Dead Man Waltzing

by Ella Barrick

  “It’s nice,” she said, “but I don’t think it goes with my Aegean Sunset walls.”

  “Maybe I should come over and see the apartment, now that you’ve off-loaded the broken sofa on Goodwill.” I made a frame of my hand and pretended to peer through it. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen the place; I haven’t been over since you repainted.”

  “Sure,” Dani said. “How about tomorrow night? Cooper left today for a business trip, some sort of security convention in Las Vegas-ha!-so I don’t have plans any evening this week.”

  I never had evening plans unless I was teaching, so I didn’t feel too sympathetic that she was dateless for a few days. I pointed out another sale couch, but she said, “I’ve got to think about it. This is the first store I’ve been to; I want to look in a couple other places.”

  I rolled my eyes but said nothing, used to my sister’s habits. I was impulsive and made decisions about sofas or clothes or holidays on a whim, on intuition. Dani pondered things, researched products in Consumer Reports, and spent forty dollars in gas trekking around to eighteen stores in order to save ten bucks on something.

  “Fine,” I said. “Let me know when you want to go looking again. I’m getting ideas for when I can afford to replace Aunt Laurinda’s midcentury atrocities.”

  “You know,” Danielle said as we threaded our way back through the displays to the door, “her furniture might be worth money, like to a collector or something.”

  “I don’t think they’re legitimate antiques. They’re just old.”

  “Retro,” Danielle corrected me. “Collectible. Maybe you could make enough off of them to buy new furniture.”

  “It’s worth a thought.” We pushed through the glass door to the parking lot. “How would I find someone who would know if it’s worth something? I don’t think that Cari Something from the Cash and Cari show is likely to drop by, or the crew from Antiques Roadshow.”

  Dani tossed her hair and sniffed, knowing I was making fun of her love of do-it-yourself and home-makeover TV shows. “Laugh if you want, but I’ve learned a lot from those shows. I’ll find someone to give you an estimate.”

  “Really?” I hugged her good-bye. “Thanks, Dani.” She headed toward her car and I called after her, “Think about it.” I wasn’t talking about the sofa.

  Chapter 5

  Between collecting Maurice from the police station, our field trip to Corinne Blakely’s house, and the furniture-shopping expedition with Dani, I’d taken an extraordinarily long lunch. No biggie, I told myself, climbing the interior stairs to the studio at almost two o’clock. Our next class wasn’t until four, and I’d be working until eight o’clock tonight with classes and a private lesson with one of the men who paid me to dance with him at professional-amateur competitions. Such students were a pro’s bread and butter, and I was hoping to take on a couple more, since one of my best students, Mark Downey, had turned out to be an unbalanced stalker type.

  When I opened the door into the studio hallway, the strains of “With You I’m Born Again,” one of my favorite waltzes, drifted from the ballroom. Curious about who was here-I’d installed new locks not long ago and only a few people had keys-I paused outside the ballroom door. Vitaly Voloshin, my new dance partner, stood at the bar stretching. He had a lanky body and was one of those people who look totally unprepossessing at first glance; in fact, you wouldn’t be surprised to hear he was a 7-Eleven clerk or video store manager, with his longish, strawlike hair, pale skin, and bony face. But when he stepped on a dance floor, he underwent an amazing transformation, becoming somehow elegant and electric. I couldn’t explain it. He caught sight of me in the mirrors I’d had installed when we redid the room after the fire, and his face split into a grin. He loved smiling since his partner, John, had gifted him with dental work that turned his formerly tannish, crooked teeth into movie star-worthy choppers.

  “Good. You is here. We can practicing. I have the new ideas for our waltz.”

  “We didn’t have a practice scheduled.”

  Vitaly raised his brows. “So?”

  “You’re right. Give me a minute.” I clattered back downstairs and threw on dance leggings, a T-shirt, and my dance shoes. He was waiting in the middle of the ballroom’s hardwood floor when I returned, hand extended in invitation. He cued the stereo with the remote as I walked toward him, feeling myself drift into the dreamy, elegant mood of the waltz as the first notes floated around me. We moved slowly at first, then more swiftly as he whirled me into a turn series. I extended my limbs with each movement, knowing the pointed toe, the half twist of the wrist, and stretched fingers made the elongated and graceful lines that separated a so-so waltzer from a champion waltzer. Even without a flowing dress and an updo, I felt timeless, regal, like I was dancing at the court of some long-deposed or beheaded European king.

