Mallory picked up the receiver, listened a moment and then said, “Both of them?” She slammed down the phone and unlocked a drawer to get at her weapon. Holstering her gun on the fly, she ran for the coatracks.
Jack Coffey yelled at her back, “Both what?” And his next thought was No! He was not getting sucked into this. Yet he sat down at her desk to punch in the number for a redial.
And Dr. Slope answered the telephone.
• • •
Alma Sutter crept across the stage, slow stepping, though her brain was racing on a combo of cocaine and mystery pills found on the floor. She had to see that blackboard. This was a test from the gods of broken mirrors. Oh, there it was, her message in chalk: ALMA! ANY MINUTE NOW!
She dropped to her knees and felt the pain of bone hitting wood. No, no, no! Oh, but she had pills for occasions like this, a pharmacy bottle stitched into the lining of her purse—her rainy-day stash. She turned her body round and crawled across the floorboards on all fours, jazzed on drugs and moving with the speed of a trotting dog.
ROLLO: After my little sister’s head was hacked off, and while it was falling to the floor, do you think she could see the carpet coming up to meet her? Was there time for the head to say goodbye to the body?
—The Brass Bed, Act II
Wall plaques and framed certificates attested to the chief medical examiner’s importance in the world of forensic medicine. Dr. Edward Slope’s hectic schedule was also in evidence with files stacked on his desk, awaiting review, and a tally sheet of dead bodies that were forming ugly gangs in the morgue. It was a logjam of a day that would never end. Yet he toyed with a pencil and stared at the ceiling—waiting for his visitor to finish leafing through an uncommonly thick autopsy report.
The doctor anticipated questions. He had one of his own: How was Kathy doing this?
The day’s first surprise had come hours earlier with the appearance of a CSU supervisor. That gray harpy had demanded tox screens and other test results. At the time, he had thought it odd for a woman of Clara Loman’s stature to perform a menial’s task—well beyond odd to fetch reports for a homicide detective; Clara ranked such cops among roaches and vermin. So, just this moment, he was a bit more blasé about the commander of Special Crimes running errands for Kathy Mallory.
Jack Coffey looked up from his reading to ask, “Who eats heroin?”
“And barbiturates—served up with chili. Now that’s a first.”
“I thought stomach contents would’ve been soup after—”
“New York chili is formidable, even after days of stewing in gastric juices. But one of my samples was congealed around the buttons of his shirt. Another one came from the vomit in his shoes. Nicely preserved vomit. Mr. Wyatt’s body was stored someplace cold.”
The lieutenant’s head rolled back. It was his turn to stare at the ceiling, squinting a bit, as if he might have lost something up there. “So the guy with the slashed throat, he’s only a suspicious death . . . but the junkie’s a homicide?”
“Both men were murdered. I just upgraded the playwright.” And apparently Kathy had failed to mention this to her boss. “You see, we had a problem with what might be the dragline of a fingernail running parallel to the wound. That wouldn’t square with the suicide of a nail biter. But the only prints on the weapon were Mr. Beck’s. So your slasher had to be wearing gloves, right? Back to the problem of a naked fingernail. It only works if the glove was torn. So then I examined the abrasion for microscopic traces of—”
“Okay, I’ll buy it.” Coffey closed his eyes a moment. “Tell me about the other one, the damn junkie.”
“I can tell you Mr. Wyatt’s chili didn’t come from a can—no preservatives. And there’s no red dye in the meat. Not a grocery store item. So I ruled out a home-cooked meal. And that leaves—”
“A restaurant.” Coffey rippled the pages of the preliminary report. “You got a time of death in here?”
“At least two days before you found him.”
“Can you—”
“Yes, I can narrow it down. Mr. Wyatt didn’t even have time to digest his dinner. Ingested with chili, the heroin wouldn’t have taken effect right away, but if you find out when he had his last meal, I’ll swear in court that he was dead within the hour.”
“Good enough,” said Jack Coffey.
Faint praise.
