It Happens in the Dark (16 page)

With this single piece of paper, she had won the heart of Detective Sanger. “Mallory, how’d you
do
that?”

“Last night, I made notes on every call the stagehands got.” She reached up to tap a sheet for Alma Sutter. “For the past month, a lot of her calls went to prepaid cell phones.” One long fingernail touched a single number underlined in red. “The time on this one matches my notes on Joe Garnet’s cell. I watched them score the drugs and make a delivery to Alma’s place. Her phone records logged a month of burners, probably every phone the stagehands used.” She circled numbers on the wardrobe lady’s sheet. “Nan Cooper made a few calls to burners with matches on Alma’s records.” She drew a straight line to the pages for Garnet and Randal. “Now we know where Cooper got that reefer, the one she gave the security guard.”

Detective Sanger finished reading her pinned-up notes on last night’s surveillance of the stagehands. “Dial-a-dealers. Good call.” He turned to Mallory. “They got no rap sheets, right?”

“Both clean.”

“Figures,” said Sanger. “Small buys, penny-ante profits on the markup.” He removed the list of throwaway cell numbers from the wall and also pulled down the stagehands’ photographs. “I’ll reach out to my old squad—see what they’ve got on that park. They might have a few buys on film. They lean on a dealer—and maybe you can nail your boys for trafficking.” He left the room as the other four men drifted away to their own cases and places on other walls.

The show was over.

And now Riker understood his partner’s reckless need for hacking. She had to lay her trap for that detective before the man lost interest and walked away. And it had to be Sanger’s idea to help. Mallory was no good at begging favors.

Janos stared at a center page in Mallory’s spread. He pointed to Peter Beck’s call sheet. “What’s this about?”

Mallory had underscored the flurry of seemingly random calls that the playwright had made during the last week of his life. “It looks like he’s losing it here. Angry man. Lots of money. He did most of his venting in a lawyer’s office. The firm—”

“Loyd, Hatchman and Croft,” said Janos. “I’m already on it.” He checked his watch. “I plan to interrupt their lunch hour.” He did the best lawyer interviews. He had no peer on the squad.

•   •   •

Alma Sutter passed by the blackboard. No messages for her today, thank God. When the actress had climbed the stairs and unlocked the door to her dressing room, she found two lines of cocaine laid out on her makeup table.

A gift? Maybe a threat?

If the police should search this room—

There were no safe places for her anymore.

Got to get rid of this coke
.

And she did. She rolled a dollar bill into a straw to inhale the lines of white powder and hide them in her nose. Just a few lines of cocaine would make her shine in rehearsal today. That was the law in New York City: Shine, baby, shine, or get back on the bus and go home.

•   •   •

The silence dragged out, but the policeman failed to catch every polite signal to end the interview at Loyd, Hatchman and Croft, PLC, a tony Park Avenue law firm.

Securing a copy of Peter Beck’s will had been no problem. Detective Janos was waiting for better information, and he waited peacefully. No loud demands, no threats. He was a gentle soul by nature, and he would never grab that mealymouthed little prick behind the desk and break his fingers—one by one—
both
hands.

No. Unthinkable.

Instead, he settled into a chair just large enough to contain his gorilla frame, and he sat there, deadpan—with a badge—with a gun. Now and then, he shifted his weight, and the chair’s joints made tiny wooden screams of distress. Smaller men—and they were always smaller—often felt the need to rush in and fill these awkward gaps with useful information.

But not this man.

The attorney in the beautiful suit only faked a smile. Tight-lipped. Pissed off. He looked down at his gold wristwatch that told the time around the planet. And all the while, money was ticking by with missed phone calls and letters and meetings to bill at exorbitant rates per minute—judging by the lush digs of deep carpet and wood paneling. And so it was money that finally made the lawyer crack when he said, “What you’re asking for is gossip. I don’t do that.” He rose from his chair, a stronger suggestion of
That’s it. We’re done. Get out!

“I can see this might take a while.” Janos held up a brown paper bag. “Since we’re just sittin’ here.” He slowly opened the bag to pull out a soda, and he set it on the lawyer’s desk. While the other man hastily placed a coaster under the sweating aluminum can, Janos pulled out a sandwich tightly wrapped in tinfoil, and set it down beside his cola, saying, “I guess I don’t get a lunch break today. But a man’s gotta eat, right?”

This opening gambit only startled the lawyer. The best was yet to come.

