It Happens in the Dark (2 page)

ROLLO:
It’s locked. My brothers rarely open my window. They’re afraid the flies might get out.

—
The Brass Bed
,
Act I

The man from Special Crimes Unit had all the props: the salt-and-pepper hair of seniority, a gold shield on display and hooded eyes that said to everyone he met tonight,
I carry a gun. Don’t piss me off.
Even so, he had to shoulder and shove his way through the mob in the lobby, where people from the audience were giving statements to uniformed officers. Regrettably, Detective Riker had tempered his drinking this evening, only two shots of booze at his niece’s wedding reception, and that was hardly enough to take the edge off a theatergoer’s elbow to his kidney.

A smaller man, half Riker’s age, followed close behind him, yelling to be heard above the fray, identifying himself as the theater company’s gopher
.
“I go for this, I go for that. Whatever ya need.” His more formal name was Bugsy, he said, “—’cause I gotta bug people to get stuff,” and then he added, “Detective Mallory’s already here. She beat the local cops.”

Of course she did. And the Upper West Sider had won that race with a forty-block handicap.
Vehicular maniac
. If only ambulances and fire trucks could match Mallory’s speed on the streets of Manhattan. Riker had no car of his own. Faced with an easy choice of drinking or driving, he had allowed his license to expire long ago. And so he had begged a ride back to the city with a fellow wedding guest, a slower motorist than his partner, one with regard for icy roads and human life.

The detective pushed through the lobby doors, and his vista widened with a jolt of space expanding, all tricked out in Technicolor. Halfway along the aisle of lush red carpet and beyond the overhang of the balcony, Riker looked up to a ceiling painted with dancers, high-kicking jazz babies weirdly blending with wall decorations of plastered-on Grecian urns. And scores of ornate sconces illuminated row upon row of red velvet chairs. Not a Broadway kind of cop, most of his theater experience came from Hollywood films, and now he was walking around inside an old movie made before he was born. Drop-dead glamorous was not a phrase he would say aloud, but here it was.

And there
she
was.

Framed by red curtains, his young partner, Kathy Mallory, stood at the center of the stage, motionless under a single unflattering light that made her seem flat like a cardboard cutout. But now other lights were trained on her, angling down from all sides to give the blond curls a weird halo effect, to sculpt a cat’s high cheekbones and round out her tall, slim body—bringing her to life.

Detective Riker had to smile.

Whoever was working the stage lights tonight, that guy was falling in love with Mallory.

A paunchy Midtown detective, Harry Deberman, stood beside her, waving his arms and ranting in shadow, clearly unloved by the lighting guy. And Mallory also ignored the man from the local copshop, though she was the interloper in this precinct.

Riker followed his guide to the end of the aisle. The gopher was quick, but not a sprinter, more of a scrambler. Years down the road, whenever the detective thought of this young man, he would forget the details of tangled sandy hair and blue eyes that were
way
too bright; he would always picture Bugsy with twitchy whiskers and a tail.

No need of directions to the corpse, the locus of the medical examiner’s team and a crew from Crime Scene Unit. The local cop from Midtown North came down from the stage to stand with this small crowd, to hitch up his pants and splay his hands and yell, “Hey
,
let’s get on with the show! Get to work here, guys!”

No one obeyed Harry Deberman. None of them moved, except to raise their eyes to Mallory, who stood in the authority of a spotlight, arms folded and so in charge of all that she surveyed. She could also win the vote for best dressed. That cashmere blazer was custom made, and even the designer jeans were tailored. Her dress code of money on the hoof said to everyone around her,
Pay attention!
And they did. Her audience below, those who dressed down to the pay grade of civil servants, awaited her okay to bag the body and process the crime scene—
her
crime scene.

On her partner’s account, Mallory had held up the removal of Peter Beck’s bloody corpse for a solid hour.

How sweet. How thoughtful.

Riker hunkered down before the front-row seat of the balding dead man, who might be in his forties, maybe younger. The face had an unfinished look: hardly any lip, more like a pencil line for a mouth; and the nose was small, a kid’s nose that had failed to grow up with the man. The black woolen coat was open to expose a shirtfront soaked with the blood of a slit throat. On the floor at the victim’s feet was an old-fashioned straight-edged razor, and the corpse conveniently reeked of alcohol—liquid courage for the long, deep cut.

Well, how neat was that?

Detective Deberman bent down to Riker’s ear. “What’re you doin’ in
my
patch? Your partner won’t tell me squat.”

As yet, Riker had no idea why his unit had been called in, and so he shrugged. “I go where I’m kicked. I do what I’m told.”

Harry Deberman squatted on his haunches and pointed to the bloody weapon on the floor. “Odds are—that belonged to my stiff. The crew tells me this wimp used to brag about shavin’ with a cutthroat razor. I got this covered. . . . You can
go
now.”

The cut angled down from the victim’s right.

“You said you knew this man?” Riker looked up to catch a nod from Bugsy. “Was he left-handed?”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Deberman, answering for the gopher. “And the cut angle matches up with a lefty. Now take a whiff. Smell the booze? The guy had to get stinking drunk to do it. So you got no business here. Everything fits with a suicide.”

“Murder,”
said Mallory in the tone of
Boo!

The man from Midtown North jumped to his feet and spun around to face Riker’s partner. He had never heard her step down from the stage to steal up behind him. Given a sporting chance to see her coming, the long slants of her eyes also made people jumpy. They were electric green. If a machine had eyes—

Mallory glanced at the corpse. “Deberman took a loose key from the coat pocket. The
right
pocket of a left-handed man.” Turning on the local detective, she said, “You thought I wouldn’t notice that?”

