It Happens in the Dark - M11

by Caroll O'Connell

  “So Wyatt worked with him before the—”

  “No, Dickie should’ve gotten a job out of that. Fair’s fair, right? But Peter said he didn’t need a director. Can you beat that?”

  Dancing on in slow revolves, cheek to cheek, with one of her hands on his ass, Gonzales learned that the playwright had no use for set designers or lighting directors, either. And Peter Beck had truly despised acting schools and coaches. In a nonunion venue, he had gotten away with refusing to audition any formally trained actors for his first play.

  “Sounds like amateur night,” said Gonzales.

  “You got that right, sweetie.” The agent rewarded him with a big smile and a squeeze to his buttocks—both hands now. “Peter thought his precious words would carry the whole play. Well, the play bombed. His second time out, he got a shot at Broadway—but he had to give up creative control. He won his first Pulitzer for that one. All Peter had to do was get out of his own way.”

  “So the guy had talent,” said Gonzales.

  “Oh, hell yes. That big ego of his? Peter could back it up. He was brilliant.”

  “So why did Leonard Crippen give the guy so many rotten reviews?”

  The lady stopped dancing, and she was not smiling anymore. “Crippen’s a sadistic troll. He’s only kind to mediocre playwrights—vicious with the great ones. As critics go, he’s a pervert. . . . Crippen hates talent.”

  • • •

  Riker held a cell phone to his ear. “Just checkin’ on Bugsy.”

  Mallory nodded and drifted back to Axel Clayborne, who was keeping company with the dead man on the table. She looked over the crowd. “Where’s Alma?”

  “Probably too stoned to find the place.” The actor mixed whiskey with water and placed the glass in her hand. “The girl’s got a habit.”

  “I can see why you’d want to get rid of her. But what did Bugsy ever do to you?” And now for her first lie of the night, she said, “The day before Peter Beck died, Bugsy went to his apartment to check on him, and I know you put that idea in his head. Were you laying groundwork for a patsy?”

  He stared at her, baffled—or acting that way.

  “You set him up,” she said. “The perfect scapegoat. Another squad is hunting him down tonight. If they catch him, he goes to a psych ward. You know what that’s like? Crazy people banging their heads on the walls, shitting on the floor, pissing on everything. Droolers and screamers. I don’t think Bugsy can stand up to that, do you? Is that the plan? He disappears into that hole, and everybody figures he’s guilty. But the insane don’t stand trial. So after a while, the media gets bored and goes away. My case is dead . . . and you get away with murder.”

  “I’d never hurt Bugsy. You have to believe me. I like that little man. I’ve got no reason to cause him any—”

  “You hurt Peter Beck. He never did you any harm.”

  “I never—”

  “You did. . . . You all did.” She turned to the casket. “And then there’s Dickie Wyatt. Did you help your junkie friend along? Maybe you dosed his food? Just enough to get his habit rolling again?” Ah, finally, the words she needed to cut him and bleed him—if only she could believe the pain in his eyes.

  “I loved Dickie.”

  “Yeah, right.” She looked down at the corpse. “Dragging his body into the theater to milk cheap publicity for—”

  “Mallory, don’t get the wrong idea. I’m a devout heterosexual—but I loved him. Of all the people in this world, I loved Dickie Wyatt best.” He leaned into the casket and kissed the dead man’s mouth.

  • • •

  Detective Janos danced with a skinny brunette, the theater’s cashier. Donna Loo’s speech still had a trace of her Brooklyn roots, a vestige of dropped consonants that her acting coach had failed to beat out of her. “But I’m workin’ on it,” she said.

  “I hear you’re the one who told Crippen about the ghostwriter.”

  “Just followin’ orders. He would’ve panned any play by Peter Beck.”

  “Whose orders?” And her next words were so predictable that he said them in unison with her. “The ghostwriter.”

  They danced by Riker, and Janos called out to him, “Hey, where’s Charles Butler? He should’ve been here by now.”

  Riker shouted back, “Why would he be coming?”

  “Mallory invited him.”

  “Then who’s babysitting our little friend?”

  “Nobody told me.” Janos and Donna Loo danced away.

