It Happens in the Dark (6 page)

Her partner stood just outside the bathroom door, looking down at a week’s worth of clothing strewn about the floor. Then he turned to the open closet, a contradiction of clean shirts and suits hung in an orderly row and, beneath them, shoe trees lined up like soldiers.

“Peter Beck’s killer was here tonight,” said Mallory. “He was here
twice.
”

Riker only glanced her way to ask where this was coming from.

“Beck let him in the door,” she said. “That’s how our perp stole the key. He needed it so he could come back later.” She held up the old barber kit to show him the razor shape of the empty well. “He couldn’t get at it while Beck was in the apartment. No good reason to come in here, not with a guest bathroom outside.” So far her partner was nodding in agreement—until she said, “I know Beck left the building with his killer tonight.”

He folded his arms and smiled to say,
Okay, I’ll bite.

Mallory quit the bedroom, followed by Riker, her expert in all things alcoholic. “Let’s say you’ve been drinking—a
lot
.” She crossed the front room to open the foyer closet. After checking the pockets of a down parka, she moved on to other jackets and coats. “Ever have trouble threading a key in a lock?”

No need for him to answer. Mallory had been eleven years old the first time she had performed that small service for Riker. She held up the house keys and jingled them. “So Beck’s on his way out the door, and the killer snatches the keys. Just being helpful. And he locks up the apartment. Only
one
lock. Our killer slips that key off the ring before he returns it to Beck.” This key ring was not a fingernail breaker. It opened easily with a simple catch, and she demonstrated a quick theft for her partner. “The perp doesn’t steal a key for the street door, and that’s smart. Even falling-down drunk, Beck might notice two keys missing from a ring of five. But you know that’s no problem.”

When the killer had returned to steal Beck’s razor, he only had to wait until a tenant showed up, and then he would have followed that person through the untended door. This was the time-honored way for every burglar in town to enter a well-secured building.

Riker followed her through all the back rooms to watch her make short work of ransacking closets and drawers. “Too bad this guy did his drinking at home. We’re not gonna find any helpful bartenders to tell us who he was with tonight.”

“Yes we will.” Mallory waited a beat, just long enough to make him a
little
crazy. “Peter Beck was on his way out, wearing his overcoat when the killer locked up.”

Riker bit down on his lower lip. He was
not
going to play. He trailed her into a kitchen of many cabinets and more drawers to plunder, and finally he cracked and said, “So?”

“Let’s say our perp stuffed the key ring in Beck’s coat pocket. Easier to get at it again—
after
he cut the man’s throat. Then he could slip the key back on the ring. That’s what I’d do.” She closed the last drawer, and her search was done. “Good idea. But later on, the keys got shifted to a pants pocket, and the killer couldn’t get at them. Beck would’ve done that if he’d stopped off someplace between here and the theater—a place that checks coats. Even drunks go through their pockets before they hand a coat to a stranger.”

“No way,” said Riker. “Kid, you got lucky tonight. It all panned out, but don’t push it, okay? Every guy in the world keeps his house keys in his pants pockets. That does
not
mean he checked his damn coat in a—”

“So where are the gloves? It’s
cold
outside. We didn’t find any gloves on the body, and they’re not here, either.”

And her partner said,
“What?”

•   •   •

The wind was rising, the temperature falling. Impervious to cold, Axel Clayborne topped off his shot glass and smiled at his rooftop companion, the man in the neighboring deck chair. “So . . . Peter’s dead, we covered that. . . . Oh, and I met the most extraordinary girl tonight. A blonde with a gun.” The bottle was half gone when the actor looked up at the sky. The clouds had parted and the stars were out, but not many. Starlight was chintzy in New York City. “She’s in her twenties. I’m pushing forty. Fancy my chances?”

Tactfully, Dickie Wyatt said nothing. But what was age to him anymore? He seemed to have grown younger with the passage of time. His brow had smoothed. The worry lines were gone.

His eyes were closed.

Good night, sweet prince
.

With no fear of interrupting the man’s rest, Axel raised his voice to say, “You don’t
smell
, Dickie. Not a bit.” He intended this as the highest of compliments. It was said that the corpses of saints did not stink, either.

•   •   •

Traveling along the shortest route to the theater, they found two restaurants with bars and coat-check service. The detectives got lucky with the second bartender to look at the photograph of their crime victim. The man left them for a moment and returned with a box of lost items. Passing over pairs of woolen gloves, he pulled out one of black leather lined with fur. “The guy came in alone, and this was lying on the bar when he left.”

“Only
one
glove,” said Mallory.

