It Happens in the Dark - M11

by Caroll O'Connell

  SUSAN: There was no warning? When the boys were younger—

  ROLLO: Everyone knew what they were. A neighbor woman once came to the house. Timid soul, afraid to come inside. Said she didn’t want any trouble. She only wanted to know if her cat had died quickly . . . or did it suffer. My mother screamed and slammed the door.

  —The Brass Bed, Act II

  Shoes?

  Did the sheriff have two shoes or two pairs?

  Mallory’s thoughts were interrupted when Leonard Crippen opened his door, startled to see her standing there.

  She favored surprise attack.

  Not quite the impresario today, the drama critic had been caught in baggy old knock-around pants and a cardigan. Even the yappy little dog at his feet wore a casual sweater. “Hush, Kiki,” he said, but the tiny poodle yapped on till it mustered a bark, so brave while hiding behind its master’s legs.

  The detective held up her copy of the play. “Peter Beck didn’t write this. . . . Can you at least pretend to be surprised?”

  No, he only eyed the manuscript with a greedy look.

  “When I talk to Bugsy, is he—”

  “Oh, no,” said Crippen. “Please leave Bugsy alone. He’s a complete innocent.” The old man stood back, inviting her in with the grandiose wave of one hand. And the dog took cover behind a chair.

  A log burned in the fireplace, and every other creature comfort that could be smashed into one room was here. A woolen lap rug lay on a well-padded recliner, and by the window, a bistro table had chairs for two. Books lined his walls, the music on the old-fashioned record player was soothing, and every surface held a bowl of hard candy. An open door to the kitchen gave her a view of shelves lined with glass jars of tea bags and cinnamon sticks, and upon the counter was a spread of toast and jam.

  Her suspect was a hobbit.

  Crippen held out one hand to receive her shrugged-off jacket, and he hung it in a closet, smashing her new shearling into a jumble of old winter wear with visible lint and an odor of mothballs—but she did nothing to harm him.

  “No one had to tell me that play wasn’t Peter’s work.” He turned to the small table by the window and pulled out a chair for her. When they were both seated, he said, “That fool never had an original idea in his life. And no sense of humor, either.” Crippen reached out to lightly touch the manuscript, asking, “May I?”

  Mallory shifted it from hand to hand, as if she might be considering his request. “Bugsy didn’t give you a copy?”

  “No, he’d never do that. He only acted out a few scenes for me. Never even hinted at what came next. That’s why—”

  “Peter Beck always got good reviews from other critics. Why not you?”

  “Higher standards, my dear. It’s not enough to string lovely words together. There should be . . . more.”

  “You knew about the ghostwriter.”

  He sighed. Caught. “Yes, but I heard that from Donna Loo, the very chatty cashier. You’ll forgive me for not mentioning it. When she told me, it was strictly entre nous.” He rose from his chair, turning his back on the detective. “I’m going to put a kettle on and make us some cocoa. Just the thing for a winter day.”

  While Mallory waited for Leonard Crippen to emerge from his kitchen, she leafed through the play with Loman’s yellow highlights on every other page. She was looking for the sheriff’s shoes, but there were none—only mentions of footprints. She reread the lines on bloody tracks from room to room.

  How did the sheriff get the killer’s shoes without making an arrest?

  Shoes. Her foster mother, Helen, had left a lot of shoes behind when she died, and her husband had not been able to part with a single pair. Mallory remembered the day when the rabbi’s wife had come to help Lou Markowitz with this chore of finding new homes for Helen’s old things. And when Rachael Kaplan, with the kindest intention, had tried to make off with the shoes, the old man had wept—and kept them. After his own death, Mallory had preserved all of Lou and Helen’s clothing in their closets and drawers—and locked the house against the kindness of others.

  In the next room, a teakettle screamed.

  She scrolled down the contact list on her cell phone, clicking on Sheriff Harper’s number. And when he answered, she said, “Not a typical rage killing. It was premeditated. A lot of thought went into your massacre, including the footprints . . . from borrowed shoes. One of the murdered women was a widow. You’ve got the bloody shoes of her dead husband, right?”