  • • •

  Riker stood by a window, looking down at toy cars in TriBeCa traffic. Holding the cell phone to his ear, he waited out five rings, long enough for Bugsy to beat it down the stairs to the telephone on the stage manager’s desk. The little guy was quick. But not this time—or last time. The theater’s answering machine kicked in once again. The recorded message advised all callers to ask the police when they could see the end of the play that was stalled in the first act, and the number for Special Crimes had been thoughtfully provided.

  Something to look forward to—an angry theater-going public choking the squad’s phone lines tomorrow.

  He placed the call again to give Bugsy more ring time to run for the phone.

  The detective turned toward the front door, though dancing couples blocked his line of sight. No problem. Charles Butler would stand a head taller than most people in this crowd. That man could not go unnoticed anywhere, and he was not here. Why had Mallory invited him? Who was watching Bugsy? And should he be worried? There was no way to know until his favorite Luddite showed up.

  Riker was only a believer on religious holidays or any day when a gun was pointing his way, but tonight he abandoned custom, raised his eyes skyward and said, “Please, God, give Charles Butler a cell phone for Christmas.”

  Mallory appeared beside him and put a fresh drink in his hand. “So . . . no answer yet.” Her tone was flat, missing the lilt of a question mark. No curiosity.

  If he were only as paranoid as his partner, he might think she had not expected anyone to pick up a ringing telephone at the theater.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I sent Lonahan to check on Bugsy.”

  “Somethin’s wrong. Bugsy always picks up backstage calls.” And when she showed no concern at all, Riker said, “Oh, not again. Tell me you didn’t drug the little guy.”

  Before she could come up with a suitable lie, his cell phone rang, and he checked the small screen. “It’s Lonahan.” Holding the phone to his ear, he said, “Yeah?” After a moment, he turned to Mallory. “So . . . how heavy was that dose? Lonahan says Charles’s out cold. . . . Bugsy’s gone.”

  And Mallory sang out for all to hear, “Runner!”

  ROLLO: You know what they’ve done . . . what they are. Of course it’s going to hurt.

  —The Brass Bed, Act III

  The squad of detectives swarmed into the street. Their cars were abandoned for a run to the subway station a block away. A train would drop them off at the last scheduled site for Bugsy’s underground performance.

  Gonzales was startled to see Axel Clayborne running with the pack. The man sprinted ahead, trying to put the make on Mallory. Pure suicide. The detective heard the actor yell at her, “You’ve got me all wrong!” This was the line Gonzales had used on Wyatt’s grab-ass agent, but the woman had slapped him anyway—again—yelling, “Dickie was a stand-up guy! He’d never do that to Peter Beck!”

  The detective could still feel the sting to his twice-slapped face as they ran down the sidewalk, then down underground, where a gang of cops and one movie star rode the rails to Times Square.

  • • •

  A drunk was vomiting close to the tracks in the location posted on a fan’s website. So Bugsy and his audience would have decamped for someplace where the air was marginally sweeter. He could be anywhere in this maze of tunnels and train platforms, twenty feet, forty and seventy feet underground.

  “I’ll get him a lawyer,” said Axel Clayborne. “A good one, whatever it
takes.”

  For the second time in as many minutes, Mallory said, “Shut up!”

  “Okay, everybody,” yelled Riker. “Spread out!”

  The squad broke up into solo runners—except for Mallory, who could not lose the movie star. And Clayborne was attracting way too much attention, collecting an entourage of people, staring at him, pointing, following him. He ran alongside her, winded when he asked, “So, this other squad—why do they think Bugsy moved the body?” And this was met with silence from the running woman. The actor and his little band of fans were falling behind as he called out to Mallory, “I can swear in court—he never touched Dickie’s body! It’s the truth!”

  She headed into a pedestrian tunnel, easily gaining speed and leaving him behind, calling back over one shoulder, “I have to wonder how you know that!”

  Mallory stopped at the tunnel’s end. Damn. The Midtown North detectives must have begun their sweep of the subway. Harry Deberman was standing on the platform by the tracks with his back to her. The moron was looking left and right, hoping to spot one man when he should be looking for a crowd—Bugsy’s audience.

