It Happens in the Dark (17 page)

“Of course I did.” Alma’s words came out in a rush. “That poor,
dear
little man. Peter spent a solid year writing that role for me. He said it was like giving a woman flowers from his own garden.” She bit her lip to slow down her runaway mouth. “Then the play changed. And
I
changed.”

“Because Dickie Wyatt was riding you every minute,” said Mallory, “making life hell for you, driving you nuts.”

“
Yes
! And he made me a better actress. I was
grateful!
”

“And the ghostwriter was—”

“That
spook—
he gave me the inside track on cold, creepy
fear
.” She clutched the bedsheet and raised it to cover her face. When the sheet dropped away, the detectives were looking at a face of abject terror, the genuine article, and then—Alma grinned. “You see? I didn’t lie when I told you the ghostwriter tortured me, but he helped me, too.” Now a dab of sarcasm. “He made me so freaking
good
at acting scared.” And for the finale, she folded her arms and stared Mallory down with an implied So
there.
Take
that.

Riker gave her an approving nod. “Not bad.” Alma
was
a good actress—and so she was not to be believed, not by him. “You’re talkin’ to grown-ups now. We
never
bought that story.”

“But it’s true!”

“Naw, the ghostwriter’s your buddy.” Riker leaned over her. “You just stood back and watched all the damage he did to your boyfriend.”

“You went along with it,” said Mallory, working the other side of the bed. “Like all the rest of them. You chose up sides against Peter Beck and—”

“No!” Alma turned from one detective to the other. “You’ve got it all wrong. After Peter walked out, I was his spy in the company.” One hand went to her mouth, perhaps overplaying the gesture that said,
I’ve said too much
. “You can’t tell anybody about that, okay? . . . Peter asked
me
to walk out, too. He wanted me to do it on opening night—just walk off stage in the first act. Well that’s
crazy.
I’d never work again after a stunt like that. The theater, this role—it’s all I care about, all I’ve ever wanted since I was
ten years old!
So I turned him down. I said no.”

She fell back on her pillow, tired from running her mouth a hundred miles an hour and punctuating sentences with sniffles—both markers for cocaine, an expensive habit for a woman with an overdrawn bank account.

“Well, Peter was furious,” said Alma. “He didn’t even show up on opening night, and I’m
damn
sure he spent that day cutting me out of the will. He made it a promise.”

“And after he died,” said Mallory, “you
still
called the lawyer . . . to check on your inheritance.”

“Detective, if you had a lottery ticket, wouldn’t you check the numbers? The odds are a million to one . . . but you’d check.”

Good answer. And one mystery was solved. Alma was not dumb.

•   •   •

Sheriff Harper was definitely flying over another state’s area code by now, though he could not see the ground for clouds. He thought of using the airplane phone lodged over his tray-table meal of stale potato chips, but then his cell phone vibrated in his breast pocket.

And now Mallory was saying, “You
think
you know who did it. But your case is still on the books. You don’t have the evidence to—”

“Little lady, I got bundles of evidence. I got bloodwork, weapons, every damn thing. I got shoe prints in the blood. I can even tell you who owned those shoes. Hell, I
got
the damn shoes.”

That should have piqued her interest, but she hung up on him.

No matter. A satisfied man, he was getting into the rhythm of this long-distance relationship. His mood changed when he felt the buck and roll of the aircraft. He looked out the window to see clouds boiling up to touch the plane’s icy wing. No! The clouds were
not
rising—the plane was going
down
. The captain’s piped-in voice called for the attention of the passengers, and now came the pilot’s give-away words for impending havoc and sudden death,
“Remain calm!”

SUSAN:
There was no warning? When the boys were younger—

ROLLO:
Everyone knew what they were. A neighbor woman once came to the house. Timid soul, afraid to come inside. Said she didn’t want any trouble. She only wanted to know if her cat had died quickly . . . or did it suffer. My mother screamed and slammed the door.

—
The Brass Bed
, Act II

Shoes?

Did the sheriff have two shoes or two pairs?

Mallory’s thoughts were interrupted when Leonard Crippen opened his door, startled to see her standing there.

She favored surprise attack.

Not quite the impresario today, the drama critic had been caught in baggy old knock-around pants and a cardigan. Even the yappy little dog at his feet wore a casual sweater. “Hush, Kiki,” he said, but the tiny poodle yapped on till it mustered a bark, so brave while hiding behind its master’s legs.

The detective held up her copy of the play. “Peter Beck didn’t write this. . . . Can you at least
pretend
to be surprised?”

No, he only eyed the manuscript with a greedy look.

“When I talk to Bugsy, is he—”

“Oh, no,” said Crippen. “Please leave Bugsy alone. He’s a complete innocent.” The old man stood back, inviting her in with the grandiose wave of one hand. And the dog took cover behind a chair.

