It Happens in the Dark - M11

by Caroll O'Connell

  “Like a murder confession?” Could the detective have found a dumber way to waste his time? By the look on his face, he thought not. And he never noticed the theft in plain sight, the download of his private journal.

  Mallory opened more of his files and stole copies of them, one by one. “I was thinking about her drug habit.”

  The man’s bad attitude vanished, and she caught him in a smile. For her next trick, she read his mind. “You know she’s jazzed on something, but you can’t ask her to pee in a cup—that’s not in Alma’s contract. So now you’re thinking maybe I can prove it for you. Then you can fire her for cause.” Yes, it was all panning out. His nod was so slight. Was he even aware of doing it? “You like Alma’s understudy that much?”

  Buckner turned smug, too secure in that last wrong-track question. He was hiding something—not for long, though. More files sailed from drawer to desktop, streaming faster than a judge could deny a search warrant.

  “But that understudy won’t get the job,” said Mallory. “You fired her. . . . I know about Nan Cooper’s replacement contract. Don’t lie. One warning is all you ever get from me.” As she spoke, Buckner’s copy of that contract was downloading from his laptop to hers, followed by all of the other contracts.

  “Dickie mentioned it before he left. He asked me to look after Nan.”

  “And sabotage Alma?” No, that was a dead end. The man was only annoyed. Before he could respond, she asked, “Who else knew about Nan Cooper’s replacement deal?”

  The stage manager shrugged. “Nobody.”

  This might be the truth—if everyone else in this theater had the same simple faith in locked drawers. She put his laptop back to sleep and closed the lid on her own machine, signaling the end of the interview—before she got to the only question she cared about. And now she phrased it as a parting thought. “I hear Clayborne never played baseball in his life. Bugsy tells me the man was clumsy when he swung the bat in rehearsals. But Leonard Crippen said he did pretty well on opening night. So who stepped up and taught him how to swing that bat like a pro?”

  “I did.”

  • • •

  As the stage manager walked away, Axel Clayborne strolled into the wings and stood beside the young cop seated at the desk. She opened her laptop to stare at the screen, and he recycled a line from an old movie script. “You have the eyes of a stone killer.”

  Apparently, Detective Mallory had heard this one before. She never looked up from her computer. A passing bug on the wing would have elicited a stronger response. And so, playing a fly on the wall, he casually perused her glowing screen as she sifted through files. The young cop was reading the cost sheet of a canceled marketing campaign for a play that was hemorrhaging money. He watched her open another file to study a history of stage diagrams for blocking the fantasy sequence.

  He leaned down to say, “I heard you casting aspersions on my bat-swinging technique.”

  “But not your dancing. I know you were trained in ballet—years of training.” Only Mallory could make that sound like a history of child molestation.

  “I can tap-dance, too. That was my entrée to Broadway. I was a chorus boy my first time out. This is the same theater where I—”

  “So the ghostwriter wrote the Fat Man’s Ballet just for you. That was a piece of luck, finding a classically trained ballet dancer who could act.”

  “Luck? Hardly. More like inspiration. The ghostwriter’s changes began after we were in rehearsals and—”

  “That’ll work for the media, but not the police. I don’t think Peter Beck believed it, either. His work wasn’t being changed. It was being replaced with a full-blown play.” She scrolled back a few pages and stopped at a photograph. “Here. This is where the ballet scene showed up on the blackboard.”

  He looked down at the complex scheme of dance notations made in chalk.

  “I could e-mail this to the SSDC. That union handles choreographers, right?”

  “No, don’t do that.” No one from that union had been involved in the ballet scene, and now he had a vision of marchers with picket signs outside the theater. “Why would you—”

  “A choreographer might tell me it takes lots of time to work out a dance routine like this one. But these diagrams date back to the second day of rehearsals.” She had yet to look up from her laptop screen. “That must’ve put you at the top of Beck’s shortlist. Did he call you out?”

