Death Dance (36 page)

The crew looked like players on the field at Yankee Stadium
whenever the dugout emptied if they believed that a Boston pitcher
intentionally had beaned a batter. Six guys were restraining one of the
hands, who was trying to pull away from them and free his arms. Others
were arguing among themselves, pushing and shoving, paying no attention
to the three supervisors who were trying to calm everyone down.

One man was lying on the floor, writhing in pain, his ankle
twisted off to the side so that his foot appeared to have sustained a
major injury.

Someone was standing at the control panel, moving levers, and
the wagon on which we were standing—the entire stage-right
platform— began to move away from the main stage. I steadied
myself against the papier-mache side of an Egyptian pyramid.

Mike grabbed the arm of one of the men in the melee and
several of the other detectives who had followed him downstairs from
the makeshift office helped to restore order. "What happened?"

"An accident."

"Maybe I'll have to ask for everyone's driver's license. Make
sure you don't run over anybody with all this equipment. It's too
frigging dangerous here at the Met. I'll try again—what
happened?"

One of the men in carpenter's pants turned to walk away.
"Something moved when it wasn't supposed to. That's all. There's a
reason we call this place the House of Pain. There's a lot of ways to
get hurt if you don't watch yourself—the fly system, the
electrical panels, and even the curtain slams down at high speed. It's
not a matter for the police."

"What moved?" Mike asked, aware that the decent workmen had
wearied of the detectives who had been poring over their personal lives
for the last week.

"That wagon," he said, pointing to the stage on which we were
standing.

The entire system of four rotating stages was electrical, not
hydraulic. I could see the pulley cable bringing the giant
platform— forty by sixty feet—back into place. It
had been activated unexpectedly, and one man's leg had been caught as
the right wagon shifted under the main stage.

Mike directed his attention to the injured man. "You okay,
buddy? We'll get you a doctor to look at the leg."

He was sitting upright now, rubbing his ankle. "There's a
medical office here. They'll check me out."

The man in the green-plaid shirt who had been restrained by
his coworkers broke away from them. "Buddy, my ass. Tell 'em who you
are. Tell 'em or I will."

The man with the twisted foot was bleeding from the side of
his mouth. The shriek we heard when his leg was caught under the
colliding wagons must have followed a punch.

Mike walked into the group of men and told them to step back.
Several protested, not willing to leave him alone with their angry
colleague. They muttered about the work that had to get done and the
rehearsal that was in progress.

Detectives helped the injured man to his feet and watched him
test his ankle. He shook them off and started to limp away.

"Harney!" the guy with Mike screamed out. "Don't go too far.
You better tell the detectives where you were last Friday."

Mike and the other men from the task force quelled the crew
and took the two combatants to opposite wings. We cleared the entire
central area so the cast and crew could get back to work.

Another loud creaking noise and a giant gap yawned in the
floor of center stage. I stepped farther back, away from the monstrous
black hole it created as the boards rolled apart. Seconds later, raised
by some kind of lift below the auditorium, the eerie funeral set from
the Temple of Vulcan—the crypt in which Aida and Radames
would be entombed, buried alive—rose onto the stage,

I turned my back to it and followed Mike to the door that
exited stage right, to the medical office where the limping man had
walked.

Mike told the nurse to give us a few minutes with her patient
and she left the three of us alone in her room. "You want to tell me
what this is about, or do I start with the guy who threw the punch."

"It's none of your business. It's outside the opera house."

"That's not what it sounded like to me. Let me see your I.D."

The man lifted the chain from around his neck and passed it to
Mike, as I leaned in to study it with him.

"Ralph Harney," Mike said aloud. "What's your date of bath?"

Ralph answered with the date that matched his credentials, as
well as his street address.

"You still live in Hoboken?"

"Yeah. Right through the tunnel."

Mike handed the card back to him. The picture was a couple of
years old, and the scraggly facial hair he sported exaggerated his age
and now made him look more dissipated.

"What's got your pal so angry? Were you working the
performance on Friday?"

