Baby Doll Games (15 page)

Chapter 18

With the preliminaries of this ease out of the way, Sigrid let Eberstadt and Peters return to work on other ongoing investigations. Those two were concurrently responsible for a rape-homicide, a domestic stabbing, and, from last Friday morning, what looked like a botched murder-suicide pact between an elderly husband and his cancer-stricken wife. Unfortunately the husband’s aim was so bad, he’d missed his own heart and was expected to live, which meant he was going to come out of his coma feeing an automatic charge of manslaughter-second.
Albee and Lowry went off to compare the taffeta hair ribbon found on Emmy Mion’s body with the one still at property. If it matched as perfectly as they expected, they planned to visit the Gillespie child’s parents.
Piled on Sigrid’s desk was more than enough paper to occupy the rest of her afternoon and that would have been the sensible thing to attack. Or she might have waited until Captain McKinnon returned from a conference and gone in to brief him on the status of the cases under her direction. Instead, as soon as her office cleared, she slipped on her raincoat and hat, left word with the front desk where she’d be and, with a vague sense of playing hooky, headed for the 8th-AV-8 Dance Theater.
Exiting with her fellow subway riders, Sigrid came up a flight of grubby wet metal steps beside a store whose windows reflected the schizophrenia of the season: cardboard monsters and remaindered Halloween candy, drastically reduced, were wedged in with Thanksgiving turkey candies, foil-wrapped chocolate Chanukah
gelt,
and Christmas tree ornaments. The cold rain fell heavily now, making the late afternoon even grayer; and a partially clogged grate at the corner had formed a pool of dirty water at the crossing so that pedestrians were having to take wide detours around and through vehicular traffic to avoid it.
Sigrid turned up the collar of her raincoat, tugged her hat down firmly and sprinted for the theater, which lay two blocks north.
Inside the narrow lobby, she felt an immediate wave of warm air. Someone must have decided that the budget could afford heat. From deeper within the theater came the sound of drumbeats and childish voices.
A young woman holding a clipboard stepped around the partition that separated the lobby from the auditorium and looked Sigrid up and down. "Are you a parent?” she asked suspiciously.
“No,” Sigrid replied. “Police.”
“May I see some identification?”
Sigrid complied and the woman neatly copied her name and the time onto the sheet of paper on her clipboard. “We’re probably locking the barn door too late,” she said grimly, “but better late than never. Do you know who killed Emmy yet?”
“We’re still investigating, Mrs.-?”
“Weinberg. Liz Weinberg. I have a son and daughter in today's class.”
Sigrid vaguely remembered seeing the Weinberg name on a supplementary list of parents not yet interviewed. “You weren’t here when it happened Saturday?”
“No, thank God! We had a bar mitzvah up in Syracuse this weekend- Didn’t get back till last night and the phone ringing off the hook till all hours while we worked out a schedule. From now on the alley door stays locked and everybody has to sign in whenever the kids are here.” Evidently it had not occurred to the young mother that they might be locking the fox in with the chickens, thought Sigrid, passing into the darkened auditorium.
Up on the brilliantly lit stage, nine children were making enough noise for nineteen. Barefooted, dressed in lollipop-colored tights and leotards, they shrieked with laughter as they tried to adjust their rhythmical march whenever Ginger Judson varied the beat of her bongo drums. They appeared to range in age from five to eight.
The iron fence was nowhere in sight this afternoon. The scaffold tree had been unbolted from its spot at stage right and pushed over into the wings. The cardboard tombstones were also gone and the painted backdrop had been hoisted overhead to uncover the mirrored wall behind.
Sigrid occasionally had trouble differentiating between boys and girls when they were that young, but after watching a few minutes from one of the side pews and seeing them reflected from all angles, she rather thought there were five girls and four boys until she heard Cliff Delgado’s voice above the laughter and drum beats: “Okay now, boys march like elephants and girls gallop like ponies”; whereupon five small bodies hunched over with their arms swinging together in front of their heads like elephant trunks.
