Berk walked to his bed and settled himself back into it.
"You read the papers, Joe? Anything besides Variety and the stock ticker?"
"Why? You gonna give me a current-events quiz?"
"Ms. Cooper here indicted a doctor last week. That sicko was drugging women to knock them out in order to have sex with them."
Berk pulled the sheet up under his chin and looked over at me. "That your case? Quite a headline you got yourself. Your boss probably would have liked it better if you caught the guy."
There wasn't much Berk missed.
"But her boss did make an interesting point, Joe. The doctor liked to go to the movies. Foreign flicks and local ones, too. Apparently he preferred that to the stage, no offense to you. So he made his own. Filmed himself raping women who didn't have a clue what was happening to them. And that fact got District Attorney Battaglia kind of wondering about you, Joe-about-"
"That prick didn't like me from the old country, Chapman. He's looking to get me any which way he can."
"Battaglia asked Ms. Cooper whether it was possible you had the same kind of perversion the doctor has?"
Berk raised himself up and guffawed in Mike's face. "Perversion? What does he know from perversion? Let me tell you, young man, Joe Berk never had to put anybody out to get laid, detective. I like 'em talking to me and smiling at me and telling me they never had it so good before. I give a shit if they're lying? Makes us both feel good. Tell Battaglia to stick that in his cigar and smoke it. I told you before, Chapman, the girls can't get enough of old Joe."
"No, no, no. Not that part, Joe. The movies. Coop and me," Mike said, looking over at me and pointing a finger. "Don't correct my grammar now, kid, okay? Coop and me, the first night we were here, mourning for you a little prematurely, we saw the video screen setup you had right in this room. Four monitors, and three of them weren't tuned in to the evening news. They were-well-where were those cameras shooting, Joe? What were you watching, and did whoever it was on the other end of the lens know she was being watched?"
Berk was squirming under the covers now, gulping for air like a fish out of water.
"We gave you a pass the first time we met you here, Joe. We felt bad that you'd taken such a hit from stepping on the sewer cover. Coop and me, we didn't figure these televisions," Mike said, sweeping his arm in the space behind him, where only the ordinary set remained today, "we didn't figure they had anything to do with the murder of Natalya Galinova. But now I don't know. I just don't know."
Berk seemed to be struggling to speak.
"Mike, go easy. Let me get the nurse," I said, turning and walking to the top of the staircase to call her to come up.
"Coop's a softie, Joe. Every now and then, something cracks through that armor she wears over her heart and gets inside and shoots directly to her brain, dulling its action for a few minutes. Me? I don't buy your bullshit. You're gasping for air 'cause you're grasping for straws. Too much time in the theater is what you've had. You're all about artifice and make-believe."
I stood in the doorway, watching Joe as he stretched his hand out to get Mike's attention. "Listen to me. Those monitors, they were so I could see my shows, check the productions without leaving home. That's all-"
"I'm sick of your lies. Those cameras weren't focused on any stages. They were in bathrooms or dressing rooms. They were in places nobody expected to be spied on. You don't have to help me, Joe. I'm good at legwork. I'll walk the soles off these shoes but I'll find your goddamn secrets before too long," Mike said, walking to the far side of the room and pulling open a cabinet drawer as he passed by a bureau. "And with any luck, I'll find your videotapes, too. 'Cause I gotta figure you were filming your showgirls, your dancers, your hookers-whoever it was-just the way that perverted doc was recording himself with every victim. You had somebody set up a camera system connected to your bedroom so you could play with yourself whenever the mood struck you. I gotta think you sat here alone in your slimy pajamas and made believe you had one of these girls right here in the room with you, keeping alive the myth of Joe Berk."
Berk tossed back the covers and tried to swing his legs over the side of the bed. "Don't touch another thing in this room. Get out of here, both of you."
"The tapes, Joe. I know there are tapes somewhere around here. Am I getting warm?" Mike asked, walking toward one of the many closet doors. "Am I getting closer?"
