It Happens in the Dark - M11

by Caroll O'Connell

  Spared the ordeal of sudden withdrawal in a prison cell, Dickie Wyatt escaped the night sweats and cramps, violent shakes and nausea chased by a river of vomit.

  Riker read that last line again. Hell, it was almost poetry.

  Mallory had moved on to a gossip column. She drew a perfect circle around another paragraph. “Hollywood’s calling. The film rights are worth millions.”

  Murder for profit would always be her personal favorite.

  Around the squad room, heads were turning toward the stairwell door. Leonard Crippen stood on the threshold, dressed in funeral black and sporting a fedora. He doffed his hat with a flourish, and then his damn calling card, an opening sigh, was heard by one and all. Now that he had everyone’s attention, the old man slowly moved down the aisle of desks to stand beside Mallory’s—awaiting her invitation to sit down in the visitor’s chair. And with her nod, he did.

  “I can tell you this play wasn’t a spontaneous rewrite during rehearsals.” Crippen handed her the manuscript. “The foreshadowing is too intricate, too well thought out.”

  “So the ghostwriter read Beck’s play before he wrote—”

  “Oh, I doubt that,” said the critic. “Forgive the cliché, but Peter does knock them out like sausages. There’s more work, more time invested in what the ghostwriter’s done—so his play came first. Imagine, if you will, that it’s a sleeve tailored to fit neatly over any old play by Peter Beck.”

  Other men were listening in, drifting closer to the conversation, and Detective Gonzales spoke for them all, asking, “So you know how the play ends?” He stood behind Mallory’s chair, pointing down at the crown of her head. “She won’t tell us. And Riker can’t read.”

  “I’m sworn to secrecy.” The critic looked to Mallory, silently asking if he should continue.

  She locked the manuscript in her desk drawer. “So the ghostwriter’s play was written first?” Riker smiled when she fed the critic a lead for her next ploy to sucker a room full of cops. “How is that possible?”

  Gonzales and the others stayed to hear the answer.

  “Peter Beck always wrote the same play, over and over. It’s always a family drama. They all have four characters, the standard cast size to fit every financial backer’s wallet. You can count on one dominant father figure. Apparently Peter had daddy issues. And there’s never more than one female role, always an ingénue, and that cut down on the complexity. Peter had trouble with women. Rumor has it, this was true on several levels. Well, you’ve seen him. Funny-looking man. A good enough wordsmith, I suppose, but nothing new to say. So he throws in bits of wisdom culled from Bartlett’s Quotations. This passes for meat in literary circles.”

  Crippen paused, no doubt to heave one more heavy sigh, but apparently, he read something in Mallory’s face that said, Don’t.

  And he continued his lecture. “Well, the lesser critics come away with the sense that they’re somehow increased for attending these hack performances. Oh, and Peter always uses the three-act format. Did you know that the ancient Greeks wrote plays for a single ninety-minute act?”

  Riker made a rolling motion with one hand to tell the man that his monologue was dragging, and they might lose their audience of cops.

  The critic ignored Riker and rose from his chair to play to the whole crowd. “Peter was raised on television programming. He liked the idea of ratcheting up the tension just before the commercial breaks. But tension was not his forte, and some—”

  “Hey!” Mallory curled a newspaper in her hands, rolling it tight. Tighter.

  “Long story short,” said Leonard Crippen, speaking faster now. “If you want to hijack a Broadway play, say—substitute one of your own—you’d choose any old thing by Peter Beck. Then your financing is guaranteed. Oh, and the element of the ghostwriter? Well, that was pure genius.” He picked up the gossip column that Mallory had circled in ink. “You know what the publicity is worth . . . even without corpses in the audience. Though I must say that was a nice touch. This was all planned out well in advance. And, if the ghostwriter can keep his anonymity, that show will run for years.” He spread his arms wide. “Everyone loves a mystery.”

  The critic’s arms dropped to his sides. What? No applause?

  “I don’t buy it,” said Gonzales, and the skeptical faces of other men echoed this complaint. “The ghostwriter crap—that idea only works on paper. No cop would ever believe this guy could get people to follow orders on a blackboard.”

