A Cat in the Wings: (InterMix) (5 page)

Chapter 8

Lucia was seated on her large sofa when Basillio and I entered her apartment. However brief her imprisonment, the trauma of it was there in her face for all to see. Her skin was stretched tight and white. Her hands were restless in her lap, the fingers seeming to search for a dancer’s gesture.

Across the large room sat a stranger: a handsome, diminutive black woman of middle age. She was reading a French-language newspaper.

I introduced Lucia to Tony. When she did not in turn introduce the black woman to us, my hasty assumption that the woman was a nurse was confirmed. She had been hired, I guessed, by the Maury family to keep an eye on Lucia during these stressful days.

“Your friend really looks like someone in trouble,” Tony stage-whispered to me, as I left his side to join Lucia on the sofa.

I don’t think Lucia heard what Tony had just said, but she looked distinctly discomfited by his presence. He remained standing, rocking back on his heels and smiling. He was wearing a nondescript sweatshirt and the kind of dark-colored trousers a bus driver might wear. It seemed that more and more these days Tony made people uncomfortable. It wasn’t so much his clothing as his grin that nearly always struck one as inappropriate.

Lucia reached out for me and I nearly flinched from her touch—it was deathly cold.

“Yes, that’s right, Alice,” she said. “Come and sit by me, the way Splat used to do. I can just see that old thing sitting here cleaning himself.”

I nodded. “Lucia, did Frank Brodsky tell you about our talk?”

“Yes, he did. I’m so grateful for your help, Alice.” And her voice suddenly rose a notch. “I need your help, Alice! It isn’t mine, that gun! I don’t know how it got there, I swear! It isn’t mine!”

“Listen to me, dear,” I said firmly. “There’s no need to convince me of any of that. But right now I have to find someone who knows where and how Dobrynin spent his last few years. After he . . . dropped out, lost it, if you can call it that. After he threw everything away.”

“He became a derelict, obviously.”

“I understand that. But he may have maintained some minimal contact with people he’d known. Even if he spent most of his time under the West Side Highway.”

“You don’t understand, Alice, the state he was in. He was impossible to deal with. He was mad.”

I paused for a moment there. “But how do you know how it was to ‘deal’ with him? If you lost contact with him, how do you know he was mad?”

“I know!” she spat out, with such desperate force that the woman across the room half rose from her chair.

“Lucia,” I said slowly, “you told me you never saw Dobrynin again after the affair ended. Is that the truth or not?”

Lucia looked away from me. “No,” she said grimly. “I saw him once more after that.”

“After he’d dropped out of the ballet scene?”

She nodded, seemed to be fighting for composure. Tony, who had gradually come closer to us while we talked, now moved back a bit, as if to give Lucia air.

“He caused a terrible scene here,” she went on. “It was awful. He came into the building demanding to see me. The doorman tried to question him, to reason with him, and finally to throw him out. It was just an insane coincidence that I happened to come home from the office while he was in the lobby.”

“Why had he come?”

“He wanted to stay here, for a few nights, he said. He was crazy, though—shrieking and prancing about the lobby. His clothing was soiled and he smelled like—” She paused to catch her breath. “I refused him. We fought. Someone telephoned the police.”

She stopped the story again, leaning forward as if she were experiencing stomach cramps.

“And then what happened?” I asked, trying my best to ignore her distress.

Lucia was crying now. “He said—after calling me the predictable names—he said I was just another in the long line of people who had loved him when he was on top, sucked the life out of him, and betrayed him now that he was on the bottom.”

“Anything else?”

“No. No. He left seconds before the police car pulled up.”

“Did he mention the names of the others who he thought had betrayed him?”

“I guess so.” She blew her nose on a tissue the nurse had brought over to her. “I don’t know—maybe.” She shook her head. “He was in a rage at all of us. He probably named Melissa. And Betty Ann Ellenville. Louis Beasley. People I pointed out to you at the service.”

Lucia pulled herself up from her seat on the sofa as if she weighed three hundred pounds.

