The detectives were done with him—and so quickly, both of them moving toward the door.
No kisses? No goodbyes?
ROLLO: Fetch a chair for our guest! (One twin opens the closet doors and pulls out a wheelchair.) A souvenir from my leaner days.
—The Brass Bed, Act I
His long hair was curly and bright white—it thieved light—a dramatic contrast to the black coat draped over his shoulders. All of his clothing was black, but not slimming. Though he had been dragged here by uniformed officers, the man with three chins stood on the threshold, politely awaiting an invitation to enter the squad room. His chest heaved with a much aggrieved sigh to let them all know that he should not be kept waiting long.
Mallory rose from her desk and called out to him, “Mr. Crippen!”
“Detective Mallory?” With a flourish, the theater critic waved the card she had left under his door. He moved down the aisle of desks, preceded by fifty pounds or so of excess weight on his belly, and he carried this paunch with grandiosity. When he stood before her, he bowed and said, “At your service.” But this did not sound ludicrous, not from a man in his seventies.
She turned to her partner, who only smiled to say, Nailed it, didn’t I? And yes, he had. The critic was indeed old and certainly from the lost world of the low-tech people.
“Have a seat, Mr. Crippen.”
In a contest of sorts, he remained standing until she sat down, and then he settled into the chair beside her desk, shifting a bit, arranging his tie and his bulk. He emitted one more sigh, as though put out by this exertion.
“Thanks for coming in,” said Riker, with a touch of sarcasm for the runaway ticket holder. “We understand Bugsy has a lot of influence with you.”
“And we think that’s strange.” Mallory followed her partner’s lead, forgoing threats for the critic’s flight from the theater—and the police. “But everything about Bugsy is a little . . . off.”
“I know him well, and I’d love to discuss that dear little man. However, just this moment, I have a small problem.” Leonard Crippen paused for another sigh, and this one should have been reserved for a death in the family. “You see, I plan to go back for tonight’s performance. However, since the theater company didn’t anticipate a third review from me, all the best seats were taken by the time I called. The only one they had left is not very good. . . . They put me in the back row.”
The critic’s slow smile was an easy translation for Mallory. She recognized it from her own repertoire, and now she completed this blackmail transaction. “We roped off four seats in the front row. Would you like to sit in the dead man’s chair?”
“Oh, would I!”
• • •
Alma Sutter’s long blond hair was done up in a bun and secured by two pointed sticks, her idea of weaponry. She flicked a wall switch by the stage door, and fluorescent tubes lit up the long passageway to the backstage area, where she found another switch. More light, but not much. The young actress unbuttoned her coat as she walked toward the dark side. Before rounding the back of the stage set, she stopped and stood very still, holding her breath.
Listening—to nothing.
No footsteps, no chalk scratching on slate, but did she feel safe yet? No. And she never would. Not here.
The blackboard was lit by a rectangle of weak light shining through the door in the scenery flat, but the blocky chalk words were clear enough. And Alma wrapped her coat tight around her, though there was no draft, no sudden drop in temperature—except for what shock could do to the innards of a body. That was cold.
She pulled one of the sharp sticks from the pile of hair atop her head. Stupid flimsy thing. Next to useless. What was closer, the alley door or the prop locker with the baseball bat?
No matter now. Her knees were buckling, threatening to drop her to the floor.
She turned toward the scenery door. Onstage, a single caged bulb hung down by a wire, burning bright in an ancient custom to prevent the mischief that unworldly spirits did in the dark. The ghost light was only left on when the last living soul had left the theater.
So she was alone.
Screaming was futile.
Alma turned back to the blackboard. Cyril Buckner would never believe this. Every time she told him about a personal message from the ghostwriter, the stage manager counted it as a black mark against her, another sign that she was doing drugs. And she was. But not hallucinogens. Today she was doing cocaine, doing her best to be sharp and—
Focused.
Alma fished her cell phone from a coat pocket. Working through the fright, she flicked by applications, hunting for the camera function before this new message could disappear. They were all so quickly there and gone.
No good. Her hands were shaking. The phone dropped to the floor.
Idiot.
She wanted to run, but her legs had gone to noodles that could not carry her anywhere. She could only stare at the five chalk words on the slate.
IT WON’T HURT MUCH, ALMA.
• • •
“I’m sure if you only ask him,” said Leonard Crippen, “Bugsy will tell you his full name is Willard Albright.”
“That’s the alias he gave us.” Mallory leaned toward the drama critic. “Do you have binoculars for your seat in the back row?”
“His real name is Alan Rains . . . or maybe that’s his stage name.”
Riker looked up from his notebook. “Bugsy’s an actor?”
“You no doubt see him as a cute little fellow with a Bronx accent. But he cut his teeth on Shakespeare at Yale Drama School.”
“So you do know him well.” Mallory made this sound like an accusation.
“Oh, yes,” said Crippen. “I’m his biggest fan. Whenever he gets a new job as a gopher, he pays me a visit and pitches that company’s play. And he acts out all the parts.”
“The whole play?”
“No, only scenes from first acts. Bit of a tease. If I want the end of a story, I have to go to the theater like everyone else. Then I review the play—so Bugsy will come back to me with another one.”
