Chapter 4 Thiago #2
The backstage corridor was narrow and close, smelling of old wood and plaster. There was also something sweet and vegetal. Luca, beside me, whispered, “Jasmine. Comes in through the loading dock when the doors are open. It’s been climbing the back wall since before the storm.”
The stage was wider than the architectural drawings had suggested.
That was a detail that mattered. More ground between Dominic’s conducting position and the wing entrances.
A proscenium arch rose forty feet above the deck.
The fly system was visible above it as a dark grid of rigging and counterweights.
I watched crew members moving along the catwalks overhead. An electrician walked with a work light clipped to his belt, pausing at intervals to check connections.
From the pit, a trumpet player ran a five-note figure over and over.
I looked out over the seats and up at the balcony.
It curved above the orchestra seating in a single unbroken arc, close enough to the stage to feel intimate.
An ironwork railing ran the full length.
From any point along that curve, a person standing at the rail would have an unobstructed sightline to the conductor’s platform. Less than sixty feet away.
Luca had moved a few steps ahead and stopped when he realized I hadn’t followed. “The sightlines,” he said.
“Yes.”
He looked up, then back at me.
I examined the space methodically: stage right, stage left, and backstage from the proscenium to the loading dock at the rear. Three wing entrances per side. Neither stairwell to the balcony was visible from the stage.
The conductor’s entrance route from the greenroom ran through a narrow corridor with a single blind turn. A mirror would need to be installed before the concert.
I photographed everything discreetly.
I stopped at the front edge of the stage and looked out into the house. The empty seats ran in a deep curve from the front rail to the rear wall. Seven hundred in the orchestra, two hundred above.
On my tablet, I sketched the layout, roughing in the balcony arc and the podium position, then drawing the lines between them.
A double bass fell over without warning.
A stagehand was moving it on a dolly across the upstage area, threading between a music stand cart and an open cello case. A second stagehand caught it.
Four seconds, beginning to end.
Luca had seen it too. “Micah Landry,” he said. “Podium setup, last two seasons.”
Luca introduced us. Micah assessed me briefly. “Whatever you need.”
“Walk me through the conductor placement.”
He did, and his explanation was clear and economical.
He would center the podium on the stage, four feet from the front edge, elevated six inches on a two-level platform.
He’d already marked the position, and it would remain unless Dominic called for a change, possibly based on acoustic feedback from the house.
Micah’s sole responsibility was the conductor’s podium.
“Who else handles it?”
“Just me.”
“The floor mark. Who placed it?”
“Me. Working from Dominic’s spec.” He glanced at Luca. “Same position as the last two seasons.”
I looked at the mark. It was an X in pale gold spike tape, eighteen inches in each direction, centered on a point that placed Dominic’s feet precisely within the balcony’s cleanest sightline. I crouched and looked along the deck at the angle .
I photographed it.
Micah watched without asking why.
I read his background check while he worked with Luca through the rehearsal schedule. Seven years with the Orpheum across multiple productions. Union member, local, with no criminal record.
He had access, and he had a deep working knowledge of Dominic’s habits. He had been present for every session in which the podium position had been established, and he would also be present at the concert. Micah had full access with his credentials. No one would look at him twice.
Luca finished with the schedule and returned his attention to me. “You examine people like furniture.”
“Furniture doesn’t move.” He smiled.
The trumpet player had stopped running his figure. Then the orchestra tuned. It rose in sections, each instrument finding the pitch the oboe offered and locking onto it.
I thought about the minor-key “Saints” on the piano bench. Someone transposed the city’s anthem into a funeral key and delivered it to the man who had become a symbol of the city’s recovery.
The structure of it was almost elegant.
Dominic walked out.
He came from the stage-left wing with baton in hand, the replacement. The orchestra stopped tuning at once, and the room redistributed its energy around him.
I moved to the stage-right wing, my back to the brick, and watched.
Dominic stood in clear relief against the house, silver hair and dark jacket. I looked up at the balcony and followed the clean, unobstructed sightline down to the spike tape mark.
The shot fired at the mansion was not the main event. It was the overture.
Whoever had carried that sheet of music through Dominic’s door had already stood in this theater. They’d already walked the sightline and understood precisely what the balcony offered and exactly where the spike tape mark placed the man below it.
Dominic raised his baton.
I kept my eyes on the balcony and stood very still. The music began.