A log burned in the fireplace, and every other creature comfort that could be smashed into one room was here. A woolen lap rug lay on a well-padded recliner, and by the window, a bistro table had chairs for two. Books lined his walls, the music on the old-fashioned record player was soothing, and every surface held a bowl of hard candy. An open door to the kitchen gave her a view of shelves lined with glass jars of tea bags and cinnamon sticks, and upon the counter was a spread of toast and jam.

Her suspect was a hobbit.

Crippen held out one hand to receive her shrugged-off jacket, and he hung it in a closet, smashing her new shearling into a jumble of old winter wear with visible lint and an odor of mothballs—but she did nothing to harm him.

“No one had to tell me that play wasn’t Peter’s work.” He turned to the small table by the window and pulled out a chair for her. When they were both seated, he said, “That fool never had an original idea in his life. And no sense of humor, either.” Crippen reached out to lightly touch the manuscript, asking, “May I?”

Mallory shifted it from hand to hand, as if she might be considering his request. “Bugsy didn’t give you a copy?”

“No, he’d never do that. He only acted out a few scenes for me. Never even hinted at what came next. That’s why—”

“Peter Beck always got good reviews from other critics. Why not you?”

“Higher standards, my dear. It’s not enough to string lovely words together. There should be . . .
more.
”

“You
knew
about the ghostwriter.”

He sighed.
Caught.
“Yes, but I heard that from Donna Loo, the very chatty cashier. You’ll forgive me for not mentioning it. When she told me, it was strictly
entre nous
.” He rose from his chair, turning his back on the detective. “I’m going to put a kettle on and make us some cocoa. Just the thing for a winter day.”

While Mallory waited for Leonard Crippen to emerge from his kitchen, she leafed through the play with Loman’s yellow highlights on every other page. She was looking for the sheriff’s shoes, but there were none—only mentions of footprints. She reread the lines on bloody tracks from room to room.

How did the sheriff get the killer’s shoes without making an arrest?

Shoes.
Her foster mother, Helen, had left a lot of shoes behind when she died, and her husband had not been able to part with a single pair. Mallory remembered the day when the rabbi’s wife had come to help Lou Markowitz with this chore of finding new homes for Helen’s old things. And when Rachael Kaplan, with the kindest intention, had tried to make off with the shoes, the old man had wept—and kept them. After his own death, Mallory had preserved all of Lou and Helen’s clothing in their closets and drawers—and locked the house against the kindness of others.

In the next room, a teakettle screamed.

She scrolled down the contact list on her cell phone, clicking on Sheriff Harper’s number. And when he answered, she said, “Not a typical rage killing. It was premeditated. A lot of thought went into your massacre, including the footprints . . . from borrowed shoes. One of the murdered women was a widow. You’ve got the bloody shoes of her dead husband, right?”

All she heard in response was “Crap!” And a click.

•   •   •

Was Detective Mallory that smart?

The sheriff sat with other displaced passengers in an airport far from home. He stared at the glass wall overlooking the tarmac, and he took this view on faith because all he could see was a massive curtain of dense falling snow. Due to zero visibility, no planes were taking off today.

Why had he run his mouth that way?

For ten years, he had said not one word to any cop outside his own tight circle of jurisdiction. And one word—
shoes—
that was all she required to extrapolate a whole lot more. His fear was that she had no need of that tip. Over the past decade, other lawmen had tried to draw him out, speculating on some insane drifter, a rage killing, or maybe a crime of opportunity—but Mallory
knew
things.

Maybe the girl didn’t need him anymore. Could she be close to an arrest?

He rose from his seat, gathering up his coat and bag to wait in the line for car rentals. It was a short wait. Everyone ahead of him was turned away. Each prospective customer was told the same thing: Many planes had been brought to ground before theirs had limped into the airport on one working engine. Oh, and congratulations for cheating death so narrowly, but there were no more cars to be had.

Could he afford to wait? No. This was a race. He could almost hear Mallory’s footsteps coming up behind him.

The sheriff showed his badge to the young man behind the rent-a-car counter, saying, “Son, I don’t care
what
you told those other folks.” Any kid who smiled like that, showing every tooth in his head, just
had
to be lying. “Get me a damn car with four-wheel drive.”

•   •   •

While Leonard Crippen set out mugs of hot cocoa, Mallory was following a line of thought from an offhand remark by Charles Butler:
Scratch a critic, you find a failed author
. And now she pursued this idea, approaching it sideways, asking, “Do
actors
ever write plays?”

“Oh, yes. Cross disciplines are very common in the theater.”