“Yeah, one glove. I saw him check all his pockets. I guess he was looking for the other one. He drank scotch. Paid cash. Tipped big. That’s all I know.”

In search of the second glove, they backtracked to a small saloon that had not made their shortlist for lack of a coat-check. The woman mixing drinks was Riker’s dream bartender, not much on looks, more of a maternal soul, who coddled her customers by leaning on the pours for every shot of booze.

Motherlove for drunks.

She instantly recognized the dead man in the photograph, and Riker gave her points because she did not blanch at the sight of blood. The playwright had been a regular customer for the past three or four weeks. “A big tipper,” she said with appropriate sadness and no need to add that, on this account, he would be missed.

Riker opened his notebook to scribble down the approximate time when Peter Beck had walked in the door. “And he had two gloves when he sat down?”

“Yeah.” The bartender handed over a solitary black glove, the only one left behind. In answer to the next question, she said, “Peter came in alone. . . . At least, I think he did. He was looking around for somebody.”

Mallory flashed her partner a
gotcha
smile.

Riker’s pencil was stalled, as if it might have run out of lead. “Did the guy check his watch, like maybe he was lookin’ to meet up with—”

“No,” said the bartender, “he was surprised. It was more like he lost someone between here and the door.”

This squared with the theory that Peter Beck had company when he left for the theater tonight. And now it seemed likely that the killer had ditched Beck here—to return to the apartment with the stolen key—so he could steal the victim’s cutthroat razor.

And Mallory’s punch lines just kept on coming.

•   •   •

The whiskey had a warming effect on Axel Clayborne. Or was he merely numb?

Certainly drunk.

Barehanded, he covered Dickie Wyatt’s corpse with snow and smoothed this whitest of blankets until there was no trace of a mound, no sign of a grave.

Done. Hidden.

Till it be morrow.

One last toast?

No, the bottle was dry. He sent it flying across the rooftop. And only now, in Dickie’s absence, Axel felt the cold.

•   •   •

Back in the car and on the roll, heading south through Greenwich Village, Riker slouched low in his seat. “It’s late, kid. Time to pack it in.”

“All right,” said Mallory. “I thought we might visit the missing ticket holder, the guy who slipped past the cops in the lobby. . . . He lives in this neighborhood.” After putting on some speed to pass through a red light before it could turn legal green—always a challenge—she made a left turn onto Houston. “But he didn’t kill Peter Beck. So I guess that can wait till tomorrow.”

Never would Riker ask how she had divined all of this from a flawed ticket count and a rookie cop’s lie. He turned away from her to lightly knock his head against the passenger window.

SUSAN:
(hushed): Don’t they ever speak?

ROLLO:
(loudly): My brothers grunt. Sometimes they giggle. And their needs are met. What use do they have for words?

—
The Brass Bed
,
Act I

Mallory was dressed for cold weather this morning, but the hallway was overheated by a hissing radiator, and she unbuttoned her new winter jacket, a rust-colored shearling. Riker was no fashionista. He could only guess that it was at least the price of ten topcoats like his own.

It was his turn to bang on the door of their runaway ticket holder. He could hear noises of a pet inside the apartment, one too small to bark like a real dog. Now the yappy little beast went silent. A dog with an off-switch? More likely the owner had hushed the animal—or thrown it out a window. He pictured Leonard Crippen snug in his bed, not at home to the police at this early hour.

Mallory bent down to slip a card under the door, and then Riker followed her into the elevator. He had so many questions, and he knew she would never give him straight answers. Where was the fun in that? They rode down to the ground floor in silence.

Last night, she had volunteered very little about Crippen, only mentioning that his theater seat had been surrounded by other people. And so it was easy to follow her logic for innocence. Given only forty seconds to kill a man—moving down a row of occupied seats in the blackout dark and on the run, trotting on toes without getting decked—well, that was just too tricky.

The detectives left the Greenwich Village apartment house to stand under a bright blue sky on Sixth Avenue. This was a neighborhood of human-scale structures, and a snow-covered playground across the street allowed more sunlight than other parts of town. Riker was quick to don his shades. He was not a morning person, but at least it was winter—no chirpy birdsong, only soft coos from dive-bombing pigeons that defecated on sidewalks and pedestrians all year long.

On the way to breakfast, he decided to save time and just ask Mallory how she knew the runaway’s name and address. Oh, yeah, and how had she known where the guy was sitting? The police check of the audience had not included that kind of detail; because of the poor turnout, most audience members had abandoned their ticketed seats for better ones. But Riker was not inclined to ramble on with his queries, and so, as they crossed the broad avenue, he only said, “Talk to me.”

