It Happens in the Dark (30 page)

“Don’t make me hurt you.”

Fine.
Enough said.

At the front of the courtroom, Axel Clayborne was performing again. “Your Honor, it’s only confusing if you know the facts.” The actor waited out the laughter from the visitors’ gallery. “Dickie Wyatt was the first to die, but his body was the
third
one found. And the woman’s death on opening night? That was a heart attack. The following night, the playwright appeared to have slit his own throat. And the reviews?
Fabulous.
So, on the
third
night—
just
to keep the ball rolling, I wheeled Dickie’s corpse into the theater and sat him down in the back row. How was I supposed to know there was a suicidal teenager in the audience?”

“Six hundred dollars for interference with a corpse,” said the judge, as if she had heard his excuse before and found it boring. Apparently, she had been on the bench
that
long. “Pay the bailiff.”

The civil rights attorney said to her, “I move for a dismissal of—”

“
Hold
that thought.” Judge Wicker fixed her eyes on the young prosecutor. “
Before
the confession—why did the police take Mr. Rains into custody? Did they have some cause for suspicion? Maybe a witness? Any old thing at all?”

“
I
had a witness.” Axel Clayborne stood before the bailiff’s table, counting out hundred-dollar bills. “I brought the head usher with me when I confessed to Captain Halston. You see, I was dressed as a nurse when I wheeled Dickie’s body into the theater. So I stooped a bit—didn’t want to seem too tall for a woman. But the usher recalled looking up at someone larger than he was. And he’s taller than Alan Rains.”

“Your Honor, that’s hearsay,” said the ADA.

“Oh, shut the hell up.” Judge Wicker laid down her gavel and covered her eyes with both hands for a moment. Then she crooked one come-hither finger at the uniformed guard by the door. When the officer stood before the bench, the judge’s voice was low, but Charles thought he heard her say, “Bring me the head of Captain Halston.”

•   •   •

Bugsy and the lawyers were still gathered before the bench when Axel Clayborne signed his final autograph, and the last of the gallery visitors were ushered out of the courtroom. The actor joined Mallory and Charles near the door, asking, “How’d I do?”

“You’re a bad liar,” she said. “You embellish too much.”

“But it was all true.”

“So?”

Riker entered from the hall. “There’s reporters and cameras all over the place. We gotta take Bugsy out the back.”

Angry, Mallory turned on Axel Clayborne. “You just
had
to milk the publicity one more time.”

“Paparazzi tend to follow me around. You can’t blame me for being famous. But this time, they’re not here for
me.
On the way in, I saw Captain Halston holding a press conference out on the courthouse steps.”

“It’s true,” said Riker. “I was there. Halston told the reporters a person of interest was being arraigned. This time, he named Alan Rains. Then a uniform showed up to bring Halston inside. The reporters followed them. They’re all coming this way.”

Mallory moved toward the door, and Clayborne said, “Bad idea. There’s an army of jackals out there, and you’re
so
photogenic.”

She heard the rabble in the hallway and then turned to look at the gathering by the bench. Bugsy’s act was degrading, feet tapping, hands fidgeting, sliding back into the role of the gopher.

Charles Butler was also watching—and worried. “I don’t think Bugsy’s holding up all that well. The reporters couldn’t get at him if we took him to Edward’s clinic. A good place to—”

“A clinic? Worst thing for him,” said Clayborne. “No doctor would ever understand the—”

“
I’m
a doctor. You’re an
actor.
Clear? Good.” Charles turned back to Mallory. “Bugsy is in a vulnerable mental state. He needs—”

“Oh, please,” said Clayborne. “
Spare
me. It’s not some run-of-the-mill delusion, nothing so cliché. One night, a character in a play passed through the fourth wall, came down from the stage and walked into the world—a living, breathing work of art. Bugsy’s alive, but what doctor could understand that he’s not real—he’s fictional.”

Not
real?
Mallory turned to see that Bugsy had wandered away from the conversation of the judge and the lawyers. He was near the door when she sang out, “No, don’t go out there!”

She lunged for him.

She clutched air.

He was swept away in a fast river of screamers and bright lights.

