It Happens in the Dark - M11

by Caroll O'Connell

  “No, Alma was just too stupid to appreciate a gifted director. She hated him for—”

  “That’s the way you saw it? Alma hated him?” Mallory folded her arms, and it was only her stance that said, Prove it.

  Dig a hole.

  Fall in.

  “She resented him from the first day,” said Clayborne. “Pill-popping ingrate, she—”

  “That early on, you knew she was using?” And Mallory knew it, too, but now her hands were riding her hips to call him a liar.

  “Well, she wasn’t exactly a junkie, not then anyway. But I know she was scoring Ecstasy, some weed and—”

  “Party drugs,” said Mallory. “Just a recreational user. And that’s why you blamed her for Wyatt’s relapse?” By her tone, she might have asked, Are you a moron? And now, done with sarcasm—a touch of pure incredulity. “You figured she dosed him to get even?”

  “I know she did.” He was smug, the one with all the answers, so happy to guide the young cop who was leading him. Hold it. The actor had the look of a man who had dropped something, lost something. What was he missing? When, exactly when, had he accused Alma Sutter of doping his friend?

  Ah, New York City rules: You lose your breath, you lose your turn.

  And Mallory said, “So Wyatt was getting high on drugs. When? In the second week of rehearsals? That’s when Alma got your first threat on the blackboard.” She rounded the bed, closing the distance between them. “And the twins say that’s when you set them loose on her.” Mallory stopped short of striking distance. “The Rinaldi brothers only have one trick—they scare people.”

  Clayborne had no comeback line, but that look in his eyes said caught to every cop ever born.

  Mallory’s cue. “Between you and the twins, Alma was scared all the time. Nerves shot to hell. And the stagehands always had pills for that, lots of them. Garnet and Randal could hardly wait to rat you out. You paid them so much cash—a drug scholarship for Alma. They sold her dope for next to nothing.”

  “I never—”

  “You had them take notes on every damn thing they gave her. That sounds like an itemized bill to me. Their list has a drug that didn’t show up in Alma’s hair-strand test. So I know a few of her early buys were for somebody else—the same drug that got your friend high in rehearsals.”

  “I knew it!” He stamped one foot to punctuate the damn in “God, damn her!” Eyes rolled up, Clayborne raised a fist. And Riker, film buff extraordinaire, was reminded of one of the actor’s old movie roles, that of a hellfire preacher.

  “That bitch,” said Mallory in a guttural tone of Yay, brother, I hear you. Mirroring the actor, she clenched one hand on the rise. “What she did to him was sick!”

  Clayborne nodded his amen to that. “Twisted bitch!” Still playing the righteous role, he raised his eyes to the catwalk, as if a prop god might be perched up there. “I’m glad she’s dead!”

  “She had it coming,” said Mallory. “Payback! Eye for an eye!”

  And now, brother, testify.

  “Damn right!” Startled, Clayborne took a step back, waving one hand, fast and jerky, trying to erase his words from the air.

  Riker counted out three beats to Mallory’s kill shot.

  “But Alma was innocent. She’s not the one who dosed your friend.”

  Punch line.

  “Dickie Wyatt was God to her,” said Mallory. “Alma would’ve slit her wrists to please him. And you missed that. You miss everything that isn’t all about you. You never saw how hard she worked just to make him smile. She took every damn thing he could throw at her. Alma was happy to take it. She wanted more. . . . I saw her cry the night we found his body.”

  Clayborne shook his head. What was he missing now? “I don’t—”

  “After you and the twins went to work on her, Alma was screwing up, forgetting lines. She needed coke to focus, pills to sleep. And more drugs, killer amounts, just to get her through the days. But it was taking her so long to OD. She wasn’t dying fast enough, and you couldn’t figure out why.”

  In a telling gesture, he raised his eyebrows to ask if Mallory had the answer to that one, and she waited him out until he said, “But you know.”

  “The play was keeping Alma alive. All she had—all she wanted—was her part in that play, and she held on tight. Alma couldn’t let go of her life.”

  On that note of actual feeling, Riker was stunned. Pity for a junkie? From Mallory?

