It Happens in the Dark, page 30
part #11 of Mallory Series
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.
That false name had been the big lie that everyone had tipped to back in the incident room. The detective suspected that Charles had simply been too polite to tell them what they so obviously already knew.
What a gentleman.
“Rats!” Janos had just discovered that birth records were not cross-indexed under mothers’ maiden names, and none of the neighbors had been able to supply a married name for the mother of the bedridden boy. It would have been so easy to stick pins beneath the sheriff’s fingernails, but Janos was not inclined to do such things. Or he might have bent the man’s arm back till he heard that stunning sound of a snapping bone—almost music—but the torture of another human being was unthinkable. Or, if not unthinkable—
“Forget Mrs. Chalmers’s sister.” Mallory sat down in the chair beside his desk. “That woman’s a dead end.” She laid a birth certificate on the blotter, though not the one he was looking for. It belonged to the invalid’s mother. “If she’d ever applied for a Social Security card, the feds would’ve had this on file—and they don’t.”
He would never ask how she knew that. His old boss, Lou Markowitz, had set the rule by example, never questioning why giant government bureaucracies were so helpful to the squad’s computer witch. “So . . . she couldn’t have filed a tax return or a joint return with her husband. No tracks.” Now he could see the mother and her ex-husband as the cash-and-carry type, who had lived off the grid with their son, the bad driver.
It was still possible to get lost in America.
Rats.
Mallory gave Charles Butler a smile. “Nice catch with the sheriff’s lies.”
Very nice catch, since the sheriff had kept silent for much of the questioning. This man had caught lies untold.
“How’d you do it?” asked Janos. “Micro expressions? That kind of thing?”
“Oh, no. Waste of time.” Charles laid down his stack of accident reports. “There are involuntary expressions of core emotions, but you’d have to catch the cues flying by in a fifteenth of a second. And there’s no universal Pinocchio expression. Micro expressions won’t catch lies. That’s a fairy tale.”
“So how—”
“I do it with poker tells. The sheriff was easy to read because he doesn’t like deceiving you. That was obvious in the first big lie, the one everybody caught. The man hesitated. Next, he inhaled a puff of air. Then pursed lips. And then he gave you that made-up name. So that’s three tells for one deception. The give-away for his nonverbal lies is pursed lips and an upturn at one corner of his mouth. Micro-expression data lists that one as a sign of contempt. But he showed no contempt for any of you, not even when you dumped his dirty laundry on the floor.” Charles turned to face Mallory—who was not there anymore. His lecture had gone on too long for the likes of her, and she had slipped away.
Janos rolled one hand as encouragement to continue.
And Charles did. “So when you asked questions that got no verbal response, in his case, in that situation, the expression meant he was holding four aces while trying to convey that he couldn’t beat a pair. I know people who have other poker tells for the exact same thing. Twitchy fingers, a tilt of the head. Different tells for all of them. . . . So much for the myth of one-size-fits-all science.”
Janos gave him a broad smile and hoped that Charles could not read the thought behind it. This lecture on poker tells would be interesting to everyone on the squad who knew that Charles Butler stank at poker—and that was everyone. This man could read another man’s hand, no doubt about it, but never hide cards of his own. Charles could not win with deception, and yet he loved the liar’s game.
The detective turned his eyes to the wide window on the lieutenant’s private office, where Riker sat drinking coffee with the enemy.
And the games went on.
• • •
Sheriff Harper had a second cup of brew while waiting for the boss of this outfit to show his face again.
Riker passed the time with him, commiserating on divorce lawyers and the misery that women left behind them—when they left. This smiling, laid-back cop was right when he said he knew things about women. Now he knew the first name of the sheriff’s ex-wife and even her maiden name. He also knew what she did for a living these days, as well as the fact that she had not left her hometown after the divorce.
But, thankfully, the man from Nebraska had not been asked one question about the family massacre, for he would deeply regret a lie told to this very decent man.
James Harper looked out through the window on the squad room, and he saw Mallory with a duffel bag slung over one shoulder as she walked alongside a small, scruffy man in baggy jeans. Her free hand was on the little fella’s arm, as if he might need help walking to the stairwell door. “A person of interest?”
