Dancing with the Dead (11 page)

“Christ! She that bad from guzzling nothing but booze? Hey, you positive she’s not into serious drugs?”

Mary hadn’t thought of that, but she was sure nothing could come between Angie and gin. “Alcohol’s her drug of choice. She doesn’t need anything else.”

“Hell of a way to be, huh?”

“They wanna run some tests.”

“Hospitals love to run tests,” Jake said. “Keeps them in business. And that’s all they are these days, believe me, nothing but businesses.” He must have cleaned up before driving to get Fred; Mary could smell his deodorant, which was not unlike the admitting nurse’s perfume. It was making her nauseated in the car’s stifling interior. Panic was circling her like a vulture, eager to exploit any sign of weakness.

“I gotta go,” she said. She twisted the ignition key and the engine kicked and sputtered to life.

“Mary, you said nobody can see Angie now anyway. No sense staying here.”

“That’s exactly why I’m leaving.”

“I meant there’s no sense in
me
staying. So let me come with you, Mary. Please. For you. You need somebody.”

The future, like a trap. Either future. Some world. She was glad Fred was waiting inside. Fred, good for something.

“No,” she told him. “Anyway, you’ve gotta drive Fred home.”

“I can phone and tell him where my car’s parked, and where I got an extra key taped behind the license plate. Let him drive it to his place and we’ll pick it up later. This is no time for you to be by yourself, babe.”

He was right. They both knew he was right, so why fight it? Why pretend?

Reluctantly she embraced something deep in her. Then the trap, the cold future, seemed to recede. A person had what and whom they had, and she might as well own up to that fact.

She wished right now she were somewhere else, a place where there was music and dancing, a secure, predictable corner of her life that wasn’t threatening or ugly.

But she was here, in the hot parking lot of Saint Sebastian Hospital, talking to Jake in the sickly glare of the overhead lights. Like it or not, this was her reality.

He placed his hand on top of hers on the steering wheel and gave it a gentle squeeze that hurt slightly and pressured her heart. “Please, Mary?”

“Let’s go,” she said. “You can help me search for bottles.”

M
ARY CLENCHED HER EYES
shut and felt what he was doing take her over. She was helpless, shameless and defenseless, and in a way it was a relief to relinquish control to someone, something, beyond her. No control, no responsibility, no fear.

She couldn’t have stopped herself even if that was what she wanted. Her stomach tensed and her upper body levitated off the mattress as she groaned and reached orgasm. She was someone else and she was no one at all. For an instant she felt as if she were soaring toward the ceiling. Then she was aware of Jake’s heavy hand between her breasts, pushing her back down on the bed.

He knew her so well, knew how to move in her and what to say, and when not to say anything. Within a few minutes she twined her legs around his thrusting buttocks and reached orgasm again, though this time not so violently.

Seconds later he moaned. She thought she heard his teeth gnash. Then his body arched trembling against hers and she felt him release inside her.

Energy went out of him as he exhaled against her cheek in a long, hot sigh.

“You okay, babe?” he asked. Despite the fact that he was supporting himself on his elbows, his perspiring body was a crushing weight.

“Yeah, I think so,” she said hoarsely. “Just get off, please.”

After he rolled off her they lay silently, listening to the hum of the air-conditioner and feeling a cool draft flow across their damp nakedness. It had all been so systematic, by now almost a ritual.

About half an hour passed before Jake kissed the side of her neck and moved his hand down between her legs.

“No, not again,” she said, and pushed the hand away. It lingered like a predator only temporarily discouraged. “Not so soon.”

“Aw, it’s not soon at all.”

“It is, Jake. Listen to me, please? Will you?”

“Shit!” The voice of a disappointed boy denied a toy.

“Jake . . .”

“Okay, I’m sorry, Mary. I missed you, is all. Hey, you oughta be glad I want you so much.” Deliberately rustling the sheets, he settled down noisily on his side of the bed, not touching her. “Maybe when we’re old and gray it won’t be like that, and you’ll be sorry.”

“No way I’ll get old and gray if you kill me first.”

He laughed, his vanity tickled. Mary could manipulate a little herself. No way to live with Jake and not learn something about it.

