After a testy few seconds, Harry Deberman handed over an evidence bag containing a single key. Before he could be asked what else had been stolen, the man melted back through the ranks of the ME’s people and the crime-scene crew. Making a show of leaving on some more urgent matter, Deberman checked his wristwatch twice as he made an escape up the aisle.
“You better run,” said Mallory, though her voice was soft, and the departing detective was well out of earshot.
“Nice catch.” Pulling off his gloves, Riker stepped back from the body and stared at the bloody weapon on the floor. “But we don’t have the makings of a homicide. Not if it turns out the guy owned that razor.”
Mallory held up a closed hand, showing him one corner of a twenty-dollar bill. “I say that key was planted. The coat pocket was the only one the perp could reach.”
“No bet,” said Riker. The black overcoat had a mangled, slept-in look about it. One of its pockets was trapped under Peter Beck’s left thigh, and the most light-fingered killer could not have accessed either pocket of the tight-fitting pants. He hefted the bagged key in one hand, as if testing its weight as court evidence. There had to be more to it than this. With only the rise of one eyebrow, he managed to say to his partner, I know you’re holding out on me.
Mallory gave a curt nod to the ME’s man, the one holding a long, zippered bag sized to carry a corpse. While the body snatchers and forensic gatherers converged on the dead man, she threaded one hand under Riker’s arm and led him off to the side, where she held out her bet money in plain sight. “I say the loose key fits the victim’s front door, and the razor does belong to him. That makes it murder.”
Cryptic brat.
He shook his head, not game enough to take her bait. “But why call us?” A death like this one rarely got the attention of Special Crimes. Their unit favored a higher body count. “I say . . . let the local cops have it.”
He smiled. She did not.
“Unless there’s more to it.” Riker’s smile got a little wider, a signal that she should pocket her twenty and just give it up. To bring this point home, he glanced at his watch. “Why waste time on a—”
“The play opened last night,” said Mallory, “but it shut down before the second act. And a city councilman was in the audience. Well, he comes back tonight to see the rest of the play. Again, it shuts down before the finish. So he calls a friend—a good friend. He’s got the commissioner’s home phone number, and Beale agrees with the councilman. Two dead bodies—one for each performance—that’s a bit much.”
“And Beale calls in Special Crimes.” So it was not just his partner’s reckless driving that got her to the crime scene ahead of the locals. He also understood why the Midtown cop had wanted this homicide so badly. It had all the elements of a career case for a mediocre detective like Harry Deberman.
And now they had a game.
Riker felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to face a younger man with long dark hair. If not for the clipboard and the microphone headset, the civilian might have stepped out of a photograph from the 1800s. His shirt had an old-fashioned collar, and a bolo tie was strung around his neck. The detective knew he would see pointy-toed western boots when he looked down. Yup. This man was good-looking, and he had movie-star teeth, but he introduced himself as the stage manager, Cyril Buckner.
The urban cowboy turned to Mallory. “I think you have the wrong idea about—”
“I’ve been looking for you,” she said. “Where’ve you been for the past hour?”
“I was trapped in the lobby with the audience.” Only this minute, he explained, the officers had released him with orders to report to her. And following an apology for eavesdropping, Cyril Buckner added, “This was a suicide. And that first death? That one doesn’t count.”
And Riker said, “Huh?”
“The woman who died last night had a heart attack.” The stage manager freed a folded page of newsprint from his clipboard. “That’s how we got this smash review.” He held it up so they could both read the bold-type words, A Play to Die For. “The drama critic only reviewed the first thirty minutes. That’s when the lady keeled over, and the cops shut us down. We didn’t get past the first act tonight, either.”
Mallory, the detective who did not need reading glasses, snatched the review from Buckner’s hand. After scanning the column, she smiled, not at all troubled over one death by natural causes. “The woman who died last night also had a front-row seat. . . . She also died at eight-thirty.” Mallory lifted her chin a bare inch to silently ask if her partner was a great believer in that sort of coincidence.