Heading for a Bleecker Street café that did not keep sleepy Villagers’ hours, they had walked a block or so before she said, “You remember that newspaper review, the one the stage manager—”

“A play to die for,” said Riker, quoting the headline, the only line he had been able to read without his bifocals.

“Last night,
The Herald
’s drama critic came back to see the rest of the play.”

“That’s Leonard Crippen?” Riker’s loyalties lay with
The Daily News
, and he had no idea who wrote
their
theater reviews.

“It helps if you know the cashier’s an actor,” said Mallory.

“Of course she is.” In this town, half the population was out-of-work actors, why not the cashier? “Let me guess. Donna Loo knows the critic on sight.”

“Right.” Mallory stopped on the corner outside the café. “And she gave him the same seat he had the night before, the best one in the house. Not the front row. Donna says the raised stage cuts off the actors’ feet, and he would’ve missed the best part of a ballet scene.”

Riker opened the door. “Got it.” He could fill in the rest. When the stage manager had shown them the rave review for opening night, only Mallory had bothered to note the critic’s name, one that was not on the police list for the audience. And then she had asked the cashier if Crippen had returned for the second performance.

Well, this was progress.

Most days his partner required no confirmation for ideas arrived at via telepathic transmissions from other planets. Best of all were the theories she constructed from nothing more than paranoia; they always panned out, and
that
was scary. But then there were the punch-line scenarios—

And now it was get-even time.

The air of the café was warm and rich with best-loved smells of coffee and bacon. Because Mallory disliked any change in her routine, seats at their regular table were always empty when they walked in—thanks to Gurt, the waitress who lost tips when the young detective hovered over customers to speed up their breakfasts.

Riker was smiling when they sat down by the window. “I see Leonard Crippen as an older guy, a lot older than me.” He looked out at the sidewalk, as if divining his insight from pigeon droppings in the snow. “
That’s
why he ran out before the cops could stop him.”

Mallory’s eyes narrowed. Suspicious? Yeah, and,
bonus
, she was annoyed. Where did he get off doing
her
act? And how had he made the ageist connection to the critic’s flight from the theater?

Easy. At the age of fifty-five, he had a growing sense of what it was like to be left behind—to eat a youngster’s dust. “Crippen could’ve filed his review from the theater
if
he had a cell phone. Imagine a newspaper guy without one. So . . . no calling, no texting. And no time to stop and chat with the cops. That could take all night—and the critic had a deadline. He
had
to run for it . . . so he could turn in his review the old-fashioned, old-fart way.”

Gotcha.

•   •   •

Streets in the SoHo precinct were small-town narrow and flanked by storefronts that changed their faces with every passing era from the factory age through the decades of squatters and artists, and then the galleries and the good-times roll of boutiques, antique stores and trendy restaurants. Now there were dark windows, here and there, with going-out-of-business posters and real estate signs signaling more changes to come.

After dropping Riker off at the station house, the only building to keep its purpose for a century, Mallory drove down to the end of the block, where she killed the engine. Snow was piled waist high between the unmarked police car and the sidewalk, and so she walked back along the slushy cobblestone roadbed—followed by footfalls, the long strides of catch-up steps.

Charles Butler spoke to her back. “You were missed at the last poker game.” And now he walked alongside her, cutting an elegant figure in his long black coat, custom made for a man six-feet-four, who could not easily buy off the rack, even if he were so inclined—and he was not. Tailoring was something they had in common, that and the Louis Markowitz Floating Poker Game.

“You have to play next week,” he said. “We need the money.”

Mallory nearly smiled. The game was penny ante, a dollar bet was considered daring, and what were the odds that Charles could ever win? He was genetically programmed to blush in every attempt at deceit. And his smile was another accident of birth; in company with a frog’s eyes and a large eagle beak, any expression of happiness made this very smart man look like a crazed clown. She almost forgot to be angry with him for chasing her down this morning.

Almost.

He had forgotten three barber appointments since she had seen him last. His brown hair had grown past his ears, and it would have covered his eyes but for a sudden gust that whipped it back and straightened out the curl. “Do you want to hear what was said behind your back?”

Not really
. Her hands jammed into her pockets, head down to duck the wind, she walked faster now. He kept pace with her and kept up the fiction that this conversation was his own idea. Not annoying by nature, Charles was certainly doing the dirty work of someone else, an older man who would keep dogging her until one of them died, and so she asked, “How
is
Rabbi Kaplan?”

