Death Dance (53 page)

For some reason, Kehoe stepped around that rope and walked
instead to the clothing rack. He removed a silk wrap from one of the
robes and came back to us, this time taking my hands and tying them
tightly behind me. He must have had another plan for the big rope.

There were no windows in the giant circular dome, no way to
communicate with the world outside. I guessed there was a hole in the
skylight overhead, because a draft of cold, fresh air blew down
occasionally, rippling through me with another chill.

Kehoe had taken the gun back from Mona and they had walked a
distance away from us to have a conversation.

"Don't you think someone will look up here?" I asked Chet
Dobbis. "What did you mean that nobody's ever been in this place? Why?"

"There was never anything up here when the mosque was built
but an antiquated ventilation system. All the smoke, all the stale
air—it was sucked up here by a behemoth of a fan and
dispersed. By the 1940s the whole process had changed and that form of
exhaust was replaced with more modern ducts that were installed
downstairs. The dome? This has never been used for anything.
It's— it's just ornamental."

"Can we get out of here, Chet? Isn't there any way out?"

He had seemed resigned from the beginning to some kind of
dreadful fate, timidly following Kehoe's directions, while now I could
focus on nothing but finding a way to escape.

Dobbis shook his head and stared down at the floor. "After I
left my job here, Kehoe must have done this."

"Done what?"

"There was a renovation of this cupola—first time
ever—in 2003. Opened it up so they could get to the outside
skin of the dome and replace the old Spanish tiles that had been part
of the original installation. Arlette, the woman who replaced me as the
center's director, told me they basically swept the place clean and
shut it up again."

"So Kehoe knew this whole space was vestigial, was of no use
to anyone, and he engineered a way in for himself. With Joe Berk's
money, and with access to all the nubile bodies Joe was willing to pay
to perform for him." And access, I thought, to the top of the dome, to
install an antenna to transmit video images.

"Looks like he managed to do that. Who the hell would even
find a way back here? And how? There's no way to open that door except
electronically, Alex. He's got some kind of control, some electrical
device that he pressed to let us in."

"No other exits?"

"Nothing up here. One way in, one way out. I'm sure of that."

"How about the firewall on the stage? Doesn't that set off an
alarm to nine-one-one?"

"It was meant to, but not if Ross disabled it when he pulled
the plug on the power and lights down there. He seems to have a
separate system of his own in here."

If an escape tactic wouldn't work, I needed to know why Ross
Kehoe had called Dobbis to the theater tonight. I needed to know if
there was any deal we could try to make with him and with Mona Berk to
let us out alive.

"What does Kehoe want with you?"

He looked over at Ross and Mona, who seemed to be arguing with
each other.

"I was stupid enough to believe him when he called me to come
over tonight. Told me that Mona had an offer for me, wanted to give me
a piece of a new production if I'd give them some advice in exchange."

Dobbis picked up his head and I could see tears in his eyes.
"I should have known he'd be setting me up for something."

I leaned toward him. "But for what? Do you know what that is?"

"He's going to kill me if we don't do something. He'll kill
both of us."

I didn't need a road map to figure that out. Every theater had
its ghosts, and we were on our way to joining the cast of this one.

"I understand you. Why, though? I'm just a product of bad
timing tonight. Why you?"

"He was setting me up to take the weight for Talya's murder
when you and your team walked in," Dobbis said, pulling in his breath
to regain his composure.

"Did you?"

"No, dammit. Nothing to do with it."

"Joe Berk? Or was it Ross Kehoe?"

"Talya knew about Joe's game. She knew he had a fetish for
young girls, for taping them while they were undressing or makinglove
or showering. Watching them is what aroused him, especially when they
didn't know—they couldn't know—that anyone could
see what they were doing. Mostly he liked to look at them when he was
home alone. Sometimes when the company he was keeping wasn't enough to
do the trick for him."

"She knew because he did it to her?"

"Talya? She was too old for Joe. But she caught him at home
with tapes of the young dancers. Videos of the girls in the showers and
in the rehearsal studios who didn't know they were being filmed, and
other kids who liked to perform for him, maybe right here in this
room—happy to be photographed from a distance, happy that he
couldn't touch them."

"How do you know?" I asked, thinking how right Battaglia had
been to ask me whether Joe Berk was a paraphile.

"Because Talya told me. She didn't like me a lot, ever since
we'd stopped being lovers years ago. But she trusted me—she
always trusted me."

"What did she tell you?"

"Talya wasn't very good at it, but she was trying to blackmail
Joe. Trying to use that information to get herself a boatload of
money— or a starring role in Joe's next big hit. I guess she
wanted me to know in case Joe did something to threaten her. She wasn't
thinking of murder or anything like that, I can assure you. But Talya
was aware that if her plan backfired, Joe would have the power to make
her life miserable."

