Last Dance

by Jeffrey Fleishman

  “This isn’t happening.”

  “It has happened.”

  “What do we do?”

  A pause. A breath.

  “I’m thinking no one steals a body unless . . . fuck, I don’t know; it’s more sinister than an OD,” he says. “Still, technically, no body, no crime. Of course, the body’s been stolen, so that’s theft, minimum. But we got to treat it like a homicide. Got to. The Russian consulate called the chief. FBI’s coming over. Someone leaked it to the press. TV cameras all over the place. International incident. We look like idiots.”

  “It is a great story—I mean, from their perspective.”

  “Don’t be a wiseass, Carver. You have a tendency to be a wiseass at the worst times.”

  I sit with a coffee and look out the window. A woman on a bike glides through traffic. She’s wearing a skirt, sneakers, and a white T-shirt; her blond hair is blowing in the wind. She’s young, pedaling toward palm trees in Pershing Square, as if she has come down from the hills to buy fabric and flowers from those cheap places near Skid Row. My eyes follow her. She turns left, the last flash of her hair disappearing around the corner, out of sight and into eternity. A sudden joy fills me. Slips away.

  “Carver. Carver.”

  “I’m here. You think a cop or someone from the ME’s was involved? How’d they know where to go—where, exactly, the body was? It was quick, right? They had to know the layout. What were they driving? What kind of explosives?”

  “Everyone’s being questioned,” says Ortiz. “I don’t think one of ours is involved, but who knows? I don’t know why, but when you see this video, it’s just too weird, you know?” He clears his throat. “Fire marshal and bomb guys are trying to figure it all out. No one hurt, thank God, but Jesus! You get any leads?”

  “Just the cellist I told you about. The one who came to her apartment and played while she danced. They had a fight a while ago, according to a neighbor. Maybe something there when I find the guy. I didn’t get much from Andreas Stein, her choreographer. The dancers didn’t know much either. She slept around. Took pills. She aged out of her prime and was trying to get it back.”

  “Can’t do that,” says Ortiz. “Impossible.”

  “Imagine having the life she had and finding you can’t have it anymore.”

  “At least she had it once.”

  “She didn’t see it that way. Ends up alone and naked in a bed.”

  “Marilyn Monroe.”

  “You’re dating yourself.”

  “I’m old, so fuck it.”

  “Whitney Houston drowned in a bathtub in Beverly Hills.”

  “Big voice.”

  “Lost it, couldn’t get it back.”

  “We could go down the avenue of the doomed all day, Carver, but we’ve got a ballerina to find. My guess is, we’re not the only ones looking. I keep replaying this video. It’s unbelievable ’cause you’re seeing it all, kinda grainy and fast, but you’re not hearing anything. Just this silence. You want to hear a voice. Something.”

  He sighs. “Jesus, Carver, we lost a body.”

  Chapter 6

  Special Agent Azadeh Nazari walks toward me with a pinot noir, a smile, and a file folder. She sits, stares me up and down, inhales a vape, and watches two women, one in a tight dress, the other in motorcycle leather, kiss in the twilight. She sips and lets her black hair down. We’re on the roof of Perch, overlooking the city in the purple-orange flare of a dying day. A lot of pickup lines and pretending are going on, especially among the young who have valeted their Priuses and Mercedes and are thinking how clever it is to be a trust-fund baby, tech geek, B film actor, wardrobe designer, gallery curator, or portfolio manager at Citibank. They drink Grey Goose, eat sliders, and pass around iPhones, laughing at their tiny movies, oblivious of the moon and the coming stars.

  “Why’d you pick here?”

  “It’s close for both us,” says Azadeh. “I like it. Don’t you live, like, right across the street? Besides, I wasn’t going to let you drag me to one of your dives.”

  “My places are respectable. One was in a Michael Mann film. They have character.”

  A breeze lifts. She sips and can’t help a grin.

  “Lose anything lately, Carver?”

  “Don’t give me shit.”

  “It went viral.”

  “Ortiz says he doesn’t think it’s one of ours. Too surreal, he said.”

  “He said surreal ? Ortiz?”

