Death Dance

by Linda Fairstein

  "What was it?"

  "To maintain law and order, to help local governments fight crime. They were a kind of primitive posse when they originated. It wasn't until the nineteenth century that their mission changed."

  "I hate friggin' posses. Last thing I need is a bunch of amateurs trying to do my job. What did they change to?"

  "In my grandparents' time, the Shriners really became the playground for the Masons, associated with most of the popular entertainers of the day. And all very taken with the exotic symbols of the original Middle Eastern or Near Eastern Shrine associations."

  "Why so?"

  "Because that's where the movement originated, centuries ago. When it was revived in America, there were two men who cofounded the order in the 1850s. One was a stage actor and the other a medical doctor-William Jermyn Florence and Dr. Walter Millary Fleming. They had this idea to use the organization to entertain people, while at the same time being charitable, raising money for medical research."

  "But what did you say about the Middle East? What symbols are you talking about?" Mike asked.

  "William Florence played in performances all over Europe and northern Africa -in many of the same theaters where my grand-mother, Giulietta Capretta, later sang. He went to Algeria and Cairo, bringing home with him some of the rituals from the shrines there, some of the trappings of the early orders that flourished in the Middle East."

  "Like what?"

  "Islamic motifs, in everything from the architecture of their meeting places to the details in the interior design. These American Shriners didn't construct theaters for their entertainment and lodging, Ms. Cooper. They actually built mosques. And they gave them Arabic names, all over the country. Bektash Shrine Temple in Concord, New Hampshire; Syria Temple in Pittsburgh; the Ararat Temple in Kansas City; the Aladdin Temple in Columbus, Ohio; the Sphinx Temple in Hartford; and the Rameses Temple in Toronto. More than half a million members nationwide."

  "A hundred years ago? Mosques all over this country?"

  "Indeed. And the leaders were all known as imperial potentates and grand masters, again in the Arabic traditions."

  "You mentioned design elements, too," I said. "What was distinctive about them?"

  "Colors for one thing. The mixtures of red and yellow and green are very evocative of the culture. Certain symbols are constants, like the crescent moon crossed with the scimitar, arabesque grillwork in many of the building features, and always mosaic tile work on the walls and ceiling-lots of glazed terra-cotta, usually with a foliate imagery-"

  "Hold it, buddy, will you? You make a study of this stuff?" Mike was trying to take notes as Alden talked.

  "I inherited the entire theatrical collection that had been in our family for decades. It's part of my genealogy, detective-it's in the blood. Nothing I had to study."

  "What do you mean you inherited something? Like what?"

  "Scores of photographs-George M. Cohan, Sophie Tucker, Lillian Russell-they all performed with the Shriners. I've got a unique assortment of signed Playbills from opening nights and events, and even costumes they wore at major events."

  "What kind of costumes?" Mike asked.

  "From opera, from Shakespearean plays, from lodge meetings-"

  "I don't mean that. I mean what did the Shriners wear?"

  "Suits just like us. Only the potentates got the fancy robes," Alden said.

  "And on their heads, what? Hoods?"

  "It's not the Klan, detective."

  "So what'd they wear?"

  "Surely you know the tarboosh, Mr. Chapman? The famous red fez?"

  "Yeah, yeah. I know it."

  "From the University of Fez -the symbol of learning and integrity."

  "You inherit some of those, Mr. Alden?"

  "I certainly did. I'll be glad to show you anything you like."

  "You keep them?"

  "At my home, detective. I've got a media room filled with memorabilia of my grandparents. Quite colorful."

  "And the letter M, Mr. Alden-you know, from the alphabet. Does that have any significance in these Shriner designs?"

  Alden didn't miss a beat as he held up his fingers to tick off his answers. "Quite likely it does, if you tell me what you mean, what it is you're looking for. Obviously, there are words like mosque and minaret, and the name of the Masons themselves. Fez is a city in Morocco. There's another M for you. I don't follow your question, Mr. Chapman."

  I kept thinking of Lucy DeVore, smiling at the camera in her red tarboosh, her hand on the doorknob that bore the distinctive letter M.