“We know about the ghostwriter.” Janos tucked a deli napkin under his chin. “And we figure Peter Beck wanted out, but his name’s still on the contract for the play.” He popped the tab on the soda can, inserted the straw, slurped loudly—and spilled a little. Now, best for last, he unwrapped the sandwich so its foul perfume could be fully appreciated. For this interview, the detective had selected the smelliest combination of meats and gross cheeses to be found in all of New York City.

Talking to lawyers was truly an art form.

Janos lifted the sandwich, threatening to eat it, and then he paused. “God, I love this stuff.” He smiled. “Even if it
does
make me gassy.”

Understood.

The lawyer could hardly wait to say, “Most clients come in with practical requests. But sometimes they want blood. Peter fell into the latter category.”

The detective lowered his sandwich. “Who did Beck wanna bleed?”

“Eventually, the entire theater company. He said they were all plotting against him. But the first time he came in, he wanted me to find something in his contract that would let him fire a member of the crew, an insignificant little man named Bugsy.”

Another connection for the cork wall.

“Did he say why?” To prompt the lawyer, Janos raised his smelly sandwich to his gaping mouth.

“Apparently, having this man on the crew was a guarantee that Leonard Crippen would review the play. Peter hated Crippen, loathed him with a passion.”

First the reward—Janos sealed the sandwich in its tinfoil wrapping, and then he asked, “Why?”

“Crippen and Peter had . . .
artistic
differences,” said the lawyer.

“You mean the critic hated his plays.”

“Crippen only panned the early work. He never bothered to show up for the later plays, and I’m sure he would’ve avoided this one—”

“If not for Bugsy.”

“But then the ghostwriter distracted Peter. So Bugsy got to keep his job.”

“Peter Beck walked out on the play,” said Janos. “So why didn’t he kill his contract with the theater company?”

“I don’t know. We messengered the legal work to his apartment, but Peter never returned the signed papers. And I thought that was odd. Without his name on the contract, the financial backers would’ve pulled out immediately. No funds—no play. Peter also wanted to change his will, but he never got around to that, either.”

“So . . . when Beck died, he owned the rights to the ghostwriter’s play?”

“As I understand it, none of the lines from Peter’s play survive in the new version. So it all hangs on copyright. If the other playwright has one, he owns the rights to his own work. Here’s the snag. You can’t find a copyright without the name of the author—or at least the title. If the copyright was deliberately hidden, and I assume it was, it might be listed as an untitled work. A date is also helpful. I explained all of this to Peter when he asked me to run a trace.”

So Peter Beck had not bought into the ghostwriter nonsense—the idea that his play was being altered line by line.

Janos handed the man a card. “Don’t tell anybody what’s in the will. Let me know who shows an interest in rights to the play.”

“Alma Sutter called the day after Peter died. I haven’t gotten back to her yet.”

“Don’t.”

•   •   •

Alma got down on hands and knees to look for stray grains of cocaine. All she found was a dust-covered pill that
might
be speed, and she popped it into her mouth.

The others would be assembled downstairs in another twenty minutes. She composed herself and tweezed her brows in a magnifying mirror.

Oh, shit
. There were white grains around her nostrils.

What if she had walked out onstage that way?

A distant screech of nails on a blackboard made her drop the hand mirror. It hit the floor and cracked. She bent down to pick up the shards with the mad idea that, if she could only glue them back together, the gods would never know this had happened.

Oh, now her fingers were bleeding.

And all around her were tiny reflections, bits of her face in broken glass—Alma in a hundred pieces.

•   •   •

Lieutenant Coffey stood in the doorway of the incident room. The facing wall had accumulated reams of data on the theater homicides, more material than his detectives could wade through in a month. And there was Charles Butler, the man with perfect recall, reading all of it at the speed of light. Tactfully, Coffey walked away without making his presence known. Every freak trait embarrassed Charles; the man was even apologetic about his height. Best to give him privacy until he was done. And then Mallory and Riker would have the perfect case file, one that could walk and talk.

Shorthanded, my ass!

The hallway opened onto the squad room. Jack Coffey turned toward Mallory’s desk and aimed his body at her like a cannonball.
Oh, too bad
. She saw him coming. Could she tell he was angry? He hoped so. But just to be sure, halfway across the room, he yelled, “Your calls are stacking up—on
my
phone!”

To make the point that she had been shortchanged on help, the detective had selectively transferred her incoming calls to him. And because she always played games within games, she only rerouted the ones that were guaranteed to suck him into her case—or go nuts. And she was probably wondering if he had finally broken down and placed a call to the chief medical examiner on the matter of Dickie Wyatt’s death.

Ain’t gonna happen. Ain’t gonna play.

