Previously, they had been interviewed separately. Today he planned a different strategy. The twins entered the room together and sat down on the other side of the table. Both young men were deep into their weirdo routine: slouched like rag dolls, eyes wandering, mouths open, as if to catch the odd fly passing by.
Janos read a few lines of their identical résumés. “You’re a long way from Hollywood.” That was where they had started out as child actors in films he had never heard of, though there was one respectable movie that anyone might recall. Then, well into their teens, they had worked in a few horror flicks. Well, that fit. “There’s gaps here, years between acting jobs. What were you guys up to all that time?”
The twins shrugged in unison, still acting the roles of mute dullards.
“I have great respect for artists.” It occurred to Janos that he could grab their scrawny necks and cut off their oxygen for a while—but that was not his way. “A police station can be a jarring environment for sensitive, creative types.” Big smile. “Relax, boys. Take all the time you need . . . I got all day.” He rose from his chair and walked up to the wide one-way glass, a mirror on this side, and he straightened his tie. “All damn day.” He was watching their reflections when the metamorphosis began.
Without a word or a glance between them, they sat up straight in perfect unison and folded their arms. When Janos turned around, he was looking at two young men who were neither witless nor unfocussed. And they still creeped him out.
“We lived on residuals between acting gigs,” said one Rinaldi, who might be either Hollis or Ferris. “Every rerun on TV, we get a check.”
“It was harder to find roles when we got past the cute stage,” said the other twin.
Ah, lie number one. They had never been cute. Even now when they had shed their stage characters, they set off alarms in the crawl of his skin. Janos sat down at the table and glanced at their résumés. “So you did a real blockbuster when you were just kids. An Axel Clayborne movie. Is that how you got hired for the play? He liked you?” No way. Scratch that. “He remembered you from that old flick?”
“No, we auditioned for the director.”
“Wyatt hired us.”
Their speech was flatline. A voice-stress analysis would be no help with the likes of them. Janos knew he could stab them with his pencil right now—if he were the sort to do that—and they would never show pain, so much pain—though they would bleed.
The detective looked down at his notebook and scribbled one more connection of crisscrossing paths with another player. He was beginning to see patterns of multiple alliances—and not the broad collusion that Riker and Mallory were looking for. The Rinaldi twins reminded him of the stagehands, whose bonding extended to no one else. The wardrobe lady had been in league with the late Dickie Wyatt. And then there was last night’s interview with Alma Sutter, a woman who had impressed him as a nation unto herself, and so he doubted the quality of her relationship with the dead playwright—but they had been paired up.
He turned from one twin to the other. Were they playing him? Oh, yeah. Their eyes were locked on him. Eyes of glass—no clue. What now? They leaned forward, tensing, set to spring across the table. Their expressions were eerie, more like an idea of smiles, and he wondered if they knew how Halloween this was to him.
“Did you kill Peter Beck and Dickie Wyatt?”
They slowly moved their heads side to side, smiling all the while.
• • •
“Just for the record,” said Jack Coffey, “that second guy, Dickie Wyatt? He wasn’t murdered. He OD’d on heroin.” But apparently Mallory had another believer in Janos. The lieutenant turned to the psychologist, who sat beside him in the dark. “So what do you make of those scary little bastards?”
“They’re impossible to read for deception,” said Charles Butler. “No inadvertent mannerisms to indicate anything reactive. . . . Very cold, those two. . . . Do you know if they lived in an abusive home? Maybe a stint in foster care? It would help if you could find someone who knew them as children.”
“We could look into that.” Actually—they could not. There was still information in the world that Mallory could not steal by robbing data banks. Even with Janos on board, the workload left no time for a background check that required knocking on doors and prolonged games of telephone tag. “You think the Rinaldi brothers could do a murder?” And now Jack Coffey waited on the man’s standard disclaimer, a disdain for the snap diagnosis.
