It Happens in the Dark - M11

by Caroll O'Connell

  Charles lifted his cup for a sip. “Has this man ever been institutionalized?” He was talking to the air. In the time it had taken him to turn the notebook page, the spread sheet of newsprint softly wafted to the table.

  Her chair was empty.

  He felt a cold touch at the back of his neck as she whispered, “You’re dead.”

  His coffee cup crashed to the floor.

  Surprise.

  And endgame.

  A month might pass before they played again. He would never know the moment of her next attempt to kill him. And Louis’s old poker crony, Rabbi Kaplan, still persisted in the belief that a penny-ante card game might be fun for her.

  Charles did not hear the door close, yet he knew that he was alone. Though he might not see her coming, he could always tell when he had been left behind. So simple really. He kept getting hit by the same damn train.

  • • •

  The detectives stood side by side, pinning new sheets to the cork in the incident room, while Riker filled his partner in on the best parts of Boys’ Night Out. “Totally hammered, Clayborne never changed his story. And Charles couldn’t catch him in a lie. The guy’s got no idea where Wyatt did his time in rehab. Maybe there wasn’t any rehab.”

  “There was,” said Mallory. “Sanger doesn’t blow smoke.”

  True enough. That was one reason why Lou Markowitz had recruited the man from Narcotics. Sanger’s expertise always panned out.

  The messy data of other cases was splashed across the other walls, but Riker noticed that every time a detective wandered through the door, that man’s eyes would go first to this patch of cork. Mallory had made it the most inviting, tacking up plastic bags with night-vision goggles that she had purchased just for them.

  She had finally learned to share her toys.

  And all the detectives played with the goggles, periodically turning out the lights, and then—lights on again—staying awhile to check out the rest of the wall, lingering by the photos of the blackboard’s changing messages. Here and there, these men had pinned up notes of phone calls made and free-time speculation.

  This morning, the unwieldy stack of telephone company records had been neatly sorted into piles on the table and summarized. This was Janos’s contribution, and now he drew a small crowd of three detectives who had strayed from their own wall space.

  The big man stood before the cork wall, arranging notes in a wide circle, and saying to his audience, “It’d take days to backtrack every damn number, but here’s the gist.” Janos tacked up the last sheet at the hub of his paper circle. “Cyril Buckner’s cell phone is the only one that connects to the whole theater company. He calls them. They check in with him. Nothin’ odd about that. He runs the show.” The clockwise wave of his arm encompassed the outlying sheets. “The rest of ’em pair off—at least on the phone records.”

  Only Mallory showed no interest in Janos’s notes. She sat down at the evidence table, pushing her laptop to one side to scan pages of telephone calls in the way another cop might read a newspaper. She had an affinity for figures, finding patterns where other people only saw columns of random numbers. Her foster parents had mortgaged their house for private-school tuition to nurture that talent and watch it blossom into a child’s play of breaking into other people’s data banks. Now their baby was all grown up and still robbing banks. Her laptop was opened, and she summoned up more numbers—and a telephone company logo.

  Riker drew closer. What the hell was she doing?

  Every single phone company would have cheerfully given her all the records she could carry—but protocols were time-consuming. Hacking was easier. Faster.

  In a room full of witnesses?

  Did she take all these cops for fools?

  Riker saw the gamboling puppy icon for a computer virus she called Good Dog. He reached out to close the lid of her laptop—and not gently. They began a small war of the eyes, and he won—or so he thought. At the other end of the table, columns of numbers and text scrolled out of a printer’s mouth. Good Dog had brought home a slew of bones.

  Ten paces down the wall, Detective Janos was working his pattern for an audience that had grown to five detectives. He stepped back from his spread of players laid out two by two, and he pointed to a set of pages at the top of his circle. “The stagehands have real light phone histories. They were both makin’ calls from the station house, but that day shows zero connections on their records. They gotta have other phones.”

  “Prepaid burners,” said Sanger. And of course the man from Narcotics would find that interesting. What honest citizen paid for a legitimate cell phone and then shelled out more money for a prepaid cell before using up the free minutes?

