by Joël Dicker
“Because you were afraid of what you were discovering?”
“No, because I was all alone! I couldn’t stand it anymore. I told myself people would worry when they didn’t see me around. Or they’d wonder why I suddenly quit the force. You know where I was, the first two weeks I was missing? At home! In my own house. Waiting for someone to ring the bell and ask how I was. But nobody came. Not even a neighbor. Nobody at all. I stayed in, didn’t go shopping, didn’t leave the house. I didn’t get one single telephone call. The only visitor was my father, who brought me some shopping. He sat with me on the couch in the living room for hours. In silence. Then he asked me, ‘What are we waiting for?’ I replied, ‘Someone, but I don’t know who.’ In the end I decided to move to the other side of the country and start a new life. I told myself it was an opportunity to devote myself fully to writing, to movies, to a play. And what better subject than this criminal case that as far as I was concerned was still unsolved? One night, I snuck into the station—I still had the keys—and recovered the case file on the Gordon killings.”
“But why leave that note in the box: ‘Here begins The Darkest Night’?” Betsy said.
“Because I was already thinking that once I’d solved the case I’d come back to Orphea and reveal the truth. Tell the whole story in the form of a successful play. I was leaving Orphea a failure. I was determined to come back a hero and put on ‘The Darkest Night’.”
“Why use that title again?”
“It was my way of thumbing my nose at all the people who had turned their backs on me. ‘The Darkest Night’ in its original form didn’t exist anymore. My colleagues, as payback for me not giving 120 percent of my days and nights to police work, had destroyed all the drafts and manuscripts I had kept in the station, and the only copy, which I had given to the bookstore, was in the hands of Mayor Gordon.”
“How did you know?” I asked.
“Meghan Padalin told me. She worked in the bookstore. She was the one who had suggested I leave a copy of the play in the section for local writers. Sometimes Hollywood celebrities visited, and, who knows, it might have been read and liked by someone important. But now in mid-July 1994, after the dirty trick my colleagues had played on me, I went to get my script back from the bookstore, and Meghan told me Mayor Gordon had just bought it. So I went to him and asked for it back, and he told me he didn’t have it anymore. I was convinced he was trying to screw me. After all, he had read the play and disliked it! He’d even torn it up in front of me! Why buy another copy from the bookstore except to do me some sort of harm? So, when I left Orphea, I wanted to prove that nothing can prevent the fulfilment of a work of art. You can burn it, jeer at it, ban it, censor it, but everything can be reborn. You thought you could destroy me? Well, here I am again, as strong as ever. That’s what I imagined. So I entrusted my father with the task of selling my house and I moved to California. With the money from the sale, I had enough to get by for a while. I plunged back into the case file. But I found myself completely stuck, I was going round in circles. The less I advanced, the more the case obsessed me.”
“And you’ve been going over and over it for the past twenty years?” Derek said.
“Yes, but I was also working day and night on scripts for movies. I made myself a living and something of a reputation. I had put the Orphea murders to one side until Stephanie Mailer turned up out of the blue.”
“And what did you manage to come up with?”
“Not much. On one side, the motorcycle accident and, on the other, Meghan Padalin. That’s all I had.”
“Do you think Meghan Padalin was investigating Fold’s motorcycle accident and that’s why she was killed?”
“I really have no idea. I made that up for the play. I thought it made a good opening scene. But you tell me: is there really, in your view, a connection between Meghan and the accident?”
“We’re as sure as you are that there’s a link between the two deaths,” I said, “but we haven’t been able to find anything which connects them.”
“It’s been eating at me for twenty years,” Hayward said. “I told myself I would never find the solution to this case. But when Stephanie Mailer came to see me in L.A. in June, it gave me hope of a breakthrough. I told her everything I knew, thinking she would do the same.”
“So Stephanie knew that Meghan Padalin was the target?”
“That was something I told her.”
“And what did she know?”
“I have no idea. When I told her I didn’t know who had committed the murders, she immediately got up to go. She said, ‘I have no time to waste.’ I demanded that at least she share whatever new information she had, but she refused. We had a little argument in the Beluga Bar. When I tried to hold her back, her bag fell, and it emptied on the floor. The papers from her investigation, her cigarette lighter, her key ring with a ridiculous big yellow ball. As I helped her to pick up her things, I tried to take the opportunity to read her notes. But obviously I couldn’t. And then you showed up, my dear Rosenberg. At first I thought I wouldn’t tell you anything. Not after Stephanie Mailer refused to share what she knew with me. But then I told myself it could be my last chance to get back to Orphea and, who knows, for my play to be performed at the opening of the festival.”
“But you had no real play.”
