Death Dance (51 page)

"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.

Dobbis stood up and I could see the silhouette of his body
moving in my direction as I turned back to the exit to push it open.
"Miss Cooper, wait!"

I yelled Mike's name and let the door slam on Dobbis as I
entered the dead-ended corridor. It was too dark there to see anything
except the shiny silver barrel of a revolver that was pointed at my
face.

The man holding the gun was Ross Kehoe.

At the instant he started to speak to me, Dobbis barged
through the door, which smacked against my back and knocked me into the
wall.

Kehoe grabbed my neck with his left hand and pressed the gun
barrel to the side of my head, just below my right ear. "Walk, both of
you. That way. Lead her, Chet, if you don't want me to blow her brains
out all over your back."

The icy feel of the cold metal bore against my skin sent a
chill through my body. I twitched involuntarily and Kehoe tightened his
grasp on the nape of my neck.

This was the gloved hand that had clamped on me from behind in
the darkened stairwell of my building last night, only now I could feel
the rough surface of his thick fingers pinching my smooth skin.

"Don't fight me. You won't win this one," Kehoe said as he
pushed me ahead of him. His voice was harsher now, more guttural than
it had been in Mona Berk's presence. This was Ross Kehoe, street thug
and stagehand, before she had tried to gentrify him. Why hadn't I
thought of him when I was jumped from behind in the dark, his lean,
sinewy body a perfect match for the masked man in black?

Dobbis moved quickly along the darkened corridor and out the
door into the lobby. Ross Kehoe told him to head up the steps, so he
began to climb the broad staircase first. I looked over at the grating
that barred the exit doors but could see nothing toward which I could
make a successful run. "Move, Alex. Follow him up."

Kehoe growled his commands at me. He freed my neck so that I
could go up behind Dobbis, but the gun barrel nudged at my back with
each riser I mounted.

I started to turn right at the top of the stairs, toward the
door that led to the adjacent office tower, the one through which Mike,
Mercer, and I had entered the back of the theater. But that wasn't the
way Kehoe planned to take us.

Kehoe reached out with the gun and tapped me on the arm.
"Left. Go left."

Dobbis was standing still. I looked back and forth between the
two men but couldn't figure the dynamic. Dobbis seemed as much a
prisoner as I did, but he obeyed Kehoe's command immediately and walked
the way he was directed.

I expected Mike and Mercer to emerge out of the doors beside
the stage within seconds. The sound of our voices would certainly alert
them that we were still in the auditorium.

"The detectives will be flooding the place any minute, Chet."

"Shut up, bitch," Kehoe said, slapping the back of my head
with his hand. I coughed and bent over, turning to look at him. Dobbis
walked on. Kehoe kept licking his lips with his tongue, then twisting
it into the side of his mouth, making a sucking sound as irritating as
a phonograph needle sliding across an old vinyl record. I'd heard that
disgusting noise when he assaulted me last night.

"I told you to move," he said.

I didn't wait to be hit again. I didn't know whether it was
good for me—or very bad—that Ross Kehoe's anxiety
seemed to be building, almost as much as mine.

There was a second staircase, not quite as wide as the one
that led up from the lobby, and Kehoe told Dobbis to take it. "I have
lots more time than that, don't I, Chet?" Kehoe asked. "I mean, don't
you think the lady's an optimist?"

Were they in this together or not? I couldn't tell.

I kept talking, thinking my words would echo below in the
great space of the open theater and that someone would be able hear me
sooner or later. "What does he mean, Chet?" I asked.

The steps became more narrow and steep as we climbed behind
the second balcony, several hundred seats held aloft by the largest
steel beam in the world.

"Tell her. You can tell her," Kehoe said with a laugh, again
followed by that awful sucking sound, some kind of nervous reflex that
got exercised more frequently when he was stressed.

The gun was still to my back, Kehoe playing with it from time
to time, running the metal tip up and down my spine whenever I had to
stop to wait for Dobbis. I walked behind him through a doorway and into
the balcony area, high above the stage. Another left turn and we were
going up more stairs, narrower still, to the very back of the last row
of seats in the theater.

Dobbis stopped on the highest step to catch his breath. "When
this place, Mecca Temple, was built in the 1920s, it was lit entirely
with gas jets. And because they needed the gaslight and torches
backstage to help the actors get around when the shows were on, and to
light the stage itself, the designers had to be creative about ways to
prevent fire from spreading."