Mike pointed to a long pole across the near edge of Dobbis's desk, too shiny and modern to be part of a traditional costume. "That looks lethal. Where did that come from?"
"It has nothing to do with the Met, I assure you. I'm a rock climber, Mr. Chapman. And a spelunker-you know, caves and that sort of thing. That pole is for trekking. It's got a precision steel tip at the point, to help get a foothold in the ice or between rocks, and it probably is pretty deadly. I live across the river, near the Palisades, and I was setting out to climb on Saturday morning when I was called back here because of Talya. I never leave my equipment in the car-it's an easy target for thieves and quite expensive to replace, so I carried it in when I parked."
I was staring at the assortment of wigs that were mounted on shelves next to the door.
"Tell me about these."
"We make everything in-house, Ms. Cooper. Every single piece of clothing, even the wigs. You've got wonderful examples there," he said, pointing at the variety of styles, "from Dr. Faust's receding hair-line to Madame Butterfly's thick upsweep."
"This one? The one on the top shelf with the long white hair?"
"Falstaff. I'm quite sure that's Falstaff."
Mike picked up my cue. "Pretty natural looking. What are they made of?"
"Human hair, of course," Dobbis said, lifting the closest wig from its stand. "Very costly, but that's still the way we do it here. Manon Lescaut, this, with all the curls and pompadours of eighteenth-century France. You see? There's a very fine mesh, which is actually glued to the singer's forehead during the performance. The hairs are knotted through that mesh. It takes three or four days to make each one of these."
"Besides you, Mr. Dobbis, who else has costumes and props available to them?" I asked.
He thought for a minute. "I'm not really sure. I don't suppose they're easily accessed. Occasionally, when they're worn-out and need to be replaced, I guess the employees get to keep some of them. The ones in better shape are auctioned off at our annual gala, along with the used pointe shoes of the dancers, as you probably know."
"These wigs," I asked, "where are they normally kept?"
Dobbis handed the one he was holding to Mike. "In the wig shop, upstairs, under lock and key, I'm sure. They're all made from human hair except for these white ones," he said, pointing at the one he had just given to Mike.
Mike rubbed the strands between his fingers. "Could have fooled me. These don't feel artificial at all."
"Nothing here is artificial, detective. It's just that human hair that's white," Dobbis said, "well, it tends to turn yellow under the stage lights. We like to keep everything natural, everything real-so all the white wigs that are used at the Met are made from animal hair. It keeps its color better. The hair in every one of the white wigs comes from albino yaks, actually. Tibetan yaks."
Mike's raised eyebrows gave away his surprise. "Have I startled you, Mr. Chapman?" Dobbis asked, smugly strutting back to his desk as though he had scored a point in a sporting competition.
"You got that right. I'm thinking blondie here, with all her peroxide, is no match for an albino yak. I got my niece's first holy communion coming up in two weeks and I just about freaked thinking Coop is such a stickler for detail that she's likely to send me on an extradition to the Himalayas for a live yak."
Dobbis couldn't figure whether Mike was trying to be fanny or not. "This matter about the hair-the wigs-is it serious?"
"Nothing that the Dalai Lama and I can't figure out," Mike said, walking to the door of Dobbis's room. "Excuse me. I meant the Dalai Lama, Richard Gere, and I."
17
Mike stopped to tell Peterson the news about the animal hair. "Let's see if we can get a fix on the wig shop upstairs. See what kind of inventory they keep. Maybe there's something missing from last week. That stuff must be expensive to make so they've got to keep careful track of it. Maybe we can get a photo or duplicate. If the killer who intercepted Galinova was wearing a white wig, it would change his entire appearance."
Employees were being questioned not only about their own activities on Friday night, but about strangers they saw in the hallways and backstage area before and after the performance. These descriptions might have less use to us if the perp had altered his appearance during the course of the evening.
Peterson asked about Dobbis's collection. "You think he had access?"
