It Happens in the Dark (13 page)

What she asked of him was fair, but he said, “You’re not all that shorthanded. I couldn’t help but notice—you guys got your own personal CSI.” He wondered if she was extorting Clara Loman. And his next thought? This was something he would not want to know. “Did you call the ME to check on your junkie director?”

“No, I didn’t need to.” She was all sarcasm now.
Not
a graceful loser. “Your cut-rate prelim on Dickie Wyatt—that didn’t come from Dr. Slope. He would’ve set you straight. So I know you talked to the on-call pathologist, the moron who rode with the meat wagon last night.”

True. And interesting. She might be holding out on him, always an easy guess, or maybe she wanted him to run her errands, work her damn case. Either way, Mallory was daring him to make a follow-up call to Dr. Slope, who—no doubt about it—would deliver her sucker punch. Did she really believe he could not see that one coming?

Not gonna play
.

And the prelim for Dickie Wyatt would nag at him all through this day—until he realized
that
was the first jab of a one-
two
punch.

•   •   •

Nan Cooper sat down at the table in the interrogation room. The overhead fluorescent lights made her red hair look even thinner today. The bald patches glowed. At the center of the table was a thick folder with her name on it, but the wardrobe lady had only glanced at it. “What’s up with you guys? I got an alibi.”

“Bernie Sales, the security guard?” Riker shook his head. “We got a few problems with his statement. You were smokin’ cigarettes in the alley the night Beck died, but Bernie was smokin’ dope.”

Mallory pulled the toxicology report from the folder, laid it on the table and used one long, red fingernail to underscore the critical line, “‘Cannabis cured in opiates.’ . . . We know he got that reefer from you.”

“That bastard gave me up?”

“Yeah,” said Riker. “Bernie isn’t all that swift even when he’s
not
stoned. The guy has no idea where he was during that forty-second blackout. You
reminded
him . . . before the first cop showed up.”

“And now I’m a suspect?” Far from indignant, the lady smiled, but her eyes traveled back to the folder—so thick with information.

Mallory plucked out another sheet of paper and slid it across the table. “That’s a copy of your brand-new union card in the name of Nan Cooper.”

“Yeah? So? Cooper’s what it says on my birth certificate, and I go by plain ol’ Nan. The fancy version is—”

“Nanette,” said Riker. “We know. But when’s the last time anybody called you plain old
Cooper
?” He laid down a photocopy of a Screen Actors Guild card in the name of Nanette Darby. He had seen all her old movies, shown in the late-night hours after closing time for his favorite bar. Curiously, this comedy star had not aged, not from the balding hairline down. “I never would’ve guessed—”

“Nanette Darby’s my stage name.” The woman folded her arms. “So . . . not a federal crime.”

“You gave us a phony address,” he said. “So we gotta wonder—”

“It’s legit. I sublet that apartment. That’s where I get my mail.”

“Yeah,” said Riker. “But Nanette Darby’s mail goes to a much nicer address on Central Park South.”

“And your
very
nice stock portfolio lives at Morgan Stanley.” Mallory opened the folder and spread a stack of financial documents across the table.

“It’s incredible what those guys can do with a chunk of cash.” The bark of a New Yorker was gone. The woman’s speech smoothed out to homogenized American, the accent from nowhere. “I did pretty well for myself—back when I was somebody.”

“So you’re filthy rich,” said Riker, “but you’re doin’ grunt work? . . . You can see why that might bug us.”

“And the disguise,” said Mallory. “Your wigmaker’s very good.”

Nan Cooper lifted one shoulder in resignation and then removed the wig of sparse strands to reveal thick raven hair in a short, stylish cut. “You’re sharp, kid. Nobody else ever caught on.”

Riker could believe that. Why would anyone but Mallory take a second look? Who would buy a wig with bald spots? He tapped a photograph clipped to the inside of the folder. “But you still don’t look like your passport photo.”

“Oh, that’s an old picture.” The actress squinted at the small portrait of a more mature movie star whose sagging eyes and mouth were upstaged by a bulbous nose that was once America’s favorite honker. “I was pushing forty when the work dried up in Hollywood. Time for a face-lift. The surgeon took off fifteen years, and he lopped off half the nose. But then I couldn’t get any decent parts. You know why? Without that fabulous beak, I just wasn’t Nanette Darby anymore. . . . What a kick in the head.”