He was not.
A lobby door swung open, and a young officer ran down an aisle, yelling, “We talked to everybody!” With the hands-up flourish of a boy sliding into home plate, he came to a stop beside Mallory. “Nobody sat behind the dead guy. There was a lady in the seat next to him. She’s got blood in her hair. But she didn’t see a thing—not till the lights came up. The whole place was pitch-black for maybe a minute.”
Mallory turned her head slowly until her eyes locked onto the small man with the designation of everyone’s errand boy, and Bugsy froze in midstride. She called out to him, “Where’s that lighting guy? Get him out here!”
In the hour before Riker’s arrival, the gopher had come to know Mallory well enough to run for his life on command. And though his legs were short, Bugsy shot up the steps to the stage at light’s speed. Once he was on the other side of the footlights, his head craned all the way back as he looked straight up to yell, “Gil, come down! She wants you!” No need to give a name; he was obviously referring to She Who Scares Me.
Sheets of dropped paper wafted down from an unseen perch high above the floorboards. Apparently, Mallory also made the lighting guy nervous. After a distant patter of feet slapping stairs, a tall youngster, gawky and shovel footed, appeared onstage, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. He only had eyes for her—big eyes.
Mallory pointed to a row of small bulbs lodged at the foot of one wall and leading to the red glow of an exit sign. “When the houselights go down, how bright are those emergency lights?”
“J-j-just bright enough for people to find their way out during a performance,” said Gil. “Except near the end of the first act—that was the blackout cue. All the lights were out for forty seconds. The lobby, too. Even the exit signs.”
The stage manager yelled, “That’s a violation of the fire code! What the hell were you—”
“I followed your instructions, okay?” Gil dropped to hands and knees, madly searching the fallen pages that littered the stage. Clutching one, he waved it like a white flag. “Here! Look for yourself. You added that cue to my—”
“No,” said Cyril Buckner, “I didn’t make any changes for lighting cues.”
“So those lights were on the whole time last night,” said Mallory, “but not tonight.” She faced the stage manager, daring him to lie to her. “Who else makes changes like that?”
“The ghostwriter.”
• • •
Backstage, a wooden staircase led up to a loft platform. Its railed walkway was lined with dressing rooms, and Mallory longed to see what was behind those locked doors, but the supervisor of the CSIs had been taken ill and taken away, and the detective had not yet convinced the remaining team to violate laws of search and seizure.
Maybe later.
She stood beside the gopher in the wings. Here, Cyril Buckner’s desk had a view of the stage through an open doorway in a scenery flat, but Mallory faced the other way, reading words on a large blackboard bolted to a more solid wall of brick.
“That board’s really old,” said Bugsy. “It’s been there forever. The ghostwriter’s the only one who uses it. That’s how he talks to us.”
“He’s never screwed with a change sheet before.” Cyril Buckner walked into the end of this conversation, accompanied by a uniformed escort. The stage manager turned to read the message on the blackboard. “Oh, shit! Well, you know th
at’s new.” He flicked through pictures on his cell phone to show the detective what had been written there earlier in the evening.
Mallory confiscated the phone and gave a nod to the waiting officer, who led the stage manager away. Bugsy remained, never drifting far from her side, as if tethered by a leash. This little man was her creature now.
With her back turned to the blackboard, the detective looked through the door in the scenery. Amid the stage furnishings of a brass bed, a table and a wheelchair, CSIs stood on taped Xs, standing in for actors while they reconstructed the moment when the playwright’s corpse was discovered in the front row. The cast and crew members, under the watch of officers, were tucked into widely spaced theater seats. But one of these people had slipped out of captivity for a while. The theater hummed with the comings and goings of cops and techs, and none of them had noticed the escapee at work on the blackboard.
“That spook’s the only one who uses chalk,” said Bugsy. “The stage manager uses a computer.” He unlocked a drawer in the desk and lifted a laptop to show her a stack of printouts. “Here ya go. Rehearsal notes, lighting cues, line changes. I post ’em on the callboard by the stage door.”
