Death Dance (6 page)

"Any developments since we spoke?" Mercer asked Mike.

"The commissioner gave us a green light to start searching the
joint."

"That's a big concession."

"The missing person status would go
real-time—twenty-four hours since Talya
disappeared—in the middle of tonight's show, which would
certainly disrupt the crowd. Everybody here thought we needed to
ratchet it up as soon as possible."

"Where is Talya staying?" I asked.

"The Mark. But she hasn't been back to the hotel room since
yesterday," Mike said. "Never called her husband, and they usually
speak three or four times a day."

"Her street clothes?" I asked.

"They're still in her dressing room," Vicci said with a trace
of an Italian accent. "Sweater and pants, her boots. Even the purse she
carries. It's all still there. I—I can't tell you how worried
I am about her. I'm absolutely frantic at the thought of anyone harming
her."

"Bet you are," Mike said. "What does an agent get these days?
Fifteen percent of nothing is nothing. That's why we need your help,
Mr. Vicci. You got a better reason than anybody to keep her alive and
well."

"Joe Berk?" I asked. "Have any of you spoken with him today?"

"Nobody can find him," Chet Dobbis said. "The office is closed
for the weekend and he's not answering calls. I'm told that's not
unusual, Ms. Cooper. In the middle of a Saturday afternoon, he might
well be attending a performance of one of his shows."

"Mind if I take a few minutes with Detective Wallace?" Mike
asked.

"I'll step inside and watch the dress rehearsal, if you don't
mind. Rinaldo, why don't you wait with me?" Dobbis said, leading Vicci
to the theater doors at the far end of the bar. There was a quiet
elegance about him, a gracefulness in the way he moved that fit so
precisely with his role in the theater.

Mike waited until they were out of range. He leaned both
elbows on the bar and rested his head in his hands. "Sorry. It's been
an uphill battle all night to get these guys to let us in. They'll go
nuts when ESU shows up with all their gear."

"You called for Emergency Services?" I asked. They were the
unit of last resort, teams of fearless cops who got into and around
places that no others could manage. They rescued jumpers from bridges
and building cornices, recovered bodies from tunnels and train tracks,
and broke down doorways and barriers to get into wherever their
colleagues needed to go. "Battering rams and the jaws of death? Isn't
that giving up the ghost a little bit early?"

"Jaws of life. They're what get you out of the jaws of death.
I guess you've never been backstage here, have you, kid? You're in for
an eye-opener." Mike swiveled around to look at me. "Remember how old
you were the first time you came to Lincoln Center?"

"Maybe eight or nine."

"What for?"

"To see the
Nutcracker
, next door at the
State Theater. My mother brought me there every Christmas." It was
almost a ritual for little girls who loved ballet and who had grown up
in the city or, as I had, in the suburbs less than an hour away.

"And the Met?" Mike asked.

"A year or two later."

"How many times since?"

He knew the answer to that question. I subscribed to the
annual repertory season of American Ballet Theater and frequented the
opera whenever I had the chance. "Dozens of times, Mike. Maybe
hundreds."

He was going somewhere with this and I waited patiently for
him to make his point.

"I know you don't like the parking garage much, but did it
ever scare you to sit inside the Met?"

"Scare me? To be in the audience? It's where I come to get
away from the tawdry things we see and hear every day at work. It
transports me to be here, to put it mildly."

I truly loved to sink into a velvet-cushioned seat at the end
of a day at the prosecutor's office, wait for the 1,500 yards of
Scalaman-dre silk curtain to lift and drape in Wagnerian style, and the
thirty-two crystal chandeliers to rise up against the twenty-four-karat
gold-leaf ceiling as they dimmed to darkness. For two or three hours I
was able to lose myself in whatever world of make-believe the artists
drew around me.

"Let me tell you about the first time I came here," Mike said.
"Same age as you—maybe ten at the time."

Mike had turned thirty-seven a few months earlier, and I would
celebrate the same birthday at the end of this month. Mercer was five
years older than us, now married to another detective named Vickee and
father to a baby born a bit more than a year ago.

