Death Dance

4

Mercer parked in the driveway that arced away from Broadway and ran the entire length in front of the plaza at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, from 65 th down to 6znd Street. The travertine complex of theater and music facilities was built in the 1960s at a cost equivalent to more than a billion dollars today.

Bright April sunshine bounced off the waters in the enormous fountain in the center of the buildings as streams gushed in the air at timed intervals, delighting the tourists who gathered around it with their guidebooks. We ignored the structures to the north and south- the Philharmonic's Avery Fisher Hall and the City Ballet and Opera's home, the New York State Theater. The block-long giant that dominated the plaza set back on its western end was the Metropolitan Opera House, and I tried to keep pace with Mercer's great strides as we both hurried to hook up with Mike Chapman.

"I hope you didn't read him wrong."

"He wants you here, Alex. That's why he called."

"I'm familiar with this world. That's really why he called. I'm not sure Mike's ready to let me back into his life."

People with cameras were everywhere, snapping photos of one another against the backdrop of the imposing buildings on this great urban acropolis. Large silk banners with the Royal Ballet's logo billowed from the flagpoles, heralding the visiting company in the calm afternoon breeze.

The three of us had worked as a team on more murder cases than most prosecutors would ever handle in their entire careers. Mercer had transferred from the Homicide Squad to Special Victims. Like me, he got satisfaction in helping women find justice in a system that had denied them access for so long, with archaic laws and even more stubborn human attitudes. The legislative reforms and stunning advances in scientific techniques brought us successes not dreamed possible even twenty years ago.

Mike preferred the elite world of homicide cops-no living victims to hand-hold, few eyewitnesses to have fall apart in court- coaxing from lifeless bodies the secrets of how they met their deaths and then ferreting out the killers. All too often our professional worlds intersected and we shouldered the cases together, trying to restore moral order to a world in which lives ended so violently and abruptly.

"You think he's ready to settle down and work, Mercer, if this turns out to be what Mike thinks it is?"

"He's got to be ready. He lost his focus after Val's death, and nobody knows that better than he does. The man needs to get back in the mix now. Lieutenant Peterson gave him time-lots of time. I'm working with him, whatever he wants on this. You stick, too, Alex. He'd like that."

I was practically running to keep up with Mercer. "You may think so, but Mike might not say that to-"

"I'm saying it. He doesn't have a better friend than you. We got to think for him now, we got to be there when and if the center doesn't hold."

Inside the Met's lobby, straight ahead, I could see the brilliant yellow-and-red panels of the two Chagall murals-each of them three stories high-celebrating the triumph of music with figures of musicians and dancers, instruments and whimsical animals.

Mercer guided me into the revolving door and pushed from behind. Several uniformed cops stood casual guard within the lobby, keeping up an air of business-as-usual for theatergoers who queued on the lines to buy tickets for next week's performances.

One of the only African-American first-grade detectives in the city, Mercer's six-foot-six figure commanded attention wherever he went. Here he flashed his badge at a young officer, who responded by removing the red velvet rope from the brass stanchion and sending us down the carpeted staircase to the lower lobby without even questioning why I accompanied Mercer.

The long flat counter of the bar would later be filled with cocktails served up for the crush of dance aficionados during intermissions of this evening's program. Now it was covered with paper from end to end. Mike Chapman stood with his back to us, his left hand in his pants pocket and the right one combing through his thick hair.

Mercer tapped his shoulder, interrupting Mike's conversation with the two men who stood across from him behind the bar. They were all studying architectural drawings of the vast corridors, below-and aboveground, which made up this imposing theatrical venue.

Mike turned to introduce us. "Mr. Dobbis here, Chet Dobbis, is the artistic director of the Metropolitan Opera. He's overseeing the ballet company's visit because it's part of a series of fundraisers for the house.

"Mr. Dobbis, I'd like you to meet Mercer Wallace-NYPD Special Victims. This is Ms. Cooper, Alex Cooper. Alex heads the Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit in the Manhattan DA's office. And she's a mean dancer."

I reached over to shake Dobbis's hand. He was taller and leaner than the photos of him I'd seen in the Times when he was hired two year ago by the great Beverly Sills-just before her retirement-and her board of directors. Forty-five, maybe older, he was dressed in a black shirt and slacks with a sweater over his shoulders, tied loosely around the neck.

