Death Dance (8 page)

"You mean, like the Shuberts?" I asked.

"Exactly. The Shuberts, the Nederlanders, the Jujamcyns, and
the Berks. There are thirty-five Broadway theaters. You want to bring a
show to town? You got the next
Cats
or
Phantom
in your back pocket? Nothing happens unless you get through to the head
hon-cho of one of these families. There are nice guys and smart guys
and decent guys in this business, and then there's Joe Berk."

"What's his relationship with Ms. Galinova?" Mike asked.

Vicci wanted to do the spin on this. "Joe has been courting my
client, but strictly in the professional sense," he said, rolling his
r's for what he must have thought was dramatic effect. "He's got an
idea for a project that she might be able to star in."

Dobbis interrupted him. "Rinaldo, you're talking to the
police. Try telling the truth, for a change."

"Why don't you give him a hand?"

"The fact is that it's Talya who's been chasing after Joe
Berk, Mr. Chapman. She's gotten to the age when most dancers have to
give some thought to the next phase of their careers. By the time these
ladies reach forty, it becomes harder and harder to convince an
audience they're a fourteen-year-old Juliet or an adolescent sleeping
beauty. And the injuries—the injuries really take their toll
on their feet and knees and hips."

"Broadway?"

"That's what she's been exploring," Dobbis said. "Talya is as
stunning an actress as she is a ballerina. The Russian accent's a bit
thick for a lot of roles, but that hasn't stopped her from trying to
develop ideas. She's ready for a star turn that would introduce her to
millions more people who don't have the first clue about ballet.
Popular culture for the masses, rather than an elite crowd."

"And Berk?" Mike asked.

"The way I see it," Dobbis said, "she thought seduction was
the best way to audition."

Vicci was unhappy. "You've got no business saying that, Chet.
I know everything that goes on in Talya's life and there's nothing at
all to that gossip."

"How old is Berk?" Mike asked.

"Seventy-four."

"Vigorous?"

"Overweight, but as strong as he is tough. He's got a
stranglehold on Broadway real estate," said Dobbis. "No reason he
couldn't have one on a human being."

"And you say he was here last night?"

"Not in the house. Not in the audience, I mean."

"Wasn't he coming to see Talya?"

"He was late for the second act," Rinaldo Vicci said. "The
Met's policy—maybe you know it—is you can't be
seated once the performance has started. They've got—how you
call it?—a little auditorium offstage right where you can
watch it on a big screen. Berk had a fit."

"Why?" I asked.

"He doesn't like crowds. It's not in his nature to sit there
with the tardy bridge-and-tunnel folk, looking at the action on a
monitor," Dobbis said. "That's how I found out he was in the dressing
room. Bullied his way in past the ushers—made a scene doing
it—and waited for Talya to get offstage."

"The fight?"

"She was peeved that he hadn't bothered to get there in time
to watch her dance."

"He likes ballet?" Mike asked.

"Berk doesn't like anything until it makes the cash jingle in
his pocket. I think he's used to something with catchy lyrics to keep
him awake during the show."

"His antics with the ushers," I said to Dobbis, "and then the
argument with a diva, didn't they get everyone's attention?"

"The staff expects a few nasty latecomers most evenings, Ms.
Cooper. Once they realized he wasn't an autograph hound, Berk's tiff
with them blew over. And any arguments between Talya and
Berk—or anyone else who crossed her—well, the
acoustics in this building are extraordinary, maybe the best in the
world. There's not a corner, not a ninety-degree angle inside the Opera
House. The ceiling and wall panels are rounded so that sound bounces
off and back into the theater."

"But I'm talking about outside the auditorium."

"The rest of the building is made up of scores of soundproofed
compartments. It has to be, if you think about it. Stagehands are
moving around enormous pieces of scenery and equipment—even
in the middle of a performance—while singers and musicians
are rehearsing in studios throughout the building, and other artists
are practicing," he said, tapping the top of the piano, "often until
the moment they walk to the stage. You aren't supposed to be able to
hear anything else from anywhere else behind the scenes."

"So Talya could have been—"

"Having a tantrum? No way for me to know."

"Then how come you told me that?" Mike asked. "That was part
of the first information from the scratch that came in last night."

"The masseur called it to my attention. I was already aware of
the brouhaha about Berk storming back to the dressing area to wait for
the end of the act. Talya got there and threw the poor man out of the
room, then began her tirade at Berk."

"A masseur in her dressing room in the middle of a ballet?"
Mike asked. "Coop, you're in the wrong line of work. What's his name
and when can we talk to him?"

"You'll have it. You'll have whatever you need."

"Did anyone see Berk leave the theater?"

Vicci and Dobbis looked at each other. "No one's mentioned it
to me,"" the agent said. "But we haven't exactly been concerned about
him, to tell you the truth."

