He turned to the pair of wheelchairs parked in the wings. A mannikin sat in one of them, draped with a sheet—like a corpse.
• • •
Mallory walked toward the tiny camera hidden on a shelf overlooking the blackboard. It was still in place. She ran a wireless feed on the screen of her cell phone. “Bugsy, when did that message show up?”
“Maybe an hour before you guys walked in the door.”
She sped up the film, rushing it toward that time stamp, and watched the jerky motion of foot traffic passing by the board. The screen went black on Bugsy’s mark for the timing of the chalkboard threat. Had her perp covered the lens of this camera, too? She reached up to touch the small device. No tack to the surface, no evidence of tampering. “Did the lights go off tonight?”
“Yeah, a few times. On and off. A glitch in the system. Happens a lot. Gil ran through all the cues on his panel. Everything’s workin’ fine now.”
So the ghostwriter had worked in the dark, and the missing pair of night-vision goggles would help with that. What else did he have in the way of technology? How had he known she was filming the board? There had been no one else in the theater when she had selected her hiding place.
Mallory looked up to the chaos of wiring, rope and cables overhead and considered Bugsy’s theory that the ghostwriter had a camera of his own hidden somewhere up there. A movement caught her eye, and her gaze shifted to the high catwalk, where she saw the back of Gil Preston, who moved quickly toward the other side of his metal walkway in the air.
Her answer might not lie in technology; it might be as simple as a bird’s-eye view. Or something else. She switched off the desk lamp and saw light leaks in the stage set’s flimsy wall.
Peepholes?
• • •
The theater was humming with hundreds of conversations. Every velvet chair was occupied except for the four front-row seats reserved for the NYPD. Riker removed a gold, tasseled rope from the armrests of one, and he sat down as a gleeful Leonard Crippen settled into the dead playwright’s seat.
The houselights dimmed. The curtains parted to a round of applause for the famous movie star on the brass bed. And thirty seconds into the first act, this night began to slide downhill. Enter Alma Sutter, backing onto the stage, being herded through a door by the creepy twins. Her waist-long hair had been chopped back to blond curls that only grazed her shoulders, and she had changed her stage costume—radically. No red dress this time. She wore a blazer, jeans and a silk T-shirt.
Did she seem taller now?
The detective had to rise from his seat, enduring hisses from the people behind him, to see over the edge of the raised stage. He expected high heels, but the actress wore black running shoes like Mallory’s. Alma was simply acting taller. Riker donned his bifocals for a better look at the bee-stung lips drawn on the woman’s mouth in the same red shade of lipstick that his partner used, and Alma had even changed the color of her eyes to Mallory green.
Leonard Crippen whispered, “Marvelous likeness.”
Riker shook his head. This was so wrong. He only heard bits of the actors’ conversation. He was more aware of the weight of a gun in his shoulder holster. When the stage lights flickered, the gun weighed more.
Onstage, the actor in the fat suit raised his voice, and this time Riker heard each word as the man demanded a chair for his guest. One of the twins pulled a wheelchair from the closet, and the fake Mallory sat down. The actress’s impression was not very good, even by Riker’s low standards. He ceased to listen to her lines of dialogue. He only caught the tone. She spoke like a dime-store replica of Mallory, missing every subtlety and abusing the flat affect that his partner only trotted out when she wanted to make a scary point. But when Riker removed his eyeglasses, the physical likeness was good—too good.
While the spotlight was on Axel Clayborne during the Fat Man’s Ballet, Riker was looking to the shadows where Mallory’s doppelganger sat in the wheelchair, one hand lifted in a lifeless mannikin pose. He had no easy moments until the fantasy sequence ended with a crash of glass from Clayborne’s leap through the window. And now a blackout. Ten seconds of darkness.
C’mon! C’mon!
Fifteen seconds. Twenty.
The stage lights came up. The broken window was mended. The invalid was lying on his brass bed, and the frozen woman came back to life. Riker could no longer look at her and see anyone but Mallory.
The actors resumed their conversation of sudden deaths in the family—lots of them.
