Taubman took all this technology as a given, and simply flicked a mouse ball. A buttoned list called STUDIO came up on the left screen. He clicked one button and the lights went out. He clicked another. Hunter-Douglas blackout shades slithered down smoothly over the windows. Because the shades ran in steel frames, the huge room became almost completely dark. Then he clicked again, and the right-hand panel lit up. SETS, it said, at the top of a long list.
"Check this out," he said. He scrolled down the list to the words "Mourning Becomes Electra Steppenwolf" and hit two keys.
A giant all-white log cabin appeared in the middle screen. At the tap of another key it opened like a dollhouse. Inside were four cutaway rooms with 1890s-looking rustic furniture, also all in white.
"Is that all generated by the computer?" I asked.
"Sure."
"Why is everything white?"
"It's easier to see what you're lighting that way. You can always restore the colors and textures later." He typed another few letters and the set went dark, with a single oil lamp on the digital table casting flickering shadows on the nonexistent walls. Two more keys and dawn rose outside the windows.
"Oh, my!" I said. I was really enchanted. "This is a lot better than dollhouses." Morning sunlight was already slanting in through the hazy air.
"I didn't design the sets, though," he said. "I just light them." He let evening fall in the Electra cabin and then quickly flipped through at least twenty more all-white sets. There were Empire drawing rooms, medieval inns lit only by the fireplace, beaches, a tree house, many, many period rooms. And in all of them you could tell the time of day and the mood, just from the lighting.
"You don't
just
light them," I said sincerely.
"Oh. Thanks."
"These can't be exactly like the actual stage productions, though," I said.
"Nothing is. This software actually lets us get closer to what the final production's going to look like than the old miniatures did."
I made him show me more. There was a craggy moor, a Scottish castle, and a stone-flagged courtyard with a gallows. Each was bathed in a different sort of light. The moor was soft and bluish, the castle was bathed in harsh, full, cold daylight, the courtyard was sad, very early morning, with a tinge of red at the horizon. It wordlessly proclaimed "the morning of an execution." For each he pulled up photos of the real productions. They looked almost the same, except not so good as the digital ones.
"This is amazing. Is this your principal business?"
"I wish. By rights, there ought to be enough money in theater lighting in Chicago for a person to survive. But there isn't. It doesn't matter how talented you are."
He clicked the room lights back on.
"So do you mean you'd rather do theater than festival lighting?"
"Usually. The Oz Festival was more fun than most, because it was more imaginative."
"More profitable, too, I would think."
"They pay reasonably well," he said, a bit sourly.
"Well, that, too, but I meant the publicity. You got a huge media boost from it."
"Yeah. Wasn't that color spread in
Chicago
magazine excellent? I do edgy work, but the magazine really picked up on the best parts. The Day-Glo, and the neon tubing on the merry-go-round. The cover photo
rocked
! Very discerning, weren't they?"
He certainly didn't seem uncomfortable about the fact that a woman had been killed near his edgy merry-go-round. Suddenly he remembered he was supposed to be modest. "Of course, the Oz Festival caught a lot of PR because this year is the hundredth anniversary of the publication of
The Wizard of Oz
. It wasn't all just because of my lighting."
Hey, no kidding.
I said, "Do you do music festivals? Or rock concerts?"
"The major rock stars have their own lighting people. I do some of the Grant Park music festivals. I do some industrials."
"Industrials? You mean like factory lighting?"
He snorted. "God, no. Like restaurants. Sometimes lobbies, like corporation lobbies. That stuff is mainly a matter of designing just the right mood. For a restaurant, the mood you set can make or break them. Imagine cafeteria lighting in L'Heure Bleu, for instance."
"I see what you mean."
I wandered around the room, looking at his stock of equipment— various lightbulbs, several dozen different types, socket styles, holders, mounts, pedestals, clamp-ons, plus small light boards with computerized circuits that did the same job huge boards used to do, and piles of rolled wire. When I was a child, there were only a couple of dozen kinds of lightbulbs in general use. My dad told me that when he was a child there were only four— twenty-five watt, fifty watt, hundred watt, and hundred-and-fifty watt. He was exaggerating, but not by much. Now, judging by Taubman's shelves, there were hundreds upon hundreds— not just different wattage but par count and focus angle and filament type, and more and more and more.
"Do you keep all these to use?"
"No. Wouldn't pay. You need very large numbers for installations. There's no point in my being a lightbulb warehouse. I just have a few examples here if I need to check one out."
"A
few
examples?"
"Yes. Just to look at. Then I try to duplicate that light on Softplot. That's the main software I use. Anyway, let's see what I can show you about the— um— the Oz Festival." He played around with a couple of swift keystrokes and the screen filled with an aerial overview of Grant Park.
"Okay. Look. The streets and permanent paths and Buckingham Fountain and so on are obvious here. These contour lines show the elevation of the ground. You know there are little rises, and some flat, low areas—"
"Yes. I know roughly where they are. And I can see them there."
"We wanted to take advantage of nice things in the terrain. This is an early sketch version. At this point we hadn't even thought of putting in the castle. The first plan was to have a central vendor area that was all green and to call it the Emerald City. But then your brother said we had to have a small on-site office and— uh— somebody said everybody loves castles. So we made the office a castle."
The plan changed. It no longer looked like a sketch. Like all CAD design, it looked a bit too polished. The terrain map showed the placement of booths and rides and light sources.
"Orange is my designation for the existing park lights. All the other lights are installed specifically for the festival."