“So you took a job as the wardrobe lady,” said Riker. “You—a rich woman.”

“A
dresser.
That’s my job title. Hey, it’s still show business, right?” Realizing that neither detective was buying into this, she said, “All right, I wanted back in—but not as a dresser—as an
actor
. I worked out a deal with Dickie Wyatt.”

Was she lying? Riker had met all the actors’ understudies when he had taken this woman from the theater. “So . . . Alma’s got
two
understudies?”

“No, babe. I was a
star
. He’d never insult me with an offer like that.”

“Of course not,” said Riker. “So he gave you a
crummier
job.”

“There’s more to it. I’ve known Dickie forever. I knew him before he got his first job in Hollywood. He was the best. Biggest heart in the business.”

“He was a junkie,” said Mallory, who always made distinctions between drug addicts and humans. “I’ve seen his track marks.”

“
Old
ones from the early days in La La Land. In the movie game, if you can survive without booze or drugs, you’re not really
in
the game. No offense, kid. I can see you’re competitive. But Hollywood’s a meaner killing ground than New York City.”

“Okay,” said Riker. “So Wyatt moved to New York, and you followed him.”

“No, I got here years ahead of Dickie, but I had no luck with auditions. I was down to doing cattle calls. You know what that’s like? They trot the actors past this kid casting director. He doesn’t even ask your name. He inspects you like meat. If you make it past that cut, then you get to open your mouth, maybe say a line or two. And they only do that so they can check your teeth.”

“What about Wyatt?”

“Dickie got work right away, no problem. Stage or screen, he was a great director. And he looked out for me—got me some small but really choice roles. He wanted to give me a part in this play, but that prick Peter Beck insisted on hiring his girlfriend. Well, Dickie asked me to stick around. So I got a wig and a union card for a dresser. You know the rest.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Riker. “If poor Alma should drop dead one night—”

“I step over her corpse, whip out my guild card and take over the role. I’ve got a replacement contract as Nanette Darby. Dickie’s idea. He said Alma’s lousy contract didn’t make her bulletproof. The agent who drew it up was in diapers.”

“So Alma could be fired,” said Mallory, “once Peter Beck was out of the way.”

“You know . . . I
like
where this is going.” Nan Cooper thrust out both hands in the prisoner’s posture. “Go ahead. Put the cuffs on. I’d
kill
for that kind of publicity. Most people think I’ve been dead for the past ten years. Arrest me. I’m
begging
you.”

The lady was disappointed when the detectives escorted her to the stairwell. No arrest, no handcuffs. “Not my lucky day,” she said as the door closed behind her.

“She’s in on it,” said Mallory.

And Riker agreed. Maybe a long bitter decade was time enough to write a play.

•   •   •

Frank, the liveried doorman, pocketed the money as smoothly as a maître d’, and he craned his neck to look up at his very tall benefactor. “Okay, she
was
home a couple of times when the rabbi came by. But the rest of the time? No. She’s been working real long hours.”

“Thank you,” said Charles Butler. He had a theory that his own bribe could not compete with what Mallory paid for her doorman’s discretion. And, in good conscience, no gentleman would outbid a lady.

He held up another fifty-dollar offering. “Anything else you can tell me?”

There was real love in Frank’s eyes when he looked at the crisp new bill hanging in the air between them, just waiting to be snatched up. But he slipped both hands into his pockets and away from temptation. He shook his head. No deal. Sorry—
so
sorry.

Mallory’s tips must be lavish.
That
or she really scared the doorman.

Charles walked up the street and turned a corner onto Central Park West. Southbound cabs were plentiful here, but he had yet to raise his hand to hail one, and ten of them sailed by. He was stalled. A little movie theater in his brain replayed the stage beheading in an endless loop.

Last night’s performance had not done justice to Mallory. The actress’s impersonation had been badly flawed, leaning too heavily on the most disturbing standout traits. Yet the caricature had rung true enough to cost him sleep—and to make him just a touch stupid.

Fool
.

What could he have hoped to learn from a doorman?