She said, “I’ve gotta get up early tomorrow so I can call into work and tell them I won’t be there till afternoon.”

“I’ll drive you down to the hospital to get Angie.”

“I don’t think that’d be a good idea.”

“Yeah, guess you’re right. I gotta say your mother’s not crazy about me.”

“She doesn’t have to be,” Mary said, and rolled over and kissed Jake on the mouth. What if Angie stayed uncaring and distant from everyone, including Mary? Not like the old Angie? A lifetime of alcohol could do that; Mary had seen it happen. She scrunched closer to Jake and clung desperately to him.

“Hey,” he said, “I thought you were the gal that wanted to sleep.”

“Changed my mind.”

His hand slid between her thighs again and closed possessively on what he sought. Fingers began to massage. She wished he’d move them higher, and he did. Then he pressed his mouth close to her ear and whispered, “I own you, babe, you know that?”

She said she knew.

When Mary stumbled into the kitchen the next morning to put Mr. Coffee to work, the first thing she saw was the line of gin bottles on the table. Five of them, all taken from Angie’s apartment. Three less than half full, two unopened. They drew the morning light and recast it as a rainbow of color over the table, reality bent and filtered through a prism and made beautiful. Temporarily.

Mary sometimes wondered how she’d escaped the compulsion to drink. The illness that was so often hereditary. Angie was—let’s face it—an alcoholic. And Duke had probably been one. Mary told herself she could take or leave alcohol, yet she seldom drank anything stronger than wine. Maybe that was because she’d seen what hard liquor could do. What it had already done to her life, even though she hadn’t been the one who’d drunk it. She tapped one of the opened bottles lightly with her fingernail. The clear tone it emitted was bell-like and beautiful.

Angie had been ingenious in hiding her stash of booze. One half-full bottle had been in the kitchen cabinet, like a decoy. It had turned out to contain water instead of gin. The other bottles had been buried in a flour canister, submerged in the toilet tank, stuck inside the bottom of the sofa through a rip in the upholstery. And of course there was the bottle behind the vacuum sweeper in the closet, the one Angie had told Mary about. Only it had actually been tucked inside the sweeper’s zippered bag, lying there like something waiting to be born.

Mary and Jake had searched the apartment for over an hour; she was reasonably sure Angie would return to an alcohol-free home. Of course, nothing was stopping her from phoning out and having a bottle delivered from the corner liquor store, but at least there wouldn’t be alcohol already in the apartment, tempting her.

Mr. Coffee had begun gurgling. Mary padded barefoot back into the bedroom.

Jake was still asleep, lying on his stomach with one arm draped over the side of the bed so his hand lay palm up on the floor. Mary looked at the clock. Quarter to eight. She’d be able to call someone at Summers Realty soon.

She didn’t feel like going back to bed, so she decided to take a shower and get dressed. After calling the office, she’d phone Saint Sebastian Hospital and find out what time she should pick up Angie. She thought that past ten o’clock or thereabouts, and Angie’d be charged for another day in the room. Blue Cross might bitch about that. Nobody wanted trouble with Blue Cross.

Mary went into the bathroom and douched, then turned on the shower. She let her nightgown puddle to the floor and stepped out of it, naked and cool.

When the water was warm enough, she climbed into the shower and washed away some of what Jake had done to her, soaping her genitals and rubbing gently, feeling some of last night happening to her again.

Jackie Foxx, one of the more aggressive salespeople at Summers Realty, answered on the second ring. Mary explained that her mother was ill and had to be checked out of the hospital, and she wouldn’t be able to get to work until that afternoon. She’d go directly to the title company for the scheduled closing on a piece of commercial property out in Chesterfield. Jackie Foxx asked if there was anything anyone could do to help, but Mary assured her everything was under control. “Everybody’s mother gets sick sooner or later,” Jackie said in a sympathetic voice, then hung up and left Mary trying not to think about where that line of logic ultimately led.

Mary called Saint Sebastian and was told her mother would be ready to leave anytime between nine and ten o’clock. Past ten, and the room rate for that day kicked in. Like a motel, Mary thought glumly, only there were two ways to check out.

She didn’t have to leave for at least half an hour, so she used the remote and switched on the TV. She tuned in “Good Morning America” at low volume, so it wouldn’t wake Jake, then sat back and sipped her coffee.

