Murder: The Musical (A Smith and Wetzon Mystery, #5) (2 page)

“Sure ... sure ... go ahead, Phil.” Carlos’s attention was on the dancers and his work.

Wetzon stood for a moment looking into the desolate orchestra crypt—Oops, she thought, where was her mind? Orchestra pit. A brown paper bag lay crumpled on the seat of a chair with a broken leg, three other chairs were upended every which way. A lone metal music stand, bent out of shape, and a page or two of sheet music were all that remained of the doomed last show. The lingering smell of the sweat of orchestras past was palpable. If this were a movie, she thought, the orchestra pit would suddenly be full of musicians in tuxedos, tuning up.

Gawd, Wetzon, she told herself. It must be the rain. And Carlos was a wreck. In a couple of hours the gypsy run-through would end rehearsals in New York. Then everyone would load out for Boston. The scenery was already en route.

A faint noise brought her eyes back to the pit in time to catch a glimpse of a brown creature with bright eyes and a long tail taking flight. Yuk. Yes, when a theatre was dark, there were problems with rats. Hell, even when they weren’t dark.

She walked slowly up the inclining aisle. Some of the red velvet seats were up, others down. Scraps of candy wrappers lay on the grimy floor, along with a few abandoned programs. Running her hand over a seat in the center orchestra, not quite under the shelf of the mezzanine, Wetzon sat. Walt hadn’t bothered with all the lights in the house, so where she sat was dusky. The tip of her boot touched the side of an empty soda can, making a hollow sound. She bent to pick it up, but it was already on its roll down the incline toward the orchestra pit. No one seemed to have bothered cleaning the theatre after the last show folded.

The familiar “ ... five—six—
seven
—eight ... ” came with fingers snapping rhythm. Dust motes beaded around the arc of light from the stage as Carlos worked with the dancers, changing a motion, a nuance, fussing.

Phil rolled an upright rehearsal piano on stage, its innards and bare wood facing Wetzon. The nap of the seat’s upholstery crunched under Wetzon’s tan Burberry raincoat. The theatre was cold. A chilling draft leaching up from the floor. Walt was fiddling with the lights. On. Off. On. Off.

“Five—six—
seven
—eight ...”

Wetzon was weary. The sun hadn’t come out in over a week and the constant gloom depressed her. Her recruiting business was active, but she felt burned out, tired all the time. Smith was acting as she had in the early days of their partnership, making all kinds of decisions on her own, as if Wetzon were not her partner but an employee. And then there was her love life.

A squeaky noise, like a giggle, came from somewhere in the dark.

You may laugh, rat, she thought, swinging her legs up from the floor to the seat next to her. That was odd. She touched the seat. Damp. She rolled her head back to look at the ceiling, a concave dome containing a huge chandelier—covered with cobwebs, no doubt. Rain was coming through from somewhere. She forgot the rat and stood, her back to the stage. As she stepped out into the aisle, she noticed someone in standing room behind the last orchestra row.

At that moment, Walt turned the house lights up. Whoever had been there was gone.

The mezzanine had a sweet curve to it, trimmed with plaster cupids, nosegays, and garlands in goldleaf. A brass rail gleamed dully. And dangling from the rail was an arm encased in a cream-colored jacket.

“Walt!” Wetzon’s knees buckled. She couldn’t take her eyes from the dark red rivulet running down the arm and splashing on the seat next to where she’d been sitting.

“What the fuck?”

Wetzon spun around. Walt had come to the edge of the stage, shading his eyes as he peered upward. Carlos and the dancers seemed frozen in mid-gambol. All stared over Wetzon’s head. “What the fuck?” Walt said again. Wetzon looked back at the mezzanine.

Hanging over the brass rail was the upper portion of a body, the head a bloody pulp.

Phil was the first to break. The ASM bolted up the aisle veering past Wetzon. On stage, no one had moved. The horror of what they were seeing was not processing.

Wetzon started down the aisle toward the stage, then stopped. Phil’s thumping footsteps echoed through the musty house like phantom knocking. “Phil, wait,” she shouted, regaining her voice. “Someone—Carlos—Walt, call 911—Get the police here.” She swayed, nearly lost her balance, caught herself and scrambled after Phil, then, up the aisle, past standing room. “Phil, don’t touch anything!”

At the top of the mez stairs, she skidded to a stop. The light here was spare. The place stank of death and all that went with it. And Phil had disappeared. She heard voices from the stage. Someone was sobbing. “Phil!” Her voice sounded thin, but this old theatre had superb acoustics, and her call carried through the empty house.

