TWENTY-EIGHT
JAKE’S PHONE CALL BROUGHT TWO POLICE CRUISERS WITH lights flashing, though since the immediate emergency was long over with, they had refrained from turning on their sirens.
One of the four cops who rushed in through the theater’s front doors turned out to be Officer Hallonquist, the same patrolman who had cited Darla at the coffee shop a few days earlier.
He shook his head a little at recognizing her, but made no comment as he and his partner hustled the handcuffed agent outside and loaded her in their car for the trip to jail.
Reese had shown up right after the uniformed officers.
“Yo, Fiorello,” one of the younger cops had called with a grin and a wave at the detective.
Reese gave the rookie the old finger-across-the-throat gesture, but it was too late.
Darla had overheard.
With a delighted grin of her own, she stared at him and said, “Wow.
Fiorello is your first name?”
“Yeah,” the rookie interjected, poking his forefinger to his cheek to form a dimple.
In a simpering voice, he added, “It means ‘little flower.’”
“Correction,” Reese snarled back.
“It means ‘he who kicks ass.’
So shaddup already, if you don’t want your butt handed to you.”
The rookie snickered but obligingly shut up.
Then Reese turned to Darla.
“Yeah, so sue me.
My dad was German and my mother was Italian.
I got his looks, and she won the baby-naming contest.
But we don’t use that name, got it?”
“How about this?”
Darla replied, trying to keep a straight face but failing miserably.
“If you don’t call me ‘Red,’ I won’t call you ‘Flower.’
Deal?”
“Deal.
Now, forget about me.
What the hell is going on here?”
he demanded with a stern look at both her and Jake.
Quickly stepping back into serious mode, Darla waited quietly by and let Jake explain what they’d been doing at the theater in the first place.
Then Darla gave Reese a quick rundown of the private conversation she’d had with Morris in the basement after Jake left, and before the police arrived.
Morris told her he had followed Hillary and his sister down the sidewalk that fateful night, and so had witnessed Valerie’s death.
He had been the caped figure who had rushed into the street to help her, and who Reese had pushed aside.
Realizing there was nothing to be done for his sister, Morris’s next thought had been to pursue Hillary, who had already melted back into the crowd.
He’d had little doubt that Hillary’s actions were deliberate.
Despite his grief, however, he’d also realized that, under the circumstances, it would be his word against hers should he accuse her of a crime.
And so, he had made the difficult choice to pretend that he’d seen nothing.
Instead, he had returned to the store, determined to find some way to later pry a confession from the agent.
Hillary had not been content with murdering Valerie, however.
A day later, she had contacted Morris with another blackmail threat, and that was when he’d had the inspiration for staging the ghostly intervention.
In the time it took for Darla to make her explanations, Morris had changed back into his street clothes and commandeered the theater’s offices for further interviews.
Darla wondered how a lowly makeup artist had managed such a feat, until Morris explained with a wry smile, “I don’t think they’ll mind, considering that I own the place.”
Once the statements had all been given—according to Reese, Morris’s official account had squared with what he had told Darla—Reese rejoined Darla and Jake in the lobby.
The play had ended, and most of the theatergoers had already departed, leaving behind a handful of curious employees to finish closing up the place.
Morris reappeared as well.
He gave a few whispered instructions to the same tuxedoed female usher who’d politely demanded Darla’s ticket.
The girl nodded and made hasty work of rushing the other employees out the door.
By then, the remaining patrol officers had driven off, leaving the three of them alone with Morris.
He gave Darla and Jake a tired smile.
“Detective Reese was asking about the ghost illusion,” he said.
“Perhaps all of you would care to see how it was created?”
At their eager nods, he led them back down to the basement.
There, he demonstrated how he had conjured Valerie’s ghostly appearance.
“It’s an old theater trick called Pepper’s Ghost Illusion,” he explained as they stood in the lounge area where the phantom Valerie had confronted Hillary.
“If you’ve ever been to Disney’s Haunted Mansion, or even one of the professional haunted houses that spring up each year for Halloween, you might have seen this effect before.
We use it here at the theater on occasion.
I had some of the stage crew set this up for me a few days ago.”
He showed them how the space beyond the lounge area actually formed an equilateral L, with the lower portion of the L blocked from their view by a wall of shelving.
A sheet of glass sat across the elbow of the L at a forty-five degree angle, with the red velvet chairs positioned behind it.
The unseen portion of the L had been where Morris in his ghostly disguise had been hidden.
That area was curtained in black fabric that formed a backdrop on all three sides and was empty, save for what appeared to be a set of freestanding steps that were also draped in black.
Like a good host, he gestured them to sit on those stairs.
“When the lights are dim here and bright there,” he said, pointing toward the chairs, “all the audience sees from the outside is exactly what’s in that space.”
With his remote control, he adjusted the lights so that a cheery beam illuminated the red velvet chairs, while the light in their half of the L dimmed.
“But if you lower the lights there”—he again indicated the chairs and turned down the illumination—“and raise the lights on this side, whatever’s here reflects on the glass and looks like a ghost on the side to the audience that’s watching.”
As he spoke, a light came on overhead.
Now, the four of them were reflected with almost mirrorlike precision in the glass, their transparent images seeming to hover over the chairs, just as Valerie’s ghost had done.
“Pretty cool,” Jake muttered, while Darla nodded her agreement.
Reese grinned a little, like a kid figuring out a new trick.