“I had something better, don’t you see that? I had a story, rooted in the history of a small town. I knew I could find a talented cast among the people coming for the festival, many of whom had some link to the the first festival and the murders. Charlotte Brown, who could have been a star if she hadn’t left me for that idiot Brown. Ostrovski, who has seen every play from Broadway to State Street. Bergdorf, a respected literary editor. Eden, head of a T.V. network, and his daughter, practically a prodigy. And to top it off, Samuel Padalin, whose wife was one of the victims. All I needed was the name of the killer. I’d briefed that cast on every possible suspect. Once we had the name, I knew they could play it by ear.”
“So that explains why you only wrote a handful of scenes.”
“Exactly. I was counting on my promise to reveal the killer on opening night to sell tickets. But I was counting on you two to find the killer.”
“But we didn’t find him.”
“That was why I added Carolina’s line about his identity. I knew you would be in the auditorium, watching the audience. I was hoping to flush him out, force him to make a mistake.”
“But we were in your dressing room,” Derek said, glancing my way. “Trying to find out what you knew.”
“Why didn’t you just tell us, Hayward?” I said. “We could have worked together, like we did back in ’94.”
“And how far did that get us?” Hayward said. He sighed. “I thought I had it all figured out. I had once-in-a-lifetime publicity for my play and as talented a cast as I could possibly have hoped for. But now, because of me, that wonderful young woman is hovering between life and death.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“You were on the right track with your original investigation,” I said at last. “It’s not the ideal moment to mention this, but we did find your play. Mayor Gordon was keeping it in a safe deposit box. In it, in the form of a code, was the name Jeremiah Fold, the man who died in a motorcycle accident. So there is a connection between Fold, Gordon, and Meghan Padalin. You understood everything, Kirk. You had all the pieces of the puzzle in your hand. Now we simply have to put them together.”
“Let me help you. It’ll be my way of making amends.”
*
Before anything else, we needed to figure out what had happened the previous night in the Grand Theater.
“I was in the wings, watching Carolina,” Hayward said. “Jerry Eden was standing next to me. Then there were the shots. Carolina collapsed. Jerry and I rushed to her, soon joined by Charlotte.”
“Could you tell from what direction the shots came?” Derek said. “From the front row? From the edge of the stage?”
In an attempt to answer this question, and before questioning the other members of the cast, we joined Major McKenna, Acting Chief Montagne and Mayor Brown in a conference room for a first review of the situation.
At this point, we had absolutely no clue as to the identity of the shooter. There were no cameras in the Grand Theater and those members of the audience who had been questioned had seen nothing. They had all repeated the same litany: the auditorium had been in total darkness at the time of the shooting, the spotlights, from behind the audience, directed onto the stage. “It really was ‘The Darkest Night’ in there,” they had said. “There were two gunshots, the girl collapsed, then there was panic. How is the poor girl?”
McKenna informed us that the weapon had not been found, either in the theater or on the surrounding streets. “The shooter has to have taken advantage of the panic to run away from the theater and dispose of the weapon.”
“It was impossible for us to stop people from leaving,” Montagne said, as if hoping to get himself off the hook. “They would have trampled each other, people could have died. Nobody ever thought the danger would come from inside. We had secured the theater from the outside.”
This was the point on which, despite the absence of clues, we were going to advance in the investigation.
“How could an armed person have gotten into the theater?” I said.
“I can’t figure that out,” McKenna said. “The guys who were in charge of the access routes are used to difficult situations. They secure international conferences, parades, the President’s visits to New York. The procedure was very strict. The theater was first searched by sniffer dogs, then placed under total surveillance. Nobody could have broken in during the night. And the audience and the cast all went through metal detectors on their way in.”
Something had escaped us. We had to figure out how a weapon had gotten into the theater. In order for us to get a better idea, McKenna sent for the officer of the State Police responsible for securing the building. This man repeated for us in detail the procedure as the major had outlined it.
“After the search, the building was secured and remained so,” the officer said. “I wouldn’t have let the President himself get in there.”
“Every single person was checked as they went in?” Derek said.
“Without exception.”
“We weren’t checked,” Betsy said.
“Police officers weren’t checked as long as they showed their badges,” the officer conceded.
“Did many officers enter the auditorium?” I said.
“No, sir. A handful of plainclothes officers, a few of our men. Mainly movement between the auditorium and the outside of the theater to make sure everything was going well.”
“Jesse,” Major McKenna said anxiously, “don’t tell me you suspect a police officer now.”
“I’m just trying to get a crystal-clear picture,” I said, and asked the officer to describe exactly how the search had been carried out.
In order to answer as precisely as possible, the officer fetched in the chief dog handler, who explained to us their modus operandi.
“We had three areas: the lobby, the auditorium, and the backstage area, including the dressing rooms. We always proceed through one area at a time, so as not to confuse the dogs. The cast was rehearsing onstage, so we started with the backstage area and the dressing rooms. That was the largest part, because there’s quite a large basement. Once that was done, we asked the cast to interrupt their rehearsal while we searched the auditorium, so as not to distract the dogs.”
“And where did the cast go while you were doing that?” I asked.
“To the backstage area. When they came back into the auditorium, they had to go through the metal detectors to guarantee that the area remained secure. That way they could go from one area to other without any problem.”