When her cup was half empty, there was a TV journalist standing in front of the Verlane house in New Orleans again. Network news shows had now fallen in love with this case. And why not? It had everything: murder, anger, mystery, the victim’s husband at odds with the authorities.

Mary’s thumb eased down on the remote’s volume button. “ . . . perhaps a new development,” the bland-featured journalist was saying. Wind was gusting in New Orleans, riffling his hair and causing a strand of it to keep getting stuck in the corner of his earnest eye.

A tape of Rene Verlane was shown again, this time soundlessly, while the journalist talked about how police were now speculating that the murder of a woman a month ago in Seattle, Washington, might somehow be linked to Danielle Verlane’s death. The similarities of the two murders were more than what the police called obvious
modus operandi.
Though both women’s throats had been slit, there apparently was something more, a mysterious and grotesque something the police were keeping to themselves, that connected the two homicides. The journalist also said that for the first time Rene Verlane himself might be considered a suspect in the eyes of the police.

Fade to an interior shot of the handsome Verlane seated on his white sofa with his legs crossed. He was wearing a cream-colored suit with a white shirt and flowered tie. Behind him the pale sheer drapes undulated in the breeze like the gowns of dancing angels; at least that was how Mary saw them.

Verlane was explaining that he, too, thought his wife and the woman in Seattle were probably murdered by the same person. The Seattle woman, Martha Roundner, had been a dark-haired, 35-year-old aerobics instructor who’d also been taking ballroom dancing lessons. The police, it seemed, were making light of that correlation and concentrating instead on whatever pertinent fact they were keeping secret.

As Verlane talked, Mary studied his face, searching for some flicker of guilt, but there was none. She hadn’t considered before that she might be looking at the killer of a woman, or women, who’d borne a superficial resemblance to her, who’d been “her type” and who’d danced. There was about Verlane a smooth kind of brutality that strangely intrigued her. Merely watching the man on television, Mary could feel his magnetism.

“It isn’t fair,” he was saying in his syrupy accent, “that the New Orleans police, and now the Seattle police, are keeping some key piece of evidence from the husband of one of the victims. Sure, I understand they want a trump card to play on the suspected killer—if the investigation ever reaches the point where they have a suspect—but a husband has the right to know everything possible about his wife’s death.”

The interviewer, now with his hair neatly combed, was professionally noncommittal about that, and tactful enough not to point out that the spouse was traditionally the prime suspect in a murder case. Was Verlane putting up a front? Talking like a guilty man? Let the viewers draw their own conclusions.

“What, if anything, do you intend doing about it, Mr. Verlane?” he asked smoothly.

The camera zoomed in for a tight close-up. Verlane’s strong dark features were set (Mary wondered how he shaved the deep cleft in his chin without cutting himself; it was a ravine), and his lips barely moved as he spoke. “Since I can’t get anywhere with the New Orleans police, I plan to travel to Seattle and find out what I can about the Roundner woman’s murder.”

“Do you intend to conduct your own investigation?”

“Why not? The police don’t seem to be making progress, either on my wife’s case or on that of the murdered woman in Seattle. There’s certainly no law against my trying to learn what they won’t tell me. I’ll go wherever necessary, and I’ll do whatever’s necessary, to find my wife’s killer, and the police be damned!”

Somewhat unnerved by the vehemence of Verlane’s response, the interviewer thanked him and turned to face the camera squarely, addressing the New Orleans station whose tape was being used on the network news.

Mary found herself sitting on the edge of the sofa, leaning forward and staring at Rene Verlane, who was still visible behind the reporter. She sat fascinated by him until the picture faded and a commercial came on the screen, an aerial view of cars speeding in formation across the desert.

She decided to buy a
Post-Dispatch
on the way to the hospital, not only to read more about the Seattle murder, but to see if there was an accompanying photo of Martha Roundner. She wondered how strongly the Seattle victim, like Danielle Verlane, resembled her. And might there be some other connection? Had Mel also instructed this woman?

It was strange, this powerful compulsion to satisfy her curiosity about the deceased, almost as if she hungered to learn about a sister she’d never met.