"I could kick myself for letting him see how thrown off I was by his answer. Anyway, the wigs he's got on display are period costumes. He'd draw a little attention to himself walking around like he's the French king, but who knows what he's got in his drawers? A wig with a contemporary cut-well, whoever was wearing it might just look like a distinguished gentleman. A diversion, a strong feature you'd be sure to remember if you passed him in a hallway or rode up with him in an elevator."
"Or maybe," I said, "the killer wanted someone to think he was Joe Berk. See a shock of white hair-or even better, just plant a few on the floor to throw us off base-knowing Berk was having some kind of liaison with Talya. Create an illusion-that's what costumes are all about. Launch a red herring to send us in Berk's direction."
"So who knew that about Berk and Galinova?" Peterson asked.
"Dobbis, of course. Rinaldo Vicci, her agent. I can't imagine it was a secret from some of the crew who worked backstage with her the past few days, and at rehearsals the week before. Talya was very visible, and Berk picked her up from the Met a few times."
"And then there's Berk's family," Mike said. "I could put on some protective armor and get into that hornet's nest."
Peterson turned back to his temporary squad headquarters. "All nice to know once we get past the most obvious likelihood. I've studied the case file from the old Met murder case. The odds are pretty good that Talya was a random pick-bumped into the wrong guy in a deserted corridor or staircase, just like that doomed violinist. He makes a pass, she rejects it, and he goes wild. A scenario Alex has seen dozens of times before."
"You're right about that."
I frequently lectured to women's groups about sexual assault and domestic violence. The question I was most often asked was whether victims should offer resistance to an attacker, especially if he's armed.
There are far too many variables to suggest answers that would work in every situation, decisions that would have to be made by women in the several seconds they had to assess the nature of the danger.
Sometimes, women with the confidence and strength to try to counter the threat of force with a kick or punch or scream before running would be able to prevent the completion of the assault. But all too often I had seen an effort to struggle thwarted by a rapist who was stronger than his prey and more prepared for the attempt, who became more enraged by the resistance, escalating his force to a deadly level to subdue his target. It was impossible to know yet whether that had been the motive that led to Talya's death.
"The ME called me about the release of Galinova's body to this guy-this-uh…"
"Her patron. Hubert Alden," Mike said.
"I kicked it over to you."
"We're dealing with it, loo," Mike said. "C'mon, kid. Let's hit the road."
We left the building by the front door and walked to the car, warmed by the bright April sunlight. Mike dialed the number for Alden's office and asked the receptionist whether he was in town and might be available for a meeting earlier than five o'clock.
"Depends on what?" he responded to her comment.
She didn't ask his purpose but said something to Mike that made him smile as he flipped his phone closed.
"Ever been to a walk-through?"
"Walk through what?" I asked.
"Like a reading for a Broadway show proposal. Mr. Alden's avail-ability depends on what time the walk-through at the Imperial Theatre ends. The one Mona Berk wanted him to see. Chatty little thing, this receptionist. Some of the prospective backers will be there, she said. The angels. Call Information. Get an address for the theater."
I dial
ed Information for the box office, and once connected, repeated the address aloud for Mike. "Two forty-six West Forty-fifth Street. How do you think we'll get in?"
"Keep your sunglasses on. Haven't you always wanted to be an angel?"
"I'm willing to start sometime. So I don't remember anything about this deadly affair. What was it that happened?"
"You know who Stanford White is, don't you?"
"Sure." The accomplished architect's firm-McKim, Mead and White-had created some of the most notable buildings in New York. Among them-Fifth Avenue's University Club and the classic Hall of Fame for Great Americans-were sites that had played a role in cases Mike and I had investigated together.
"Did you know that he designed Madison Square Garden?"
The huge sports and entertainment complex had opened in the 1960s on Seventh Avenue and 33rd Street, but I knew that White had lived more than a century ago. "That's impossible."
Mike was driving down Seventh Avenue. "Not this one. The old one."
"Where was that?"
