It Happens in the Dark (19 page)

He set down their lunch orders. They never thanked him for anything.

The twins had seemed halfway normal when he had first met them. Then they had stepped into their roles and stayed there, never speaking anymore, only making needs known by grunts and giggles, true to their roles in the play. These days, they even attacked their food in a dimwitted way, dribbling here, spilling there. He watched them rip open the bags, sending french fries flying and dropping bits of coleslaw on the floor.

Another mess to clean up. Animals.
Chimps!

The gopher shifted from foot to foot, looking this way and that, waiting for the next dustup. Alma Sutter sat at the stage manager’s desk, swilling coffee and reading one of her many dog-eared books on acting, as if she could learn her craft that way. She popped something into her mouth. Not a candy. Not a vitamin.

If not for the drug habit, she could afford an acting coach. Though just now, she acted scared, one hand rising to cover her mouth.

Not bad
. Was she practicing some new piece of stage business—or maybe an acting exercise from her book?

Her head snapped to attention, and then her whole body trembled.

Bugsy approved. Those new moves would work nicely with a role that was wall-to-wall terror.

Bring it on, girl.

Now came the slow turn of her head, and she stared at the blackboard behind her chair. Though there was nothing written there, she quickly turned away, convincingly horrified.

Very
convincing. This was
good
. She was playing off her own paranoia, using it,
working
it. Bugsy could almost hear the scrabble of ghost chalk on the board.

Alma had attracted the attention of the Rinaldi brothers, who quick-stepped out of character, no longer slack-jawed, dull-eyed boys. As her head lifted again, so did theirs, and they copied her act, move for move, tremble and fear. And then they locked eyes with the actress.

She yelled at them, “You hear it, too!”

The Rinaldi twins snapped back into their stage roles and grunted in unison, a dialect of chimpanzee that meant
What?
Are you nuts?

•   •   •

Riker and Mallory were last in line, and Janos was at the head of this parade as eight detectives marched down the hall to the incident room. And, all the while, their leader played up the midwestern slaughter with a houseful of blood and a headless girl.

When they had all gathered before the cork wall, the story hour began with Janos reading aloud from recently posted newspaper articles on an old family massacre in Nebraska. And when he was done, he turned to his audience. “It all pans out with the play. The mother and her sister, a grandmother, the little girls and twin boys in the attic.”

And Gonzales said, “But nothin’ about a murder weapon.”

“Two weapons.” Mallory opened her copy of the play to a page of highlighted lines. “A baseball bat and an axe.”

Gonzales shook his head. “That’s not—”

“Okay,” said Janos, before Gonzales could poke a new hole in his patter. “Those are details the sheriff held back. So if the ghostwriter got that part right, we can nail him.”

“A bat and an axe?” This was news to Washington, who had no idea how the play would end, and Janos, his own partner, would not tell him. “Okay, that says crime of opportunity. The women and kids were killed with weapons found at the scene.”

“Yeah,” said Riker, not wanting to douse this contribution with the prevailing theory of a premeditated mass murder. “Nebraska’s woodpile country. Half those people got axes lying around. And a baseball bat fits with kids in the house.”

“
Maybe
I can buy that,” said Gonzales the Spoiler. “But what about the guy in the brass bed? In the play, he’s a third survivor. The newspapers only count the two boys. You
know
the reporters interviewed neighbors up and down that street. Hard to screw up the body count.”

“Unless the third kid was a shut-in,” said Lonahan. “The guy in the play’s a cripple.”

“Nice point,” said Riker. “If we had more time, we’d canvass the neighborhood by phone, maybe turn up someone else livin’ in that house.”

“Then,” said Janos, “there’s court records, tax records and—”

“So,” said Gonzales, “you figure this sheriff keeps a material witness in the closet—for
ten years
? Too bad we can’t just ask him.”

Mallory smiled at his mention of the word
we
.

•   •   •

Though the sheriff’s rented jeep was the only vehicle on the highway in this storm, he had managed to run it into a ditch hundreds of miles short of New York City.

His head ached something fierce, and it took some time to focus his eyes.

He stared at the blood on the steering wheel. A minute crawled by before he looked at the rearview mirror and made the connection to the bleeding wound on his forehead. And now he realized why this vehicle had not been snapped up from the airport rental lot: The airbag had not been replaced after some previous wreck. What else might be wrong with this damn jeep? And how long had he been unconscious?

God
damn
, it was cold.

He closed his tired eyes for a moment, allowing reason to make inroads through the wad of cotton that passed for his brain, and then he did the logical thing, making repeated attempts to call for help—while sitting in a cell-phone dead zone.