“You’re the only cop in New York City who’s got a lieutenant for a secretary.” He stepped up to her desk and laid down a message from the CSI supervisor, Clara Loman. “Heller took her off this case. So why is she updating you on Broadway chili joints?”

“Well, she’s got free time. And you won’t give us enough warm bodies to work our homicides.”

“I count one
maybe
homicide.”

“So you never called Dr. Slope,” she said. “Did Loman find a match for Dickie Wyatt’s stomach contents?”

What?
Why chase down a dead junkie’s last meal? “Loman didn’t say, and I didn’t ask.” Coffey slammed two more messages on her desk, both from a sheriff in the Midwest. “Are you
ever
gonna call this guy?”

“Did he tell you anything helpful?”

“No, Mallory. The bastard only wants to talk to
you.
”

“He’ll call back.”

And of course his gun was locked in a desk drawer, a squad-room policy created for moments like this.
So
tempting. Coffey pointed to the ringing phone on her desk. “I don’t like to
bother
you . . . you being shorthanded and all, but . . . could you take that damn call
yourself
!”

Mallory picked up the receiver, listened a moment and then said, “
Both
of them?” She slammed down the phone and unlocked a drawer to get at her weapon. Holstering her gun on the fly, she ran for the coatracks.

Jack Coffey yelled at her back, “Both
what
?” And his next thought was
No
! He was
not
getting sucked into this. Yet he sat down at her desk to punch in the number for a redial.

And Dr. Slope answered the telephone.

•   •   •

Alma Sutter crept across the stage, slow stepping, though her brain was racing on a combo of cocaine and mystery pills found on the floor. She
had
to see that blackboard. This was a test from the gods of broken mirrors. Oh, there it was, her message in chalk: ALMA! ANY MINUTE NOW!

She dropped to her knees and felt the pain of bone hitting wood.
No, no, no!
Oh, but she had pills for occasions like this, a pharmacy bottle stitched into the lining of her purse—her rainy-day stash. She turned her body round and crawled across the floorboards on all fours, jazzed on drugs and moving with the speed of a trotting dog.

ROLLO:
After my little sister’s head was hacked off, and while it was falling to the floor, do you think she could see the carpet coming up to meet her? Was there time for the head to say goodbye to the body?

—
The Brass Bed
, Act II

Wall plaques and framed certificates attested to the chief medical examiner’s importance in the world of forensic medicine. Dr. Edward Slope’s hectic schedule was also in evidence with files stacked on his desk, awaiting review, and a tally sheet of dead bodies that were forming ugly gangs in the morgue. It was a logjam of a day that would never end. Yet he toyed with a pencil and stared at the ceiling—waiting for his visitor to finish leafing through an uncommonly thick autopsy report.

The doctor anticipated questions. He had one of his own: How was Kathy doing this?

The day’s first surprise had come hours earlier with the appearance of a CSU supervisor. That gray harpy had demanded tox screens and other test results. At the time, he had thought it odd for a woman of Clara Loman’s stature to perform a menial’s task—well
beyond
odd to fetch reports for a homicide detective; Clara ranked such cops among roaches and vermin. So, just this moment, he was a bit more blasé about the commander of Special Crimes running errands for Kathy Mallory.

Jack Coffey looked up from his reading to ask, “Who
eats
heroin?”

“
And
barbiturates—served up with chili. Now
that’s
a first.”

“I thought stomach contents would’ve been soup after—”

“New York chili
is
formidable, even after days of stewing in gastric juices. But one of my samples was congealed around the buttons of his shirt. Another one came from the vomit in his shoes. Nicely preserved vomit. Mr. Wyatt’s body was stored someplace cold.”

The lieutenant’s head rolled back. It was his turn to stare at the ceiling, squinting a bit, as if he might have lost something up there. “So the guy with the slashed throat, he’s only a
suspicious
death . . . but the junkie’s a
homicide
?”

“Both men were murdered. I just upgraded the playwright.” And apparently Kathy had failed to mention this to her boss. “You see, we had a problem with what
might
be the dragline of a fingernail running parallel to the wound. That wouldn’t square with the suicide of a nail biter. But the only prints on the weapon were Mr. Beck’s. So your slasher
had
to be wearing gloves, right? Back to the problem of a naked fingernail. It only works if the glove was torn. So then I examined the abrasion for microscopic traces of—”

“
Okay
, I’ll buy it.” Coffey closed his eyes a moment. “Tell me about the other one, the damn junkie.”

