“I know it’s not funny,” Petersen said. “But we had an awful time with the slip for the program. You know, we usually say that due to an illness so-and-so is substituting for so-and-so. But what could we say tonight? ‘Due to the arrest of Veronica Maywood, Hailey Coles will appear in tonight’s performance of Paganini Variations’?”
“What did you say?” Cynthia asked.
“Just that Hailey would replace Veronica No reason assigned.”
Frost looked at his watch. The stage manager had given the call for the Company to assemble onstage, and the dancers began drifting in. Given the variety of the evening’s program, almost all the dancers were performing. The members of the orchestra, in their tuxedos, and the stage crew, mostly in sweat shirts and jeans, joined the group.
At seven forty-five, Reuben, with Cynthia and Arne Petersen at his side, went to the center of the stage. The assemblage before them was obviously puzzled at this strange gathering. My God, Reuben thought, I hope they don’t think we’re going to disband the Company. He decided he had better speak right away.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the National Ballet,” he began. “I regret that I have some most distressing personal news for you. It’s going to be particularly difficult for you because it comes so close to performance time. I’m sorry that this can’t be helped, but the event I am about to describe did not occur until a few hours ago.”
Reuben took a deep breath and went on. “As you all know, our Director, Clifton Holt, was murdered less than two weeks ago. Murdered by a young man who was thought to be acting entirely on his own. Unfortunately, that now appears not to have been the case. Late this afternoon the police arrested Veronica Maywood for having paid the murderer to kill Clifton. I am deeply saddened by this, as I know all of you will be. But I know also that tonight’s performance will go on, and this Company will go on. What you—all of you—have created over the years is too resilient an organization to be brought low by this awful occurrence, horrible as it is. So to you all, I say God bless, and to all you dancers, break a leg tonight. Thank you.”
Those standing before Frost reacted in a variety of ways—tears, mutual embraces, unbelieving stares. But the group soon broke up, with a performance about to begin. The orchestra members hurried down the stairs to the pit, and the dancers in Holt’s Mozart Concerto, the first number on the program, began their warm-up exercises.
Those not involved in Mozart Concerto followed Reuben, Cynthia and Arne as they left the stage, eager to hear more details. The three of them quite unconsciously separated and began to talk to small groups that clustered around them. The Frosts both decided that they would miss the Mozart work; they were needed here to give what comfort they could.
They did not get to their seats until the lights were dimming for the second number on the program, the Company’s version of a suite of Bournonville dances. As he had so many times before, often rushing in from the office or a late business appointment, Reuben took comfort from the familiarity of being in his seat at the Zacklin. It was a setting that cleared the mind better than any other palliative he knew. Business problems, a dirty and delayed subway train or, tonight, the whole horror of Veronica Maywood’s arrest, had a way of dissolving, or at least temporarily disappearing, when the lights dimmed, the conductor appeared, the music started and the curtain went up.
Watching the Bournonville, the average spectator would never have suspected that the dancers had so recently received catastrophic news. The buoyant cheerfulness of the peasant dances, the bright costumes and the dancers’ unrelenting smiles gave nothing away. The Frosts were proud of them.
During the second intermission, they tried to be as inconspicuous as possible at the side of the mezzanine lobby. It was clear that the word had not traveled, as no one came up seeking further information. On the other hand, it was equally clear that the underground dance network had somehow found out that Hailey Coles was making her debut in Paganini Variations. The balletomanes who followed such things, the Company’s equivalent of the most ardent rock groupies, were out in force.
Reuben had never figured out how this astonishing news network operated, nor how, some way, tickets were always available to these dedicated fans on short notice. But he was glad to see them there; their presence buttressed his hope that Hailey’s debut would signal a rebirth for the Company and start it back on an upward course after the dreadful events of recent days.