Alongside Mallory, Charles moved through the doors and into the running crowd, using arms and shoulders to help her plow the field, but Riker was more effective as he body slammed a photographer and tripped a reporter.

The crowd of media set upon Bugsy in a frenzy, microphones thrust toward the back of his head and shouts of “Hey, Alan!” and “Mr. Rains” and “Stop!” followed by a barrage of “Did you do it?” and “How crazy
are
you?”

The gopher ran down the hall with barking reporters on all sides, photographers, pole lights and cameras engulfing him in the dog pack. Mallory elbowed her way into the thick of the fray, fighting a path through the mob to see Bugsy brought to bay, cornered at the end of the corridor.

Center stage in the world and frightened by it, lost in it, his head was bowed, and, apropos of no question asked of him, he said a line from a long-ago performance. “I’m just a
little
man.” And then, head lolled back, eyes focused on nothing, he tap-danced for the jackals.

ROLLO:
Don’t scream. Don’t cry. Disappoint them.

—
The Brass Bed
, Act III

Words of a wise man:
Don’t ever let me catch you punching out a reporter.
And the late Louis Markowitz had also told her,
It’s unsanitary, kid. You don’t know
where
that scum has been.

Mallory washed off the blood of a reporter’s split lip, and then she washed her hands again. And
again
. She would never get clean.

What a hell of a backfire day.

While splashing water on her face, she caught the movement in the glass above the row of sinks. There was no instant recognition of her reflection when she came upon it unawares, an effect of distortion from her early years on city streets, the residue of every bad thing she had seen or smelled or touched before the age of ten—and what had reached out to touch her. All the mirrors in the world had been cracked in childhood.

What did Bugsy see in
his
broken mirror?

She lowered her eyes and washed her hands again.

Captain Halston was crushed. He would not recover from today’s carnage, but her case was in ruins. The media would cloud the landscape of suspects with Bugsy’s taint of crazy. The detective banged her fist on the countertop, bringing on the pain, the only remedy she knew for rage.

And then she was calm.

Mallory picked up a bag of pharmacy bottles, the donations from station-house personnel, and she carried it to the crib, a bunkroom, where cops could catch a nap on the double-decker cots during all-nighters. There, Charles Butler had taken on the chore of getting the gopher out of his Alan Rains suit. And now Bugsy lay on a lower berth, dressed in his underwear, deep in shock.

“He’s better off here.” Mallory would tolerate no more argument about this. “It’s quiet. Safe.”

“I suppose you’re right.” Charles hunkered down to cover Bugsy with a blanket. “The bedlam of a hospital emergency room would’ve been a nightmare for him. But he still needs a medical doctor to write a prescription for—”

“Got it covered.” She handed over the bag. “We took up a collection.”

While the psychologist pored through the pharmacy containers, reading the labels, a uniformed officer entered the room with one more bottle of pills for the cause.

Bugsy turned on his side. The blanket was flung off, and his T-shirt rode up to expose the old track of a surgeon’s scalpel bisecting his body.

“That thing must be a foot long.” The patrolman leaned down for a closer look at this wicked scar from a plucked-out kidney that a teenage boy had given to his girl. “What happened to him?”

“He fell in love,” said Charles.

•   •   •

Riker had been real friendly on the way up the stairs to Special Crimes, but then the detective had gone off to scare up some coffee to take the chill off the day, leaving the sheriff to stand alone at the center of the squad room, a suitcase at his feet.

A visitor’s name tag was strung around James Harper’s neck, and he had just this minute removed his parka to display a gold star pinned on his Sunday-go-to-meeting sports coat. The other cops of this outfit paid him no mind, some of them crisscrossing the room and others shuffling paperwork and talking on phones.

And then he saw her, the only female on this murder squad—so said the desk sergeant downstairs. She was younger than he expected. His other bias was that the girl was too pretty, so pretty she was hard on a man’s eyes. And cold?
Damn
cold. She looked right through him. The young cop had a real determined walk, and he could see that she was fixing to pass him by. He stepped into her path and flagged her down like she was a New York City taxicab. “Detective Mallory!”

She stopped to look him up and down. Sizing him up for a hick? Oh, yeah.