  "If these shrines were so popular all over America, how come they built one everyplace in the country except Manhattan?" Mike asked. "How come there's no Shriners' theater right here?"

  "I hope you don't mind being corrected again, detective, but one of the most immense, ostentatious mosques ever created was opened here in 1923, on a prime piece of real estate dead in the center of the city. Still standing, Mr. Chapman, right in midtown on Fifty-fifth Street, and I'll bet you've been inside it dozens of times."

  "There's no mosque on Fifty-fifth Street," Mike said.

  "What's the name?"

  "Mecca Temple, Miss Cooper. Maybe that's the M you've been looking for. Mecca Temple of the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine."

  35

  "Where on Fifty-fifth Street?" Mike asked, Alden's suggestion an affront to his pride in his intimate knowledge of the city over which he kept watch. Each street, each avenue, each grid evoked the memory of a crime scene Mike had worked. "There's a synagogue over on the southwest corner of Lex, but there's no mosque."

  "West Fifty-fifth, between Sixth and Seventh avenues," Alden said, pleased with himself that he had us stymied.

  I closed my eyes to envision the block and thought immediately of the large theater there that I had been to more often than even Alden could have guessed.

  " City Center?"

  "The City Center of Music and Drama, Ms. Cooper. Next time you have tickets for a show, stand across the street and crane your neck to look up to the very top of the building, maybe twelve or fourteen stories high. You can still see the words Mecca Temple carved into the facade."

  I have stood on the sidewalk at the entrance to City Center scores of times since my first childhood visits and never once noticed the carved letters so far overhead.

  "But it's-it's been a theater for longer than I've been alive. Before Lincoln Center was built, it was home to the New York City Ballet and Opera." I was taken aback at the thought that this cultural treasure had a history that wasn't familiar to me-and, I was sure, to many other theatergoers.

  Mike wanted to leave for the building at once. He walked to Laura's desk to use her phone, and when I heard him ask for the desk sergeant at Midtown North-the precinct just a few short blocks from City Center-I knew he was calling to send a patrolman around the corner to examine and report back on the shape and design of the doorknobs in the old showplace.

  "I can't believe I never knew about that."

  "It's ancient history, Ms. Cooper. Does it interest you?"

  I tried to keep Alden chatting without letting him know that the reason for my heightened interest was because of a possible link to our investigation. I've studied dance all my life. I see the Ailey Dance Company there every year, and, of course, it's where American Ballet Theater does their fall series. And all the Broadway revivals they stage-who doesn't know City Center?"

  "Then I must arrange for you to meet the director. I'm sure you two would be sympatica-she's a brilliant young lawyer who also used to dance. Arlette Schiller, do you know her?"

  "I don't," I said, one eye on Mike as he reentered the room. "But I'd certainly like the introduction."

  "So how long was Mecca actually Mecca?" Mike asked.

  "The temple opened in 1923, with grand wizards and potentates from all over the country. Quite an engineering marvel it was, this massive sandstone cube topped by its extraordinary dome. The main steel girder
that supports the balcony is the longest one ever used in New York City still to this day-six stories tall if you were to lay it on end-delivered by ship to the harbor and snaked uptown on a caravan of trucks."

  "But just for Shriners?"

  "Originally, detective, yes. There was the auditorium, of course. It's right around the corner from Carnegie Hall, as you know. But even back then, no one was allowed to smoke at Carnegie Hall. Since cigar smoking was a big part of the lodge activities, the auditorium was built with all sorts of huge exhaust fans in it, to accommodate the practice as well as to help draw stage business away from Carnegie. Mecca 's theatrical section seated almost five thousand people, if you can imagine that so long ago. The rest of the shrine's rooms-banquet halls, lodgings, ceremonial shrines-well, they were all quite private."

  "So what happened to the place?" Mike asked.

  "First came the Crash of Twenty-nine, and then the Great Depression. It was no better for the Shriners than for anyone else in the country. Even though they considered themselves a philanthropic organization, they couldn't claim a tax exemption because they rented the auditorium to outside groups. By the late 1930s, the banks foreclosed on the loans that had been used to build Mecca."