Stomach heaving, her whole body began to quiver. She went back to the stairs and sat, bending her head to her knees.

“Oh, God!” Phil’s voice. Then sounds of retching.

So much, Wetzon thought miserably, for an uncontaminated murder scene. She heard stumbling behind her and, rousing, asked, “Is it Dilla?”

Even in the poor light, Phil’s face was parchment. He’d lost his cap; perspiration mottled his forehead and upper lip. There was blood on his hands, and he reeked of vomit. “Christ,” he choked. “Christ, Christ, Christ. Somebody’s bashed her head in.” He staggered down the stairs, babbling incoherently.

“Phil? Is it Dilla?” But Wetzon was talking to the air. Phil had disappeared once again. She rose and instead of heading down, edged slowly toward the center aisle.

Blood tinged the rose-patterned carpet black all around the top of the stairs. It soaked through a stack of old Playbills that had been left behind the first seat. The carpeting on the steps down to the edge of the mezzanine showed a trail of black roses leading to a crumpled mass at the foot of the stairs. Shit, Phil had moved her.

Wetzon pressed her lips together. There was so much blood up here, how could Dilla have gotten all the way down to the edge of the mez and half over the ledge? Unless she’d still been alive.... She bowed her head and backed away.

“Birdie!”

Turning abruptly, she almost lost her balance again, tottered over the top step and clutched at the wall; her hand was sticky and left a red smudge. Carlos was coming up the stairs. “Don’t,” she gasped. “It’s ... bad.” She went to meet him and together they walked down holding on to each other. Phil was crouched on the bottom step, his head in his hands. She had the dippy thought:
He’d have blood on his head.

“It’s Dilla, isn’t it?” Carlos had trouble getting the words out.

“Who else would it be?” Wetzon brushed her hair out of her face, almost angrily. It was over a year since she’d had to cut her hair off after what she referred to as the-let’s-take-a-shot-at-Wetzon affair, and it was taking forever to grow long enough to put back in her old dancer’s knot.

“And I was cursing her out—God!” Carlos looked down at Phil and patted his shoulder. “Walt’s going to keep watch on the stage door.”

“Is it open?”

“Yeah. Someone broke a key in the lock and jammed it.” Carlos knelt in front of Phil and touched the hands still masking his face. “Come on, Phil,” he said very gently. “Come with us.”

Phil rubbed his eyes with his fists and hiccuped back a sob. He stood, his eyes ringed with blood like some kind of vampire fiend, and mutely followed Carlos and Wetzon.

“Mort’s going to go crazy when—”

Carlos never got to finish his statement. Mort Hornberg, the esteemed director of
Hotshot: The Musical
, stomped on stage from the wings with a woman Wetzon didn’t know. They were followed by Sam Meidner, composer-lyricist, and JoJo Diamond, the musical director, even more slovenly than Wetzon had remembered and now sporting a short gray beard. Aline Rose, book writer, with the latest in her long line of precious boy assistants, brought up the rear.

Mort was agitation in motion.

Wetzon and Carlos, Phil in their wake, drifted down the aisle toward the stage. Wetzon could see Carlos’s dancers sitting in the first row, whispering and rustling, heads bobbing up and down. Twitching bundles of nervous energy.

Waves of hysteria, led by a high-pitched wail, rolled off the stage and careered through the house. The keening reverberated downward from the dome, fluttered the crystals of the chandelier, then ceased. Silence dropped a chill blanket over all.

Wetzon took an aisle seat, third row, and waited. Carlos had mentioned something about talking to Mort … She lost time somewhere. Now blue uniforms and other strangers filled the stage to overflow—or seemed to—spilling over the sides. She could hear voices coming from the mez above, but she didn’t look up.

Someone settled down behind her. She could feel his breath on the back of her neck. “Detective Sergeant Bernstein, Miss. Walter ... um.” She heard him thumb over a page in his notebook. “Greenow. Walter Greenow says you were the first to see the deceased.”

She nodded, her heart sinking. There was no mistaking that voice. Turning in her seat, she recognized the bushy eyebrows that crossed the line between his eyes. She lowered her gaze. Maybe he wouldn’t recognize her.

“Okay. Stay right here. I’ll be back.” The detective heaved himself out of his seat and joined the stream up the aisle toward the mez staircase.

It was the disagreeable Detective Bernstein she remembered from Manhattan North. Paunchy, gray curly hair, and she knew there was a yarmulke pinned to his head under his brown fedora. Three years ago he’d accused her of murder.

