On a signal to each other, Mike and Mercer pulled open the two doors that stood catty-corner in the cul-de-sac of the hallway. Mike took the one that led toward the stage and I was behind Mercer as he moved into the auditorium toward Chet Dobbis.
"What the-" The startled Met director stepped back and dropped into a front-row seat, beneath the glistening white-and-gold detail of the ceiling that shone against the dimly lighted house. "I'm so thankful you're here."
At the same moment, I heard someone running behind the black-curtained area in the wings. I looked from Dobbis, whose sincerity I doubted at this point, back to the source of the footsteps.
Mike streaked across the middle of the stage in pursuit of the shadowed figure, and Mercer doubled back out the door we had entered together and up the steps to join in the chase.
I started toward Chet Dobbis to ask the reason for his gratitude when the theater went completely dark. The thick gray steel fire curtain dropped from the fly down to the floorboards with the alacrity of the blade of a guillotine.
42
Dobbis stood up and I could see the silhouette of his body moving in my direction as I turned back to the exit to push it open. "Miss Cooper, wait!"
I yelled Mike's name and let the door slam on Dobbis as I entered the dead-ended corridor. It was too dark there to see anything except the shiny silver barrel of a revolver that was pointed at my face.
The man holding the gun was Ross Kehoe.
At the instant he started to speak to me, Dobbis barged through the door, which smacked against my back and knocked me into the wall.
Kehoe grabbed my neck with his left hand and pressed the gun barrel to the side of my head, just below my right ear. "Walk, both of you. That way. Lead her, Chet, if you don't want me to blow her brains out all over your back."
The icy feel of the cold metal bore against my skin sent a chill through my body. I twitched involuntarily and Kehoe tightened his grasp on the nape of my neck.
This was the gloved hand that had clamped on me from behind in the darkened stairwell of my building last night, only now I could feel the rough surface of his thick fingers pinching my smooth skin.
"Don't fight me. You won't win this one," Kehoe said as he pushed me ahead of him. His voice was harsher now, more guttural than it had been in Mona Berk's presence. This was Ross Kehoe, street thug and stagehand, before she had tried to gentrify him. Why hadn't I thought of him when I was jumped from behind in the dark, his lean, sinewy body a perfect match for the masked man in black?
Dobbis moved quickly along the darkened corridor and out the door into the lobby. Ross Kehoe told him to head up the steps, so he began to climb the broad staircase first. I looked over at the grating that barred the exit doors but could see nothing toward which I could make a successful run. "Move, Alex. Follow him up."
Kehoe growled his commands at me. He freed my neck so that I could go up behind Dobbis, but the gun barrel nudged at my back with each riser I mounted.
I started to turn right at the top of the stairs, toward the door that led to the adjacent office tower, the one through which Mike, Mercer, and I had entered the back of the theater. But that wasn't the way Kehoe planned to take us.
Kehoe reached out with the gun and tapped me on the arm. "Left. Go left."
Dobbis was standing still. I looked back and forth between the two men but couldn't figure the dynamic. Dobbis seemed as much a prisoner as I did, but he obeyed Kehoe's command immediately and walked the way he was directed.
I expected Mike and Mercer to emerge out of the doors beside the stage within seconds. The sound of our voices would certainly alert them that we were still in the auditorium.
"The detectives will be flooding the place any minute, Chet."
"Shut up, bitch," Kehoe said, slapping the back of my head with his hand. I coughed and bent over, turning to look at him. Dobbis walked on. Kehoe kept licking his lips with his tongue, then twisting it into the side of his mouth, making a sucking sound as irritating as a phonograph needle sliding across an old vinyl record. I'd heard that disgusting noise when he assaulted me last night.
"I told you to move," he said.
I didn't wait to be hit again. I didn't know whether it was good for me-or very bad-that Ross Kehoe's anxiety seemed to be building, almost as much as mine.
There was a second staircase, not quite as wide as the one that led up from the lobby, and Kehoe told Dobbis to take it. "I have lots more time than that, don't I, Chet?" Kehoe asked. "I mean, don't you think the lady's an optimist?"