The nurse came in the room just as Berk lifted a small figurine- a statuette of Napoleon-from the bedside table and threw it at Mike's head. It didn't come close to hitting him, but it shattered the mirror on the wall behind the bureau.
"Bad arm you got. And seven years of bad luck to go with it."
The nurse was trying to calm her patient and get him back in bed. The slight exertion of throwing the brass piece seemed to have exhausted Berk.
"You're a fool, Chapman. I've had guys thrown off the force for less than this. You're way out of line."
"I hate being lied to, Joe. I hate murder most of all-"
"I never killed anybody. You're being stupid about that."
Mike stood on the other side of the bed, while the nurse took Berk's pulse and adjusted the pillows behind him.
"Then why do you keep lying to me? You aren't honest about the little things, so now I got to worry about what you're hiding, I got to focus on what's your connection to the big things. Like why did Galinova have to die?"
Berk closed his eyes and tried to take a few breaths.
"Why did you keep lying about Lucy DeVore?"
Berk didn't speak.
"There's no point lying. That coma she's in was medically induced. She'll be out of it later this week. Paralyzed, maybe, but I expect she'll have good reason to want to tell us the truth. This photograph, Joe. Look at it."
Berk didn't move.
"Open your eyes. It's your hat, isn't it? Lucy's wearing your hat?"
Berk cocked an eye and examined the photograph. "The fez? C'mon, detective. You're gonna bait me, I expect you to do better than that."
"I've seen pictures of you with a hat just like that."
Joe Berk was smiling. He had the upper hand again, or so it seemed. "Once. I had one of those on my head once. Sardi's. A Jewish boy with a fez on his keppel for four hours? It seemed like a lifetime to have to wear it that long. Forty, maybe fifty years ago. Gave a million dollars to a hospital for crippled children that year, trying to buy my way into the theatrical community. In return, for one night I was an honorary member of the Ancient Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. That's what your fez is, Mr. Chapman."
"What? Shriners?"
"Of course, Shriners. The industry used to be full of them. The theaters were their playground. Yul Brynner, you kids remember him? Maybe not a real king, but what a prince. He told me that night I reminded him of Jackie Gleason and his pals at the Raccoon Lodge. Ridiculous looking. I couldn't wait to get the damn thing off my head."
Berk closed his eyes again and his voice faded. "You want a fez? You want to know who put that hat on Lucy's head? Check with Hubert Alden. He's got a thing for those red tasseled caps."
34
Mike walked me into One Hogan Place and took me directly to the ninth-floor District Attorney's Squad, the hand-chosen NYPD detectives who were assigned to Battaglia to work on major investigations led by some of the six hundred prosecutors on our staff. The captain wasn't there yet but a team had been brought in to assist on last night's attack and I spent the first three hours of the day being debriefed by them about the entire week's happenings so they could partner with Mike and Mercer if the events of last night at my apartment were indeed related to our investigation at the Metropolitan Opera House.
Mike left us to return to midtown, intent on bringing Hubert Alden down to me for questioning later in the day.
At noon, when we completed the first grueling round of detail, I went into the restroom to wash my face in hopes of reviving my flagging spirits.
On my way back to
my own office, I ran into Mike getting off the elevator. He was carrying a tall vase of flowers that obscured his face as he made his way down the corridor.
"Are you crazy? That must have cost a-"
"Don't worry, kid. They're not from me," he said. "Security wouldn't let the poor delivery guy in the door after your express letter bomb incident."
I followed him past Laura's desk and made room for the dramatic arrangement of spring flowers-stargazer lilies and hydrangeas, deep-fuchsia anemones and pale pink long-stemmed roses.
"Open the card," Mike said.
He caught my hesitation.
"Open it. I'm not all that curious about your admirers, Coop. I just want to make sure the note doesn't explode in your puss."
I unsealed the small card. "Alex-to make up for the daffodils, and for alarming you with my doorstep delivery. Dan Bolin."
"What could possibly be in that note that makes you turn red?" Mike asked, reaching for it.