By stage light, Riker checked his wristwatch. They were closing in on the time when Peter Beck had been murdered.
Onstage, the bedridden invalid was somehow offended by what the woman said, but Riker had not been paying attention to those lines. The lights flickered to cue another fantasy scene, and the actress froze into her statue pose again. The man rose from his bed, one hand clenched.
Riker’s hand moved toward his gun.
But the actor did not strike her. He gently touched her hair, her face. He leaned in close and inhaled her perfume. The stage went dark for a count of five seconds, and when the lights came back on, Clayborne held a baseball bat in his hands. Flickering in and out of darkness, the actor slowly raised the bat for a swing. A spotlight was trained on him as the bat connected to the fake Mallory’s face—and smashed it. Her bloody head went flying off her body to roll toward the footlights.
A fake head.
And now for Riker’s next surprise, the crowd cheered.
Goddamn pack of ghouls.
His gun was in his hand when the lights went out again.
The detective ticked off forty sweaty seconds of darkness, and when the stage lights brightened, the actor was in his bed once more, the actress’s head was back on her shoulders, and they were talking, gesturing, all the signs of life ongoing. The curtain came down, the houselights came up, and—Oh, Christ!—Mallory was seated beside him, holding a pair of night-vision goggles.
Two heart attacks in one night.
“Lots of time to slit your throat,” she said.
Leonard Crippen was clapping and shouting, “Brilliant! Just brilliant!” When the audience applause died down, he said, “An original scheme of unrequited love. He hates her, loves her, wants to bed her and behead her. On opening night, Clayborne got a bit carried away with that baseball bat—like he was going for a home run. And that poor woman who died in the audience? She was sitting front-row center when the rubber head flew into her lap.”
Mallory leaned forward in her chair to see around her partner and glare at the critic. “And you didn’t think that was worth mentioning? . . . Earlier?”
“I said I didn’t want to ruin it for you.” Crippen sighed, clearly feeling unappreciated.
“So Dr. Slope was right about the lady’s heart attack,” said Riker.
There was no way to plan a thing like that. The opening-night fatality had been a natural death and not a rehearsal for the murder of Peter Beck.
“That head wasn’t in the police report for the first death,” said Mallory.
“Yeah.” Riker faced the critic. “No flying heads. I would’ve remembered that. So a woman drops dead in the front row. And somebody thoughtfully removes the fake head from her lap before the cops show up?”
“No idea,” said Crippen. “The audience was cleared out almost immediately. I don’t know when the police arrived.”
“Then it wasn’t cops who shut down the play,” said Riker.
And they had been lied to.
“Oh, no. The stage manager cleared out the theater that night. He didn’t tell you? He begged the crowd—well, maybe twenty people on opening night. He begged them not to give up the finale for the first act. No doubt he was thinking of the lawsuit potential for killing a theater lover that way. For my part, I didn’t mention the flying head in my review—so as not to ruin the first act for the next audience. . . . I have rules. Well, last night, when Peter Beck died, I had the same—”
“
Trouble.” Mallory stared at the floor in front of the last empty chair in this row, where trickles of blood flowed in thin streams.
• • •
The drama critic watched the paramedics load their patient onto a gurney, and he sighed, though not in sympathy with the young victim. He turned to the detectives, asking, “When will we ever move on to the second act?”
The teenager on the gurney was ashen, but still alive. The slashed wrists were bound in thick bandages. His companions for the evening, a girl and a boy, attended the same high school in the neighboring state of New Jersey. They were also members of the same suicide club, though tonight they had shown less resolve than their friend, and their own razor blades had been taken away from them.
Attracted by the recent death count for the play, they had hoped that a triple suicide would get their names in the newspapers. “And maybe we’d be on TV,” said the schoolgirl.
Riker never flinched. He had heard every damned thing.
But the theater critic was not so blasé. “A suicide club? You’re a bit young for such a dead-end idea.”
The girl only lifted one slight shoulder in response, and her friend said, “We’re from Jersey,” as if that said it all.
