The actor appealed to Detective Riker. “Am I being punished?”
“Oh, yeah.”
The stagehands had also been kept late, but not just for penance. Riker had finally resolved the problem of kids in union jobs that should have gone to senior men, and it had the stink of deep financial trouble. Thanks to nepotism, the teenagers had signed on with Lollypop’s uncle and Pimples’s dad, a seasoned prop master. The older men had elected not to take a cut in pay, and they had found work elsewhere. Gil Preston’s story was much the same. He had originally been hired as the lighting director’s assistant. And Bugsy, the gopher, was also doing the job of the stage manager’s laid-off assistant.
This was Broadway on a shoestring.
The crew had been cut by more than half, and so a question mark still remained after Nan Cooper’s name. Why lose all those people and keep a wardrobe lady on salary?
• • •
Mallory looked up to the catwalk and yelled, “Gil! Lights!” And there was instant darkness.
Axel Clayborne resumed his blackout position on the brass bed, covering himself with a blanket that could have hidden the small murder kit of a straight-edge razor, goggles and place cards. He did this very smoothly for a man who could not see.
But she could—aided by night-vision lenses.
With the turn of her head, Mallory aimed the green light of her third eye at the blind stagehands and called out to them in the dark, “Garnet! Randal!” They stiffened up, their sightless eyes gone wide and spooked, believing that she was standing in front of them—as she softly padded around behind the boys to touch the backs of their necks and whisper, “You’re dead.” She ripped off her goggles, yelling, “Lights!”
Blinking at the sudden brightness, the teenagers spun around to face her.
Frightened much? Oh, yes.
She squared off against them. “So . . . you two are moving props on the stage. . . . A man’s being murdered in the audience.” One hand went to her hip. “And you don’t see that?”
“Well, no, we wouldn’t,” said Garnet, the pimple-faced boy. “When we wear the goggles, we keep our eyes on the floor.” He nudged his friend. “Remember that last dress rehearsal?”
“Yeah,” said Randal, the thin one with the round head. “This idiot PR guy tested his camera flash during a blackout scene. The damn goggles magnified the light a zillion times. It was like lookin’ into the sun. I thought I was gonna go blind.”
“Another time,” said Garnet, “somebody next to me lit a penlight. Messed me up for the whole scene. Your eyes need recovery time when you get blinded, and we ain’t got any. It’s all split-second moves. The goggles gotta come off before the lights come back on.”
“Or we’re screwed.”
“Yeah. So we don’t take our eyes off the floor.”
Mallory turned to the actor on the brass bed. “And there goes your alibi.” She hunkered down to look at the theater diagram laid out on the floor. Maybe the stagehands had no time to do a murder in the audience, but they knew something, did something. What?
She waved them away. “That’s all for tonight. You can leave.”
As the teenagers hustled down the stairs and made a fast retreat up the aisle, Riker turned to Axel Clayborne, another offender who could have enlightened them earlier and saved them some time. “We’re done with you, too. Everybody out!”
Her partner was no longer starstruck. He was pissed off.
When the detectives were alone on the stage, Riker sat down on the brass bed. “You know it wasn’t just the kids. The whole pack of ’em decided not to tell us about the goggles. And they weren’t protecting the stagehands. Those two couldn’t have done it.”
Mallory held up the folded sheet of newsprint with the only review of the first performance. “Wouldn’t you think more than one critic would’ve turned out for the opening of a Broadway play?”
“We’ve had lots of canceled openings,” said a soft, breathy voice from the wings. “Nobody knew if the curtain would go up last night.”
Alma Sutter had been sent home an hour ago. And so it was a surprise to see her step through the open door in the scenery. The actress approached them with halting steps, a touch of fear and other guilty signs of a sin-ridden Catholic schoolgirl on her way to confession—and then, of course, straight to hell.
• • •
Flanked by her audience of two detectives, Alma sat on floorboards, her legs dangling over the edge of the stage. “Peter Beck was a very nice man. He was always good to me. Then the play changed . . . and Peter changed.”