Riker walked up behind them as the gopher explained the odd history of one play replacing another, line by line, via anonymous changes printed on the blackboard.
Was her partner listening to any of this? No, he was not.
Sloughing off his winter coat, Riker sat on the edge of the desk. Though it only took a moment to read the words on the blackboard, he continued to stare at them—and Mallory stared at his suit. There were no wrinkles or stains, though he rarely resorted to dry cleaning until it was well past time to throw away his worn-out threads. A brand-new suit? Only a family wedding would rate this extreme measure; he was more lax about the funerals. She had not been invited, perhaps because she never showed up at these events. But when had he tired of asking her to come?
“Look at this.” She held up the stage manager’s cell phone to show him the small photograph of block letters in white chalk. “The ghostwriter was rewriting Peter Beck’s play.”
Because Riker would not wear bifocals in public, he only nodded, never taking his troubled eyes off the actual blackboard in front of him.
Bugsy leaned in close to look at her picture of it on the small screen. “Oh, that’s the spook’s line change for the second act.”
Those chalked words had since been erased and replaced with a new message: GOOD EVENING, DETECTIVE MALLORY. HOW YOU INSPIRE ME. FORGIVE ME, MUSE. CRUEL, I KNOW, BUT YOU MUST LOSE YOUR LOVELY HEAD. OH, THE BLOODY THINGS I DO FOR ART.
“Very formal,” said Riker. “Even for a first date.”
SUSAN: A spinal injury?
ROLLO: My own carelessness. . . . I tripped in the blood. It was everywhere.
—The Brass Bed, Act I
Clara Loman walked onstage, buttoning her coat over the white coveralls of a CSI. The overhead lights deepened the frown lines of this tall, lanky woman with gray hair and rank. One rung below the commander of Crime Scene Unit, she supervised the night shift from a desk, rarely venturing into the field. Tonight was the exception, due to the burst appendix of her senior man. And so she had been late to arrive at the theater—and appalled to find Mallory issuing orders to crime-scene investigators. That was intolerable.
With terrifying efficiency, Loman had spent the past hour whipping her crew of CSIs in a race to bag the forensic evidence and move on. Now she informed the two homicide detectives that her people had business elsewhere tonight “—and your questions will be brief.” She spread a large sheet of graph paper across the brass bed at the center of the stage.
The CSIs had diagrammed ground-floor parameters for the crime scene, though the stairs to off-limits dressing rooms were marked, as were the exits and large objects. But Riker was only interested in the initialed Xs for the positions of cast and crew during the forty seconds when Peter Beck was being murdered in the dark.
So far no one had been caught lying in the crosscheck of statements made to CSIs when asked the key question: Where were you when the lights went out?
Loman tapped the Xs initialed by the two stagehands. “I ruled out these kids. They were moving props and furniture around during the blackout. I clocked them myself on a run-through. There wasn’t enough time to do their jobs and a murder in the audience.”
Ruling suspects in or out was not her call, but Riker had been raised well, and he would not engage in a pissing contest with a woman who had more gray hair than he did. “What’d your guys get off our witness, the lady sitting next to Peter Beck?”
“She caught the bloodfly from the razor. No way she’d get that kind of splatter pattern if she was the slasher. Send the woman home.” This was said in the unmistakable tone of an order, as if the detectives might be Loman’s underlings.
They were not.
Riker’s partner appeared to let this slide. Oh, no, that was wishful thinking on his part. Her smile was just a flash, a taste of things to come. He shot her a glance to beg, Play nice. Please?
The CSI supervisor pulled on a pair of woolen gloves to announce that she was leaving, and Mallory politely asked, “How much blood would’ve landed on our perp?”
“A few flecks or none at all. Given the angle of the wound, the killer was sitting on Beck’s left and reaching across him to make the cut. The victim was a shield for the bloodfly.” Loman’s gloved hand penciled a quick slash on the diagram. “That downward angle and a half-cut throat—you don’t see that with suicides. So it was murder.” Not a complete waste of her time.