  All she heard in response was “Crap!” And a click.

  • • •

  Was Detective Mallory that smart?

  The sheriff sat with other displaced passengers in an airport far from home. He stared at the glass wall overlooking the tarmac, and he took this view on faith because all he could see was a massive curtain of dense falling snow. Due to zero visibility, no planes were taking off today.

  Why had he run his mouth that way?

  For ten years, he had said not one word to any cop outside his own tight circle of jurisdiction. And one word—shoes—that was all she required to extrapolate a whole lot more. His fear was that she had no need of that tip. Over the past decade, other lawmen had tried to draw him out, speculating on some insane drifter, a rage killing, or maybe a crime of opportunity—but Mallory knew things.

  Maybe the girl didn’t need him anymore. Could she be close to an arrest?

  He rose from his seat, gathering up his coat and bag to wait in the line for car rentals. It was a short wait. Everyone ahead of him was turned away. Each prospective customer was told the same thing: Many planes had been brought to ground before theirs had limped into the airport on one working engine. Oh, and congratulations for cheating death so narrowly, but there were no more cars to be had.

  Could he afford to wait? No. This was a race. He could almost hear Mallory’s footsteps coming up behind him.

  The sheriff showed his badge to the young man behind the rent-a-car counter, saying, “Son, I don’t care what you told those other folks.” Any kid who smiled like that, showing every tooth in his head, just had to be lying. “Get me a damn car with four-wheel drive.”

  • • •

  While Leonard Crippen set out mugs of hot cocoa, Mallory was following a line of thought from an offhand remark by Charles Butler: Scratch a critic, you find a failed author. And now she pursued this idea, approaching it sideways, asking, “Do actors ever write plays?”

  “Oh, yes. Cross disciplines are very common in the theater.”

  “Bugsy was nicely educated. Yale Drama School. Do you think he could—”

  “No, he couldn’t.” The critic smiled and waved both hands to say this was ridiculous. “When he was Alan Rains, maybe. As Bugsy? No, it’s not in his character.” He laid one hand upon the manuscript at the center of the table. “Now may I—”

  Mallory picked it up and held it out of reach. “He’s still Alan Rains.”

  “Wishful thinking, my dear.” The old man heaved another sigh.

  The detective wished he would stop doing that, though she had now developed a lexicon of his sighs, and some of them lied—like this one, the expression of deep regret.

  “There’s no one home but Bugsy anymore,” he said.

  “Then who’s been acting out those scenes in the subway—entertaining you for years? A gopher?”

  He flashed her a quick smile of touché. “Talent will out, I suppose. The ghost of a talent in Bugsy’s case. But it’s not his nature to murder anyone.”

  “He’d need a strong motive,” said Mallory. “Bugsy doesn’t give a damn about money. It would have to be something like hate . . . or jealousy. You can get into that, can’t you? Maybe that’s why you panned all of Peter Beck’s plays.”

  “No, my dear, only his early work. I never saw the rest of them. Why waste an evening sitting through a tired, hackneyed—”

  “I suppose you could’ve written a better play?”

  Crippen’s understanding came in a slowly widening grin a
s he pressed one hand to his breast. “I’m a suspect?” He laughed. “Oh, that’s marvelous. Bless you, child. To answer your question, no, I couldn’t. Peter had a slender talent at best, but I have none at all, not in that vein. I’m only a humble critic.”

  • • •

  “Leonard Crippen is a vile man,” said Mrs. Rains, a resident of Connecticut.

  The woman was in her mid-forties, though she appeared to be ten years older. Charles Butler had seen this kind of damage before, the common fallout of losing a child. And her son Alan Rains, alias Bugsy, might be best described as lost.

  Only the mention of the drama critic had set her hands to trembling when she attempted to fill their cups. Charles gently relieved her of the heavy pot and completed the tea service for both of them. Such a lovely teapot, and a rare one. The maker’s stamp in the silver dated it back to the days of the American Revolution. The lady shared his love of all things antique, and there were many other fine pieces in the shadows all around him. What would the room be like if she would just open the draperies?