And neither could Riker throw him any scraps. That detective could divulge nothing to a civilian who was not yet in the game, though that status was subject to change via a formal invitation from the NYPD. His telephone might be ringing with just such an offer at this very moment.

Riker
had
promised to call.

On the strength of that promise, Charles had unboxed an answering machine that had been state-of-the-art years ago when Mallory had given it to him for Christmas. All her gifts were computerized. She was so determined to yank him out of a past century, where he lived among antiques that required no owner’s manual to operate. Oh, but now he could imagine Detective Riker’s shock if the man should call and hear the electronically recorded message of a confirmed Luddite.

Charles was aware of less flattering designations. In his occasional role as a consulting psychologist, he had once or twice heard himself referred to as a witch doctor. This remark had been muttered by the more cynical detectives, though all of them probably saw him that way. Indeed, in his current sorry state, he could almost see himself reduced to casting chicken bones by the light of the moon. He looked up at the daytime sky. In this moment, he might be taken for a man seeking omens in the shapes of passing clouds.

Facts gleaned from newspapers and personal experience were few, but only two of them mattered: Mallory had been written into a play, and the writer’s intentions were clear.

Off with her head.

SUSAN:
An axe . . . and a baseball bat.

ROLLO:
The bat was mine when I was a boy. The twins never played. Well, not until that night. They played with the women and the girls all night long.

—
The Brass Bed
, Act II

Detective Janos walked down the hall between Mallory and Riker, outsizing them gorilla fashion, but he was kindly and tender when he spoke of his own case and the recently booked suspect, a homeless man who had molested and murdered a schoolboy.

Only
one
dead schoolboy.

Mallory was keeping score. That case should have been worked out of an East Side precinct. And there were others that did not belong in this copshop.

“The skin around the perp’s ankles is turning black,” said Janos. “You know what
that
means.”

“Yeah,” said Riker, “gangrene and goodbye, feet. It means there
is
a God.”

“So the lieutenant says I’m all yours.” Janos inclined his head to Mallory. “
Now
do I get to read the play?”

“I made a copy just for you.” She led the way into the incident room.

Cork lined every wall from the baseboard to the ceiling molding, and it held paper trails of bloody morgue photos, crime-scene diagrams and text—for too many murders. The wall space allotted to the theater homicides was attracting the attention of other men, including one she coveted for his background in Narcotics.

Though Detective Sanger had joined the elite murder squad years ago, he still wore the long hair of a narc and a diamond pinky ring, the bling of an undercover drug dealer. He was staring at her posted wish list; it begged for details that required more time than she and Riker had between them.

“This reads like a weird bridal registry.” Sanger reached out to the evidence table, where telephone records for the theater company were stacked, and he lifted two sheets off the top. “This just came in. Cell-phone calls for Dickie Wyatt, your junkie director. He canceled his landline weeks ago. I bet you couldn’t find a recent address, am I right?”

“Yeah,” said Riker. “When Wyatt left the play, he sublet his apartment. The new tenant’s clueless.”

“Take a look at this.” Sanger pinned the cell-phone history to the cork wall and pointed to a date. “That’s the end of a two-week period with no activity. Your guy ordered blockers for voice mail and texting. So he’s got no stacked-up messages for the downtime.” His finger moved on to a line near the bottom of the sheet. “Then here—a few days before Wyatt turns up dead—he takes a call. I checked. It came from a deli pay phone.”

The detective smiled as he stepped back from the wall. “And that’s how I know your guy was in lockdown rehab. Wyatt sublet his apartment so he wouldn’t go home to triggers for his drug habit. You look cross-eyed at the chair you sat in the last time you got stoned—that’s a trigger. He would’ve surrendered his cell phone when he went into treatment. So I know he was fresh out of rehab when he took that last call. That means he’s got another place out there. A hotel or a sublet. He didn’t stay with a friend. He would’ve avoided every old tie to his dope days. Find out where he got rehabbed, and you might get a current address.”

Janos raised his eyebrows. “How do you—”

“Magic.” Sanger shot both his cuffs to show that he had nothing up his sleeves. “Or maybe I’m just fuckin’ good at this.” He turned to Mallory with an afterthought. “Oh, and two weeks of rehab? That says minor relapse, not heavy using. You get a hair-strand drug test on that guy—you’ll see I’m right.”

