Linda Fairstein - Death Dance

"No other exits?"

"Nothing up here. One way in, one way out. I'm sure of that."

"How about the firewall on the stage? Doesn't that set off an alarm to nine-one-one?"

"It was meant to, but not if Ross disabled it when he pulled the plug on the power and lights down there. He seems to have a separate system of his own in here."

If an escape tactic wouldn't work, I needed to know why Ross Kehoe had called Dobbis to the theater tonight. I needed to know if there was any deal we could try to make with him and with Mona Berk to let us out alive.

"What does Kehoe want with you?"

He looked over at Ross and Mona, who seemed to be arguing with each other.

"I was stupid enough to believe him when he called me to come over tonight. Told me that Mona had an offer for me, wanted to give me a piece of a new production if I'd give them some advice in exchange."

Dobbis picked up his head and I could see tears in his eyes. "I should have known he'd be setting me up for something."

I leaned toward him. "But for what? Do you know what that is?"

"He's going to kill me if we don't do something. He'll kill both of us."

I didn't need a road map to figure that out. Every theater had its ghosts, and we were on our way to joining the cast of this one.

"I understand you. Why, though? I'm just a product of bad timing tonight. Why you?"

"He was setting me up to take the weight for Talya's murder when you and your team walked in," Dobbis said, pulling in his breath to regain his composure.

"Did you?"

"No, dammit. Nothing to do with it."

"Joe Berk? Or was it Ross Kehoe?"

"Talya knew about Joe's game. She knew he had a fetish for young girls, for taping them while they were undressing or makinglove or showering. Watching them is what aroused him, especially when they didn't know-they couldn't know-that anyone could see what they were doing. Mostly he liked to look at them when he was home alone. Sometimes when the company he was keeping wasn't enough to do the trick for him."

"She knew because he did it to her?"

"Talya? She was too old for Joe. But she caught him at home with tapes of the young dancers. Videos of the girls in the showers and in the rehearsal studios who didn't know they were being filmed, and other kids who liked to perform for him, maybe right here in this room-happy to be photographed from a distance, happy that he couldn't touch them."

"How do you know?" I asked, thinking how right Battaglia had been to ask me whether Joe Berk was a paraphile.

"Because Talya told me. She didn't like me a lot, ever since we'd stopped being lovers years ago. But she trusted me-she always trusted me."

"What did she tell you?"

"Talya wasn't very good at it, but she was trying to blackmail Joe. Trying to use that information to get herself a boatload of money- or a starring role in Joe's next big hit. I guess she wanted me to know in case Joe did something to threaten her. She wasn't thinking of murder or anything like that, I can assure you. But Talya was aware that if her plan backfired, Joe would have the power to make her life miserable."

"Do you think Joe paid Ross to kill Talya that night at the Met?"

"I'm tired of thinking. It's not going to help us any to think at this point," Dobbis said, raising his bound hands to his face and rubbing across his eyes as best he could. "I should have been using my brain for the last week, while you and your detectives had me in your sights instead of Kehoe and Berk."

"You were all in our sights, Chet. Every one of you. That's how it works till we're able to break down the information we've got. Maybe if you'd told us how much you knew about Talya, back then. Maybe if you let us know about Talya and what was going on in her relationship with Berk. There's a lot you've said just now that could have helped us last week."

I despised his self-pitying whining. If he hadn't lied to Mercer and Mike, if he hadn't withheld what he knew about Talya and about Joe Berk, we wouldn't be together in this bizarre crypt that was unlikely to be opened until the next renovation, maybe fifty years from now.

"I didn't know enough to tell you anything. It was only tonight, only a minute or two before you walked into the theater, that Ross bragged to me about killing Joe Berk."

"Today? He told you that he killed Joe today?"

Chet Dobbis threw back his head and looked up at the sliver of sky above us. "No, no, no. You still don't get it, do you? Ross Kehoe killed Joe Berk last Sunday night, right in front of the Belasco Theatre."

I wasn't walking back the cat anymore, I was running with him.

Ross Kehoe-Joe's trusted employee, his driver, the genius with every kind of electrical equipment. That day at the Imperial Theatre, moments before he walked Lucy behind the curtain to put her up on the swing, it was Ross Kehoe who stood on the stage, directing the guy in charge of the lighting to give him something cooler, to bring down the brightness. Why didn't Mike or I realize then that Kehoe had a specialty, an area of expertise that had all to do with electricity?

Last night, when the lights went out in my home, when someone broke into or scammed his way into the building and shut down the power in the A line of apartments, why didn't I think of Kehoe's electrical prowess when I racked my brain for possible suspects connected to the investigation?

And when Joe Berk stepped on a manhole that was wired to jolt him into the great beyond, why didn't any of us figure that the man who used to chauffeur him would know exactly where to park the car, know exactly what sewer cover Joe would step on when he came out of his apartment to get across the street to go to dinner with his wayward son? How easy for someone with Kehoe's ability to cut the wrapping on the insulation in the power box-just minutes before Berk and his son left the Belasco to go to dinner-in order to mimic the tragic accidents that had electrocuted unsuspecting pedestrians in Manhattan in years past.

Of course Briggs had told Mona about the dinner plans. Of course Kehoe had the opportunity to stage-what had the ME called it?-an "electrical event" and wait in the wings, on the dark street, to make sure Joe Berk was his only victim.

So Joe Berk had been meant to die last Sunday, just two nights after Natalya Galinova's murder. And shortly after his beloved Briggs had dropped the lawsuit against him, hoping for reconciliation. It was Briggs who had been escorting Joe out to the car on their way to dinner that evening, and undoubtedly Briggs and Mona who had been partners with Ross in Joe Berk's skillful execution.

None of them had counted on Joe's ninth life, short as it was.

Chet Dobbis was also sweating profusely. "Joe Berk's accidental death was supposed to put an end to your investigation."

"How? Why would-"

"Ross made that much clear to me tonight. Talya was killed on Friday. She and Joe were in the middle of a tempest-had been for days-fighting and feuding quite publicly. He missed her performance that night but showed up in her dressing room."

Everything Dobbis said so far made sense.

"She disappeared at the Met that very evening. The best Joe could do was say his driver would vouch for him. Even an idiot knows that one of Joe's employees would swear to anything to keep his job. That's worthless in a court of law."

Dobbis was right. The chauffeur was always a lousy alibi.

"Joe's glove was found near Talya's body. That's what Ross told me. He said he heard it from Joe. Is it true?"

I nodded my head. A glove with Joe Berk's DNA on it-and a good chance now that the other skin cells on the surface would soon be matched to Ross Kehoe, whose profile was in the linkage database from the earlier homicide investigation on Staten Island. All the information in that database that had been rendered useless-paralyzed for the time being-after I appeared in court last week on the Ramon Carido case before Judge McFarland.