This was a tighter time frame than any cop had a right to hope for. And now, before his visitor could ask the next predictable question, Edward said, “Zero possibility of suicide for Mr. Wyatt.” The doctor laid down an autopsy photograph, a close-up of ugly blue bulges in veins once abused by hypodermic needles. “These track marks are old ones. No new punctures. But he obviously knew how to shoot up. Ergo, his chili was dosed by someone else. You know it. I know it.” Done with that, he nodded at the report in Coffey’s hands. “Page fifteen, you’ll find his hair-strand test. It’s good for a ninety-day drug history. He was clean up till last month. There’s a range of a few weeks with markers for heroin—the trace amounts of an occasional user. Then nothing leading up to his death. And I’d call that suspicious, too. It won’t fit the relapse pattern of a heroin addict. But it might suggest a few weeks of rehearsal for your killer. Say he spiked Mr. Wyatt’s food a few times before the fatal dose, just to—” No need to finish. He could see that suggestion was clearly a stretch for the man from Special Crimes.
Jack Coffey was wearing his best political smile, so insincere, a bit of condescension that the police reserved for pathologists who liked to play detective. Kathy Mallory had a smile rather like that one in her toolbox, though hers was more expressive, closer to actual spit.
The lieutenant laid the report on the desk. “Sit on this for a while, okay? We’ll let our perp think he got away with murder.” He stood up, jingling car keys in one hand, but he made no move toward the door. “One question. Mallory never called you, never pushed you for results on Dickie Wyatt?”
“Why would she bother? She knew I’d pull out all the stops for a drug overdose.” Edward Slope took loving care with every dead addict, indulging both his vocation and avocation. Much of his free time was devoted to keeping these hapless souls alive, and every autopsy furthered that end. Kathy had counted on that. “This was her lucky corpse.”
• • •
The detectives had first tried Alma’s dressing room, but there had been no response to a knock, and Riker trusted his partner’s instinct for live bodies behind closed doors.
Downstairs, Mallory opened a metal locker—and slammed it.
Midstride, Bugsy heard that bang and jumped—a short hop—and then completed his run to flick another wall switch.
The backstage area was now daylight bright and still no sign of Alma Sutter. Onstage, the assembled theater company had no clue to her whereabouts, only volunteering that she was late for rehearsal—though her name was on the sign-in sheet at the stage door.
Riker opened a trunk, a small one that would only work with the theory of a dead actress chopped up in pieces. But what the hell. Disappointed with the contents, only clothing, he turned to his partner. “Loman figures our perp mixed the heroin with chili to buy himself alibi time to get clear of the body. She thinks we’re looking for an idiot. Wyatt could’ve lived for thirty minutes to an hour. Lots of time to name his killer.”
“She’s wrong,” said Mallory. “Our perp only wanted Wyatt to walk out the door before the drugs kicked in, and that’s smart. If a customer drops dead in a restaurant, the staff’s going to remember who he had dinner with that night. So the poisoner commits a murder in plain sight—and buys himself anonymity.”
“Or herself.” Riker believed that women made the best poisoners. Sexist? Maybe, but true. “Alma had motive. Wyatt wanted her out of the play.” Then again, if it was the killer who moved the corpse to the theater, they were still looking for a man with the upper-body strength to lift a hundred and eighty pounds from a wheelchair and into a theater seat. Or two women acting in conc
ert? One woman and a gopher?
Every hideyhole on this floor had been checked, except for one more trunk, and it was padlocked. Before he could call out to Bugsy, the little man appeared at his side with a key ring in hand, and he unlocked it. Riker lifted the lid to see more costumes. Then his exploring hand touched something hard—and sharp. He tipped the trunk to empty the contents onto the floor, and now an axe lay on top of the clothing. This was nothing from a woodpile, but large and long in the blade—a fireman’s axe made to chop down doors. “That’s no prop.”
“I know. It just turned up one day.” Bugsy raised his eyes to the dressing-room doors along the walkway above. “Up there. Joe Garnet’s dad found it. He was our prop master. Nice old guy. Well, there was an axe in the dialogue, but nothin’ like that on his prop list. So he figured the twins left it there—a joke on Alma.”