"My old man and I were out together for the afternoon, a
weekday in late July. It didn't happen often that I got to spend a
whole day with him," Mike said. We knew all about his father, who'd
been on the force for twenty-six years. Brian Chapman was a legend in
the department, and the heart attack that killed him forty-eight hours
after he turned in his gun and shield made Mike even more determined to
follow in his footsteps.

"Somebody gave him tickets for the Yankees game and, man, was
I psyched. He got off duty at eight a. m., slept a couple of hours,
took my buddies and me out on the street to pitch to us so we could
play stickball, see how far we could whack the ball. Three manhole
covers or more."

Mercer nodded his head, familiar with the New York City street
game.

"Something you never did in the burbs, right, Coop? It was
before cell phones. My mother shouted him in from the stoop to take an
emergency call from his boss. When he got back out, my dad pulled me
aside and asked me if I wanted to take a ride. Told me he wouldn't be
able to go to the game after all, 'cause something had come up with
work. He knew how unhappy that made me, except he told me I could come
along with him this time. Me, I'd give up every Yankee from the Babe to
Mantle to Guidry to Piniella—and throw in Jeter and A-Rod
now, too—just to hang out on the job with my pop."

"I know what you mean," I said.

"He let me choose what I wanted to do, so I gave the other
kids the ball-game tickets and we got in his jalopy, drove over and
parked on Amsterdam Avenue, right behind Lincoln Center. I remember
coming in the back door that day, through the garage, everybody
stepping aside as soon as he palmed the gold shield. 'On the
job'—I still hear his voice saying that to people. He told me
a girl was missing, a musician who played in the orchestra, and that
lots of guys were already here looking for her. The big boss was
interviewing her husband back at the squad. They needed every cop they
could get because of the size of this place."

"She went missing like Natalya, in the middle of a show?"
Mercer asked.

But I had my own question. "Why'd your dad take you into a
breaking case?"

Mike answered me first. "'Cause he had the same logical
thought that you did, Coop. It's the Metropolitan Opera, for
chrissakes. The Big House is what they called it. Four thousand
people—
four thousand
—were
sitting in that very room on one side of the curtain," he said,
pointing to the auditorium door, "four hundred more working their asses
off to make the show go on, and somebody disappears from the orchestra
pit without one person in the whole joint hearing a peep? Not possible."

I nodded at him. I understood what his dad had been thinking.

"She must have been upset about something and walked out
between acts. That's what he and every other cop thought. Same as her
friends in the orchestra. The woman behind her just moved up and shoved
the girl's violin under her seat, and the conductor kept right on going
with the show. Hey, you know the stats as well as anybody. Women are
far more likely to be hurt or killed by someone they know and love than
by a stranger in a crowded theater."

"That's why they were grilling the husband at the same time
the cops were searching the place," Mercer said.

"You bet. Garden-variety domestic violence is what he figured
it was. You're missing the point. This wasn't about the
case—not about the police work," Mike said, looking at me.

"What then?"

"My old man had never been inside the Met. Didn't know the
first thing about stuff as grand as opera or ballet. My house, you
heard Sinatra and Dean Martin, Judy Garland and Dinah Shore. No
Pavarotti or Caruso or Callas. Entertainment was the living room
television set, big deal was going out to an occasional movie or a
night at the fights.

"This was a chance for my father to show me some culture, Ms.
Cooper, something as foreign to me as stickball and warm beer are to
you."

Mike liked to underscore the differences in our upbringings.
My mother was trained as a nurse, but stopped working after she married
my father and gave birth to my two older brothers and me. Their
middle-class lifestyle changed dramatically when my father, Benjamin,
and his partner invented an innovative medical device that thereafter
was used in most cardiac surgery for more than thirty years. The tiny
Cooper-Hoffman valve was responsible for providing me with a superb
education at Wellesley College and the University of Virginia School of
Law, an old farmhouse on Martha's Vineyard that was my refuge from the
turmoil of my job, and lots of small luxuries that wouldn't have been
affordable on the salary of a young public servant.