  “He’d only need the support of the director,” said Crippen. “The director is God to the cast. And, in this case, he’s also the play’s producer. Dickie Wyatt would’ve overridden everybody.”

  Gonzales shook his head, unconvinced. “But the playwright—”

  “Oh, everyone overrides a playwright,” said Crippen. “Peter Beck ranked one rung below the stagehands. No, I take that back. Even Bugsy was more essential to the performance.”

  • • •

  Riker had been fetched from the squad room, and Jack Coffey swiveled his chair to face the television set in the corner of his private office.

  “I taped a press conference . . . just for you.” The lieutenant pressed the play button on his remote, and the screen came to life with the wide-angle picture of a city hospital. The camera lens closed in on the face of a young man, who answered reporters’ questions about Alma Sutter’s near-death experience, painting her as yet another victim of the cursed Broadway play.

  Coffey paused the film. “You told me she was fine.”

  “She was!” Riker stared at the frozen screen image. “This is bullshit. Who is that little prick?”

  “That’s Alma Sutter’s agent. You guys got zero containment on this story. And I got six minutes before that phone rings. Who’s gonna get a piece of me first? The chief of detectives? Some clown from the mayor’s office? It’s a crapshoot. But you better give me something!”

  “Tell ’em it’s the agent’s scam. Alma’s not even at the hospital. Cyril Buckner called and told her to get her ass back to the theater.”

  “After she OD’d? Did this guy somehow miss the fact that she was taken away in an ambulance?”

  “I don’t think Buckner misses much,” said Riker. “But I was there when Alma took his call. I heard her say she only fainted—just a case of malnutrition and stress. She told him the docs gave her a vitamin booster. That was a lie, but she’s not about to tell him she OD’d on drugs. I know she went back to the theater. I flagged down the lady’s cab.”

  “How close are you to—”

  “Give us more men, and we’ll wrap it up faster.”

  Jack Coffey’s desk phone rang. And now the cell phone in his pocket was ringing, too.

  • • •

  Bugsy carried bags of deli sandwiches to the Rinaldi brothers, who had stopped taking meals with the rest of the theater company. Today they used a footlocker for their table as they squatted on the floor in the wings.

  He set down their lunch orders. They never thanked him for anything.

  The twins had seemed halfway normal when he had first met them. Then they had stepped into their roles and stayed there, never speaking anymore, only making needs known by grunts and giggles, true to their roles in the play. These days, they even attacked their food in a dimwitted way, dribbling here, spilling there. He watched them rip open the bags, sending french fries flying and dropping bits of coleslaw on the floor.

  Another mess to clean up. Animals. Chimps!

  The gopher shifted from foot to foot, looking this way and that, waiting for the next dustup. Alma Sutter sat at the stage manager’s desk, swilling coffee and reading one of her many dog-eared books on acting, as if she could learn her craft that way. She popped something into her mouth. Not a candy. Not a vitamin.

  If not for the drug habit, she could afford an acting coach. Though just now, she acted scared, one hand rising to cover her mouth.

  Not bad. Was she practicing some new piece of stage business—or maybe an acting exer
cise from her book?

  Her head snapped to attention, and then her whole body trembled.

  Bugsy approved. Those new moves would work nicely with a role that was wall-to-wall terror.

  Bring it on, girl.

  Now came the slow turn of her head, and she stared at the blackboard behind her chair. Though there was nothing written there, she quickly turned away, convincingly horrified.

  Very convincing. This was good. She was playing off her own paranoia, using it, working it. Bugsy could almost hear the scrabble of ghost chalk on the board.

  Alma had attracted the attention of the Rinaldi brothers, who quick-stepped out of character, no longer slack-jawed, dull-eyed boys. As her head lifted again, so did theirs, and they copied her act, move for move, tremble and fear. And then they locked eyes with the actress.

  She yelled at them, “You hear it, too!”

  The Rinaldi twins snapped back into their stage roles and grunted in unison, a dialect of chimpanzee that meant What? Are you nuts?