“Scaring the shit out of her? That’s a joke?”
“Yeah. No.” Bugsy back stepped, startled, as if this reprimand had been meant for him. “The prop master told me to hide it, lock it up—and don’t tell nobody.”
Mallory left off rummaging through lockers and joined them to stare at the axe on the floor. Turning now, she ran up the stairs to the warren of small rooms. Riker caught up to her on the walkway as she bent down to a few seconds’ work on a keyhole. The door to Alma’s dressing room swung open.
The actress lay on the floor, eyes closed, one arm twisted under her body, and her legs were sprawled at odd angles.
Not hiding. Not napping.
• • •
Jack Coffey answered his desk phone to pick up another one of Mallory’s rerouted calls. It was the Midwest sheriff again, and the man still refused to state his business, only insisting that it was “mighty important.” The lieutenant looked up to see Detective Sanger hanging in the doorway. Coffey tapped the glowing phone number on his caller ID. With no words between them, but enough said, Sanger returned to the squad room on the run.
And now Coffey said to the man on the phone, “Obviously, Detective Mallory doesn’t give a shit about your little problem out there in the sticks.”
This lure was met with dead silence on the other man’s end of the telephone line.
“Sheriff? I might be the only friend you got in this town. If you can’t give me—”
“It’s about the massacre,” said the man from Nebraska.
The massacre.
Multiple murders were stock and trade, but massacre implied a spree killer with a high body count. No such case in the house. And did he plan to share that information with the lawman from the boonies?
No, he had a better idea.
“The next time you call Mallory—don’t use your own phone. Oh, and reroute your call through a different area code. Hang on a minute, okay?” He covered the receiver.
Detective Sanger leaned into his office. “Couldn’t be more legit, boss. The sheriff’s calling from his office phone.” Sanger held up his cell. “I got a deputy here who says he’s eyeballing the man right now.”
Coffey smiled and said to the sheriff, “Gotta pencil? I’m gonna give you Mallory’s cell-phone number . . . and her home phone, too.”
• • •
The snows of Nebraska were two feet deep across a flat plane that stretched all the way to the horizon line, and the brightness would have blinded him without dark glasses. But the endless expanse of sky was clear and blue as the sheriff rumbled down plowed road, trusting the wheel to his deputy, who put on more speed as they got closer to the airport.
The sheriff held a cell phone to his ear and smiled at the man in the driver’s seat. “Jilly’s outdone herself.” Jillian was his communications expert, a glorified dispatcher who also kept his small fleet of jeeps in good running order. “She routed me through Canada.”
And it worked. The young voice at the other end of this convoluted connection said, “Mallory.”
“I propose a trade,” he said to the girl from New York City. “I give you something, and you—”
“Sheriff, I’m busy right now. Maybe later I can spare six minutes to solve your—”
“Oh, I solved it,” he said, and—click—he cut her off.
• • •
Damn jerkwater cop.
Mallory pocketed her phone as she walked through the emergency room, returning to Alma Sutter’s bedside, where Riker was carrying on the questioning under circumstances far from private. Crying and screaming from other quarters penetrated the curtains drawn around the bed of the quick-recovery artist.
The actress was awake and neither drowsy nor spacey. She was hyper, jazzed on something, but what? All hospital treatment for a drug overdose had been refused.
“You might wanna give the ER doc a sporting chance to help you,” said Riker. “He identified a few pills we found on the floor. Anything else he should know about?”
Alma shook her head. “Just sedatives.” Hardly sedated, the jangled actress fumbled with her compact and dropped it before she could finish repairing her makeup. “I have a prescription.”
“Sure you do,” he said.
“You can ask my doctor. He’s treating me for anxiety. I have lots of anxiety.” Her compact was retrieved from the tangle of bedsheets, and now its mirror reflected a smiling face out of sync with that ailment. Alma put on a touch of angst in the way another woman would put on lipstick.
