Death Dance

32

I was able to crawl down the steps to retrieve my phone and dial 911 before the building workmen reached me.

By the time the sergeant and two uniformed cops from the 19th Precinct arrived in the lobby, the team of Con Ed repairmen had restored power to the A line and started the elevators running again. There was no electrical fire and it would be hours before they could determine the reason for the blackout.

The sergeant took me up to my apartment while the cops called for a backup unit to go through the building from top to bottom.

I poured each of us some scotch and we sat in the living room, his police radio on the coffee table so that we could hear the conversations back and forth as the guys searched the staircases and hallways in vain.

When the doorbell rang, Sergeant Camacho walked to the door to let his men in.

"Yo, sarge. I didn't know you and Coop had hooked up. Am I breaking anything apart here? A cocktail? Last dance?" Chapman was leaning against the entrance to my apartment, gnawing on a toothpick as he held the door open with his foot.

Camacho blushed and started to protest that he'd only responded to a call and was starting to fill out the paperwork on my complaint.

"Relax, pal. Take it easy. Not enough I spent the last six hours checking out a jumper off a project rooftop in East Harlem, now I got blondie seeing shadows in the stairwell. The least you could have done is invite me to the after-party, too," Mike said, walking into the den, toward the bar. "Mind if I turn in the brew for something more refreshing?"

"Good news travels fast, I guess."

"The commanding officer of the Nineteenth called in an unusual on you. Lieutenant Peterson heard it on the scanner and told me to get my ass over here ASAP. And by the way? Peterson says the CO thinks you've got Munchausen syndrome. That you make these whacko stories up just because you like my company."

"The only thing I like better than your company is a good night's sleep. I'm forgetting how that happens."

An unusual report was filed in matters that might be of some significance to the commissioner and higher-ups in the department. The fact that a prosecutor working on a high-profile matter had been rousted from her home during the night and had been the target of an attempted assault would be of interest to everyone.

"You know your guys are coming up empty, don't you, sarge? I just saw one of them in the lobby and there's no trace of an intruder."

I bit into my lip and tried to calm myself.

"This place is big. If it wasn't the midnight shift, we woulda had more guys on duty, bigger response to sweep the building. Do it faster."

"It can't be that difficult. He fled up the stairs. He eventually had to go down to get out of the building, didn't he?" I asked. "You're telling me nobody saw him?"

Mike sat opposite me, his hand on the knee of my jeans. "Give the guys time to canvass people. Maybe we're dealing with a pro. He got in without anybody knowing about him, could be he slipped out that way, too. You okay?"

"Considering the alternative? I'm great."

"You have any idea what this guy was trying to do to you?"

I glanced at the sergeant, afraid he would think I was crazy if I said what I really thought.

"C'mon, Coop. Tell me."

"You don't really believe I was flushed out of my apartment randomly, do you?" I looked back and forth between their faces but neither answered. "You think this perfectly prepared-I don't know what to call him-lunatic? Will that do? A guy dressed completely in black, head and hands covered-no I.D., no trace evidence. You think he just happened to be there when my lights went out? Not for a minute. This has to be connected to something I'm working on."

"Did he talk to you? Say anything that suggests he knew who you were?"

"Talk to me? It wasn't a pickup, Detective Chapman. The plan was obviously to kill me by choking or-"

"Whoa. A little dramatic tonight, aren't we? Kill you?"

"I called out to him, thinking maybe he was a neighbor. He never answered. All he wanted to do was overtake me and pin me down so that he could-well, he could do whatever it was he intended to do to me." I rubbed my neck. "I'm telling you he gripped me so hard that if I hadn't gotten away from him he'd have stopped my breathing within seconds."

The sergeant was emboldened by Mike's skepticism. "Maybe, ma'am, he was just coming along behind you and fell on the staircase. My guys are knocking on-"

"Oh, my masked neighbor? The one who dresses for blizzards in April? The clumsy one who can't stay on his feet?" I stood up and walked to the front door. "Why am I wasting time with you two? Sergeant, I'd like you to take me down to the lobby so I can see who these guys are from Con Edison."

"Coop, stay here and I'll bring up their supervisor so you can satisfy yourself that none of them have anything-"

"I wasn't talking to you, Mike. You might as well go home and keep wallowing in your own misery. No need to take me seriously."

Mike grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me away from the door. "Wallowing? Is that what I've been doing for three months? Is that what Val-"

"I'm sorry. That's not what I meant to-"

"You don't usually have any difficulty expressing yourself. I get your point."

"I apologize, Mike." I squared off to face him directly. "I'm scared and I'm tired and I'm the one who's feeling sorry for myself tonight. Please accept my apology."

"Whoever did this to you was either inside another apartment or out of the building by the time the first RMP got here."

