It Happens in the Dark (18 page)

ROLLO:
When our neighbors were interviewed after the massacre, those who still had surviving cats and dogs, they only had the nicest things to say about the twins.

—
The Brass Bed
, Act II

While Leonard Crippen turned the first few pages of the ghostwriter’s play, Mallory wore a cell-phone earpiece, a connection to Charles Butler in the nearby state of Connecticut, and she listened to the highlights of his interview with Bugsy’s mother. When Charles was done, the detective reached across the table and snatched the play from the critic’s hands.

Startled, the old man opened his mouth, but the only sound heard was the yapping of the lapdog, the first to take umbrage. Mallory rolled the manuscript in one tight fist, the universal sign language for
Bad dog! I’ll beat the crap out of you!
And the poodle fled the room.

The drama critic raised his eyebrows to ask,
But what have
I
done?

Now she could believe that this man had not written the play. He had never even read it, and he desperately wanted to. Or maybe he had been an actor in his younger days. “Let’s talk about Bugsy—your
other
pet—and what you did to his mother.”

“So you’ve spoken to her.” Crippen slowly released a stream of air in imitation of a man deflating. “I imagine she thinks the worst of me.”

“Understatement,” said Charles Butler’s voice in Mallory’s earpiece.

The drama critic rose from the table and picked up a pink watering can in the shape of a tin flamingo. Nervous and in need of props, some suspects played with pencils or cigarettes during an interview. This one watered flowers.

“Well, I can’t have you believing that I let Bugsy go on this way for my own amusement.” He paused to wet the soil of an African violet. “Years ago, I went to visit him at a hospital in Connecticut. That’s where I met his mother. Mrs. Rains was having him evaluated so she could put him away. I gather he’d become something of an embarrassment to her.”

“She
loved
her son,” said Charles’s disembodied voice. “Still loves him.”

The critic bent over to stream water into another ceramic pot. “His mother thought the madness began
years
before she had him hospitalized.”

“He’s lying,” said Charles.

Crippen moved on to the last potted plant. “I suppose all young people in love are psychotic. When Alan Rains was seventeen, he gave his girlfriend a kidney. That’s not puppy love, Detective. That’s a case of I-can’t-live-without-the-girl love. The boy colluded with her parents, and they told the doctors that Alan was her brother. The surgery was over and done with before Mrs. Rains could step in and stop it.”

“She never tried to stop it,” said the eavesdropper in Connecticut. “She was proud of him.”

“They were married when he was nineteen,” said Crippen. “And he left Yale for New York. They had a few hardscrabble years in the city. The girl was on transplant medication, very expensive. Imagine the pressure on poor Alan to succeed.”

“The mother sent them money every week,” said Charles. “She loved them both.”

And the critic prattled on. “Four months into Alan’s starring role on Broadway, the girl became very ill. She was rejecting the kidney. Alan quit the play to take care of his wife. Walking out on a hit play is endgame for a young actor’s career. He gave up everything for her—and the girl died anyway. A true American tragedy.”

“More like Shakespeare,” said Charles. “That’s the way the mother sees it. When our Romeo became Bugsy—that was just the next best thing to being dead.”

Mallory heard a woman’s voice in the background, then a crash of dishes, and now the click of a disconnected telephone.

“Well, you know the rest,” said Leonard Crippen. “His mother tried to have him committed to a loony bin.”

“That’s when you got a lawyer to bust him out of that hospital.”

“Guilty. However, in my defense, Bugsy has a constitutional right to be whomever he likes, crazy or no. My attorney only laid down the law. . . . But you don’t approve. Let’s see if I can guess why. Perhaps it’s because Alan Rains was a young hero, offering up his body parts to save the girl he loved. He was a passionate soul, and he—”

“He was a better man than Bugsy. But
you
decided that Alan Rains wasn’t worth saving . . . and now the law says no one can save him.”