"Do you think Joe paid Ross to kill Talya that night at the
Met?"

"I'm tired of thinking. It's not going to help us any to think
at this point," Dobbis said, raising his bound hands to his face and
rubbing across his eyes as best he could. "I should have been using my
brain for the last week, while you and your detectives had
me
in your sights
instead of Kehoe and Berk."

"You were all in our sights, Chet. Every one of you. That's
how it works till we're able to break down the information we've got.
Maybe if you'd told us how much you knew about Talya, back then. Maybe
if you let us know about Talya and what was going on in her
relationship with Berk. There's a lot you've said just now that could
have helped us last week."

I despised his self-pitying whining. If he hadn't lied to
Mercer and Mike, if he hadn't withheld what he knew about Talya and
about Joe Berk, we wouldn't be together in this bizarre crypt that was
unlikely to be opened until the next renovation, maybe fifty years from
now.

"I didn't know enough to tell you anything. It was only
tonight, only a minute or two before you walked into the theater, that
Ross bragged to me about killing Joe Berk."

"Today? He told you that he killed Joe today?"

Chet Dobbis threw back his head and looked up at the sliver of
sky above us. "No, no, no. You still don't get it, do you? Ross Kehoe
killed Joe Berk last Sunday night, right in front of the Belasco
Theatre."

I wasn't walking back the cat anymore, I was running with him.

Ross Kehoe—Joe's trusted employee, his driver, the
genius with every kind of electrical equipment. That day at the
Imperial Theatre, moments before he walked Lucy behind the curtain to
put her up on the swing, it was Ross Kehoe who stood on the stage,
directing the guy in charge of the lighting to give him something
cooler, to bring down the brightness. Why didn't Mike or I realize then
that Kehoe had a specialty, an area of expertise that had all to do
with electricity?

Last night, when the lights went out in my home, when someone
broke into or scammed his way into the building and shut down the power
in the A line of apartments, why didn't I think of Kehoe's electrical
prowess when I racked my brain for possible suspects connected to the
investigation?

And when Joe Berk stepped on a manhole that was wired to jolt
him into the great beyond, why didn't any of us figure that the man who
used to chauffeur him would know exactly where to park the car, know
exactly what sewer cover Joe would step on when he came out of his
apartment to get across the street to go to dinner with his wayward
son? How easy for someone with Kehoe's ability to cut the wrapping on
the insulation in the power box—just minutes before Berk and
his son left the Belasco to go to dinner—in order to mimic
the tragic accidents that had electrocuted unsuspecting pedestrians in
Manhattan in years past.

Of course Briggs had told Mona about the dinner plans. Of
course Kehoe had the opportunity to stage—what had the ME
called it?—an "electrical event" and wait in the wings, on
the dark street, to make sure Joe Berk was his only victim.

So Joe Berk had been meant to die last Sunday, just two nights
after Natalya Galinova's murder. And shortly after his beloved Briggs
had dropped the lawsuit against him, hoping for reconciliation. It was
Briggs who had been escorting Joe out to the car on their way to dinner
that evening, and undoubtedly Briggs and Mona who had been partners
with Ross in Joe Berk's skillful execution.

None of them had counted on Joe's ninth life, short as it was.

Chet Dobbis was also sweating profusely. "Joe Berk's
accidental death was supposed to put an end to your investigation."

"How? Why would—"

"Ross made that much clear to me tonight. Talya was killed on
Friday. She and Joe were in the middle of a tempest—had been
for days—fighting and feuding quite publicly. He missed her
performance that night but showed up in her dressing room."

Everything Dobbis said so far made sense.

"She disappeared at the Met that very evening. The best Joe
could do was say his driver would vouch for him. Even an idiot knows
that one of Joe's employees would swear to anything to keep his job.
That's worthless in a court of law."

Dobbis was right. The chauffeur was always a lousy alibi.

"Joe's glove was found near Talya's body. That's what Ross
told me. He said he heard it from Joe. Is it true?"

I nodded my head. A glove with Joe Berk's DNA on
it—and a good chance now that the other skin cells on the
surface would soon be matched to Ross Kehoe, whose profile was in the
linkage database from the earlier homicide investigation on Staten
Island. All the information in that database that had been rendered
useless—paralyzed for the time being—after I
appeared in court last week on the Ramon Carido case before Judge
McFarland.

"You think Ross couldn't have gotten his hands on a pair of
Joe's gloves and planted one at the scene? You think Joe would ever
have missed them?"

"Not likely. He probably had—"

"Dozens of pairs. That was his style, Alex. More of
everything. Whoever got through the winter without losing a glove
somewhere?"

"But Talya's murder? Did Joe really know his way around the
Met?"