It Happens in the Dark (14 page)

•   •   •

In search of a misplaced visitor from the Midtown North Precinct, Riker returned to the incident room to see that Charles Butler had found the missing man. Now the psychologist, a devout pacifist, lifted Harry Deberman off the ground by six inches, gripping the smaller man’s coat lapels in his fists.

And four detectives stood idly by, watching a civilian manhandle a cop.
That
was interesting.

Riker moseyed across the room, very laid back, his best form for breaking up fights in the making. “Hey, Charles. How’s it goin’?” The psychologist was startled, as if waking from a trance, and surprised to see a man in his hands, hanging there, feet pedaling the air. Wits now collected, Charles’s face colored with an embarrassed flush, probably wondering what to do next—while the cop from Midtown North continued to dangle. And Riker said to the dangling detective, “You got no business back here.”

“Christ! You gonna
do
somethin’ about this guy?”

“Maybe. . . . What’s the beef, Harry?”

“I just asked if anybody was bangin’ the ice queen.”

And now it all made sense. The other men in this room might not find Mallory all that friendly or likeable, but she was
their
damn ice queen.

Riker smiled at Charles. “You mind? She’s my partner. I got dibs.”

The man in hand was slowly lowered to the floor, and Riker leaned in to ask, “Harry, you like your nose the way it is? So pretty and straight?”

Deberman did his best trick. He ran for the door.

But that exit was blocked by the entrance of Jack Coffey, who now grabbed both sides of the doorframe—no way out—and he said, “Okay, Deberman, let me guess. Your captain’s an Axel Clayborne fan, right? We’ll get him an autograph. Don’t let me catch you sneaking back here one more time.”

“I’m on loan. I got the transfer sheet.” Deberman fished through his pockets, muttering, “Where the hell is it? The captain said you’d need a man with experience in the Theater District.”

“Go back and tell him I said thanks.”

Riker could finish that thought for the lieutenant:
Thanks for sending a worthless sack of garbage, hardly a man, and not a very good spy
.

“But I don’t need you,” said Coffey, a man with standards. He was short on manpower and at the point of dragging toddlers off the street to fill out the ranks, but not yet desperate enough to make use of a notorious screwup cop like Harry Deberman.

The drama was done. Deberman was escorted out by four detectives and their boss, leaving Riker alone with a contrite Charles Butler, a rational citizen, who had run amuck today in protective overdrive. The detective had long ago tired of explaining to this man that Mallory was the one with the gun.

And she needed no help from civilians to defend her honor. The entire squad had speculated on her sex life and arrived at a general consensus: If Mallory
did
have sex, she would never leave any survivors to verify it. And so this was a dead issue among the detectives of Special Crimes.

Riker sent the psychologist home with a strong suggestion. “
Stay
home till we call you.” Charles’s display of gallantry would certainly get back to Mallory—maybe six seconds from now. She would not like being the object of a squad-room joke, and it was doubtful that she would find use for a consulting shrink anytime soon. She could hold on to a grudge for years.

SUSAN:
Why don’t they
say
something? (One twin takes a practice swing with the baseball bat. Susan screams.)

ROLLO:
I told you they didn’t need words.

—
The Brass Bed
,
Act II

Riker and Mallory had parted company in SoHo, and now they were meeting up again on Avenue A in the East Village, each of them following their own stagehand. The pimpled boy, Garnet, and Randal, the lollypop kid, were dressed in clean parkas and jeans. When the wind was blowing his way, Riker noticed that they smelled better, a likely sign that the duo was looking for female companionship. At their age, every night was date night in New York City.

But no, they took their shadow cops for a stroll through Tompkins Square Park.

Behind the cover of the band shell, the detectives watched them scoring dope out in the open, sitting on a bench with another amateur at the drug trade, a youngster who toted a book bag that gave him up as a student from NYU.

“Janos was right about those two,” said Riker. The stagehands
were
stupid kids. “They’re making this way too easy.” He used his cell phone to photograph the stagehands’ drug buy. The student had even accommodated these shots in the dark by waiting for his customers under a lamppost, and this did not speak well for higher education. Was that kid stoned? Yes, he was. In the old days, a drug dealer never sampled his product. Oh, where were the pros of yesteryear?

The buy was done. The stagehands and their shadow cops were off again. The next stop was a saloon with an older clientele, a place that would not cater to teenagers with fake IDs to jack up their ages. The bartender’s suspicious eyes were on Garnet and Randal, but they never bothered to take off their parkas. The detectives watched them through the window, and the stagehands watched the door. Now one boy nudged the other when a customer Riker’s age entered the bar, a rich man judging by the cut of his coat and the pretty woman at his side. The teenagers walked up to him with no hustle, no sales pitch or haggle on price. By handshakes all around, Garnet’s hand palming cash, and Randal’s shake slipping contraband to the buyer, the deal was concluded, and the boys were out the door and down the street, followed by Mallory and Riker. Neither one of the stagehands ever looked back. They did not possess one iota of the paranoia issued to every New Yorker at birth.