The Company executed Paganini Variations as never before. The corps danced full out and with a sharp attack and a precision not, alas, always seen. Gerald Hazard danced the principal male role. Frost was struck by the irony as Hazard, so recently a suspected felon, danced the tenth variation, in which Rachmaninoff’s frequent leitmotif, the dies irae, appears. Then Hailey Coles did her solo variations with an authority that rivaled Veronica Maywood’s. God, what good work the Company’s school was doing! Reuben thought. Then more work for the corps was followed by the eighteenth variation, the unspeakably beautiful andante cantabile in which Rachmaninoff turns the basic theme of the piece on its head, where Hailey Coles, partnered by Gerald Hazard, achieved the magic that Clifton Holt had created for Veronica May-wood. Coles became a weightless, ethereal beauty in Gerald Hazard’s disciplined arms; she danced with a softness that many, many ballerinas older and more experienced simply could not have achieved. Yet airless and weightless as she was, she projected both grace and authority.
The performance was stunning and, sadly or triumphantly as one viewed it, Veronica Maywood had been equaled, and perhaps even surpassed.
Then the ballet came to its end, with the corps dancing gloriously and then, finally, in tandem with Hailey and Gerald, reaching the abrupt, surprising and quiet end of the work.
As the curtain came down, in that brief interval before the audience responded, Reuben turned, with tears in his eyes, to Cynthia. She was in tears too, but they clasped hands, and looked at each other, as the tumultuous applause began.
EPILOGUE
THE FOLLOWING STORY APPEARED IN TIME, THE WEEKLY NEWSMAGAZINE, THE MONDAY AFTER VERONICA MAYWOOD’S ARREST:
DEATH DANCE
[All ballerinas] possess in common those elements necessary to make a ballerina; they are all tough, merciless, self-centered, narrow-minded, and without awareness of and interest in the needs of their male counterparts.
—Peter Martins, Far from Denmark
(1982)
TWO WEEKS AGO, PETER MARTINS, CO-DIRECTOR OF THE prestigious New York City Ballet, and dance lovers throughout the world were shocked by the senseless stabbing of Clifton Holt, 52, artistic director of City Ballet’s friendly rival, the National Ballet.
Holt, described almost universally as the finest world-class choreographer in the generation after George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, was fatally stabbed in the stage-door alley outside National Ballet’s headquarters theatre in New York on April 4. His assailant, James Wilson, a 22-year-old New York heroin addict and part-time drug peddler, was caught fleeing from the scene.
Wilson himself was fatally stabbed days later by a fellow prisoner at the Men’s House of Detention on New York’s Rikers Island, but only after he had bragged to his fellow inmates about Holt’s murder, claiming he had been hired to do it for $24,000—$12,000 down, $12,000 after he carried it off. His jail-cell boast was given credibility by the presence of $12,000 in new bills in his walk-up apartment in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen.
Last week New York police traced the funds to a, branch bank on Manhattan’s East Side. Then, taking advantage of the federal forms required to be filed by banks for cash transfers over $10,000, Wilson’s payoff was traced to Bernard Reyman, a high-rolling yuppie stock salesman—and dope addict—at the prestigious Wall Street firm of Hughes & Company.
Reyman, who died of a heroin overdose in early March, in turn was linked to Veronica Maywood, 32, the star ballerina of National Ballet, and investigation showed that he had apparently lent her the $24,000 the police say she paid to Wilson, Reyman�
��s pusher, to murder Holt.
Maywood, involved romantically with Reyman for several months, had left him before Holt’s murder, but nonetheless had allegedly persuaded him to lend her the $24,000 blood money. Reyman, deep into drugs and irrationally paranoid, had apparently made the ballerina execute a promissory note, which led the police to her last week.
At the time of her arrest, Maywood was one of the country’s leading dancers. Born in an Ontario farm town in Canada, she studied ballet in Toronto before bursting onto the scene in New York. The sometime mistress of Clifton Holt, she had been the guiding star of the greatest ballets Holt choreographed for National Ballet from the time of its formation in 1970. Her collaboration with Holt, which dance cognoscenti compared to the legendary partnership between Suzanne Farrell and Balanchine, helped the fledgling National Ballet achieve its current international stature.