“
One
key.” Riker snapped on latex gloves and probed underneath the corpse’s winter coat to reach the pants pockets, and there he felt a bulge with the hard edges of a key ring. In New York City, most house keys traveled in fives: a mailbox key, one for a building’s outer door, and three more for the deadbolts that secured the average apartment in this lock-down town. Now the loose key from the overcoat was more interesting. Riker stood up, held out one hand and said, “Gimme.”

After a testy few seconds, Harry Deberman handed over an evidence bag containing a single key. Before he could be asked what else had been stolen, the man melted back through the ranks of the ME’s people and the crime-scene crew. Making a show of leaving on some more urgent matter, Deberman checked his wristwatch twice as he made an escape up the aisle.

“You
better
run,” said Mallory, though her voice was soft, and the departing detective was well out of earshot.

“Nice catch.” Pulling off his gloves, Riker stepped back from the body and stared at the bloody weapon on the floor. “But we don’t have the makings of a homicide. Not if it turns out the guy owned that razor.”

Mallory held up a closed hand, showing him one corner of a twenty-dollar bill. “I say that key was planted. The coat pocket was the only one the perp could reach.”

“No bet,” said Riker. The black overcoat had a mangled, slept-in look about it. One of its pockets was trapped under Peter Beck’s left thigh, and the most light-fingered killer could not have accessed either pocket of the tight-fitting pants. He hefted the bagged key in one hand, as if testing its weight as court evidence. There had to be more to it than this. With only the rise of one eyebrow, he managed to say to his partner,
I know you’re holding out on me.

Mallory gave a curt nod to the ME’s man, the one holding a long, zippered bag sized to carry a corpse. While the body snatchers and forensic gatherers converged on the dead man, she threaded one hand under Riker’s arm and led him off to the side, where she held out her bet money in plain sight. “I say the loose key fits the victim’s front door, and the razor
does
belong to him.
That
makes it murder.”

Cryptic brat.

He shook his head, not game enough to take her bait. “But why call
us
?” A death like this one rarely got the attention of Special Crimes. Their unit favored a higher body count. “
I
say . . . let the local cops have it.”

He smiled. She did not.

“Unless there’s more to it.” Riker’s smile got a little wider, a signal that she should pocket her twenty and just give it up. To bring this point home, he glanced at his watch. “Why waste time on a—”

“The play opened last night,” said Mallory, “but it shut down before the second act. And a city councilman was in the audience. Well, he comes back tonight to see the rest of the play. Again, it shuts down before the finish. So he calls a friend—a
good
friend. He’s got the commissioner’s home phone number, and Beale agrees with the councilman.
Two
dead bodies—one for each performance—that’s a bit much.”

“And Beale calls in Special Crimes.” So it was not just his partner’s reckless driving that got her to the crime scene ahead of the locals. He also understood why the Midtown cop had wanted this homicide so badly. It had all the elements of a career case for a mediocre detective like Harry Deberman.

And now they had a game.

Riker felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to face a younger man with long dark hair. If not for the clipboard and the microphone headset, the civilian might have stepped out of a photograph from the 1800s. His shirt had an old-fashioned collar, and a bolo tie was strung around his neck. The detective knew he would see pointy-toed western boots when he looked down.
Yup.
This man was good-looking, and he had movie-star teeth, but he introduced himself as the stage manager, Cyril Buckner.

The urban cowboy turned to Mallory. “I think you have the wrong idea about—”

“I’ve been looking for you,” she said. “Where’ve you been for the past hour?”

“I was trapped in the lobby with the audience.” Only this minute, he explained, the officers had released him with orders to report to her. And following an apology for eavesdropping, Cyril Buckner added, “This
was
a suicide. And that first death? That one doesn’t count.”

And Riker said, “Huh?”

“The woman who died last night had a heart attack.” The stage manager freed a folded page of newsprint from his clipboard. “That’s how we got this smash review.” He held it up so they could both read the bold-type words,
A Play to Die For
. “The drama critic only reviewed the first thirty minutes. That’s when the lady keeled over, and the cops shut us down. We didn’t get past the first act tonight, either.”

Mallory, the detective who did
not
need reading glasses, snatched the review from Buckner’s hand. After scanning the column, she smiled, not at all troubled over one death by natural causes. “The woman who died last night
also
had a front-row seat. . . . She
also
died at eight-thirty.” Mallory lifted her chin a bare inch to silently ask if her partner was a great believer in that sort of coincidence.

He was not.

A lobby door swung open, and a young officer ran down an aisle, yelling, “We talked to everybody!” With the hands-up flourish of a boy sliding into home plate, he came to a stop beside Mallory. “Nobody sat behind the dead guy. There
was
a lady in the seat next to him. She’s got blood in her hair. But she didn’t see a thing—not till the lights came up. The whole place was pitch-black for maybe a minute.”

Mallory turned her head slowly until her eyes locked onto the small man with the designation of everyone’s errand boy, and Bugsy froze in midstride. She called out to him, “Where’s that lighting guy? Get him out here!”

In the hour before Riker’s arrival, the gopher had come to know Mallory well enough to run for his life on command. And though his legs were short, Bugsy shot up the steps to the stage at light’s speed. Once he was on the other side of the footlights, his head craned all the way back as he looked straight up to yell, “Gil, come down! She wants you!” No need to give a name; he was obviously referring to She Who Scares Me.

Sheets of dropped paper wafted down from an unseen perch high above the floorboards. Apparently, Mallory also made the lighting guy nervous. After a distant patter of feet slapping stairs, a tall youngster, gawky and shovel footed, appeared onstage, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. He only had eyes for her—
big
eyes.