Death Dance (45 page)

Alden didn't miss a beat as he held up his fingers to tick off
his answers. "Quite likely it does, if you tell me what you mean, what
it is you're looking for. Obviously, there are words like
mosque
and
minaret
, and the name of the Masons
themselves. Fez is a city in Morocco. There's another
M
for you. I don't follow your question, Mr. Chapman."

I kept thinking of Lucy DeVore, smiling at the camera in her
red tarboosh, her hand on the doorknob that bore the distinctive letter
M.

"If these shrines were so popular all over America, how come
they built one everyplace in the country except Manhattan?" Mike asked.
"How come there's no Shriners' theater right here?"

"I hope you don't mind being corrected again, detective, but
one of the most immense, ostentatious mosques ever created was opened
here in 1923, on a prime piece of real estate dead in the center of the
city. Still standing, Mr. Chapman, right in midtown on Fifty-fifth
Street, and I'll bet you've been inside it dozens of times."

"There's no mosque on Fifty-fifth Street," Mike said.

"What's the name?"

"Mecca Temple, Miss Cooper. Maybe that's the
M
you've been looking for. Mecca Temple of the Ancient Arabic Order of
the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine."

"Where on Fifty-fifth Street?" Mike asked, Alden's suggestion
an affront to his pride in his intimate knowledge of the city over
which he kept watch. Each street, each avenue, each grid evoked the
memory of a crime scene Mike had worked. "There's a synagogue over on
the southwest corner of Lex, but there's no mosque."

"West Fifty-fifth, between Sixth and Seventh avenues," Alden
said, pleased with himself that he had us stymied.

I closed my eyes to envision the block and thought immediately
of the large theater there that I had been to more often than even
Alden could have guessed.

"City Center?"

"The City Center of Music and Drama, Ms. Cooper. Next time you
have tickets for a show, stand across the street and crane your neck to
look up to the very top of the building, maybe twelve or fourteen
stories high. You can still see the words
Mecca Temple
carved into the facade."

I have stood on the sidewalk at the entrance to City Center
scores of times since my first childhood visits and never once noticed
the carved letters so far overhead.

"But it's—it's been a theater for longer than I've
been alive. Before Lincoln Center was built, it was home to the New
York City Ballet and Opera." I was taken aback at the thought that this
cultural treasure had a history that wasn't familiar to
me—and, I was sure, to many other theatergoers.

Mike wanted to leave for the building at once. He walked to
Laura's desk to use her phone, and when I heard him ask for the desk
sergeant at Midtown North—the precinct just a few short
blocks from City Center—I knew he was calling to send a
patrolman around the corner to examine and report back on the shape and
design of the doorknobs in the old showplace.

"I can't believe I never knew about that."

"It's ancient history, Ms. Cooper. Does it interest you?"

I tried to keep Alden chatting without letting him know that
the reason for my heightened interest was because of a possible link to
our investigation. I've studied dance all my life. I see the Ailey
Dance Company there every year, and, of course, it's where American
Ballet Theater does their fall series. And all the Broadway revivals
they stage—who doesn't know City Center?"

"Then I must arrange for you to meet the director. I'm sure
you two would be sympatica—she's a brilliant young lawyer who
also used to dance. Arlette Schiller, do you know her?"

"I don't," I said, one eye on Mike as he reentered the room.
"But I'd certainly like the introduction."

"So how long was Mecca actually Mecca?" Mike asked.

"The temple opened in 1923, with grand wizards and potentates
from all over the country. Quite an engineering marvel it was, this
massive sandstone cube topped by its extraordinary dome. The main steel
girder that supports the balcony is the longest one ever used in New
York City still to this day—six stories tall if you were to
lay it on end—delivered by ship to the harbor and snaked
uptown on a caravan of trucks."

"But just for Shriners?"

"Originally, detective, yes. There was the auditorium, of
course. It's right around the corner from Carnegie Hall, as you know.
But even back then, no one was allowed to smoke at Carnegie Hall. Since
cigar smoking was a big part of the lodge activities, the auditorium
was built with all sorts of huge exhaust fans in it, to accommodate the
practice as well as to help draw stage business away from Carnegie.
Mecca's theatrical section seated almost five thousand people, if you
can imagine that so long ago. The rest of the shrine's
rooms—banquet halls, lodgings, ceremonial
shrines—well, they were all quite private."

"So what happened to the place?" Mike asked.

"First came the Crash of Twenty-nine, and then the Great
Depression. It was no better for the Shriners than for anyone else in
the country. Even though they considered themselves a philanthropic
organization, they couldn't claim a tax exemption because they rented
the auditorium to outside groups. By the late 1930s, the banks
foreclosed on the loans that had been used to build Mecca."

