It Happens in the Dark (5 page)

“It’s a Bible quotation.” Mallory could quote scripture better than any soapbox lunatic in the city.

“Four years of Catholic school finally pays off,” said Riker. Though his partner had spent much of her childhood in a Jewish household, her foster mother, the late Helen Markowitz, had given the Catholics equal time—due to a misunderstanding in Kathy Mallory’s puppy days when the feral street kid had made the sign of the cross. Later, it was discovered that the little girl only used this religious gesture to ward off mad dogs and cops.

A Sunday-school dropout he might be, but Riker well understood why the actress had assumed that this love letter was meant for his partner.

WHO IS SHE THAT LOOKETH FORT
H AS THE MORNING, FAI
R AS THE MOON, CLEAR
AS THE SUN, AND TERRI
BLE AS AN ARMY WITH
BANNERS?

SUSAN:
(paces the length of the room) I’m not afraid. . . . I’m not.

ROLLO:
Give it time.

—
The Brass Bed
, Act I

Snowfall was light, a final dusting of the storm that had paralyzed all but the city’s main arteries for two days. There were no pedestrians in sight, and gone was the twenty-four-hour static of traffic and the drive-by blasts of music from car radios. Manhattan by night—nothing sweeter. But this night, the town had taken itself indoors, and Riker found the lack of noise unsettling. Creepy. A born New Yorker, he could only read perfect peace as the hush at the end of the world. But then a hulking snowplow lumbered past the theater on its way to some blocked road, and the two detectives walked down Forty-ninth Street.

Riker wrapped his scarf a little tighter against a sudden chill wind. His partner wore a trench coat, a poor choice in winter. It must have been the first thing that came to hand in her flight to the crime scene. He wanted to ask if she was cold, but this might be taken the wrong way, as though he were asking if she didn’t feel the cold like a
normal
human. Mallory the Machine was her moniker, the one used behind her back in the squad room, where she kept everyone at the distance of her surname. Everyone. Even though he had watched her grow up in the care of old friends, he was not allowed to call her Kathy anymore.

After the funeral of Inspector Louis Markowitz, Riker had received a letter written against a day when Lou’s foster child might be left alone in Copland. The dead man’s final words had obliged him to look after her, and Riker had taken this to mean keeping her safe. Now he expanded upon that old instruction, removing his scarf and wrapping it around her neck to keep her warm.

She forgave him for this act of kindness by not acknowledging his gift, and neither did she shrug it off as she unlocked her car, a silver convertible that any passerby might take for a Volkswagen—if they never looked under the hood to see the Porsche engine of a speed freak who loved to drive—
lived
to drive. Semi-suicidal Riker was the only man on the squad who would ride with her, and so he had become her partner by default; that was the story he told, and he stuck to it whenever he was asked the question that always began with
Why in God’s name
—

“One of the first cops on the scene lied to us.” Mallory slid in behind the wheel. “Somebody from the audience got past them before they secured the doors.”

“A
uniform
confessed to a screwup like that?”

She shot him a look that said,
Oh, sure—like that was ever going to happen.

Then how could she know? Riker climbed in on the passenger side. Was he going to ask her? No, he knew this game too well. Contrary to what the rest of the squad believed, Mallory
did
have a sense of humor, twisted though it might be. There was never any laughter when she got to the end of a joke—only a fleeting smile to say,
Gotcha
.

But not tonight.

That was his resolve as his partner pulled away from the curb for the six-block ride to Peter Beck’s residence in Hell’s Kitchen. Riker double-checked the math, leafing through the officers’ notes on people interviewed in the lobby. And now he consulted his own notebook. “I don’t have the cashier’s statement. Donna Loo? She was your interview, right?”

“Yes, she was.” Mallory slowed down for a red light. Coming to a full stop was against her religion. She pulled a small evidence bag from the pocket of her trench coat and handed it over. “Donna doesn’t know who left them. They were in the cashier’s booth when she came to work.”

Through the clear plastic, Riker read the typed note that banded a packet of four tickets:
Peter Beck and guests.
“But the lighting guy said the man came in by the alley door.”