But Riker had seen many a botched suicide, and the call of murder belonged to the medical examiner, not her.
“The witness was sitting on the victim’s right.” Loman drew circles around three chairs to the left of the dead man’s position. “The woman said these seats were empty when she sat down—still empty after the blackout.”
“And she mentioned place cards on those seats,” said Mallory—just being helpful—with a bit of attitude.
The tip of Clara Loman’s pencil poked a hole in the diagram. And this could only mean—oh, shit!—her CSIs had missed something. Had they even looked for the place cards?
Before his partner could go to war on this woman, Riker asked, “So where did our guy come from?” He leaned over the diagram to point out the Xs initialed by the cashier and the head usher. “These two alibi each other. They were playin’ grab ass in the lobby.” In a momentary departure from his only vanity, he slipped on his bifocals, then quickly pocketed them, and his finger settled on the Xs for the wardrobe lady and the security guard. “These marks are off by a hair. Nan Cooper and Bernie Sales should be on the other side of that door. They went out in the alley for a smoke.”
Loman’s jaw jutted out, unhappy with this criticism of her team. She turned to the wings and called out to a young CSI, “Henry, did you check outside the rear door?”
The man nodded and held up his bag of alley trash along with a smaller bag of cigarette butts.
“Swab Miss Cooper and Mr. Sales! Make it quick!” Loman turned back to the detectives. “We’ll run their DNA against the butts.”
“Waste of time and money,” said Riker. “I’d rule ’em both out. Bernie’s from a rent-a-cop agency. Luck of the draw, different guys on different nights. He’s got no reason to lie up an alibi for the wardrobe lady.”
“What about the audience,” said Mallory, “did you—”
“Did we spray seventy-one people with Luminol?” Done with the heavy sarcasm, Loman dismissed the younger detective with the wave of one hand. “No, my team eyeballed all of them for blood.”
“Seventy-one people?” Mallory’s tone implied another screwup in addition to the missing place cards and the diagram’s error. She liked to keep score.
“That’s my count,” said Loman, who was not about to take any grief from a puppy cop. “Nobody got out of this theater before the patrolmen showed up, and their tally matche
s mine.”
“She’s right,” said Riker, playing the peacemaker. “We got containment.” He handed his partner a witness statement taken from the head usher. “The guy snagged two cops off the sidewalk outside the theater. So the lobby entrance was secured right away. Then we got Nan and Bernie smokin’ behind the alley door. Nobody got past ’em.”
Loman bowed her head to draw a circle around small slash marks that stood for a third exit. “And the only route to the stage door was blocked by a volunteer usher. Satisfied?”
“Good enough,” said Riker—before Mallory could say otherwise. “I bet nobody from the audience even tried to get out.” Sudden death was considered live theater in New York City. People always formed a crowd around a crime scene, and, in this case, they had bought tickets.
His partner was unconvinced. Or maybe he only believed that because she wore half a smile that said to the woman from CSU, I’m gonna getcha.
Trouble? Oh, yeah.
Turning her back on Loman, Mallory looked out over the rows of empty seats to watch the bright portholes in the lobby doors go dark. And now the red exit signs ceased to glow, and so did the small bulbs along the wall.
What was that about?
Mallory raised her face to the youngster up on the catwalk, and yelled, “Gil, cut the stage lights!”
In that instant, the whole world winked out of existence. Every touchstone was lost in the blackout dark, and Riker was not even sure of the floorboards beneath his feet. Stone blind, he had no sense of space, no up or down. Only isolation. Though this theater was full of CSIs, cops and civilians, there was no sound of companion voices, no shuffle of shoes onstage or backstage. Every man and woman was still as death, afraid of moving even one step into the unknown. How far did he stand from the edge of the stage and a leg-breaker fall?
It Happens in the Dark - M11 Page 2