"Does your data include underground plans, like tunnels and Grant Park Underground, and so on?"
As I said this, I watched his face to see if he showed any guilt. If he'd chased Jeremy and me in the tunnels, he ought to react. But I could see no distress or change of expression.
He said, "Well, Grant Park Underground, for sure." He typed in a couple of commands and a dotted line appeared, showing the outline of the underground. "Tunnels— mm— I don't think even the City of Chicago knows where all the tunnels are," he said. "Some of the drainage tunnels ought to be in here. And maybe power cabling."
Another set of lines showed up on the map. The display was getting crowded and confusing, since at my request he had just superimposed one thing on top of another. But even so, seeing those tunnels gave me a chill. There were a
lot
of tunnels. One of them ran practically under the Flying Monkeys merry-go-round, or at least its planned location in this early sketch. It was disconcerting to realize that the park was so honeycombed underneath, and even more upsetting to understand that you could be down there underground, right under the feet of potential rescuers, but without any way to get their attention or to escape.
Taubman said, "Okay, let me show you how we use this software. Do you live in a house or apartment?"
"Apartment."
"Describe it. How big is it and what shape?"
"Well, it's about twenty feet long and about fifteen wide, not counting the bathroom and an eight-by-ten kitchen."
"That isn't very big."
I've often described it as being about the size of an average Chicago bus. It's a little wider but not as long, so it really does have about the same square footage. I said, "Freelance reporting is not a way to get rich."
"Okay," he said. By now the shape of my apartment had appeared on his screen with size markings along the sides. "Look at the bulb in the track fixture above you."
"I see it." It was a tiny bulb, half naked, held only by its power points and a clamp. My mother would hate it. She just
loves
lampshades, the bigger the better and some still in their store wrapping.
"That's a halogen bulb with a twenty-five-degree beam. I use that because I want to bathe this desk area in task lighting so I can read papers. The degrees just mean that part of an arc. If I wanted more of a narrow spotlight, I'd pick a fifteen-degree bulb. If I wanted a wider wash of light, I might pick a forty-degree light beam. You understand? Now what in your apartment would you like to spotlight?"
"Well, I have a parrot who's extremely fine. Long John's perch is right about here."
"Okay." Taubman clicked and a symbol representing a bulb appeared above Long John Silver's perch. Then an area of concentric circles grew around it.
"The center," Taubman said, "is where the light is strongest. The others just show you where the scatter goes and how intense it is. Now tell me where you have your furniture."
I did. A big pool from a wide-angle beam appeared over a reasonable simulacrum of my thrift-shop sofa and a medium twenty-five-degree pool of reading light over the really comfy chair that I had found discarded on the street and had slip-covered. He threw in a medium-beam light near the front door, which would be nice to have.
"Now you say you have a parrot?"
"Yes."
"Would he like this?" A boxlike shape representing just my living room appeared, then rotated, so that instead of looking down at the place from the ceiling, we were now looking at the back wall. He punched some buttons, muttered "macros" and "cyan" and some other incomprehensible stuff, and suddenly on the wall appeared a jungle! It was a projection, of course, and beautiful! But not beautiful enough for Taubman. He muttered some more, scrolling through menus on his left-hand screen. "Most of the furniture and whatever is canned," he said. "I don't have to build much from scratch anymore. This is actually one of the jungles they used in
The Phantom Menace.
" As I watched, magenta-and-pink butterflies popped into existence on several leaves. Then yellow highlights flickered along the edges of the vines.
"My goodness. That's great!"
He played around with colors for a while, turning some of the larger leaves bluer, augmenting the leaf veins, just doing riffs to impress me. Which was fine. But still, I was here for a reason.
I had a suspicion about one thing he mentioned. "I hate to change the subject, but you said earlier that 'somebody' thought everybody loves castles. Who was it?"
He shrugged his sharp shoulders, but I kept looking at him and finally he said, "Well, it was Jennifer. Oh, lord. Poor Jennifer."
"Yes. That was a terrible thing to happen."
He nodded. He looked genuinely sad. I said, "Mr. Taubman, do you know who killed her?"
"Of course not. I would have told the police if I did."
"Or who killed Tom Plumly?"
"No."
His bony face was not very expressive. But he shifted uneasily in his chair. All I could do was press him more. "Plumly was right there with you and Pottle and Mazzanovich. And then he ran away. Why?"
"I guess he wanted to see Barry." Taubman looked away from me.
"What had you been talking about?"
"Oh, the festival. What else? One of the food stands was doing something dangerous with its cooking fuel. And one had something inappropriate on its sign. Naked ladies. Pottle was all upset about it. As if kids are gonna care that you've got nude dancing girls on a banner! Probably love it."
Well, I had asked, but I also got the feeling he was trying to distract me.
"Did you stab Plumly?"
"Listen, Ms. Marsala. I realize your brother is in trouble. I sympathize with what you're going through. I understand that you're willing to be rude in order to get the job done. But I didn't kill Plumly or attack him or stab him or anything, and that's the last I'm going to say about it."
"Could he have stabbed himself?"
"Could he? I suppose anybody
could
. But I can't see why he would."
Nor could I. "What kind of a person was he?"
"Reasonably pleasant, I guess. Rather intelligent, really. Seemed to be interested in the festival's artistic elements, which was surprising. After all, he was an ex-cop. And he ran a security service." I reflected briefly on what choice words McCoo might utter if somebody told him a cop is not supposed to be interested in artistic elements. Then in a fit of shame I remembered that I, too, had been surprised that Plumly was an avid reader.