I knew Mike loved and respected his father as deeply as I did
my own. That thought took me back to his story. "He must have delighted
in having you by his side," I said.

"I remember how he brought me through the
corridors—endless gray cinder block walls with doorways going
off in every direction. It's the size of a football field and a half
from the front door to the back. Somehow, we wound up in the wrong
place—on the main stage, looking out into the empty house,
tier after tier of seats. I had to crane my neck to see to the top row."

"You remember that?" Mercer asked.

"Like I was inside St. Peter's for the first time. That it was
the most magnificent place I'd ever seen in my life. There was so much
gold on every surface, and the biggest crystals in the
chandeliers— well, I thought they were diamonds the size of
baseballs. I'd never been near anything like this. People were walking
around backstage in costumes—the girls hardly had anything on
and the men were dressed in tights with bare chests."

"What did your father do with you?"

"I guess he thought he'd sit me down and let me watch a
rehearsal while he worked," Mike said to Mercer, "but most of the
artists were too distracted to perform with the searches going on in
every corner of the building. So I went along with him. He wasn't
expecting any trouble, right? And all the guys knew me—you
remember Giorgio and Struk, don't you? It was their case."

Two of the smartest detectives I'd worked with as a young
prosecutor, they had handled major cases long before I came on the job.

"Sure. Didn't Giorgio train you?" I asked.

Mike nodded at me. "Jerry G. was just breaking in at the time.
Asked Dad to go up to the fourth floor. Along the way, every time we
passed somebody in a costume, my old man'd stop them and introduce them
to me. I don't know what the hell he was thinking, but he wanted me to
shake hands with people he thought might be famous, like maybe the
class would rub off on me," he said, laughing at the memory of it.

"Sweet," Mercer said, smiling back at him. "Sweet idea."

"Those girls were something else. They all looked so soft and
so beautiful. Each one he put a hand out to greet had creamier
shoulders than the next, with jewelry sparkling on their ears and in
their hair."

Mike smiled at Mercer as he talked on. I hadn't seen him this
animated and happy since before Val's death. "I don't think I'd ever
seen women in makeup before, elegant women—not all that much
older than I was—who tousled my hair and stroked my cheek as
they went past me; each of them seemed like a fairy queen to me. You
ever dress up like that?"

"Only for our recitals," I said. "My favorite day at the end
of the year."

"We got up to the fourth floor and it was like a city unto
itself. There was the scenic design room, with a few guys building a
palace for some opera and others making a fantastic tree out of
Styrofoam. There were Roman columns and castle parapets, papier-mache
mountains, Egyptian pyramids and Hindu temples, like a giant playroom.
Cops were everywhere, looking behind plywood frames twenty feet high,
stacked against every surface.

"Then came a clothing studio where thousands of costumes were
made, with tailors and seamstresses hunched over drafting tables.
Life-size figures were standing in the hallways, and a pole—a
spaghetti rack, they called it—hung from one end of the
corridor to the other. There were soldiers' uniforms and kings' robes,
and still cops sticking their noses in every nook and cranny 'cause you
could have hidden ten bodies just about anywhere up there and not found
'em for years. And me? I was mesmerized by the
costumes—touching the gold braid and holding the different
fabrics against my skin, wondering if I'd ever feel anything that
silken again."

"How about Brian?" Mercer asked.

"Pop did what he had to do, asking the workers if they'd seen
or heard anything, writing down all their names. He was happy just
watching me, 'cause I really was entranced by the whole thing. Exactly
what he wanted to bring me for. Till one of the rookies came running to
get him, whispered something to him."

Mike paused and when the storytelling stopped, the smile was
gone with it. When he went on, there was no trace of a pleasant memory.

"I can remember the look on my dad's face. He didn't seem to
know what to do at that very moment, and I wasn't used to seeing him
like that. I think he wanted to leave me right where I was, but he knew
he couldn't do that. The guys were all working too hard to ask any of
them to look after me. He gave me one of those very stern,
hand-on-my-shoulder commands in his best brogue: 'Mikey, my son, just
follow me and stay out of everyone's way.'"