The old man set down his watering can and heaved a long sigh, one that conveyed great sorrow. Over the passing years, had he second-guessed his act of meddling? Or was he only sorry to be caught?

Mallory dropped the manuscript on the table, but the critic would not touch it until he had her nod of approval. His dog hovered on the threshold of the room, also waiting for a nod from her.

•   •   •

The aftermath of the snowstorm trumped murder in the headlines today, but there was treasure buried on the inside pages, and all the daily newspapers were spread out on the detectives’ facing desks.

“Here’s another link.” Mallory circled a paragraph in a half-page obituary for Peter Beck. “The playwright and the director were roommates in college—years before either one of them met up with Axel Clayborne.”

Riker parried with his own find. “But Clayborne and Wyatt were joined at the hip. It says here, those guys did everything together—plays, movies. And then, things fell apart when they were working in Europe.” In the next line of type, Riker found a mention of a film made in Italy, one that he had really liked, though he would never admit to seeing a movie with anything as classy as subtitles. “After a few years, Dickie shows up in New York—without his buddy, Axel. You figure they had a fight, a big one? Maybe one of them carried a grudge?”

Naw, that was too lame to get her attention. No, wait. She
was
listening. Mallory pushed a folded newspaper across the dividing line of desks, and he read the circled article on the late director of stage and screen. Years ago, on a movie lot in Rome, Dickie Wyatt had been arrested on a charge of drug possession. But Axel Clayborne had stepped up to claim the heroin as his own property. So the actor, an innocent man, went to jail, and his friend, the addict, went free.

Spared the ordeal of sudden withdrawal in a prison cell, Dickie Wyatt escaped the night sweats and cramps, violent shakes and nausea chased by a river of vomit.

Riker read that last line again. Hell, it was almost poetry.

Mallory had moved on to a gossip column. She drew a perfect circle around another paragraph. “Hollywood’s calling. The film rights are worth millions.”

Murder for profit would always be her personal favorite.

Around the squad room, heads were turning toward the stairwell door. Leonard Crippen stood on the threshold, dressed in funeral black and sporting a fedora. He doffed his hat with a flourish, and then his damn calling card, an opening sigh, was heard by one and all. Now that he had everyone’s attention, the old man slowly moved down the aisle of desks to stand beside Mallory’s—awaiting her invitation to sit down in the visitor’s chair. And with her nod, he did.

“I can tell you this play wasn’t a spontaneous rewrite during rehearsals.” Crippen handed her the manuscript. “The foreshadowing is too intricate, too well thought out.”

“So the ghostwriter read Beck’s play
before
he wrote—”

“Oh, I doubt that,” said the critic. “Forgive the cliché, but Peter
does
knock them out like sausages. There’s more work, more time invested in what the ghostwriter’s done—so his play came first. Imagine, if you will, that it’s a sleeve tailored to fit neatly over any old play by Peter Beck.”

Other men were listening in, drifting closer to the conversation, and Detective Gonzales spoke for them all, asking, “So you know how the play ends?” He stood behind Mallory’s chair, pointing down at the crown of her head. “She won’t tell us. And Riker can’t read.”

“I’m sworn to secrecy.” The critic looked to Mallory, silently asking if he should continue.

She locked the manuscript in her desk drawer. “So the ghostwriter’s play was written first?” Riker smiled when she fed the critic a lead for her next ploy to sucker a room full of cops. “How is that
possible
?”

Gonzales and the others stayed to hear the answer.

“Peter Beck always wrote the same play, over and over. It’s always a family drama. They all have four characters, the standard cast size to fit every financial backer’s wallet. You can count on one dominant father figure. Apparently Peter had daddy issues. And there’s never more than one female role, always an ingénue, and that cut down on the complexity. Peter had trouble with women. Rumor has it, this was true on several levels. Well, you’ve seen him. Funny-looking man. A good enough wordsmith, I suppose, but nothing new to say. So he throws in bits of wisdom culled from
Bartlett’s Quotations
. This passes for meat in literary circles.”