  Riker glanced at his partner. She was blending her new sheets with the sorted stacks of phone records and making new configurations on the table.

  Janos’s pointing finger moved on to his next set of notes. “Alma Sutter and Peter Beck called each other two and three times a day. Lovers, right? But on the opening night of the play, her only call is less than a minute. That says hang up to me, and the honeymoon’s over for those two. In the last few week of Beck’s life, he makes lots of calls to the theater people, but nothing stands out except—well, they never call him.” He reached out to a pair on one side. “The Rinaldi twins only call the stage manager and their agent in LA. That’s it. They got no friends. But they’re creepy little guys, so that makes sense.”

  In sidelong vision, Riker saw his partner pinning sheets of paper to another patch of wall space. The heads of other detectives were turning her way.

  But Janos had their attention again as he pointed to another pair of notes in his circle. “Axel Clayborne and the dead director, Dickie Wyatt. These guys called each other every night till Wyatt’s phone went quiet.” His finger moved to the bottom of the circle, where Dickie Wyatt appeared again in a pairing with Nan Cooper. “The wardrobe lady used to call him a lot. So these two make another pair. If there’s collusion, I say it doesn’t go beyond two people.” Janos stepped back from the wall. “That’s it. Nothin’ else stands out.”

  All eyes turned to Mallory. She had created a large square of sheets, each one running seamlessly into the other. And now, with great concentration, she drew lines in black and some in red ink.

  Janos and the other detectives drifted down the wall to watch Mallory do her spooky act, marking up her square with perfectly straight lines that normal humans could only make with a ruler. A new category had been added to the stagehands’ phone records, and the hand-printed sheet was marked in giant letters: THROWAWAY CELLS. Everyone moved closer to admire this page. It was impressive. The great appeal of prepaid phones was that they could not be traced back to purchasers.

  With this single piece of paper, she had won the heart of Detective Sanger. “Mallory, how’d you do that?”

  “Last night, I made notes on every call the stagehands got.” She reached up to tap a sheet for Alma Sutter. “For the past month, a lot of her calls went to prepaid cell phones.” One long fingernail touched a single number underlined in red. “The time on this one matches my notes on Joe Garnet’s cell. I watched them score the drugs and make a delivery to Alma’s place. Her phone records logged a month of burners, probably every phone the stagehands used.” She circled numbers on the wardrobe lady’s sheet. “Nan Cooper made a few calls to burners with matches on Alma’s records.” She drew a straight line to the pages for Garnet and Randal. “Now we know where Cooper got that reefer, the one she gave the security guard.”

  Detective Sanger finished reading her pinned-up notes on last night’s surveillance of the stagehands. “Dial-a-dealers. Good call.” He turned to Mallory. “They got no rap sheets, right?”

  “Both clean.”

  “Figures,” said Sanger. “Small buys, penny-ante profits on the markup.” He removed the list of throwaway cell numbers from the wall and also pulled down the stagehands’ photographs. “I’ll reach out to my old squad—see what they’ve got on
that park. They might have a few buys on film. They lean on a dealer—and maybe you can nail your boys for trafficking.” He left the room as the other four men drifted away to their own cases and places on other walls.

  The show was over.

  And now Riker understood his partner’s reckless need for hacking. She had to lay her trap for that detective before the man lost interest and walked away. And it had to be Sanger’s idea to help. Mallory was no good at begging favors.

  Janos stared at a center page in Mallory’s spread. He pointed to Peter Beck’s call sheet. “What’s this about?”

  Mallory had underscored the flurry of seemingly random calls that the playwright had made during the last week of his life. “It looks like he’s losing it here. Angry man. Lots of money. He did most of his venting in a lawyer’s office. The firm—”

  “Loyd, Hatchman and Croft,” said Janos. “I’m already on it.” He checked his watch. “I plan to interrupt their lunch hour.” He did the best lawyer interviews. He had no peer on the squad.