“They could,” said Charles, with no hesitation. “And afterward . . . no feeling of remorse. You can read a lot into the detective’s reactions, his comfort level. At the top of the interview, Janos knew they were playacting, but he also knew there was something wrong with them at core. Maybe just a twinge in his gut. Sometimes that’s the only warning you ever get. . . . But look at them now. These two like to advertise the naked truth of what they are. That’s their idea of sport.”
• • •
In search of a misplaced visitor from the Midtown North Precinct, Riker returned to the incident room to see that Charles Butler had found the missing man. Now the psychologist, a devout pacifist, lifted Harry Deberman off the ground by six inches, gripping the smaller man’s coat lapels in his fists.
And four detectives stood idly by, watching a civilian manhandle a cop. That was interesting.
Riker moseyed across the room, very laid back, his best form for breaking up fights in the making. “Hey, Charles. How’s it goin’?” The psychologist was startled, as if waking from a trance, and surprised to see a man in his hands, hanging there, feet pedaling the air. Wits now collected, Charles’s face colored with an embarrassed flush, probably wondering what to do next—while the cop from Midtown North continued to dangle. And Riker said to the dangling detective, “You got no business back here.”
“Christ! You gonna do somethin’ about this guy?”
“Maybe. . . . What’s the beef, Harry?”
“I just asked if anybody was bangin’ the ice queen.”
And now it all made sense. The other men in this room might not find Mallory all that friendly or likeable, but she was their damn ice queen.
Riker smiled at Charles. “You mind? She’s my partner. I got dibs.”
The man in hand was slowly lowered to the floor, and Riker leaned in to ask, “Harry, you like your nose the way it is? So pretty and straight?”
Deberman did his best trick. He ran for the door.
But that exit was blocked by the entrance of Jack Coffey, who now grabbed both sides of the doorframe—no way out—and he said, “Okay, Deberman, let me guess. Your captain’s an Axel Clayborne fan, right? We’ll get him an autograph. Don’t let me catch you sneaking back here one more time.”
“I’m on loan. I got the transfer sheet.” Deberman fished through his pockets, muttering, “Where the hell is it? The captain said you’d need a man with experience in the Theater District.”
“Go back and tell him I said thanks.”
Riker could finish that thought for the lieutenant: Thanks for sending a worthless sack of garbage, hardly a man, and not a very good spy.
“But I don’t need you,” said Coffey, a man with standards. He was short on manpower and at the point of dragging toddlers off the street to fill out the ranks, but not yet desperate enough to make use of a notorious screwup cop like Harry Deberman.
The drama was done. Deberman was escorted out by four detectives and their boss, leaving Riker alone with a contrite Charles Butler, a rational citizen, who had run amuck today in protective overdrive. The detective had long ago tired of explaining to this man that Mallory was the one with the gun.
And she needed no help from civilians to defend her honor. The entire squad had speculated on her sex life and arrived at a general consensus: If Mallory did have sex, she would never leave any survivors to verify it. And so this was a dead issue among the detectives of Special Crimes.
Riker sent the psychologist home with a strong suggestion. “Stay home till we
call you.” Charles’s display of gallantry would certainly get back to Mallory—maybe six seconds from now. She would not like being the object of a squad-room joke, and it was doubtful that she would find use for a consulting shrink anytime soon. She could hold on to a grudge for years.
SUSAN: Why don’t they say something? (One twin takes a practice swing with the baseball bat. Susan screams.)
ROLLO: I told you they didn’t need words.
—The Brass Bed, Act II
Riker and Mallory had parted company in SoHo, and now they were meeting up again on Avenue A in the East Village, each of them following their own stagehand. The pimpled boy, Garnet, and Randal, the lollypop kid, were dressed in clean parkas and jeans. When the wind was blowing his way, Riker noticed that they smelled better, a likely sign that the duo was looking for female companionship. At their age, every night was date night in New York City.
But no, they took their shadow cops for a stroll through Tompkins Square Park.
Behind the cover of the band shell, the detectives watched them scoring dope out in the open, sitting on a bench with another amateur at the drug trade, a youngster who toted a book bag that gave him up as a student from NYU.