“I can tell you Mr. Wyatt’s chili didn’t come from a can—no preservatives. And there’s no red dye in the meat. Not a grocery store item. So I ruled out a home-cooked meal. And that leaves—”

“A restaurant.” Coffey rippled the pages of the preliminary report. “You got a time of death in here?”

“At least two days before you found him.”

“Can you—”

“Yes, I can narrow it down. Mr. Wyatt didn’t even have time to digest his dinner. Ingested with chili, the heroin wouldn’t have taken effect right away, but if you find out when he had his last meal, I’ll swear in court that he was dead within the hour.”

“Good enough,” said Jack Coffey.

Faint praise.

This was a tighter time frame than any cop had a right to hope for. And now, before his visitor could ask the next predictable question, Edward said, “Zero possibility of suicide for Mr. Wyatt.” The doctor laid down an autopsy photograph, a close-up of ugly blue bulges in veins once abused by hypodermic needles. “These track marks are old ones. No new punctures. But he obviously knew
how
to shoot up. Ergo, his chili was dosed by someone else.
You
know it.
I
know it.” Done with that, he nodded at the report in Coffey’s hands. “Page fifteen, you’ll find his hair-strand test. It’s good for a ninety-day drug history. He was clean up till last month. There’s a range of a few weeks with markers for heroin—the trace amounts of an occasional user. Then nothing leading up to his death. And I’d call
that
suspicious, too. It won’t fit the relapse pattern of a heroin addict. But it
might
suggest a few weeks of rehearsal for your killer. Say he spiked Mr. Wyatt’s food a few times before the fatal dose, just to—” No need to finish. He could see that suggestion was clearly a stretch for the man from Special Crimes.

Jack Coffey was wearing his best political smile, so insincere, a bit of condescension that the police reserved for pathologists who liked to play detective. Kathy Mallory had a smile rather like that one in her toolbox, though hers was more expressive, closer to actual spit.

The lieutenant laid the report on the desk. “Sit on this for a while, okay? We’ll let our perp think he got away with murder.” He stood up, jingling car keys in one hand, but he made no move toward the door. “One question. Mallory
never
called you, never pushed you for results on Dickie Wyatt?”

“Why would she bother? She knew I’d pull out all the stops for a drug overdose.” Edward Slope took loving care with every dead addict, indulging both his vocation and avocation. Much of his free time was devoted to keeping these hapless souls alive, and every autopsy furthered that end. Kathy had counted on that. “This was her lucky corpse.”

•   •   •

The detectives had first tried Alma’s dressing room, but there had been no response to a knock, and Riker trusted his partner’s instinct for live bodies behind closed doors.

Downstairs, Mallory opened a metal locker—and slammed it.

Midstride, Bugsy heard that bang and jumped—a short hop—and then completed his run to flick another wall switch.

The backstage area was now daylight bright and still no sign of Alma Sutter. Onstage, the assembled theater company had no clue to her whereabouts, only volunteering that she was late for rehearsal—though her name was on the sign-in sheet at the stage door.

Riker opened a trunk, a small one that would only work with the theory of a dead actress chopped up in pieces. But what the hell. Disappointed with the contents, only clothing, he turned to his partner. “Loman figures our perp mixed the heroin with chili to buy himself alibi time to get clear of the body. She thinks we’re looking for an idiot. Wyatt could’ve lived for thirty minutes to an hour. Lots of time to name his killer.”

“She’s wrong,” said Mallory. “Our perp only wanted Wyatt to walk out the door before the drugs kicked in, and that’s smart. If a customer drops dead in a restaurant, the staff’s going to remember who he had dinner with that night. So the poisoner commits a murder in plain sight—and buys himself anonymity.”

“Or
her
self.” Riker believed that women made the best poisoners. Sexist? Maybe, but true. “Alma had motive. Wyatt wanted her out of the play.” Then again, if it was the killer who moved the corpse to the theater, they were still looking for a man with the upper-body strength to lift a hundred and eighty pounds from a wheelchair and into a theater seat. Or two women acting in concert? One woman and a gopher?

Every hideyhole on this floor had been checked, except for one more trunk, and it was padlocked. Before he could call out to Bugsy, the little man appeared at his side with a key ring in hand, and he unlocked it. Riker lifted the lid to see more costumes. Then his exploring hand touched something hard—and sharp. He tipped the trunk to empty the contents onto the floor, and now an axe lay on top of the clothing. This was nothing from a woodpile, but large and long in the blade—a fireman’s axe made to chop down doors. “That’s no prop.”

“I know. It just turned up one day.” Bugsy raised his eyes to the dressing-room doors along the walkway above. “Up there. Joe Garnet’s dad found it. He was our prop master. Nice old guy. Well, there
was
an axe in the dialogue, but nothin’ like that on his prop list. So he figured the twins left it there—a joke on Alma.”