And now she had lost the man. He was walking toward his own wall, his own case, on the other side of the room. And she was already scheming ways to get him back.

“Hey,” said Riker. “Wanna take a ride down to the ME’s Office?” Getting no response, he added, “You can have another tox-screen war with Dr. Slope. C’mon. It’ll be fun.”

“No need,” said Mallory. “He loves dead junkies.” Dead or alive, drug addicts were the doctor’s hobby, and this had always mystified her
.
Edward Slope was so enamored with this brand of scum, he had even formed a charity clinic so that he could work on the live ones in his spare time. On Dickie Wyatt’s account, the chief medical examiner would run every test in his arsenal—the deluxe autopsy.

•   •   •

Charles Butler was snagged the moment he entered the station house, and now he crossed the squad room alongside the commander of Special Crimes. He was looking down at the bald spot on Jack Coffey’s head when the man said, “Hell, no. You don’t need an invitation
.
Mallory’s bitching about getting shortchanged on manpower. She’s gonna
love
this.”

Judging by the lieutenant’s tone, Charles knew this was far from true.

He was a dead man.

Yes, Mallory would definitely kill him. Or maybe Riker would get to him first.

Oh, this had been a grave mistake. He had only stopped by to offer a few thoughts on the pathology of a playwright with fantasies of decapitation—perhaps not terribly useful thoughts. And maybe this excuse for a visit was a bit too contrived. He should have called ahead—or followed Riker’s simple instruction to wait by the telephone.

As they entered the incident room, the lieutenant announced, “Look who I found downstairs!”

Mallory glanced at Charles and then, with no further interest in him, turned back to her chore of pinning papers on the cork wall. Riker was not smiling, not loving this, either. While these two detectives where pleading a case for needing more help from their squad—help should not walk in the door with their boss.

Well, could this be more awkward?

Charles was a man treading water, waiting for a lifeboat to sail by. And it did, in the form of Jack Coffey, who placed one hand on the psychologist’s arm and led him away.

Out in the hall, the lieutenant said, “Suppose we sit in on a few interviews?” Two doors down, he fitted a key into a lock, and they entered a familiar room with three tiered rows of tip-up theater seats, and a window of one-way glass the length of a wall. Years ago, Coffey’s predecessor, Louis Markowitz, had bragged that this was the Cadillac of watchers’ rooms, coveted by every other police station, including One Police Plaza.

The two men sat down in darkness, facing the window on the lighted interrogation room and its occupants: a very patient Detective Janos and a sulky teenager.

•   •   •

Janos’s first case assignment had ended five minutes ago, when the stagehand, Ted Randal, had stalked out of the room with the flippant excuse of “Places to go, man.”

Now the detective sat across the table from the other boy, Joe Garnet, who ignored him to take a cell-phone call and say, “Yeah, I’ll be there in ten.”

And Janos smiled, not the least bit annoyed by this rudeness. Oh, perish the thought. He was making a note on the exact time of Garnet’s call when he heard the second ringtone from the boy’s cell. After the last interview, he had many such notes to match with telephone company records—to confirm a theory that no match would be found, not to the phones listed in the names of the stagehands. The nonstop action on the throwaways would be a clue to a sideline, most likely drugs, but Janos called it leverage for another day and another conversation.

Kids were just too easy.

After only a few minutes of talk and another ringtone, Joe Garnet left the interrogation room, not bothering to ask permission and offering nothing so polite as a goodbye. But Janos was not dejected by this lack of respect. All teenagers were Heaven-sent to test his faith in the sanctity of human life. He would never dream of popping one of them in the nose—
really
hard, several times.

The rap on the door signaled the arrival of the Rinaldi brothers, Hollis and Ferris.

Janos sang out, “Gimme a minute!” He scanned statements given to other detectives following the discovery of Dickie Wyatt’s corpse, and all that was missing was an actual statement of anything. There were notes on gestures only. The brothers had kept silent.

So much for his mission to trip them up on a lie.