“Janos was right about those two,” said Riker. The stagehands were stupid kids. “They’re making this way too easy.” He used his cell phone to photograph the stagehands’ drug buy. The student had even accommodated these shots in the dark by waiting for his customers under a lamppost, and this did not speak well for higher education. Was that kid stoned? Yes, he was. In the old days, a drug dealer never sampled his product. Oh, where were the pros of yesteryear?
The buy was done. The stagehands and their shadow cops were off again. The next stop was a saloon with an older clientele, a place that would not cater to teenagers with fake IDs to jack up their ages. The bartender’s suspicious eyes were on Garnet and Randal, but they never bothered to take off their parkas. The detectives watched them through the window, and the stagehands watched the door. Now one boy nudged the other when a customer Riker’s age entered the bar, a rich man judging by the cut of his coat and the pretty woman at his side. The teenagers walked up to him with no hustle, no sales pitch or haggle on price. By handshakes all around, Garnet’s hand palming cash, and Randal’s shake slipping contraband to the buyer, the deal was concluded, and the boys were out the door and down the street, followed by Mallory and Riker. Neither one of the stagehands ever looked back. They did not possess one iota of the paranoia issued to every New Yorker at birth.
Onto the next block, they were into the next bar, where customers were a blend of ages, twenties to forties, and the teenagers were not even carded. Garnet slapped hands in a high five with the bouncer at the door, and Riker knew more money had traveled from pocket to pocket. Everything could be bought in this town. Given enough cash, ten-year-olds could get stinking drunk in this dive. The detectives watched the stagehands spend their proceeds, trying their luck with the ladies, but they always approached the prettiest girls. Pimples and Lollypop had no shot with Pretty.
Past ten and into the nightclub hours, Riker bowed out of the shadow detail as the teens descended steps to a basement club on Houston. The place was jumping with live music that shut off like a radio when the door closed behind Garnet and Randal.
Riker had aged out of his garage-band days when he had played a wicked electric guitar, though damned if he could say how he had gotten from then to now. A middle-aged man could not follow the boys down into that young scene below the sidewalk.
But Mallory could.
Age bowed to Beauty. He left her standing there and headed south for the station house and a long night of cold calls to drug-rehab centers, hunting the one that might have sheltered Dickie Wyatt. Riker favored night-shift workers for these interviews. Bored witless, they were the ones most likely to welcome conversation in the small hours.
As he strolled past the desk sergeant, the man pointed to the visitors’ bench on the other side of the room, and Riker turned to see Axel Clayborne rising from his seat.
“I never told him you’d be back tonight,” said the sergeant, an unabashed Clayborne fan, who had certainly done just that. “He’s been parked here for an hour.”
Riker watched the smiling movie star cross the floor, one hand extended for a shake. The detective kept both hands in his coat pockets, saying, “It’s late. Try me tomorrow.”
Clayborne’s smile never faltered with this slight. “Thought you might have time for a drink. I’m buying.”
“Oh, yeah?” Any suspect walking into a copshop of his own volition had Riker’s attention, especially at this time of night. Some perps, the bold ones, the sickest kind, loved to insinuate themselves into an investigation.
“I’ll be right with you.” The detective opened his notebook and scribbled instructions for the desk sergeant to fetch him some backup, while telling the civilian, “I know just the place.”
Clayborne followed him back outside, into the wind and through the slush as they crossed two streets and turned a corner, heading toward the neon light of a cop bar.
When they walked in the door, Riker saw two men from Special Crimes ending a long day into night at one of the tables, and he spotted another man from his squad at the bar, but they were here by luck. Detectives Sanger and Washington had come in behind him by design, donating free time to the cause. With only brief eye contact and a nod toward the movie star, Riker snagged the other three men into the action as he led the way to an empty table and took the chair that put his back to the wall. The actor sat down with no view of the room, unaware of men drifting toward him from all quarters.
“Save me some time,” said Riker. “Give me the name of Dickie Wyatt’s rehab clinic.”