She could tell they had already heard several versions of this story tonight, and they were sick of it. By their glances and signals, Alma followed a silent conversation of cops. The man, with only the rise of one flat hand, stayed his partner’s objections to going slowly. Detective Mallory’s expression of ennui—and the brief opening of her blazer to expose a weapon—let him know that she would prefer to extract information at gunpoint.
The actress recoiled as if this last part had been said aloud.
The man, the nice detective, smiled at her. “Take your time, kid.”
Kid? On this cue, Alma struck an attitude of little-girl-lost, lacing her fingers in prayer, eyes cast down. Shy child. “The ghostwriter’s changes started with the Fat Man’s Ballet. It was wonderful.” Her lashes fluttered up, eyes wide with imitation wonder. “And Peter saw that, too. He didn’t have a problem with it. But then the ghostwriter started rewriting all the lines. Every rehearsal was a screaming match until Peter walked out. He didn’t even come to the opening. So I was surprised to see him out front tonight.”
Detective Riker scribbled in his notebook and then asked, “What time?”
“Maybe fifteen minutes before curtain. I was standing behind the—”
Mallory leaned in close—too close. “You saw those place cards on the chairs.”
Not a question.
Confession time. “Yes. . . . I should’ve told you. I’m so sorry.” Alma looked down at her dangling shoes, aiming for shame. Bad little girl. “I was really nervous . . . but that wasn’t the first time I saw the cards.” Ah, she was out of trouble now. They liked that part.
“Okay,” said Riker. “So the first time you looked at the audience, did you see anybody else out there?”
“There’s always somebody out front. The ushers for sure. But not the stagehands. I would’ve remembered them. They dress in solid black so you don’t see them moving props onstage. Except for that total blackout tonight, there’s emergency lights and exit signs. With any light at all, white skin shows up in the—” Oh, she was losing the female cop to boredom. “Well, anyway, that’s why the stagehands wear black ski masks and gloves.”
Detective Mallory looked to her partner. “Loman missed that, too.”
“Alma,” said Detective Riker. “Cut to the good part. What’s eating you?”
“A friend of mine died tonight.”
“Your boyfriend,” said Detective Mallory, who would have heard all the backstage gossip by now.
“We were friends, but I auditioned. It’s not like Peter gave me the role.” Was she believed? Alma turned from one cop to the other. No and no. Well, this part they would believe: “We had a falling out.”
“A fight,” said Riker.
“With a razor,” said Mallory.
“Oh, God, no! Just shouting. He was so paranoid. He thought we were all against him. But that wasn’t true. Everyone felt sorry for Peter. The ghostwriter destroyed him.”
“By changing the play?”
“By writing a better play. You see? It had to be suicide. It wasn’t the weather that wrecked our turnout. A star like Axel Clayborne would’ve brought out fans, even in a blizzard. But Peter had his lawyers shut down our preview and every scheduled opening night. They killed all the ads—newspapers, radio, TV. You can starve out any Broadway play without ticket sales. A lot of people got laid off. The legal fees were huge, and—”
“But none of you wanted Beck to die.” Mallory’s sarcasm was delivered deadpan.
“What for? Yesterday the judge sided with us. He let the play open last night. And we got a great review because of that lady in the audience. She was so scared, she had a heart attack and dropped dead.”
“What a lucky break.” Riker was no longer the nice detective.
“But don’t you see? That’s why Peter showed up tonight. If he couldn’t starve the play, he could give it the ultimate kiss of death—a playwright committing suicide after the first act.” Alma bowed her head for the closing line. It had taken her the better part of an hour to come up with it. “The play was killing Peter . . . so he killed the play.”
Life could be so simple if the police would only allow it.
“All of you followed the ghostwriter’s changes.” Detective Mallory said this as an accusation heavy on sarcasm. “Someone you’ve never even met, never—”
“Oh,” said Alma. “He left another message on the blackboard. It’s for you.”
• • •
Riker watched the actress’s back as she walked away. It seemed like everyone her age was stoned on something. In her case—wandering eyes, slow reaction time—a sedative was an easy guess. It would have been helpful to know if she had popped any pills before the murder of Peter Beck, a kill that had required speed and good reflexes.