  When Clayborne and his admirers had caught up to her, she said, “Make yourself useful. Go downstairs and check the lower platform.”

  He did as he was told and disappeared on the way down to the next level, taking his fans with him and gaining a new one on the stairs.

  Eyes on Harry Deberman’s back, Mallory made her way across the platform to a cluster of people. When she heard the first note of a violin, she knew it was the wrong performance, and she looked back at Deberman. The detective was still oblivious. He had the look of a man killing time—while collecting overtime pay for no work.

  It might be worth a minute’s conversation to find out how many of Midtown’s cops were working this detail tonight. Mallory circled around to another staircase, walked half the way down, then turned and started up again. Now Deberman spotted her. He trotted toward her, saying, “Thanks for savin’ me some time, kid.” He looked down the stairwell behind her. “So he wasn’t down there, huh?”

  “Yes, he was. I shot him dead.”

  “No need to get bitchy, kid.”

  • • •

  Axel Clayborne stood on a wooden bench, the better to see over the heads of the impromptu gathering. Beside him, a bum held a battery-powered stage lamp, but the halogen bulb was dark.

  Curious.

  Beyond the crowd, on a patch of cement that stood for a stage, an old woman in dirty clothes held a page of script and read her lines, drunk and stumbling over the words, all but the last three, “Why, why, why?”

  The watchers were silent, tense, waiting.

  Bugsy’s head slowly turned to take in every face in his audience, and then his arms spread wide to beg their understanding. “I was scared shitless all the time. . . . But life was large. It’s like I was there for the big bang.” He looked up. “Let there be light!” Upon this cue, the bum beside Axel clicked on the stage lamp. And now Bugsy stood in a bright spotlight. “A big bang, balls of fire . . . and me . . . and my cosmic rock ’n’ roll band.” He looked down at his shoes. “After that, what’s a guy gonna do for a second act? . . . I’ll tell ya. . . . I shrank myself down to fit in a tiny world. I’m alive, but try an’ find me. Ya can’t. I’m that small. Ya think I loved that girl? No!” he yelled, and then his voice dropped low. “I’d have to be life size, man size to love her. . . . I’m a bug.” He raised his eyes to the bum with the lamp, and, on this cue, the spotlight winked out.

  Axel applauded madly with the rest of the crowd, enthusiastically joining in with their whoops and whistles.

  “You were supposed to find him for me, not—”

  “Jesus!” Axel turned to see that Mallory had materialized on the bench beside him, where the bum used to be. She could stop a man’s heart with a trick like that. And now they both watched Bugsy passing the hat among the crowd. When it came his turn, Axel emptied his wallet into it.

  What?

  He saw the gopher give all the money to his delighted, toothless costar and the bum with the stage lamp.

  “He can’t keep it,” said Mallory. “His character never has that much cash.”

  “His what?” And now Axel recalled the day he had gone to the police station to pick up a box of goggles—and stayed awhile to chat about the gopher. “You’re saying I was right? Bugsy was a character in a play?” He turned to stare at the gopher. “A play was based on his life?”

  “It’s the other way around,” she said.

  He found it surprisingly easy to believe her totally mad explanation for why the gopher was bound for a psych ward if he was caught tonight: A former stage actor, once critically acclaimed, Bugsy was now a playwright’s character, a little man who had lost his mind—a man who did not exist outside the context of a play.

  “You know what that means,” said Axel. “Every waking moment of his life is a performance, and he’s absolutely stunning.” But the gopher was so much more than that. He was living testament to the world’s greatest theorist on acting. “Bugsy is an idea come to life. He’s Stanislavski’s Magic If. The actor projects himself into the imaginary realm of the play, inhabiting it . . . as if it were real. We all aim for that, but no one ever gets there.” He stared at the gopher. “Only him.”

  Ah, but the police were heretics in the actor’s church, and Axel could see that the young infidel beside him found this miracle—boring. How to sum it up before he lost her entirely? “Only a truly gifted actor could be that kind of crazy.”

  Mallory nodded her agreement, and now he realized that he had been telling her something she already knew—and that bored her. He would not underestimate her one more time.