Sources close to the National Ballet indicate that not all had been well between Holt and Maywood in recent months. The breakup of their romance, although occurring much earlier, had not helped. Then Holt, by all accounts a genius but a difficult man to deal with, both personally and professionally, signaled in rehearsals for his major new ballet this season that Maywood—old at 32 in ballet terms—might no longer be the chosen female dancer on whom he would make his works.
The New York police completed their investigation late last week and arrested Maywood on Saturday when she returned to New York from a triumphant guest appearance with the Pennsylvania Ballet in Pittsburgh Friday night.
Maywood displayed the fiery temper for which she is famous when she was arrested at her New York apartment house, biting an arresting policeman on the hand so badly that he had to be hospitalized. She was clearly continuing to play Kate in John Cranko’s Taming of the Shrew, which she had danced the night before in Pittsburgh. And, to the last, being tough, merciless, self-centered and narrow-minded to an extreme that even Peter Martins, who has seen them all, would not have imagined.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Reuben Frost Mysteries
THE ANDERSENS
1
“Don’t get angry with me, Reuben, but I’ve got a question for you,” Cynthia Frost said to her husband, as they finished their dinner in the dining room of their New York City town house.
After forty years of marriage, Reuben Frost could recognize trouble when it threatened. He knew from experience that the words “don’t get angry” meant that his wife was about to bring up a subject calculated to provoke him.
“Of course I won’t get angry,” Reuben answered. “What’s the question?”
“Darling, do we really have to go to the Andersen family weekend?” Cynthia asked, referring to the annual late-August gathering of the heirs of Nils Andersen—the principal owners of the Andersen Foods Corporation.
“I don’t see any way out of it,” Reuben said. “We’ve been going for so many years we can’t stop now. We’re expected.”
“Reuben, dear, I understood all that while you were in charge of the Andersens’ legal work at Chase & Ward. But now that you’re retired as a partner, I don’t see why we’ve got any obligation to be there. One of the young couples should have to suffer through it.”
“You forget, Cynthia, that even though I’m no longer a partner, I’m still of counsel to the firm and have to do my share. For better or worse, going to the Andersen weekend is one of the ways I can do that. Besides, Flemming and Sally expect us. And you do like Sally.”
Frost, making his case, referred to his wife’s affection, or at least affinity, for Sally Bryant Anderson, whose career as a professional tennis player had paralleled Cynthia’s own as a leading American ballerina.
“Yes, I do like Sally,” Cynthia said. “And Flemming and Sally are a fine couple. But three days with someone else’s family, most of them strangers, is really too much. And by the end of August the Mohawk Inn’s like the North Pole.”
“I know, I know. But Flemming called me just the day before yesterday to make sure we were coming. I can’t turn him down.”
“I knew that’s what you’d say. So we’ll go, and watch the water-balloon tag and see Billy O’Neal get drunk—if he’s in the mood for one of his drunken fits—and …”
“Don’t go on, Cynthia. After all these years, I know the drill as well as you do,” Reuben said, with resignation.
“And I really do think someone else from the firm should take over,” Cynthia declared.
“It’s not that easy. Since I retired, I haven’t had much to do with AFC—officially at least. You’re right about that. But Flemming’s still Chairman of the Board and he consults me from time to time.”
“Who’s in charge of AFC at the firm now? It’s Ernest Crowder, isn’t it?”
“Yes it is. So you see the problem. Ernest’s a wonderful lawyer, but a total social misfit, as you would be the first to point out—a crabby bachelor with no patience, no small talk and a willingness to tell the world what he doesn’t approve of. Such as drinking. Can’t you see Ernest and Billy O’Neal squaring off?”
“It might be amusing having him around, though. Just think how he would react to the water-balloon nonsense.”
“You think he’d disapprove?” Reuben asked.
“Of course.”
“You’re wrong. Ernest Crowder would see the water-balloon matches for just what they are: good, clean Protestant fun. Innocent, sublimating and thoroughly virtuous.”