  This was a house in mourning—no other way to read it. The mantelpiece was only missing the black funeral bunting. It was a memorial for her son, lined with photographs of him in a march from infancy to manhood. And the centerpiece was a Tony Award. The handsome young actor was very much at home in his skin, his grin radiating confidence in every portrait.

  Back in Manhattan, on Mallory’s cork wall, a candid shot of Bugsy had the gopher smiling the way a dog might smile—out of fear, so eager to please. That person was not pictured here.

  White lilies adorned a small table that held two more photographs in ornate frames. Here, Alan Rains posed with a teenage girl, who wore a corsage on her gown—America’s quintessential picture of a school prom night. In the second frame, the same girl wore a wedding dress. Another shrine? “Your daughter-in-law?”

  “Margret,” said Mrs. Rains. “Mags . . . that’s what we called her. Still a child when we buried her, only twenty-one years old. Alan was destroyed. He had to be sedated . . . so he couldn’t attend her funeral service. He never saw Mags in her coffin. After the burial, Alan would leave the house every day—and I’d sit by the phone. I knew a waiting room would call . . . the one in the hospital where she died . . . or a waiting room in a doctor’s office. There were three of those. You see, he wouldn’t believe she was dead. How could that be? How was it possible that he’d never see his wife walk through another door? And so, every day, he’d find his way to one of those waiting rooms . . . the perfect places to wait for Mags. And then, after an hour or so . . . a receptionist would call me . . . and—”

  The lady’s voice broke. “He stopped doing that after about a month. Then he never left the house at all. Hardly ever left his bed.” She fell silent for a few moments. “When I tried to help my son, Leonard Crippen hired an attorney to stop me.”

  And that lawyer had won the motion to release Alan Rains from a psychiatric facility, thereby revoking the mother’s guardianship of her adult son, her only child. Charles had this much from Mallory’s notes on the old sanity hearing. “I’m told it was a civil-rights attorney.”

  “Yes, and he beat me in court. As long as my boy doesn’t pose a danger to himself or to others, it seems Alan has the legal right to go insane. And Mr. Crippen does his best to keep him that way.” Her hands tightened around the fragile china cup.

  Charles feared she might break it.

  He knew he should go, but he could not leave her, not after bringing on all this fresh anger and pain. Was she about to cry?

  “Sometimes I visit Alan’s subway performances. . . . My son still recognizes me. . . . I wonder how long that will last.” She set down her teacup, and now her hands were tightly clenched, fingernails digging into her palms.

  Fists and tears.

  ROLLO: When our neighbors were interviewed after the massacre, those who still had surviving cats and dogs, they only had the nicest things to say about the twins.

  —The Brass Bed, Act II

  While Leonard Crippen turned the first few pages of the ghostwriter’s play, Mallory wore a cell-phone earpiece, a connection to Charles Butler in the nearby state of Connecticut, and she listened to the highlights of his interview with Bugsy’s mother. When Charles was done, the detective reached across the table and snatched the play from the critic’s hands.

  Startled, the old man opened his mouth, but the only sound heard was the yapping of the lapdog, the first to take umbrage. Mallory rolled the manuscript in one tight fist, the universal sign language for Bad dog! I’ll beat the crap out of you! And the poodle fled the room.

  The drama critic raised his eyebrows to ask, But what have I done?

  Now she could believe that this man had not written the play. He had never even read it, and he desperately wanted to. Or maybe he had been an actor in his younger days. “Let’s talk about Bugsy—your other pet—and what you did to his mother.”

  “So you’ve spoken to her.” Crippen slowly released a stream of air in imitation of a man deflating. “I imagine she thinks the worst of me.”

  “Understatement,” said Charles Butler’s voice in Mallory’s earpiece.

  The drama critic rose from the table and picked up a pink watering can in the shape of a tin flamingo. Nervous and in need of props, some suspects played with pencils or cigarettes during an interview. This one watered flowers.