“Scaring the
shit
out of her? That’s a
joke
?”

“Yeah.
No
.” Bugsy back stepped, startled, as if this reprimand had been meant for him. “The prop master told me to hide it, lock it up—and don’t tell nobody.”

Mallory left off rummaging through lockers and joined them to stare at the axe on the floor. Turning now, she ran up the stairs to the warren of small rooms. Riker caught up to her on the walkway as she bent down to a few seconds’ work on a keyhole. The door to Alma’s dressing room swung open.

The actress lay on the floor, eyes closed, one arm twisted under her body, and her legs were sprawled at odd angles.

Not hiding. Not napping.

•   •   •

Jack Coffey answered his desk phone to pick up another one of Mallory’s rerouted calls. It was the Midwest sheriff again, and the man still refused to state his business, only insisting that it was “mighty important.” The lieutenant looked up to see Detective Sanger hanging in the doorway. Coffey tapped the glowing phone number on his caller ID. With no words between them, but enough said, Sanger returned to the squad room on the run.

And now Coffey said to the man on the phone, “Obviously, Detective Mallory doesn’t give a shit about your little problem out there in the sticks.”

This lure was met with dead silence on the other man’s end of the telephone line.

“Sheriff? I might be the only friend you got in this town. If you can’t give me—”

“It’s about the massacre,” said the man from Nebraska.

The
massacre.

Multiple murders were stock and trade, but
massacre
implied a spree killer with a high body count. No such case in the house. And did he plan to share that information with the lawman from the boonies?

No, he had a better idea.

“The next time you call Mallory—don’t use your own phone. Oh, and reroute your call through a different area code. Hang on a minute, okay?” He covered the receiver.

Detective Sanger leaned into his office. “Couldn’t be more legit, boss. The sheriff’s calling from his office phone.” Sanger held up his cell. “I got a deputy here who says he’s eyeballing the man right now.”

Coffey smiled and said to the sheriff, “Gotta pencil? I’m gonna give you Mallory’s cell-phone number . . . and her home phone, too.”

•   •   •

The snows of Nebraska were two feet deep across a flat plane that stretched all the way to the horizon line, and the brightness would have blinded him without dark glasses. But the endless expanse of sky was clear and blue as the sheriff rumbled down plowed road, trusting the wheel to his deputy, who put on more speed as they got closer to the airport.

The sheriff held a cell phone to his ear and smiled at the man in the driver’s seat. “Jilly’s outdone herself.” Jillian was his communications expert, a glorified dispatcher who also kept his small fleet of jeeps in good running order. “She routed me through Canada.”

And it worked. The young voice at the other end of this convoluted connection said, “Mallory.”

“I propose a trade,” he said to the girl from New York City. “I give you something, and you—”

“Sheriff, I’m busy right now. Maybe later I can spare six minutes to solve your—”

“Oh, I solved it,” he said, and—
click—
he cut her off.

•   •   •

Damn jerkwater cop
.

Mallory pocketed her phone as she walked through the emergency room, returning to Alma Sutter’s bedside, where Riker was carrying on the questioning under circumstances far from private. Crying and screaming from other quarters penetrated the curtains drawn around the bed of the quick-recovery artist.

The actress was awake and neither drowsy nor spacey. She was hyper, jazzed on something, but what? All hospital treatment for a drug overdose had been refused.

“You might wanna give the ER doc a sporting chance to help you,” said Riker. “He identified a few pills we found on the floor. Anything else he should know about?”

Alma shook her head. “Just sedatives.” Hardly sedated, the jangled actress fumbled with her compact and dropped it before she could finish repairing her makeup. “I have a prescription.”

“Sure you do,” he said.

“You can ask my doctor. He’s treating me for anxiety. I have
lots
of anxiety.” Her compact was retrieved from the tangle of bedsheets, and now its mirror reflected a smiling face out of sync with that ailment. Alma put on a touch of angst in the way another woman would put on lipstick.

“Tell you what,” said Riker. “Forget the drugs, okay? Just tell us about your inheritance from Peter Beck.”

“Peter mentioned me in his will?”

“Yeah. Sweet, huh? We know you called Beck’s attorney before rigor mortis set in on the corpse.”

“So you’ve
seen
the will.” Alma smiled at him.

The implied murder motive had failed to register with her. Too difficult to follow? How dumb could she be? Mallory crept up on the woman’s blind side. “You
knew
he planned to leave you the rights to his play.”