I dropped it on the top of my desk. "That's ridiculous. I'm not blushing. I don't even know the guy."
"A hundred bucks' worth of petals and you don't know him? Imagine what'll happen when you start putting out for him. Why is he sending stuff like this if you don't know him? We gotta put him in the suspect pool for last night?"
"Joan knows him. I don't mean she knows him, but she's talked to him. He was on the Vineyard this weekend."
"You're not making sense with this 'know him but we don't really know him' stuff. Guess I picked the wrong weekend to take a pass on your invite. You do a three-way or something to deserve this?"
Laura was standing in the doorway; when she started to talk to me, I stepped toward her and Mike picked up the card. "Mike, Mr. Alden is downstairs. Shall I have them let him up?"
"Yeah, he didn't want to accept my hospitality for the ride. Told me his driver would bring him down here. Given the choice, I'd pick the backseat of his limo, too," Mike said. "So who's this Bolin guy?"
"Oh, Alex? A gentleman named Bolin called this morning and asked if it was okay to have flowers sent here. Something about not wanting to upset you by asking for your home address, but I gave him this one."
"That's fine, Laura."
I bent over the desk, trying to make order out of the scattered folders and newly accumulated mail, but Mike knew I was just avoiding his glare.
"You didn't answer me. Who's this guy you know but you don't know? Where does he live? What does he do? Where was he last night?"
"Look, it was a harmless flirtation on his part. I sat next to a guy on a plane for half an hour and he tried to ask me out. Not interested."
"The florist and I would both have to say you didn't make that very clear, did you? Don't you think we have to talk to him, put him in the mix?"
Laura was still in the doorway, probably feeling responsible for the appearance of the flowers, disliking as she did any tension between Mike and me. "He sounded like a perfectly nice man, Mike. I wouldn't have given the green light if I'd known-"
"Can we leave him out of this entire discussion unless it becomes necessary to go in a new direction?"
"I don't know why you're protecting him, Coop."
"That's not what I'm doing. I'm trying to keep him out of my personal life-and my business-until this murder investigation and all its offshoots are resolved."
"Maybe last night had something to do with Dr. Sengor's case," Laura said, trying to be helpful.
"Sengor's in Turkey, his accomplice is in jail-"
"What if he had more than one accomplice?" Mike asked.
"Joan Stafford thinks I'm paranoid. Maybe it's from hanging around this place too much. Both of you see suspects everywhere."
Laura turned away from us when we heard Hubert Alden's voice from the hallway. "Is this Alexandra Cooper's office?"
Mike lifted the flower arrangement and started out of the room. "I'm putting this on Laura's desk for the time being. Doesn't exactly look like a serious prosecutor's lair with half of the Versailles gardens looming between you and your target."
He walked back in the room followed by Hubert Alden, who removed his hands from the pants pocket of his well-tailored navy pinstripe suit and rubbed them together as he surveyed the gritty surroundings of my small office-cramped, in need of a paint job, and decorated with court exhibits that were reminders of cases won and lost over the last decade.
"And you're a bureau chief, Ms. Cooper?" Alden said, watching a peeling paint chip on the ceiling as though it were about to fall on his shoulder and mar the surface of his jacket. "I can't imagine how the Indians live."
"One of the perks of public service. You never have to waste time thinking about how to redecorate. Whichever shade of gray the city uses every twenty years is fine with me. I'd like to thank you for coming down here. We have a few more things we'd like to discuss with you."
"Has there been a resolution yet about the release of Ms. Gali-nova's body from the morgue? I'm flying to Europe at the end of the week and it would truly set my mind at ease if we could get her out of the morgue and put her to rest with some dignity."
I made a note to call the ME's office. "I should be able to finalize that."
"If you're leaving town, that is," Mike said, settling into the chair next to Alden.
"How dramatic of you, detective. Now, what do you know that you think might put the brakes on my plans?"
"I remember standing in the back of the theater with you the day that Lucy DeVore had her tragic-well, let's still call it an accident. And if I'm not mistaken, that's when you told us you were not in New York on Friday night, when Ms. Galinova was murdered. Did I get that right?"