  “Gunfight parlance? I love it.” But the young gunslinger beside him was not amused. “In fact, Peter did accuse me of being the ghostwriter. I told him I’d never even thought of trying my hand at writing.”

  “Then you lied,” said a man’s rough voice behind him.

  Axel turned around to see that Mallory’s partner had quietly joined them.

  Riker slouched against the wall. “I know why you got blacklisted in Hollywood. You thought a screenplay sucked—so you rewrote it. That movie went over budget. Big time. The studio shut down production. And they canned your ass.”

  Axel turned his smile on the prettier detective, his preferred source of abuse. “Film studios are run by morons.”

  “Pissed-off morons,” said Riker. “They had to eat the losses.”

  “They had no vision, no faith,” said Axel, appealing to Mallory.

  Whoa, no mercy there.

  He spoke to the neutral zone between the detectives. “My director did the rewrites on that film. I always give credit where it’s due, and Dickie Wyatt was a freaking genius.”

  • • •

  Cyril Buckner stood in the center of the lobby, warding off reporters, shouting, “She only fainted, damn it!” In response to another question hollered from the back of the crowd, he said, “I don’t care what Alma’s agent said. She was back at work an hour later!”

  One reporter directed a cameraman to change his angle, and then he yelled, “Miss Sutter!”

  Buckner turned to see Detective Mallory in dark glasses. She had just passed through the lobby doors, and now she was surrounded by cameras and lights as reporters called out “Alma” this and “Miss Sutter” that.

  Idiots.

  He glanced at the theater poster on the wall, a rush job, a brand-new shot of Alma Sutter in stage makeup and the detective’s haircut. But the two women were hardly identical. Yet the reporters were mobbing the young cop, mistaking her for the actress, who was the paler version of Mallory.

  And now he understood their error.

  Outside the context of a stage, Alma was only a face in the crowd, not all that special in New York City, home to a million pretty girls, most of them not so well dressed as Mallory. Buckner coveted her shearling jacket, and he could even name the pricey designer. But there was more to her draw than wardrobe. Though her eyes were hidden by the aviator sunglasses, another designer item with real gold rims, Mallory had star quality, attracting these satellites and pulling them toward her, commanding attention without a hand lifted, without a word spoken.

  And another reporter called out, “Miss Sutter?”

  Mallory smiled with more perfect teeth than Alma’s, saying, “Yes?”

  “Is it true you only fainted?”

  “That’s right. I just needed a vitamin shot. Good as new. But I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the police for doing a wonderful job—even though they’re so shorthanded on this case.”

  The reporters and cameramen followed her out to the street, where she signed an autograph for an excited passerby, who had no idea who she might be, but she was so obviously somebody.

  • • •

  “Shorthanded?” With a flick of his remote, Jack Coffey killed the broadcast on his office television set. It was only a local cable show, but that clip might make the network news tonight.

  He could commend Mallory for undoing the damage of the agent’s press conference at the hospital. Or he could shoot her for that public reprimand on his allocation of manpower. What to do? The lieutenant was leaning toward the bullet remedy when he turned to
the man standing before his desk.

  “She’s right,” said Detective Sanger. “Mallory and Riker need more backup.”

  Traitor.

  “I gave them Janos. How’d they snag you?”

  “I took a look at their drug angle.” Sanger handed him a sheet of Alma Sutter’s phone records and pointed to an underscored number. “If this throwaway cell links back to the stagehands, and I’m real sure it does, that ties them to a dealer. And I don’t mean their dweeb connection in Tompkins Square Park. That kid’s a lightweight, a joke. This guy peddles heroin with one street name. Let’s say the ME can match it to Wyatt’s last fix. The connection’s still dicey. It all hangs on phone records. The stagehands would have to roll on a customer . . . like Alma Sutter. Her records are the bible for the burner phones. She’s the cast junkie.”

  It would also help to know where Dickie Wyatt ate his last bowl of chili.