Were they in this together or not? I couldn't tell.
I kept talking, thinking my words would echo below in the great space of the open theater and that someone would be able hear me sooner or later. "What does he mean, Chet?" I asked.
The steps became more narrow and steep as we climbed behind the second balcony, several hundred seats held aloft by the largest steel beam in the world.
"Tell her. You can tell her," Kehoe said with a laugh, again followed by that awful sucking sound, some kind of nervous reflex that got exercised more frequently when he was stressed.
The gun was still to my back, Kehoe playing with it from time to time, running the metal tip up and down my spine whenever I had to stop to wait for Dobbis. I walked behind him through a doorway and into the balcony area, high above the stage. Another left turn and we were going up more stairs, narrower still, to the very back of the last row of seats in the theater.
Dobbis stopped on the highest step to catch his breath. "When this place, Mecca Temple, was built in the 1920s, it was lit entirely with gas jets. And because they needed the gaslight and torches backstage to help the actors get around when the shows were on, and to light the stage itself, the designers had to be creative about ways to prevent fire from spreading."
I looked down toward the stage, but even in the darkness, the height from these narrow steps and the incredibly steep rake of the upper balcony made the view dizzying. I grabbed the brass railing and held on to it.
Dobbis pointed to the steel trap of a curtain that had cut me off from Mercer and Mike. "The idea here was to be able to transform the stage-in the case of fire-into a chimney, to separate it completely from the seats in order to protect the audience. The flames would be confined to the stage and shoot straight up, while the people in the audience would be safe. They'd have time to escape."
I steadied myself and continued to look for any sign of life below. Dobbis went on. "The curtain was made of asbestos originally. Replaced by steel." He stopped talking and closed his eyes. "This firewall is impenetrable."
Kehoe prodded me to walk again. I clutched the railing so that I wouldn't lose my footing and fall, as we made our way against the red velvet drapes behind the last row of seats. Not far above my head was the ornate ceiling, with elaborate Arabic designs outlined in brilliant gold leaf that seemed to glow in the dark, like the perforated stars that sat recessed into the ceiling beside the unlit chandeliers.
I had to turn sideways to shimmy between the heavy drapery and the last row of seats. "What does that have to do with-"
Dobbis was clutching the seatback of a chair, slowly putting one foot ahead of the other, since he barely fit in the narrow space. "It means that when we redesigned the theater, in order to fireproof the building against an accident or an electrical fire backstage, we did it so that with a single button, the manager could isolate the stage completely. The steel curtain drops in three seconds flat-"
"I think she caught that, didn't she?" Kehoe said, mocking Dobbis.
"There's only another five seconds for anyone onstage to get off when that happens. But then the steel sides and rear drop-and if you don't know they're coming-you get caught in there, just the way your cops did. It's like a giant steel trap."
"But he got out." I was referring to Ross Kehoe, as I grasped the seatbacks and followed Dobbis's baby steps, coming to an abrupt stop behind him as he reached a cement setback in the middle of the row.
&nb
sp; "You remember the way, Chet, don't you? Take those stairs."
"I can't see anything, damn it. You should go ahead of me."
Kehoe laughed. "You could probably scale your way up the side of the Grand Canyon or the top of Everest and you're telling me you can't climb up there? Four more steps, Chet. Feel your way."
Chet Dobbis leaned over the opening and crawled. Kehoe squeezed behind me as I followed Dobbis, still hearing no noise, no sign of rescuers, coming from below.
Kehoe padded like a panther in the darkness, familiar with his surroundings and secure in his footing.
"They'll get out, too," I said, sounding no more confident than I felt. "Soon."
Chet Dobbis was at the top, reaching out a hand for me to stand up in the dusty confines of a storeroom full of antiquated stage lighting equipment. "It won't be that easy for them, Miss Cooper. If I had to make an educated guess, I'd say Ross has sealed the whole place off. Killed all the electricity down there. In half an hour, it has an automatic disengage system built in, but thirty minutes is a long time to wait."