“Oh, God,” Cynthia said, with a sigh, “I guess Andersen Foods did enough for you and the firm so that we have to go. Mature and mellow Reuben Frost and his sweet wife, Cynthia.”
“Afraid so, my dear. But cheer up. You never can tell, maybe this year there’ll be some excitement.”
“Doubtful.”
It might be possible for an American to go through life without coming into contact with a product of the Andersen Foods Corporation—AFC. But not very likely, unless this strange, atypical citizen somehow avoided eating. Scores of AFC products were favorites of the consuming public and made AFC a leader in the so-called “food-at-home” market. There were chopped-up vegetables for the baby and salt-free ones for its grandparents; frozen low-calorie concoctions for those on diets and high-calorie candies and ice creams for those not so inhibited; cereals for breakfast, packaged meat for lunch and TV-dinners for the evening. And all washed down with an AFC soft drink, a cup of AFC coffee or—more recently—a beer made by a brewery acquired by AFC.
Like many successful American enterprises, AFC had started modestly. It had been founded in 1898 by Nils Andersen, a Dane who had migrated with his family to Duluth, Minnesota. Andersen was both a farmer and a tinkerer, and the process of storing fresh products in metal cans, then coming into common use in the United States, intrigued him.
Starting in a workshop at the back of his barn, Andersen succeeded in bettering the canning methods then in use, taking advantage of the research on canning spoilage being done by Professor Henry Russell at the University of Wisconsin.
Andersen’s improved techniques not only cut down on the number of cans that exploded from defective processing, to the delight of retailers, but better preserved the flavor of what was inside them as well, to the satisfaction of consumers. Soon the immigrant tinkerer had a thriving processing plant, canning and distributing corn, peas and other vegetables grown in the midwestern heartland.
As the business prospered, Nils Andersen showed a talent for expanding its operation and scope, building new canneries in California and Baltimore before he retired in 1920. His son, the first Laurance Andersen, continued the business with even greater success. He led the expansion of AFC’s product line out of canned goods, adding breakfast cereals and other dry foods. But his greatest success, pursued all his life, was supervision of AFC’s advertising program. The Company’s direct but low-key promotions succeeded in creating an image of quality—a deserved image of quality—with the consumer. The American public became comfortable with AFC’s products, if not downr
ight proud that it was consuming them.
Flemming Andersen, the first Laurance’s only son, stepped into the presidency of AFC when he returned from World War II. Although only thirty-five at the time, he justified in short order the confidence his father had shown in turning management over to him. He combined the talents of both his practical grandfather and super-salesman father. Taking AFC public in the early 1960s was a major accomplishment, requiring him to convince other members of the family that it was a good thing for the nation’s widows and orphans—and pension plans and giant insurance companies and other impersonal investors—to have a majority interest in AFC (but with actual control of the Company safely vested in the Andersens).
The family battle over going public had left scars or, more precisely, had deepened at least one old wound. Laurance Andersen, an otherwise enlightened man of his time, had seen fit to divide ownership of AFC into two parts—two unequal and discriminatory parts. After giving effect to Laurance Andersen’s will, his son, Flemming, owned two-thirds of the shares of AFC and his daughter, Christina, owned one-third. This was not done out of any animosity toward Christina; Laurance had certainly been as fond of her as of his son. It simply reflected a chauvinist notion of preserving family stability through favoring the male line of succession.
At the time AFC went public, Christina—or more precisely, her husband, Jarvis O’Neal—had tried to have the imbalance corrected. But Flemming Andersen had resisted his brother-in-law’s effort. Not because his arguments were without merit but because the division between the O’Neal branch of the family and Flemming’s own seemed roughly equitable, since Christina and Jarvis had only one child and he and Sally had three.
Christina Andersen O’Neal never in her lifetime held Flemming’s action against him. Her husband did, and there was bad blood between the two men until Jarvis died in 1970. His death did not end the feud, however. The O’Neal son, William, known to one and all as Billy, was more than eager to take it up, watching and criticizing Flemming from his position as Executive Vice President of AFC.
Murder Takes a Partner Page 24