  “But Mallory and Riker have too many leads to chase down,” said Sanger. “They got ties to an old massacre in Nebraska. There’s a profit motive in Beck’s will. And then there’s a copyright angle, the drugs—”

  “Okay! Enough. You’re the new man on the theater homicides. Hook up with Clara Loman. She’s working a chili angle for Mallory.” And when Sanger’s eyes got a little wider, the lieutenant said, “I don’t want that getting back to Loman’s boss.” If Heller found out that Mallory was co-opting CSU staff, there would be war. “When you hit the chili joints, flash pictures of Wyatt and Sutter.”

  Long after his detective had been dismissed, Jack Coffey remained to replay the TV clip of Mallory impersonating the actress. He played it again and again.

  Shorthanded? Yeah, she was.

  The NYPD was always making pitches to the public, begging for tips and leads on a case. This was the first time in the history of the department that a cop had made a public plea for help from her own boss.

  • • •

  Damn right she was angry.

  “I checked with the lieutenant! He okay’d it!” The desk sergeant was not about to lose face in front of his officers, those who had gathered nearby to watch this fight. “Not my fault,” he said to the detective, though he had given Mallory’s package to the wrong man.

  The thick manila envelope, clearly marked, should have been picked up by Robin Duffy, a retired lawyer from Brooklyn. He had lived across the street from the Markowitz house during all the years of her foster care. She trusted Robin because he had no agenda other than to make her smile, and, toward that end, the old man would gladly swallow cyanide for her.

  But the man who had made off with her evidence tonight was not so amenable.

  Mallory stared at the sergeant’s logbook of signatures. Thanks to Jack Coffey—bastard—those documents were now in the hands of a poker fanatic on a mission from God.

  She turned her head to look through the glass doors of the station house. There he was, a slender, bearded man standing on the sidewalk, holding her package in his hands—call it bait—and the rabbi had an air of false innocence about him, given that the name of his game was Ransom.

  He only had to wave at her, and she nodded her understanding of his terms; she had known him that long—most of her life. Though he had come for her unarmed, Mallory would have no recourse but to follow him into an evening of slow torture among men who played cards like demented nursing-home escapees.

  She turned away from the desk sergeant and walked toward the doors to meet up with David Kaplan, her foster parents’ oldest friend and spiritual adviser. He was already smiling like a winner, and that she could fix.

  Behind her, the sergeant called out, “Hey, if you can’t trust a rabbi, who can you trust?”

  Yeah, right.

  • • •

  The walls of Charles Butler’s library were fifteen feet high and colored with book bindings from floor to ceiling. Below a tall arched window, a Queen Anne desk was laid out with platters of meats, cheeses, sliced-and-diced vegetables, and there was mustard in three different shades from bright yellow to spicy brown for spreads on whole wheat, rye or pumpernickel—all the makings of triple-decker sandwiches.

  And the air was richly flavored with whiskey and cigar smoke.

  The poker table dated back to a gambling era of legend, bright lights and tommy guns—the birth of Las Vegas. However inspiring, it had not improved Charles’s odds of winning, not by one whit. His blush conceded to Kathy Mallory that he was holding a worthless hand, and with only the tilt of her head, she asked, Why drag out the humiliation?

  So he folded his cards.

  Edward Slope was still in the game, and he would be until the last nickel chip was lost. Stubborn man, his jutting jaw indicated that he could not beat two pair, but he would not fold. And, “No,” he said to Mallory, “I’m not going to run a hair-strand test on the playwright. You’ve already got a perfectly good tox screen and a rather obvious call on cause of death.”

  “Which one?” Mallory smiled. “Did you make two or three obvious calls? I’ve lost count.”

  The doctor streamed cigar smoke over her head. He was stoic, giving her no satisfaction, unless Charles counted that small throbbing vein in the man’s forehead and the tight grip on his whiskey glass.

  “I need that hair-strand test,” she said. “I want a longer drug history for—”

  “Tough. There’s no reason to suspect a drug habit. The man was a damn vegetarian.”

  “And a drunk.”

  “I can’t justify it—so you can’t have it.”

  This exchange of sniper shots across the table was as close as the two of them could ever come to civil discourse.

