It Happens in the Dark (3 page)

Mallory pointed to a row of small bulbs lodged at the foot of one wall and leading to the red glow of an exit sign. “When the houselights go down, how bright are those emergency lights?”

“J-j-just bright enough for people to find their way out during a performance,” said Gil. “Except near the end of the first act—that was the blackout cue.
All
the lights were out for forty seconds. The lobby, too. Even the exit signs.”

The stage manager yelled, “That’s a violation of the fire code! What the
hell
were you—”

“I followed your instructions, okay?” Gil dropped to hands and knees, madly searching the fallen pages that littered the stage. Clutching one, he waved it like a white flag. “Here! Look for yourself. You added that cue to my—”

“No,” said Cyril Buckner, “I didn’t make
any
changes for lighting cues.”

“So those lights were on the whole time
last
night,” said Mallory, “but not tonight.” She faced the stage manager,
daring
him to lie to her. “Who
else
makes changes like that?”

“The ghostwriter.”

•   •   •

Backstage, a wooden staircase led up to a loft platform. Its railed walkway was lined with dressing rooms, and Mallory longed to see what was behind those locked doors, but the supervisor of the CSIs had been taken ill and taken away, and the detective had not yet convinced the remaining team to violate laws of search and seizure.

Maybe later.

She stood beside the gopher in the wings. Here, Cyril Buckner’s desk had a view of the stage through an open doorway in a scenery flat, but Mallory faced the other way, reading words on a large blackboard bolted to a more solid wall of brick.

“That board’s really old,” said Bugsy. “It’s been there forever. The ghostwriter’s the only one who uses it. That’s how he talks to us.”

“He’s never screwed with a change sheet before.” Cyril Buckner walked into the end of this conversation, accompanied by a uniformed escort. The stage manager turned to read the message on the blackboard. “Oh, shit! Well, you
know
that’s new.” He flicked through pictures on his cell phone to show the detective what had been written there earlier in the evening.

Mallory confiscated the phone and gave a nod to the waiting officer, who led the stage manager away. Bugsy remained, never drifting far from her side, as if tethered by a leash. This little man was
her
creature now.

With her back turned to the blackboard, the detective looked through the door in the scenery. Amid the stage furnishings of a brass bed, a table and a wheelchair, CSIs stood on taped
X
s, standing in for actors while they reconstructed the moment when the playwright’s corpse was discovered in the front row. The cast and crew members, under the watch of officers, were tucked into widely spaced theater seats. But one of these people had slipped out of captivity for a while. The theater hummed with the comings and goings of cops and techs, and none of them had noticed the escapee at work on the blackboard.

“That spook’s the only one who uses chalk,” said Bugsy. “The stage manager uses a computer.” He unlocked a drawer in the desk and lifted a laptop to show her a stack of printouts. “Here ya go. Rehearsal notes, lighting cues, line changes. I post ’em on the callboard by the stage door.”

Riker walked up behind them as the gopher explained the odd history of one play replacing another, line by line, via anonymous changes printed on the blackboard.

Was her partner listening to any of this? No, he was not.

Sloughing off his winter coat, Riker sat on the edge of the desk. Though it only took a moment to read the words on the blackboard, he continued to stare at them—and Mallory stared at his suit. There were no wrinkles or stains, though he rarely resorted to dry cleaning until it was well past time to throw away his worn-out threads. A brand-new suit? Only a family wedding would rate this extreme measure; he was more lax about the funerals. She had not been invited, perhaps because she never showed up at these events. But when had he tired of asking her to come?

“Look at this.” She held up the stage manager’s cell phone to show him the small photograph of block letters in white chalk. “The ghostwriter was rewriting Peter Beck’s play.”

Because Riker would not wear bifocals in public, he only nodded, never taking his troubled eyes off the actual blackboard in front of him.

Bugsy leaned in close to look at her picture of it on the small screen. “Oh, that’s the spook’s line change for the second act.”