“Tell you what,” said Riker. “Forget the drugs, okay? Just tell us about your inheritance from Peter Beck.”
“Peter mentioned me in his will?”
“Yeah. Sweet, huh? We know you called Beck’s attorney before rigor mortis set in on the corpse.”
“So you’ve seen the will.” Alma smiled at him.
The implied murder motive had failed to register with her. Too difficult to follow? How dumb could she be? Mallory crept up on the woman’s blind side. “You knew he planned to leave you the rights to his play.”
“Of course I did.” Alma’s words came out in a rush. “That poor, dear little man. Peter spent a solid year writing that role for me. He said it was like giving a woman flowers from his own garden.” She bit her lip to slow down her runaway mouth. “Then the play changed. And I changed.”
“Because Dickie Wyatt was riding you every minute,” said Mallory, “making life hell for you, driving you nuts.”
“Yes! And he made me a better actress. I was grateful!”
“And the ghostwriter was—”
“That spook—he gave me the inside track on cold, creepy fear.” She clutched the bedsheet and raised it to cover her face. When the sheet dropped away, the detectives were looking at a face of abject terror, the genuine article, and then—Alma grinned. “You see? I didn’t lie when I told you the ghostwriter tortured me, but he helped me, too.” Now a dab of sarcasm. “He made me so freaking good at acting scared.” And for the finale, she folded her arms and stared Mallory down with an implied So there. Take that.
Riker gave her an approving nod. “Not bad.” Alma was a good actress—and so she was not to be believed, not by him. “You’re talkin’ to grown-ups now. We never bought that story.”
“But it’s true!”
“Naw, the ghostwriter’s your buddy.” Riker leaned over her. “You just stood back and watched all the damage he did to your boyfriend.”
“You went along with it,” said Mallory, working the other side of the bed. “Like all the rest of them. You chose up sides against Peter Beck and—”
“No!” Alma turned from one detective to the other. “You’ve got it all wrong. After Peter walked out, I was his spy in the company.” One hand went to her mouth, perhaps overplaying the gesture that said, I’ve said too much. “You can’t tell anybody about that, okay? . . . Peter asked me to walk out, too. He wanted me to do it on opening night—just walk off stage in the first act. Well that’s crazy. I’d never work again after a stunt like that. The theater, this role—it’s all I care about, all I’ve ever wanted since I was ten years old! So I turned him down. I
said no.”
She fell back on her pillow, tired from running her mouth a hundred miles an hour and punctuating sentences with sniffles—both markers for cocaine, an expensive habit for a woman with an overdrawn bank account.
“Well, Peter was furious,” said Alma. “He didn’t even show up on opening night, and I’m damn sure he spent that day cutting me out of the will. He made it a promise.”
“And after he died,” said Mallory, “you still called the lawyer . . . to check on your inheritance.”
“Detective, if you had a lottery ticket, wouldn’t you check the numbers? The odds are a million to one . . . but you’d check.”
Good answer. And one mystery was solved. Alma was not dumb.
• • •
Sheriff Harper was definitely flying over another state’s area code by now, though he could not see the ground for clouds. He thought of using the airplane phone lodged over his tray-table meal of stale potato chips, but then his cell phone vibrated in his breast pocket.
And now Mallory was saying, “You think you know who did it. But your case is still on the books. You don’t have the evidence to—”
“Little lady, I got bundles of evidence. I got bloodwork, weapons, every damn thing. I got shoe prints in the blood. I can even tell you who owned those shoes. Hell, I got the damn shoes.”
That should have piqued her interest, but she hung up on him.
No matter. A satisfied man, he was getting into the rhythm of this long-distance relationship. His mood changed when he felt the buck and roll of the aircraft. He looked out the window to see clouds boiling up to touch the plane’s icy wing. No! The clouds were not rising—the plane was going down. The captain’s piped-in voice called for the attention of the passengers, and now came the pilot’s give-away words for impending havoc and sudden death, “Remain calm!”
It Happens in the Dark - M11 Page 16