She shifted in her seat and looked up toward the mez, catching a flash of Phil in the last row of the orchestra talking earnestly to someone, a thick-waisted woman, whose back was to Wetzon. The mez was filled with blue activity and yellow tape. Now they were contaminating the crime scene, too.

When she turned front again, she saw Gerry Schoenfeld, chairman of the Shubert Organization, had arrived. He came into the orchestra and quickly up the aisle. There he was met by the woman Phil had been huddling with. She was standing near the last row, a faceless silhouette in the deep shadows cast by the mez overhang.

Wetzon heard Schoenfeld say, “There’s a room off the box office you can use. What do you think, Edna?” It was a statement rather than a question. “We’ll set up some chairs and I’ll send over some coffee. This is a terrible tragedy, terrible. We want to do everything we can—”

“Fine, sir. We appreciate that.” Bernstein was back. He squeezed Wetzon’s shoulder and whispered
sotto voce
in her ear, “Now don’t go away, ya hear?”

She stole a glance at him and he gave her a wink. Or was it an eye twitch? Charming, she thought glumly. Just charming. She wondered if the woman detective he’d worked with when she last met him was still working with him. He was such a sexist pig.

With a flurry of purple cashmere, Aline Rose flounced into the seat behind Wetzon after Bernstein left. The seat protested with a loud creak, to no avail. The voluminous folds of Aline’s cape didn’t conceal a stump-shaped body. “Bad stuff, huh?” Her red-framed glasses were missing one temple bar and sat crookedly on her nose, giving her the appearance of a pug with glasses. “Do I know you?”

“I’m Leslie Wetzon, Aline.” Wetzon offered her hand. “I used to—”

“I remember you. Carlos’s friend.” The book writer ignored Wetzon’s hand. “Over here, Edward!” An androgynous young man, whose leather motorcycle jacket didn’t hide bulging muscles, sat down behind Aline and began kneading the back of her neck. “There’s a dear good boy.” Aline nodded to Wetzon. “My assistant, Edward Gray.” It seemed she’d already forgotten Wetzon’s name.

Edward had little gold hoops in each dear little earlobe. He rolled his eyes over Wetzon. She saw him conclude she wasn’t important to him, which was fine with her.

“Ah, ah, don’t stop, Edward.” Aline’s head lolled. Her black eyeliner was a loop-the-loop on her lids, as if applied by Ray Charles. “They think it’s Dilla. Mugged or something. I guess when you deck yourself out with all that flashy jewelry, you become a target.”

“Yeah.” Edward kept kneading. His expression didn’t change.

“Of course, Dilla was still Dilla. She made a lot of enemies—Ouch! Not so hard, Edward.”

“Enemies?” Wetzon smiled. “Not our Dilla.”

“Anyway, she was all right last night when we left …”

“Huh? You mean you were here last night?”

“We all were. Well, almost all. Mort, Sam, JoJo, Edward and I. And Sunny Browning, Mort’s assistant. We were going over last minute staging … changes …” Aline’s voice trailed off.

“You forgot to mention Carlos.”

“Oh.” Aline looked blank. “Carlos? Of course.” She shifted in her seat to take full advantage of Edward’s hands. Her cashmere cloak separated and a bit of white gauze showed for an instant, then was gone.

There was a bandage on Aline’s right wrist.

The cold was acid creeping into bones, mixing with fear, horror, and speculation. Up in the mezzanine the police activity inevitably created by a murder progressed in full view of those on the stage and in the first few rows of the orchestra. A theatrical performance in reverse.

Wetzon could feel her back stiffening from the endless sitting. Cold locked her fingers and her knees. She rubbed her hands together. Her gloves were in her pocket, but her fingers were crusty with a pale film of dried blood. She dug a Wash’n Dri from her cosmetic bag and surreptitiously scrubbed the blood from her hands. When she finished, she folded up the square and stuffed it back in its envelope and the envelope into her coat pocket. And out came her leather gloves, lined in cashmere. Immediate relief. The washup was something she probably shouldn’t have done, but she hadn’t killed Dilla, so why should she sit here suffering in the cold?

Bernstein hadn’t come back. She caught glimpses of the detective in the mez, moving back and forth, talking to people. Rising, she stretched her spine. Aline was still getting her massage from Edward, whose gaze seemed riveted not on the object of his ministrations but stageward, where Carlos, eyes closed, was dancing a slow dirge oblivious to everyone.