Those chalked words had since been erased and replaced with a new message:
GOOD EVENING, DETEC
TIVE MALLORY. HOW YOU
INSPIRE ME. FORGIVE
ME, MUSE. CRUEL, I KNOW
, BUT YOU MUST LOSE Y
OUR LOVELY HEAD. OH, T
HE BLOODY THINGS I D
O FOR ART.

“Very formal,” said Riker. “Even for a first date.”

SUSAN:
A spinal injury?

ROLLO:
My own carelessness. . . . I tripped in the blood. It was everywhere.

—
The Brass Bed
, Act I

Clara Loman walked onstage, buttoning her coat over the white coveralls of a CSI. The overhead lights deepened the frown lines of this tall, lanky woman with gray hair and rank. One rung below the commander of Crime Scene Unit, she supervised the night shift from a desk, rarely venturing into the field. Tonight was the exception, due to the burst appendix of her senior man. And so she had been late to arrive at the theater—and appalled to find Mallory issuing orders to crime-scene investigators.
That
was intolerable.

With terrifying efficiency, Loman had spent the past hour whipping her crew of CSIs in a race to bag the forensic evidence and
move on.
Now she informed the two homicide detectives that her people had business elsewhere tonight “—and your questions
will
be brief.” She spread a large sheet of graph paper across the brass bed at the center of the stage.

The CSIs had diagrammed ground-floor parameters for the crime scene, though the stairs to off-limits dressing rooms were marked, as were the exits and large objects. But Riker was only interested in the initialed
X
s for the positions of cast and crew during the forty seconds when Peter Beck was being murdered in the dark.

So far no one had been caught lying in the crosscheck of statements made to CSIs when asked the key question: Where were you when the lights went out?

Loman tapped the
X
s initialed by the two stagehands. “I ruled out these kids. They were moving props and furniture around during the blackout. I clocked them myself on a run-through. There wasn’t enough time to do their jobs
and
a murder in the audience.”

Ruling suspects in or out was not her call, but Riker had been raised well, and he would not engage in a pissing contest with a woman who had more gray hair than he did. “What’d your guys get off our witness, the lady sitting next to Peter Beck?”

“She caught the bloodfly from the razor. No way she’d get that kind of splatter pattern if she was the slasher. Send the woman home.” This was said in the unmistakable tone of an order, as if the detectives might be Loman’s underlings.

They were not.

Riker’s partner appeared to let this slide. Oh, no, that was wishful thinking on his part. Her smile was just a flash, a
taste
of things to come. He shot her a glance to beg,
Play nice. Please?

The CSI supervisor pulled on a pair of woolen gloves to announce that she was leaving, and Mallory politely asked, “How much blood would’ve landed on our perp?”

“A few flecks or none at all. Given the angle of the wound, the killer was sitting on Beck’s left and reaching across him to make the cut. The victim was a shield for the bloodfly.” Loman’s gloved hand penciled a quick slash on the diagram. “That downward angle and a half-cut throat—you don’t see that with suicides. So it
was
murder.” Not a
complete
waste of her time.

But Riker had seen many a botched suicide, and the call of murder belonged to the medical examiner, not her.

“The witness was sitting on the victim’s right.” Loman drew circles around three chairs to the left of the dead man’s position. “The woman said these seats were empty when she sat down—still empty after the blackout.”

“And she mentioned
place cards
on those seats,” said Mallory—just being helpful—with a bit of attitude.

The tip of Clara Loman’s pencil poked a hole in the diagram. And this could only mean—oh, shit!—her CSIs had missed something. Had they even
looked
for the place cards?

Before his partner could go to war on this woman, Riker asked, “So where did our guy come from?” He leaned over the diagram to point out the
X
s initialed by the cashier and the head usher. “These two alibi each other. They were playin’ grab ass in the lobby.” In a momentary departure from his only vanity, he slipped on his bifocals, then quickly pocketed them, and his finger settled on the
X
s for the wardrobe lady and the security guard. “These marks are off by a hair. Nan Cooper and Bernie Sales should be on the other side of that door. They went out in the alley for a smoke.”

