Death Dance

41

"No one in or out upstairs," Mike said to Frank, putting the key to the bedroom door back in the desk. "Lawyers should be crawling all over this place by tomorrow morning. They'll be more of them carving up Berk's empire than there are maggots on a dead rat."

Briggs had agreed to go back to his own apartment to spend the night.

Frank had taken off his trench coat and settled in behind Berk's desk.

"Watch out for the ghosts, Frank."

"And exactly which ones would they be, counselor?"

"Belasco's ghost. The theater downstairs is supposed to be haunted. Now that Berk's dead, there might be two spirits floating around. Could be a traffic jam, with the size of those egos."

"Well, Alex, you know me and floating spirits. Sounds more like a cocktail than a fright."

I drove the Crown Vic back uptown to City Center while Mike made some calls. He found out that there were two detectives on a fixed post in front of the loft where Mona Berk and Ross Kehoe lived, but the guys had no idea whether they'd arrived there before or after Berk went inside. They had no sightings of either resident.

"Beep me the minute you see anything," Mike said before he hung up. "They're right, though, Coop. It's dinnertime. Eight o'clock. If Berk and Kehoe are out eating somewhere, they may not show up for hours. I gotta assume Peterson has her office covered, too."

He dialed the lieutenant's number, but someone else in the squad answered. Peterson was out on his meal, so Mike passed the message along to the colleague who had answered the phone.

I took Eighth Avenue uptown. We needed to go east on 56th Street, since only the entrance to the office tower-not the theater- would be open at this hour of the night.

I was parking the car when someone entering the building caught my attention. "Did you see that?"

"What?"

"Going into City Center. Wasn't that Chet Dobbis?"

"Can't tell. I just caught the back of his head."

I locked the door and threw the keys over the hood to Mike. "I'd swear it was Dobbis."

"He used to work here, according to Hubert Alden, before he went to the Met."

"But no longer," I said, crossing the street to follow him inside.

The guard sitting behind the desk smiled at Mike and me as we walked in. We had no idea where we were going but he didn't seem to care.

"Excuse me," I said as Mike flashed his badge.

"Go right on ahead," he said, not looking up from his solitaire hand.

"You give new meaning to the word security. We're looking for my partner, Detective Wallace. You know where he is?"

The guard picked up a piece of paper and pushed the phone to Mike. "He said for you to call him when you got back. The director is letting him use her secretary's desk. Just dial extension two-nine-nine."

"And that man who just came in before we did?" I asked. "Was that Mr. Dobbis?"

"Was it who?"

"How long have you worked here? Was it the former director, Chet Dobbis?"

"Sorry, miss. I've only been here two months. I'm real bad on names."

Mike hung up the phone. "Let's get Mercer first. He's meeting us back at that ladies' lounge on the seventh floor."

The corridors were empty and we wound our way around to the elevators and up to the rehearsal studios. Mercer was waiting for us there.

"Check it out, Alex. I don't want to embarrass anyone."

I walked in and turned on the light. No one was inside, so I opened the door for Mike and Mercer.

We went to the showers to reexamine the room using a flashlight that Mike had brought in from the car. There was a small recess above the molding in the opposite wall and it looked like a hole had been drilled in to support the kind of microcamera that Mike and Mercer were familiar with from their surveillance cases.

"You want Crime Scene to take some pictures of these spots, don't you?" Mike asked. "They've got to do it before Vito comes in tomorrow to dig behind it and see where the wiring goes."

"I already called. They're not going to come out on a job like this tonight. They've got their hands full with a homicide in Inwood and a drug raid that turned into a shoot-out. They told me to secure it till morning," Mercer said. "They'll have a crew here first thing, and they can document whatever Vito finds."

"Can we close it off?"

"Yeah. Before Stan left for the night, he got me the janitor. Soon as we're done he's going to lock it and put up one of their 'out of order' signs on it. That should work. I'll call him when we get downstairs," Mercer said as we started back to the elevator.

"You know Merriam? Frankie Merriam?"

"Heavyset red-faced guy from Staten Island?" Mercer asked.

"Map of Ireland on his mug-that's the guy. We gotta bring you up to date on what he says about Ross Kehoe."

"So let's go grab some dinner. What we need to do is sit down and sort out all these pieces. What's close by?"

"Michael's," I said. "On Fifty-fifth Street, a block away."

The restaurant was a favorite of literary lions and media heavy-weights, but it was after eight thirty, so we'd be able to nab a table in the quiet garden room in the rear.

"Walk back the cat," Mike said.

"What?"

"That's what the three of us have to do. Walk back the cat."

"What do you mean?"

"Military intelligence, Coop. Spook-speak. Say somebody shoots the king or blows up the embassy. After it happens the cat walkers go back and look at all the intelligence they had before the event, apply the stuff they know after the fact to whatever happened. Uncover the moles, find the motive."

"I'm for that. We know a hell of a lot more than we did before the weekend. Did Mike tell you that I swear I saw Chet Dobbis coming into this building when we pulled into the block?" I asked Mercer.

"No, but now that explains what Ms. Schiller's secretary was waiting around for while I was hanging out for you."

The elevator doors opened on the ground floor as Mercer continued. "One of the other secretaries came by so they could walk to the subway together, and I heard her say she was staying late, waiting for Mr. D to get here. She had to let him into the theater before she left. Some kind of proposal he was working on. It never occurred to me they were talking about Dobbis."

"So that's only ten minutes ago?"

"Yeah."

"Let's check the theater. What the hell is he coming back here for-and at night, when no one's around?"

Instead of turning right toward the security desk, we retraced our steps through the narrow hallway, piled deep with soon-to-be-discarded equipment that we had navigated earlier in the day. The heavy door that separated the office tower from the original Mecca Temple building was open, and the three of us threaded our way behind the mezzanine seats, our footsteps padded by the thick carpeting of traditional Moorish design that covered the entire space.

The vast auditorium was darkened, except for a few rays of light that came from off to the side of stage right. I could hear a man's voice from the pit below, and we all stopped so that Mercer, the tallest of us, could peer down from the steep rake of the balcony to see who was speaking.

He motioned us to the top of the staircase and whispered, "It's Dobbis. His back is to us so I can't hear what he's saying, but it looks like he's talking to someone in the wings."

We continued down the wide staircase from the old Shriners' lounge, descending to the rear of the once-elegant lobby of the old theater. The doors leading to the street were all locked and covered with metal grating, while those that accessed the auditorium were closed over.

Mike put his finger to his lips and led us down the side of a corridor that abutted the theater. It seemed to be taking us as near to the stage, to the front of the orchestra, as we could get before revealing ourselves to Dobbis.

On a signal to each other, Mike and Mercer pulled open the two doors that stood catty-corner in the cul-de-sac of the hallway. Mike took the one that led toward the stage and I was behind Mercer as he moved into the auditorium toward Chet Dobbis.

"What the-" The startled Met director stepped back and dropped into a front-row seat, beneath the glistening white-and-gold detail of the ceiling that shone against the dimly lighted house. "I'm so thankful you're here."

At the same moment, I heard someone running behind the black-curtained area in the wings. I looked from Dobbis, whose sincerity I doubted at this point, back to the source of the footsteps.

Mike streaked across the middle of the stage in pursuit of the shadowed figure, and Mercer doubled back out the door we had entered together and up the steps to join in the chase.

I started toward Chet Dobbis to ask the reason for his gratitude when the theater went completely dark. The thick gray steel fire curtain dropped from the fly down to the floorboards with the alacrity of the blade of a guillotine.