Riker glanced at the window. “Naw.” The detective sipped his coffee and smiled. “So your ex-wife moved back in with her dad.”
“Yup. Only six blocks away.”
Lieutenant Coffey entered the private office.
About time.
The lieutenant was definitely one angry man as he faced his detective, saying, “The play goes on tonight.”
What play?
“Bad move.” Riker rose to his feet, not liking this news one bit. “You know what’s gonna—”
“Tell it to Councilman Perry. That twit leaned on Beale again.”
“So what? The commissioner can’t interfere with an ongoing—”
“Yeah,” said Coffey, “I’ve heard that joke, too. Since when did regulations ever stop that old fart? And now he’s got the mayor onboard. God forbid one closed theater should interfere with tourism. We got nine hours before—” The lieutenant turned around to face James Harper. “Oh, you’re invited, Sheriff. We got front-row seats for the hottest show in town.”
Well, finally. Some hospitality.
• • •
Mallory entered the dressing room and dropped the gopher’s duffel bag on the padded armchair. A small dust cloud rose up from the cushion.
Bugsy’s sedation had worn off, but he had been silent during the ride from the station house. Now he sat down on his bedroll. So very still. This was not his twitchy nature, and neither was the sadness. Mallory had brought a bottle of pills to help him sleep—to forget this day. That would be the easy way out.
For him.
And for her.
Instead, she turned to the makeup table and stared at the broken mirror. “That story you told me? The one about the old murder? I looked it up.” Two decades ago, that case had been neatly wrapped within an hour. She reached out to touch the glass and run one finger around the outline of a missing shard. “There was no murder weapon at the crime scene. A hunk of glass might match up with the ME’s report, but the theater owner’s corpse wasn’t found up here.”
“I know,” said Bugsy. “The way the real story goes, it was the family’s idea to move his body outta the lady’s dressin’ room.” With some effort, he rose to his feet. “I told ya about the renovations, right? The theater let us use the stage at night—saved a bundle on rentin’ rehearsal space.” He pulled down a decades-old calendar, exposing a clean square of green wall. At its center was a small, round spot of raw plaster. “Before the contractors fixed up the other dressin’ rooms, I found plugs like this one in all of ’em. . . . Filled-in peepholes.”
Mallory nodded her understanding: Twenty years ago, the victim’s family had not wanted this room searched by the police. The hole in the wall might have exposed the murdered relative as a sexual deviant—a peeper.
“See this?” Bugsy pointed to a patch of the mirror where a second shard was missing, a smaller one. “The way I heard it, while they were cartin’ the old guy’s body downstairs, the actress was up here, slittin’ her wrists.” He pulled back a scatter rug to reveal a bleached-out section of floor—blood evidence destroyed. “The lady was still alive when the family dragged her outta here. The cops found her bleedin’ to death in the alley.”
“Did you tell that story to Alma Sutter?”
“Yeah, I tried to tell her she wasn’t the only one to—” His head snapped toward the open door.
Mallory had also heard it—the sound of an object hitting the floor below them, something dropped or knocked over. Other people had keys to this theater and reason to be here, but it was the absence of any more sound that made her slide the revolver from its holster. This was the guilty silence of someone frozen in waiting—another listener downstairs.
ROLLO: There is one thing that I can do if you allow it.
—The Brass Bed, Act III
“Lock up after me,” she whispered. “No noise.” Gun in hand, Mallory stepped over the threshold of the dressing room.
Along the railed walkway, she stopped at every door beyond Bugsy’s. No need to pick the locks. She had a good ear for a dead room. She descended the stairs, treading lightly, and crossed the floor behind the stage set for a look at the blackboard.
The slate was wiped clean.
Mallory walked to the alley door and tried the knob. Still locked. There was no noise, and she could not say why reflex kicked in, why she spun around to point her gun at a ginger cat—with chalk-dusted fur.
The cat arched its back, tail high, and hissed with a show of sharp teeth. Then, conceding victory, it fled, followed closely by the detective holstering her revolver on the run. Mallory crashed through the clothes on the wardrobe racks in time to see the animal disappear through a rubber pet flap in a door—an undersized door with an old-fashioned keyhole lock.
