Death Dance (22 page)

"And then there's Berk's family," Mike said. "I could put on
some protective armor and get into that hornet's nest."

Peterson turned back to his temporary squad headquarters. "All
nice to know once we get past the most obvious likelihood. I've studied
the case file from the old Met murder case. The odds are pretty good
that Talya was a random pick—bumped into the wrong guy in a
deserted corridor or staircase, just like that doomed violinist. He
makes a pass, she rejects it, and he goes wild. A scenario Alex has
seen dozens of times before."

"You're right about that."

I frequently lectured to women's groups about sexual assault
and domestic violence. The question I was most often asked was whether
victims should offer resistance to an attacker, especially if he's
armed.

There are far too many variables to suggest answers that would
work in every situation, decisions that would have to be made by women
in the several seconds they had to assess the nature of the danger.

Sometimes, women with the confidence and strength to try to
counter the threat of force with a kick or punch or scream before
running would be able to prevent the completion of the assault. But all
too often I had seen an effort to struggle thwarted by a rapist who was
stronger than his prey and more prepared for the attempt, who became
more enraged by the resistance, escalating his force to a deadly level
to subdue his target. It was impossible to know yet whether that had
been the motive that led to Talya's death.

"The ME called me about the release of Galinova's body to this
guy—this—uh…"

"Her patron. Hubert Alden," Mike said.

"I kicked it over to you."

"We're dealing with it, loo," Mike said. "C'mon, kid. Let's
hit the road."

We left the building by the front door and walked to the car,
warmed by the bright April sunlight. Mike dialed the number for Alden's
office and asked the receptionist whether he was in town and might be
available for a meeting earlier than five o'clock.

"Depends on what?" he responded to her comment.

She didn't ask his purpose but said something to Mike that
made him smile as he flipped his phone closed.

"Ever been to a walk-through?"

"Walk through what?" I asked.

"Like a reading for a Broadway show proposal. Mr. Alden's
avail—ability depends on what time the walk-through at the
Imperial Theatre ends. The one Mona Berk wanted him to see. Chatty
little thing, this receptionist. Some of the prospective backers will
be there, she said. The angels. Call Information. Get an address for
the theater."

I dialed Information for the box office, and once connected,
repeated the address aloud for Mike. "Two forty-six West Forty-fifth
Street. How do you think we'll get in?"

"Keep your sunglasses on. Haven't you always wanted to be an
angel?"

"I'm willing to start sometime. So I don't remember anything
about this deadly affair. What was it that happened?"

"You know who Stanford White is, don't you?"

"Sure." The accomplished architect's firm—McKim,
Mead and White—had created some of the most notable buildings
in New York. Among them—Fifth Avenue's University Club and
the classic Hall of Fame for Great Americans—were sites that
had played a role in cases Mike and I had investigated together.

"Did you know that he designed Madison Square Garden?"

The huge sports and entertainment complex had opened in the
1960s on Seventh Avenue and 33rd Street, but I knew that White had
lived more than a century ago. "That's impossible."

Mike was driving down Seventh Avenue. "Not this one. The old
one."

"Where was that?"

"Who's buried in Grant's tomb, kid? White built the one on
Madison Square—you know, Madison and Twenty-sixth Street. It
was a musical theater and concert hall. White was in his fifties when
all this happened, but he had a thing for young girls. I mean teenagers
like Evelyn Nesbit. You'd have been after his ass."

We parked half a block from the theater and walked toward the
entrance.

"How old was Nesbit?"

"Probably fourteen or fifteen when Stanford White met her. She
was a great beauty, and had one of those domineering stage mothers who
brought her to New York to model for artists."

"Real artists?"

"At first. Then fashion photography, and by fifteen she was a
showgirl."

There was a young man at the door of the theater with a list
of names in a notebook. He was leaning back in his chair, eyes closed
as he listened to his iPod. He must have heard us and sat up. "You are?"

"Mr. Alden's expecting us. Hubert Alden."

