Dancing with the Dead (22 page)

Mary thanked her and accepted the pills. Then she stood up. Her right hip was partly numb and her legs felt as heavy and unresponsive as if she’d been dancing for hours. Dr. Keshna was gazing at her again with her very wise eyes, understanding and unfathomable pity in them; she seemed to know something about Angie and Mary but there was no way to impart the knowledge. She touched Mary lightly again, this time on the back of her arm, as if she might ease anguish with the laying on of her tiny, gentle hands.

Neither woman spoke as Mary trudged from the hospital into the night.

H
E’D FOLLOWED HER HOME
from the hospital and watched her park her car, then walk with her head bowed to her apartment and disappear inside. Lights came on, but she didn’t move around and he didn’t glimpse her through a window. She was no doubt tired, after her busy day and busy night.

He smiled. He knew about what she did, almost everything she did. She wouldn’t like that if she found out, but wasn’t that the delicious part?

She’d still be awake. He could walk up to her door and knock, and she’d answer.

And it would be as simple as that. Inside. He’d be inside, and there’d be nothing she could do about it. He absently ran his hand over his tumescent penis, thinking about that. It was always this way. A measure of time would pass, then he’d have to act. Something made him act, often when it wasn’t wise, and he simply had to make the best of the way things turned out. Sometimes that was difficult. It was a good thing he was smart.

Suddenly he stepped down off the curb and started across the street toward her apartment, repeating her name in his mind:
Mary, Mary, Mary.
She could probably feel that upstairs, but she wouldn’t quite know what the feeling meant. Not yet.

Light washed over him as a car rounded the corner, but he didn’t pay much attention.

Until he saw the dull red and blue bar of lights on the roof, and the official lettering on the door.

A police car!

The patrol car slowed as it approached him. He continued to cross the street without speeding up. He could hear the car’s engine slowly laboring near him. When he glanced to the side he saw there were two men in the dusty blue cruiser. As he stepped up on the sidewalk it almost braked to a halt and he thought for sure the one on the passenger side would say something to him, stop him and question him. Why were they so interested in him, anyway? Did he look suspicious? Could they somehow know his thoughts?

He stopped near a parked car, a big expensive gray Buick, and pretended to be fishing in his pocket for a key, taking his time, waiting for the patrol car cops to lose interest in him and travel on. A big luxury boat like the Buick, he must be an important man with influence; they better have a good reason for treating him like a criminal. A citizen could sue!

Great! Now the police car was sitting still in the middle of the street. And he had no key. What now? What would they think if he walked away from the Buick? That he forgot his briefcase?

No, not the way he was dressed.

More headlights!

A pickup truck had turned the corner onto Utah and stopped behind the patrol car, its driver waiting for the car to drive on.

Desperately, he fumbled with the door handle and found the Buick was unlocked. Much better! Luck going his way. He climbed in and slid across the seat until he was behind the steering wheel. Acted as if he were bending forward to fit the key in the ignition.

That must have done it. The pickup truck eased closer to the cruiser’s rear bumper as its driver became impatient, and the cops gave up their curiosity. The police car edged forward, then picked up speed. The truck followed at a deferential distance.

He sat behind the steering wheel and watched through the windshield until both vehicles had disappeared down the street.

Then he got out of the Buick and ran in the opposite direction until a pain beneath his heart made him stop.

As soon as she awakened the next morning, Mary reached out a hand and passed it over the smooth, cool expanse of the sheet, as if to reassure herself she was safe in her own bed.

Daylight was exploding silently through the spaces in the Venetian blinds, shooting needles into her eyes. She closed them again and thought for a moment that Angie’s cancer was a nightmare remembered. But it wasn’t. The undeniable fact of it settled over her like a pall.

She hadn’t been able to get to sleep right away last night, sitting up and watching TV, the end of the Letterman show, people whose pets did amazing things on cue.

Later, in bed, she’d lain awake for a long time staring into darkness, her thoughts as aimless as stringless kites, dipping and soaring anywhere they wouldn’t have to settle on Angie.