  New songs came on, but Vitaly and I held the mood. People think that competitive dancers get to prepare a routine to a specific song, like they do on Ballroom with the B-Listers, but we really dance to whatever the competition organizers cue up. Vitaly’s clasp was strong, his steps perfectly suited to mine, and we danced for at least forty-five minutes, stopping to perfect a pose or rework a turn, before I found Maurice’s problems intruding on my thoughts. Vitaly felt my mind drift and cut the music in midphrase, frowning slightly.

  “You is losing concentrations,” he said.

  “I know. I’m sorry. Let’s take a break.” I darted across the hall to the minifridge in the bathroom and returned with a bottled water for myself and a grapefruit juice for Vitaly. “You heard about Corinne Blakely?” I asked, handing him the bottle.

  “Da.” He drank deeply and swiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Is tragic losing for dance world. She was-how do you say?-‘only one of her type.’”

  “One of a kind. Did you know her well?”

  “Comme ci, comme ça.” Vitaly waggled his hand in the international gesture for “so-so.” “We are dancing together at exhibition in France.”

  “I remember that exhibition. What was it-two, three years ago?”

  “She is having amazing control, is being very precisely,” he said, “for a-”

  He threw in a Russian word that I automatically translated as “old woman,” “grandmother,” or “ancient crone.”

  “Maurice was having lunch with her when she died. The police interrogated him.”

  Vitaly opened his eyes wide. “Is not possible!”

  I didn’t know whether he thought it was impossible that Maurice killed Corinne, or impossible that the police questioned him.

  After another long glug of grapefruit juice, he added, “Is bad for business. Peoples is not liking dancing with murderers or where murders is happened.” His eyes slid to the spot near the windows where I’d found Rafe’s body.

  “Maurice is not a murderer.”

  “You should proving.” Vitaly’s face lit up.

  “Investigate? I don’t think so.” I shook my head, making my ponytail swish across my shoulders.

  “But yes! You has found Rafe’s killer. You can finding Corinne’s.”

  “I’ve got a ballroom studio to run, students to recruit, expenses to slash, and classes to teach,” I said. “I don’t have time to play investigator. Besides, the police let Maurice go after talking to him this morning; chances are he’s not even a suspect anymore.”

  My cell phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number. “Hello?”

  “Anastasia, you’ll have to ask Vitaly to fill in for me at tonight’s class.” Maurice’s voice was calm, but a twinge of tension, like a taut piano wire, hummed through it. “I’ve been arrested.”

  Chapter 6

  A few frantic minutes and a couple of phone calls later, I had elicited a promise from Phineas Drake’s law firm that a legal minion of some sort would be dispatched to Maurice immediately, even though the great man himself was on a train returning from New York City. Hearing the desperation in my voice (or having checked Maurice’s fina
ncials and found that he could pay the firm’s exorbitant fees), the aloof assistant patched me through to Phineas Drake’s cell phone. I could hear the rhythmic clacking of the train as we spoke, and I visualized the bearded, bearlike man reclining in a seat, his size and girth discouraging anyone from sitting beside him.

  “Stacy Graysin.” Drake’s voice boomed through the phone, and I could see Vitaly crane his neck to listen. “I didn’t think I’d be hearing from you again so soon.” He chuckled, a rich Santa-ish sound. I always had trouble reconciling his jovial exterior with his sharp and calculating mind.

  I explained about Maurice’s situation. “I don’t know why they’ve arrested him,” I said. “I don’t think he knew for sure.”

  When he spoke again, Drake’s voice was all business. “If he’s been smart enough to keep his mouth shut, it won’t matter; we’ll get him out of it, although it may be tomorrow, because it’s too late to get him arraigned today. Allison is on her way. She’s a chip off the old block.”

  I had no idea what “old block” he was talking about.

  “For a while there, during her sophomore year at Yale, it looked like she was going to be a vet, but then she decided to follow in dear old Dad’s footsteps and become a legal eagle.”

