Romeo in Shubert Alley

Wednesday, November 18, 1951, a chilly, drizzly day in Times Square, Manhattan. At high noon a man steps out of a cab that has just brought him from Idlewild Airport and is immediately shot dead by an assailant no one could later say they saw or could identify. It is over in seconds. A beat patrolman finds no wallet or ID on the dead man's body nor had he arrived with a suitcase. This is the situation encountered by New York homicide detective, Paul Romeo, when he arrives on the scene. Romeo and his desk bound, one-legged partner, Andy Mazak, manage to identify the victim as Kevin Blaise, an aspiring playwright and composer who has flown from San Francisco on the trail of someone he believed had stolen his idea for a musical version of Shakespeare's "Macbeth." During his wartime Army service Blaise met a man named Edgar Jacubik with whom he'd agreed to join in bringing about a Broadway production of the Macbeth show. But Blaise was discharged from the service early, under a cloud, and Jacubik thereafter disappeared with every bit of Blaise's' manuscript material and musical scores. As Romeo digs deeper into the identity of the murdered man and his impulsive overnight cross-country flight he is led inexorably to the heart of the Broadway theatrical community, a world with which he is very familiar: his wife, Josette, is a working actress on Broadway. During his quest to find a killer he encounters notable figures of the day, among them Ed Sullivan, Dizzy Gillespie, Jackie Gleason and a young, unknown actor named James Dean. As Romeo unwinds the motives behind this murder and another seemingly connected to the first, he must navigate a nether world of deception, greed, hidden sexual identity, even allegations of treason. Romeo understands full well that the theater is a place of artifice and illusion. Just the thing to cover up two murders.