It Happens in the Dark (9 page)

•   •   •

It was a stage manager’s job to assume responsibility for absolutely everything. All during the rehearsal period—which would not
end
—between changing lines and stage blocking, new lighting cues and a mountain of paperwork, Cyril Buckner also played the rabbi, doling out wisdom. Then, as the actors’ priest, he heard confessions. He had also stepped in after Dickie Wyatt’s contract had lapsed, and now he did that man’s job, too, keeping faith with the director’s vision—and the ghostwriter’s play, which would not stop changing.

On the plus side, the increased rehearsal time was a luxury in Broadway economics. On the downside of high legal fees and stalled openings, he now had a skeleton crew. Declining cuts in pay, most of his people had quit before the first performance. And the unions were knocking on his door, banging it down, wanting to chat about violations like replacing the doorman with a rent-a-cop, and
not
replacing other people, and maybe the TWU had discovered that the dresser, Nan Cooper, was working for free. Add one more hassle to the mix, and Cyril was going to
kill
somebody.

Anyone would do.

Today, he had begun with new bits of action for the Rinaldi brothers, who played out their psychotic roles to the nth degree, on and offstage. Type-casting had been Dickie Wyatt’s art, stumbling only when hiring Alma Sutter, no one’s first choice for the role of Susan. Now the ghostwriter had given her
more
lines.

And where
was
that stupid bitch?

The stage manager cum director, read Alma’s part for Axel Clayborne, who lounged on the brass bed, flanked by the twins. This actor was always line perfect. And so, when he missed the next cue, Cyril Buckner was startled, and he looked up from the page to see all three of his actors peering into the wings.

Alma Sutter stepped through the scenery door to stand under the spotlight. She raked one hand through her mutilated hair, and then, parading upstage and down in her new costume, she asked, “What do you think?”

“Shoot me,” said Cyril. “Just
shoot
me and get it over with!”

The Rinaldi twins, as usual, were speechless.

Axel Clayborne clapped his hands. “The haircut reminds me of a salon on the Lower East Side. Their idea of styling hair’s a bit like rough sex in the Third World. But Nan Cooper’s a wizard with scissors. She can fix that. Otherwise, it’s wonderful. Edgy. Risky.”

“Bullshit!” Cyril turned on Alma. “What the
fuck
have you done to yourself?”

She felt the punch of words more than most people, and now she backed away, her hands flying up to protect her ears. “It’s the ghostwriter’s change, not mine.”

“
Screw
him!” The stage manager crumpled the change sheets in one hand. “You can’t
do
this. We’re already pushing our luck with the cops.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Axel. “I suppose it depends on whether or not you think the ghostwriter murdered Peter. You believe it, don’t you, Cyril? So who would you rather piss off—the cops or a psycho?”

SUSAN:
What are they doing with that matchbox?

ROLLO:
They’re collecting the dead flies. Every boy needs a hobby.

—
The Brass Bed
,
Act I

Out on the street, the line was long for the sold-out performance, and reporters interviewed ticket holders, asking if they liked their chances of living through this night.

Sidestepping the cameras and lights, a troop of detectives from Special Crimes entered by the alley door. More than half the squad had volunteered to do backstage reconnaissance off the books, only wanting the rest of the story that Leonard Crippen had begun at the station house. The motives of the civilian audience were less pure: blood and guts
and
a play for the price of admission.

Mallory led the way to the stage manager’s desk in the wings, where they all stopped to read the latest message on the blackboard.

Cyril Buckner joined them to cock one thumb at the words printed in white chalk. “Never mind that. He’s screwing with you guys. But we’re playing it safe. You saw the ambulance parked outside? We hired it for the night.”

“Cheap publicity gimmick,” said Detective Janos.

“No, we
also
gave complimentary tickets to three cardiologists. We don’t
want
anyone to die tonight.”

Riker was born with a face that said,
I know you’re lying
. It was his best comeback line, and he never needed to say it aloud. The stage manager walked away—quickly. The detective stayed to stare at the ghostwriter’s message for his partner. It could only be a continuation of the threat to take off her head: MALLORY, TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT. NOTHING PERSONAL

He turned to the pair of wheelchairs parked in the wings. A mannikin sat in one of them, draped with a sheet—like a corpse.