  “You were wrong about Alma’s perfect timing.” Now every human quality was gone from her voice, and Mallory the Machine said, “During the blackout, the stagehands noticed she was a few seconds late getting back to the wheelchair . . . wearing night-vision goggles. . . . Yeah, you got that one thing right. Peter Beck still wanted his play back—and his girl. He never signed the papers to break his contract. He was still holding it over Alma’s head, the one thing that would’ve done her in. That’s how she saw it. Life or death. And she killed Peter Beck . . . before he could kill the play.”

  Axel Clayborne was slow to grasp this—his own lie come true. Clearly, he had never believed that the actress could have murdered the playwright.

  “Alma was pretty far gone when she slit Beck’s throat,” said Mallory. “The doctors say she was brain damaged before she stroked out. Judgment shot to hell. Hopped up and half dead from all those drugs. And so scared. Your work. The way I see it . . . you killed them both.”

  Mallory drew a cutthroat line across her neck to end the taping.

  Almost poetic.

  Riker nodded and depressed the stop button on the recorder. “Thanks for running your mouth,” he said to the actor. “That’s all we need.”

  “For what?” Clayborne watched him wrap the microphone wire around the recorder. He had forgotten that he was being taped. “I didn’t kill anyone.”

  “You murdered them.” Mallory sounded weary. How many ways did she have to say this? If not for Axel Clayborne, those two people would be alive tonight. “We didn’t expect a confession. The tape is for the medical examiner. He’s doing Alma’s psychological autopsy. We need one for your grand-jury indictment.”

  “If you wanna plead out on that count,” said Riker, “the movie-star deal is usually eight, maybe ten years to life. But that only covers Alma. Trial number two—ricochet rules apply for Peter Beck. You took your best shot at the actress, and a ricochet killed the playwright.”

  “And then,” said Mallory, “there’s complicity in the murder of Dickie Wyatt.”

  What? No, the DA had turned Mallory down on this score. No formal charge could be made in the death of the dead director. But the recorder was no longer taping this. Riker turned to her, silently asking, What are you—

  “Dickie? No, he wasn’t murdered.” The actor turned from Riker to Mallory. “I opened my door . . . he fell into my arms and died. It was a drug overdose.”

  “Murder,” said Mallory, “and it’s all on you.”

  “No! I loved him!”

  “I know you did.” She said this with no sarcasm, no irony. “You wanted him to live forever.”

  He held out his hands, begging her to make sense of this.

  And she said, “When Bugsy—”

  “The gopher? You blame me for—” Clayborne nodded. “Well, I suppose that one almost makes sense. The twins are my monsters, aren’t they? I’m sorry that little man got hurt tonight. I’ll cover his medical bills. I’ll get him the best—”

  “He’s dead!” One tight fist was on the rise, and Mallory brought it down on the table. So hard. A hammer fall. The flimsy table broke. The pieces of it crashed to the floor with the pills and the bottle, and splashed red wine pooled around the splintered wood. Clayborne stepped back, colliding with the wheelchair. Balance lost, he landed in the seat, the chair rolled backward, and Mallory closed in to stand over him. No way out of that chair.

  Riker watched the rage leach out of her face—her fists. Calm again, dead calm, she said, “Back when Alma was only doing party drugs,
she scored heroin for her boyfriend. I don’t think she knew what he was planning. The stagehands watched her hand it off to him. But Beck’s tox screen was clean for the past ninety days. You get it now? He did the dosing. Dickie Wyatt was enforcing the ghostwriter’s changes, and Beck wanted a new director so he could put his play back together again. He only wanted Wyatt gone . . . not dead.”

  Mallory moved behind the wheelchair. “Peter Beck was a great playwright.” She leaned down close to Clayborne’s ear. “Dickie Wyatt always thought so. That’s what his agent said at the wake. And you? By comparison, you’re a monkey who managed to find the right end of a pencil. . . . Did you think Wyatt didn’t know that?”

  Shaking his head, Axel Clayborne tried to rise from the chair.

  She placed her hands on his shoulders and pressed down hard. “Even before you pitched him the ghostwriter scam, Wyatt knew you were a hack. Years ago, you rewrote that old movie script and made a hash of it. Then you let your friend take the blame. Goodbye Hollywood, goodbye career.”