Onto the next block, they were into the next bar, where customers were a blend of ages, twenties to forties, and the teenagers were not even carded. Garnet slapped hands in a high five with the bouncer at the door, and Riker knew more money had traveled from pocket to pocket. Everything could be bought in this town. Given enough cash, ten-year-olds could get stinking drunk in this dive. The detectives watched the stagehands spend their proceeds, trying their luck with the ladies, but they always approached the prettiest girls. Pimples and Lollypop had no shot with Pretty.

Past ten and into the nightclub hours, Riker bowed out of the shadow detail as the teens descended steps to a basement club on Houston. The place was jumping with live music that shut off like a radio when the door closed behind Garnet and Randal.

Riker had aged out of his garage-band days when he had played a wicked electric guitar, though damned if he could say how he had gotten from then to now. A middle-aged man could not follow the boys down into that young scene below the sidewalk.

But Mallory could.

Age bowed to Beauty. He left her standing there and headed south for the station house and a long night of cold calls to drug-rehab centers, hunting the one that might have sheltered Dickie Wyatt. Riker favored night-shift workers for these interviews. Bored witless, they were the ones most likely to welcome conversation in the small hours.

As he strolled past the desk sergeant, the man pointed to the visitors’ bench on the other side of the room, and Riker turned to see Axel Clayborne rising from his seat.

“I never told him you’d be back tonight,” said the sergeant, an unabashed Clayborne fan, who had certainly done just that. “He’s been parked here for an hour.”

Riker watched the smiling movie star cross the floor, one hand extended for a shake. The detective kept both hands in his coat pockets, saying, “It’s late. Try me tomorrow.”

Clayborne’s smile never faltered with this slight. “Thought you might have time for a drink. I’m buying.”

“Oh, yeah?” Any suspect walking into a copshop of his own volition had Riker’s attention, especially at this time of night. Some perps, the bold ones, the sickest kind, loved to insinuate themselves into an investigation.

“I’ll be right with you.” The detective opened his notebook and scribbled instructions for the desk sergeant to fetch him some backup, while telling the civilian, “I know just the place.”

Clayborne followed him back outside, into the wind and through the slush as they crossed two streets and turned a corner, heading toward the neon light of a cop bar.

When they walked in the door, Riker saw two men from Special Crimes ending a long day into night at one of the tables, and he spotted another man from his squad at the bar, but they were here by luck. Detectives Sanger and Washington had come in behind him by design, donating free time to the cause. With only brief eye contact and a nod toward the movie star, Riker snagged the other three men into the action as he led the way to an empty table and took the chair that put his back to the wall. The actor sat down with no view of the room, unaware of men drifting toward him from all quarters.

“Save me some time,” said Riker. “Give me the name of Dickie Wyatt’s rehab clinic.”

“So that’s where he was.” Clayborne shrugged off his coat.

“Like you didn’t know.”

“Dickie never told me where he was going.”

“He was an old friend,” said Rubin Washington, who stood behind the actor’s chair. “But not a
good
friend. You didn’t miss him much when he died.”

Riker caught a wince of pain on the actor’s face that put a lie to that.

Washington sat down and humped his chair closer to the actor, bumping up against him now to make the angry point that he was not a man to be screwed with. “Where’s that rehab clinic?”

Gonzales wore a mean scowl as he pulled out a chair and sat down on the other side of Clayborne, completing the squeeze.

“You’ll have to excuse them,” said Riker. “They didn’t like the play. Dressing that actress up like a cop? That didn’t win you any love. Now gimme a name.”

“I didn’t
know
Dickie was in rehab,” said Clayborne. “When his contract was up, he left the play. The next day, his phone was disconnected, and he was just . . .
gone
.”

“Then you must be one of his dope buddies.” Detective Sanger settled into a chair beside Riker’s. “You’d be like poison to an addict in recovery.”

“We used to get high, okay?
Dickie
was the addict. I only kept him company.”

“Shooting heroin with your best bud,” said Sanger. “What a pal. So who supplied the dope that killed him?”

“Not
me
.” Clayborne was close to indignant. “And I only did recreational drugs. A few lines of coke, some reefer now and then. Dickie used to shoot up, but he got clean years ago. He was—”

“You’re
lying
,” said Washington, leaning close to the man’s ear, but not to whisper. He shouted, “Wyatt was getting high during rehearsals!
You
told me that!” The detective
radiated
intimidation.

The waitress held her tray to her breast like a shield, and she backed away from their table.