Kehoe pushed me aside and lined up behind us. There was a slice of a footpath between stacks of plywood scenery that had been left leaning against walls and cardboard cartons that were labeled with show titles, costumes and props abandoned on top of them.
"They've got cell phones," I said, remembering that Laura had not gotten one to replace mine before I left the office this afternoon.
"Easier to get through from outer space than from inside that metal enclosure," Dobbis said. "Nobody knows that better than Ross."
"Why?" I asked. "Why does Ross know?"
"'Cause that was my job, girl," Kehoe said, sneering at me, the same irritating noise coming from his lips. "You kept asking me what I did for Joe, didn't you? You think I'm some kind of jerk, don't you?"
Another door for Dobbis to open. Another step into a black chamber, like the poor man's equivalent of entering Tut's tomb. Once again my eyes gradually became accustomed to the greater darkness; the room was piled from top to bottom with theatrical treasures, if not the golden objects of a boy king.
Dobbis was feeling his way through the mess, his movement slowed by the overflow of old sets that were in his way.
"You didn't give me credit for being so smart, did you, Alex?" Again Kehoe clutched my neck with his bare hand, trying to shake an answer out of me. I could feel the calloused skin, the strong grip of a man who had labored as a stagehand for years before being rescued by Mona Berk from his working-class surroundings.
Kehoe squeezed tighter.
I had nothing to say. I hadn't seen a moment's chance to break away on this trek, and now I seemed to have lost the ability to resist against his brute force.
"Joe did. Joe Berk did. Saw me working backstage when I was just getting started. Still a teenager, brought in by my uncle, trying to get into the carpenters' union. Move it, Chet. One more door there, then up a flight. Don't you remember?"
"I've never come this far. Nobody's been there since this place was built."
"Been where?" I asked, the words catching in my throat.
"Forget fucking carpentry. I figured that one out feist. I watched my old man's thumb get ripped to shreds by a saw while he was building a set for some bullshit play that didn't even stay open for two weeks. Tore the bone off down to the joint. Too much back-breaking work, and you're sucking in the sawdust all day long. It was the lights I liked. I liked controlling the whole operation with the flick of one switch. All the juice was in my hands and even old Joe Berk thought I was a genius."
Another pitch-black chamber, this one hung with row upon row of faded costumes.
Royal robes and ballgowns, tutus and tulle skirts of every length, outfits for soldiers and cowboys and chorus girls and cancan dancers.
Dobbis leaned over and half crawled up another set of stairs. "Joe Berk's jack-of-all-trades. You did all his dirty work for him."
"You don't know half of what that old bastard was up to," Kehoe said, waiting for me to follow Dobbis.
"Is this it?" Dobbis asked.
"Open the door."
Chet Dobbis turned his shoulder to the black steel frame and pushed but nothing moved.
Kehoe removed a small silver gadget, the size of a can opener, from his left pocket. He pressed a button on it and the door slid to the side, allowing a slice of light from within to streak down the painted black cement steps.
"It's the dome of the old mosque, Alex. We're going into the dome."
43
One more long wooden staircase, its steps embedded with a row of tiny lights like the pathways that illuminate on airplanes to show the way to the exits in case of emergency.
At the top of the flight, awaiting our arrival, stood Mona Berk.
"Shit," she said to Kehoe. "What are you doing with her, too?"
"I didn't expect the cops to show up in the middle of this. I had to think fast."
"Not your strong suit. Let's figure this out."
Dobbis went first, and despite the danger to both of us, seemed to stand in place and look all around the room, taking in everything he could see.
Ross ordered him to move and when I reached the top of the landing, I understood what had stopped Dobbis in his tracks.
Overhead, in the center of the massive circular structure, was a large skylight. Through it streaked moonbeams from the cloudless April night. Adjacent buildings-large hotels, offices, and high-priced apartments that overlooked the vast space of the mosque dome- also cast down an eerie neon night-light.