“You do it for laughs,” said Riker.
The critic expelled a puff of air—incredulous. “I do it for the pleasure of his performance. Bugsy’s brilliant. If he didn’t pitch the plays, I’d never get to see him act. Writing a review is a small price for that experience—even a tiresome play by Peter Beck. Though I must say I was pleasantly surprised. This one’s not at all Beck’s style. He writes tedious melodramas about family relationships. But the current play seems to have a touch of Hitchcock. Of course, I only know the first act. I’m sure you read the whole thing.” He turned from one detective to the other. “You didn’t?”
• • •
It was perverse. Of course it was. But the ghostwriter had made her a better actress, and this idea had once fed Alma’s theory that Dickie Wyatt had left her all those messages, pushing her into a state of terror, another country with a scream for an anthem. Who but Dickie would have cared enough to scare her?
Back in the safe cradle of her Ohio hometown, no one had ever been unkind to her. She had been loved—poor preparation for this town, for this role that required cold sweat and a skippy heart. But now she had the hang of fear; she lived inside of it, slept in it, woke to it. But today’s threat was different. It promised pain. Alma read the words over and over. Where was the ghostwriter now? Coming for her? Right behind her? She had pills for moments like this, but trembling hands could not manage the childproof cap on her anti-anxiety meds, and the pharmacy bottle dropped to the floor. She willed herself to walk toward the alley door. Then she ran.
Behind her, she heard the sound of fingernails screeching on slate.
She stopped.
And turned.
No one there.
Against her will, her legs walked her back to the blackboard. No-o-o! She screamed, or thought she did. Her mouth opened wide, but nothing came out.
The five words were gone, replaced by so
many words filling out the slate, a zillion letters printed in the seconds it had taken her to cut and run.
• • •
“I don’t think they held out on you,” said Leonard Crippen. “I’m sure the theater company has no idea that Bugsy is Alan Rains. He only had one role in a Broadway play, and only for six months. Well, that was years ago. He’s very different now. His speech, the way he dresses—the way he doesn’t comb his hair. And he smells like a clothing rack in a secondhand store. All of that fits the role he played on Broadway. He even took the character’s name, Bugsy—a small, scared creature of desperate moves—a gopher. And now he’s Bugsy all day, all night. I’ve never known him to step out of character.”
“So he’s crazy,” said Riker.
“Aren’t they all? The theater’s a dicey way to make a living. No safety net. No guarantees that you’ll pay the rent next month. You’d have to be insane to want that life. Now this is where it gets very cruel.”
More detectives had straggled into the squad room. Some of them perched on nearby desks, and others formed a loose circle around the critic, listening to the story of a sorry little man who could not find his way out of a play.
• • •
Fingers fluttering, all in a panic, Alma Sutter fumbled with the key to open her dressing room door. One blind hand flicked on the light switch, as if that might save her. She slammed the door and locked it. Panting from her run up the stairs, she sank into the arms of a padded chair. Waves of hair fell down around her shoulders. Her topknot had come undone and so had she.
The closet was wide open, and the bright red dress she wore onstage should have been the first thing to catch her eye. But it was gone, replaced with another costume.
So the ghostwriter had a key to this room. There were no safe places. Where was he? Right now—where?
A row of glowing bulbs lit the makeup mirror on the wall. And below it, pots of paint and sticks of more color, brushes and tubes had been swept to one side, making space for a pair of scissors laid out on the table like crisscrossed knives.
Very sharp.
The first cut was tentative, sloppy.
Alma cried.
• • •
“It’s all about unacted desires.” The squad room was now full of cops. His audience complete, the critic stood up, swept back his hair and addressed them. “Allow me to set the stage.” He lowered his head as a modest bow. All eyes were on him when he raised his chin and said, “The curtains part, and you see a sparsely furnished bedroom in a New York high-rise. The back wall has a large window with a skyline view. There’s a lamp on a table, but no chairs. Scores of matchboxes are glued to the wallpaper. The main character, Rollo, a rather corpulent fellow—” As a concession to this particular crowd, he said, “A very heavy man languishes on a brass bed center stage.
“That role should’ve been played by a younger actor, but it’s Axel Clayborne, so who cares? He plays an invalid. Stage left, a door opens, and you see a young woman, Susan. She enters walking backward. She won’t take her eyes off two identical young men, who seem to be herding her into the room. The twins leave. She tries the doorknob. Useless. She’s locked in. The woman turns to the invalid on the bed. She’s timid, frightened. Susan tells Rollo she’s come to help him. And, given her current predicament—he laughs.
“They develop an instant rapport based on mutual terror of the twins, who keep popping into the room. Rollo asks them to fetch a chair for their guest. They go to the closet and pull out a wheelchair. Rollo explains that he outgrew it years after the accident. He tells her that the twins stuff him with food day and night. ‘One day,’ he says, ‘I won’t be able to fit through the door.’ Slowly he turns to the window, a wider exit. Then he tells her how his spine was damaged. This leads into the story of a family massacre, which his two brothers survived without a scratch. But other relatives? Not so fortunate.