"Who's buried in Grant's tomb, kid? White built the one on Madison Square-you know, Madison and Twenty-sixth Street. It was a musical theater and concert hall. White was in his fifties when all this happened, but he had a thing for young girls. I mean teenagers like Evelyn Nesbit. You'd have been after his ass."
We parked half a block from the theater and walked toward the entrance.
"How old was Nesbit?"
"Probably fourteen or fifteen when Stanford White met her. She was a great beauty, and had one of those domineering stage mothers who brought her to New York to model for artists."
"Real artists?"
"At first. Then fashion photography, and by fifteen she was a showgirl."
There was a young man at the door of the theater with a list of names in a notebook. He was leaning back in his chair, eyes closed as he listened to his iPod. He must have heard us and sat up. "You are?"
"Mr. Alden's expecting us. Hubert Alden."
He saw Alden's name checked off at the top of the list of twenty or so others and pointed us to the entrance. On a small bronze plaque, I noted that the building was owned by the Shubert Organization.
"What's Mona doing in a Shubert theater?" I asked Mike.
"Probably avoiding Uncle Joe. If she held this audition in a Berk property, he'd be the first to know about it. Might spoil her party."
We intentionally bypassed the orchestra and found the staircase that led to the top tier of this vast theater, which had none of the intimacy of the Belasco. The plaque described it as the home of such musicals as Fiddler on the Roof and Dreamgirls; its walls and ceiling were covered with elegant panels of floral and geometric motifs. One had only to return to the original Broadway theaters to see some of New York's most distinctive and elegant interiors-frescoed walls and ceilings, sculptured reliefs crafted by the great artists of the day, cartouches and decorated glass panels, chandeliers and Tiffany lamps-many restored today to their early splendor.
Mike kept going until we found side seats in the next-to-last row of the balcony. The entire upper half of the house was unlighted and although we could see down to the stage, it would be hard for anyone to notice us.
"The gang's all here," Mike said, in a whisper, "and I'm in my usual seat. Bet you've never been up this high."
The large stage was empty of everything except a baby grand piano and a pianist, and Lucy DeVore, script in hand, dressed only in an ecru-colored lace-trimmed teddy and matching tap pants.
Scattered in the first couple of rows were some familiar heads. Mona Berk was sitting next to Rinaldo Vicci, and Ross Kehoe was rising to walk up the steps to the stage. I guessed that Alden was among the other spectators.
Kehoe called out to whomever was operating the lights. "Give me something cooler. Bring it down a bit, can you?"
The adjustment was made.
Kehoe signaled his approval with a wave and added another direction. "Be ready with an amber spot for Lucy,okay? Something that will really glow, goldenlike. You know how to do that or you need me to come up there?"
From somewhere above us a voice called out, "Got it."
Ross Kehoe nodded and walked into the wings. There was some conversation between Mona Berk and Lucy DeVore, but we couldn't hear it.
"So Evelyn Nesbit?" I asked Mike.
"Everyone wanted a piece of the kid. John Barrymore tried to marry her, but she dumped him for Stanford White. She became White's mistress."
"Did he ever marry her?"
"He already had a wife, and a bunch of children. But he also had a fantastic studio, an apartment at the top of Madison Square Garden-a duplex, just like Joe Berk. On the second floor, suspended from the frame of a skylight, White had a red velvet swing. Story was that he'd give the girls champagne, undress them, and watch them play on the swing-back and forth up to the ceiling of his loft- naked. That was his thing."
A young man, also with script in hand, came out from stage right, and it appeared Lucy was ready to go on.His sleeves were rolled up and he wore khaki pants; Mona called to him to get in place, closer to Lucy. "Harry, I want you right on top of her. It looks more threatening that way when you get mad, when you react towhat she says."
"Harry Thaw," Mike said. "Millionaire kid from Pittsburgh who married Evelyn. Total psycho."
"Did he know about Stanford White?"
"Not enough. Not at first. He knew White liked young chorines-preferably blondes-but Evelyn claimed to Thaw that she was a virgin."
"I take it that Thaw found out she wasn't?"