The other woman approached quickly and noiselessly, then stopped at a discreet distance to wait for Lucia’s next move. Close enough to assist her if she stumbled, far enough away so as not to hover or give the impression that Lucia was a cripple. I envied her her timing and tact.

“I’m tired, Alice. So tired,” Lucia said. “Is there anything more now, or can you excuse me? I must sleep.”

“No, go right ahead,” I said. “I . . . we’ll be in touch.” I nodded good-bye to the other woman.

Lucia left the room at a snail’s pace, the nurse matching her steps.

“She’s trancked to the gills, Swede,” Tony observed when they’d gone.

Of course. I’d been talking to a heavily sedated woman.

We let ourselves out and waited in the hall for one of the magisterial elevators.

“Is the game afoot, then, Sherlock?” Tony asked flippantly. “Are we about to roll up our sleeves and get
en pointe
?”

“What?”

“The game, Swede. The hunt. You know. Deduct-and-detect. Seek-and-find. Search-and-destroy. You’ve got the old bloodlust, girl. I can see it in your baby blues.”

“Enough mixed metaphors, Tony. And you know I don’t have baby-blue eyes.”

Ignoring me, he tried, ridiculously, to execute an ambitious ballet leap right there in the hallway. He announced it as he jumped: “Double
tour en l’air
!”

He smashed heavily into the wall, then slid down it like some hapless second banana in a Looney Tunes feature.

“Dear God!” I rushed over to the stunned Basillio and helped him up. Holding on to my arm, he hobbled to the now open elevator and stepped in gingerly.

Basillio fell into shamed silence. As we rode down, I realized there was probably more than a grain of truth in his comment about my being turned on by the “hunt.” I was serious about helping Lucia out of this mess, of course, but I had to admit the idea of stepping into the
haute
world of the ballet was tantalizing in the extreme.

Unlike Tony, however, I would never be caught attempting a
tour
of any proportion. First of all—I looked over at the obviously pained and red-faced Basillio—women rarely perform that step. And second—I didn’t dare let him see me struggling not to laugh—my medical insurance is always an inch away from cancellation. As for Tony’s insurance, I was betting the fool had none.

Chapter 9

One of my regular clients had once told me, as we sat over cups of her home-mixed herbal tea: “Put a whopping spoonful of caviar on a small piece of milk-soaked bread, and place it on the floor twenty feet away from a cat. No matter how much that cat wants that caviar, most likely she will not approach it directly—as would a hungry dog or bird or bee.” Cats do not, she said emphatically, approach food directly.

“Now, there are those who say the reason for this is that the cat approaches inert food sources the same way she approaches ‘live’ food which she must kill to obtain—that is, circuitously, in a stalking mode.

“It is my belief that the cat is performing a quasi-mystical geometric ritual known only to felines. Which is why cats often inscribe squares, triangles, and other such configurations before finally coming close to their food dish.”

At the time I had made no comment, simply taking my paycheck and saying so long to Hilda, an impossibly beautiful white angora, and Waldo, a tiger-stripe half the size of a Doberman. Yet that wild speculation on feline geometrical movements was swirling around in my head as I sat in Louis Beasley’s rather strange home. He had finally allowed me to question him in his combination apartment/place of business, at 2 Fifth Avenue.

The room in which this porcine, world-famous, ostentatiously dressed impresario met me was curiously devoid of furniture, with the exception of an armchair and several writing or drafting desks, set high on swivels. Along the walls were elaborate built-in fish tanks, where colorful creatures cut like blades through the water.

Beasley sat in the high-backed armchair, a cream-colored throw over his legs.

His lover, or companion, or secretary—one doesn’t quite know how to characterize the relationship in a single word—kept circling the two of us but mostly Beasley, as though the pink-cheeked older man were a potential food source. Hence my thoughts about cats and caviar. For that was what it was like: Beasley the caviar on a large and costly cracker, and Vol Teak the inscribing feline, spelling out those quasi-mystical shapes.