As his partner followed Alma Sutter into the wings, a sound from above made him tilt his head back to see the eavesdropper. Even without bifocals, Riker had no trouble following the track of the youngster’s wide eyes. Gil Preston was fascinated by Mallory.
It was easy to forget when he was around. The lighting guy, shy string bean, kept the distance of a schoolboy with a hopeless crush. His gaze stayed locked on Mallory until she was out of sight, disappearing through the door in the stage set. And now he saw Riker watching him.
The stage lights went out.
The detective followed the glow of a lamp through the scenery door, and he joined the two women in the wings by Buckner’s desk. Mallory was staring at the new message on the blackboard—written with the chalk that Loman’s crew had never found. By now, it had walked out the door in somebody’s pocket. But not Alma’s. The actress’s pockets were turned inside out when his partner returned her coat, saying, “Go home.”
When Alma Sutter was out of sight, Mallory reached up to a shelf near the desk and pulled aside a canvas tarp that had covered the stage manager’s laptop, all but the tiny dot of its camera lens. With taps of the keyboard, she raised the camera’s view of the black slate, a moving picture of uniformed officers and CSIs walking by. She sped up the motion to make the foot traffic faster, and then—the screen went black.
“Damn,” said Riker. “He jammed the laptop signal?”
Mallory pressed one finger over the lens. “Sticky. Our guy’s low tech. He came up on the laptop’s blindside and put tape over the lens.” She turned toward the sound of a scuffle on the stairs.
Riker heard footsteps behind the stage set. And now Bugsy was walking toward them in the scruff-of-the-neck custody of a uniformed officer, who said, “I caught him coming out of a dressing room. He’s got a bedroll stashed up there.”
When Riker had dismissed the officer with thanks, he turned a smile on the nervous gopher. “It’s okay, Bugsy. You can stay the night . . . but I guess we can scratch that flophouse address you gave us.”
The little man drifted to Mallory’s side, looking up to her as his higher power. She pulled a roll of bills from a back pocket and peeled off a twenty, saying, “Get something to eat.”
Riker was touched. Would this gesture pass for empathy with the homeless gopher? Well, no. But it would have made her foster mother so happy, this hopeful sign of late-blooming humanity—Mallory feeding her pet.
The money disappeared into Bugsy’s back pocket. His eyes dropped to the moving picture on the laptop screen. The camera blackout had ended, and people were passing by the lens again. “Oh, we tried that. Tried every damn thing to catch the spook. Nothin’ worked. One time, I sprinkled talcum powder on the floor. The ghostwriter left a message—but no footprints. I bet the guy’s got his own camera planted somewhere.”
“Maybe.” Riker looked up to the high-hanging litter of scaffolding, pulley rigs and weights, pipes and spaghetti loops of rope, cable and wire. “But who’s got a year to go look for it?” He turned his attention back to the new blackboard message. This time, no name was mentioned—or needed. It was an apt description. “What’s it from? Shakespeare?”
“It’s a Bible quotation.” Mallory could quote scripture better than any soapbox lunatic in the city.
“Four years of Catholic school finally pays off,” said Riker. Though his partner had spent much of her childhood in a Jewish household, her foster mother, the late Helen Markowitz, had given the Catholics equal time—due to a misunderstanding in Kathy Mallory’s puppy days when the feral street kid had made the sign of the cross. Later, it was discovered that the little girl only used this religious gesture to ward off mad dogs and cops.
A Sunday-school dropout he might be, but Riker well understood why the actress had assumed that this love letter was meant for his partner.
WHO IS SHE THAT LOOKETH FORTH AS THE MORNING, FAIR AS THE MOON, CLEAR AS THE SUN, AND TERRIBLE AS AN ARMY WITH BANNERS?
SUSAN: (paces the length of the room) I’m not afraid. . . . I’m not.
ROLLO: Give it time.