“Sheriff Harper, did you come empty-handed? If you did, you wasted a trip.”

He picked up his suitcase and smiled. “I’ll show you mine. You show me yours.”

Detective Mallory walked around him—and away from him.

He followed her, saying to her back, “I got the whole damn case file.” And this was true, though he might have implied that he had brought all of it in his suitcase. He had not.

The girl kept walking, and now they were turning down a hallway.

Right behind her, he said, “So when can we start to get reciprocal?”

“Just the minute you turn out your pockets and show me what’s in that suitcase.” She passed through an open doorway. “If I don’t find an extradition order for
my
killer, I might throw you a bone.”

He followed her into a room lined with cork and papered with diagrams, bloody photographs and such. He shot a quick look at an autopsy report—and another one. These walls held a ton of evidence. Reaching into his breast pocket, he pulled out the John Doe extradition papers. “You can hold on to ’em for a while. I don’t mind.” He had copies.

As she folded his warrants away in the back pocket of her jeans, other cops began to straggle into the room by twos and threes, and then the door finally closed behind the last detective. The sheriff was no longer being ignored. He stood at the center of a crowd, and none of these folks seemed real happy to make his acquaintance.

•   •   •

Riker moseyed down the hall, heading for the lynching party in the incident room, when he was waylaid by his favorite shrink, who carried Bugsy’s duffel bag. “Hey, Charles. How’s the little guy doin’?”

“Hard to say. An officer asked him about the kidney scar, and Bugsy said it wasn’t
his
scar . . . it belonged to someone else.”

“So he’s totally lost it?”

“Well, that might be the medication talking. He’s sleeping now, but when he wakes up, I’d like to move him to familiar surroundings. Is it safe to take him back to the theater?”

“Yeah, we got damage control. Reporters only call us to ask about Alan Rains. None of ’em made the Bugsy connection. And the cameras didn’t get any good shots of his face—mostly Mallory’s hand and mine.” Riker checked his watch.

It was time to beat the living crap out of the sheriff from Nebraska.

“So, Charles . . . wanna go to a party?”

•   •   •

Detective Janos’s hands described slow circles of confusion when he asked, “How could you just
lose
two twelve-year-old kids?”

All around Sheriff Harper, the other detectives took one step closer to prompt his reply, and he said, “No way to hold on to ’em. Like I told Detective Mallory, a relative took the twins out of state. I don’t know which state she dumped ’em in, but you
know
they wound up in foster care. Once kids get lost in that system, they don’t leave tracks.” He turned to face Mallory. “How much luck did
you
have with that?”

“So you’ve been waiting all these years,” she said, “for some other cop to find them for you.”

“I figured they’d surface sooner or later.”

“After they
killed
somebody!” This shot had come from an angry man behind him.

The sheriff’s suitcase lay open at the base of one cork wall, and Mallory stood beside it, pinning up photographs, his candid shots of the Chalmers twins, nothing as grand as little mug shots. The boys in pajamas had lowered their heads, and strands of long hair covered their eyes—and their
ears
. He had to smile. He would bet his house and car that Mallory was still working on the bogus lead of jughandle ears.
Thank you, Bugsy, whoever the hell you are
.

She looked at the pictures on the wall, her arms folded, disapproving. “These are the best you’ve got?”

Oh, hell no. He had left all the
good
pictures back in Nebraska. “No class photos,” said the sheriff, and that part was true enough. “The boys were home-schooled.”

“But not their sisters,” said Mallory.

“Only the twins,” said a pissed-off man on his right, the one with a loud voice like a damned foghorn.

“So the mother knew there was something wrong with those two.” Detective Gonzales moved in on the sheriff’s left flank. “That’s why she kept them out of school.”

“You always knew the boys did it,” said Mallory.

“I got no evidence of that. No blood on ’em when—”

“But there
was
blood. Lots of it.” Down the wall, a gray-haired woman—Clara something—was pinning up copies of his crime-scene photos and the personal notes robbed from his suitcase. “The sheriff found moisture in the shower stall and more blood in the drain trap. The killer apparently showered.” The older woman shot a nasty look in his direction as she pointed to his picture of blood-red shoe prints on a hallway carpet. “Seriously? You’ve
got
the shoes, but you don’t know who made these tracks?”