Another damn screwup!
This exit had not been marked on the crime-scene diagram. But this time, Clara Loman could not be faulted; before her late arrival that night, the floor plan had been sketched out by her CSIs. And not one of those bastards had thought to search behind the wardrobe racks. No, too much work.
The ancient lock was easily picked with tools from her pouch, though she could have opened it with any small bits of metal that came to hand. The lock undone, she opened the door.
Not a building exit.
Mallory stepped through the opening in the brick wall and onto a small, square landing. One narrow flight of stairs led upward, and this would be the long-dead peeper’s passageway to the dressing rooms. The other one, a down-staircase, faded to black after six steps. Smells of piss, feces and wood rot rose from below. She flicked a wall switch, and a bare bulb came to light at the foot of the stairs. Though she stepped softly, the ancient wood creaked underfoot. Half the way down, she stopped.
Another creak of the wood.
She turned to see Bugsy four steps above—armed with a baseball bat. Her own noise on the stairs had masked his steps coming down behind her. Surprise number two: Her gun was pointed at his head, an act of reflex, but he showed no sign of fear, though that was his normal state in every waking minute.
He lowered the bat.
She lowered the gun.
By hand signals, Mallory pointed the way back up the stairs, mouthing the words, Get out! Now!
Shoulders back, he stood up straight, and his feet were firmly planted in a very unBugsy way. Acting brave?
No, that wasn’t it.
Hello, Alan Rains.
What a hell of a time to go sane.
All her gesturing was of no use. He meant to make a stand with her. He was her wingman now. In sign language, they agreed that he would remain here to guard the stairs leading up to the door. No noise.
When Mallory touched down on the last step, she saw crisscrossing tracks, paw prints of chalk dust, each trail fading to nothing. Nearby was a Kitty Litter box overflowing with turds. Beyond that, she saw a bone-dry pet bowl with the word water printed on the side. Only the one empty bowl. There was no sign that the cat was ever fed. And this told her it was a working animal, catching its own supper of mice or rats.
The ceiling was a patchwork of tin squares stained with rust, and the floor was stacked with dusty cartons, trunks and crates. Alongside a mop covered with mold, a workman’s ladder with a broken step was propped against one wall. And cat turds littered the floor. This space had gone unused for so long, even the existence of the theater’s mouse catcher had been forgotten.
On the far side of the room, the ginger cat crouched beneath a pipe joint that leaked occasional drops of water into the patient animal’s open mouth. His perch was a drip-stained carton. One side of the cardboard had collapsed and spilled out a cache of small, soggy boxes that were falling to pieces, releasing sticks of white chalk, some of them degraded by water leaking from the pipe above. Mallory rounded the crate to surprise the cat.
Yellow eyes big with fear, it ran for cover behind a steamer trunk, leaving a chalk-dust trail on the floor.
Other trails, faint ones, repeatedly led to a door with scratches on it as high as a cat could reach. There was no lock, but the knob would not turn under her hand. It was stuck—fused shut with rusted works. Mallory applied more force until she heard a click and a metallic snap of something broken inside the mechanism. And still the door would not open. One foot wedged against the wall, hand to the knob, she pulled.
The cat reappeared. It was at her heels, then brushing past her legs. Frantic now, it clawed the wood, mad to get inside. Whatever was in there, it outweighed the animal’s fear of humans. The door was giving, and now it opened—to show her a grimy toilet and nothing more.
The cat smelled water.
The animal was on its hind legs, pawing the closed toilet seat, crying—so thirsty.
Mallory snapped on a latex glove. After flushing the toilet, she opened the filthy seat cover as fresh water swirled into the bowl. Then a quick flash of flying ginger fur—and now the cat artfully balanced on the porcelain rim, head dipping low, drinking its fill. Above the light noise of the lapping cat, Mallory heard a sound upstairs, a subtle movement of shoes—stealthy. The detective stood motionless, listening, her ears stripping away the ceiling, to hear the sound of nails scratching slate.
