Free Murder: The Musical (A Smith and Wetzon Mystery, #5) by Annette Meyers Page B

thought, Smith will get tired of Hartmann and I’ll take what’s sitting in my safe deposit box to the district attorney’s office.
    “Oh, spare me one of your goody-two-shoes lectures,” Smith said waspishly.
    “Twoey is a love, and you’ve let him slip through your fingers. Did you happen to notice how Sunny Browning was with him?”
    “That slut?”
    “Smith! You don’t even know her.”
    “He would never look at her twice.”
    “Whatever.” Wetzon turned away and took the budget material on Hotshot out of her purse and dropped it on her desk. Absentmindedly, she flipped over the page to the breakdown on royalties and the weekly costs to run the show.
     
    It is estimated that the gross weekly box office receipts at a theatre with 1500 seats, with an average price ticket of $45 would be $600,000.
     
    Ha! So what if orchestra tickets cost upward of $65? No wonder the Theatre was dying.
    Her eyes wandered down the first six names and numbers on the list:
     
    Morton Hornberg, director: 4%
    Aline Rose, librettist: 4%
    Sam Meidner, composer-lyrist: 4%
    Carlos Prince, choreographer: 3%
    Dilla Crosby, assoc. producer: 2%
    Morton Hornberg, producer: 2.5%
     
    When she got to the seventh name on the royalty list, she blinked and looked again. Vaguely, she heard Smith talking behind her, saying something about Mort Hornberg, but it didn’t penetrate.
    The last name on the royalty list was Susan Orkin.

12.
    Fran Burke, even if you didn’t know better, would never be mistaken for a woman. He’d been christened Francis Xavier, but everyone called him Fran at least as long as he’d been in the Theatre. He was a road manager who specialized in taking out touring companies and tryouts. Although gnarled with arthritis and dependent on a cane, at seventy, Fran was still sharp as a steel blade. It was said that Fran controlled the ice on the street.
    Not for the first time Wetzon marveled at the fact that her two careers both were referred to as The Street—one Broadway, the other, Wall. And the similarities didn’t stop there. Both contained producers and managers—stars with tremendous egos. The stalwart reliable Equity actor-dancer could find his like on Wall Street in the honest responsible broker. And Wetzon well knew there were almost as many ways to commit fraud on Broadway as there were on the other Street. Skimming, kickbacks, and padding all came under the heading of “ice.”
    Wetzon, lost in her puzzlement about Susan Orkin being on the Hotshot Company’s royalty list, didn’t see the man with the cane until she walked right into him. “Oh—excuse—I’m so sorry,” she stammered, and then she realized it was Fran Burke, and he was smiling a big, broad smile, showing receding gums and nicotine-stained teeth.
    “Leslie Wetzon! Where you been, girl? Off raising some young ones?” He clasped her hand and chucked her under the chin. Fran wore a rumpled blue suit under his black Aquascutum and no hat covered his thick yellowish white hair, which he combed straight back. Once long ago, when Company was in Chicago, he had not docked Wetzon for missing a performance. She’d sprained her ankle when a wagon was off its mark. “You’re family,” he’d said when she thanked him.
    “Nope,” she said now. “I’m still single, Fran, just making a lot of money running a business.”
    “Come on and walk with me to Shubert Alley.” He didn’t wait for her to make up her mind, but took a firm hold of her elbow. “Yeah, your buddy Carlos said something about it.” Wetzon knew Fran was of the generation that didn’t approve of career women. Oh, it was all right for a young girl to be stagestruck, but once that had worn off, women should marry and have children. Fran had outlived two wives that Wetzon remembered. His third was in a nursing home in Spring Lake, and he was living, last she’d heard, with a woman who had been amanuensis to a Broadway producing team in the 1960s. Now he gave her a thorough