If his runaway wife were here, assuming that she still cared if he lived or died, she would look at the bright side: All this fucking snow would surely melt in the spring.
Foulmouthed woman
. And then, with the lightest sarcasm, she would suggest that he might want to hole up someplace warm—since the car was dead
and
the heater. But, stupid man who never listened to her, he should on no account close his eyes one more time or he would surely die.

Before his ex-wife, who wasn’t there, could kick his ass out of the jeep, he opened the door, putting all his weight behind a mighty shove against the imprisoning snow. It was past knee deep when he left the vehicle. Every step was struggle and strain before wife-sense kicked in again, and he swung his suitcase like a hammer, tamping down snow to make the steep incline climbable, though it was slow going.

His back ached, and his arms were sore before both feet were finally planted on the roadbed. While following a hazy glow that might be a sign for a motel, he fell on his face to roll the rest of the way down an off-ramp.

He could hear his ex-wife laughing all the way from Nebraska.

Flat on his back, he longed to close his eyes, to sleep a little. But he picked himself up and batted off the caked snow. As he slogged across a motel parking lot of cars buried under white mounds, in his thoughts, he composed a postcard to the laughing woman who was always stepping lightly around his mind—making promises to her that he might keep this time—this hundredth time.

When he was past the glass doors and standing in the lobby, he had no feeling in his hands or feet, but he had apparently passed through the dead zone. His cell phone was ringing, Mallory calling. The postcard to his wife was forgotten when the young detective asked, “Which boy owned the baseball bat? Or did it belong to one of the girls?”

Did she know about the axe, too?

The sheriff hesitated just a hair of a second too long. And he knew he would not be believed when he said, “I know their dad played ball in his younger days.”

“You won’t tell me the truth, but you won’t lie. Is that it?”

“Neither one of those boys ever played—”

“What about the
third
boy . . . the older one you’ve got stashed away? Odd that the neighbors never mentioned him to reporters. But they never saw that kid, did they? He never left the house. Maybe that was
his
bat . . . before he was bedridden. . . . I guess that’s your cue to hang up on me, Sheriff.”

And he did.

ROLLO:
The window glass was made to ward off pigeons, bullets and small aircraft. How could you possibly expect to break it with your shoe?

—
The Brass Bed
, Act II

Axel Clayborne danced the Fat Man’s Ballet, completing a twirl on the ball of one foot, arms and legs flung wide as the points of a star, and then a short run of steps ending in a leap onto the brass bed. But there was no second leap through the wide window. He was staring at it when the stage manager appeared beside the bed. “Cyril, do we want crashing glass for a rehearsal?”

Cyril Buckner shouted at the stagehands in the wings, “Forget something?”

Joe Garnet and Ted Randal appeared behind the window in the scenery, and they pulled out the pane of breakaway stunt glass. That took five seconds by Riker’s count.

The detective and his partner sat with Gil Preston in the dark of the back row for another five wasted minutes. Mallory could not get one complete sentence from the young man, who sweated and stammered and could not get past “—l-l-let—”

And Mallory said, “Let go? The understudy was fired? When did that happen?”

Yes-or-no answers were easy, but this one might take a few days. Before Gil could soil his pants, Riker shot a glance at Mallory, and then he tapped the face of his wristwatch, shorthand for
Time’s a wasting.

With her knapsack slung over one shoulder, she stepped into the aisle and walked toward the stage.

Riker resumed the interview. “So tell me about the ghostwriter’s line changes. That must’ve pissed off the actors.”

“The twins didn’t care,” said the suddenly stammer-free Gil. “They don’t have any lines. And Axel Clayborne’s word perfect in six seconds. In the beginning, it wasn’t a problem for Alma, either. But these days, she’s not all that good with changes. Kind of spacey—when she isn’t hyper.”

“What about the stage manager?”

“Oh, Cyril just went along with the director. They all did. Except Peter. He was always getting angry and walking out.”

“What about you?”

“It drove me
nuts
! And that was
before
I took over the lighting director’s job.” Gil faced the stage, where Clayborne had begun his dance again. “I was just an assistant when the ghostwriter came up with that ballet scene, but
I
did all the work. And those damn blackout scenes—new light cues every time they changed the blocking. Well, you can’t do Axel’s follow lights from a booth. I had to drag my light panel up to the—”

“Okay, I get it.” Riker opened his newspaper to the sports page, as if this interview might be over. It was not. “Ever play baseball?”

“Sure, who didn’t?”