He saw Alden's name checked off at the top of the list of
twenty or so others and pointed us to the entrance. On a small bronze
plaque, I noted that the building was owned by the Shubert Organization.

"What's Mona doing in a Shubert theater?" I asked Mike.

"Probably avoiding Uncle Joe. If she held this audition in a
Berk property, he'd be the first to know about it. Might spoil her
party."

We intentionally bypassed the orchestra and found the
staircase that led to the top tier of this vast theater, which had none
of the intimacy of the Belasco. The plaque described it as the home of
such musicals as
Fiddler on the Roof
and
Dreamgirls;
its walls and ceiling were covered with elegant panels of floral and
geometric motifs. One had only to return to the original Broadway
theaters to see some of New York's most distinctive and elegant
interiors—frescoed walls and ceilings, sculptured reliefs
crafted by the great artists of the day, cartouches and decorated glass
panels, chandeliers and Tiffany lamps—many restored today to
their early splendor.

Mike kept going until we found side seats in the next-to-last
row of the balcony. The entire upper half of the house was unlighted
and although we could see down to the stage, it would be hard for
anyone to notice us.

"The gang's all here," Mike said, in a whisper, "and I'm in my
usual seat. Bet you've never been up this high."

The large stage was empty of everything except a baby grand
piano and a pianist, and Lucy DeVore, script in hand, dressed only in
an ecru-colored lace-trimmed teddy and matching tap pants.

Scattered in the first couple of rows were some familiar
heads. Mona Berk was sitting next to Rinaldo Vicci, and Ross Kehoe was
rising to walk up the steps to the stage. I guessed that Alden was
among the other spectators.

Kehoe called out to whomever was operating the lights. "Give
me something cooler. Bring it down a bit, can you?"

The adjustment was made.

Kehoe signaled his approval with a wave and added another
direction. "Be ready with an amber spot for Lucy,okay? Something that
will really glow, goldenlike. You know how to do that or you need me to
come up there?"

From somewhere above us a voice called out, "Got it."

Ross Kehoe nodded and walked into the wings. There was some
conversation between Mona Berk and Lucy DeVore, but we couldn't hear it.

"So Evelyn Nesbit?" I asked Mike.

"Everyone wanted a piece of the kid. John Barrymore tried to
marry her, but she dumped him for Stanford White. She became White's
mistress."

"Did he ever marry her?"

"He already had a wife, and a bunch of children. But he also
had a fantastic studio, an apartment at the top of Madison Square
Garden—a duplex, just like Joe Berk. On the second floor,
suspended from the frame of a skylight, White had a red velvet swing.
Story was that he'd give the girls champagne, undress them, and watch
them play on the swing—back and forth up to the ceiling of
his loft— naked. That was his thing."

A young man, also with script in hand
,
came out from stage right, and it appeared Lucy was ready to go on.His
sleeves were rolled up and he wore khaki pants; Mona called to him to
get in place, closer to Lucy. "Harry, I want you right on top of her.
It looks more threatening that way when you get mad, when you react
towhat she says."

"Harry Thaw," Mike said. "Millionaire kid from Pittsburgh who
married Evelyn. Total psycho."

"Did he know about Stanford White?"

"Not enough. Not at first. He knew White liked young
chorines—preferably blondes—but Evelyn claimed to
Thaw that she was a virgin."

"I take it that Thaw found out she wasn't?"

"One of the papers published a photograph of Evelyn. She
looked like she was sleeping, stretched out on a bearskin rug in
White's apartment. Her long platinum hair was the only thing covering
her."

Mona Berk was standing now, shouting directions to Lucy DeVore.

Lucy was speaking Evelyn's words, the teenager beginning to
whimper as she disclosed the story of her deflowering by Stanford
White. "I didn't want to be there, Harry. Really, I didn't. I didn't
want to drink the champagne, but St—but Mr. White, he made me
do it."

Mike was in my ear. "How many times have you heard that excuse
in your office, Coop? How do you force someone to drink champagne? Hold
her in a headlock and pour the stuff down her throat? I don't get it."