•   •   •

Mallory walked toward the tiny camera hidden on a shelf overlooking the blackboard. It was still in place. She ran a wireless feed on the screen of her cell phone. “Bugsy, when did that message show up?”

“Maybe an hour before you guys walked in the door.”

She sped up the film, rushing it toward that time stamp, and watched the jerky motion of foot traffic passing by the board. The screen went black on Bugsy’s mark for the timing of the chalkboard threat. Had her perp covered the lens of this camera, too? She reached up to touch the small device. No tack to the surface, no evidence of tampering. “Did the lights go off tonight?”

“Yeah, a few times. On and off. A glitch in the system. Happens a lot. Gil ran through all the cues on his panel. Everything’s workin’ fine now.”

So the ghostwriter had worked in the dark, and the missing pair of night-vision goggles would help with that. What else did he have in the way of technology? How had he known she was filming the board? There had been no one else in the theater when she had selected her hiding place.

Mallory looked up to the chaos of wiring, rope and cables overhead and considered Bugsy’s theory that the ghostwriter had a camera of his own hidden somewhere up there. A movement caught her eye, and her gaze shifted to the high catwalk, where she saw the back of Gil Preston, who moved quickly toward the other side of his metal walkway in the air.

Her answer might not lie in technology; it might be as simple as a bird’s-eye view. Or something else. She switched off the desk lamp and saw light leaks in the stage set’s flimsy wall.

Peepholes?

•   •   •

The theater was humming with hundreds of conversations. Every velvet chair was occupied except for the four front-row seats reserved for the NYPD. Riker removed a gold, tasseled rope from the armrests of one, and he sat down as a gleeful Leonard Crippen settled into the dead playwright’s seat.

The houselights dimmed. The curtains parted to a round of applause for the famous movie star on the brass bed. And thirty seconds into the first act, this night began to slide downhill. Enter Alma Sutter, backing onto the stage, being herded through a door by the creepy twins. Her waist-long hair had been chopped back to blond curls that only grazed her shoulders, and she had changed her stage costume—radically. No red dress this time. She wore a blazer, jeans and a silk T-shirt.

Did she seem taller now?

The detective had to rise from his seat, enduring hisses from the people behind him, to see over the edge of the raised stage. He expected high heels, but the actress wore black running shoes like Mallory’s. Alma was simply
acting
taller. Riker donned his bifocals for a better look at the bee-stung lips drawn on the woman’s mouth in the same red shade of lipstick that his partner used, and Alma had even changed the color of her eyes to Mallory green.

Leonard Crippen whispered, “Marvelous likeness.”

Riker shook his head. This was so wrong. He only heard bits of the actors’ conversation. He was more aware of the weight of a gun in his shoulder holster. When the stage lights flickered, the gun weighed more.

Onstage, the actor in the fat suit raised his voice, and this time Riker heard each word as the man demanded a chair for his guest. One of the twins pulled a wheelchair from the closet, and the fake Mallory sat down. The actress’s impression was not very good, even by Riker’s low standards. He ceased to listen to her lines of dialogue. He only caught the tone. She spoke like a dime-store replica of Mallory, missing every subtlety and abusing the flat affect that his partner only trotted out when she wanted to make a scary point. But when Riker removed his eyeglasses, the physical likeness was good—too good.

While the spotlight was on Axel Clayborne during the Fat Man’s Ballet, Riker was looking to the shadows where Mallory’s doppelganger sat in the wheelchair, one hand lifted in a lifeless mannikin pose. He had no easy moments until the fantasy sequence ended with a crash of glass from Clayborne’s leap through the window. And now a blackout. Ten seconds of darkness.

C’mon! C’mon!

Fifteen seconds.
Twenty
.

The stage lights came up. The broken window was mended. The invalid was lying on his brass bed, and the frozen woman came back to life. Riker could no longer look at her and see anyone but Mallory.

The actors resumed their conversation of sudden deaths in the family—lots of them.

By stage light, Riker checked his wristwatch. They were closing in on the time when Peter Beck had been murdered.

Onstage, the bedridden invalid was somehow offended by what the woman said, but Riker had not been paying attention to those lines. The lights flickered to cue another fantasy scene, and the actress froze into her statue pose again. The man rose from his bed, one hand clenched.

Riker’s hand moved toward his gun.