  “Well, I can’t have you believing that I let Bugsy go on this way for my own amusement.” He paused to wet the soil of an African violet. “Years ago, I went to visit him at a hospital in Connecticut. That’s where I met his mother. Mrs. Rains was having him evaluated so she could put him away. I gather he’d become something of an embarrassment to her.”

  “She loved her son,” said Charles’s disembodied voice. “Still loves him.”

  The critic bent over to stream water into another ceramic pot. “His mother thought the madness began years before she had him hospitalized.”

  “He’s lying,” said Charles.

  Crippen moved on to the last potted plant. “I suppose all young people in love are psychotic. When Alan Rains was seventeen, he gave his girlfriend a kidney. That’s not puppy love, Detective. That’s a case of I-can’t-live-without-the-girl love. The boy colluded with her parents, and they told the doctors that Alan was her brother. The surgery was over and done with before Mrs. Rains could step in and stop it.”

  “She never tried to stop it,” said the eavesdropper in Connecticut. “She was proud of him.”

  “They were married when he was nineteen,” said Crippen. “And he left Yale for New York. They had a few hardscrabble years in the city. The girl was on transplant medication, very expensive. Imagine the pressure on poor Alan to succeed.”

  “The mother sent them money every week,” said Charles. “She loved them both.”

  And the critic prattled on. “Four months into Alan’s starring role on Broadway, the girl became very ill. She was rejecting the kidney. Alan quit the play to take care of his wife. Walking out on a hit play is endgame for a young actor’s career. He gave up everything for her—and the girl died anyway. A true American tragedy.”

  “More like Shakespeare,” said Charles. “That’s the way the mother sees it. When our Romeo became Bugsy—that was just the next best thing to being dead.”

  Mallory heard a woman’s voice in the background, then a crash of dishes, and now the click of a disconnected telephone.

  “Well, you know the rest,” said Leonard Crippen. “His mother tried to have him committed to a loony bin.”

  “That’s when you got a lawyer to bust him out of that hospital.”

  “Guilty. However, in my defense, Bugsy has a constitutional right to be whomever he likes, crazy or no. My attorney only laid down the law. . . . But you don’t approve. Let’s see if I can guess why. Perhaps it’s because Alan Rains was a young hero, offering up his body parts to save the girl he loved. He was a passionate soul, and he—”

 
; “He was a better man than Bugsy. But you decided that Alan Rains wasn’t worth saving . . . and now the law says no one can save him.”

  The old man set down his watering can and heaved a long sigh, one that conveyed great sorrow. Over the passing years, had he second-guessed his act of meddling? Or was he only sorry to be caught?

  Mallory dropped the manuscript on the table, but the critic would not touch it until he had her nod of approval. His dog hovered on the threshold of the room, also waiting for a nod from her.

  • • •

  The aftermath of the snowstorm trumped murder in the headlines today, but there was treasure buried on the inside pages, and all the daily newspapers were spread out on the detectives’ facing desks.

  “Here’s another link.” Mallory circled a paragraph in a half-page obituary for Peter Beck. “The playwright and the director were roommates in college—years before either one of them met up with Axel Clayborne.”

  Riker parried with his own find. “But Clayborne and Wyatt were joined at the hip. It says here, those guys did everything together—plays, movies. And then, things fell apart when they were working in Europe.” In the next line of type, Riker found a mention of a film made in Italy, one that he had really liked, though he would never admit to seeing a movie with anything as classy as subtitles. “After a few years, Dickie shows up in New York—without his buddy, Axel. You figure they had a fight, a big one? Maybe one of them carried a grudge?”

  Naw, that was too lame to get her attention. No, wait. She was listening. Mallory pushed a folded newspaper across the dividing line of desks, and he read the circled article on the late director of stage and screen. Years ago, on a movie lot in Rome, Dickie Wyatt had been arrested on a charge of drug possession. But Axel Clayborne had stepped up to claim the heroin as his own property. So the actor, an innocent man, went to jail, and his friend, the addict, went free.