Harry Thaw wasn't buying Lucy's version of events, either. He
ranted at her, raising a hand as though to strike his young bride.

"He drugged me, Harry. He must have put something in my drink
to make me pass out. You know I wouldn't have given myself to an old
man like that willingly."

"Drug-facilitated sexual assault," Mike said. "A hundred years
ago."

"False reporting, too. She wouldn't have made it past Mercer's
first interview."

Lucy DeVore dissolved into tears pretty effectively as she
described how she awakened in White's bed, naked and helpless, and how
he took advantage of her without her understanding or permission. Thaw
reached to embrace her and the pianist broke into the music for his
soliloquy about stolen innocence. Nobody would leave the theater
humming that one on opening night.

Ross Kehoe came back onstage and put his arm around Lucy, and
together they disappeared off stage left.

A few leggy chorus girls, older than Lucy DeVore and just as
well built, sauntered onto the stage, dressed in black leotards that
highlighted their blond locks and high-heeled shoes laced at the
throat. They limbered up and showed off their talents with stretches
and splits, while the pianist vamped some ragtime to invoke the spirit
of the Gilded Age setting in which these events had occurred.

Mona was talking to the assembled angels scattered in the
theater seats. "So this is the big scene on the roof of Madison Square
Garden. Climax of the first act—we'll go to intermission with
this one. It's a hot summer night in 1906. A very elegant gentleman is
sitting alone at a table, closest to the dancers. That's Stanford
White."

A handsome man, prematurely grayed—I
guessed—by a dash or two of talcum powder, came onto the
stage pushing a small table on wheels and carrying a chair that he
placed beside it on which to sit.

The piano player kicked up the rhythm and the girls did a
stylized dance routine, which Stanford White watched with great
enthusiasm, applauding wildly and calling out their names from time to
time.

From within the folds of the burgundy curtain on stage right,
Harry Thaw slipped onto the stage, pretending to make his way through
the imaginary tables of crowded theatergoers. It was hard to take your
eyes off the showgirls, whose bodies moved in spectacular
synchronicity, but Thaw continued to slink in and around them to the
extreme opposite side of the stage.

As the music stopped and one of the girls flopped onto the lap
of a delighted Stanford White, a gunshot rang through the nearly empty
theater and echoed with the force of a cannon. Harry Thaw had come
around from behind and fired a gun into White's back as the dancers
screamed and White fell from his chair, taking the chorine with him,
all enveloped in a huge cloud of smoke that billowed from behind the
thick curtain.

At the sound of the blast, I gripped Mike's arm, surprised by
the burst of gunshot. I hadn't remembered that the prominent architect
had been murdered by Thaw.

"Relax, kid. That's how it happened in real life."

The smoke began to clear as the music segued into a soft
ballad. Thaw and White picked up the table and chair and followed the
girls offstage.

From far upstage, against the darkened backdrop, a small
spotlight caught a pair of legs—perfectly contoured, long and
lean—dangling high above the boards. As the music got louder,
a voice from the front row—probably Mona
Berk's—yelled out the word "Go!"

The legs kicked, like those of a child pumping a swing on a
playground. Within seconds, the vision of the very platinum Lucy DeVore
was in full view, her golden hair streaming down as she propelled
herself forward and back across the length of the stage, her slinky
teddy gleaming in the single spot that followed her movement. The swing
descended slowly from the fly, with the motion of a smooth but steady
pendulum as the ragtime rhythm picked up the pace.

Lucy turned her head to the audience far below her and started
to sing the opening lines of the number. Her legs bent back beneath her
and then carried her up out of sight again, sacrificing the words she
was singing to the striking visual image she created.

As she drifted down and across to stage left, there was the
sound of a loud crack. The seat of the swing broke away, and Lucy's
scream pierced the back row of the balcony as she clung in vain to the
hanging ropes that had supported her before she slammed onto the floor
of the stage.