The highbrow crowd in Van Nuys—fur coats draped over hollow hearts—had already written Jehoshaphat Merlin’s obituary in permanent ink. Eighty-three years old, a bullet lodged in his skull, he’d gone down mid-soliloquy while playing Romeo like time had forgotten him. It should’ve been a perfect curtain call. But death took one look at Merlin and passed. The old tragedian clawed his way back, and when Jonny and Boris dragged his longtime dresser Robert Vestal, his would-be killer, to the noose, Merlin repaid the favor the only way he knew how—by announcing another farewell. King Lear, Van Nuys Performing Arts Center, World Theater Day. The faithful few came crawling back, clinging to the myth like it might still breathe.
Jonny and Boris didn’t trust the invitation, but they took it anyway. They figured maybe the old buzzard had discovered gratitude in his second life—maybe a handshake, maybe a couple of comp tickets if the planets lined up just right. Instead, they got Merlin in his dressing room, marinating in greasepaint and ego, wrapped in velvet like a relic that refused to stay buried. His voice rolled out in that baritone of his, stretching words until they nearly snapped. A “luminary” like him, he said, needed protection in a cesspool like Van Nuys. Since Vestal swung, he couldn’t keep a dresser longer than a fortnight. So he offered the detectives a job—valets and bodyguards, no extra pay, no gratitude, no illusions.
Boris gave it a moment, head tilted, the way he did when he was trying to find the upside in a bad deal. He said it might be worth a shot—two weeks in show business, keeping an eye on a company that had been taking potshots at its leading man all tour long. Merlin didn’t like the tone. Said he was a harsh master, the kind that broke men and called it discipline. Seventy years serving Shakespeare, and no one had ever met his standards. Then he lowered the boom, voice turning soft and deadly. He promised them one thing: after two weeks in his employ, the two miserable souls who despised him most in the entire company would be Jonny and Boris.
In Van Nuys, that wasn’t a warning. It was prophecy.