"I'm on the night gang. I don't come on till after the show's
over. Part of the crew who break down the sets."

"Well, did you do that on Friday?"

"Yeah."

"So what's the beef? Why does he say you're lying?"

"'Cause he hates my guts."

"Any reason in particular?"

"His sister. I was engaged to marry his sister."

"You broke it up? That's why he's angry?"

Ralph Harney didn't answer.

"Yo. I'm talking to you. You broke it up?"

"She got killed in a car crash."

"And who was driving?"

A pause before he answered. "Me. I was hurt bad, too."

Harney picked up his head to show Mike the scar that trailed
from the corner of his eyelid down across his cheek. I thought I could
see scratch marks—relatively recent ones—healing on
the skin above his goatee.

"But the girl died. Any charges?"

"What?"

"Criminal charges. Speeding? Intox driving?"

"Nope. No charges. Like I said, it was an accident." Harney
was grimacing with pain. He pulled up the leg of his pants and the skin
was sliced through to the bone. Blood had caked around the wound and
dripped onto the top of his boot. "Can you wait with this or what?"

"You shouldn't have walked on it. You don't want to compound
it if it's fractured," Mike said, stepping out to tell the nurse she
could get to work on her patient.

We exchanged places with her and walked down the corridor to
find the guy in the green-plaid shirt. Two of the other detectives had
casually penned him in near the rear of the stage, where the loading
dock opens into the garage, letting him smoke a cigarette. Mike
signaled them to move off as we approached.

"Mike Chapman," he said, holding out his hand. "You're?"

"Dowd. Brian Dowd."

"You want to tell me the story?"

"What'd Harney say? He's the storyteller."

"That you've got it in for him."

"He's a scumbag."

"I'm sorry about your sister. He told us about that."

"Told you that he killed her?"

"That she died in an accident."

"You call it an accident when a guy's had five or six vodkas
with beer chasers and then gets in the car to drive home? I call it
murder."

"Was he arrested?" Mike asked, testing the story Harney told
us against Dowd's version of events.

"No, no, he wasn't locked up. You know why? "Cause his body
was thrown from the car is what he says. Got all disoriented and had a
traumatic head injury is what he says. He conveniently didn't show up
at the hospital till the next afternoon, when he'd sobered up and his
blood alcohol didn't test off the charts anymore."

Mike paused, understanding Dowd's rage at his sister's killer
.
"How long ago?"

"Less than a year. I tried to get the car keys away from him
that night. Harney was so wasted he could barely stand up straight. My
sister promised me she'd drive but she couldn't control him either.
She—her body—was in the passenger seat when they
found her, same as always."

"And this is somehow related to Friday night?"

Dowd dropped the cigarette to the floor and crushed it with
his boot. "I suppose he told you he worked late?"

"Yeah. The night gang."

"Then how come he was downstairs in the locker room before the
curtain went up? Eight o'clock, I swear to God. Drinking beer and
playing solitaire."

"Who were you with when you saw him?"

Dowd sneered at Mike. "My word isn't good enough? You need a
crowd?"

"Two would be a good round number."

"I got new glasses. Haven't had them a week. I left them in my
locker and had to go back downstairs. Everyone else on the stage crew
was in his place. That's how come I was alone when I saw him."

"And that's what you started fighting with him about just now?"

"Partly."

"You must have enlisted a couple of coconspirators."

"I didn't need anybody to deck that coward."

"And somehow the wagon just started rolling, ready to crush
his legs once he was down on the floor?"

"It's a busy place, this stage. Got to watch your step all the
time."

Mike had his hands in his pockets, walking toward the loading
dock.

"Jerks."

"You say something else?" Mike asked.

"Yeah. Your cop friends are jerks."

"Anyone in particular?"

Dowd was taking deep breaths now. "You think you've got us all
figured out?" he said, making a sweeping gesture with his arm. "You
think you know everything about us, have a sample of our DNA?"

"That's what we've been trying to do for the last week."

