Linda Fairstein - Death Dance

"You know more than you're telling me."

"I always know more than you give me credit for, kid, don't I?"

"I'll give you an acknowledgment in my next legal brief. What is it?"

"It doesn't take a law degree to know that the source for all the electricity in the building comes in through the basement. The basement is accessible from within the building, isn't it?"

I nodded. "From the garage, too. And from the outside, although I assume those doors are locked at night. It's huge. There's a storage room, a laundry room. I've never even been inside the custodial area."

"Working a toaster oven is high tech for you," Mike said. "Once inside that boiler room, a guy with a few high school vocational classes under his belt could easily find the main electrical panel that connects to the A-line apartments and with not much more than a pair of needle-nose pliers, put you and anyone else he wanted out of business for the night."

"And the elevator banks?" I asked. "Was the super really ordered to shut them down?"

"Yeah. You can smell the burnt rubber in the basement. They had to take that precaution with both banks of elevators."

"You believe there was a man after me, right?"

"I'd believe you if you told me you saw a UFO, kid. I'm not the enemy here," Mike said, steering me back to the living room sofa to sit down. "Face it. This building is a block long. You've got the north and south wings, two elevator banks for residents plus the freight elevator, and two sets of fire stairs. All your stalker had to do was make the place go dark, then walk up the staircase and wait for all the pigeons to come out of their cubbyholes. It's not the how that's hard to figure, it's the why."

"Security cameras?" the sergeant asked.

"Too snooty here," Mike said. "Management wanted them installed after an incident a few years back. Coop's neighbors were up in arms. Invasion of privacy and all that crap. No cameras."

"All he had to do after the attack," I said, "was go back up to one of the floors above me and walk across the hallway to the other side of the building-"

Mike took over from there. "Take off his mask and gloves, drop them and the black sweater in the garbage chute, and walk down and out like any other respectable citizen, unnoticed because of all the commotion that's going on in the lobby and outside the building."

"The CO has a man on each entrance of the building. Everybody passing through this morning will have to stop to be identified, residents or not," Camacho said.

"Can't wait till I get my eviction notice," I said. "Talk about a nuisance tenant."

"Give me your keys."

"What?"

"Your keys. I'm going to take the sergeant downstairs to see where things stand while you grab a few hours of that sleep you say you need. I'll let myself back in for a nap. Better than wallowing alone at home."

"Mike, I feel like-"

"The keys," he said, holding a hand up in my face to stop me from going on. "Rest up 'cause we got an early-morning meeting with Joe Berk."

"I'm not sure I have the fortitude for him first thing in the morning. He's so crude. You got something I don't know about?"

"I've been working on that photograph of Lucy DeVore. You know, the recent one, looks like it could have been taken since she got to New York."

"Wearing the fez, leaning on a doorknob with a word inscribed in the metal that begins with the initial M?"

"Yeah, that one. So first I stopped by the task force operation at the opera house. Not even close. There's nothing that looks like the same design or lettering on anything at the Met. So I got a list of the other legitimate theaters from one of the old-timers who works the box office, for all the Broadway houses that begin with M. I started at the Music Box."

"What a beauty, isn't it? It was designed to house musicals by Irving Berlin. That's why my father always loved to go there-reminded him of his childhood."

"Too delicate. Not a match. So I tried the Majestic."

"That one's huge."

"No good. Forever Phantom . Even threw in the Martin Beck. Nada. And there used to be a theater called the Morosco, the old broad told me, but it was demolished a long time ago."

"I can't think of any others."

"I couldn't, either. But the same dame told me about the Brooks Atkinson, whoever the hell he was."

"A critic. He wrote theater reviews for the Times ."

"Yeah, well, that was built back in the 1920s. And it was called the Mansfield then," Mike said, not even trying to suppress a smile. "Why you'd name anything for a critic is beyond me. I still thought it was worth checking out the original fixtures despite the change on the marquee."

"I take it you found your doorknob."

"Nope. But hanging in the theater lobby was a whole bunch of blowups of famous actors from forty, fifty years ago, celebrating at Sardi's after some kind of award show. In one of them, you can see Yul Brynner, Zero Mostel, and Richard Burton, each raising a glass, with Joe Berk smack in the middle of the group. And on top of his foul-mouthed fat head is the same, exact kind of tasseled red fez that Lucy DeVore was wearing in that photograph we found in her hotel room."

When we left my building in the morning, detectives were still canvassing neighbors, crime-scene technicians were going over the exits and basement for trace evidence, and the lobby was abuzz with curious tenants who wanted to know about all the police activity that they paid so dearly not to experience.

"Speed it up, blondie. You're getting the fish eye from the super," Mike said, pushing me through the revolving door and pointing to his department car, parked at the curb at the end of the driveway.

"Are we calling to say we're on the way? Seven thirty's a pretty unsociable hour for a drop-in."

"We'll get Berk's pump working early. Might be good for him."

We stopped in front of the Belasco, right opposite the manhole that had jolted Berk's heart just a week ago. Mike rang the buzzer of the apartment's front door and several minutes later, a woman's voice asked us to identify ourselves. It was a different private-duty nurse who admitted us to the office at the bottom of the winding staircase.

"Mr. Berk's having a bad morning. I can't allow you in without permission from his physician."

"I've got some medicine that might help him breathe a little better," Mike said, ignoring the white-capped sentry and climbing the wide steps two at a time.

I shrugged at the nurse and followed.

The patient's nile green satin pajamas had been replaced by a pair of magenta ones, but all else looked the same. Berk came shuffling out of the bathroom, wrapping the tie of the robe around his waist. He was obviously startled to see us in his bedroom.

"You're pariahs, both of you. What's left of me that you want this time? Here," he said, holding his arm straight out ahead of him, pushing up the sleeve. "My blood? Take it. C'mon, drain it out of me. Maybe I'll get a deduction for a charitable contribution."

Berk walked to his bed and settled himself back into it.

"You read the papers, Joe? Anything besides Variety and the stock ticker?"

"Why? You gonna give me a current-events quiz?"

"Ms. Cooper here indicted a doctor last week. That sicko was drugging women to knock them out in order to have sex with them."

Berk pulled the sheet up under his chin and looked over at me. "That your case? Quite a headline you got yourself. Your boss probably would have liked it better if you caught the guy."

There wasn't much Berk missed.

"But her boss did make an interesting point, Joe. The doctor liked to go to the movies. Foreign flicks and local ones, too. Apparently he preferred that to the stage, no offense to you. So he made his own. Filmed himself raping women who didn't have a clue what was happening to them. And that fact got District Attorney Battaglia kind of wondering about you, Joe-about-"