“I didn’t,” said Riker. “I was a city kid. Stickball’s my game. But you were born on the Texas Panhandle. Geography ain’t my strong point, kid. Is that anywhere near Nebraska?”

•   •   •

Inside a locked drawer, Cyril Buckner’s small computer awakened from sleep mode, wirelessly stretching, reaching up through layers of wood and surrendering to the remote keyboard on Mallory’s open laptop.

She sat at Buckner’s desk in the wings, and he remained standing, surly as a schoolboy in detention. He had no regional accent, but that was the way of Army brats; they grew up here and there and everywhere, never stopping long enough to acquire a local dialect.

While aiming for a look of boredom, she tapped the keys of her laptop, her window on the computer in the drawer, and covertly opened his personal files, hunting for family ties to Nebraska. “So they all bring you their little problems. Alma seems edgy to me. Did she ever come to you with anything interesting?”

“Like a murder confession?” Could the detective have found a dumber way to waste his time? By the look on his face, he thought not. And he never noticed the theft in plain sight, the download of his private journal.

Mallory opened more of his files and stole copies of them, one by one. “I was thinking about her drug habit.”

The man’s bad attitude vanished, and she caught him in a smile. For her next trick, she read his mind. “You know she’s jazzed on something, but you can’t ask her to pee in a cup—that’s not in Alma’s contract. So now you’re thinking maybe I can prove it for you. Then you can fire her for cause.” Yes, it was all panning out. His nod was so slight. Was he even aware of doing it? “You like Alma’s understudy that much?”

Buckner turned smug, too secure in that last wrong-track question. He was hiding something—not for long, though. More files sailed from drawer to desktop, streaming faster than a judge could deny a search warrant.

“But that understudy won’t get the job,” said Mallory. “You fired her. . . . I know about Nan Cooper’s replacement contract. Don’t lie. One warning is all you ever get from me.” As she spoke, Buckner’s copy of that contract was downloading from his laptop to hers, followed by all of the other contracts.

“Dickie mentioned it before he left. He asked me to look after Nan.”

“And sabotage Alma?” No, that was a dead end. The man was only annoyed. Before he could respond, she asked, “Who else knew about Nan Cooper’s replacement deal?”

The stage manager shrugged. “Nobody.”

This
might
be the truth—if everyone else in this theater had the same simple faith in locked drawers. She put his laptop back to sleep and closed the lid on her own machine, signaling the end of the interview—before she got to the only question she cared about. And now she phrased it as a parting thought. “I hear Clayborne never played baseball in his life. Bugsy tells me the man was clumsy when he swung the bat in rehearsals. But Leonard Crippen said he did pretty well on opening night. So who stepped up and taught him how to swing that bat like a pro?”

“I did.”

•   •   •

As the stage manager walked away, Axel Clayborne strolled into the wings and stood beside the young cop seated at the desk. She opened her laptop to stare at the screen, and he recycled a line from an old movie script. “You have the eyes of a stone killer.”

Apparently, Detective Mallory had heard this one before. She never looked up from her computer. A passing bug on the wing would have elicited a stronger response. And so, playing a fly on the wall, he casually perused her glowing screen as she sifted through files. The young cop was reading the cost sheet of a canceled marketing campaign for a play that was hemorrhaging money. He watched her open another file to study a history of stage diagrams for blocking the fantasy sequence.

He leaned down to say, “I heard you casting aspersions on my bat-swinging technique.”

“But
not
your dancing. I know you were trained in ballet—
years
of training.” Only Mallory could make that sound like a history of child molestation.

“I can tap-dance, too. That was my entrée to Broadway. I was a chorus boy my first time out. This is the same theater where I—”

“So the ghostwriter wrote the Fat Man’s Ballet just for you. That was a piece of luck, finding a classically trained ballet dancer who could act.”

“Luck? Hardly. More like inspiration. The ghostwriter’s changes began after we were in rehearsals and—”

“That’ll work for the media, but not the police. I don’t think Peter Beck believed it, either. His work wasn’t being changed. It was being replaced with a full-blown play.” She scrolled back a few pages and stopped at a photograph. “Here. This is where the ballet scene showed up on the blackboard.”

He looked down at the complex scheme of dance notations made in chalk.

“I could e-mail this to the SSDC. That union handles choreographers, right?”

“No, don’t do that.” No one from that union had been involved in the ballet scene, and now he had a vision of marchers with picket signs outside the theater. “Why would you—”

“A choreographer might tell me it takes lots of time to work out a dance routine like this one. But these diagrams date back to the second day of rehearsals.” She had yet to look up from her laptop screen. “That must’ve put you at the top of Beck’s shortlist. Did he call you out?”

