Death Dance

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 apologize 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."

"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."