"And this is Rinaldo Vicci. He's Ms. Galinova's agent." I towered over the diminutive Vicci, who bowed in my direction. I guessed him to be fifty, too portly for his height, with pasty skin that looked blotchy and irritated. The glen plaid suit he sported was in need of serious alterations, the buttons pulling across his belly as he stretched out a hand to each of us.

"Any developments since we spoke?" Mercer asked Mike.

"The commissioner gave us a green light to start searching the joint."

"That's a big concession."

"The missing person status would go real-time-twenty-four hours since Talya disappeared-in the middle of tonight's show, which would certainly disrupt the crowd. Everybody here thought we needed to ratchet it up as soon as possible."

"Where is Talya staying?" I asked.

"The Mark. But she hasn't been back to the hotel room since yesterday," Mike said. "Never called her husband, and they usually speak three or four times a day."

"Her street clothes?" I asked.

"They're still in her dressing room," Vicci said with a trace of an Italian accent. "Sweater and pants, her boots. Even the purse she carries. It's all still there. I-I can't tell you how worried I am about her. I'm absolutely frantic at the thought of anyone harming her."

"Bet you are," Mike said. "What does an agent get these days? Fifteen percent of nothing is nothing. That's why we need your help, Mr. Vicci. You got a better reason than anybody to keep her alive and well."

"Joe Berk?" I asked. "Have any of you spoken with him today?"

"Nobody can find him," Chet Dobbis said. "The office is closed for the weekend and he's not answering calls. I'm told that's not unusual, Ms. Cooper. In the middle of a Saturday afternoon, he might well be attending a performance of one of his shows."

"Mind if I take a few minutes with Detective Wallace?" Mike asked.

"I'll step inside and watch the dress rehearsal, if you don't mind. Rinaldo, why don't you wait with me?" Dobbis said, leading Vicci to the theater doors at the far end of the bar. There was a quiet elegance about him, a gracefulness in the way he moved that fit so precisely with his role in the theater.

Mike waited until they were out of range. He leaned both elbows on the bar and rested his head in his hands. "Sorry. It's been an uphill battle all night to get these guys to let us in. They'll go nuts when ESU shows up with all their gear."

"You called for Emergency Services?" I asked. They were the unit of last resort, teams of fearless cops who got into and around places that no others could manage. They rescued jumpers from bridges and building cornices, recovered bodies from tunnels and train tracks, and broke down doorways and barriers to get into wherever their colleagues needed to go. "Battering rams and the jaws of death? Isn't that giving up the ghost a little bit early?"

"Jaws of life. They're what get you out of the jaws of death. I guess you've never been backstage here, have you, kid? You're in for an eye-opener." Mike swiveled around to look at me. "Remember how old you were the first time you came to Lincoln Center?"

"Maybe eight or nine."

"What for?"

"To see the Nutcracker, next door at the State Theater. My mother brought me there every Christmas." It was almost a ritual for little girls who loved ballet and who had grown up in the city or, as I had, in the suburbs less than an hour away.

"And the Met?" Mike asked.

"A year or two later."

"How many times since?"

He knew the answer to that question. I subscribed to the annual repertory season of American Ballet Theater and frequented the opera whenever I had the chance. "Dozens of times, Mike. Maybe hundreds."

He was going somewhere with this and I waited patiently for him to make his point.

"I know you don't like the parking garage much, but did it ever scare you to sit inside the Met?"

"Scare me? To be in the audience? It's where I come to get away from the tawdry things we see and hear every day at work. It transports me to be here, to put it mildly."

I truly loved to sink into a velvet-cushioned seat at the end of a day at the prosecutor's office, wait for the 1,500 yards of Scalaman-dre silk curtain to lift and drape in Wagnerian style, and the thirty-two crystal chandeliers to rise up against the twenty-four-karat gold-leaf ceiling as they dimmed to darkness. For two or three hours I was able to lose myself in whatever world of make-believe the artists drew around me.

"Let me tell you about the first time I came here," Mike said. "Same age as you-maybe ten at the time."

Mike had turned thirty-seven a few months earlier, and I would celebrate the same birthday at the end of this month. Mercer was five years older than us, now married to another detective named Vickee and father to a baby born a bit more than a year ago.

"My old man and I were out together for the afternoon, a weekday in late July. It didn't happen often that I got to spend a whole day with him," Mike said. We knew all about his father, who'd been on the force for twenty-six years. Brian Chapman was a legend in the department, and the heart attack that killed him forty-eight hours after he turned in his gun and shield made Mike even more determined to follow in his footsteps.