  “You have a daughter?” Somehow I hadn’t pictured Drake as being married, much less having children.

  “Six.”

  “Six daughters? Good heavens!”

  “Three are lawyers like their pop, two are doctors like their mom, and one’s a clockmaker.”

  I resisted the urge to pry further into the Drake family’s situation. “So Allison can get Maurice out? Can she find out why they arrested him?”

  “Absolutely. In fact, I can find that out with a phone call to the DA. Call me back in ten.” He hung up.

  Vitaly had been dancing from foot to foot in front of me, impatient to find out more. “What is happening?” he asked.

  “The police have arrested Maurice for Corinne Blakely’s murder, and I’ve arranged for a lawyer to represent him. Can you help me with the Latin class tonight?”

  “Da. Of course.” Vitaly nodded impatiently. “What can I doing to help Maurice?”

  I smiled, touched by his willingness to help a man he’d known only a couple of months. “That’s very kind, Vitaly, but I can’t think of anything right now, besides covering his classes and maybe working with his private students.”

  “Vitaly is doing,” he said with the air of one making a heroic sacrifice. “I will even dancing with the hippies.”

  I didn’t correct his English. One of Vitaly’s conditions about working here had been that he wouldn’t have to partner heavy women, even though one of them was one of our top two or three dancers. “Has it been ten minutes?” I looked at my watch. “Close enough.”

  Phineas Drake answered on the first ring. “They’ve got a pill bottle that apparently was the source of the poison that killed the Blakely woman,” he said without preamble. “It’s got Goldberg’s fingerprints on it.”

  I gasped. Drake chuckled. He didn’t seem worried about the damning evidence against Maurice. “Dozens of ways Goldberg’s fingerprints could’ve gotten on that bottle,” he assured me. “If that’s all the police have… pfft. We’ll know more after we get a look at the autopsy report.”

  I hung up, feeling slightly queasy, and relayed the news to Vitaly. “He asked me to feed his cats,” I added. I hadn’t even known Maurice had cats, but he’d asked me to take care of Gene and Cyd “for a night or two” when he called about his arrest.

  “Go, then,” Vitaly said, flicking me away with his hands. “Vitaly is holding the port until you returning.”

  “Fort.” I left.

  * * *

  Maurice’s house was a Craftsman-style bungalow with a compact front yard planted with dark green ivy rather than grass. Pink, mauve, and white impatiens bloomed in red ceramic pots on either side of the door, which was painted a dark purple. I wondered whether the color was Maurice’s choice, or if he bought the house like that. I found the key under the rightmost pot, as Maurice had said, and opened the door.

  “Mrow!”

  A silvery cat with darker gray markings came trotting toward me, tail up, and began to twine around my legs. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought she’d been alone for days rather than just the hours since Maurice’s arrest. “You must be Cyd,” I said. “As in Cyd Charisse.” I stooped to scratch under her chin. The cat purred, intimating that I could call her anything I liked as long as I kept scratching. Another cat, bigger and darker, with white markings like eyebrows over his green eyes, and a white-tipped tail, jumped from a plant ledge to a console table in the hall, knocking something off with a clink. I squatted to stroke both cats and pick up whatever Gene-named for Gene Kelly, Maurice had told me-had knocked off.

  It was a key. I was about to put it back on the table when a thought came to me. It looked like the key Maurice had used at Corinne Blakely’s house, brass-colored and a bit larger than your standard house key. I weighed it in my hand, thinking. Thought one: Finding the manuscript was important to Maurice. Thought two: Turner Blakely had mentioned he was off to Virginia Beach, two and a half hours away, for a bachelor party. He’d drink too much, put the moves on the stripper-he was the kind of guy whose friends would definitely have a stripper or two at a bachelor party-and crash at a friend’s house for the night. Thought three: This evening would be a perfect time to search Corinne’s house for the manuscript. There might not be another chance.

  Dismissing thought four, which had to do with arrest, trial, and imprisonment for breaking and entering, I fed the cats, locked up, and pointed my Beetle toward home. I’d have to postpone my debut as a housebreaker until after the Latin dance class.