“You two can go.” Mallory waved them toward the aisle, where police officers waited to transport the youngsters to Bellevue’s psych ward, thwarting any other plans they might have for ending this night.
Riker looked out over the audience. It was a real New York crowd—pissed off. They wanted to stay, regarding the latest victim as part of a show that was not over yet. And damn it—the kid wasn’t even dead. Grudgingly, they filed out the doors to the lobby, prompted by police officers.
In the back row, people struggled to pass the inconvenient obstacle of a man who had not yet surrendered his seat. Much annoyed, a woman nudged him, and then, dropping her testy attitude, she bent down to lift the brim of his baseball cap for a close inspection of his pale face.
And a sniff.
She called out to the two detectives standing near the stage. “Hey! You missed one!”
ROLLO: They need me for my disability checks. But also . . . they need an audience.
—The Brass Bed, Act I
The strong cologne slathered on the corpse could not completely mask an odor of putrefied flesh. But going by appearances and not the smell, the man with pale skin and a stubble of beard might be only dozing. Decomposition had not yet grotesquely altered the features, though wrinkles would have smoothed out with the ultimate relaxation of death, and so he might be thirty or ten years older. And he had not died in that red velvet chair, not tonight.
Riker snapped on latex gloves and lifted the ball cap to see a good head of brown hair, no distinguishing bald spots. In life, the victim had been a sloppy eater—or maybe drunk when he had stained his shirt with food. And there was crusty vomit trapped in the laces and tongues of his shoes.
Just the kind of corpse that Riker could relate to.
He caught the eye of the man piloting the medical examiner’s gurney. “Hold off till we get an ID.” The detective jabbed one thumb back over his shoulder to point out the cast and crew lining up in the aisle to view the dead body. “Maybe another fifteen minutes, okay?”
Riker turned to the young man at his side, an on-call pathologist, who hoarded words as if they might be worth money, and whose name he had not bothered to remember. The pencil-line moustache alone had earned the detective’s contempt. “Is there anything you can tell me?”
“Rigor passed off.” The doctor lifted the corpse’s left hand and let it fall. “But this is secondary laxity. The victim didn’t die tonight,” he said, telling the detective nothing that he had not already guessed the moment he saw the body—smelled the body.
“Great,” said Riker, “just great.” He elbowed the boy pathologist out of the way, and then leaned down to peel back the dead man’s coat—a nice coat, lots of money. He freed the arms from the sleeves, and leaned the torso forward. Raising the shirttail high, he could see dark stains on the shoulder blades where contact was made with the ground and gravity had pooled the blood. He knelt down to lift one of the victim’s pant legs and found more stain on the calf muscle. “And now we know the guy was laid out flat after death.” Some winters they would find the bodies of street people dead of exposure, but those corpses were almost always curled on their sides, different blood pools. He rolled the shirtsleeves up past the dead man’s elbows. “Okay, we got old track marks from a needle, but no new punctures. Good to know.” And the detective left the on-call pathologist as he had found him, a man with nothing useful to do.
Riker strolled down the aisle, passing the line of people waiting to view the corpse. Joining his partner near the stage, he said, “I figure the guy’s been dead at least two days.”
Mallory resumed her conversation with the head usher. “And you can’t remember a dead man handing you a ticket at the door?”
Tough one. The usher scratched his head.
“The smelly man,” said Riker.
And now the usher smiled. “Oh, yeah—the guy in the wheelchair. His nurse gave me the tickets. Hers was standing room, his was handicap seating. That means we park ’em in the aisle. He wore a baseball cap, so I never saw his face. I told the nurse to wheel him down front. She said no, he wanted to sit in the back. Well, nobody asks for a bad seat.” The usher looked toward the last row, where the ME’s team obscured the body. “So . . . is he wearing a—”
“Yeah,” said Riker, “that’s our guy. Can you describe his nurse?”
“There were at least a thousand people here tonight.” And now he realized that petulance would not fly with either cop. “She had a black coat. No, maybe brown. Yeah, could’ve been dark brown. . . . I remember the nurse’s cap for sure.”