  Seated in the club chair to her left, David Kaplan wore the faint smile he reserved for the happy occasion of holding good cards. Thus Charles, the most luckless player of the lot, could see that the rabbi was entertaining a notion that he might have a fair shot at winning this hand.

  Fair? What a dreamer.

  No doubt, it was Mallory’s very lack of fairness that had allowed the rabbi to win a previous hand, building his confidence and his contributions to the pot. Poor David was done for, though no such intention was writ on Mallory’s face. It was more a matter of her style. Soon the players would be all in—every chip. The faster they lost to her, the sooner she could leave them. And that was thanks to an unbreakable bylaw of this game begun in her childhood: The players could not buy more poker chips to extend the pain of being beaten by a little girl with a big talent for fleecing them. The late Louis Markowitz had once referred to this old rule as a cap on his foster daughter’s weekly allowance money.

  On the other side of the room, Robin Duffy sat in an armchair by the light of a Tiffany lamp. It was odd to see this small bulldog of a man with a somber expression. He was rarely without a smile and always joyful in Mallory’s company. But now, in her service, the retired lawyer sat out the game to sift through her evidence of legal documents. And to compensate him for this, she had taken over the old man’s seat at the table and played in his stead. Thus, Robin could not fail to be the night’s big winner by proxy.

  Edward Slope stared at the backs of Mallory’s cards, as if she might have marked them with a clue to what she was holding. The doctor prided himself on his inscrutable granite façade, but Charles found it rather easy to read the man’s thoughts. Just now, the doctor would be wondering why Mallory would want more forensic tests on a man who had clearly died of a slashed throat. Might that be a ploy to distract him from a bluff? What the hell was she up to? As if seeking guidance from the founder of the Louis Markowitz Floating Poker Game, Edward’s eyes wandered to the empty chair, where Louis’s ghost was undoubtedly laughing his ass off.

  Mallory further confused the doctor by losing interest in the hair-strand test. Now she only concentrated on getting at the remains of his stash, saying, “Don’t embarrass yourself.”

  Magic words. Edward met her bet and raised it. Daring man. Chips worth many nickels and dimes were pushed into the pot. And David was ri
ght behind him in lockstep. Seeing the doctor’s raise, the rabbi also stepped off Mallory’s cliff, every chip wagered.

  They would never learn.

  How could they not be suspicious of her tonight?

  With no argument, she had politely dealt the cards counterclockwise in deference to a crescent moon. She had even credited the proper wild card for an even calendar date coinciding with curbside trash collection. And she had also allowed for other cards that were wild for reasons related to weather.

  Robin Duffy preempted the wholesale slaughter that was surely coming. He returned to their company with Mallory’s stack of papers in hand. The lawyer’s jowls lifted in a broad smile when he noticed how his pile of chips had grown in his absence. And he said to her, “I know how they did it, but there’s a snag in the plan.”

  The old man had everyone’s ear as he slid into the dead man’s chair before the only space on the table not cluttered with plates and glasses, chips and cards, and he laid down the documents. “Peter Beck had no legal recourse, not in regard to line changes. He traded away all his rights for a casting veto.” Robin held up a clipped sheaf of paper. “This is his contract. It grants the director absolute creative control. Dickie Wyatt could alter the play in any way he saw fit.”

  “He didn’t change Beck’s play,” said Mallory. “It was erased.”

  “But there was no breach of contract.” Robin rippled the pages of the next document, a court transcript. “Now here’s where it gets interesting. When the play became unrecognizable as Peter Beck’s work, he won the right to void his contract . . . but he never did. And that’s peculiar. Evidently, Beck hated the new play. He calls it drivel in this transcript. So why would he want to keep his name on it?” Robin turned to the expert in all things psychologically inexplicable.

  But Charles did not plan to psychoanalyze a corpse. Only hacks would do that. Relying solely on logic, he said, “My guess? Not one of his original lines survived. That’s newsworthy. Perhaps he wanted to avoid public humiliation on a grand scale.”