Loman’s jaw jutted out, unhappy with this criticism of her team. She turned to the wings and called out to a young CSI, “Henry, did you check outside the rear door?”

The man nodded and held up his bag of alley trash along with a smaller bag of cigarette butts.

“Swab Miss Cooper and Mr. Sales! Make it
quick
!” Loman turned back to the detectives. “We’ll run their DNA against the butts.”

“Waste of time and money,” said Riker. “I’d rule ’em both out. Bernie’s from a rent-a-cop agency. Luck of the draw, different guys on different nights. He’s got no reason to lie up an alibi for the wardrobe lady.”

“What about the audience,” said Mallory, “did you—”

“Did we spray
seventy-one
people with Luminol?” Done with the heavy sarcasm, Loman dismissed the younger detective with the wave of one hand. “No, my team eyeballed all of them for blood.”

“Seventy-
one
people?” Mallory’s tone implied another screwup in addition to the missing place cards and the diagram’s error. She liked to keep score.

“That’s my count,” said Loman, who was not about to take any grief from a puppy cop. “Nobody got out of this theater before the patrolmen showed up, and their tally matches mine.”

“She’s right,” said Riker, playing the peacemaker. “We got containment.” He handed his partner a witness statement taken from the head usher. “The guy snagged two cops off the sidewalk outside the theater. So the lobby entrance was secured right away. Then we got Nan and Bernie smokin’ behind the alley door. Nobody got past ’em.”

Loman bowed her head to draw a circle around small slash marks that stood for a third exit. “And the only route to the stage door was blocked by a volunteer usher. Satisfied?”

“Good enough,” said Riker—before Mallory could say otherwise. “I bet nobody from the audience even
tried
to get out.” Sudden death was considered live theater in New York City. People always formed a crowd around a crime scene, and, in this case, they had bought tickets.

His partner was unconvinced. Or maybe he only believed that because she wore half a smile that said to the woman from CSU,
I’m gonna getcha
.

Trouble? Oh, yeah.

Turning her back on Loman, Mallory looked out over the rows of empty seats to watch the bright portholes in the lobby doors go dark. And now the red exit signs ceased to glow, and so did the small bulbs along the wall.

What was that about?

Mallory raised her face to the youngster up on the catwalk, and yelled, “Gil, cut the stage lights!”

In that instant, the whole world winked out of existence. Every touchstone was lost in the blackout dark, and Riker was not even sure of the floorboards beneath his feet. Stone blind, he had no sense of space, no up or down. Only isolation. Though this theater was full of CSIs, cops and civilians, there was no sound of companion voices, no shuffle of shoes onstage or backstage. Every man and woman was still as death, afraid of moving even one step into the unknown. How far did he stand from the edge of the stage and a leg-breaker fall?

Clara Loman’s disembodied voice was a church whisper. “There was only one cut.
No
hesitation wounds. Even if the killer paced out the walk to Peter Beck’s chair, he’d still have to find the man’s throat in the dark.”

“Yeah,” said Riker. “You’d have to fumble around. There’d be some warning. You put your hands on a guy in the dark, he’s gonna jump. He’s gonna
say
somethin’. . . . But that didn’t happen.” In the stillness that came with total darkness, the woman seated next to the victim could not have failed to notice a struggle, not with only the width of a chair’s armrest between her and Peter Beck. This would only work if they were looking for a razor-packing, killer bat—or some other freak of nature that could see in the dark.

Mallory spoke out from the void. “Loman’s crew missed more than the place cards.” The young detective clapped her hands. And there was light.

Riker turned to see Clara Loman’s back as the woman stalked off the stage, shrugging out of her coat,
ripping
off her gloves. And now her bare hands balled into fists.

Point taken.

