Linda Fairstein - Death Dance

I walked in and turned on the light. No one was inside, so I opened the door for Mike and Mercer.

We went to the showers to reexamine the room using a flashlight that Mike had brought in from the car. There was a small recess above the molding in the opposite wall and it looked like a hole had been drilled in to support the kind of microcamera that Mike and Mercer were familiar with from their surveillance cases.

"You want Crime Scene to take some pictures of these spots, don't you?" Mike asked. "They've got to do it before Vito comes in tomorrow to dig behind it and see where the wiring goes."

"I already called. They're not going to come out on a job like this tonight. They've got their hands full with a homicide in Inwood and a drug raid that turned into a shoot-out. They told me to secure it till morning," Mercer said. "They'll have a crew here first thing, and they can document whatever Vito finds."

"Can we close it off?"

"Yeah. Before Stan left for the night, he got me the janitor. Soon as we're done he's going to lock it and put up one of their 'out of order' signs on it. That should work. I'll call him when we get downstairs," Mercer said as we started back to the elevator.

"You know Merriam? Frankie Merriam?"

"Heavyset red-faced guy from Staten Island?" Mercer asked.

"Map of Ireland on his mug-that's the guy. We gotta bring you up to date on what he says about Ross Kehoe."

"So let's go grab some dinner. What we need to do is sit down and sort out all these pieces. What's close by?"

"Michael's," I said. "On Fifty-fifth Street, a block away."

The restaurant was a favorite of literary lions and media heavy-weights, but it was after eight thirty, so we'd be able to nab a table in the quiet garden room in the rear.

"Walk back the cat," Mike said.

"What?"

"That's what the three of us have to do. Walk back the cat."

"What do you mean?"

"Military intelligence, Coop. Spook-speak. Say somebody shoots the king or blows up the embassy. After it happens the cat walkers go back and look at all the intelligence they had before the event, apply the stuff they know after the fact to whatever happened. Uncover the moles, find the motive."

"I'm for that. We know a hell of a lot more than we did before the weekend. Did Mike tell you that I swear I saw Chet Dobbis coming into this building when we pulled into the block?" I asked Mercer.

"No, but now that explains what Ms. Schiller's secretary was waiting around for while I was hanging out for you."

The elevator doors opened on the ground floor as Mercer continued. "One of the other secretaries came by so they could walk to the subway together, and I heard her say she was staying late, waiting for Mr. D to get here. She had to let him into the theater before she left. Some kind of proposal he was working on. It never occurred to me they were talking about Dobbis."

"So that's only ten minutes ago?"

"Yeah."

"Let's check the theater. What the hell is he coming back here for-and at night, when no one's around?"

Instead of turning right toward the security desk, we retraced our steps through the narrow hallway, piled deep with soon-to-be-discarded equipment that we had navigated earlier in the day. The heavy door that separated the office tower from the original Mecca Temple building was open, and the three of us threaded our way behind the mezzanine seats, our footsteps padded by the thick carpeting of traditional Moorish design that covered the entire space.

The vast auditorium was darkened, except for a few rays of light that came from off to the side of stage right. I could hear a man's voice from the pit below, and we all stopped so that Mercer, the tallest of us, could peer down from the steep rake of the balcony to see who was speaking.

He motioned us to the top of the staircase and whispered, "It's Dobbis. His back is to us so I can't hear what he's saying, but it looks like he's talking to someone in the wings."

We continued down the wide staircase from the old Shriners' lounge, descending to the rear of the once-elegant lobby of the old theater. The doors leading to the street were all locked and covered with metal grating, while those that accessed the auditorium were closed over.

Mike put his finger to his lips and led us down the side of a corridor that abutted the theater. It seemed to be taking us as near to the stage, to the front of the orchestra, as we could get before revealing ourselves to Dobbis.

On a signal to each other, Mike and Mercer pulled open the two doors that stood catty-corner in the cul-de-sac of the hallway. Mike took the one that led toward the stage and I was behind Mercer as he moved into the auditorium toward Chet Dobbis.

"What the-" The startled Met director stepped back and dropped into a front-row seat, beneath the glistening white-and-gold detail of the ceiling that shone against the dimly lighted house. "I'm so thankful you're here."

At the same moment, I heard someone running behind the black-curtained area in the wings. I looked from Dobbis, whose sincerity I doubted at this point, back to the source of the footsteps.

Mike streaked across the middle of the stage in pursuit of the shadowed figure, and Mercer doubled back out the door we had entered together and up the steps to join in the chase.

I started toward Chet Dobbis to ask the reason for his gratitude when the theater went completely dark. The thick gray steel fire curtain dropped from the fly down to the floorboards with the alacrity of the blade of a guillotine.

Dobbis stood up and I could see the silhouette of his body moving in my direction as I turned back to the exit to push it open. "Miss Cooper, wait!"

I yelled Mike's name and let the door slam on Dobbis as I entered the dead-ended corridor. It was too dark there to see anything except the shiny silver barrel of a revolver that was pointed at my face.

The man holding the gun was Ross Kehoe.

At the instant he started to speak to me, Dobbis barged through the door, which smacked against my back and knocked me into the wall.

Kehoe grabbed my neck with his left hand and pressed the gun barrel to the side of my head, just below my right ear. "Walk, both of you. That way. Lead her, Chet, if you don't want me to blow her brains out all over your back."

The icy feel of the cold metal bore against my skin sent a chill through my body. I twitched involuntarily and Kehoe tightened his grasp on the nape of my neck.

This was the gloved hand that had clamped on me from behind in the darkened stairwell of my building last night, only now I could feel the rough surface of his thick fingers pinching my smooth skin.

"Don't fight me. You won't win this one," Kehoe said as he pushed me ahead of him. His voice was harsher now, more guttural than it had been in Mona Berk's presence. This was Ross Kehoe, street thug and stagehand, before she had tried to gentrify him. Why hadn't I thought of him when I was jumped from behind in the dark, his lean, sinewy body a perfect match for the masked man in black?

Dobbis moved quickly along the darkened corridor and out the door into the lobby. Ross Kehoe told him to head up the steps, so he began to climb the broad staircase first. I looked over at the grating that barred the exit doors but could see nothing toward which I could make a successful run. "Move, Alex. Follow him up."

Kehoe growled his commands at me. He freed my neck so that I could go up behind Dobbis, but the gun barrel nudged at my back with each riser I mounted.

I started to turn right at the top of the stairs, toward the door that led to the adjacent office tower, the one through which Mike, Mercer, and I had entered the back of the theater. But that wasn't the way Kehoe planned to take us.