“Ray Holman?” I asked. “Is he missing?”
Dale shook his head. “Probably didn’t think we’d start this soon and snuck off to have a beer.”
The head carpenter summoned his crew. “Okay, you guys, let’s strike this sucker, starting with the band shell.”
Ray Holman’s being gone bothered me a whole lot more than it seemed to bother Alan Dale. I went back to the dressing room where B. W. Wainwright had taken charge. “You ought to send someone out to check the rest of the trunks,” I told him. “It looks to me like they’ve all got false bottoms.”
Glancy and Dick were dispatched to take care of that. I looked at the closed door to Jasmine’s dressing room. I knew she was in there, and I wanted to go and talk to her, to reassure her and tell her not to worry, but I thought better of it. Moments later, Alan Dale came pounding on the door to the common area.
“Beaumont, can you come here for a minute?”
“What’s going on?” I asked as we walked away from the dressing rooms.
“You’d better come take a look at this.”
“What is it?”
“Just come look.”
He led me to the back of the stage, where the pedestal used to support the band shell stuck up out of the decking like the empty stump of a tree. The band shell had been removed to one side and was being dismantled by several stagehands.
“You got a strong stomach?” Dale asked, handing me a flashlight.
“Strong enough,” I replied. “Why? What’s going on?”
“Crawl under there and take a look.”
I got down on my hands and knees and crawled along the worm-gear track. As soon as I put my head under the decking, I smelled the unmistakable odor of human feces and blood and death. The decking had somehow contained it, kept it bottled up. It wasn’t necessary to go any farther to know there was a body under there. I shone the light along the track until I saw the outline of a man’s shoe. Then I crawled back out from under the decking. Alan Dale was standing there waiting for me.
“Do you know who it is?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I turned around as soon as I saw the shoe.”
“Me too,” I said. “I’ve got to call the department. They’ll have to get a team over here.”
“Help yourself to the phone,” Dale told me. “You know where it is.”
I started for the phone with the head carpenter trailing behind me. “Looks to me like he got bound up in the worm-gear drive. That’s about where it ran off the track. Shouldn’t we try to get him out?” he asked.
“No. It’s too late for that. He’s dead; I’m sure of it. Doc Baker from the medical examiner’s office and the crime-scene investigators from the crime lab have got to be here when we uncover him. Is it possible it’s Ray Holman?” I asked.
“Maybe,” Dale said.
I dialed Sergeant Lowell James’s desk directly. There wasn’t much point in going through 911.
“Hello, Sarge, this is Beau.”
“It’s about time you called in. We’ve had complaints from parking enforcement about your car. I understand it’s still parked in front of the theater with its emergency lights flashing.”
“That’s what this is,” I countered, “an emergency.”
“For two hours?”
“Look, Sarge, do you want me to report this homicide, or are you going to climb my frame about parked cars?”
“What homicide?” James snapped.
“Beats the hell out of me. We’ve got an unidentified body under the decking on the stage of the Fifth Avenue Theater. And the DEA guys are here. They’ve already arrested two people on drug charges and are looking for a third.”
“The DEA? How’d they get called into this, and why weren’t we notified?”
“Would you do me a favor and just call Doc Baker’s office? And contact the crime lab. We can handle all this paper-pushing bullshit later.”
“Right,” James said. “We’ll handle it, all right.”
Twenty minutes later, Sergeant James and I were waiting near the back of the Fifth Avenue’s stage when Doc Baker came huffing up to us, his tie flapping loose around his neck, his white hair standing on end. The same young female photographer was trailing behind him.
“All right, all right. What’s going on here?”
“There’s a body under the decking,” I told him. “We left it there until you got here.”
Doc Baker walked to the back of the stage. He looked at the space between the decking and the floor; then he looked at his own wide girth. There was no way he would fit.