“That was a relapse,” said Clayborne, “a bit of backsliding on Dickie’s part. So rehab makes perfect sense. He was vigilant about staying clean. And valiant. Every day was a fight to beat his habit. Heroic, I’d say.”

Two more detectives joined the party to flank Riker’s chair when he said, “You know who you sound like? . . . The ghostwriter.”

“Yeah,” said Gonzales, removing his topcoat. “Flowery, kind of fruity for my taste.” And now he also shed his suit jacket for a public display of muscle—and a gun in his shoulder holster. “So it was
your
idea to knock off Mallory’s head in that play.”

In a breach of cop etiquette for public places, more guns were exposed all around the table as detectives continued this striptease—off with the coats, rolling up shirtsleeves, a signal that things were about to get physical. And this was a lie. The saloon had one rule—no bloodletting. But Clayborne believed his eyes, and he turned them to Riker, the only man still fully dressed and close to civil.

The game was Good Cop—
Gang
of Bad Cops.

Lonahan walked up behind the actor’s chair and placed his beefy hands on the man’s shoulders. He spoke in his normal tone of voice, loud enough to be heard in the outer boroughs. “So you got a little fantasy goin’ here—killin’ women. Ain’t that what your play’s about? And now Mallory’s the—”

“It’s
not
my play! And I don’t wish
any
harm to Detective Mallory. I
like
her.”

And every cop at the table took
that
for a lie.

Except for Riker. He believed the actor, but only because of the man’s short acquaintance with Mallory. Anybody under eighty would be attracted to her—then disturbed by her—and last would come the back-away dance that begged distance from her. Clayborne might have a high tolerance for strange, but it was a rare man who could truly care for that little sociopath—a man like Charles Butler—who had just walked in the door.

The tall psychologist spotted Riker from across the room. Then he smiled and raised both hands in a show of surrender as he approached the table. The comical face that could not hide a thought announced that he was here to make peace.

The detective turned to the actor. “I want you to meet a friend of mine.”

•   •   •

Mallory’s first dancing partner had been Louis Markowitz. He had taught her the fox trot, the waltz and the tango, but he had truly been a fool for rock ’n’ roll. So said his wife, Helen, the dancing queen, on nights when the two of them rolled back the living room rug to twirl and shake it up and down the floorboards, stepping to the beat of vintage tunes from the sixties and seventies.

The whole house had rocked throughout her childhood in their care.

Early into her teens, she had learned to dance with partners her own age, to touch classmates without hurting them. However, Helen’s talking-to-boys lesson had been something of a failure. Her foster father had explained the flaw one spring night in Brooklyn while they sat outside on the front porch. A date had escorted her to a school dance, and she had come home alone. “It’s not your fault, kid,” the old man had said to her then. “You were born with gunslinger eyes. Forget that boy. One day you’ll meet a guy you can’t scare.” He had laughed. Like that was a joke. “But, seriously, kid, how did you like the band?”

Tonight, Mallory stood inside a crowd of bodies pressed up against hers in smells of perfume and cologne, sweat and booze. They all swayed and stomped to the worst of rock music from a live band, and every one of the musicians should be shot dead. Yet there
was
a beat, and she danced to it, danced with every comer, never losing sight of the stagehands, who sat out every song at the bar with their backs to the room, having given up on being turned down by women.

Joe Garnet took a call on his cell phone. Mallory noted the exact time as she grabbed her jacket off the back of a chair with an idea that the three of them would be moving on soon.
Yes.
The boys pulled on their parkas, and Ted Randal made a call as they all walked out the door, the two stagehands and their blond shadow.

She followed them back to the park, where they stood by the same bench, looking around, and an angry Garnet said to his cell phone, “Where the hell are you, man?” The night was too bitter cold for their dealer to run an open drugstore, and he had yet to show.

Now they all had time to kill.

It was one o’clock.
Perfect.
She searched her pockets and found the index card that Clara Loman had given her this morning. She read the contact numbers for the Nebraska sheriff who had refused to share details of an old family massacre. Mallory figured the man for an early riser who would have gone to bed hours ago. Her call was picked up on one ring—had to be a bedside phone—and a sleepy voice said, “Yeah?” And when she had given him her name and rank, he asked, “Do you know what the hell time it is, Detective Mallory?”

She heard the sound of a lamp switched on. There would be no warm-up for the sheriff. She planned to knock him off his stride, knock him right off the edge of his nice warm bed. “About that old massacre,” she said. “Did the twins know any forensic details? Or did they really stay in the attic the whole time their family was being slaughtered?”

Silence.

She needed better bait. “Why weren’t those boys registered for school? Both of the girls were.”

“I’d have to say I’m definitely cozying up to you, ma’am. Call me back if you can tell me something
useful
.”