"So the mosque went into bankruptcy?"

"It did indeed, after a very short life. Sat empty like a
forlorn Arabian palace in the middle of this urban landscape. Before
all the sky—scrapers went up in midtown, you could see that
fantastic dome from miles away in every direction. The government got
the property by tax foreclosure and put the building up for auction in
1942."

"Who bought it?"

Alden smiled. "The City of New York itself turned out to be
the highest bidder. Stole the place, even by the standards of those
days, for one hundred thousand dollars. The claim on it was more than
six times that amount. It was the genius of LaGuardia."

"What?" Mike asked.

"Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. The rest of the politicians wanted
to tear the building down and replace it with a parking lot."

"Except for LaGuardia?"

"Yes, he'd long had the idea to create a great municipal
theater, with cheap tickets so that the arts could be more available to
the ordinary citizen. He didn't want it to be like New York's
commercial theaters, so he aimed to build a constituency made up of
colleges and schools, philanthropic and professional groups. The mayor
wanted shows to start at five thirty in the evening so people could
come straight from work, save the train and bus fare. He had some
wonderful ideas to support the performing arts in New York."

"And let them be more accessible than Broadway?"

"By far, Ms. Cooper. When City Center opened, you could sit in
the balcony for thirty-five cents or pay top
dollar—literally, a dollar ten—for the orchestra.
Broadway seats cost three times as much."

My phone rang and Laura answered it, buzzing the intercom.
Mike reached over and picked it up. "Yeah, sarge?"

He listened for a few seconds and hung up the phone. "No doubt
about it. This time M is for Mecca."

"I'm quite pleased I could help you solve your puzzle,
detective. Anything… ?"

"When's the last time you were there, Mr. Alden?"

His forehead wrinkled and his dark, thick eyebrows met as one.
"It's been weeks, Mr. Chapman. Several weeks."

"Exactly when?"

"Look, if you're back to playing 'gotcha' again, I'd obviously
prefer to check my office diary."

"Why'd you go?"

Alden looked to me. "They have this wonderful Encore
series— Broadway shows."

I knew the series, which had proved to be enormously
successful for the center year after year.

"It was a performance of
Bye, Bye, Birdie
.
That's amusing, come to think of it."

Mike was too focused on Lucy DeVore posed in someone's fez,
leaning on a door handle in the Mecca Theater, to be easily amused.
"How so?"

"Birdie was really the first musical to bring rock'n'roll to
Broadway."

"Spare me the lyrics. Coop's likely to break into a dance.
What of it?"

"There's a scene in the show where the characters go into the
wrong room and break up a Shriners' meeting. Remember that?"

I didn't.

"Tarbooshes and flying tassels everywhere. I'm sure there are
plenty of them in wardrobe over at City Center. You don't need to see
mine."

The one on Lucy's head had distinctive markings. A crescent
and scimitar—whose meaning I now understood—over
some Arabic design. We'd be able to tell whether it was a costume from
a Broadway performance or the real deal from an antique mosque.

"How about backstage, Mr. Alden? You been backstage lately?"

Again the man's brow furrowed as he tried, it seemed to me, to
second-guess the direction Mike Chapman was going before he supplied an
answer.

"I've been backstage dozens of times, detective. I'm
a—"

"Yeah, I know. You're a friggin' patron of the friggin' arts.
I've bought more beers at Yankee Stadium than you've got Playbills, but
it doesn't get me in the locker room to pose for pictures with the boys
after the game. Dancers. You been backstage here lately with any of the
ladies?"

Mike was losing the bigger picture to close in on the image of
Lucy DeVore. Hubert Alden had no idea where Mike was headed.

"Upstairs, certainly."

"Whaddaya mean? In the balcony?"

"No, no. There are nine or ten floors of studios in the office
tower behind the auditorium, Mr. Chapman. Some of the most spectacular
dance studios in the city are housed there, rented out to many of the
companies for rehearsal space."

"And you've been up in there recently? Where exactly?"

"I'm surprised that Chet Dobbis didn't explain all of this to
you when you talked to him about Talya Galinova."

"What's for Dobbis to tell?"

"Before he came to the Met, Chet was the artistic director at
City Center. He knows every inch of that place from the top of the dome
to the crawl spaces in the basement."

Mike looked at me to see if I was following Alden's point.
"What does that have to do with Galinova?"

"Well, of course I've visited Talya at City Center. So did
Dobbis, so did Rinaldo Vicci, so did Joe Berk. Talya's rehearsal studio
was there, Mr. Chapman," Alden said, making the connection between Lucy
DeVore's accident and Galinova's murder a bit less tenuous in my mind.
"She spent much more time in that building than she did at the Met."