The Steel Kiss

Welcome to the world of forensics, Rhyme thought.

CHAPTER 29

Sweeney Todd, now, that was a challenge.

Joe Heady, a carpenter at the Whitmore Theater in Times Square, was thinking of the successful revival of the Sondheim play a year ago. He and the other set builders and gaffers had had to create a working barber’s chair—well, working to the extent that it would drop open on command, allowing the customer to slide into the pit below after the Demon Barber of Fleet Street had sliced open his throat.

They’d worked for months to get the chair to function seamlessly—and to create a wonderfully gothic Dickensian set.

But the set for this job? Damn child’s play. Downright boring.

Heady lugged some two-by-four pieces of common-grade pine into the set construction workshop behind the theater on 46th Street and dumped them on the concrete floor. For this play his job was to build a large maze, the sort that a rat—make that a two-foot holographic projection rat—would poke through at various points in the play, which was about some family gathering and arguing and a bunch of other crap. Not a single cut throat for the entire two hours and change. Having read the script, Heady decided a little literal blood would have helped.

But a maze was what the set designer wanted and a maze she was going to get.

A big man, with bushy black-and-gray hair, Heady arranged the pieces of wood in the order in which he’d cut them and then stiffly rose. Actually grunting. Sixty-one years old, he’d given retirement a shot; he and the wife had moved here after his thirty-six years on the assembly line in Detroit. Living closer to the kids and grandkids in Jersey was great. Up to a point. But Heady wasn’t ready to hang up his tools yet, and his son-in-law hooked him up with this job. Heady was basically a machinist—the Detroit thing—but handy is handy, and the theater hired him on the spot for set-building carpentry. He loved the work. Only problem: The wood weighed a lot more than it did twenty years ago. Funny how that happens.

He spread the plans for the maze on a table nearby, then plucked a steel tape measure off his belt and a pencil—an old-time pencil, which he sharpened with a locking-blade knife—from his pocket and set them beside the plans. Pulling on his reading glasses, he reviewed the schematics.

This was one of the nicer theaters on Broadway and definitely one of the best set-building workshops in Manhattan. It was large, sixty by sixty feet, with the south wall stocked with more wood than most lumberyards had in inventory. Against the west wall were the bins of hardware (nails, nuts, bolts, springs, screws, washers, you name it), hand and small power tools, workbenches, paint and a small kitchen area. In the middle, mounted to the floor, were the big power tools.

The day was pleasant and the massive double doors—large enough for the delivery of the biggest props—were open onto 46th Street. A breeze wafted in, carrying smells that Heady liked: car exhaust, perfume from who knew where, charcoal smoke from the nut and pretzel vendors. The traffic was chaotic and people in every style of clothing you could imagine streamed past constantly, surging in every direction. He’d never developed affection for Motown. But now, a convert, he was a devout Manhattanite, even though he lived in Paramus.

And he loved his job too. On nice days like this, with the doors open, passersby sometimes stopped and glanced in, curious to watch the set builders at work. One of Heady’s proudest days was when someone called him to the door. The carpenter, anticipating a question about a tool or what set he was working on, was astonished when the man asked for an autograph. He’d loved the sets from the revival of The King and I and wanted Heady to sign the Playbill.

Heady heated up some water in the microwave, poured in some instant Starbucks coffee and sipped the black brew while he made notes about the cuts he was about to make. He glanced at the bench to make sure a necessary accessory was handy: sound-dampening earmuffs. He absolutely had to wear these because of a device that sat in the middle of the workshop.

The huge Ayoni table saw was the latest addition. The bulk of the work done in set building on Broadway is carpentry—cutting, framing, joining and painting. The Ayoni was rapidly becoming a workhorse for that task. Weighing in at over three hundred pounds, the device featured circular blades with edges sharp as shark’s teeth. The steel blades were interchangeable, in varying thicknesses and tooth depth and shape—the thicker, with larger teeth, were meant for rough frames, the thinner and finer for finishing work. These wicked disks spun at nearly two thousand RPM and screamed as loudly as a jet plane’s engines.

Heady loved the saw. It would slice through the thickest wood like tearing newsprint and featured a computer chip that remembered setting and dimensions for the past fifty jobs.