“It’s like when you have a lamp on in your house, and you look out the window at night.
You can see everything behind you—and even yourself—reflected in the glass, so it kind of looks like you and your room are outside on the street.”
“Exactly,” Morris said with an approving smile.
“The lighting is crucial, as is the black backdrop on this side.
It’s a simple enough effect, but very powerful if the audience is in the mood to believe.”
And it seemed that all of them had been in that mood, Darla told herself, remembering the chill she’d felt at her first sight of the ghost.
Probably, Morris had tinkered with the air-conditioning down there, too, and had lit the cigarette to further trigger the connection to Valerie.
Reese remained behind at the theater awhile longer, while Darla and Jake made their good-byes and returned to the brownstone.
It was after midnight by the time the taxi they’d commandeered at Darla’s insistence left them off on the curb.
As she stepped out onto the sidewalk, Darla noticed in surprise that the Valerie shrine with its guttered candles and dead flowers had been cleared away sometime during their absence, leaving the sidewalk bare once more.
Jake followed her gaze and nodded.
“Our sanitation department at work,” she observed.
Then, noting Darla’s troubled expression, she added, “Don’t feel bad, kid.
That mound of flowers couldn’t have stayed here forever, you know.”
“I know.
It just seems a shame that all those poems and letters and tributes that Valerie’s fans left for her ended up in the back of a trash truck.”
“Actually, I think Mary Ann gathered all those things up this morning.
She thought the family might want them, so she was going to package up everything and give it to you to forward.”
“I’m sure Morris and his parents will appreciate that,” Darla agreed, relieved and yet feeling a bit guilty that she hadn’t thought of doing the same thing.
They parted after agreeing to meet back at Darla’s apartment when Reese finished at the theater and stopped by to update them on the situation.
Yawning, Darla went upstairs to change out of her theater clothing.
Hamlet was waiting for her, his expression disapproving.
“Sorry, boy, we were chasing down ghosts and murderers,” she explained, earning a spit and a hiss from Mr.
Anxious Parent Cat for her trouble.
Once snuggly attired in sweats, she flipped on her computer and did her official scan of the store.
Everything appeared in order, so she left the screen up and turned on her favorite all-news television station.
Within a few minutes of watching, she discovered that word of Hillary’s arrest had already hit the media.
“And in breaking news,” the jowly broadcaster proclaimed, “a twenty-nine-year-old New York City woman has been arrested in what is now considered to be the murder of bestselling author Valerie Baylor last week.”
Snippets of video from the autographing rolled as he described what little the police had released to this point.
Darla was glad for Morris’s sake that, at least for the moment, no reference was made to Mavis or ghosts.
And a fleeting shot of Hillary doing the perp walk made Darla smile in grim satisfaction.
A knock sounded at her door a few minutes later.
It was Jake and Reese, the former having exchanged her chic leopard-print dress for a pair of sweats and a T-shirt like Darla’s, and the latter wearing his usual leather motorcycle jacket and bearing a chilled bottle of sparkling wine.
“Hey, I had it in the fridge and thought we should celebrate,” he said, popping the cork before Darla even had a chance to chase down the proper glasses.
Then, with a mock disappointed look, he added, “Of course, I’d been planning on drinking with a couple of hot broads, and not two kids ready for a pajama party.”
Jake gave him a friendly punch in the shoulder, though a smiling Darla wasn’t sure if it was for the “hot broad” comment or the pajama party reference.
Once she returned with glassware and the surprisingly good champagne had been poured, Darla offered up a little toast toward the ceiling.
“To Valerie.”
“To Valerie,” her friends echoed and raised their glasses, as well.
“I guess she wasn’t quite the witch she pretended to be,” Darla observed after they’d settled on the horsehair sofa, displacing a miffed Hamlet in the process.
“But the way she treated Mavis at the autographing .
.
.”
“Pretty much an act,” Reese said.
“Morris and I had another informal chat after you two left.
Apparently, the whole Valerie-as-diva thing was a put-on.
They figured it was best to have the public Valerie Baylor be something of a bitch.
That way, if a fan or an interviewer asked her a question about the books that she couldn’t answer, she could blow them off, and people would figure that’s just how she was.
It also helped protect Mavis.
They were afraid if the two of them got too chatty together, it would call attention to her, er, him.
And that was what Morris was trying to avoid from the start.
Social anxiety disorder is what he said it’s called.”
“Jeez, you’d think the guy was rich enough to afford counseling, or at least a bottle of antidepressants,” Jake broke in.
Darla gave her friend a disapproving glance.
“It’s not always that easy.
I once worked with a woman who refused to go out to lunch with the rest of the department.
We all thought she was a snob.
Then one day she told me she just was afraid to eat in front of anyone, couldn’t swallow a bite if anyone was looking at her.
I’m sure Morris does the best he can.”
Jake appeared unconvinced, but she dropped the subject of the author’s brother for the equally confusing motivation surrounding Hillary.
“Her, I don’t get, either,” she said of the agent.
“Wasn’t killing off Valerie basically killing off her golden goose?”
“Not necessarily,” Darla answered.
“If Valerie’s death really had been an accident—or if Morris had thought it was—Hillary could have cut a deal with Morris directly.
They could have said that Valerie had a couple of finished manuscripts sitting around and then put them out posthumously under her name.
And once everyone got used to her being dead, Morris could have officially been authorized by the estate to keep writing under her name.
It’s been done with a lot of authors before.”