Crippen paused, no doubt to heave one more heavy sigh, but apparently, he read something in Mallory’s face that said,
Don’t.

And he continued his lecture. “Well, the lesser critics come away with the sense that they’re somehow increased for attending these hack performances. Oh, and Peter always uses the three-act format. Did you know that the ancient Greeks wrote plays for a single ninety-minute act?”

Riker made a rolling motion with one hand to tell the man that his monologue was dragging, and they might lose their audience of cops.

The critic ignored Riker and rose from his chair to play to the whole crowd. “Peter was raised on television programming. He liked the idea of ratcheting up the tension just before the commercial breaks. But tension was not his forte, and some—”

“Hey!” Mallory curled a newspaper in her hands, rolling it tight.
Tighter.

“Long story short,” said Leonard Crippen, speaking faster now. “If you want to hijack a Broadway play, say—substitute one of your own—you’d choose any old thing by Peter Beck. Then your financing is guaranteed. Oh, and the element of the ghostwriter? Well, that was pure genius.” He picked up the gossip column that Mallory had circled in ink. “You
know
what the publicity is worth . . . even without corpses in the audience. Though I must say that
was
a nice touch. This was all planned out well in advance.
And
, if the ghostwriter can keep his anonymity, that show will run for years.” He spread his arms wide. “Everyone loves a mystery.”

The critic’s arms dropped to his sides. What? No applause?

“I don’t buy it,” said Gonzales, and the skeptical faces of other men echoed this complaint. “The ghostwriter crap—that idea only works on paper. No cop would ever believe this guy could get people to follow orders on a blackboard.”

“He’d only need the support of the director,” said Crippen. “The director is God to the cast. And, in this case, he’s also the play’s producer. Dickie Wyatt would’ve overridden everybody.”

Gonzales shook his head, unconvinced. “But the playwright—”

“Oh,
everyone
overrides a playwright,” said Crippen. “Peter Beck ranked one rung below the stagehands. No, I take that back. Even Bugsy was more essential to the performance.”

•   •   •

Riker had been fetched from the squad room, and Jack Coffey swiveled his chair to face the television set in the corner of his private office.

“I taped a press conference . . . just for you.” The lieutenant pressed the play button on his remote, and the screen came to life with the wide-angle picture of a city hospital. The camera lens closed in on the face of a young man, who answered reporters’ questions about Alma Sutter’s near-death experience, painting her as yet another victim of the cursed Broadway play.

Coffey paused the film. “You told me she was fine.”

“She
was
!” Riker stared at the frozen screen image. “This is bullshit. Who
is
that little prick?”

“That’s Alma Sutter’s agent. You guys got zero containment on this story. And I got six minutes before that phone rings. Who’s gonna get a piece of me first? The chief of detectives? Some clown from the mayor’s office? It’s a crapshoot. But you better give me
something
!”

“Tell ’em it’s the agent’s scam. Alma’s not even
at
the hospital. Cyril Buckner called and told her to get her ass back to the theater.”

“After she OD’d? Did this guy somehow miss the fact that she was taken away in an ambulance?”

“I don’t think Buckner misses much,” said Riker. “But I was there when Alma took his call. I heard her say she only fainted—just a case of malnutrition and stress. She told him the docs gave her a vitamin booster. That was a lie, but she’s not about to tell him she OD’d on drugs. I
know
she went back to the theater. I flagged down the lady’s cab.”

“How close are you to—”

“Give us more men, and we’ll wrap it up faster.”

Jack Coffey’s desk phone rang. And now the cell phone in his pocket was ringing, too.

•   •   •

Bugsy carried bags of deli sandwiches to the Rinaldi brothers, who had stopped taking meals with the rest of the theater company. Today they used a footlocker for their table as they squatted on the floor in the wings.