Since Mallory had already guessed this part, the sheriff saw no harm in telling the truth on this score. “Mr. Chalmers died the year before. A suicide. His wife never got up the steam to toss out his clothes. We found her husband’s bloody shoes put back in the bedroom closet.”

“How
many
shoes?” asked Mallory. “One pair? Two?”

The sheriff ignored her and stepped up to the wall, pretending interest in headshots of the Rinaldi brothers. “I can’t tell much from these. The noses don’t look right, and I never saw the Chalmers kids smile.”

Riker ambled into the room. His was the only friendly face James Harper had seen all day, and now the man handed him the promised cup of coffee. The two of them stood before the cork wall, side by side in companionable silence for a minute or so. Then the detective reached out to tap the old photo of the twins in their pajamas. “They creeped you out, didn’t they?”

“From the get-go.”

And break time was over.

Detective Gonzales emptied the sheriff’s suitcase out on the floor.

Now, among the remaining file holders and sundry items, James Harper was looking down at his soiled underpants and smelly socks with holes in the toes. These New York boys knew how to throw a party and do it up right. They might as well have stripped him naked.

And he had to admire that.

Gonzales had opened the last of the folders, and he looked up at Mallory, shaking his head. The loud cop, Lonahan, turned to face the sheriff. “We
know
a teenage boy lived in that house. But there’s nothin’ here, no pictures of him, no witness statement. It’s like a big hole in your case. So this older kid—what was his name?”

The sheriff shrugged this off as a forgotten detail, and that was a mistake, a big one. Words or shrugs—lies were lies. He looked from one face to another, knowing he would not be believed when he said, “I think the older boy’s name was Gerry. Somethin’ like that.” It went against his nature to lie to cops, and so he gave them one true thing: “The kid wasn’t in the house when it happened. He had a solid alibi for that night.”

“So you just lost track of him,” said Mallory. “
And
the twins. That was careless.”

“Hey,” said Riker, the one decent man in the room. “Give the sheriff a break. The kid wasn’t even there that night. Who wastes resources on a dead end?”

James Harper had earlier bonded with this man in four minutes flat, discovering that Riker was also divorced, a common hazard of the cop’s trade.

“We know this kid . . . Gerry? That’s his name? He left the house by ambulance.” Riker’s tone was civil, not accusing. Just asking is all. “What was wrong with him anyway?”

“A car accident laid him up for a few years.”

“Sounds like a bad wreck,” said Mallory. “Was the boy driving the car? . . . Was he old enough to have a license?”

“I guess I wasn’t too concerned with that,” said the sheriff. “I had a lot on my plate. Three murdered women—two little girls in
pieces
.”

Detective Sanger had found a file he liked. He scanned the papers as he spoke. “Mrs. Chalmers only had four kids, the girls and the twins.” He looked up at the sheriff. “What about the lady’s sister? We know she lived in that house. You got a married name for her? . . . She was divorced, right? . . . Was she Gerry’s mother?” When no answers were forthcoming, he asked, “Was that woman divorced in Nebraska?”

The sheriff held up both hands in a gesture of helpless ignorance.

Mallory turned to a man with an eagle’s beak and a real nice suit. This was the frog-eyed giant who had walked in behind Riker. And when the man spoke, he sounded nothing like a cop; he sounded like a walking, talking lie detector when he said to Mallory, “The boy
was
driving the car. At the time of the accident, he wasn’t old enough to have a license. His mother
was
Mrs. Chalmers’s sister, and she
did
divorce her husband out of state. I
think
she kept her married name, but I’d be guessing on that one.”

•   •   •

While Janos typed in police protocols to enter a Nebraska website for birth records, detectives at other desks were hunting vehicular accidents racked up by unlicensed teenagers at the wheel. “So the older kid’s name isn’t Gerry, right?”

“Right you are.” Charles Butler stood over the printer. He had been given the chore of reading likely accident reports as they rolled out of the machine. “That was the deception that set my baseline.” And it was the only one he had failed to mention until now.