Her proof of conspiracy was in Charles’s reddening face—that and David Kaplan’s many calls stacking up on her answering machine, all invitations to the game and every one of them laced with guilt. The rabbi was ruthless in his lectures on her neglect of old friends—her crimes of the heart.

“David thinks the rules might be too hard on you,” said Charles, the rabbi’s emissary, his proxy
stalker
. “The others agreed. . . . I was your only defender.”

A lame joke, but so was the card game. She had tired of it when she was twelve years old, long before Charles Butler had become a player. At forty, this psychologist was the youngest man in her foster father’s tight circle of hand-me-down friends. Then and now, he was the anomaly in a world where cops and shrinks were natural enemies, though he had proved useful at times. Transparent Charles, who could not hide a lie of his own, had an uncanny knack for catching liars. He made a polygraph machine look like a Ouija board.

And he might be useful again.

She weighed the payoff against the attendant hassle of a predictable payment: a chair at the table in the poker game, a wasted night.
So
not worth it.

They had reached the station house. Mallory turned her back on him to pass through an opening in the snow bank, heading for the doors. She caught his reflection in the door’s glass. Ephemeral. Ghosty. And now—the smile of a hopeful loon.

“Charles, I’m running late.”

“The game’s at my place this week. In your honor, we’re dispensing with some of the rules.”

The doors opened, two patrolmen stepped out, and she could see Riker waiting for her inside. “I have to go.”

“Treys will
not
be wild if it snows,” said Charles. “Sevens won’t be wild cards, either, though it
is
an election year. And never mind the crescent moon. All cards will be dealt in a clockwise fashion.”

Mallory watched his reflection as one hand reached out to tap her shoulder in a plea for her to turn around. He stopped an inch shy of touching her.

She had rules, too.

With no goodbye, she moved on through the doors, already forgetting that he was ever there.

•   •   •

The lieutenant in command of Special Crimes had no clear memory of how he had found his way home last night.

There had to be a better cure for high anxiety. Drink should be a last resort to keep his head from exploding. In his rookie days, Jack Coffey had spent much time in cop bars, studying under legendary drunks, but proved an unworthy acolyte with merely average ability to hold his liquor. He was also average in respect to physical features, his height and weight—ordinary everything, though the lieutenant was a better cop than most. Still in his thirties, some might say he was young to hold this command—and young to be losing his hair. The growing bald spot at the back of his head was put down to stress.

Too many murders in the house.

He held the telephone receiver to his ear and listened to a city councilman ramble on about missing night-vision goggles—like that was a sane complaint to a homicide squad
.
It made more sense when Councilman Perry ranted about having seen two first acts, and tonight he wanted to see the whole damn play, but how could the play go on if the police had the goggles?

It would be impolitic to explain to this man that the hierarchy of the NYPD did not include whiney bureaucrats. And so Jack Coffey said, “Goggles. Check. I’ll get right on that.”

Maybe next year.

Click.
And the councilman was gone.

It would have been so helpful if Riker and Mallory had shown up on time to brief him on the Broadway suicide. This morning, most of his information had come from the media, and more reporters were stacking up in a row of blinking red lights for calls on hold. They would have to wait. In his present sorry state, he was sensitive to every noise, even to the sound of hair falling out of his scalp and crashing to the floor.

Leaving his private office, seeking relief from the telephone that would
not
stop ringing, the lieutenant carried his newspaper out to the squad room, a large space with tall windows filmed in grime to discourage sunlight. The high ceiling was crisscrossed with pipes and ducts and spanned by long tubes of ancient fluorescent lights that hissed and threatened to go on the blink any minute. Only two of the desks had empty chairs. The others were occupied by men with cups of brew and deli bags.

No phones were ringing out here, not yet. Blessed peace.

The only holiday decoration was a small potted Christmas tree. This was a personal gift from the mayor to every overworked squad in the city, a token of his honor’s affection as he crippled the police with budget slashes. It said to one and all,
Merry Christmas and screw you.
The tree had turned brown, and the same apathy that denied it any water had left it to rot on the windowsill. No, wait. Something was different today. The bright plastic decorations were missing. Some joker had strung the brittle branches with bullets painted black. Now doubly grim, the little tree set the tone for morale.

Ah, his errant detectives had come through the stairwell door. They walked to the coatrack—
slowly
—as if they were not late
enough
. He stared at Mallory as she shrugged off her new jacket, rich suede lined with fleece. What the hell did that thing cost?
Thousands.
It called to him across the room, screaming,
Dirty money! Dirty money!
He always took her wardrobe additions personally. She
wanted
him to have a heart attack.