Lucia was beginning to shiver. She stopped about five feet from the gathering.
Suddenly, I could see why they were all there.
Sitting against the building wall was a derelict, without shoes. His eyes were wide open. They were a startling shade of blue.
I was about to remonstrate with Lucia for dragging me out onto a freezing balcony to look at a drunk. After all, there were hundreds of homeless derelicts living around Lincoln Center.
But then I saw something distinctive about this drunk other than his beautiful eyes and the fact that he was shoeless in winter.
There was a hole in his forehead. A small jagged hole. The man was dead. The hole had been made by a bullet. Lucia increased the pressure of her hand on my arm as if she were falling.
“It’s Dobrynin, Alice. Dobrynin!”
Was Lucia mad? “Do you mean Peter Dobrynin?”
“Yes! Yes! Yes! It’s him. It’s Peter Dobrynin!” She whispered frantically, and her fingers pinched my arm so tightly that I cried out from the pain. One of the policemen turned and stared at me.
Peter Dobrynin? I stared at the shoeless dead man again. How could it be?
Peter Dobrynin had dropped out of the public eye three years ago. The most acclaimed male ballet dancer since Nijinsky had gone into seclusion. There were all kinds of rumors and speculations. He had gone into a drug rehab clinic. He had entered a monastery in Vermont. He had been admitted into a mental hospital. No one knew for sure.
But what an impact this one-time student of the Kirov Ballet had made on the dance world before he dropped out.
He was bigger and more powerful and more dramatic than Baryshnikov, more technically proficient and more musical than Nureyev. His roles in Giselle and Firebird and Petrouchka had made him the new hero of the American ballet.
And Dobrynin was as flamboyant offstage as he was onstage—lover, brawler, lunatic, junkie, drunk, frequenter of jet-set parties as well as funky Harlem discos. He was always out of control.
Lucia started to pull me away. But I fought to stay, to keep staring at the corpse. Had this dreadful wreck of a man really once been the golden dancer, Dobrynin?
The wind began to whip across the open balcony, making me shudder. After all, it was Christmastime in New York.
***
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Lydia Adamson is a pseudonym for a noted mystery writer and cat lover in New York City.
Alice Nestleton Mystery Series eBooks from InterMix
A Cat in the Manger
A Cat of a Different Color
A Cat in Wolf’s Clothing
A Cat By Any Other Name
Look for A Cat Tells Two Tales
available now in print from Obsidian
Cat by Any Other Name (9781101597729) Page 16