  • • •

  Alma Sutter passed by the blackboard. No messages for her today, thank God. When the actress had climbed the stairs and unlocked the door to her dressing room, she found two lines of cocaine laid out on her makeup table.

  A gift? Maybe a threat?

  If the police should search this room—

  There were no safe places for her anymore.

  Got to get rid of this coke.

  And she did. She rolled a dollar bill into a straw to inhale the lines of white powder and hide them in her nose. Just a few lines of cocaine would make her shine in rehearsal today. That was the law in New York City: Shine, baby, shine, or get back on the bus and go home.

  • • •

  The silence dragged out, but the policeman failed to catch every polite signal to end the interview at Loyd, Hatchman and Croft, PLC, a tony Park Avenue law firm.

  Securing a copy of Peter Beck’s will had been no problem. Detective Janos was waiting for better information, and he waited peacefully. No loud demands, no threats. He was a gentle soul by nature, and he would never grab that mealymouthed little prick behind the desk and break his fingers—one by one—both hands.

  No. Unthinkable.

  Instead, he settled into a chair just large enough to contain his gorilla frame, and he sat there, deadpan—with a badge—with a gun. Now and then, he shifted his weight, and the chair’s joints made tiny wooden screams of distress. Smaller men—and they were always smaller—often felt the need to rush in and fill these awkward gaps with useful information.

  But not this man.

  The attorney in the beautiful suit only faked a smile. Tight-lipped. Pissed off. He looked down at his gold wristwatch that told the time around the planet. And all the while, money was ticking by with missed phone calls and letters and meetings to bill at exorbitant rates per minute—judging by the lush digs of deep carpet and wood paneling. And so it was money that finally made the lawyer crack when he said, “What you’re asking for is gossip. I don’t do that.” He rose from his chair, a stronger suggestion of That’s it. We’re done. Get out!

  “I can see this might take a while.” Janos held up a brown paper bag. “Since we’re just sittin’ here.” He slowly opened the bag to pull out a soda, and he set it on the lawyer’s desk. While the other man hastily placed a coaster under the sweating aluminum can, Janos pulled out a sandwich tightly wrapped in tinfoil, and set it down beside his cola, saying, “I guess I don’t get a lunch break today. But a man’s gotta eat, right?”

  This opening gambit only startled the lawyer. The best was yet to come.

  “We know about the ghostwriter.” Janos tucked a deli napkin under his chin. “And we figure Peter Beck wanted out, but his name’s still on the contract for the play.” He popped the tab on the soda can, inserted the straw, slurped loudly—and spilled a little. Now, best for last, he unwrapped the sandwich so its foul perfume could be fully appreciated. For this interview, the detective had selected the smelliest combination of meats and gross cheeses to be found in all of New York City.

  Talking to lawyers was truly an art form.

  Janos lifted the sandwich, threatening to eat it, and then he paused. “God, I love this stuff.” He smiled. “Even if it does make me gassy.”

  Understood.

  The lawyer could hardly wait to say, “Most clients come in with practical requests. But sometimes they want blood. Peter fell into the latter category.”

  The detective lowered his sandwich. “Who did Beck wanna bleed?”

  “Eventually, the entire theater company. He said they were all plotting against him. But the first time he came in, he wanted me to find something in his contract that would let him fire a member of the crew, an insignificant little man named Bugsy.”

  Another connection for the cork wall.

  “Did he say why?” To prompt the lawyer, Janos raised his smelly sandwich to his gaping mouth.

  “Apparently, having this man on the crew was a guarantee that Leonard Crippen would review the play. Peter hated Crippen, loathed him with a passion.”

  First the reward—Janos sealed the sandwich in its tinfoil wrapping, and then he asked, “Why?”

  “Crippen and Peter had . . . artistic differences,” said the lawyer.

  “You mean the critic hated his plays.”

  “Crippen only panned the early work. He never bothered to show up for the later plays, and I’m sure he would’ve avoided this one—”

  “If not for Bugsy.”

  “But then the ghostwriter distracted Peter. So Bugsy got to keep his job.”