•   •   •

The actors had been asked to give up only their stage costumes, but all of the crew’s clothing had been bagged by CSIs to be tested for the dead man’s blood and fiber. Now the two stagehands walked up to the footlights in stocking feet and clothes borrowed from a wardrobe rack. Joe Garnet was a boy with a bad case of acne. The other teenager, Ted Randal, had a round head atop a stick-thin body. In Riker’s shorthand notes, he had rechristened them as Pimples and Lollypop. And they had each earned a question mark after their names.

The theater was a limited job market, more so in hard times, and the detective had to wonder why the stagehand positions had not been filled by senior union men. A question mark also followed the name of the lighting technician, Gil Preston, another youngster with a union card.

Riker turned around to watch a uniformed officer shepherd a troupe of matrons down the aisle by the wall. These volunteer ushers wore plastic CSU booties and theater costumes. Hours ago, they had been written off as harmless theater groupies, but now there was just one more question. When they were assembled in front of the stage, the detective pointed toward four velvet chairs encircled with yellow crime-scene tape. “Did you ladies put place cards on any of those seats?” They shook their heads. “Did you at least
see
the place cards?” After more head-shaking, they were led away, all of them somewhat disappointed when told that they were not suspects. And they were sent home.

More people straggled onto the stage. No close fit of loaned clothing had been found for Bugsy. The gopher’s shirt hung tent-like, and the pant-leg cuffs were triple rolled.

The wardrobe lady, Nan Cooper, had exchanged her own muumuu for a loose black sheath that made her into a sexless stovepipe. Her red hair was teased into a frizzy ball, a lame attempt to hide balding patches. On this account, she now had Mallory’s interest. The young detective stared at the woman’s scalp, moving in close—closer. His partner would always stop to look at every odd thing. But the older woman only shrugged off this way too intimate inspection—and
that
got Riker’s attention. Though he had yet to speak with Nan Cooper, she now had her own question mark in his notebook.

Edging down the line, he stopped to face the lone actress in the play—a young one. Nothing in her eyes, true baby blues, registered as New Yorker savvy, and her face fit his cookie-cutter idea of a corn-fed cheerleader. Alma Sutter could only be a few years off the bus from Elsewhere, America, which was any town but this one. Loose blond hair waved down to her waist, and without the garish stage makeup, she seemed childlike. Nervous, too. The actress rocked heel to toe, considering his question of place cards. “No, I didn’t see them, either.”

Very breathy,
very
Marilyn Monroe.

And though she bore no other likeness to that long-dead film icon, Riker was just a wee bit in love. He knew this moment was a keeper—a kind of souvenir.

He moved on down the line to stand before two short, skinny actors named in his notes as Weirdo Twins. The identical Rinaldi brothers, Hollis and Ferris, were in their early twenties. They had a slack-jawed, stupid look about them, and their hair was chopped short, the sort of cut favored by caregivers in mental institutions.

“What about you guys? See any place cards?”

Their slow-moving eyes lacked focus as they shifted their weight from one foot to the other in unison, playing idiots to perfection. Riker waited for the Rinaldi boys to realize that his partner was standing behind them.
So
close. Could they feel her breathing on them? Yeah, and they also did the startle response in tandem. The runts turned to look up at tall Mallory, who folded her arms to complete a stance of no mercy.
Damn
, she was good at this; no one could do cold-and-bloodless like her. She stared them down with machine-green eyes, no life in them now, and she spoke with an eerie lack of inflection. “The play is over. Cut the crap.”

She had
out-weirded
them.
Amateurs.
The twins dropped the glazed look of brainless fools and actually stood at attention, just two ordinary guys with bad haircuts.

Riker sighed.
Actors
.

At the other end of this chorus line, Bugsy the gopher raised his hand as children do in class, and he said, “The twins like to stay in character. The roles they play—”

“Yeah,
right
.” More than likely they had only wanted to mess with him. Riker stood back from the lineup. One actor was missing, the older man, the fat one with a girth as wide as the brass bed at the center of this stage. “Where’s the big guy—Rollo?”