Although she concentrated on the way Delgado and Judson were conducting the children s dance class, Sigrid was suddenly overwhelmed by such an intense conviction that Nauman was somewhere near that she turned to the pew behind, fully expecting him to be there. Instead, she saw a rather homely young man with a smear of yellow ocher beneath his left ear and a bulky wool sweater that exuded a familiar aroma of turpentine and paint thinner, odors that instantly conjured up a vivid memory of Nauman whenever she smelled them now. Another artist, no doubt.
He gave Sigrid a friendly smile and slipped along his pew till he was close enough to murmur, “Mine’s the one with the yellow-and-purple leotard. Which one’s yours?”
“I don’t have one,” Sigrid replied, noting for the first time three unfamiliar women seated six rows down on the opposite side of the theater, two as young as Liz Weinberg, the third several years older. More mothers and a grandmother?
She watched the child in yellow and purple, the tallest of the four girls, as she galloped with the others in and out of the slower-moving line of “elephants.”
“Do you always come with your daughter?” she asked.
He shook his head. “We’re only three blocks away, but after what happened here Saturday… Caitlin-my wife-she thought we ought to take Shannon out of class, but she loves it so much. Just look at her!”
The ponies and elephants tumbled into a noisy heap at Delgado’s feet, and if that little girl’s blissful face were any barometer, she did indeed love the class.
“Besides,” said her father, “I don’t figure the kids are in any danger and since they’ve got that psychiatrist coming back to talk with them today, Shannon ought to be here for it.”
“Did she know the child who was killed last February?” asked Sigrid.
He looked at her suspiciously. “You connected with the theater?”
“I’m a police officer,” she answered and introduced herself.
“Howard ©’Brian," he said. “Yeah, Shannon knew her. Not well, though. They overlapped in this class for a month, then last January the Gillespie girl moved up to the Wednesday-afternoon class for the nine-to-twelve age group. A month later and she was dead.” He rested his arms on the back of Sigrid’s pew; his eyes followed his daughters movements onstage. “It’s a bitch when something like that happens,” he said softly. “You get paranoid with your kids, don’t want to let them out of your sight. I walked Shannon everywhere till Memorial Day, till her friends teased her so much she made me stop, and here I am doing it again.” Sigrid nodded toward the other parents. “You don’t seem to be alone.”
O’Brian frowned. “There’s usually fifteen to twenty kids in this session. About a third of the parents have pulled theirs out and maybe they’re the smart ones. I don’t know. Emmy Mion wasn’t much taller than Shannon or Amanda.” He leaned closer to Sigrid and the evocative smell of turpentine grew even stronger “Tell me the truth, Lieutenant: Is some nut running around with a thing against small girl dancers?”
“We certainly hope not, Mr O’Brian.”
“Weird that some guy could sneak in from the alley and waltz right onstage to kill her”
“Is that what they’re saying?”
“That’s what someone told my wife. That it was some psycho loony Emmy used to dance with out in California who followed her here. We made them promise to keep that alley door locked from now on and somebody’s going to sit out in the lobby whenever classes are on to sign people in and out.”
Sigrid sat half-turned in the pew so that she could both look at O’Brian and see the stage. “Did your daughter talk much about Emmy Mion?” ^ “Not more than eighteen or twenty times a day,” he answered wryly. “Did you know Emmy could do a somersault in midair, walk on her hands, hey! swing from the rafters, too, for all I know?”
Sigrid smiled. “Nothing negative, then?”
Howard O’Brian’s face became serious again. “You mean any hanky-panky going on, like those day-care centers where the kids were molested?”
“It happens.”
“Not here,” he said emphatically. “That’s the first thing the kids were asked after the little Gillespie girl was killed and we wouldn’t have let Shannon stay on if there’d been the slightest hint of any funny teacher stuff. There’s always been a good feel about this place. These people really seem to like working with kids. It’s not just a job for them-hey, they’re only kids themselves. Look at diem.”