"One of the papers published a photograph of Evelyn. She looked like she was sleeping, stretched out on a bearskin rug in White's apartment. Her long platinum hair was the only thing covering her."
Mona Berk was standing now, shouting directions to Lucy DeVore.
Lucy was speaking Evelyn's words, the teenager beginning to whimper as she disclosed the story of her deflowering by Stanford White. "I didn't want to be there, Harry. Really, I didn't. I didn't want to drink the champagne, but St-but Mr. White, he made me do it."
Mike was in my ear. "How many times have you heard that excuse in your office, Coop? How do you force someone to drink champagne? Hold her in a headlock and pour the stuff down her throat? I don't get it."
Harry Thaw wasn't buying Lucy's version of events, either. He ranted at her, raising a hand as though to strike his young bride.
"He drugged me, Harry. He must have put something in my drink to make me pass out. You know I wouldn't have given myself to an old man like that willingly."
"Drug-facilitated sexual assault," Mike said. "A hundred years ago."
"False reporting, too. She wouldn't have made it past Mercer's first interview."
Lucy DeVore dissolved into tears pretty effectively as she described how she awakened in White's bed, naked and helpless, and how he took advantage of her without her understanding or permission. Thaw reached to embrace her and the pianist broke into the music for his soliloquy about stolen innocence. Nobody would leave the theater humming that one on opening night.
Ross Kehoe came back onstage and put his arm around Lucy, and together they disappeared off stage left.
A few leggy chorus girls, older than Lucy DeVore and just as well built, sauntered onto the stage, dressed in black leotards that highlighted their blond locks and high-heeled shoes laced at the throat. They limbered up and showed off their talents with stretches and splits, while the pianist vamped some ragtime to invoke the spirit of the Gilded Age setting in which these events had occurred.
Mona was talking to the assembled angels scattered in the theater seats. "So this is the big scene on the roof of Madison Square Garden. Climax of the first act-we'll go to intermission with this one. It's a hot summer night in 1906. A very elegant gentleman is sitting alone at a table, closest to the dancers. That's Stanford White."
A handsome man, prematurely grayed-I guessed-by a dash or two of talcum powder, came onto the stage pushing a small table o
n wheels and carrying a chair that he placed beside it on which to sit.
The piano player kicked up the rhythm and the girls did a stylized dance routine, which Stanford White watched with great enthusiasm, applauding wildly and calling out their names from time to time.
From within the folds of the burgundy curtain on stage right, Harry Thaw slipped onto the stage, pretending to make his way through the imaginary tables of crowded theatergoers. It was hard to take your eyes off the showgirls, whose bodies moved in spectacular synchronicity, but Thaw continued to slink in and around them to the extreme opposite side of the stage.
As the music stopped and one of the girls flopped onto the lap of a delighted Stanford White, a gunshot rang through the nearly empty theater and echoed with the force of a cannon. Harry Thaw had come around from behind and fired a gun into White's back as the dancers screamed and White fell from his chair, taking the chorine with him, all enveloped in a huge cloud of smoke that billowed from behind the thick curtain.
At the sound of the blast, I gripped Mike's arm, surprised by the burst of gunshot. I hadn't remembered that the prominent architect had been murdered by Thaw.
"Relax, kid. That's how it happened in real life."
The smoke began to clear as the music segued into a soft ballad. Thaw and White picked up the table and chair and followed the girls offstage.
From far upstage, against the darkened backdrop, a small spotlight caught a pair of legs-perfectly contoured, long and lean-dangling high above the boards. As the music got louder, a voice from the front row-probably Mona Berk's-yelled out the word "Go!"
The legs kicked, like those of a child pumping a swing on a playground. Within seconds, the vision of the very platinum Lucy DeVore was in full view, her golden hair streaming down as she propelled herself forward and back across the length of the stage, her slinky teddy gleaming in the single spot that followed her movement. The swing descended slowly from the fly, with the motion of a smooth but steady pendulum as the ragtime rhythm picked up the pace.
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