Death Dance (17 page)

I tried to disengage my hand from Berk's grasp. He opened his
eyes and reached out for my wrist. "We're going to have to go, Mr.
Berk. You need to rest."

"I'll rest when I'm good and ready."

"Mike and I have to get to work."

"You mean if I don't answer your questions, you're gonna leave
me alone in this place? Don't go until my son gets back. It won't be
very long. You want to talk about Talya?"

"That would help us."

"First I gotta explain how Izzy and I got into the theater
business, right? I wouldn't be having anything to do with fancy dancers
and Tennessee Williams and all that jazz if we hadn't moved the
organization into the stage world. Can't make sense of my relationship
with Talya until you understand what my business is about."

The man didn't want to be alone. He didn't have the least
interest in cooperating with us, but he didn't want to be on his own in
the alien and uncontrollable world of the sterile hospital room.

"I think I'm more interested in your personal relationship
with Talya than your professional one."

Again he ignored me. "Real estate. Simple as that. We were
buying up so much commercial land in midtown when the market went to
hell in 'seventy-six, we found ourselves competing with the Shu-berts
and Nederlanders for property. We wound up with four legitimate
theaters. The stage—I told Izzy—that's where the
magic is. Forget television and the movies, people still want to come
out at night and touch the stars."

I looked to Mike and now he was shaking his head.

"We've got to go, Mr. Berk. Is there someone you'd like me to
call to come sit with you? One of your children?"

"Briggs'll be back any minute now. He promised me. The others
are scattered all over the country. We got offices in L.A., in Chicago,
in Miami. I only got the youngest kid here with me."

"How about nephews or nieces? Izzy's kids."

"Same story. Spread out all over the place. I'll give you my
secretary's number. Let's get her over here, okay?"

"We can do that," I said. "How about Mona?"

"Who?"

"Mona, your niece. Izzy's daughter."

"Oh, so now she's Mona? Desdemona Berk, Ms. Cooper. The first
Broadway show Izzy ever saw was in 1943.
Othello
.
Paul Robeson as the Moor. Trust me, that's an actor who'd never have
done bull-shit ads for the telephone company
like—like—what's his name? What a talent Robeson
was. Uta Hagen, she was Desdemona. Izzy was a kid, but he was
entranced. Another marriage and four sons later, he finally gets the
baby girl."

"Mona's office is here in town, though, isn't it? Would you
like me to call her?"

Berk dropped his hold of my arm, turned his head to the other
side of the bed, and pretended to spit on the floor. "Bite your tongue.
I'd rather eat nails."

Mike walked to the foot of the bed. "Briggs called your niece
last night, while the ambulance was on the way to the hospital. She
came over to the theater right away. Maybe he can tell you why he
wanted her to be there."

"Where? In my office? My home?" Berk was trying to pull
himself up. "I'll tell you why she was there. She wanted to be the
first one to drive a nail in my coffin. Nobody let her in, did they?
Did they?"

He was shouting now and a nurse opened the door and displaced
me at the side of the bed. This was a giant step beyond the level of
agitation that Dr. Wong didn't want us to provoke.

"We're not the ones who let her in," Mike said, omitting the
fact that she hadn't needed anyone's help in gaining access through the
secret elevator in the apartment.

"Talk to my lawyers, detective. That little
vonce
—that
cockroach—shouldn't be anywhere near my place. She's filed a
lawsuit against me. She's trying to break up the business organization
and my family. Desdemona Berk—my brother Izzy should rest in
peace—she's a greedy little bitch."

"Want to grab some coffee before I go downtown to my office?"
I said to Mike.

"Nah. I'll go up to the squad and put in a few hours."

"So how come you didn't ask him about the monitors in his
apartment?"

"He was holding your hand, not mine. I thought you'd get to
it. That's not homicide work, that's some kind of Peeping Tom stuff,
right up your alley."

Mike was a detail guy. It was rare for him to let a single
fact slip from his grasp. It was even more unusual for him to turn down
my offer of a free breakfast.

"Are you going to talk to Mona?" I asked.

"About what? Right now all I'm interested in is who else saw
Natalya Galinova before she disappeared and why her personal life
seemed to be in such turmoil."

"I'll be in my office if you want anything," I said, hailing a
Yellow Cab on the corner of Tenth Avenue and 59th Street.

It was only eight fifteen when I bought two cups of black
coffee from the cart on the corner of the Hogan Place entrance to the
court-house. I scanned my I.D. card and pushed through the turnstile,
greeting the cop whose fixed post was security in the cramped lobby of
the District Attorney's Office.