She opened one eye and peered painfully at the clock whose alarm she’d forgotten to set. Seven-thirty. If she hurried, she could still get to work on time. She assured herself of that as she struggled out of bed. The angled beams of sunlight were warm where they struck her bare legs.

After using a quick, cool shower to bring herself fully awake, she got dressed and walked into the kitchen. She needed coffee badly.

She added a little water to yesterday’s leftover brew in Mr. Coffee’s glass pot, poured some into a cup and put it in the microwave. She walked around the apartment while the coffee was getting hot, pacing, relieving some kind of pressure she didn’t understand.

Finally she walked back into the kitchen. She decided to drink her coffee black, maybe clear her head by using caffeine as a substitute for a good night’s sleep.

Still not hungry, but knowing she should eat, she stuck a piece of bread in the toaster, and when it popped up she spread strawberry jam on it.

As soon as she’d sat down with her toast and cup at the table there was a knock on her door. Hurried footsteps descended the steps to the foyer, and she barely heard the street door open and close.

Lowering her toast from where she’d lifted it halfway to her mouth, she set it next to her steaming cup, then she walked into the living room and crossed the carpet to the door.

She looked through the fisheye peephole and saw no one in the hall. Leaving the door on the chain, she opened it a few inches and saw the package on the mat. It was wrapped in brown paper and had a UPS sticker on it.

She closed the door briefly to unfasten the chainlock, then quickly brought the package inside. There was the return address in blue felt-tip pen: Spangle Soul Shoe Co., Chicago.

The Latin dance shoes she’d ordered! She wanted to look at them now. Though she didn’t have a lot of time to spare, she’d open the package before leaving for work. Life had its priorities.

She carried the package into the kitchen, got a steak knife from a drawer, and sat down at the table. After a sip of coffee, she used the knife to cut the tape on the package and peeled away the wrapping paper. Then she opened the box and lifted out one of the shoes from its cushion of crinkled tissue paper.

It was white satin, with what appeared to be two-and-a-half-inch heels. Mary was pleased. The shoes looked much like their catalogue illustration, and they’d do just fine for her rhythm dances in Ohio after she had them dyed black to make them appear more Latin, as Mel had advised.

Now came the big question: would they fit? It was difficult getting anything through the mail that actually fit. And there was no selection of ballroom dance shoes in St. Louis, which was why she’d sent away to Chicago. This would be the third pair she’d tried, and she didn’t want to send them back as she had the others.

A folded paper in the shoebox caught her eye. A brief handwritten note in with the shoes, expressing the hope that Mary would be satisfied. Personal service was important in the small world of mail order dance supplies, which was why it was so easy to return merchandise to the seller. Returns and exchanges were almost expected.

She took off her street shoe and slipped one of the dance shoes onto her foot.

As she stood up and put weight on the foot, she felt it spread in the new shoe. Maybe this pair would be too tight. She couldn’t be sure; she needed to put on both shoes and go through a few dance steps, on the carpet so she wouldn’t mar the suede soles in case she decided to return them. Had to find out if they pinched.

But there really was no time for that now, she cautioned herself; she’d better get to work and shuffle the necessary papers for this afternoon’s closing at the title company.

She returned the shoe to the box with its mate, then worked her street shoe back on her foot. Hurried a few bites of toast and a long sip of scalding coffee. Ready for the day. Sure.

As she took the stairs to the street, she brushed crumbs from her hands, then from the front of her coat.

It was eight-twenty when she got to work. There was one phone message for her, abbreviated in the receptionist’s precise handwriting, red ink like blood on the memo sheet:

“Man/8:10/wdnt lve nme/wil cal bk.”

B
UT HE DIDN’T CALL.
Not by lunch time anyway. The hours were getting heavy.

Probably, Mary told herself, it hadn’t been Rene who’d called the office that morning. How could he know the phone number? She didn’t recall telling him where she worked, but of course she might have mentioned it and forgotten. If so, what else might she have said and not remembered? If Rene knew where she worked, what else might he know about her?