  "So the mosque went into bankruptcy?"

  "It did indeed, after a very short life. Sat empty like a forlorn Arabian palace in the middle of this urban landscape. Before all the sky-scrapers went up in midtown, you could see that fantastic dome from miles away in every direction. The government got the property by tax foreclosure and put the building up for auction in 1942."

  "Who bought it?"

  Alden smiled. "The City of New York itself turned out to be the highest bidder. Stole the place, even by the standards of those days, for one hundred thousand dollars. The claim on it was more than six times that amount. It was the genius of LaGuardia."

  "What?" Mike asked.

  "Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. The rest of the politicians wanted to tear the building down and replace it with a parking lot."

  "Except for LaGuardia?"

  "Yes, he'd long had the idea to create a great municipal theater, with cheap tickets so that the arts could be more available to the ordinary citizen. He didn't want it to be like New York 's commercial theaters, so he aimed to build a constituency made up of colleges and schools, philanthropic and professional groups. The mayor wanted shows to start at five thirty in the evening so people could come straight from work, save the train and bus fare. He had some wonderful ideas to support the performing arts in New York."

  "And let them be more accessible than Broadway?"

  "By far, Ms. Cooper. When City Center opened, you could sit in the balcony for thirty-five cents or pay top dollar-literally, a dollar ten-for the orchestra. Broadway seats cost three times as much."

  My phone rang and Laura answered it, buzzing the intercom. Mike reached over and picked it up. "Yeah, sarge?"

  He listened for a few seconds and hung up the phone. "No doubt about it. This time M is for Mecca."

  "I'm quite pleased I could help you solve your puzzle, detective. Anything…?"

  "When's the last time you were there, Mr. Alden?"

  His forehead wrinkled and his dark, thick eyebrows met as one. "It's been weeks, Mr. Chapman. Several weeks."

  "Exactly when?"

  "Look, if you're back to playing 'gotcha' again, I'd obviously prefer to check my office diary."

  "Why'd you go?"

  Alden looked to me. "They have this wonderful Encore series- Broadway shows."

  I knew the series, which had proved to be enormously successful for the center year after year.

  "It was a performance of Bye, Bye, Birdie. That's amusing, come to think of it."

  Mike was too focused on Lucy DeVore posed in someone's fez, leaning on a door handle in the Mecca Theater, to be easily amused. "How so?"

  "Birdie was really the first musical to bring rock'n'roll to Broadway."

  "Spare me the lyrics. Coop's likely to break into a dance. What of it?"

  "There's a scene in the show where the characters go into the wrong room and break up a Shriners' meeting. Remember that?"

  I didn't.

  "Tarbooshes and flying tassels everywhere. I'm sure there are plenty of them in wardrobe over at City Center. You don't need to see mine."

  The one on Lucy's head had distinctive markings. A crescent and scimitar-whose meaning I now understood-over some Arabic design. We'd be able to tell whether it was a costume from a Broadway performance or the real deal from an antique mosque.

  "How about backstage, Mr. Alden? You been backstage lately?"

  Again the man's brow furrowed as he tried, it seemed to me, to second-guess the direction Mike Chapman was going before he supplied an answer.

  "I've been backstage dozens of times, detective. I'm a-"

  "Yeah, I know. You're a friggin' patron of the friggin' arts. I've bought more beers at Yankee Stadium than you've got Playbills, but it doesn't get me in the locker room to pose for pictures with the boys after the game. Dancers. You been backstage here lately with any of the ladies?"

  Mike was losing the bigger picture to close in on the image of Lucy DeVore. Hubert Alden had no idea where Mike was headed.

  "Upstairs, certainly."

  "Whaddaya mean? In the balcony?"

  "No, no. There are nine or ten floors of studios in the office tower behind the auditorium, Mr. Chapman. Some of the most spectacular dance studios in the city are housed there, rented out to many of the companies for rehearsal space."

  "And you've been up in there recently? Where exactly?"

  "I'm surprised that Chet Dobbis didn't explain all of this to you when you talked to him about Talya Galinova."

