all. The unit publicist isn’t in a position to evaluate the technical competence of people like that. If somebody’s bad, I may hear something, but otherwise, I don’t concern myself with the script supervisor and the camera assistants. “If you want a better opinion, ask Claude.”
