Death Dance (37 page)

"And if he won't agree to do it?"

"That's why I keep you by my side, Coop. You'll get me a court
order."

"You keep forgetting about that odd technicality called
probable cause. You develop some of it and I'll give you whatever you
need."

"It takes so much longer to play by your rules."

"What's the hurry? Cool your heels. Try and be
useful—get an admission from him. If Harney was never
arrested for the Bronx homicide, or if he's been exonerated as a
suspect, then his DNA profile is only in the linkage database. He's not
a convicted offender, much to Dowd's dismay."

"So what?"

"That's exactly the issue Mercer and I were in front of Judge
McFarland about yesterday afternoon. If Harney starts looking good to
you, I'm going to have to go back to her on my knees next week. She's
forbidden the serologists to make any comparisons from that linkage
suspect pool until she rules on the authority for its existence."

"That'll endear you to the lieutenant," Mike called out,
walking away from me toward the medical office. "Why'd you try to fix a
perfectly good system when it wasn't broken?"

"It wasn't my plan," I said, turning to go back up to the
board—room, and practically bumping into the nurse with whom
we had left Ralph Harney. She was coming from the corridor that led out
to the garage exit of the opera house.

Mike jogged back toward us. "Where's your patient?"

"I couldn't deal with him, detective. He insisted on going to
see his own doctor. There was no way to fight it, so I just helped him
into a taxi."

"Ralph Harney walked out of here? You got a doctor's name, you
have any idea where he went?"

The nurse was dumbfounded by Mike's irritation. "I don't know
anything, Mr. Chapman. He just seemed in a terrible hurry to go."

The lieutenant was angrier than I had ever seen him. "I got
twenty detectives sitting on their asses up here, like they're Mrs.
Vanderbilt's invited guests for opening night. We got one squirrelly
guy in this whole cast of characters—with a gimp, no
less—and he's out the door before anybody's the wiser for it?
It's more like a night at the opera with the Marx Brothers."

He started shouting names as his men got to their feet,
putting on suit jackets and remaking the knots in the ties that hung
suspended from their shirt collars. "Go pull Harney's cousin off his
job and bring him up to the squad. Give him a feel for what a real
interrogation is like," he said to the first pair he spotted. "Alex,
can I lock him up for anything?"

"I'll try to be creative. Not for lying to the cops, if that's
what you mean."

"Yeah. What the hell? Everybody can bullshit us. We're just
the dumb friggin' police department. You two—Roman and
Bliss—over to Hoboken. Somebody want to get information on
Harney's family and run with it? Relatives, friends, hangouts, watering
holes, known pros locations. Move it."

"Better have somebody call around to local emergency rooms," I
said. "There's always a chance that ankle really was broken and he's
gone in to get it X-rayed. No reason to assume he's skipped town."

"Ever the optimist, blondie. I know you prefer to be ignorant
about military history, but I thought the theater arts were right up
your alley," Mike said.

"And?"

"John Wilkes Booth. Shot the president in the Ford Theater,
leaped onto the stage, managed to evade capture and get out of town
despite the fact that he snapped the fibula in his left leg. Where
there's a will there's a way. I don't think Ralph Harney is planning to
stick around and make himself useful. You want me in on this, boss?"

"Nah. We screwed this one up on our own. You had something
else planned, didn't you?"

"Joe Berk. See if he's missing one of his fancy gloves."

"Keep running with your end. We'll carry this disaster as far
as we can."

The drive down Ninth Avenue to the theater district was
familiar now. I called Mercer to see whether there were any prints on
the letter and envelope that had been delivered to me. I knew he would
get the lab director to jump the analysis to the top of this morning's
pile of cases.

"Halfway there," Mercer said. "What was left of the stationery
inside your flaming missive had Selim Sengor's
fingerprints—three of them. On the envelope, we've got a
partial of his gopher, Dr. Alkit."

Those would have been easy enough to compare quickly because
both men had been arrested, so their print comparisons were available
to the expert. "Any other partials?"

"A few on the envelope. I got somebody tracking down the
messenger so we can roll his fingers, and then we'll check Laura, too."

"Don't forget the DA's Squad has hers on file," I said,
reminding Mercer that all of the office employees had to submit to be
printed during the security clearance process.

"Well, you can get this off your mind. Sengor's an ocean away
and we've got Alkit under arrest. Whoever handles his case can up the
ante with these new charges."

"Thanks, Mercer. Speak to you later."

We parked down the block from the Belasco and made our way to
the entrance shortly before noon.

Two workmen were on ladders, spread in front of the marquee.
They were putting up letters that would announce the next show to move
into the house. The front doors were wide open and we walked into the
theater to make our way to Berk's elevator through the side corridor.

The auditorium was dark, but the curtain was open and the
stage was dimly lit. I could make out the shape of a large box, and
Mike walked down the center aisle to see what it was.