And high above me, suspended from the rounded ceiling on lengths of shiny brass chain links, was a red velvet swing-the kind that sixteen-year-old Evelyn Nesbit swung on naked to amuse her paramour, the great Stanford White, and the kind of swing from which Lucy DeVore dropped, likely to die, the day Ross Kehoe walked her backstage for her audition.
"Over there, Chet," Kehoe said, directing him to a sofa in a corner of the great dome that had been furnished to look like a hidden bordello.
When Dobbis took his seat, Ross passed the gun to Mona and told her to keep it on me while he tied Dobbis's hands behind his back with some strips of cloth that looked ready-made for the occasion.
I studied him now, out from behind me for the first time since he'd accosted me. He was edgier still, pushing Dobbis's limbs when the captive director didn't comply fast enough, licking his lips constantly and sucking in more air.
I tried to scope the rest of the room, not wanting to take my eyes off the handgun for many seconds. There was a bed, to the side of the swing, that was dressed in the lavish style of the linens in Joe Berk's room and had the same crest and monogrammed initials; an antique brass clothing stand from which hung a variety of lingerie and robes; a well-stocked bar with liquors, wines, and crystal glasses of every shape and size.
I started to walk back the cat. "Where's the camera?"
"What?" Mona asked.
"That's what you did for Joe, isn't it?" I said to Kehoe, ignoring Mona Berk. "You wired up places for Joe Berk. You're the electrical specialist-that's what you did in theaters, isn't it? You built him an entertainment system that let him watch anybody he wanted-women in dressing rooms, bedrooms, showers-and whatever the hell was going on here, in this… this playground you created for him."
"Whatever turned him on, Alex. That's what he paid me for. Got to the age where Joe wasn't always able to do an evening performance after his matinee. Sometimes he just liked to watch."
Kehoe walked toward me and motioned me back to an area with chairs and a sofa. "You're next, Ms. DA. Pick a seat. Make yourself comfortable."
I didn't move.
"The bitch is so used to telling people what they're supposed to do, I don't think she takes orders well," Mona said. "Ross told you to get over there."
I didn't know whether fear or exhaustion had the tighter hold on me. I was sweating and breathing heavily, but chilled as well and shivering from that. My head throbbed and my neck ached from Keh
oe's angry grip.
As I sat on a straight-backed chair, Kehoe looked around the room for something with which to restrain me. Near the seat of the swing was a length of thick rope, wrapped in a coil, like a cobra waiting to strike. It reminded me of the cables used to hold weights attached to the fly gallery that dropped the scenery onto the stage.
For some reason, Kehoe stepped around that rope and walked instead to the clothing rack. He removed a silk wrap from one of the robes and came back to us, this time taking my hands and tying them tightly behind me. He must have had another plan for the big rope.
There were no windows in the giant circular dome, no way to communicate with the world outside. I guessed there was a hole in the skylight overhead, because a draft of cold, fresh air blew down occasionally, rippling through me with another chill.
Kehoe had taken the gun back from Mona and they had walked a distance away from us to have a conversation.
"Don't you think someone will look up here?" I asked Chet Dobbis. "What did you mean that nobody's ever been in this place? Why?"
"There was never anything up here when the mosque was built but an antiquated ventilation system. All the smoke, all the stale air-it was sucked up here by a behemoth of a fan and dispersed. By the 1940s the whole process had changed and that form of exhaust was replaced with more modern ducts that were installed downstairs. The dome? This has never been used for anything. It's- it's just ornamental."
"Can we get out of here, Chet? Isn't there any way out?"
He had seemed resigned from the beginning to some kind of dreadful fate, timidly following Kehoe's directions, while now I could focus on nothing but finding a way to escape.
Dobbis shook his head and stared down at the floor. "After I left my job here, Kehoe must have done this."
"Done what?"
"There was a renovation of this cupola-first time ever-in 2003. Opened it up so they could get to the outside skin of the dome and replace the old Spanish tiles that had been part of the original installation. Arlette, the woman who replaced me as the center's director, told me they basically swept the place clean and shut it up again."
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