"Ralph Harney. Better check that one again, you're so fucking
smart."

"Something wrong with the information he gave us?"

Dowd laughed. "Only thing wrong is that he didn't give it to
you."

"That's easy to check. I'll just see if there's a card for him
upstairs. The detectives have interviewed almost everybody in the crew."

"You're missing the point, Chapman. Harney isn't the one who
talked to your boys. He had his cousin come in here in his place, the
day he knew he was supposed to be questioned."

"How'd he get past the security?" I asked.

"First cousins. Hal Harney. They look like brothers, the two
of them. Hal's in the same union, maybe a year older than Ralph. Works
down at the Majestic."

Mike was agitated now, running his fingers through his hair.
We had been told the theatrical jobs were incestuous, that the union
membership was passed along from family member to family
member— fathers and sons, uncles and cousins—hard
for an outsider to break in through the ranks.

"Showed his pass and walked right through the door. Like who's
gonna realize it if you don't know Ralph well enough to tell the
difference? So Hal sits for the interview with these cracker jack
detectives instead of Ralph."

"And it's Hal's DNA sample we've got down at the M.E.'s office
waiting to be tested," Mike said. "We don't have Ralph's."

"That's why you're jerks," Brian Dowd said, practically
jabbing at Mike's chest with his finger. '"Cause Ralph knows it'd match
up with what you got before. That you'd look at him a little more
close, ask him who mauled his face the other night."

"Got what before?"

"DNA. You've already got Ralph Harney's DNA. That's why be
wanted Hal to sit in for him this time."

"And why do you think we have his DNA?"

"'Cause of that hooker that was killed up in the Bronx back
around Christmas—the one that was strangled?" |

"Hunts Point Market?" Mike asked, referring to an area of the
borough that was notorious for the prostitutes who worked it around the
clock.

"Yeah. Killed in a motel room near the Whitestone Bridge."

"Why did the police get Ralph's DNA?" I asked.

"'Cause the bastard went on a real bender after my sister
died. Hit the bottle even worse than before. Nobody in the old
neighborhood wanted anything to do with him, so he started picking up
whores. Somebody got his license plate in front of the motel the night
the girl was killed, and that's when detectives came to the house. My
brother told me that Ralph stood in a lineup and they wanted him to
submit to a DNA test. You oughta know about it," Dowd said, looking at
Mike.

"We work Manhattan. There's a different Homicide Squad in the
Bronx. I don't have any idea what happened to the case, but I can find
out."

"Well, if Ralph had anything to do with it, the angels were
sitting on his shoulder again. Never got busted for that one, either."

"And you think he had something to do with Galinova last
Friday?"

"If that broad took a bad turn and ran into Ralphie with his
load on, I'm saying he's capable of making all the wrong moves. He's
not right in the head. He hasn't been since my sister died. What'd he
say about the scratches he's got, huh? What kind of answer does he have
about those?"

The orchestra was playing again, and Brian Dowd was shouting
at us over the music.

The prompter was seated in her box downstage, ready to call
out the first word of every line to the leads in the production, who
had gathered in the faux crypt on the main stage.

"How late are you working today, Brian?" Mike asked.

"I'm on till four," he said. "I'm here as late as you need me."

Mike headed around the rear of the revolving wagon toward the
exit on stage right, putting out his arm to stop me as a back-drop hung
on an overhead pipe dropped into place from the fly above us.

When we got into the hallway and could hear each other, Mike
slammed his hand against the concrete wall. "That's the damn trouble
with this kind of voluntary dragnet. Ralph Harney has the balls to get
a stand-in for his questioning. Why? You gotta ask yourself why?"

"The 'why?' seems pretty obvious to me. Harney didn't want the
task force to think they were dealing with a murder suspect."

"That scam is over. Go up and tell Peterson about this. He can
call the Bronx squad for details on the case withthe pros. I'll get
Harney out of the medical office and march him upstairs for a little
tete-a-tete with my boys. See if he'll give us some
saliva—maybe even some of that blood that's clotted on his
leg."