The eighth-floor corridor was still empty when I pushed open
the anteroom door, passing my secretary's desk and turning on the
lights in my office. I had left hurriedly on Friday evening to get to
work with Mercer on the Jean Eakens case up at the Special Victims
Squad. The case memos and screening sheets from the forty senior
assistants who worked in my unit were still scattered on my desktop for
review and response, so I spent time making comments on them until the
phones started ringing at nine.

Half of the morning was occupied with phone calls to press for
special attention to the new cases. I needed the toxicologist to do the
routine drug screening in the Eakens case, but also to be aware that
Xanax had been recovered from the doctor's kitchen counter. I begged
the chief serologist to rush the DNA profile from the blood on the
teeth of the dog who saved his owner from a rape in Riverside Park. A
match to a known felon would launch a search that might prevent other
women from being victimized.

I had no official role in the death investigation of Natalya
Galinova, but knew that Mike could navigate the most professional
medical examiner's office in the country with a skill that would
produce the best results possible in a timely fashion.

At eleven, after I had set my secretary, Laura, to work on
some correspondence, I walked across the hall to the executive wing, to
see whether Rose Malone, the district attorney's assistant, could fit
me into his schedule. I waited through a series of phone calls from the
governor and several lesser public officials before I was summoned into
the large office from which Paul Battaglia supervised the work of the
six hundred lawyers on his staff.

There wasn't an hour of the day or night that Battaglia was
without a cigar stub in his mouth. He could talk straight for thirty
minutes without hobbling the unlit Cohiba that was stuck to his lips,
and when he was actually smoking, as he was now, he would remove it
occasionally to waft a ribbon of smoke in my direction.

"Good morning, Paul. Thanks for giving me some time. There are
a couple of new cases that are likely to get some ink, that I thought
you'd want to know about."

"Like what?" he asked, drawing back one side of his lip
and
speaking out of the corner of his mouth.

"Like a physician who drugged two women in order to rape them.
Canadian tourists."

The press always played up the foreign element in crime
stories. Politicians hated any mentions that might scare people away
from the city's most profitable industry. "And the good news is that we
finally have DNA from the Riverside rapist, so we're likely to have a
profile to put in the databank by midweek."

I expected his usual barrage of precise questions about the
pedigree of the doctor who'd been arrested or the breed of the heroic
dog. "You think I think that's why you're in here to see me?"

I blushed and that drew a wide smile around the cigar clenched
in his teeth.

"The commissioner called me about the Galinova woman. He seems
to know that you were up at the crime scene."

And didn't call to tell Battaglia about it, which was the
unspoken part of the district attorney's "gotcha."

"We were working on my rape case up at the squad when Homicide
got the news she'd gone missing. Chapman thought I might be useful
because of my familiarity with the ballet world, and the possibility
that Galinova had been assaulted before she was killed."

"Chapman always finds a way to make you useful, doesn't he?"

I ignored the shot. There wasn't a rumor that circulated
anywhere within the office that escaped Battaglia's radar. "Paul, I'd
really like to ask you to assign me to the investigation."

Homicide cases were controlled in the Trial Division by Pat
McKinney, a rat-faced prosecutor whose legal ability was obscured by
the pettiness of his personality and the longtime affair he'd conducted
with an incompetent young lawyer for whom he'd carved out a protected
place in the bureau. I had challenged McKinney too many times to be
favored with investigations that fell on the outer borders of my own
unit. Battaglia's reliance on my sex crimes prosecutors for the
resolution of so many high-profile cases—our ability to
exonerate falsely accused suspects before charging them and to nail
those guilty of such heinous crimes—had given me direct
access to him whenever I wanted it.

"Nobody's got the case for us?"

"No suspects yet. The squad's just getting on all the
employees today. Nobody's been tapped to work on it."

"It's not a rape, according to the commissioner. Any reason to
think the perp was trying?"

I had gone online to find the old news stories about the first
murder at the Met. I reminded Battaglia of the facts, since the case
had occurred before he was in office.

"That wasn't a completed rape either, Paul, but it was
certainly an attempt at one. The best those detectives could
reconstruct, the violinist ran into the stagehand when she was lost. He
got her in an elevator and tried to assault her. He probably killed her
when she resisted, when she was struggling."

"So you want to keep that option open?"

"Yes. We've got four hundred guys who were somewhere backstage
that afternoon and evening, so detectives have got to talk to every one
of them, in case this was random—or to see whether one of
them had been stalking Galinova since she'd arrived here. And we're
developing a very complex personal life. A lover's quarrel—a
domestic—isn't so far out of the question."

"How so?"

"Galinova recently put her husband on notice that she wanted a
legal separation. She had something going on with this guy called Joe
Berk, and a former lover is the artistic—"

"Slow down, Alex. Don't just throw Joe Berk's name in here and
slide by it."