  “So all these weeks, I’ve been watching the best performance on Broadway, and I never knew it.” But Axel knew why Mallory now scrutinized his face with such distrust, for he had been the first one to characterize Bugsy as a fictional man.

  She folded her arms, disbelieving him even before she asked, “You didn’t know he was Alan Rains?”

  “Not a clue. I’ve never seen Rains act onstage.” He turned to the other side of the platform, where men in suits were marching toward them. Resolute. Grim. They were cops, certainly, but no face he could recognize as one of Mallory’s people. “Might that be trouble?”

  • • •

  Ron Bowman was in the lead. The other detectives from Midtown North were close behind him, and Harry Deberman was huffing and dragging in the rear. More men and women were coming down the stairs. Mallory stood between them and Bugsy, her jacket and blazer drawn back, her holstered gun on display.

  Surprised, Bowman slowed his steps at the sight of her exposed weapon, a neon billboard sign that advertised Cop War. “I’ve got a warrant, Mallory.”

  “My collar,” she said, “my prisoner.”

  “There’s twelve of us . . . one of you.” He gave her the easygoing shrug of a reasonable man who believed in the logic of numbers and—

  “You miscounted,” said Riker, moving through the ranks of the Midtown squad.

  And they all stood aside for him.

  The game had changed.

  Riker could not lose their respect, not even if he were falling down drunk and puking. Standing upright and sober, he was a contender, and Ron Bowman, the pack leader, was stalled. But that could not last long.

  “The prisoner belongs to us.” Riker walked past Bowman to make a stand with Mallory. He made eye contact with every detective in the lineup, assured that not one of them would lay a hand on him to get to Bugsy.

  Stalemate.

  Last, Riker faced down his friend, the man he had raised from a kiddie cop.

  One by one, the men from Special Crimes came stealing down the stairs to fall into place behind Bowman’s squad. The detectives from Midtown North now turned around to stand toe-to-toe with the newcomers.

  And the game had changed again.

  “Cops squaring off against cops.” Riker’s tone wa
s even and calm. “That’s the kind of shit move I’d expect from Halston. But he’s not here tonight. It’s all on you, Ron. Your call.”

  Heads were turning among the men and women from Midtown North, and Bowman put his hands in his pockets to say the war was over. Nicely done. Without the need of a spoken command, his people backed off a step to stand easy. To Riker, he said, “You guys got no problem delivering the prisoner for arraignment?”

  “First thing in the morning.” Riker’s word was golden. The deal was sealed.

  The detectives from Special Crimes had won—and they had lost.

  • • •

  Charles Butler’s kitchen was lit by a century-old fixture in the high tin ceiling. Hidden away in a cupboard was a modern coffeemaker that could not be operated without a degree in computer programming. That was last year’s Christmas gift from Mallory. The antique lover wondered what kind of technological gadget she would give him this year, assuming that they were still friends when that holiday rolled around.

  He was wide awake now—no thanks to her—and he lit a gas burner underneath his old percolator to make a pot of drug-free brew. He knew she had put the sedatives in the deli coffee. He turned to the man behind him, saying, venting, “Oh, and having Janos deliver it? Pure genius.” Who could suspect that gentle gorilla of drugging innocent people?

  Riker pulled out a chair at the kitchen table. “I know she’s sorry about that.” But this was said without much conviction.

  “Sorry?” Mallory had yet to allude to the drugging incident, much less apologize, though Charles realized he had not been her target. Oh, no, he had recovered too quickly. Obviously, she had weighted the dose toward the much smaller man, intending the gopher to sleep through the night. And was that a comfort? Hardly.

  “Charles, can you prep the little guy for the arraignment tomorrow?”

  “I’ll try, but there’s no way that can end well. A few days back, Mallory challenged the Bugsy persona, and he couldn’t handle it. The way she described it, I wouldn’t say he was catatonic, but close enough. When a judge challenges him tomorrow in a public venue, Bugsy won’t be responsive. If he has a meltdown in open court, that’s reason enough to ship him off to a psych ward for evaluation. And that’s going to be a disaster.”