Linda Fairstein - Death Dance

Kehoe reached out with the gun and tapped me on the arm. "Left. Go left."

Dobbis was standing still. I looked back and forth between the two men but couldn't figure the dynamic. Dobbis seemed as much a prisoner as I did, but he obeyed Kehoe's command immediately and walked the way he was directed.

I expected Mike and Mercer to emerge out of the doors beside the stage within seconds. The sound of our voices would certainly alert them that we were still in the auditorium.

"The detectives will be flooding the place any minute, Chet."

"Shut up, bitch," Kehoe said, slapping the back of my head with his hand. I coughed and bent over, turning to look at him. Dobbis walked on. Kehoe kept licking his lips with his tongue, then twisting it into the side of his mouth, making a sucking sound as irritating as a phonograph needle sliding across an old vinyl record. I'd heard that disgusting noise when he assaulted me last night.

"I told you to move," he said.

I didn't wait to be hit again. I didn't know whether it was good for me-or very bad-that Ross Kehoe's anxiety seemed to be building, almost as much as mine.

There was a second staircase, not quite as wide as the one that led up from the lobby, and Kehoe told Dobbis to take it. "I have lots more time than that, don't I, Chet?" Kehoe asked. "I mean, don't you think the lady's an optimist?"

Were they in this together or not? I couldn't tell.

I kept talking, thinking my words would echo below in the great space of the open theater and that someone would be able hear me sooner or later. "What does he mean, Chet?" I asked.

The steps became more narrow and steep as we climbed behind the second balcony, several hundred seats held aloft by the largest steel beam in the world.

"Tell her. You can tell her," Kehoe said with a laugh, again followed by that awful sucking sound, some kind of nervous reflex that got exercised more frequently when he was stressed.

The gun was still to my back, Kehoe playing with it from time to time, running the metal tip up and down my spine whenever I had to stop to wait for Dobbis. I walked behind him through a doorway and into the balcony area, high above the stage. Another left turn and we were going up more stairs, narrower still, to the very back of the last row of seats in the theater.

Dobbis stopped on the highest step to catch his breath. "When this place, Mecca Temple, was built in the 1920s, it was lit entirely with gas jets. And because they needed the gaslight and torches backstage to help the actors get around when the shows were on, and to light the stage itself, the designers had to be creative about ways to prevent fire from spreading."

I looked down toward the stage, but even in the darkness, the height from these narrow steps and the incredibly steep rake of the upper balcony made the view dizzying. I grabbed the brass railing and held on to it.

Dobbis pointed to the steel trap of a curtain that had cut me off from Mercer and Mike. "The idea here was to be able to transform the stage-in the case of fire-into a chimney, to separate it completely from the seats in order to protect the audience. The flames would be confined to the stage and shoot straight up, while the people in the audience would be safe. They'd have time to escape."

I steadied myself and continued to look for any sign of life below. Dobbis went on. "The curtain was made of asbestos originally. Replaced by steel." He stopped talking and closed his eyes. "This firewall is impenetrable."

Kehoe prodded me to walk again. I clutched the railing so that I wouldn't lose my footing and fall, as we made our way against the red velvet drapes behind the last row of seats. Not far above my head was the ornate ceiling, with elaborate Arabic designs outlined in brilliant gold leaf that seemed to glow in the dark, like the perforated stars that sat recessed into the ceiling beside the unlit chandeliers.

I had to turn sideways to shimmy between the heavy drapery and the last row of seats. "What does that have to do with-"

Dobbis was clutching the seatback of a chair, slowly putting one foot ahead of the other, since he barely fit in the narrow space. "It means that when we redesigned the theater, in order to fireproof the building against an accident or an electrical fire backstage, we did it so that with a single button, the manager could isolate the stage completely. The steel curtain drops in three seconds flat-"

"I think she caught that, didn't she?" Kehoe said, mocking Dobbis.

"There's only another five seconds for anyone onstage to get off when that happens. But then the steel sides and rear drop-and if you don't know they're coming-you get caught in there, just the way your cops did. It's like a giant steel trap."

"But he got out." I was referring to Ross Kehoe, as I grasped the seatbacks and followed Dobbis's baby steps, coming to an abrupt stop behind him as he reached a cement setback in the middle of the row.

"You remember the way, Chet, don't you? Take those stairs."

"I can't see anything, damn it. You should go ahead of me."

Kehoe laughed. "You could probably scale your way up the side of the Grand Canyon or the top of Everest and you're telling me you can't climb up there? Four more steps, Chet. Feel your way."

Chet Dobbis leaned over the opening and crawled. Kehoe squeezed behind me as I followed Dobbis, still hearing no noise, no sign of rescuers, coming from below.

Kehoe padded like a panther in the darkness, familiar with his surroundings and secure in his footing.

"They'll get out, too," I said, sounding no more confident than I felt. "Soon."

Chet Dobbis was at the top, reaching out a hand for me to stand up in the dusty confines of a storeroom full of antiquated stage lighting equipment. "It won't be that easy for them, Miss Cooper. If I had to make an educated guess, I'd say Ross has sealed the whole place off. Killed all the electricity down there. In half an hour, it has an automatic disengage system built in, but thirty minutes is a long time to wait."

Kehoe pushed me aside and lined up behind us. There was a slice of a footpath between stacks of plywood scenery that had been left leaning against walls and cardboard cartons that were labeled with show titles, costumes and props abandoned on top of them.

"They've got cell phones," I said, remembering that Laura had not gotten one to replace mine before I left the office this afternoon.

"Easier to get through from outer space than from inside that metal enclosure," Dobbis said. "Nobody knows that better than Ross."

"Why?" I asked. "Why does Ross know?"

"'Cause that was my job, girl," Kehoe said, sneering at me, the same irritating noise coming from his lips. "You kept asking me what I did for Joe, didn't you? You think I'm some kind of jerk, don't you?"

Another door for Dobbis to open. Another step into a black chamber, like the poor man's equivalent of entering Tut's tomb. Once again my eyes gradually became accustomed to the greater darkness; the room was piled from top to bottom with theatrical treasures, if not the golden objects of a boy king.

Dobbis was feeling his way through the mess, his movement slowed by the overflow of old sets that were in his way.

"You didn't give me credit for being so smart, did you, Alex?" Again Kehoe clutched my neck with his bare hand, trying to shake an answer out of me. I could feel the calloused skin, the strong grip of a man who had labored as a stagehand for years before being rescued by Mona Berk from his working-class surroundings.

Kehoe squeezed tighter.

I had nothing to say. I hadn't seen a moment's chance to break away on this trek, and now I seemed to have lost the ability to resist against his brute force.

"Joe did. Joe Berk did. Saw me working backstage when I was just getting started. Still a teenager, brought in by my uncle, trying to get into the carpenters' union. Move it, Chet. One more door there, then up a flight. Don't you remember?"