By two-thirty she was almost worn out from praying each time the phone rang, feeling the emptiness in her when each call resulted in an ordinary business conversation. Instead of humming with passion, the line buzzed with talk of closing costs and adjustable rate mortgages.

At three o’clock, just after she’d worked up some figures with Victor on what it would take to finance a four-family, the phone didn’t disappoint her.

“Mary? This is Rene.”

“I know your voice.” She saw herself as if through the window, a conservatively dressed real estate employee talking on the phone, her hammering heart not visible. The closing woman. Amazing what went on beneath the calm surface of normality.

“Sorry about calling you at work, but I needed to talk.”

“It’s okay, really.”

“I tried your apartment last night, but you weren’t home. No one was.”

“Rene, the guy we talked about—Jake—he’s moved out for good.”

“It was your idea?”

“Yeah. Things weren’t good between us. They never were good, actually.”

“It sounds like you did the right thing.”

“I’m sure I did.” He didn’t say anything, but she could hear him breathing. “Rene, did I mention to you where I worked?”

“No. Why?”

“The phone number here. How’d you get it?”

“Oh! I figured you’d left for work this morning, and I didn’t wanna call again at your apartment. Then I remembered you said you worked at a real estate company, so I got a St. Louis phone directory at the library and started going down the list. Called each one till I got to Summers and asked for you, and a woman said you hadn’t come in yet, so I knew I had the right place. Is it okay? I mean, can you talk?”

“Sure, no problem.”

“Another woman’s died, Mary. Here in Kansas City.”

Whoa! She mashed the receiver harder into her ear, as if to press in the realization of what she’d just heard. “You’re in Kansas City?”

“Yeah, but not for long. The police don’t know I’m here yet, and I’m catching a flight back to New Orleans in a few hours.”

“The woman who was killed? . . .”

“She was a dancer, in her thirties, with dark hair. Like Danielle.”

Like me.
“And you were in Kansas City when it happened.”

“I’m afraid I was. For the dance competition. Checking up on some of the names you gave me. I talked to a reporter with one of the papers, a man I met about five years ago at a convention here. Name’s Pete Joller. I told him about my theory of a sort of intercity Jack the Ripper who kills ballroom dancers. He thinks it makes sense, and he agreed to help me cross-check the names with a list of Kansas City female homicide victims the past five years. He called last night about midnight, and I expected him to let me know the results. Instead he told me he’d gotten word a woman had just been discovered with her throat slashed. He checked and found out she was a ballroom dancer—local, though, not part of the competition.”

“Had she?—”

“That’s all I know about it,” Rene interrupted, his voice tight. “But just the fact I was in town when it happened’ll get the police all over me again.”

Mary barely saw, barely heard, the cars swishing past outside the window on Kingshighway. The people in the cars were engrossed in their own problems, their own universe, and had no idea what kind of conversation was taking place so close to them; a different world behind every windshield. “You got any kind of alibi?”

“No. I was at the dance competition, but nobody’ll remember me. Then I went back to my hotel. The murder occurred about ten o’clock, when I was in my room alone.”

“What can I do?” Mary asked. She was beginning to grasp the dimensions of this, how it would look for Rene when the New Orleans police found out. And they would find out, especially if the woman had been violated after death. “Where were you?” they’d ask their prime suspect. The answer could prove fatal.

“I don’t want you to do anything,” Rene told her. “I’ll have to tell the police I was in Kansas City for the dance competition, hoping to learn something about Danielle’s murder.”

“That’s the truth.”

“You and I know it, anyway. The police’ll be skeptical. I won’t tell them about you giving me information.”

If you have to, go ahead.
She thought it, heard it in her mind, but she didn’t say it. She was afraid of the police, of authority. Fear had been with her all her life, like a parasite in her bowels, sapping her of resolve and independence. The frustration, the curse, was that she knew it and could do nothing about it. That was the nature of fear.

“I just wanted to talk to you before you saw or heard about the murder on the news,” Rene said. “Wanted to assure you, no matter what you hear about me, no matter what anybody says, I never so much as laid eyes on that woman.”