Unlike Tony, however, I would never be caught attempting a tour of any proportion. First of all—I looked over at the obviously pained and red-faced Basillio—women rarely perform that step. And second—I didn’t dare let him see me struggling not to laugh—my medical insurance is always an inch away from cancellation. As for Tony’s insurance, I was betting the fool had none.
Chapter 9
One of my regular clients had once told me, as we sat over cups of her home-mixed herbal tea: “Put a whopping spoonful of caviar on a small piece of milk-soaked bread, and place it on the floor twenty feet away from a cat. No matter how much that cat wants that caviar, most likely she will not approach it directly—as would a hungry dog or bird or bee.” Cats do not, she said emphatically, approach food directly.
“Now, there are those who say the reason for this is that the cat approaches inert food sources the same way she approaches ‘live’ food which she must kill to obtain—that is, circuitously, in a stalking mode.
“It is my belief that the cat is performing a quasi-mystical geometric ritual known only to felines. Which is why cats often inscribe squares, triangles, and other such configurations before finally coming close to their food dish.”
At the time I had made no comment, simply taking my paycheck and saying so long to Hilda, an impossibly beautiful white angora, and Waldo, a tiger-stripe half the size of a Doberman. Yet that wild speculation on feline geometrical movements was swirling around in my head as I sat in Louis Beasley’s rather strange home. He had finally allowed me to question him in his combination apartment/place of business, at 2 Fifth Avenue.
The room in which this porcine, world-famous, ostentatiously dressed impresario met me was curiously devoid of furniture, with the exception of an armchair and several writing or drafting desks, set high on swivels. Along the walls were elaborate built-in fish tanks, where colorful creatures cut like blades through the water.
Beasley sat in the high-backed armchair, a cream-colored throw over his legs.
His lover, or companion, or secretary—one doesn’t quite know how to characterize the relationship in a single word—kept circling the two of us but mostly Beasley, as though the pink-cheeked older man were a potential food source. Hence my thoughts about cats and caviar. For that was what it was like: Beasley the caviar on a large and costly cracker, and Vol Teak the inscribing feline, spelling out those quasi-mystical shapes.
Beasley had been most unfriendly at the start. He’d grilled me extensively as to exactly what kind of “investigator” I was, making the word sound distasteful.
But the moment I informed him of Lucia’s words—that Peter Dobrynin had spoken bitterly of Beasley’s betrayal of him when he was in need—the imperious Beasley, defensive, launched into a monologue that seemed to go on forever.
“Yes, I saw him in that debased state. Three years ago this Christmas. The worst had already happened. That he had thrown away the career of the decade was enough of a tragedy. But the man standing before me had thrown away everything—all human dignity. Tossed it away! He accosted me on the street. I didn’t recognize him at first. This great dancer . . . this god . . . this force of nature . . . there he was waiting in a doorway. Filthy. Drunk. Off his head.
“He wanted me to give him a bed!” Beasley exclaimed, the incredulity he clearly had felt that night now back in his voice. “He didn’t ask for it. He demanded! He was abusive, violent. Reeking of wherever it was he’d been flopping. Why, of course I sent him away. It was simply too much to bear . . . too sad. Dobrynin had simply gone the way of all the others. And there was no way to bring him back.”
“All what others?” I interjected.
I had affronted him mightily, I could see, by interrupting. He shone his contempt on me like a searchlight. Then, instead of answering my question, he called over his shoulder to Vol, sleek in his stone-washed black jeans and too-small T-shirt: “Perhaps it’s time for coffee, yes?”
Teak nodded in affirmation but made no move at all to get the coffee.
I wished that Tony were there with me, with his disconcerting grin. At that moment I could have used his ability to throw people slightly off-balance. But he was at the hotel resting, recuperating from the stupidly self-inflicted wounds he’d suffered in Lucia’s hallway.
“The other great ones, I meant.” Beasley had resumed his monologue. “The great dancers, the great artists who all descend into hell eventually. Who collapse under the weight of their gifts. Whose fire of genius sets them ablaze.”