Previously, they had been interviewed separately. Today he planned a different strategy. The twins entered the room together and sat down on the other side of the table. Both young men were deep into their weirdo routine: slouched like rag dolls, eyes wandering, mouths open, as if to catch the odd fly passing by.

Janos read a few lines of their identical résumés. “You’re a long way from Hollywood.” That was where they had started out as child actors in films he had never heard of, though there was one respectable movie that anyone might recall. Then, well into their teens, they had worked in a few horror flicks. Well,
that
fit. “There’s gaps here, years between acting jobs. What were you guys up to all that time?”

The twins shrugged in unison, still acting the roles of mute dullards.

“I have great respect for artists.” It occurred to Janos that he could grab their scrawny necks and cut off their oxygen for a while—but that was not his way. “A police station can be a jarring environment for sensitive, creative types.”
Big
smile. “Relax, boys. Take all the time you need . . . I got all day.” He rose from his chair and walked up to the wide one-way glass, a mirror on this side, and he straightened his tie. “All damn day.” He was watching their reflections when the metamorphosis began.

Without a word or a glance between them, they sat up straight in perfect unison and folded their arms. When Janos turned around, he was looking at two young men who were neither witless nor unfocussed. And they
still
creeped him out.

“We lived on residuals between acting gigs,” said one Rinaldi, who might be either Hollis or Ferris. “Every rerun on TV, we get a check.”

“It was harder to find roles when we got past the cute stage,” said the other twin.

Ah, lie number one. They had never been
cute
. Even now when they had shed their stage characters, they set off alarms in the crawl of his skin. Janos sat down at the table and glanced at their résumés. “So you did a real blockbuster when you were just kids. An Axel Clayborne movie. Is that how you got hired for the play? He liked you?” No way. Scratch that. “He
remembered
you from that old flick?”

“No, we auditioned for the director.”

“Wyatt hired us.”

Their speech was flatline. A voice-stress analysis would be no help with the likes of them. Janos knew he could stab them with his pencil
right now
—if he were the sort to do that—and they would never show pain, so
much
pain—though they
would
bleed.

The detective looked down at his notebook and scribbled one more connection of crisscrossing paths with another player. He was beginning to see patterns of multiple alliances—and not the broad collusion that Riker and Mallory were looking for. The Rinaldi twins reminded him of the stagehands, whose bonding extended to no one else. The wardrobe lady had been in league with the late Dickie Wyatt. And then there was last night’s interview with Alma Sutter, a woman who had impressed him as a nation unto herself, and so he doubted the quality of her relationship with the dead playwright—but they
had
been paired up.

He turned from one twin to the other. Were they playing him? Oh, yeah. Their eyes were locked on him. Eyes of glass—no clue. What now? They leaned forward, tensing, set to spring across the table. Their expressions were eerie, more like an idea of smiles, and he wondered if they knew how Halloween this was to him.

“Did you kill Peter Beck and Dickie Wyatt?”

They slowly moved their heads side to side, smiling all the while.

•   •   •

“Just for the record,” said Jack Coffey, “that second guy, Dickie Wyatt? He wasn’t murdered. He OD’d on heroin.” But apparently Mallory had another believer in Janos. The lieutenant turned to the psychologist, who sat beside him in the dark. “So what do you make of those scary little bastards?”

“They’re impossible to read for deception,” said Charles Butler. “No inadvertent mannerisms to indicate anything reactive. . . . Very cold, those two. . . . Do you know if they lived in an abusive home? Maybe a stint in foster care? It would help if you could find someone who knew them as children.”

“We could look into that.” Actually—they could not. There was still information in the world that Mallory could not steal by robbing data banks. Even with Janos on board, the workload left no time for a background check that required knocking on doors and prolonged games of telephone tag. “You think the Rinaldi brothers could do a murder?” And now Jack Coffey waited on the man’s standard disclaimer, a disdain for the snap diagnosis.

“They
could
,” said Charles, with no hesitation. “And afterward . . . no feeling of remorse. You can read a lot into the detective’s reactions, his comfort level. At the top of the interview, Janos knew they were playacting, but he also knew there was something wrong with them at core. Maybe just a twinge in his gut. Sometimes that’s the only warning you ever get. . . . But look at them now. These two like to advertise the naked truth of what they are. That’s their idea of sport.”