“Yes. I think someone I know is in the show. Cathy.”

“Which one? We got two. Vega or O’Brien?”

“Vega.” At least that was the name on her photo.

“Sorry. She’s out of the show,” he said curtly and resumed sweeping a little harder.

“Out?” No lie. She was out for good. “Why is she out of the show?”

He stopped again and wiped at his forehead with the back of his hand. “Didn’t show up for the opening last night.”

“I can’t believe it,” I exclaimed in an unnaturally high voice that I hoped made me sound surprised. “She talked about it all the time. She was so excited. Did she get sick?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know. She didn’t even bother to call.”

“How unprofessional.” I sounded even more fey. “What on earth did you do?”

“Steve was furious. Especially after the way she begged for the part. Fortunately, it wasn’t much of a part, and one of the other girls was able to fill in.”

I clasped my hands together in a beseeching manner and frowned because it was the only way I could think of to convey that I felt upset. “This really worries me. Something must have happened to her. Don’t you think so?” Then I waited.

He swept a pile of dust and lint between us. “Nope. She was a flake. I think she was scared. Had the jitters.”

So she went downtown to cop. That made a certain amount of sense. It could have explained the short and apparently unhappy life of Cathy Vega, but it did not explain Carmen Luzano. What was the connection between them? The two women must have known each other. Was it Carmen I was supposed to be helping, involved somehow in the death of the one who called herself Cathy Vega? Didn’t vega mean “star”? As in Las Vegas. I made a mental note to ask Lupe the next time I saw her.

“I should talk to Steve,” I announced, glancing past the man’s shoulder to the entrance to the theater. “He must be worried, too. Is he here?”

Almost on cue I heard a man’s voice on the other side of the curtain, which I slipped through.

“Goddamn it to hell, honey, pick up your feet. You’re a beautiful woman on her way to meet her lover, not an elephant on the way to the burial grounds.”

The blonde he was talking to seemed to have frozen to a spot near an imaginary door. She was beautiful and young. A petulant look was working its way across her face.

“Steve,” she whined, “I was doing it like you told me before.”

Around the stage were a man, two more women and a woman sitting on a folding metal chair with a script in her lap. One of the women fidgeted slightly with either impatience or boredom.