Derek tapped his forehead. “Were the actors searched when they arrived that day at the theater?”
“No. But all their bags were sniffed by the dogs in the dressing rooms, and then they went through the metal detectors.”
“But if an actor had arrived at the theater with the weapon on him the day before, and had kept it on him during the rehearsals, while you were searching the dressing rooms, he could then have gone back to his dressing room while you searched the auditorium and left the weapon there, as that was now considered a secured area. On opening night, he would have passed through the metal detector without any problem because the weapon was already in the theater. It was all done the day before. The security measures had been announced in the press, so the shooter had time to plan ahead. He had only to recover it from his dressing room yesterday, before the start of the show.”
“So the shooter was one of the cast?” Mayor Brown said, horrified.
The shooter was there, in the next room.
We first made each cast member take a powder test, but none had any trace of it on their hands or clothes. We also tested their stage costumes, sent teams to search each person’s dressing room, hotel room, and home if they were local. Of course, they could have been wearing gloves or even a coat at the time of the shooting. And besides, the shooter had by now had time to get rid of the weapon, to change, to take a shower.
Hayward had said he had been with Jerry Eden when the shots rang out. We were able to reach Eden by phone: Carolina had been in the operating room for hours, he said, but he had no news. He confirmed that Hayward had been next to him when his daughter had been shot. We trusted Eden: he had no known connection with the events of 1994 and it was scarcely conceivable that he would want to kill his own daughter. Thus we could eliminate Hayward from our list of suspects.
We spent all day questioning the other members of the cast, but without success. Nobody had seen anything. As for knowing where everyone was at the time of the shooting, they had all been in the backstage area, close to Hayward, they stated. But nobody would swear to every one of the cast having been there.
By late afternoon, we had made no progress.
“What do you mean, you don’t have anything?” Major McKenna said sharply when we informed him of the situation.
“There were no powder traces on any member of the cast,” I said. “Nobody saw anything that could lead us to the shooter.”
“But we know one of them was probably the shooter!”
“I’m aware of that, sir. Yet we have no clues, nothing on which to hold anyone or charge them. It’s like they’re covering for each other.”
“And have you questioned all of them?”
“Yes. They’ve been here for twelve hours.”
“If you have nothing against them, let them go. We have no choice. But tell them not to leave New York State.”
“Do you have any news of Carolina, sir?” Betsy said.
“The operation’s over. The surgeons removed two bullets from her body and tried to repair the damage to her organs. But she’s lost a lot of blood and has had to be placed in an artificial coma. The doctors are not absolutely confident she will get through the night.”
“Can you ask for the bullets to be analyzed as a matter of urgency, sir?”
“Of course. What are you thinking?”
“We have to know whether they could have come from a police weapon.”
There was a long silence. Then the major got up from his chair and brought the meeting to an end.
“Get some rest,” he said. “You look like zombies.”
When Betsy got home she was shocked to discover Mark, her ex-husband, sitting on her porch.
“Mark? What the hell are you doing here?”
“We’re all worried sick, Betsy. On T.V., all they are talking about is the
shooting at the Grand Theater. You haven’t answered our calls or our texts.”
“I’m fine, thanks. You can go home now.”
“When I heard about what had happened here, I was reminded of Sabar’s jewelry store.”
“Oh, please don’t start on that!”
“Your mother said the same thing.”
“Then you should marry my mother, you seem to think along the same lines.”
Mark remained seated. He plainly had no intention of leaving. Betsy, exhausted, slumped down next to him.
“I thought you came to Orphea to be in a town where nothing happened,” he said.
“That’s true,” Betsy said. “I did.”
He made a bitter grimace. “Anyone would think you joined that intervention unit in New York just to piss me off.”
“Stop playing the victim, Mark. Do I have to remind you that I was already in the N.Y.P.D. when you met me?”
“It’s true. And I have to admit it was one of the things I liked about you. But have you ever, for a fraction of a second, put yourself in my place? One day I meet an amazing woman: brilliant, stunningly beautiful, funny. I’m actually lucky enough to marry her. And suddenly this stupendous woman puts on a bulletproof vest to go to work every day. And when she goes out through the door of the apartment, with her semi-automatic pistol at her belt, I wonder if I’ll ever see her again. And every time I hear a police siren, every time there’s an alert, every time the T.V. says there’s been a shooting or an emergency situation, I wonder if she’s been caught up in it. And when there’s a knock at the door, is it a neighbor who wants to borrow some salt? Has she forgotten her keys? Or is it a uniformed officer who’s come to tell me my wife died in the line of duty? And the rising anxiety when she’s late home! And the nagging worry when she doesn’t call me back after I’ve left her a string of messages! And the irregular hours, so that she goes to bed when I get up and vice versa! And the night calls and the going out in the middle of the night! And the overtime! And the canceled weekends! That’s what my life with you was like, Betsy.”