"Must be a cheerful production moving in. That looks like a
coffin."

I walked closer and could see that Mike was right. As I got
halfway down toward the front row, several floorboards on the stage
parted to reveal an opening—though one smaller than that at
the Met. The thick white hair of Joe Berk was the first thing I saw
rising out of the hole, as he—still in his robe and satin
pajamas—was lifted up to the stage from a pit below it on
some kind of hydraulic system.

"Ha! Hope you two sleuths didn't think you were coming to my
funeral," he said, stepping off the square platform as it locked in
place. "One-man shows—personally, I hate 'em. Short of
Olivier and Gielgud—and that gal whose got all those talking
vaginas—there aren't many stars with the talent to keep an
audience in their seats."

Berk walked over to the coffin and lifted its lid. "Got one of
these young magicians coming in. Big sensation in London. He does all
the great Houdini escape tricks—the iron box, the packing
case in a tank of water, the ring and the dove. There's a nut for you,
Chapman."

"Who?"

"Houdini. That's who. Harry Houdini. He was a rabbi's son.
Hungarian," Berk said, laughing at something he remembered. "My mother
had a thing for Hungarians.
Prust
—you
know the word? Yiddish for 'common.' You talk about changing names? So
this kid is born Ehrich Weiss. He wants to change it? Fine with me. I'm
the last guy to fault him for that. But how'd he pick Harry Houdini?
You're ashamed of being Jewish, so instead you want the world to think
you're a wop? Nuts if you ask me."

Mike's political incorrectness was in the amateur ranking
compared with Berk's.

"Why the coffin?" Mike asked.

"It's an original, from Houdini himself. This is where he
performed his act for years. The stage of the Belasco. We got all his
hokey cabinets and props for more than half a century. There's eighteen
trapdoors in the floor of this place. I can disappear into the pit and
come back up laid out in that casket in thirty seconds. Wanna see?"

"No, thanks. I'll take your word for it," I said. My own brush
with premature burial had given me a strong aversion to such games.

"Chapman, you think Houdini didn't have tricks?"

"I'm sure he did, Joe. I don't much believe in magic."

"Smart boy. Right on this very stage he used to do the
coffin-escape gimmick. He'd let people from the audience come up and
inspect the box, examine the screws that held the lid down, and then
secure them with sealing wax. Did it hundreds of time and nobody ever
called him a fake. What do you think, detective?"

"You got me, Joe."

"Come look at the fittings in the bottom here. It's ingenious.
You'd never spot it unless someone showed it to you. The screws on the
lower part look like they're holding the bottom edge in place. But see?
They're just fitted into dowels that slide off the edge. He'd stay in
the coffin as long as he thought the audience was enjoying the drama,
escape from the bottom, through the trapdoor on which the coffin had
been placed, then stroll out onstage whenever he was good and ready."

Berk let the lid slam down on the empty coffin. "Illusions,
Mr. Chapman, that's what my world is all about."

"And suckers still being born every day. That's why we're back
to see you. I'm sick of illusions."

"You're running hot and cold on me, sonny. I got to get back
up
to bed. I'm not quite myself yet," Berk said, shuffling in his slippers
toward the elevator.

"We'll follow you up."

"Never mind, never you mind. What is it now?"

"Gloves, Joe. One of the guys on my team found a man's glove
at the Met—in the hallway where Natalya Galinova struggled
with her killer."

"She liked gloves. Long silk ones, like the ladies used to
wear in my day."

"Not hers. Your glove."

"Mine?" he said, hyperventilating as he rested himself against
a packing crate in the wings off stage right. He blew his nose with a
tissue and tossed it in a garbage can in the far corner. "What are you,
another Houdini? A mentalist? Who told you they're mine?"

Mike wasn't ready to admit he'd taken something of Berk's
—improperly—that had yielded a DNA profile. A pack
of high-powered lawyers would probably settle on our shoulders before
we could leave the building.

"I could take the shirt from your pajamas, your skin cells
would be all over it, just from the way your body rubs against it."

"You'll take nothing of mine, Chapman." Berk was ready to walk
again.

"I could pick up that Kleenex you just threw away and the lab
could use it to match to the gloves we—"

"My snot? That's what you're gonna resort to in order to find
out what Joe Berk is made of? Go ahead, detective. That's your element,
maybe, like dirt from the street. You're welcome to it."

"Suppose I can prove—maybe not today, but next week
or the week after—suppose I could prove it was one of your
gloves?"

"Then what? Then you're gonna say I used the gloves to kill
Talya and left one of them behind for you to find, right? I'm not that
stupid. And I wouldn't waste a pair of my good gloves on a hysterical
broad who'd seen her best days on the far side of a stage curtain. Too
expensive. Too hard to replace a well-made pair of gloves."