  “Peter Beck walked out on the play,” said Janos. “So why didn’t he kill his contract with the theater company?”

  “I don’t know. We messengered the legal work to his apartment, but Peter never returned the signed papers. And I thought that was odd. Without his name on the contract, the financial backers would’ve pulled out immediately. No funds—no play. Peter also wanted to change his will, but he never got around to that, either.”

  “So . . . when Beck died, he owned the rights to the ghostwriter’s play?”

  “As I understand it, none of the lines from Peter’s play survive in the new version. So it all hangs on copyright. If the other playwright has one, he owns the rights to his own work. Here’s the snag. You can’t find a copyright without the name of the author—or at least the title. If the copyright was deliberately hidden, and I assume it was, it might be listed as an untitled work. A date is also helpful. I explained all of this to Peter when he asked me to run a trace.”

  So Peter Beck had not bought into the ghostwriter nonsense—the idea that his play was being altered line by line.

  Janos handed the man a card. “Don’t tell anybody what’s in the will. Let me know who shows an interest in rights to the play.”

  “Alma Sutter called the day after Peter died. I haven’t gotten back to her yet.”

  “Don’t.”

  • • •

  Alma got down on hands and knees to look for stray grains of cocaine. All she found was a dust-covered pill that might be speed, and she popped it into her mouth.

  The others would be assembled downstairs in another twenty minutes. She composed herself and tweezed her brows in a magnifying mirror.

  Oh, shit. There were white grains around her nostrils.

  What if she had walked out onstage that way?

  A distant screech of nails on a blackboard made her drop the hand mirror. It hit the floor and cracked. She bent down to pick up the shards with the mad idea that, if she could only glue them back together, the gods would never know this had happened.

  Oh, now her fingers were bleeding.

  And all around her were tiny reflections, bits of her face in broken glass—Alma in a hundred pieces.

  • • •

  Lieutenant Coffey stood in the doorway of the incident room. The facing wall had accumulated reams of data on the theater homicides, more material than
his detectives could wade through in a month. And there was Charles Butler, the man with perfect recall, reading all of it at the speed of light. Tactfully, Coffey walked away without making his presence known. Every freak trait embarrassed Charles; the man was even apologetic about his height. Best to give him privacy until he was done. And then Mallory and Riker would have the perfect case file, one that could walk and talk.

  Shorthanded, my ass!

  The hallway opened onto the squad room. Jack Coffey turned toward Mallory’s desk and aimed his body at her like a cannonball. Oh, too bad. She saw him coming. Could she tell he was angry? He hoped so. But just to be sure, halfway across the room, he yelled, “Your calls are stacking up—on my phone!”

  To make the point that she had been shortchanged on help, the detective had selectively transferred her incoming calls to him. And because she always played games within games, she only rerouted the ones that were guaranteed to suck him into her case—or go nuts. And she was probably wondering if he had finally broken down and placed a call to the chief medical examiner on the matter of Dickie Wyatt’s death.

  Ain’t gonna happen. Ain’t gonna play.

  “You’re the only cop in New York City who’s got a lieutenant for a secretary.” He stepped up to her desk and laid down a message from the CSI supervisor, Clara Loman. “Heller took her off this case. So why is she updating you on Broadway chili joints?”

  “Well, she’s got free time. And you won’t give us enough warm bodies to work our homicides.”

  “I count one maybe homicide.”

  “So you never called Dr. Slope,” she said. “Did Loman find a match for Dickie Wyatt’s stomach contents?”

  What? Why chase down a dead junkie’s last meal? “Loman didn’t say, and I didn’t ask.” Coffey slammed two more messages on her desk, both from a sheriff in the Midwest. “Are you ever gonna call this guy?”

  “Did he tell you anything helpful?”

  “No, Mallory. The bastard only wants to talk to you.”

  “He’ll call back.”

  And of course his gun was locked in a desk drawer, a squad-room policy created for moments like this. So tempting. Coffey pointed to the ringing phone on her desk. “I don’t like to bother you . . . you being shorthanded and all, but . . . could you take that damn call yourself!”