"Somebody gave him tickets for the Yankees game and, man, was I psyched. He got off duty at eight a. m., slept a couple of hours, took my buddies and me out on the street to pitch to us so we could play stickball, see how far we could whack the ball. Three manhole covers or more."

Mercer nodded his head, familiar with the New York City street game.

"Something you never did in the burbs, right, Coop? It was before cell phones. My mother shouted him in from the stoop to take an emergency call from his boss. When he got back out, my dad pulled me aside and asked me if I wanted to take a ride. Told me he wouldn't be able to go to the game after all, 'cause something had come up with work. He knew how unhappy that made me, except he told me I could come along with him this time. Me, I'd give up every Yankee from the Babe to Mantle to Guidry to Piniella-and throw in Jeter and A-Rod now, too-just to hang out on the job with my pop."

"I know what you mean," I said.

"He let me choose what I wanted to do, so I gave the other kids the ball-game tickets and we got in his jalopy, drove over and parked on Amsterdam Avenue, right behind Lincoln Center. I remember coming in the back door that day, through the garage, everybody stepping aside as soon as he palmed the gold shield. 'On the job'-I still hear his voice saying that to people. He told me a girl was missing, a musician who played in the orchestra, and that lots of guys were already here looking for her. The big boss was interviewing her husband back at the squad. They needed every cop they could get because of the size of this place."

"She went missing like Natalya, in the middle of a show?" Mercer asked.

But I had my own question. "Why'd your dad take you into a breaking case?"

Mike answered me first. "'Cause he had the same logical thought that you did, Coop. It's the Metropolitan Opera, for chrissakes. The Big House is what they called it. Four thousand people-four thousand-were sitting in that very room on one side of the curtain," he said, pointing to the auditorium door, "four hundred more working their asses off to make the show go on, and somebody disappears from the orchestra pit without one person in the whole joint hearing a peep? Not possible."

I nodded at him. I understood what his dad had been thinking.

"She must have been upset about something and walked out between acts. That's what he and every other cop thought. Same as her friends in the orchestra. The woman behind her just moved up and shoved the girl's violin under her seat, and the conductor kept right on going with the show. Hey, you know the stats as well as anybody. Women are far more likely to be hurt or killed by someone they know and love than by a stranger in a crowded theater."

"That's why they were grilling the husband at the same time the cops were searching the place," Mercer said.

"You bet. Garden-variety domestic violence is what he figured it was. You're missing the point. This wasn't about the case-not about the police work," Mike said, looking at me.

"What then?"

"My old man had never been inside the Met. Didn't know the first thing about stuff as grand as opera or ballet. My house, you heard Sinatra and Dean Martin, Judy Garland and Dinah Shore. No Pavarotti or Caruso or Callas. Entertainment was the living room television set, big deal was going out to an occasional movie or a night at the fights.

"This was a chance for my father to show me some culture, Ms. Cooper, something as foreign to me as stickball and warm beer are to you."

Mike liked to underscore the differences in our upbringings. My mother was trained as a nurse, but stopped working after she married my father and gave birth to my two older brothers and me. Their middle-class lifestyle changed dramatically when my father, Benjamin, and his partner invented an innovative medical device that thereafter was used in most cardiac surgery for more than thirty years. The tiny Cooper-Hoffman valve was responsible for providing me with a superb education at Wellesley College and the University of Virginia School of Law, an old farmhouse on Martha's Vineyard that was my refuge from the turmoil of my job, and lots of small luxuries that wouldn't have been affordable on the salary of a young public servant.

I knew Mike loved and respected his father as deeply as I did my own. That thought took me back to his story. "He must have delighted in having you by his side," I said.

"I remember how he brought me through the corridors-endless gray cinder block walls with doorways going off in every direction. It's the size of a football field and a half from the front door to the back. Somehow, we wound up in the wrong place-on the main stage, looking out into the empty house, tier after tier of seats. I had to crane my neck to see to the top row."

"You remember that?" Mercer asked.

"Like I was inside St. Peter's for the first time. That it was the most magnificent place I'd ever seen in my life. There was so much gold on every surface, and the biggest crystals in the chandeliers- well, I thought they were diamonds the size of baseballs. I'd never been near anything like this. People were walking around backstage in costumes-the girls hardly had anything on and the men were dressed in tights with bare chests."