  “I made it up to him.”

  “I know. You pled guilty to Wyatt’s drug charge. You went to prison for your best friend. So, when you say you loved him, I believe you. But this time, he only backed you up because he owed you. Maybe you thought he liked what you did to Peter Beck? When Wyatt left the play, he never said where he was going . . . because he was done with you.”

  “That’s not true! When he OD’d, he came to me for help.”

  Mallory put more pressure on his shoulders, vise tight, and ever so softly, she said, “No, that’s not what happened. He was two days out of rehab, clean and sober, when he got a phone call . . . an offer to share a meal. Wyatt had a conscience. He couldn’t say no. Tonight, a waiter picked Peter Beck’s face from a photo array. Odd-looking guy, hard to forget. And he acted strange, too. The waiter remembers him coming in an hour before the dinner crowd. The man had his choice of tables, but he took the worst one—in a corner near the kitchen, and he ordered two meals. He wanted them served before his guest arrived. Beck sat with his back to the room. Nobody saw him doctoring a bowl of chili with a lethal dose of heroin. . . . I guess he believed you when you gave Dickie Wyatt all the credit . . . for driving him insane.”

  Mallory relaxed her grip on Clayborne. He sagged in the chair like he had no bones. And his face was pale—no blood left, either.

  But she was not quite done with him. “When Dickie Wyatt left that restaurant, the snowstorm was in full swing. No cabs on the street. So he heads for the subway—your neighborhood. He’s feeling sick and high. He knows he’s been drugged, and he knows why he’s dying. Can you see Peter Beck walking alongside him, totally crazy, explaining it to him? But Wyatt can’t call 9-1-1. No cell phone. He left it home. And every storefront was locked and gated early that night. Now here’s the part that’ll just . . . kill you. He walked right past the subway, where he could’ve gotten help. He didn’t even try to save himself. What was the point anymore? Thanks to you, he could never get clean again. . . . So he just kept walking. The more he walked, the faster he died.”

  Clayborne’s mouth opened wide, and though he made no sound, Riker fancied that he could hear the man screaming, and that was the way he would remember this night.

  Mallory stepped away from the wheelchair and looked down at the fingernails of her gun hand, examining them for imperfections, so bored with the act of gutting a man. Then the hand dropped to her side, and Riker could only read her expression as Oh, what the hell, one more cut.

  “You know why Dickie Wyatt walked all the way to your place? . . . He knew you loved him, and he thought it might kill you . . . to watch him die.”

  The actor’s words came out strangled, and he had to say them again. “I did love him.”

  “I know.” Mallory hunkered down beside the spill of pharmacy drugs. “I can see you’ve been grieving.” She picked up one container to read the label. “Happy pills for the sad man.” After emptying the tablets into her hand, she counted them. “Not many left. You’re way over the dosage.” The other bottles were held up to the ghost light. “Uppers, downers. You’re already walking around in Alma’s junkie shoes.”

  Eye for an eye.

  “I warned you,” said Mallory. “I told you I didn’t need a gun to mess you up. When Bugsy died, I called the Chicago investors. They want their money back. They’ll get a court order to freeze your assets. And that’s when I’ll come for you. How will you make bail? . . . Not much time left to grieve—and get stoned.” She took his right hand, filled it with pill bottles and closed his fingers round them—with a squeeze. “I’ve got a bet with my partner. I say you’ve got no reason to live.”

  There had been no wager on Clayborne’s life. She had lied about that. What rube would bet against her?

  Mallory exited stage left, and Riker refrained from applause.

  ROLLO: You knew it couldn’t end any other way.

  —The Brass Bed, Act III

  There was no clock in Charles Butler’s kitchen, but a window on the change of seasons kept rough track of time. It was spring.

  All his trust issues put to rest, he happily drank the coffee—even though Kathy Mallory had poured it for him. This morning, she had come politely knocking on his door, rather than pick the lock to scare him with another shattering round of Heart Attack Express. They had not played the game in a long time.

  Had she tired of it?

  Mallory had brought him Sunday editions of every newspaper in the city, a concession to his love of smudgy newsprint, his distaste for the sterile glow of computer text. And he was touched by this gesture.