  "What's for Dobbis to tell?"

  "Before he came to the Met, Chet was the artistic director at City Center. He knows every inch of that place from the top of the dome to the crawl spaces in the basement."

  Mike looked at me to see if I was following Alden's point. "What does that have to do with Galinova?"

  "Well, of course I've visited Talya at City Center. So did Dobbis, so did Rinaldo Vicci, so did Joe Berk. Talya's rehearsal studio was there, Mr. Chapman," Alden said, making the connection between Lucy DeVore's accident and Galinova's murder a bit less tenuous in my mind. "She spent much more time in that building than she did at the Met."

  36

  There was no point keeping Hubert Alden in my office any longer. His information was pointing us in a new direction, reweaving many of the same characters into a new tapestry, giving us another venue to explore-one that was familiar to most of them.

  As Mike walked Alden to the elevators, Mercer Wallace came into my office carrying a bag full of sandwiches.

  "Heard you were busy doing your StairMaster workout early this morning," he said, unpacking the late lunch he brought for each of us. "I figured after that you could even stand a bag of chips for a change."

  "Feed me, m'man," Mike said, returning to the room and reaching for the roast beef hero, biting into it as though he hadn't eaten in days. "How was your weekend?"

  "I think I've been in every homeless shelter and soup kitchen in the city since you left town. Still looking for Ramon Carido," Mercer said. "He must be living under a rock in the park, and it has gotta be driving him crazy. This beautiful spring weather-every jogger and biker and stroller is out there on his hunting ground, stoking his imagination. I doubt he'll ever go after a dog-walker again."

  "Coop missed all the local news while she was on the Vineyard. Every station showed that sketch of him around the clock."

  "Reward money's up to twenty grand from one of the victims-advocacy groups. Some mutt'll turn him in for the loot before too long."

  "So you worked all weekend while I played hooky?"

  "And lucky thing you did, Ms. Cooper. May I say that for once you are no longer the favorite prosecutor of the Manhattan Special Victims Squad? I don't want to be a snitch, but somebody drew a mustache and horns
on that picture of you holding my baby boy last Christmas. You look downright evil."

  "Easy come, easy go. What now?"

  "The guys are really pissed at you because of the order from Judge McFarland in the Carido case."

  "You mean not being able to try to match their DNA evidence to the linkage database? Two weeks and we'll have a whole new set of rules. Good ones, I hope."

  "In the meantime, we caught six new squeals since Thursday night."

  "Yeah, I saw the complaint reports on Laura's desk this morning. Four of them knew their attackers. DNA won't make the difference in those cases. Tell the squad to work those cases the old-fashioned way-with their brains."

  "Well, they need the databank in the other two. In fact, when you look those reports over more carefully, you'll see that Saturday night's break-in down on Allen Street may be part of a pattern. We want to try to link it to an open series in Tribeca."

  Mike had finished his hero and was working on his second bag of nachos. "She's not going to win any popularity contests in the Homicide Squad either. Same beef."

  "I didn't go up to court intending to try to make new law, guys. It was a command performance."

  "Yeah, well, don't go calling nine-one-one again any time soon," Mike said, wiping the mustard from his cheek with the back of his hand. "Some dick is likely to tell you to stick your DNA up your-"

  "Laura? You just reminded me, Mike. Laura?" She poked her head through the doorway. "Would you call down to the supply office? They need to issue me a new cell phone. Beg them to let me keep my old number, okay?"

  "Got it."

  "I had to turn mine in to the detectives this morning so they can make a record of the exact times of the calls I made from my building last night," I explained to Mike and Mercer. "They have to check with Benito, too. Maybe he heard whether my attacker said anything while the line was open."

  "I thought you told me he didn't say a word."

  "That's exactly what I told you. And I'm Sure of it. They just want to double-check, in case I'm mistaken.''

  "Guess you got zero credibility, Coop. Those cops trust you about twice as much as you trust your witnesses. It's good medicine for you. What'd you think of Hubert Alden?" Mike had finished his bottle of root beer and reached for a swig of my Diet Coke to wash down the food.