“Short woman, tall woman? Hair color? Anything?”
“Her mouth was huge, or maybe that was just the lipstick. Who knows? All I remember is this big splash of red on her face. Does that help?”
No. Red was the color of distraction. It was the standout memory of every eyewitness, and all other detail would fade alongside it.
“Go!” Mallory waited in silence until the usher had joined the line halfway up the aisle. “Backstage, they’ve got two wheelchairs, one for the actress, one for the mannikin. I’m guessing a chair was missing for about ten minutes before the play started.” She held up a ticket with a number for their corpse’s theater seat. “This ticket was reserved for Leonard Crippen. The cashier was holding it for him. She didn’t know we moved him to the front row.”
“Well, somebody knew that seat was gonna be empty.” Riker walked toward the line of people that was now moving slowly toward the corpse. He pulled Crippen aside, asking, “Who knew we gave you Peter Beck’s seat?”
The critic smiled and spread his hands. Silly question. “I told everybody!”
Both men turned toward the sound of a woman’s scream.
Nan Cooper, first in line to view the corpse, yelled, “Dickie! Oh, God, no!” The wardrobe lady’s legs failed her, and she would have fallen, but Cyril Buckner caught her in his arms.
The stage manager stared at the dead man. “That’s our director, Dickie Wyatt.”
The line broke formation, and all of them gathered near the corpse. No one spoke. Nan Cooper buried her face in Buckner’s breast. She could not stop crying. Alma Sutter was also tearing up. The rest of them only seemed surprised—except for Axel Clayborne. Riker could not read this man’s face.
• • •
Cops, cast and crew were spaced out in separate rows of red velvet chairs. For this special occasion of a third death in as many nights, each suspect had a man from Special Crimes to take down a statement. Tomorrow these elite homicide cops would be lost to their own cases—unless Mallory could find a way to hold on to them.
Detective Gonzales stood by her side. He had the physique of a bodybuilder, though he was best known as the squad’s Doubting Thomas. There was no one be
tter at poking holes in statements, and he doubted every word out of Alma’s mouth. “Nobody backs up the actress’s story about the blackboard. They all think she’s nuts. But me? I say she’s lying.”
Mallory agreed. She would not buy insanity. One certifiable lunatic like Bugsy was all that the odds would allow. She drifted down a row of tipped-up seats, stopping behind a conversation between Alma Sutter and Detective Janos. The actress was elaborating on her story: The ghostwriter was after her—only her—leaving secret messages and forcing her to do things.
This fairy tale was pushing the patience of Janos, not an easy feat. Despite his thuggish appearance, he was a very gentle man, and so it was almost an outburst of temper when he said, so softly, “I’m not buying it, lady. The ghostwriter? That’s bull. He tells you to cut your hair, and you just do it? Gimme a break.” He openly assessed her wardrobe, her newly shorn locks and the contact lenses of neon green. “It was your idea to impersonate a cop tonight.”
So far, no one from Special Crimes was buying into any part of the ghostwriter story, nor could they believe that any grown-up would. All the detectives smelled collusion. As Mallory walked away, she heard Janos say to Alma, “Incidentally, the real-deal detective wears better threads than yours.”
Stealing up on Axel Clayborne’s blind side, Mallory sat down behind him to listen in on his interview with Rubin Washington, a detective with nearly as much seniority as her partner. Unlike Riker, Washington was no film buff, not the least bit awed by the movie star. And he had already taught this actor that charm only irritated him.
Clayborne was subdued when he said, “In hindsight, I suppose Dickie’s death was predictable. Anyone can tell you he was getting high in rehearsals. Then his contract expired after the third week. That’s when the stage manager took over for him. But the play’s opening was always getting canceled by lawyers. And now we still meet for—”
“Not what I asked,” said Detective Washington. “Where’s Dickie Wyatt been for the past two weeks?” No one else had been able to fill that hole in the dead man’s timeline.
It Happens in the Dark - M11 Page 9