Oh. I got it. That old-fashioned romantic rot that has nothing to do with the real world. But I didn’t bother to protest. It was obvious Beasley himself was not a part of the real world. Rather, he inhabited one from the dim, dim past—a world long gone, if indeed it had ever existed at all.
“I can even understand,” he went on, “how that poor woman was driven to kill him.”
“I’m sure Miss Maury would appreciate your understanding, Mr. Beasley, but the fact is, she did not kill him.”
He dismissed my statement. “Women too numerous to count have thrown themselves away on Dobrynin. He used them like shoehorns.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
Beasley carefully folded up the afghan on his lap. There had been no need for it, really; the apartment was quite warm.
“Ah. But you didn’t know Peter, did you? Your loss and your blessing. You see, he gave new meaning to the word ‘excess.’ He would . . . ingest . . . anything—alcohol, barbiturates, cocaine, anything. Anything that would help him slip into the desired state. And of course he always needed someone to accompany him on the ride—usually a woman. It was as if he needed someone to impress while he was getting to where he wanted to go. And of course, not to be excessively vulgar, he needed someone to . . . Well, suffice it to say that he ate life. And he ate people. He used women to grease the skids into heaven, and hell. You see? Like a shoehorn.”
Vol’s restless circling had at last ceased, but we still had no coffee. He came closer to me, smiled—he was handsome indeed—and sat down on the carpet, executing the perfect lotus position in one smooth move.
When I had managed to pull my eyes away from his haunting face, I caught a movement in one of the tanks along the wall. There seemed to be a disturbance going on, as if the water pump that regulated the tank had gone on the blink and was troubling the placid water. Or had this strange couple installed tanks that contained victims and predators, a steady-state cycle of birth and death in which one or the other was always erupting? I almost pointed to the fish to inform my hosts of the danger, but then I let my hand drop back onto my lap.
After a moment’s thought I asked, “Have you any idea where Peter Dobrynin spent the last three years of his life?”
Beasley snorted. “On the street, I presume. Or under it.”
“And did it not disturb you that this . . . god was out there, alone, in summer and winter, perhaps starving, perhaps abused?”
“Young woman,” he began—I suppose I am young, in relation to Louis Beasley—“I am not a sentimentalist.” I might have argued with that, but I said nothing.
“Young woman,” he continued, “wherever Dobrynin was, you may be sure that he was neither alone nor starving. And if there was any abuse taking place, he was not on the receiving end of it.
“In addition, the individual in filthy clothing who attacked me on the street that winter night was no longer Dobrynin the dancer, Dobrynin the god. He was an apparition. He was a hobo.”
“Then you have no thoughts as to who might have shot him?”
“Well, of course I do.” Of course I do, you silly cow, he might as well have said.
“Who?” I asked.
“Any one of a thousand women he seduced and abandoned. Any of his shoehorns.”
Vol Teak spoke for the first time: “When a person degrades you, why, naturally you want to pay them back in kind,” he said matter-of-factly. “Don’t you think? Or, don’t you?”
“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know, as I’ve never been ‘degraded’ by anyone,” I said, a bit prissily I’m sure. “Certainly not to the point of wanting to commit murder.”
“Ah,” he said, giving me a little Mona Lisa smile I hated. “Perhaps the rich can never be degraded.”
“Rich? I am far from rich. So far that I’m poor.”
“Well,” he said patronizingly, “certainly not spiritually? After all, you are an actress of some acclaim, we hear.”
***
My fifteen-minute interview with Vol Teak alone—while Beasley himself made the damn pot of coffee—had turned out to be even less enlightening—more worthless, so to speak—than the talk with the culture czar Beasley.
As I walked the cold Village street, turning around now and then to admire the majestic Christmas tree under the arch at Washington Square, I mulled over Beasley’s fixation on women. Had Dobrynin never degraded men? Hadn’t he ever used one of them as his shoehorn of the evening?