  At first.

  Charles set down his cup and picked up the tabloid, not his personal choice, but it lay on top of her stack. The obituary began on the front page, and there he learned that the man’s body had been discovered yesterday. However, death had occurred some time ago. Nearly a week had passed since the recluse of recent months had released his bowels and died. Days of decomposition had added to the stink of fecal matter, but within the first hour, flies had come slipping under the door. Maggots had bloomed and multiplied until the neighbors had complained about the incessant buzzing of a thousand insects—so loud, they said—and oh, the smell, so godawful.

  Lovely. A touch of horror on the Sabbath.

  Well, this was a theater town, and he supposed that even a natural demise behind closed doors must have some drama. As he reached out for the second newspaper, he read the headline: SCARED TO DEATH.

  Mallory refilled his cup. The hairs on his forearms were rising. Why was that?

  Charles turned his eyes to the opening paragraph. It appeared that, prior to withdrawing from the world, the deceased had put on bizarre public displays, running down Broadway, running for his life, though with no pursuer in sight, and panicking pedestrians by yelling, “She has a gun!”

  Mallory poured cream into Charles’s coffee—a perfectly innocent act.

  No witness to these scenes could account for any gun, much less a woman to wield it. The frightened man had also been observed tearing through the streets near his apartment. And, finally, too fearful to leave his home even to walk the dog, the drama critic had given his poodle away to a neighbor.

  A noted cardiologist was quoted here, blaming stress as a major cause of heart failure, but adding that, given the victim’s age and sedentary life, more damage had been done by the physical exertion of escaping the woman who frightened him. The old man’s fear had apparently forced him to run a far, fast pace.

  On to page two. An unnamed source at the NYPD had leaked the identity of Leonard Crippen’s stalker, though the woman had always approached him from behind, and the critic, too scared to turn around, had never seen her face. Even so, he had named her.

  Mallory sipped her coffee. Charles’s cup was suspended in midair.

  The article went on to say that, in numerous police reports, Leonard Crippen had accused the mother of a murdered actor, claiming that she was the only one with mo
tive to kill him.

  Oh, no. That poor woman? Oh, yes.

  On the night of Bugsy’s death, Charles had driven the grieving mother home, and he had stayed with her awhile in that house of mourning, replete with a mantelpiece shrine, a reminder that she had lost her son long before the Rinaldi brothers killed him.

  Crippen’s carnage had been more insidious to her.

  But the critic had refused to tell authorities what the mother’s motive might be. And yesterday, following this tantalizing lead, reporters had flocked to the Connecticut home of Mrs. Rains, a frail, soft-spoken lady unlikely to own a gun, let alone menace anyone, and she was dismissed as a player in the tragedy. As yet, police had found no credible gunwoman, if indeed one had ever existed.

  In Charles’s view, the reporters had given up on their only suspect too easily, and logic was on his side. In his own conversations with Mrs. Rains, she had not been shy in castigating the critic. Yet she had passed up an opportunity to posthumously and quite publicly expose Leonard Crippen as a monster.

  Fear of self-incrimination?

  Doubtful. Absent any witnesses, no case could be made against her, and so rancor should have held sway. But the lady had evidently found satisfaction elsewhere.

  Motherlove could be fierce, and Bugsy’s mother had the requisite hatred for an obsessive stalker, but she lacked the makings of a murderess. Like most ordinary people who were neither soldiers nor police, she might form the intent to kill, but he knew she would surely hesitate before pulling a trigger to end a human life. And this fitted well with the critic’s habit of taking sudden flight, quite literally outrunning bullets.

  The last newspaper at the bottom of the pile was the only one to include the fact that the mystery woman had never failed to whisper a threat, a shock to make her victim’s heart race and bang. According to the police source, this offered no clue to identity since there could be no voice recognition in whispers.

  Though the actual words might be helpful.

  Turning back to the story’s beginning on page one, he found the familiar byline of Woody Merrill. In the past, this reporter had been the recipient of tips fed to him by the late Louis Markowitz, and now Charles looked up from his newspaper to consult Mallory, the most likely source of this exclusive detail. “It says here that the woman threatened Crippen. But there’s no mention of what—”