“Gunfight parlance? I
love
it.” But the young gunslinger beside him was not amused. “In fact, Peter did accuse me of being the ghostwriter. I told him I’d never even
thought
of trying my hand at writing.”

“Then you lied,” said a man’s rough voice behind him.

Axel turned around to see that Mallory’s partner had quietly joined them.

Riker slouched against the wall. “I know why you got blacklisted in Hollywood. You thought a screenplay sucked—so you rewrote it. That movie went over budget.
Big
time. The studio shut down production. And they
canned
your ass.”

Axel turned his smile on the prettier detective, his preferred source of abuse. “Film studios are run by morons.”

“Pissed-off morons,” said Riker. “They had to eat the losses.”

“They had no vision, no faith,” said Axel, appealing to Mallory.

Whoa
, no mercy there.

He spoke to the neutral zone between the detectives. “My director did the rewrites on that film. I always give credit where it’s due, and Dickie Wyatt was a freaking genius.”

•   •   •

Cyril Buckner stood in the center of the lobby, warding off reporters, shouting, “She only fainted, damn it!” In response to another question hollered from the back of the crowd, he said, “I don’t care
what
Alma’s agent said. She was back at work an hour later!”

One reporter directed a cameraman to change his angle, and then he yelled, “Miss Sutter!”

Buckner turned to see Detective Mallory in dark glasses. She had just passed through the lobby doors, and now she was surrounded by cameras and lights as reporters called out “Alma” this and “Miss Sutter” that.

Idiots.

He glanced at the theater poster on the wall, a rush job, a brand-new shot of Alma Sutter in stage makeup and the detective’s haircut. But the two women were hardly identical. Yet the reporters were mobbing the young cop, mistaking her for the actress, who was the paler version of Mallory.

And now he understood their error.

Outside the context of a stage, Alma was only a face in the crowd, not all that special in New York City, home to a million pretty girls, most of them not so well dressed as Mallory. Buckner coveted her shearling jacket, and he could even name the pricey designer. But there was more to her draw than wardrobe. Though her eyes were hidden by the aviator sunglasses, another designer item with
real
gold rims, Mallory had star quality, attracting these satellites and pulling them toward her, commanding attention without a hand lifted, without a word spoken.

And another reporter called out, “Miss Sutter?”

Mallory smiled with more perfect teeth than Alma’s, saying, “Yes?”

“Is it true you only fainted?”

“That’s right. I just needed a vitamin shot. Good as new. But I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the police for doing a wonderful job—even though they’re so
shorthanded
on this case.”

The reporters and cameramen followed her out to the street, where she signed an autograph for an excited passerby, who had no idea who she might be, but she was so obviously
somebody
.

•   •   •

“Shorthanded?” With a flick of his remote, Jack Coffey killed the broadcast on his office television set. It was only a local cable show, but that clip might make the network news tonight.

He
could
commend Mallory for undoing the damage of the agent’s press conference at the hospital. Or he could shoot her for that public reprimand on his allocation of manpower. What to do? The lieutenant was leaning toward the bullet remedy when he turned to the man standing before his desk.

“She’s right,” said Detective Sanger. “Mallory and Riker need more backup.”

Traitor.

“I gave them Janos. How’d they snag
you
?”

“I took a look at their drug angle.” Sanger handed him a sheet of Alma Sutter’s phone records and pointed to an underscored number. “If this throwaway cell links back to the stagehands, and I’m
real
sure it does, that ties them to a dealer. And I
don’t
mean their dweeb connection in Tompkins Square Park. That kid’s a lightweight, a joke.
This
guy peddles heroin with one street name. Let’s say the ME can match it to Wyatt’s last fix. The connection’s still dicey. It all hangs on phone records. The stagehands would have to roll on a customer . . . like Alma Sutter. Her records are the bible for the burner phones. She’s the cast junkie.”

It would also help to know where Dickie Wyatt ate his last bowl of chili.

“But Mallory and Riker have too many leads to chase down,” said Sanger. “They got ties to an old massacre in Nebraska. There’s a profit motive in Beck’s will. And then there’s a copyright angle, the drugs—”

“Okay! Enough. You’re the new man on the theater homicides. Hook up with Clara Loman. She’s working a chili angle for Mallory.” And when Sanger’s eyes got a little wider, the lieutenant said, “I don’t want that getting back to Loman’s boss.” If Heller found out that Mallory was co-opting CSU staff, there would be war. “When you hit the chili joints, flash pictures of Wyatt and Sutter.”