"Mike, will you forgive-"

"It's not the time for this, Coop. The sergeant doesn't need to know my backstory, okay? These Con Ed guys who are here-"

"You've seen them yourself? They're legit?"

"There's bad wiring, they say, that took the electricity in this whole line down."

"Bad, like it's damaged? Or like it was intentionally altered?"

"It's two o'clock in the morning. Bad is all they know so far." Mike took a slug of vodka and adjusted the collar of his jacket.

"You know more than you're telling me."

"I always know more than you give me credit for, kid, don't I?"

"I'll give you an acknowledgment in my next legal brief. What is it?"

"It doesn't take a law degree to know that the source for all the electricity in the building comes in through the basement. The basement is accessible from within the building, isn't it?"

I nodded. "From the garage, too. And from the outside, although I assume those doors are locked at night. It's huge. There's a storage room, a laundry room. I've never even been inside the custodial area."

"Working a toaster oven is high tech for you," Mike said. "Once inside that boiler room, a guy with a few high school vocational classes under his belt could easily find the main electrical panel that connects to the A-line apartments and with not much more than a pair of needle-nose pliers, put you and anyone else he wanted out of business for the night."

"And the elevator banks?" I asked. "Was the super really ordered to shut them down?"

"Yeah. You can smell the burnt rubber in the basement. They had to take that precaution with both banks of elevators."

"You believe there was a man after me, right?"

"I'd believe you if you told me you saw a UFO, kid. I'm not the enemy here," Mike said, steering me back to the living room sofa to sit down. "Face it. This building is a block long. You've got the north and south wings, two elevator banks for residents plus the freight elevator, and two sets of fire stairs. All your stalker had to do was make the place go dark, then walk up the staircase and wait for all the pigeons to come out of their cubbyholes. It's not the how that's hard to figure, it's the why."

"Security cameras?" the sergeant asked.

"Too snooty here," Mike said. "Management wanted them installed after an incident a few years back. Coop's neighbors were up in arms. Invasion of privacy and all that crap. No cameras."

"All he had to do after the attack," I said, "was go back up to one of the floors above me and walk across the hallway to the other side of the building-"

Mike took over from there. "Take off his mask and gloves, drop them and the black sweater in the garbage chute, and walk down and out like any other respectable citizen, unnoticed because of all the commotion that's going on in the lobby and outside the building."

"The CO has a man on each entrance of the building. Everybody passing through this morning will have to stop to be identified, residents or not," Camacho said.

"Can't wait till I get my eviction notice," I said. "Talk about a nuisance tenant."

"Give me your keys."

"What?"

"Your keys. I'm going to take the sergeant downstairs to see where things stand while you grab a few hours of that sleep you say you need. I'll let myself back in for a nap. Better than wallowing alone at home."

"Mike, I feel like-"

"The keys," he said, holding a hand up in my face to stop me from going on. "Rest up 'cause we got an early-morning meeting with Joe Berk."

"I'm not sure I have the fortitude for him first thing in the morning. He's so crude. You got something I don't know about?"

"I've been working on that photograph of Lucy DeVore. You know, the recent one, looks like it could have been taken since she got to New York."

"Wearing the fez, leaning on a doorknob with a word inscribed in the metal that begins with the initial M?"

"Yeah, that one. So first I stopped by the task force operation at the opera house. Not even close. There's nothing that looks like the same design or lettering on anything at the Met. So I got a list of the other legitimate theaters from one of the old-timers who works the box office, for all the Broadway houses that begin with M. I started at the Music Box."

"What a beauty, isn't it? It was designed to house musicals by Irving Berlin. That's why my father always loved to go there-reminded him of his childhood."

"Too delicate. Not a match. So I tried the Majestic."

"That one's huge."

"No good. Forever Phantom. Even threw in the Martin Beck. Nada. And there used to be a theater called the Morosco, the old broad told me, but it was demolished a long time ago."

"I can't think of any others."

"I couldn't, either. But the same dame told me about the Brooks Atkinson, whoever the hell he was."

"A critic. He wrote theater reviews for the Times."

"Yeah, well, that was built back in the 1920s. And it was called the Mansfield then," Mike said, not even trying to suppress a smile. "Why you'd name anything for a critic is beyond me. I still thought it was worth checking out the original fixtures despite the change on the marquee."

"I take it you found your doorknob."

"Nope. But hanging in the theater lobby was a whole bunch of blowups of famous actors from forty, fifty years ago, celebrating at Sardi's after some kind of award show. In one of them, you can see Yul Brynner, Zero Mostel, and Richard Burton, each raising a glass, with Joe Berk smack in the middle of the group. And on top of his foul-mouthed fat head is the same, exact kind of tasseled red fez that Lucy DeVore was wearing in that photograph we found in her hotel room."