“Right,” said Mallory. “Beck didn’t
need
a ticket. But after that good review, our killer couldn’t count on a bad turnout. He had to keep Donna from selling those seats in the front row. She handed out seventy-two tickets tonight. I checked her count with the usher’s stubs.”

Oh,
shit
! Only seventy-
one
people had given up their names and IDs while submitting to a CSI search for blood evidence. Clara Loman must have counted Peter Beck as ticket holder seventy-two. Another damned screwup.

“Okay,” said Riker. “Maybe those cops were wrong about nobody gettin’ out, but what makes you think one of ’em lied? Maybe you—”

“Read the head usher’s statement. He pulled the two cops off the sidewalk outside the front entrance. Donna Loo backs him up on that. So now they’re all in the lobby. The usher and the cashier have their backs to the street door—and that’s when somebody flies out. The cops don’t stop the runaway. They’re both listening to the usher, right? They don’t even know what’s happened yet. Only one cop saw that ticket holder run out the door . . . and he
lied
about it.”

Riker sighed. She might be making this up as she went along, but there was no fault in her logic. One ticket holder was in the wind, and one of the four people in that lobby
might
have seen the escape. “So you just worked this out with the ticket count? That’s how you know one cop lied?”
Fat chance.

“I can even tell you which cop.”

He knew she was
not
doing this with tea leaves. Too easy.

“It was the younger one,” said Mallory. “The rookie. I nailed him five minutes after I got to the theater. He couldn’t look me in the eye when I asked if anyone got past him.”

Punch line.

And well timed. They turned onto Peter Beck’s side street, traveling slowly in the wake of a snowplow. The neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen had long ago lost its gangland reputation. Thanks to an infusion of wealth and an invasion of interior decorators, only pansy criminals would live here.

“I guess our guy walked to the theater,” said Riker. The sidewalks were passable, shoveled by shopkeepers and building supers, but not the road ahead.

•   •   •

Axel Clayborne had downed many shots of Chivas Regal, but the actor was not yet hammered, not by half. He left his apartment and climbed the steps to the roof, where a door opened upon a square field of pristine snow. To the north, the Empire State Building was a needle on the skyline. Closer to home, colored holiday lights were strung on balconies, and tinny notes of song wafted up from the street. He leaned over the brick parapet to look down at the sidewalk far below, where drunken ants were singing Christmas carols by the neon glow of a bar sign.

He was surrounded on all sides by the bright windows of his TriBeCa neighborhood, though no close rooftop was higher than this one. The storm had covered the deck chairs and the table. They were unrecognizable mounds. Axel unwound his scarf and used it to whack the furniture and send the snow flying. When the tabletop was clear, he laid out two shot glasses and a whiskey bottle.

Now . . . where was Dickie Wyatt? He had so much to tell this man with whom he shared everything. Once, they had even shared a toothbrush on a red-eye flight out of Cairo.

Axel turned east. That way? No, he had bearings now, and his feet punched deep holes in the snow as he made his way to the opposite corner of the sky, shouting, “Dickie! I’m home!”

•   •   •

Peter Beck’s doorman had a typical New Yorker’s reaction to the sudden death of one of his tenants. “Well, I’ll be damned.” He tilted his head to one side in the attitude of
So what else is new?

The hour was late, and the old man wore a bathrobe over his pajamas as he answered questions in the lobby of the building where he was also a resident, though his studio apartment was underground. “No windows,” he complained, and their crime victim lived in the sky “—with God and the pigeons. But I haven’t seen Mr. Beck for a week. Not in the daytime. There used to be a second shift, but we had budget cuts. Cheap bastards. And me? I go off duty at six-thirty.” He turned from one detective to the other, the giveaway sign of awaiting a challenge.

“But tonight you left early,” said Mallory.

His eyes darted right to left. Looking for a way out? He raised his hands, palms up, a prelude to coming clean. “I had a doctor’s appointment.”

“Okay,” said Riker, “let’s say that’s true. What time did you leave? And before you answer that, if I think you’re lyin’, we’ll bang on doors all over this building till we—”

“Around five o’clock, maybe quarter after.”

Mallory pointed to the main entrance. “And that door was locked when you left?”