But the actor did not strike her. He gently touched her hair, her face. He leaned in close and inhaled her perfume. The stage went dark for a count of five seconds, and when the lights came back on, Clayborne held a baseball bat in his hands. Flickering in and out of darkness, the actor slowly raised the bat for a swing. A spotlight was trained on him as the bat connected to the fake Mallory’s face—and smashed it. Her bloody head went flying off her body to roll toward the footlights.

A fake head.

And now for Riker’s next surprise, the crowd
cheered.

Goddamn pack of ghouls
.

His gun was in his hand when the lights went out again.

The detective ticked off forty sweaty seconds of darkness, and when the stage lights brightened, the actor was in his bed once more, the actress’s head was back on her shoulders, and they were talking, gesturing, all the signs of life ongoing. The curtain came down, the houselights came up, and—
Oh, Christ!—
Mallory was seated beside him, holding a pair of night-vision goggles.

Two heart attacks in one night.

“Lots of time to slit your throat,” she said.

Leonard Crippen was clapping and shouting, “Brilliant! Just brilliant!” When the audience applause died down, he said, “An original scheme of unrequited love. He hates her, loves her, wants to bed her and behead her. On opening night, Clayborne got a bit carried away with that baseball bat—like he was going for a home run. And that poor woman who died in the audience? She was sitting front-row center when the rubber head flew into her lap.”

Mallory leaned forward in her chair to see around her partner and glare at the critic. “And you didn’t think that was worth mentioning? . . .
Earlier
?”

“I
said
I didn’t want to ruin it for you.” Crippen sighed, clearly feeling unappreciated.

“So Dr. Slope was right about the lady’s heart attack,” said Riker.

There was no way to plan a thing like that. The opening-night fatality had been a natural death and not a rehearsal for the murder of Peter Beck.

“That head wasn’t in the police report for the first death,” said Mallory.

“Yeah.” Riker faced the critic. “No flying heads. I would’ve remembered that. So a woman drops dead in the front row. And somebody thoughtfully removes the fake head from her lap
before
the cops show up?”

“No idea,” said Crippen. “The audience was cleared out almost immediately. I don’t know
when
the police arrived.”

“Then it wasn’t cops who shut down the play,” said Riker.

And they had been lied to.

“Oh, no. The stage manager cleared out the theater that night. He didn’t tell you? He begged the crowd—well, maybe twenty people on opening night. He
begged
them not to give up the finale for the first act. No doubt he was thinking of the lawsuit potential for killing a theater lover that way. For my part, I didn’t mention the flying head in my review—so as not to ruin the first act for the next audience. . . . I have rules. Well, last night, when Peter Beck died, I had the same—”

“Trouble.” Mallory stared at the floor in front of the last empty chair in this row, where trickles of blood flowed in thin streams.

•   •   •

The drama critic watched the paramedics load their patient onto a gurney, and he sighed, though not in sympathy with the young victim. He turned to the detectives, asking, “When will we
ever
move on to the second act?”

The teenager on the gurney was ashen, but still alive. The slashed wrists were bound in thick bandages. His companions for the evening, a girl and a boy, attended the same high school in the neighboring state of New Jersey. They were also members of the same suicide club, though tonight they had shown less resolve than their friend, and their own razor blades had been taken away from them.

Attracted by the recent death count for the play, they had hoped that a triple suicide would get their names in the newspapers. “And maybe we’d be on TV,” said the schoolgirl.

Riker never flinched. He had heard every damned thing.

But the theater critic was not so blasé. “A suicide club? You’re a bit young for such a dead-end idea.”

The girl only lifted one slight shoulder in response, and her friend said, “We’re from Jersey,” as if that said it all.

“You two can go.” Mallory waved them toward the aisle, where police officers waited to transport the youngsters to Bellevue’s psych ward, thwarting any other plans they might have for ending this night.

Riker looked out over the audience. It was a real New York crowd—
pissed off
. They wanted to stay, regarding the latest victim as part of a show that was not over yet. And damn it—the kid wasn’t even
dead
. Grudgingly, they filed out the doors to the lobby, prompted by police officers.

In the back row, people struggled to pass the inconvenient obstacle of a man who had not yet surrendered his seat. Much annoyed, a woman nudged him, and then, dropping her testy attitude, she bent down to lift the brim of his baseball cap for a close inspection of his pale face.

And a sniff.

She called out to the two detectives standing near the stage. “Hey! You missed one!”