Up on the stage, Eric Kee and Ulrike Innes had joined in with the children for some monkey-see, monkey- do pantomime as Cliff Delgado called out, “Happy! It’s your birthday!”
Ginger’s bongos gave way to the lighthearted slap and jingle of her tambourine.
“You got balloons for your party! They’re so big they almost swoo-oop you off the ground.” As Cliff’s voice swooped, Eric and Rikki each swung a child into the air and pretended to bobble him across the stage while the other children mimicked being tugged upward. The musty maroon velvet curtains had been pulled all the way back and Nate Richmond’s reflection could be seen standing before his lightboard at stage left. A pixie smile lit his ageless face as he bounced colored lights over the children like confetti.
“Ooops! Billy just popped his balloon!” Cliff called. “Oh, he’s sad. So sad, and you’re sad for him.”
The children drooped around a small boy, Ginger switched back to the drums and beat them in a somber dirge, and the confetti-colored lights merged into a pale blue.
As the class wound down, a slender figure emerged from one of the side doors that led backstage and paused to speak to the three women, who immediately stood up and moved to the rear pews. The figure continued over to Sigrid and Howard O’Brian.
“Hi! I’m Dr. Ferrell and-Sigrid! I didn’t realize you were here.”
Christa Ferrell beamed at her old schoolmate happily. She wore an expensive-looking green sweater that had whimsical giraffes knitted into its design; and with the sleeves pushed up and her cornsilk hair piled loosely atop her head, she looked as fresh and young as one of the children. Her smile included Sigrid’s companion. “Are you a daddy?”
Looking dazzled, Howard O’Brian stuck out his hand. “Shannon’s my daddy, yes. I mean, yes, I’m Shannon O’Brian’s father.”
The psychiatrist shook his hand and explained, “I’m asking all the parents to move as far from the stage as possible so that the children won t be inhibited by your presence when I meet with them in a few minutes.”
“Oh sure,” said O’Brian and scooped up his scarf and jacket. “Nice talking to you, Lieutenant, and I sure hope you people catch the guy soon.”
Christa Ferrell looked at Sigrid dubiously. “You didn’t want to sit in on this first session, did you? Strangers are sometimes tricky until I’ve established trust”
“I’ll poke around backstage,” Sigrid said. “But when you’re through, I’d like to hear how it went.”
“Fine.” Christa Ferrell moved toward the stage as Helen Delgado rounded the mirrored wall at the rear with a tray that held a pitcher and some paper cups. Today the designer had sleeked her hair back into a smooth braided chignon, and enormous yellow plastic sunflowers bloomed in her ears.
“Now then,” she said warmly, “who’s ready for juice?”
With six members of the 8th-AV-8 out front among the children, backstage seemed deserted. Beyond the circular iron staircase, the door to the prop room was open so Sigrid stepped inside and looked around. Painted flats were piled against one wall and shelves held a limited inventory of props that reflected the troupe’s meager budget: cheap umbrellas, plastic canes, a collection of hats that might have come from thrift stores. Hanging from the ceiling was a net filled with multicolored plastic beach balls, and directly beneath, looking like leftovers from an EA.O. Schwarz fire sale
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were a life-size stuffed lion, tiger, and ostrich in mangy velour.
A table in the far corner of the large room held numerous cans of spray paint; brushes, rollers, and a couple of small face masks hung from nails over the table. Judging by the thick mat of newspapers on the floor and the overlapping layers of colors splattered on both comer walls, Sigrid decided this must be where Helen Delgado painted her flats.
Propped against the fourth wall was the spiked iron fence. Its removal from the stage, unlike that of the scaffold tree, appeared to be permanent.
“We didn’t think the children ought to have to keep looking at it,” said Helen Delgado from the open doorway.
"Probably wise of you," Sigrid murmured and, as she accompanied the designer down the hall, asked, "Have you learned anything more about the telephone call Miss Mion expected Saturday?”