“Oh, yeah. The tenants got their own keys.”

“What about Beck’s visitors?” Riker waved the old man into the waiting elevator. “Anybody stand out?”

“Well, yesterday this little guy shows up. He wants to see Mr. Beck. I think his name was Bugsy. Yeah, that’s it. But Mr. Beck never answered his intercom buzzer.” The doorman pushed a button, and the elevator hummed as they rode upward. “The little guy was worried—said Beck wasn’t taking phone calls, either. So I get the manager’s key, and we go upstairs to knock on the door. No answer. But I don’t use the key ’cause I hear somebody moving around in there. So this guy, Bugsy, he was satisfied, and he left.”

The elevator opened, and the doorman said, “I got no keys tonight. If you want in, I have to call the—”

“Got it covered,” said Riker. “Go back to sleep.”

The detectives stepped out to walk down a hallway carpet that was the pale green shade of money. And when they stood before the dead man’s door, the top lock, one of three, was not a fit for any keys on Peter Beck’s ring, but Riker unlocked it with the loose one from the victim’s coat pocket. And Mallory refrained from saying,
I told you so
.

He flicked on the light switch in the foyer, and then he whistled. “Beck must’ve been a
great
playwright.”

In a town where success was measured in square feet of living space, the foyer was big enough to park a truck. And beyond the window glass, the Hudson River spanned the entire wall of the front room. Come morning, it would be flooded with light, another marker for wealth.

But prosperity had not brought happiness to Peter Beck.

The signs of depression were recognizable from Mallory’s rare forays into her partner’s apartment. Every surface and much of the floor was littered with unopened mail, empty liquor bottles, cast-off clothes and crumbs of food from take-out cartons. In Riker’s place, this effect was cumulative. But here, in a neighborhood of once-a-week cleaning ladies, it was the excess of a
very
sad man. And now she noticed golden statues of theater awards, some of them broken, all of them knocked to the floor below the mantelpiece—evidence of an
angry
man.

Riker bent down to pick up a receipt with the logo of a liquor store. “Delivery charges. This address is two blocks away, but the guy got his booze delivered. Lots of it.”

Mallory found another receipt, one stapled to a paper bag from a vegan restaurant.

A vegetarian drunk?

A cursory search of the room’s drawers and cabinets gave up nothing more than the average hotel suite. Very neat. Too neat. This would not square with the litter trails of a man who did not bother to cart his garbage to the trash chute in the outer hallway.

Riker closed a drawer. “Let’s toss the whole place. Better us than Loman’s crew.”

Mallory agreed. If Clara Loman saw the same evidence of a tidy vegetarian recently turned boozing slob, she might make a call of suicide by a man unhinged, and that CSI had done enough damage tonight.

The detectives moved on to the next room, Beck’s den, where a handsome desk and a long table provided workspace for the playwright, but there were no writing tools in sight. And the air was stale. It smelled of abandonment. A light gray film covered every surface to mark the last visit of a cleaning woman. It outlined the rectangular shape of a recently moved, maybe stolen, laptop. An easy guess. Disconnected wires led to the desktop printer and a scanner. The lone, shallow file drawer told Mallory that Beck had been a purger of hard copy. The rest of his personal papers would have been committed to the missing computer and then to the document-shredder in the corner. Other drawers were clutter free, and their spare contents could be seen at a glance.

Thieves prized compulsive neatness in their victims; valuables were so quickly found for the taking, and so it took less than a minute to know that there were no thumb drives or any backup disks left behind. The thief’s fingerprints would not be found here, either. Only the missing laptop had left a track in the dust.

A second hallway door opened onto a toilet, a sink and a wide mirror lined with vanity lights. Her foster mother, Helen, would have called this the powder room, a convenience for visitors. Farther down the hall, Mallory entered another doorway and walked past a king-size, unmade bed. The stink of booze rose off the sheets. She stepped into the master bathroom of modern luxury appointments, marble tiles and a sauna. The only old thing, a worn leather case, lay open beside the sink, and it held an incomplete set of antique barber tools. One empty well of the velvet lining was molded to fit a missing straight-edge razor. So the murder weapon
had
belonged to Peter Beck.