“Now Rollo tells her about his dead dream. Before he was paralyzed, he had trained as a dancer. And that brings us to the Fat Man’s Ballet. In the middle of Susan’s line, the lights go out. She falls silent. Then a spotlight shines on Rollo, the only one not in shadow. Susan’s frozen like a statue. You hear the opening strains of the Firebird Suite. The lights flick on and off as the invalid rises from his bed, and he begins to dance in his pajamas and bare feet. . . . And he is beautiful. You wouldn’t expect that. There’s no comedy here. No one laughs at the dancing fat man. The audience sees his dream play out. The heart melts. Then he makes one fabulous leap onto the bed. You want to applaud. But then . . . he leaps out the window, shattering the glass. The audience gasps. The lights go out. You hear the city sounds of traffic in the dark. Then dead silence. The stage lights come up. The window is unbroken, and the invalid is back in his bed. The actress moves again and speaks the rest of her interrupted line.
“That was the first fantasy sequence. The next one was so frightening, it gave a fatal heart attack to a woman in the audience. . . . But I can’t bear to ruin it for you. You really must see the play.”
• • •
It was a stage manager’s job to assume responsibility for absolutely everything. All during the rehearsal period—which would not end—between changing lines and stage blocking, new lighting cues and a mountain of paperwork, Cyril Buckner also played the rabbi, doling out wisdom. Then, as the actors’ priest, he heard confessions. He had also stepped in after Dickie Wyatt’s contract had lapsed, and now he did that man’s job, too, keeping faith with the director’s vision—and the ghostwriter’s play, which would not stop changing.
On the plus side, the increased rehearsal time was a luxury in Broadway economics. On the downside of high legal fees and stalled openings, he now had a skeleton crew. Declining cuts in pay, most of his people had quit before the first performance. And the unions were knocking on his door, banging it down, wanting to chat about violations like replacing the doorman with a rent-a-cop, and not replacing other people, and maybe the TWU had discovered that the dresser, Nan Cooper, was working for free. Add one more hassle to the mix, and Cyril was going to kill somebody.
Anyone would do.
Today, he had begun with new bits of action for the Rinaldi brothers, who played out their psychotic roles to the nth degree, on and offstage. Type-casting had been Dickie Wyatt’s art, stumbling only when hiring Alma Sutter, no one’s first choice for the role of Susan. Now the ghostwriter had given her more lines.
And where was that stupid bitch?
The stage manager cum director, read Alma’s part for Axel Clayborne, who lounged on the brass bed, flanked by the twins. This actor was always line perfect. And so, when he missed the next cue, Cyril Buckner was startled, and he looked up from the page to see all three of his actors peering into the wings.
Alma Sutter stepped through the scenery door to stand under the spotlight. She raked one hand through her mutilated hair, and then, parading upstage and down in her new costume, she asked, “What do you think?”
“Shoot me,” said Cyril. “Just shoot me and get it over with!”
The Rinaldi twins, as usual, were speechless.
Axel Clayborne clapped his hands. “The haircut reminds me of a salon on the Lower East Side. Their idea of styling hair’s a bit like rough sex in the Third World. But Nan Cooper’s a wizard with scissors. She can fix that. Otherwise, it’s wonderful. Edgy. Risky.”
“Bullshit!” Cyril turned on Alma. “What the fuck have you done to yourself?”
She felt the punch of words more than most people, and now she backed away, her hands flying up to protect her ears. “It’s the ghostwriter’s change, not mine.”
“Screw him!” The stage manager crumpled the change sheets in one hand. “You can’t do this. We’re already pushing our luck with the cops.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Axel. “I suppose it depends on whether or not you think the ghostwriter murdered Peter. You believe it, don’t you, Cyril? So who would you rather piss off—the cops or a psycho?”
ROLLO: They’re collecting the dead flies. Every boy needs a hobby.
—The Brass Bed, Act I
Out on the street, the line was long for the sold-out performance, and reporters interviewed ticket holders, asking if they liked their chances of living through this night.
Sidestepping the cameras and lights, a troop of detectives from Special Crimes entered by the alley door. More than half the squad had volunteered to do backstage reconnaissance off the books, only wanting the rest of the story that Leonard Crippen had begun at the station house. The motives of the civilian audience were less pure: blood and guts and a play for the price of admission.
Mallory led the way to the stage manager’s desk in the wings, where they all stopped to read the latest message on the blackboard.
Cyril Buckner joined them to cock one thumb at the words printed in white chalk. “Never mind that. He’s screwing with you guys. But we’re playing it safe. You saw the ambulance parked outside? We hired it for the night.”
“Cheap publicity gimmick,” said Detective Janos.
“No, we also gave complimentary tickets to three cardiologists. We don’t want anyone to die tonight.”
Riker was born with a face that said, I know you’re lying. It was his best comeback line, and he never needed to say it aloud. The stage manager walked away—quickly. The detective stayed to stare at the ghostwriter’s message for his partner. It could only be a continuation of the threat to take off her head: MALLORY, TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT. NOTHING PERSONAL
It Happens in the Dark - M11 Page 8