"What did your father do with you?"

"I guess he thought he'd sit me down and let me watch a rehearsal while he worked," Mike said to Mercer, "but most of the artists were too distracted to perform with the searches going on in every corner of the building. So I went along with him. He wasn't expecting any trouble, right? And all the guys knew me-you remember Giorgio and Struk, don't you? It was their case."

Two of the smartest detectives I'd worked with as a young prosecutor, they had handled major cases long before I came on the job.

"Sure. Didn't Giorgio train you?" I asked.

Mike nodded at me. "Jerry G. was just breaking in at the time. Asked Dad to go up to the fourth floor. Along the way, every time we passed somebody in a costume, my old man'd stop them and introduce them to me. I don't know what the hell he was thinking, but he wanted me to shake hands with people he thought might be famous, like maybe the class would rub off on me," he said, laughing at the memory of it.

"Sweet," Mercer said, smiling back at him. "Sweet idea."

"Those girls were something else. They all looked so soft and so beautiful. Each one he put a hand out to greet had creamier shoulders than the next, with jewelry sparkling on their ears and in their hair."

Mike smiled at Mercer as he talked on. I hadn't seen him this animated and happy since before Val's death. "I don't think I'd ever seen women in makeup before, elegant women-not all that much older than I was-who tousled my hair and stroked my cheek as they went past me; each of them seemed like a fairy queen to me. You ever dress up like that?"

"Only for our recitals," I said. "My favorite day at the end of the year."

"We got up to the fourth floor and it was like a city unto itself. There was the scenic design room, with a few guys building a palace for some opera and others making a fantastic tree out of Styrofoam. There were Roman columns and castle parapets, papier-mache mountains, Egyptian pyramids and Hindu temples, like a giant playroom. Cops were everywhere, looking behind plywood frames twenty feet high, stacked against every surface.

"Then came a clothing studio where thousands of costumes were made, with tailors and seamstresses hunched over drafting tables. Life-size figures were standing in the hallways, and a pole-a spaghetti rack, they called it-hung from one end of the corridor to the other. There were soldiers' uniforms and kings' robes, and still cops sticking their noses in every nook and cranny 'cause you could have hidden ten bodies just about anywhere up there and not found 'em for years. And me? I was mesmerized by the costumes-touching the gold braid and holding the different fabrics against my skin, wondering if I'd ever feel anything that silken again."

"How about Brian?" Mercer asked.

"Pop did what he had to do, asking the workers if they'd seen or heard anything, writing down all their names. He was happy just watching me, 'cause I really was entranced by the whole thing. Exactly what he wanted to bring me for. Till one of the rookies came running to get him, whispered something to him."

Mike paused and when the storytelling stopped, the smile was gone with it. When he went on, there was no trace of a pleasant memory.

"I can remember the look on my dad's face. He didn't seem to know what to do at that very moment, and I wasn't used to seeing him like that. I think he wanted to leave me right where I was, but he knew he couldn't do that. The guys were all working too hard to ask any of them to look after me. He gave me one of those very stern, hand-on-my-shoulder commands in his best brogue: 'Mikey, my son, just follow me and stay out of everyone's way.'"

"Where to?" Mercer asked.

"Back through the maze of shops and studios, till someone put us on an elevator that took us up to the roof. We stepped off and I saw Giorgio and Struk. One of them called out to Brian and pointed at me, telling him to leave me back, right where I was."

Mike stopped again. "My old man was wrong. That's the first thing I remembered thinking that day. I didn't believe the guy ever had a bad instinct in his life and maybe this time he'd screwed up for once. I was so shaken and disappointed, I thought I was gonna be sick. I knew he'd catch hell from my mother for bringing me along, for his thinking the missing musician was alive and well someplace else, and for his idea that the Met would be a good afternoon outing for his kid."

"You mean they told you what happened to the girl?" Mercer asked.

"Tell me? Nobody was paying any attention to me from that point on, with good reason. So I got down on the floor and held on to a pipe along the edge of the building, leaning out just enough to see what they were all staring at below us.

"There was her body, crumpled on the top of a setback, six floors down from the roof, four stories above the street. Long blond hair down most of her back, spattered with blood, her legs twisted and bent like a wishbone torn apart at a Thanksgiving dinner."

I thought immediately of the missing Natalya Galinova.

"I still can't shake that memory," Mike said. "You never forget the first time you see a corpse."