Death Dance (7 page)

"Where to?" Mercer asked.

"Back through the maze of shops and studios, till someone put
us on an elevator that took us up to the roof. We stepped off and I saw
Giorgio and Struk. One of them called out to Brian and pointed at me,
telling him to leave me back, right where I was."

Mike stopped again. "My old man was wrong. That's the first
thing I remembered thinking that day. I didn't believe the guy ever had
a bad instinct in his life and maybe this time he'd screwed up for
once. I was so shaken and disappointed, I thought I was gonna be sick.
I knew he'd catch hell from my mother for bringing me along, for his
thinking the missing musician was alive and well someplace else, and
for his idea that the Met would be a good afternoon outing for his kid."

"You mean they told you what happened to the girl?" Mercer
asked.

"Tell me? Nobody was paying any attention to me from that
point on, with good reason. So I got down on the floor and held on to a
pipe along the edge of the building, leaning out just enough to see
what they were all staring at below us.

"There was her body, crumpled on the top of a setback, six
floors down from the roof, four stories above the street. Long blond
hair down most of her back, spattered with blood, her legs twisted and
bent like a wishbone torn apart at a Thanksgiving dinner."

I thought immediately of the missing Natalya Galinova.

"I still can't shake that memory," Mike said. "You never
forget the first time you see a corpse."

Murder at the Met. If it could happen a quarter of a century
ago, it could happen again today. No matter how elegant the setting, no
matter how benign the business going on inside, no matter how familiar
the great urban institution, there was nothing that made any place in
the city safe from violence. No wonder Mike was urging the police brass
to get inside and moving on this case.

"Who killed the musician?" I asked.

"A twenty-one-year-old stage carpenter. Must have intercepted
her when she got lost in a hallway, trying to get backstage to meet one
of the dancers. He was a baby-faced kid with a bad alcohol problem.
Pretended to show her the way, tried to rape her, and she fought him
off. Got him the old-fashioned way, before DNA. Fingerprints on the
pipe near where she went off the roof, and then a confession. That
judge you're always flirting with?"

I laughed. "Roger Hayes?"

"He tried the case for your office. Brilliant job. My dad kept
a scrapbook with all the clippings. I've got it at home—and
the killer, he's still rotting away upstate."

Mike opened the auditorium door and asked Dobbis and Vicci to
come out.

"Where would you like to start, Mr. Chapman?" Chet Dobbis
asked.

"Crime scene is processing the site where the objects were
found," Mike said to Mercer and me. "There's another area near that
where a nail's sticking out of the wall. Looks like Talya's hair got
caught on it. Pulled out a clump from her scalp."

He turned back to Dobbis. "Where's a good place to talk?"

"There's a rehearsal in the auditorium. I don't think that's a
good idea. Perhaps Natalya's dressing room, Rinaldo?"

"Sure. That'll be fine."

Dobbis pointed to a doorway. "Behind stage right."

It was to the left of the great auditorium, and Mike reversed
his course as he must have realized that stage directions were sited
from the perspective of the artist facing the audience.

"Why don't you tell us what the security is like here?" Mike
asked.

I was walking alongside Dobbis, with Mike and Mercer behind us
and Rinaldo Vicci waddling in the rear.

"Until today I would have answered that it's been quite good."

"Talk about during the performances."

"Front of the house, of course, you can't get in without
tickets. Thirty-eight hundred seats—center orchestra starts
at ninety dollars, on up through six tiers, balcony at the top."

"The nose-bleed section," Mike said, poking me in the back.
"Bet you've never been up there, Coop. You'd get vertigo just thinking
about it."

"Two hundred seventy-five people pay for standing room at the
back of the orchestra. That's your four thousand tally."

"Employees?"

"Several hundred. Stagehands, electricians, makeup artists,
costume and set designers. Every piece of scenery, every item of
clothing or headdress, every prop for more than twenty-five operas that
are mounted here throughout the season is made in-house. And then we
have guests who rent the space, if you will, ballet companies like the
Royal, who bring their own people in."

"So every day… ?" I asked.

"You've got hundreds of employees, and hundreds more
transients passing through. Tours are conducted
daily—schoolchildren, tourists of all ages and nationalities,
visiting performers and dignitaries, materials are delivered from
morning until night. Artists have visitors—family, friends,
other producers they're auditioning for. We've got coaches and
prompters and conductors. A cast of thousands, you might say."

"Screened by security?"

"They come in through the stage-door entrance. They've got to
show identification, of course. Do they sign in or have we lists of
their names? For the employees, certainly. For everyone else, I think
not."

The gray cement corridor was cheerless and cold. Its walls
were lined on one side with enormous trunks stamped with the Royal
Ballet name in white stencils. A few were open, revealing peasant
dresses and pirate shirts, all part of the repertoire that would be
danced during the week.

