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"Oh, right But even so, didn't you see a newspaper? Listen to the radio? You cah Grand Central, you e to carry and a confessed murderer to escort," I re in Bosnia"

"Forget Bosnia Bosnia didn't "

"Will?"

He nodded "Either it's Nuerous than anybody thought You know the theater critic?"

"Regis Kilbourne"

"That's the one," he said "Will got hi for it

I'd somehow missed the column he wrote It had appeared toward the end of the previous week, not in the Arts section where his revieays ran, but on the Tie I've since had a look at that issue of the paper, and it seems to me I read Safire's column that day, an inside-the-mind-of piece on a pair of presidential hopefuls So I very likely took a look at what Regis Kilbourne had to say, and probably stopped reading before I got to the payoff

That would have been natural enough, because his brief essay started off as a spirited defense of freedos before, in response to having been given a spot on Will's list, going on about a critic's profound responsibilities to his conscience and his public I ht very well have decided I didn't have to listen to all that again

He'd used up the greater portion of his 850 words before he got to the point The rest of his coluiven over to a review of a draed neither on nor off Broadway but all over town He reviewed Will, and he gave him a bad notice

"It is custo-running show after a substantive change in the cast When the original production was essentially a star vehicle, such revisits are al And this is certainly true in the case of what, were it mounted as a Broadway musical, some producer would surely entitle Will! coatory exclamation point

"In its first incarnation, Will! was unquestionably good theater With the late Adrian Whitfield quietly elegant in the title role, the production had a powerful grip on its audience of eight million New Yorkers But what succeeded initially as brilliant tragedy (albeit not unleavened by its comic moments) has come back to us as farce, and a farce with all the zest and sparkle of a fallen soufflй

"With Whitfield's death and uns-and has fallen flat on his face Will Nu hie We take this pale copy seriously only because we reinal

"Noher adversaries to the four corners of Wonderland I say the same to this craven who drapes hio about guarded and live as if under siege No longer will one seat of my two on the aisle be taken up by a burly chap who'dmy life back, and I can only recommend the same course of action to the current Will Close the show, strike the set-and get a life"

Kilbourne had made his decision on his own, but he'd let the cops know about it before his oped piece inforainst it, nobody tried very hard to talk him out of it They'd reached much the saerous as the original, but it was beginning to look as though Will wasn't a copycat killer after all He was a copycat letter writer He would still be pursued, and eventually caught, but there was a lot less urgency attached to thehearts with a college student and a confessed murderer in the kitchen of a ranch house in Lakewood, Ohio, Regis Kilbourne atching a preview performance of the new PJ Barry play, Poor Little Rhode Island His coin, who looked like a rapher After the perforht supper at Joe Alien's, then took a taxi to the brownstone in Chelsea where he had a floor-through apartested she stay over, but she had an early shoot and wanted to get ho on ould have happened if she'd stayed the night Would Kilbourne still be alive? Or would she have died along with him?) He walked to Seventh Avenue with her and put her in a cab headed don-her loft was on Crosby Street-and the last she saw of hiht back to his apartment, and sometime within the next hour or two he had a visitor It appeared that either Will had et hold of a key or Kilbourne let hins of forced entry Nor did Kilbourne seem to have resisted his killer He'd been struck on the head with soh force to have very likely rendered him unconscious He'd either fallen to the floor or been laid out there, facedown Then the killer stabbed him in the back with a Sabatier carbon-steel kitchen knife, which had been subsequently removed from the corpse, washed in the sink, and placed in the wire basket to dry

("Will's probably not a chef," Elaine told me "You have to hand-dry knives like that They're not stainless, and they'll rust A chef would have known that" Maybe he knew, I said, and didn't care A chef would have cared, she said)

I don't know that the knife had time to rust, but I do know there were traces of blood still on it, which nailed it down as the h, or prints other than Kilbourne's and Melba Rogin's anywhere in the apart the slacks and sweater he'd donned to put Melba in a cab (She said he'd worn a brown suede baseball jacket as well, and that gar over the back of a chair) Either Will had arrived before his victiain in the sa to Melba, he'd been wide ahen she left hiht have stayed up to read or watch television, or even to write his review

If he'd done any writing, he'd left no sign of it He still used a typewriter, an ancient Royal portable that evidently had some sort of toteress in his typewriter, no notes alongside it Soin how he'd liked the play-he'd probably have asked the same question of Mary Lincoln-and she clai about a play until he'd written his review "But I don't think he loved it," she adot his na that Kilbourne had hated the play and written a withering review, and that his late-night visitor was the playwright himself, PJ Barry, who'd struck down his tor it to the flames "But I know PJ Barry," Smith wrote, "and I've seen Poor Little Rhode Island, and I can nothan I can believe anyone could find a bad word to say about his play"

There were no calls to or from Kilbourne's apartment around the tiers entering or lurking around the brownstone Sooner or later, though, they would turn up a witness, so, so