Mercer opened the door and signaled to Mike and me to come out
into the hallway. I had seen him at crime scenes and hospital bedsides,
in courtrooms and prison holding pens. There was no facial expression
of Mercer's that I couldn't read. This one broadcast bad news.

"It's Natalya," I said.

"Let's get up there before the whole area is compromised," he
said, shaking his head.

"If you hadn't ramped up this search like you did, Mike? They
wouldn't have found her till summer."

"Where?"

"You'd have to know this place as well as the guys who built
it."

Mike started walking to the bank of elevators behind stage
right. "What floor?"

"They're up on six. Like a roof—"

"The roof's on ten," Mike said, a fact seared in the memory of
a ten-year-old boy.

"It's an enclosure then, with a walkway that leads outside,
over a great square pit. It's where the air-conditioning units
are—with fans bigger than I am."

What better to mute the sounds of a final struggle.

We were there in less than four minutes, precinct detectives
and uniformed rookies stepping aside and pressing their backs against
the dirty gray walls as they saw Mike Chapman approach, everything
about him signifying the arrival of a homicide cop who had come to take
over control of the grim corridor.

The closer we got to the rampart that led outside, the bellow
from the giant rotors made it more impossible to hear conversation. The
pipes seemed to be vibrating as the monstrous blades circulated air and
blew it up at us.

"What's the drop?" Mike asked a janitor who had apparently
made the discovery and was standing closest to the opening.

"Thirty feet, easy."

Mike stepped down onto the rim of the fan pit—a
platform a couple of feet wide—and was followed by Mercer,
who held out a hand for me. I wanted to clutch one of the black pipes
to steady myself, but knew they might hold trace evidence of value.

I glanced over the edge and at first saw only the blackness
below. It took seconds for my eyes to adjust to the dark as my body
braced against the roaring blasts from the giant fan blades.

Even as the soot whirled around me, I could see the flash of a
white tulle costume lifting with the current, revealing the motionless,
broken body of Natalya Galinova, wedged into the remote corner of the
filthy air shaft.

The janitor led us down to the third floor, through the
electrical shop and the multistory paint bridges where crews of workers
were constructing scenery, back to the interior point within the
building where the air shaft bottomed out.

Only Mike, Mercer, and I entered the narrow passageway. The
air circulation system had been turned off at Mike's direction and he
led us in to check for any signs of life while we waited for someone
from the medical examiner's office to make the decision about how to
move Talya.

Mike kneeled at the wire-mesh cage, shining a torch-size
flashlight into the hole, trying to get as close to her body as he
could.

I flinched when the beam found Talya's head. Not much of it
was intact. It didn't matter how many corpses I'd seen. The moment
never got easier.

Mike was talking to Mercer, framing a description like the
ones he'd heard week after week as he stood witness at the autopsy
table in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. "Probably a circular
fracture of the cranial vault. Can you see that split through the
hairline?"

The long, fine strands of Talya's hair were plastered against
her scalp. She had gone into the shaft headfirst, it appeared, her neck
twisted under the weight of her slim body.

The skull was actually split in pieces, looking like the
blood-stained map of an intersection of five major highways.

Mercer differentiated the injury from a depressed skull
fracture, the kind that occurs when an object crushes a small area of
the head. "Must have been alive when she was thrown over."

The circular fractures radiated out from the point of impact,
aggravated by the velocity of the dancer's descent and the height of
the drop.

Blood was everywhere, pooled beneath Talya's ear and
splattered all over the satin torso of her costume.

"You see her arms?" Mercer asked.

"Looks like they're behind her. Probably tied."

The legs that had been so distinctly Galinova's—long
and lean, well muscled and with extension that had been remarked upon
by every reviewer since her debut in Moscow more than twenty years
earlier—were visible from beneath the ripped tulle skirt. The
left one was twisted inward, the knee apparently knocked out of its
joint as it bounced off the wall of the shaft. The right one, closer to
us, seemed broken in half at the calf, the bone protruding through the
Lycra tights that covered Talya's leg. There was no toe shoe on that
foot, as there appeared to be on the other.

Mike moved the light like a wand, up and down the lines of the
body, looking for any other marks or signs of injuries unrelated to the
fall.

Behind me I could hear the voices of new arrivals. "Chapman?
We're comin' in."

"Move it, Coop. That's Emergency Services."

I backed out of the space and greeted the crew from ESU. They
were lugging just about every kind of device that could be imagined to
cut through the metal grating.

While I listened to them work their way into the small
cell—the caged area above the giant fan—that held
Talya Galinova, one of the death-scene investigators appeared to do a
cursory study of the body, declare the matter a homicide, and supervise
the delicate removal of the remains to the basement of the morgue.