  “Not verbatim, but that was the gist.”

  She looks at the menu, puts it down. She opens the file.

  “Katrina Ivanovna. How much do you know?”

  “I read the obituaries,” I say. “Let’s play nice and pretend the FBI and the LAPD get along and are, you know, collaborative. She’s a famous pill-addicted ballerina with a cat and a loft on Spring, a lot of lovers, who, in a few days, was going to be Giselle.”

  “That’s what I like about you, Carver. Concise. Pack it all into a sentence.”

  “I’m not as informed as you.”

  Azadeh looks around, lowers her voice, and leans toward me.

  “Katrina trained with the best dance teachers in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Her father, Anton, was in the KGB but not in the field. He pushed paper. An analyst of some sort. Knows Putin, but not close. He retired early and spends his time at a dacha outside Moscow. Her mother is the interesting one.” Azadeh finishes her pinot. She waves for a waiter and asks me if I want another—on the Bureau, of course I do. “Maria Ivanovna is the daughter of one of Boris Yeltsin’s best friends. Went to the best schools. There’s a gap we don’t know much about, but she ended up in petroleum. She’s connected to Gazprom and has a link to a gold mine in Guinea. She’s not an oligarch but she knows their secrets and hunts reindeer with them in Siberia. She sleeps around, like her daughter. But discreet. Very plugged in. Definitely a Kremlin insider.”

  “Is it a hit? Poisoning job like those murders in England? Plutonium in the tea, or something, wasn’t it?”

  “We don’t think so,” says Azadeh. “Maria’s in good standing. Anton’s just a gardener. But who knows, right? Maria has serious cred. Could have angered someone, run afoul, I guess. Katrina and her mother weren’t close. They stopped speaking years ago—best we can tell, anyway. We’ve asked the CIA for an assist, but you know what it’s like trying to squeeze a nickel out of them. Of course, if we had the—”

  “Don’t go there,” I say. “We don’t have her body. At the moment.”

  Azadeh smiles. The waiter sets down the drinks and leaves.

  “You saw her, right?”

  “Pills and Stoli bottles,” I say. “Sad ending.”

  “So?”

  “Didn’t feel like that though. I’m thinking she was smothered, or someone forced the OD. No marks, no blood.”

  “Suspects?”

  “A cellist.”

  “Hmm. Not the usual.”

  “He played while she danced. They argued.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Hey . . .”

  “Sorry.”

  “Did she get back to Russia much?”

  “No. Pretty much cut ties there,” says Azadeh. “Lived all over Europe. South America. That place on Spring. She was a wanderer.”

  “Of dying talent.”

  “I watched clips of her on YouTube before I came here. She was lovely. Full of grace.”

  “You sound like a prayer.”

  I smile. Azadeh rolls her eyes.

  “I wanted to be a ballerina when I was a girl,” she says. “I’d twirl in my bedroom and through the halls. Humming. I was a great hummer, Carver. I was very young.”

  “A Valley girl, weren’t you?”

  “My parents moved there after they left Iran, right before Khomeini and the mullahs took over.”

 
“The Great Satan time.”

  “My father got out with his money and his faith. ‘Islam,’ he used to say, ‘doesn’t want little girls to dance.’ He wasn’t a fanatic. That’s just how he thought back then. He was cosmopolitan at heart and became quite American. But he kept this false hope that one day he might go back. A lot of older Iranians out here think this. At least, they used to. We call them the ‘burned generation.’”

  “Between worlds. What does your old man think of your wife? Elsa, right?”

  “I’ve turned him into a progressive. Lesbian daughters can do that.”

  “Or make you a fundamentalist.”

  “He goes to the mosque. Trump has pushed him closer to God. I think it’s more out of defiance than religion though.”

  “Our president has that effect.”