  * * *

  Twilight stretched shadows across the yard and gave the unlit house a somewhat forbidding aspect when I arrived at nearly eight thirty. An accident on the parkway made the drive that had taken twenty minutes in late morning take three times that long. One of the joys of living in the greater D.C. area. I had plenty of time to question my impulsiveness on the drive, but I didn’t turn around. If there was the slightest chance that the mysterious manuscript would help erase Maurice from the police’s suspect list, then I had to do what I could to find it.

  Getting out of my car, I climbed the steps to the front door and slid the key into the lock. I looked over my shoulder, feeling furtive, and saw nothing and no one except my yellow Beetle looking lonely on the circular driveway. I eased the door open. Darkness greeted me. I pulled out the small flashlight I’d had the forethought to bring along and clicked the “on” button. Nothing happened. I shook it and tried again. More nothing. Shoot. Next time I’d have to be forethoughtful enough to check the batteries before setting out on a house-searching expedition. I reminded myself that there were no nearby neighbors and felt along the wall for a light switch. My fingers touched a rheostat and I turned it slightly. The chandelier glowed to life, bulbs half-lit like fireflies surrounded by sparkly crystals.

  I’d had time to develop a strategy on the drive, and I set out in search of an office. No way could I search every room in this mansion-I’d lived in apartment complexes that were smaller-so I’d decided to look in Corinne’s office and her bedroom. Then I’d leave, even if I hadn’t found the manuscript. On the ground floor, I poked my head into rooms filled with antique tallboys and silk-covered sofas too fragile to sit on, a dining room table long enough to seat the Redskins’ starting offense and defense, oil paintings in heavy frames, and a kitchen with an oversize farm sink and cabinet-front appliances. I suspected most of the parlors, drawing rooms, music rooms, and sitting rooms-or whatever they were called-went largely unused. Nothing looked remotely like an office.

  I climbed the curving staircase to the second floor, my footsteps muffled by the expensive-feeling carpet lining the steps. A wide hallway extended on either side of me, and I went right. The first room I looked in was a bedroom, but th
e room across from it, which must face the backyard, was an office, complete with desk, file cabinet, and typewriter. Finally! I made my way across the room mostly by feel and fumbled with the drapes, pulling the cord to close them. Only then did I return to the door, find the light switch, and flick it on, illuminating a Tiffany table lamp.

  I made straight for the desk, the sight of the old Smith Corona electric typewriter making me hopeful. No stack of manuscript pages sat beside it, however, and I could find none in the drawers. Sighing, I turned to the wooden file cabinet and opened the top drawer. Financial records. Investments. Insurance. The second drawer held what looked like personal correspondence, each file folder labeled with a name. Riffling through the first folder, marked AMELIA ADAMS, I found letters dating back to the mid-twentieth century. Corinne must have saved every letter she ever got. Fascinating for a biographer, but not so useful to me. The rest of the folders in the drawer, alphabetically filed, held similar contents.

  I checked the time. I’d been in the house eighteen minutes. The low buzz of adrenaline that had been keeping me pumped was beginning to wear off, and I felt jumpy and tired. What if Turner Blakely had car trouble and didn’t make it to the bachelor party? He could be home any moment. What if some nosy neighbor got curious about my Volkswagen and called the police? They could be surrounding the house right now. Once the thought had entered my mind, I couldn’t get rid of it. Giving in to my paranoia, I crossed to the window and drew one fold of the drapes aside a smidge. Nothing moved in the backyard. Feeling silly, I returned to the file cabinet and opened the bottom drawer.

  No sign of a manuscript here, either, but one of the folders was labeled BOOK AGENT, and another bore the name of a publishing house. I didn’t have time to read all the legal documents in either folder, but I copied down the agent’s name and phone number, as well as the name of the woman who’d signed the letters from the publisher; her title was executive editor and vice president. Slipping my one puny page of notes into my pocket, I checked to make sure I had my useless flashlight, and returned to the hall. I glanced toward the door at the end of the hall, the one I figured led to Corinne Blakely’s bedroom. The half-open door beckoned me, an invitation, but my nerves were fried, and I felt uncomfortable about invading the dead woman’s bedroom. Ransacking her office was bad enough; I couldn’t make myself paw through her bedside tables or peer under the bed for a manuscript I was beginning to think must be already with her agent or editor. I turned toward the stairs.