  • • •

  Riker and Mallory were last in line, and Janos was at the head of this parade as eight detectives marched down the hall to the incident room. And, all the while, their leader played up the midwestern slaughter with a houseful of blood and a headless girl.

  When they had all gathered before the cork wall, the story hour began with Janos reading aloud from recently posted newspaper articles on an old family massacre in Nebraska. And when he was done, he turned to his audience. “It all pans out with the play. The mother and her sister, a grandmother, the little girls and twin boys in the attic.”

  And Gonzales said, “But nothin’ about a murder weapon.”

  “Two weapons.” Mallory opened her copy of the play to a page of highlighted lines. “A baseball bat and an axe.”

  Gonzales shook his head. “That’s not—”

  “Okay,” said Janos, before Gonzales could poke a new hole in his patter. “Those are details the sheriff held back. So if the ghostwriter got that part right, we can nail him.”

  “A bat and an axe?” This was news to Washington, who had no idea how the play would end, and Janos, his own partner, would not tell him. “Okay, that says crime of opportunity. The women and kids were killed with weapons found at the scene.”

  “Yeah,” said Riker, not wanting to douse this contribution with the prevailing theory of a premeditated mass murder. “Nebraska’s woodpile country. Half those people got axes lying around. And a baseball bat fits with kids in the house.”

  “Maybe I can buy that,” said Gonzales the Spoiler. “But what about the guy in the brass bed? In the play, he’s a third survivor. The newspapers only count the two boys. You know the reporters interviewed neighbors up and down that street. Hard to screw up the body count.”

  “Unless the third kid was a shut-in,” said Lonahan. “The guy in the play’s a cripple.”

  “Nice point,” said Riker. “If we had more time, we’d canvass the neighborhood by phone, maybe turn up someone else livin’ in that house.”

  “Then,” said Janos, “there’s court records, tax records and—”

  “So,” said Gonzales, “you figure this sheriff keeps a material witness in the closet—for ten years? Too bad we can’t just ask him.”

  Mallory smiled at his mention of the word we.

  • • •

  Though the sheriff’s rented jeep was the only vehicle on the highway in this storm, he had managed to run it into a ditch hundreds of miles short of New York City.

  His head ached something fierce, and it took some time to focus his eyes.

  He stared at the blood on the steering wheel. A minute crawled by before he looked at the rearview mirror and made the connection to the bleeding wound on his forehead. And now he realized why this vehicle had not been snapped up from the airport rental lot: The airbag had not been replaced after some previous wreck. What else might be wrong with this damn jeep? And how long had he been unconscious?

  God damn, it was cold.

  He closed his tired eyes for a moment, allowing reason to make inroads through the wad of cotton that passed for his brain, and then he did the logical thing, making repeated attempts to call for help—while sitting in a cell-phone dead zone.

  If his runaway wife were here, assuming that she still cared if he lived or died, she would look at the bright side: All this fucking snow would surely melt in the spring. Foulmouthed woman. And then, with the lightest sarcasm, she would suggest that he might want to hole up someplace warm—since the car was dead and the heater. But, stupid man who never listened to her, he should on no account close his eyes one more time or he would surely die.

  Before his ex-wife, who wasn’t there, could kick his ass out of the jeep, he opened the door, putting all his weight behind a mighty shove against the imprisoning snow. It was past knee deep when he left the vehicle. Every step was struggle and strain before wife-sense kicked in again, and he swung his suitcase like a hammer, tamping down snow to make the steep incline climbable, though it was slow going.

  His back ached, and his arms were sore before both feet were finally planted on the roadbed. While following a hazy glow that might be a sign for a motel, he fell on his face to roll the rest of the way down an off-ramp.

  He could hear his ex-wife laughing all the way from Nebraska.

  Flat on his back, he longed to close his eyes, to sleep a little. But he picked himself up and batted off the caked snow. As he slogged across a motel parking lot of cars buried under white mounds, in his thoughts, he composed a postcard to the laughing woman who was always stepping lightly around his mind—making promises to her that he might keep this time—this hundredth time.