“So that’s where he was.” Clayborne shrugged off his coat.
“Like you didn’t know.”
“Dickie never told me where he was going.”
“He was an old friend,” said Rubin Washington, who stood behind the actor’s chair. “But not a good friend. You didn’t miss him much when he died.”
Riker caught a wince of pain on the actor’s face that put a lie to that.
Washington sat down and humped his chair closer to the actor, bumping up against him now to make the angry point that he was not a man to be screwed with. “Where’s that rehab clinic?”
Gonzales wore a mean scowl as he pulled out a chair and sat down on the other side of Clayborne, completing the squeeze.
“You’ll have to excuse them,” said Riker. “They didn’t like the play. Dressing that actress up like a cop? That didn’t win you any love. Now gimme a name.”
“I didn’t know Dickie was in rehab,” said Clayborne. “When his contract was up, he left the play. The next day, his phone was disconnected, and he was just . . . gone.”
“Then you must be one of his dope buddies.” Detective Sanger settled into a chair beside Riker’s. “You’d be like poison to an addict in recovery.”
“We used to get high, okay? Dickie was the addict. I only kept him company.”
“Shooting heroin with your best bud,” said Sanger. “What a pal. So who supplied the dope that killed him?”
“Not me.” Clayborne was close to indignant. “And I only did recreational drugs. A few lines of coke, some reefer now and then. Dickie used to shoot up, but he got clean years ago. He was—”
“You’re lying,” said Washington, leaning close to the man’s ear, but not to whisper. He shouted, “Wyatt was getting high during rehearsals! You told me that!” The detective radiated intimidation.
The waitress held her tray to her breast like a shield, and she backed away from their table.
“That was a relapse,” said Clayborne, “a bit of backsliding on Dickie’s part. So rehab makes perfect sense. He was vigilant about staying clean. And valiant. Every day was a fight to beat his habit. Heroic, I’d say.”
Two more detectives joined the party to flank Riker’s chair when he said, “You know who yo
u sound like? . . . The ghostwriter.”
“Yeah,” said Gonzales, removing his topcoat. “Flowery, kind of fruity for my taste.” And now he also shed his suit jacket for a public display of muscle—and a gun in his shoulder holster. “So it was your idea to knock off Mallory’s head in that play.”
In a breach of cop etiquette for public places, more guns were exposed all around the table as detectives continued this striptease—off with the coats, rolling up shirtsleeves, a signal that things were about to get physical. And this was a lie. The saloon had one rule—no bloodletting. But Clayborne believed his eyes, and he turned them to Riker, the only man still fully dressed and close to civil.
The game was Good Cop—Gang of Bad Cops.
Lonahan walked up behind the actor’s chair and placed his beefy hands on the man’s shoulders. He spoke in his normal tone of voice, loud enough to be heard in the outer boroughs. “So you got a little fantasy goin’ here—killin’ women. Ain’t that what your play’s about? And now Mallory’s the—”
“It’s not my play! And I don’t wish any harm to Detective Mallory. I like her.”
And every cop at the table took that for a lie.
Except for Riker. He believed the actor, but only because of the man’s short acquaintance with Mallory. Anybody under eighty would be attracted to her—then disturbed by her—and last would come the back-away dance that begged distance from her. Clayborne might have a high tolerance for strange, but it was a rare man who could truly care for that little sociopath—a man like Charles Butler—who had just walked in the door.
The tall psychologist spotted Riker from across the room. Then he smiled and raised both hands in a show of surrender as he approached the table. The comical face that could not hide a thought announced that he was here to make peace.
The detective turned to the actor. “I want you to meet a friend of mine.”
• • •
Mallory’s first dancing partner had been Louis Markowitz. He had taught her the fox trot, the waltz and the tango, but he had truly been a fool for rock ’n’ roll. So said his wife, Helen, the dancing queen, on nights when the two of them rolled back the living room rug to twirl and shake it up and down the floorboards, stepping to the beat of vintage tunes from the sixties and seventies.
It Happens in the Dark - M11 Page 13