“Bugsy was nicely educated. Yale Drama School. Do you think he could—”

“No, he couldn’t.” The critic smiled and waved both hands to say this was ridiculous. “When he was Alan Rains,
maybe
. As Bugsy? No, it’s not in his character.” He laid one hand upon the manuscript at the center of the table. “
Now
may I—”

Mallory picked it up and held it out of reach. “He’s
still
Alan Rains.”

“Wishful thinking, my dear.” The old man heaved another sigh.

The detective wished he would stop doing that, though she had now developed a lexicon of his sighs, and some of them lied—like this one, the expression of deep regret.

“There’s no one home but Bugsy anymore,” he said.

“Then who’s been acting out those scenes in the subway—entertaining you for
years
? A gopher?”

He flashed her a quick smile of touché. “Talent will out, I suppose. The ghost of a talent in Bugsy’s case. But it’s not his nature to
murder
anyone.”

“He’d need a strong motive,” said Mallory. “Bugsy doesn’t give a damn about money. It would have to be something like hate . . . or
jealousy
. You can get into that, can’t you? Maybe that’s why you panned all of Peter Beck’s plays.”

“No, my dear, only his early work. I never saw the rest of them. Why waste an evening sitting through a tired, hackneyed—”

“I suppose you could’ve written a
better
play?”

Crippen’s understanding came in a slowly widening grin as he pressed one hand to his breast. “
I’m
a suspect?” He laughed. “Oh, that’s
marvelous.
Bless you, child. To answer your question, no, I couldn’t. Peter had a slender talent at best, but I have none at all, not in that vein. I’m only a humble critic.”

•   •   •

“Leonard Crippen is a
vile
man,” said Mrs. Rains, a resident of Connecticut.

The woman was in her mid-forties, though she appeared to be ten years older. Charles Butler had seen this kind of damage before, the common fallout of losing a child. And her son Alan Rains, alias Bugsy, might be best described as lost.

Only the mention of the drama critic had set her hands to trembling when she attempted to fill their cups. Charles gently relieved her of the heavy pot and completed the tea service for both of them. Such a lovely teapot, and a rare one. The maker’s stamp in the silver dated it back to the days of the American Revolution. The lady shared his love of all things antique, and there were many other fine pieces in the shadows all around him. What would the room be like if she would just open the draperies?

This was a house in mourning—no other way to read it. The mantelpiece was only missing the black funeral bunting. It was a memorial for her son, lined with photographs of him in a march from infancy to manhood. And the centerpiece was a Tony Award. The handsome young actor was very much at home in his skin, his grin radiating confidence in every portrait.

Back in Manhattan, on Mallory’s cork wall, a candid shot of Bugsy had the gopher smiling the way a dog might smile—out of fear, so eager to please. That person was not pictured here.

White lilies adorned a small table that held two more photographs in ornate frames. Here, Alan Rains posed with a teenage girl, who wore a corsage on her gown—America’s quintessential picture of a school prom night. In the second frame, the same girl wore a wedding dress. Another shrine? “Your daughter-in-law?”

“Margret,” said Mrs. Rains. “Mags . . . that’s what we called her. Still a child when we buried her, only twenty-one years old. Alan was destroyed. He had to be sedated . . . so he couldn’t attend her funeral service. He never saw Mags in her coffin. After the burial, Alan would leave the house every day—and I’d sit by the phone. I knew a waiting room would call . . . the one in the hospital where she died . . . or a waiting room in a doctor’s office. There were three of those. You see, he wouldn’t believe she was dead. How could that be? How was it possible that he’d never see his wife walk through another door? And so, every day, he’d find his way to one of those waiting rooms . . . the perfect places to wait for Mags. And then, after an hour or so . . . a receptionist would call me . . . and—”

The lady’s voice broke. “He stopped doing that after about a month. Then he never left the house at all. Hardly ever left his bed.” She fell silent for a few moments. “When I tried to help my son, Leonard Crippen hired an attorney to stop me.”

And that lawyer had won the motion to release Alan Rains from a psychiatric facility, thereby revoking the mother’s guardianship of her adult son, her only child. Charles had this much from Mallory’s notes on the old sanity hearing. “I’m told it was a civil-rights attorney.”

“Yes, and he beat me in court. As long as my boy doesn’t pose a danger to himself or to others, it seems Alan has the legal right to go insane. And Mr. Crippen does his best to keep him that way.” Her hands tightened around the fragile china cup.

Charles feared she might break it.

He knew he should go, but he could not leave her, not after bringing on all this fresh anger and pain. Was she about to cry?

“Sometimes I visit Alan’s subway performances. . . . My son still recognizes me. . . . I wonder how long that will last.” She set down her teacup, and now her hands were tightly clenched, fingernails digging into her palms.

Fists and tears.