—The Brass Bed, Act I
Snowfall was light, a final dusting of the storm that had paralyzed all but the city’s main arteries for two days. There were no pedestrians in sight, and gone was the twenty-four-hour static of traffic and the drive-by blasts of music from car radios. Manhattan by night—nothing sweeter. But this night, the town had taken itself indoors, and Riker found the lack of noise unsettling. Creepy. A born New Yorker, he could only read perfect peace as the hush at the end of the world. But then a hulking snowplow lumbered past the theater on its way to some blocked road, and the two detectives walked down Forty-ninth Street.
Riker wrapped his scarf a little tighter against a sudden chill wind. His partner wore a trench coat, a poor choice in winter. It must have been the first thing that came to hand in her flight to the crime scene. He wanted to ask if she was cold, but this might be taken the wrong way, as though he were asking if she didn’t feel the cold like a normal human. Mallory the Machine was her moniker, the one used behind her back in the squad room, where she kept everyone at the distance of her surname. Everyone. Even though he had watched her grow up in the care of old friends, he was not allowed to call her Kathy anymore.
After the funeral of Inspector Louis Markowitz, Riker had received a letter written against a day when Lou’s foster child might be left alone in Copland. The dead man’s final words had obliged him to look after her, and Riker had taken this to mean keeping her safe. Now he expanded upon that old instruction, removing his scarf and wrapping it around her neck to keep her warm.
She forgave him for this act of kindness by not acknowledging his gift, and neither did she shrug it off as she unlocked her car, a silver convertible that any passerby might take for a Volkswagen—if they never looked under the hood to see the Porsche engine of a speed freak who loved to drive—lived to drive. Semi-suicidal Riker was the only man on the squad who would ride with her, and so he had become her partner by default; that was the story he told, and he stuck to it whenever he was asked the question that always began with Why in God’s name—
“One of the first cops on the scene lied to us.” Mallory slid in behind the wheel. “Somebody from the audience got past them before they secured the doors.”
“A uniform confessed to a screwup like that?”
She shot him a look that said, Oh, sure—like that was ever going to happen.
Then how could she know? Riker climbed in on the passenger side. Was he going to ask her? No, he knew this game too well. Contrary to what the rest of the squad believed, Ma
llory did have a sense of humor, twisted though it might be. There was never any laughter when she got to the end of a joke—only a fleeting smile to say, Gotcha.
But not tonight.
That was his resolve as his partner pulled away from the curb for the six-block ride to Peter Beck’s residence in Hell’s Kitchen. Riker double-checked the math, leafing through the officers’ notes on people interviewed in the lobby. And now he consulted his own notebook. “I don’t have the cashier’s statement. Donna Loo? She was your interview, right?”
“Yes, she was.” Mallory slowed down for a red light. Coming to a full stop was against her religion. She pulled a small evidence bag from the pocket of her trench coat and handed it over. “Donna doesn’t know who left them. They were in the cashier’s booth when she came to work.”
Through the clear plastic, Riker read the typed note that banded a packet of four tickets: Peter Beck and guests. “But the lighting guy said the man came in by the alley door.”
“Right,” said Mallory. “Beck didn’t need a ticket. But after that good review, our killer couldn’t count on a bad turnout. He had to keep Donna from selling those seats in the front row. She handed out seventy-two tickets tonight. I checked her count with the usher’s stubs.”
Oh, shit! Only seventy-one people had given up their names and IDs while submitting to a CSI search for blood evidence. Clara Loman must have counted Peter Beck as ticket holder seventy-two. Another damned screwup.
“Okay,” said Riker. “Maybe those cops were wrong about nobody gettin’ out, but what makes you think one of ’em lied? Maybe you—”
“Read the head usher’s statement. He pulled the two cops off the sidewalk outside the front entrance. Donna Loo backs him up on that. So now they’re all in the lobby. The usher and the cashier have their backs to the street door—and that’s when somebody flies out. The cops don’t stop the runaway. They’re both listening to the usher, right? They don’t even know what’s happened yet. Only one cop saw that ticket holder run out the door . . . and he lied about it.”
It Happens in the Dark - M11 Page 4