  I met Azadeh when I was starting with the cops after Berkeley and she joined the FBI after Yale. She was a prize for the Bureau back then—a clever, gay, multilingual daughter of Islam who listened to the Ramones and skateboarded on weekends. We went to Venice Beach once, strolled along the canals, smelled the marsh air and the money, and, at night, walked to the shore with a six-pack and a candle that wouldn’t stay lit, looking at the moon and listening to the waves and the homeless, drinking until fog covered the sand. We were wet and cold by morning, shivering and huddled against each other, but in no hurry to leave. We shared a damp cigarette, a bag of cashews, and the last beer. We fell into each other’s stories, two people on the brink of new lives. I remember the voices of surfers at dawn—their laughs, the slap of boards on the water, and the way the mist lifted and the sky hardened and fishermen cut bait on the pier and a girl with a guitar and a broken amplifier sang hymns in front of a boardwalk café that had yet to open.

  “Katrina danced at a Weinstein party,” I say.

  “That creep.”

  “What if it was something like that? Jealousy. Abuse. Slept with the wrong guy.”

  “With her, could be a lot of wrong guys. She got around. I wouldn’t #MeToo this thing. But stealing a body is occult, fetishistic, don’t you think? It’s more than covering up a crime.”

  “We don’t know what the crime is.”

  “And with no body . . .”

  I shoot her a look.

  “Sorry, Carver, but it really is a clusterfuck.”

  “What’s clusterfuck in Farsi?”

  “Sanctions.”

  We laugh. Azadeh pays the bill.

  “You get anything from her phone or laptop?”

  “Not yet.”

  “We’ll talk.”

  She closes the file, waves, and is gone. Perch is full. Voices, rattling glasses, high heels. Scents of dope and magnolia. I look west over the city, past Pershing Square and palms brought here long ago when they began making movies and believing in things not real. Los Angeles is a crueler place than that though. It leaves you thinking so much more is beyond your grasp than you once thought. But you stay, with your inlaid box of strange souvenirs, among killers and naked ballerinas and young couples drunk in the night, pretending. I stare at the unfinished twelve-story mural across the street: angels floating around a tribal child, a girl of the land’s first people, who looks with white-flecked eyes into darkness. I finish my drink, frisk myself for a nonexistent cigarette, and take the elevator down. A stoned redhead kisses me in the lobby. “This is awkward,” she says. “I thought you were someone I came with. I seemed to have lost them all.” She wobbles away. The valet looks at me, expectant, but I shake my head, turn right, and head up Hill. I see Esmeralda leaning against the Hotel Clark, wrapped in scarves, her shopping carts and bags a fortress around her. I sit next to her on the sidewalk. We listen to each other’s breathing. She turns toward me.

  “Give me ten dollars.”

  “No.”

  “Whiskey?”

  “Don’t have any.”

  “Why you here bothering me, then? I got to sleep. You always be coming around at all hours. Like a snake. A snake is what you are. No money, no whiskey, just a snake.”

  “How have you been? I didn’t see you last night.”

  “Had me at the hospital.”

  “You okay?”

  “I left,” she says. “That’s where you go to die. A hospital ain’t a place for living. Any soul worth a shit knows that. They gave me a shower. Held me under real long. Scrubbed me like a dog. Hate them, hate them all.”

  Two Harleys roar past and stop near the corner. The riders join other bikers who are drinking canned beer and tequila and whistling at Latinas waiting in line at La Cita. Bouncers get nervous around this time. Winds blow down from the San Gabriels, carrying voices and intentions from all directions. A cop car slows but keeps going, and on the other corner, a bus drops off a batch of cleaning women who disappear up the hill toward the financial towers and a billboard advertising for accident and personal-injury lawyers: “Stopped Getting Screwed. Se Habla Español.”

  Esmeralda coughs.

  “You’ve been on the streets too long,” I say.

  “Shh!” she whispers. “You see that man over there? Sitting, yellow eyes.”

  “Where?”

  “Right there across the street. Sitting there smiling with his yellow eyes. He’s been staring at me for a while. I’m hiding from him, but he finds me. Always finds me somehow. How do they do that? Big-ass city, but they find you. You got a man with yellow eyes following you?”

  “Not lately.”

  “He’ll be there. They come when you don’t think they will. Like snow. They had snow where I used to live. I think they did. Somewhere not from here. A cold place with a bad sky.”