Why was it that Louis Beasley couldn’t even conceive of a man firing a bullet into the great dancer’s head?
Chapter 10
Tony raised himself on one elbow. “Well, well, well. If it isn’t the Florence Nightingale of the Great White Way! Is there a more compassionate woman alive? To what do I owe the honor of this visit, O tender-hearted golden angel of mercy?”
His bitterness startled me. He was obviously angry with me, but I hadn’t the slightest idea why. It had, after all, been his decision to try to defy gravity. It was that preposterous attempt to execute an impossible turn that had landed him flat on his back. I reminded him of this.
“Get a grip, Basillio,” I warned him. “I just stopped in to see how you were doing.”
“Empty-handed? No chocolates? No roses? No Life magazines?”
“Sorry. I’m just on my way to Melissa Taniment’s place. I have an appointment in twenty minutes.” Melissa lived only three blocks away, in an important-looking dual-purpose glass building—it contained both offices and luxury condominiums—on First Avenue.
“Well, what about my twenty-five hundred? Am I still getting paid even though I’m sidelined?”
“Oh, come on, Tony,” I teased. “You know I’m an enlightened employer.”
He turned his torso toward the nightstand, reaching for a cigarette, and suddenly grimaced from the pain, which seemed to have become localized in his lower back.
“Still bad?” I asked.
“It’s much better, but it hurts like hell when I make any kind of sudden movement.”
“Why don’t you go to the doctor, Tony?”
“For the same reason you don’t go to a drama coach.”
“Which is . . .? Never mind, don’t tell me. I don’t have time for one of your philosophical riddles right now.”
“So what happened with Beasley and his pet snake? Fill me in, boss.”
“Nothing much. Beasley thinks Lucia did it.”
“And does he know anything about our hero’s lost years?”
“He says no. Says he saw him three Christmases ago, and not again until Dobrynin was in his coffin. I’m hoping Melissa will be more helpful. Unlike Beasley, she seems positively anxious to talk to me.”
Tony finished his cigarette. “Listen, why don’t you come back to visit me after the interview?”
“Um, I don’t know, Tony. There’s so much work I ought to get to today.”
“Have a heart, Nestleton. Look upon me as another cat-sitting assignment. I’m a big, exotic, crippled—”
“We’ll see, Tony, we’ll see.”
I waved good-bye and headed out the door.
***
Like Louis Beasley, Melissa Taniment lived in an odd atmosphere. Her apartment was an enormous modern affair, bright from dozens of windows but with the discordant feel of a mausoleum. She’d filled it with truckloads of memorabilia—ballet photos and old toe shoes enshrined on bookshelves,,autographed sketches of herself done by a variety of artists. scrapbooks, and bric-a-brac, including a horrid old lamp featuring dancers cavorting on its base. The place was some sort of memory museum.
Her back ramrod-straight, she greeted me graciously. Her husband, she said, was away on business. She led me straight through the place into the big walk-through kitchen, which was spotless and cold.
I was astonished at how small she was. I towered over her. Why is it ballerinas seem so much larger than life onstage? I think perhaps its their broad shoulders—the elegance of their slope. And Melissa’s shoulders were impressively large, capped by a beautifully muscled neck. My earlier impression had been correct: retirement had not dimmed her loveliness.
I flushed, suddenly embarrassed as I realized that I was regarding her as some sort of relic. In truth, she was younger than I. And I don’t know that I would appreciate anyone’s assessing me in the same way.
Sitting across from her, I also felt a sense of relief—Louis Beasley’s characterization of all Dobrynin’s women as “shoehorns” couldn’t possibly be accurate. It seemed most unlikely that Melissa Taniment had ever been a shoehorn for anyone, at any time in her life. It seemed impossible that she would allow herself to be degraded.
“Now, Miss Nestleton,” she inquired in a pleasant tone, “how may I help you? What did you wish to ask me?”
That phrase of Tony’s—“our hero’s lost years”—sprang to mind. I forced myself not to use it, however. “I am trying to discover how Peter Dobrynin spent the last three years of his life, before . . . before his untimely death. Can you tell me anything about that?”