Mike rapped his knuckles on a trunk and called to a uniformed
cop at the far end of the long hall. "Get more guys in here. Open every
one of these. I don't care if you have to break the locks to get
inside, just check each of them."

We were single file going through now, Dobbis leading us as he
talked. "That's the doctor's office," he said. "Nurses are on duty all
throughout the day, and there's a physician in the house for every
performance. Talya knew that as well."

Past another door. He turned the knob, but it didn't give.
"Animal handlers. SPCA requirements. Whenever we've got an opera with a
horse or a donkey or a camel, we've got to have someone who meets
humane society regulations. In
Giselle
, there are
a couple of borzois—Russian wolfhounds—so even this
room was occupied last night."

Mike yelled again to the cop. "Yo. You doing anything? Get a
custodian with keys or a sledgehammer to get through these doors."

Chet Dobbis showed his annoyance for the first time. "We're
going as fast as we can manage, detective. I've given orders to have
everything unlocked for you."

"After the show, Mr. Dobbis," I said, "suppose Talya had gone
somewhere on another floor in the building, for a legitimate reason.
How soon would the backstage area be emptied out of all the workers?"

"It never is. The Met stage is alive for the better part of
twenty-four hours. The show will go on tonight, and when it's over, the
stage crew will strike the sets that were used. The night gang will
take over and they'll start working to put up the scenery for whatever
the next day's dress rehearsal will be. When the rehearsal is finished,
they strike that set and get things in place for the following night.
The work is endless and the place is always bustling."

"Even Sundays?"

"Often. There are usually practice sessions, even if the house
is dark. And then you've got charity benefits and special events that
we put on quite frequently."

Another left turn and we were at a door marked dressing rooms.
Dobbis entered and the string of us followed him in. A small wall unit
held a series of locked boxes. "This is where the principals keep their
valuables while they're dancing. Talya's wallet and hotel key are still
there," Vicci said. "I've got her spare."
Mike took the key from the agent, unlocked the box, and removed the
items. "Hold on to these," he said to me. "I'll voucher them if she
doesn't show up for dinner tonight."

Straight ahead was a T-shaped intersection. "The corps has
lockers in another part of the building. This area is just for the
stars," Dobbis said. "There's even a pecking order in here. In opera
season, the soprano and the tenor have the center rooms. The baritone,
the mezzo, and the bass are off to the side. So Natalya had this room,
of course."

He ushered us into a private suite, bare of any personal items
except an index card tacked to the door with Natalya's name in black
marker, and her clothes hanging on a rack inside. I checked the
bath-room and stall shower, but saw nothing. Dobbis offered me the
chair in front of the mirrored dressing table.

There was a piano against the opposite wall, where Vicci
seated himself. Dobbis perched on the edge of a sofa, while Mike and
Mercer remained standing.

"There aren't many windows in this joint," Mike said. "What
are we looking out at?"

Except for the five glass arches that faced the plaza, the Met
seemed completely encased in its marble skin.

"That's Amsterdam Avenue behind me," Dobbis said. "It's
actually the only window that opens in the entire building. Rudolf Bing
was the general manager when the company moved to Lincoln Center back
in 1966. His favorite diva was Renata Tebaldi, and she wanted fresh air
whenever she sang. So, voila, a window."

Dobbis thought Mike was interested in the history of the
house, but I knew he was only studying means of entering or exiting the
building.

"You mind getting up off that sofa?" Mike said, motioning to
the director and then speaking to Mercer. "Let's get this sill dusted
and see if there are any footprints on the couch."

Mike picked up the phone on the wall next to the piano.

"That's just an intercom, detective. You can't ring out,"
Dobbis said. "The stage manager calls in to give the artist her cue.
It's a three-minute walk to the wings from this room, almost six to get
to stage left for an entrance."

Mercer turned to the door and called back to Mike. "You want
the guys from the Crime Scene Unit to come down and process this next?"

"Yeah."

"Easier for me to see what they're up to."

"So what's the story with this guy Joe Berk?" Mike asked as
Mercer walked out. "How'd you know he was in here with her last night?"

"The Wizard? He'd be hard to miss."

"Wizard of what?"

"That's what he likes to call himself. The Wizard of the Great
White Way."

"More like a lizard," Rinaldo Vicci said. "The venomous kind."

"What does Berk do?" Mike asked. "He's a producer?"

Chet Dobbis laughed. "Joe Berk owns Broadway. That's what he
really does. Everything else flows from that."

"You gotta explain that to me. How does somebody
own
Broadway?"

"The theaters themselves, detective. There are four families
in New York that control every single one of the legitimate theaters."