  She pulls her scarves tight. Face black, eyes bloodshot, she looks like a gourd, withered, her hands long and knotted, knees pulled to her chest, lost in a pile of rancid clothing. She turns away from me; her breathing changes. I wait until she sleeps, staring into the few lighted windows left on the street, searching for the yellowed-eyed man of her crazy dreams.

  Chapter 7

  How can a body get lost?

  Where does it go?

  I see her, lying still in the bed. Veins like blue ink beneath pale skin. Her bruised ballerina feet. Her eyes open, her mouth a slight flash of teeth, as if locked between syllables. Something she wanted to say, a final thought, a revelation. No, something more frightening, I think—a recognition, perhaps lasting less than a second, that it was ending; a train of faces whooshing past, girls and dancers, the way they moved year after year, like painted saints on chapel walls, always there, spinning around her. No more.

  Ortiz slides me a coffee. He’s breathing in the slow, labored rhythm he has when he’s mad and mystified, letting it build, running a hand through his thinning hair, looking out the window of Demitasse to the edge of Little Tokyo. He’s put on a little weight over the years, but his eyes are quick and clear. He starts to stay something, bites his lips, sips espresso, stirs in a sugar. Licks the spoon. Sighs.

  “Don’t talk to any reporters, Carver.”

  “I know the drill. I’m pretty reticent, don’t you think?”

  “Why do you say shit like that? Reticent. Why can’t you just say quiet? Words people actually use.” He slides his spoon into the cup. “You weren’t always so reticent either. You got too close to that pain-in-the-ass reporter. What’s her name?”

  “Susan Chandler.”

  “Yeah, her. I don’t like her, Carver. Has a way of getting phone numbers and shit she shouldn’t have.”

  “She’s gone. Took a job at the Washington Post.”

  “Good news,” he says. “I guess it doesn’t matter. Story’s out. Headlines. Social media. Jimmy Fallon. We’re a punch line. Trump even tweeted about it. ‘LAPD can’t stop illegals, loses ballerina. SAD.’ I hate that guy.”

  “Anybody from inside?”

  “We’ve grilled the
MEs staff, all cops connected, morgue drivers, janitors—the bunch of them. Nothing. We gotta go further back. Former employees. I’m still thinking no though.”

  He reaches for another sugar packet, decides against it.

  “You see the security video?” he says. “Two men in uniforms and ball caps running through the halls with a body bag. They knew where to go.”

  “They looked lost a couple of times.”

  “Happened fast. A ballerina doesn’t weigh more than a bird. But why kill someone and leave a body behind in a loft and then steal it later from the morgue? Makes no sense. Get rid of the body right away. No body, no crime, no clues.”

  “Maybe the killer and the thief aren’t the same.”

  “C’mon, Carver. What are we looking at, then?”

  I don’t answer. Ortiz exhales. The barista brings him another espresso. “Thank you, Mariella,” he says in the voice he uses only for her. I shoot him a look. He leans close. “What? I’m married. I know. I can imagine. No harm.” A girl opens a laptop on the counter, puts on headphones, and peers into her screen, smiling at a virtual labyrinth that unfolds into a paradise and then into the black and stars of deep space.

  “You see the stuff they pulled from her phone?” says Ortiz. “They’re still working on it, but it’s a start.”

  “I’m heading there now. You know the guy?”

  “A writer or some shit.”

  “Ghostwrites biographies for celebs.”

  “Our ballerina had a story to tell.”

  “Could be. She met him for a drink at the NoMad a little past eleven the night she died. He’s her last text.”

  “What about the cello guy?”

  “Haven’t found him.”

  Ortiz stares out the window.

  “Hey, Carver, you gotta get a new car. Jesus, man, look at that thing.”

  “It’s vintage.”

  “It’s a wreck. What year?”

  “Late eighties. I thought you loved my Porsche.”

  “I do, but still. It’s one of those character things with you, isn’t it? You know the way you are. Righteous. Not the annoying kind, although at times, maybe, yes. Sticking with something out of spite or a sense of devotion. You’re kinda like a dog that way, Carver.”