Linda Fairstein - Death Dance

" City Center?"

"The City Center of Music and Drama, Ms. Cooper. Next time you have tickets for a show, stand across the street and crane your neck to look up to the very top of the building, maybe twelve or fourteen stories high. You can still see the words Mecca Temple carved into the facade."

I have stood on the sidewalk at the entrance to City Center scores of times since my first childhood visits and never once noticed the carved letters so far overhead.

"But it's-it's been a theater for longer than I've been alive. Before Lincoln Center was built, it was home to the New York City Ballet and Opera." I was taken aback at the thought that this cultural treasure had a history that wasn't familiar to me-and, I was sure, to many other theatergoers.

Mike wanted to leave for the building at once. He walked to Laura's desk to use her phone, and when I heard him ask for the desk sergeant at Midtown North-the precinct just a few short blocks from City Center-I knew he was calling to send a patrolman around the corner to examine and report back on the shape and design of the doorknobs in the old showplace.

"I can't believe I never knew about that."

"It's ancient history, Ms. Cooper. Does it interest you?"

I tried to keep Alden chatting without letting him know that the reason for my heightened interest was because of a possible link to our investigation. I've studied dance all my life. I see the Ailey Dance Company there every year, and, of course, it's where American Ballet Theater does their fall series. And all the Broadway revivals they stage-who doesn't know City Center?"

"Then I must arrange for you to meet the director. I'm sure you two would be sympatica-she's a brilliant young lawyer who also used to dance. Arlette Schiller, do you know her?"

"I don't," I said, one eye on Mike as he reentered the room. "But I'd certainly like the introduction."

"So how long was Mecca actually Mecca?" Mike asked.

"The temple opened in 1923, with grand wizards and potentates from all over the country. Quite an engineering marvel it was, this massive sandstone cube topped by its extraordinary dome. The main steel girder that supports the balcony is the longest one ever used in New York City still to this day-six stories tall if you were to lay it on end-delivered by ship to the harbor and snaked uptown on a caravan of trucks."

"But just for Shriners?"

"Originally, detective, yes. There was the auditorium, of course. It's right around the corner from Carnegie Hall, as you know. But even back then, no one was allowed to smoke at Carnegie Hall. Since cigar smoking was a big part of the lodge activities, the auditorium was built with all sorts of huge exhaust fans in it, to accommodate the practice as well as to help draw stage business away from Carnegie. Mecca 's theatrical section seated almost five thousand people, if you can imagine that so long ago. The rest of the shrine's rooms-banquet halls, lodgings, ceremonial shrines-well, they were all quite private."

"So what happened to the place?" Mike asked.

"First came the Crash of Twenty-nine, and then the Great Depression. It was no better for the Shriners than for anyone else in the country. Even though they considered themselves a philanthropic organization, they couldn't claim a tax exemption because they rented the auditorium to outside groups. By the late 1930s, the banks foreclosed on the loans that had been used to build Mecca."

"So the mosque went into bankruptcy?"

"It did indeed, after a very short life. Sat empty like a forlorn Arabian palace in the middle of this urban landscape. Before all the sky-scrapers went up in midtown, you could see that fantastic dome from miles away in every direction. The government got the property by tax foreclosure and put the building up for auction in 1942."

"Who bought it?"

Alden smiled. "The City of New York itself turned out to be the highest bidder. Stole the place, even by the standards of those days, for one hundred thousand dollars. The claim on it was more than six times that amount. It was the genius of LaGuardia."

"What?" Mike asked.

"Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. The rest of the politicians wanted to tear the building down and replace it with a parking lot."

"Except for LaGuardia?"

"Yes, he'd long had the idea to create a great municipal theater, with cheap tickets so that the arts could be more available to the ordinary citizen. He didn't want it to be like New York 's commercial theaters, so he aimed to build a constituency made up of colleges and schools, philanthropic and professional groups. The mayor wanted shows to start at five thirty in the evening so people could come straight from work, save the train and bus fare. He had some wonderful ideas to support the performing arts in New York."

"And let them be more accessible than Broadway?"

"By far, Ms. Cooper. When City Center opened, you could sit in the balcony for thirty-five cents or pay top dollar-literally, a dollar ten-for the orchestra. Broadway seats cost three times as much."

My phone rang and Laura answered it, buzzing the intercom. Mike reached over and picked it up. "Yeah, sarge?"

He listened for a few seconds and hung up the phone. "No doubt about it. This time M is for Mecca."

"I'm quite pleased I could help you solve your puzzle, detective. Anything…?"

"When's the last time you were there, Mr. Alden?"

His forehead wrinkled and his dark, thick eyebrows met as one. "It's been weeks, Mr. Chapman. Several weeks."

"Exactly when?"

"Look, if you're back to playing 'gotcha' again, I'd obviously prefer to check my office diary."

"Why'd you go?"

Alden looked to me. "They have this wonderful Encore series- Broadway shows."

I knew the series, which had proved to be enormously successful for the center year after year.

"It was a performance of Bye, Bye, Birdie . That's amusing, come to think of it."

Mike was too focused on Lucy DeVore posed in someone's fez, leaning on a door handle in the Mecca Theater, to be easily amused. "How so?"

"Birdie was really the first musical to bring rock'n'roll to Broadway."

"Spare me the lyrics. Coop's likely to break into a dance. What of it?"

"There's a scene in the show where the characters go into the wrong room and break up a Shriners' meeting. Remember that?"

I didn't.

"Tarbooshes and flying tassels everywhere. I'm sure there are plenty of them in wardrobe over at City Center. You don't need to see mine."

The one on Lucy's head had distinctive markings. A crescent and scimitar-whose meaning I now understood-over some Arabic design. We'd be able to tell whether it was a costume from a Broadway performance or the real deal from an antique mosque.

"How about backstage, Mr. Alden? You been backstage lately?"

Again the man's brow furrowed as he tried, it seemed to me, to second-guess the direction Mike Chapman was going before he supplied an answer.

"I've been backstage dozens of times, detective. I'm a-"

"Yeah, I know. You're a friggin' patron of the friggin' arts. I've bought more beers at Yankee Stadium than you've got Playbills, but it doesn't get me in the locker room to pose for pictures with the boys after the game. Dancers. You been backstage here lately with any of the ladies?"

Mike was losing the bigger picture to close in on the image of Lucy DeVore. Hubert Alden had no idea where Mike was headed.

"Upstairs, certainly."

"Whaddaya mean? In the balcony?"

"No, no. There are nine or ten floors of studios in the office tower behind the auditorium, Mr. Chapman. Some of the most spectacular dance studios in the city are housed there, rented out to many of the companies for rehearsal space."

"And you've been up in there recently? Where exactly?"