  When he was past the glass doors and standing in the lobby, he had no feeling in his hands or feet, but he had apparently passed through the dead zone. His cell phone was ringing, Mallory calling. The postcard to his wife was forgotten when the young detective asked, “Which boy owned the baseball bat? Or did it belong to one of the girls?”

  Did she know about the axe, too?

  The sheriff hesitated just a hair of a second too long. And he knew he would not be believed when he said, “I know their dad played ball in his younger days.”

  “You won’t tell me the truth, but you won’t lie. Is that it?”

  “Neither one of those boys ever played—”

  “What about the third boy . . . the older one you’ve got stashed away? Odd that the neighbors never mentioned him to reporters. But they never saw that kid, did they? He never left the house. Maybe that was his bat . . . before he was bedridden. . . . I guess that’s your cue to hang up on me, Sheriff.”

  And he did.

  ROLLO: The window glass was made to ward off pigeons, bullets and small aircraft. How could you possibly expect to break it with your shoe?

  —The Brass Bed, Act II

  Axel Clayborne danced the Fat Man’s Ballet, completing a twirl on the ball of one foot, arms and legs flung wide as the points of a star, and then a short run of steps ending in a leap onto the brass bed. But there was no second leap through the wide window. He was staring at it when the stage manager appeared beside the bed. “Cyril, do we want crashing glass for a rehearsal?”

  Cyril Buckner shouted at the stagehands in the wings, “Forget something?”

  Joe Garnet and Ted Randal appeared behind the window in the scenery, and they pulled out the pane of breakaway stunt glass. That took five seconds by Riker’s count.

  The detective and his partner sat with Gil Preston in the dark of the back row for another five wasted minutes. Mallory could not get one complete sentence from the young man, who sweated and stammered and could not get past “—l-l-let—”

  And Mallory said, “Let go? The understudy was fired? When did that happen?”

  Yes-or-no answers were easy, but this one might take a few days. Before Gil could soil his pants, Riker shot a glance at Mallory, and then he tapped the face of his wristwatch, shorthand for Time’s a wasting.r />
  With her knapsack slung over one shoulder, she stepped into the aisle and walked toward the stage.

  Riker resumed the interview. “So tell me about the ghostwriter’s line changes. That must’ve pissed off the actors.”

  “The twins didn’t care,” said the suddenly stammer-free Gil. “They don’t have any lines. And Axel Clayborne’s word perfect in six seconds. In the beginning, it wasn’t a problem for Alma, either. But these days, she’s not all that good with changes. Kind of spacey—when she isn’t hyper.”

  “What about the stage manager?”

  “Oh, Cyril just went along with the director. They all did. Except Peter. He was always getting angry and walking out.”

  “What about you?”

  “It drove me nuts! And that was before I took over the lighting director’s job.” Gil faced the stage, where Clayborne had begun his dance again. “I was just an assistant when the ghostwriter came up with that ballet scene, but I did all the work. And those damn blackout scenes—new light cues every time they changed the blocking. Well, you can’t do Axel’s follow lights from a booth. I had to drag my light panel up to the—”

  “Okay, I get it.” Riker opened his newspaper to the sports page, as if this interview might be over. It was not. “Ever play baseball?”

  “Sure, who didn’t?”

  “I didn’t,” said Riker. “I was a city kid. Stickball’s my game. But you were born on the Texas Panhandle. Geography ain’t my strong point, kid. Is that anywhere near Nebraska?”

  • • •

  Inside a locked drawer, Cyril Buckner’s small computer awakened from sleep mode, wirelessly stretching, reaching up through layers of wood and surrendering to the remote keyboard on Mallory’s open laptop.

  She sat at Buckner’s desk in the wings, and he remained standing, surly as a schoolboy in detention. He had no regional accent, but that was the way of Army brats; they grew up here and there and everywhere, never stopping long enough to acquire a local dialect.

  While aiming for a look of boredom, she tapped the keys of her laptop, her window on the computer in the drawer, and covertly opened his personal files, hunting for family ties to Nebraska. “So they all bring you their little problems. Alma seems edgy to me. Did she ever come to you with anything interesting?”