"Exactly so. I spent that weekend at my house in Vail."
"Maybe dead dancers don't talk, but cell phones can still tell tales, Mr. Alden. There's a message on Talya's phone," Mike said. I knew he was bluffing now because her phone had never been found. We were only going on Joe Berk's statement that he claimed to have listened to Hubert Alden's invitation to take the ballerina out for a late supper the night she went missing. "Your voice, offering to pick her up that same evening."
Alden raised his head, looking out the window over mine, face-to-face with a gargoyle who laughed back at him from the building cornice across the narrow street, its tongue extended from its wide stone mouth.
"Dinner, Mr. Alden? That ring a bell?"
"I never got an answer from Talya. I made that call from my office, late in the afternoon, I think. Naturally, I would have stayed in town if she'd responded that she wanted to see me. I keep the company plane at Teterboro, in New Jersey, right over the George Washington Bridge."
"You didn't happen to stop by the opera house on your way to the airport, did you?"
"Mr. Chapman, I was scheduled to fly out at around seven o'clock that evening. I didn't stop anywhere, because I was anxious to get into the Vail airport before they shut it down for the night."
"But it's your own wings, no? You tell the pilot it's ten or it's midnight, and that's when the flight goes."
"We were wheels up before Natalya went onstage, detective. The first act started at eight p.m., didn't it?" Alden was steaming now, unhappy about the implied accusation and perhaps also unhappy that we may have heard something more intimate in the phone conversation than he had revealed to us. "The flight records on both ends will confirm my departure and arrival times."
"Those records will tell me about the movements of the aircraft, Mr. Alden. Whether they account for where you were that night is another matter."
Alden leaned forward with his elbows on the arms of the wooden chair and shook his head while he looked down at the floor. "You brought me down here for this? You'll be embarrassed when you get the answers you're looking for."
Mike could shift gears as suddenly as moods. He backed off the subject of Galinova's murder, and sensed from our first conversation with Alden that he would be more comfortable talking about his theatrical ancestors.
"I'll be first in line to apol
ogize if I'm wrong, Mr. Alden. I mean, there it was in your own voice, the night of the murder. I had to ask you, since you didn't tell us about your dinner invitation the first time we talked. And the main reason we asked to see you again is that we really wanted your help about something else, something that involves Joe Berk."
Alden seemed to perk up now, pleased to shift the attention back to Berk.
"I'm figuring you might know some of this because of your grand-mother, the opera singer, and 'cause your grandfather was such a patron of the arts. You know anything about the Shriners?"
Alden looked at me to check my expression, and I met his glance with a smile. "Why do you ask?"
"Obviously, I can't tell you exactly why, but let's just say Berk hasn't been too candid with us, and maybe you can help me understand why."
"Candor isn't part of Joe's vocabulary. What is it about the Shriners?"
"Who are they? What do they have to do with the theatrical community?" Mike asked the general question to start Alden talking, but I knew he would work his way up to the red tasseled fez.
"The Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, detective. A nineteenth-century offshoot of the Masons-you know about them, don't you?"
I knew that Freemasons were opponents of divine right kingships, attracted by the freedom of early craftsmen, spiritual heirs of the men who built the world's great monuments-the pyramids, Solomon's Temple, the Roman aqueducts, and later the medieval cathedrals.
"Fraternal organizations," Mike said.
"Yes, but with a firm set of beliefs that are centered in the freedom of man. You had Voltaire and Ben Franklin, George Washington and Mozart, all espousing democratic ideals and benevolence. By the mid-nineteenth century, most towns in America had at least one Masonic Lodge, not just for fraternal purposes, but for philanthropic goals as well."
"And the Shriners?"
"They first of all had to be Masons, but their order evolved from a more exotic heritage-the seventh-century Order of the Mystic Shrine," Alden said, looking over at Mike. "You'd actually be amused by their original purpose."
Death Dance Page 28