Melissa folded her hands on the countertop and waited a moment before answering.
“But I cannot help you answer that,” she said finally, speaking with a trace, just a trace, of that affected English one picks up from speech coaches. “How could I know?” she explained gently. “We’d completely lost contact these last years.”
“I see. It’s just that . . . I thought he might have come asking for your help at least once during that time.” It was my turn to lay on the long a’s and the smile of glass.
Melissa’s composure seemed not at all shaken. But I noticed that she did begin to look away from me more often. “Well, yes,” she said at length. “I did see Peter once. I suppose it was three years or so ago.”
“Around Christmastime?”
At last, I was beginning to pick up a faint trace of the chill I knew she was capable of emanating.
“I believe so,” she said, then continued, speaking very deliberately now. “Peter demanded money from me. He was drunk, and lewd, and thoroughly abusive. My husband put him out bodily.” She was staring past me by then. “That . . . is . . . all.”
“He never called or tried to see you again?”
“No.”
Melissa turned her gaze back to me then, and there was something much softer in it, something almost pained.
“I did, however, attempt to reach him once,” she said.
“When was that?”
“Two years ago Peter’s mother died. She lived in Connecticut, near Hartford. Family friends there called me, thinking I might be able to reach him and tell him of her death. But of course I was unable to do so.”
“When you say you tried to contact him—where exactly did you look?”
“Nowhere, in fact,” she answered dully. “I had no idea where to begin to look for him. He was lost to me.”
By now, strangely enough, her pleasant manner had begun to return.
“You see, I really cannot help to answer your questions, but I am happy you’ve come today,” she said, smiling.
Now I was truly confused.
“As you can see, I don’t need any more . . . things. Or money,” Melissa went on. “I’m surrounded by things. But the idea that Peter left something for me is so touching . . . no matter what it is. I know I’ll be grateful to have it.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,” I said sincerely. “Didn’t Peter Dobrynin die a pauper?”
Her f
ace congealed. “But you said you were here representing an attorney. I assumed there was an estate . . . or letters . . . or something.”
“Where did you get that idea?”
The ballerina was on her feet now, and this time she seemed to loom powerfully over me. “You are here under false pretenses, Miss Nestleton! You said you were in the employ of the same attorney who represents Lucia Maury!”
“No, you misunderstood,” I protested. “Lucia’s attorney has indeed retained me, but to investigate Peter Dobrynin’s murder.”
“Please go!” She turned the wrath of those mysterious eyes on me.
I started to speak again.
“Liar!” she cut me off.
As I left, she spat the word again.
Chapter 11
Betty Ann Ellenville had the look of the middle-aged woman who lives alone in a pretty town, spending her days doing serious organic gardening and occasionally throwing interesting pots on her woodshed wheel. She was short and pleasantly round-faced, with a careless, home-done haircut, and she greeted me in an old pair of overalls with a starched white shirt beneath the straps. No one would ever think, on meeting her for the first time, that she was one of the most respected dance critics in New York.
I had had a little adventure getting up to her loft. She lived on the top floor of a seven-story building on Spring Street, in a converted factory. I had to quickly figure out how to operate the very old-fashioned elevator that sat waiting in the lobby. One had to yank chains and pull levers and manipulate cords to get the thing moving. I felt as though I were a room-service meal going up on a dumbwaiter.
When I had finally reached her door and she had admitted me, I was delighted to see a wonderful fire roaring away in the fireplace, set in a gargantuan wall of exposed brick. It was the SoHo apartment of dreams—her place was marvelous.
No sooner had she shown me to a spot on an exquisite art-deco sofa than she said, “I do not believe for a moment that Lucia killed Peter. Not for a moment. I can’t understand why the police don’t look for the killer among the wretched derelicts he knew. Why, he was probably murdered over a cheap bottle of wine! I mean, really! It’s all quite absurd.”
A Cat in the Wings: Page 5