Beasley had been most unfriendly at the start. He’d grilled me extensively as to exactly what kind of “investigator” I was, making the word sound distasteful.

But the moment I informed him of Lucia’s words—that Peter Dobrynin had spoken bitterly of Beasley’s betrayal of him when he was in need—the imperious Beasley, defensive, launched into a monologue that seemed to go on forever.

“Yes, I saw him in that debased state. Three years ago this Christmas. The worst had already happened. That he had thrown away the career of the decade was enough of a tragedy. But the man standing before me had thrown away
everything
—all human dignity. Tossed it away! He accosted me on the street. I didn’t recognize him at first. This great dancer . . . this god . . . this force of nature . . . there he was waiting in a doorway. Filthy. Drunk. Off his head.

“He wanted me to give him a bed!” Beasley exclaimed, the incredulity he clearly had felt that night now back in his voice. “He didn’t
ask
for it. He
demanded
! He was abusive, violent. Reeking of wherever it was he’d been flopping. Why, of course I sent him away. It was simply too much to bear . . . too sad. Dobrynin had simply gone the way of all the others. And there was no way to bring him back.”

“All
what
others?” I interjected.

I had affronted him mightily, I could see, by interrupting. He shone his contempt on me like a searchlight. Then, instead of answering my question, he called over his shoulder to Vol, sleek in his stone-washed black jeans and too-small T-shirt: “Perhaps it’s time for coffee, yes?”

Teak nodded in affirmation but made no move at all to get the coffee.

I wished that Tony were there with me, with his disconcerting grin. At that moment I could have used his ability to throw people slightly off-balance. But he was at the hotel resting, recuperating from the stupidly self-inflicted wounds he’d suffered in Lucia’s hallway.

“The other great ones, I meant.” Beasley had resumed his monologue. “The great dancers, the great artists who all descend into hell eventually. Who collapse under the weight of their gifts. Whose fire of genius sets them ablaze.”

Oh. I got it. That old-fashioned romantic rot that has nothing to do with the real world. But I didn’t bother to protest. It was obvious Beasley himself was not a part of the real world. Rather, he inhabited one from the dim, dim past—a world long gone, if indeed it had ever existed at all.

“I can even understand,” he went on, “how that poor woman was driven to kill him.”

“I’m sure Miss Maury would appreciate your understanding, Mr. Beasley, but the fact is, she did not kill him.”

He dismissed my statement. “Women too numerous to count have thrown themselves away on Dobrynin. He used them like shoehorns.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

Beasley carefully folded up the afghan on his lap. There had been no need for it, really; the apartment was quite warm.

“Ah. But you didn’t
know
Peter, did you? Your loss and your blessing. You see, he gave new meaning to the word ‘excess.’ He would . . . ingest . . . anything—alcohol, barbiturates, cocaine, anything. Anything that would help him slip into the desired state. And of course he always needed someone to accompany him on the ride—usually a woman. It was as if he needed someone to impress while he was getting to where he wanted to go. And of course, not to be excessively vulgar, he needed someone to . . . Well, suffice it to say that he
ate
life. And he ate people. He used women to grease the skids into heaven, and hell. You see? Like a shoehorn.”

Vol’s restless circling had at last ceased, but we still had no coffee. He came closer to me, smiled—he was handsome indeed—and sat down on the carpet, executing the perfect lotus position in one smooth move.

When I had managed to pull my eyes away from his haunting face, I caught a movement in one of the tanks along the wall. There seemed to be a disturbance going on, as if the water pump that regulated the tank had gone on the blink and was troubling the placid water. Or had this strange couple installed tanks that contained victims and predators, a steady-state cycle of birth and death in which one or the other was always erupting? I almost pointed to the fish to inform my hosts of the danger, but then I let my hand drop back onto my lap.

After a moment’s thought I asked, “Have you any idea where Peter Dobrynin spent the last three years of his life?”

Beasley snorted. “On the street, I presume. Or under it.”

“And did it not disturb you that this . . .
god
was out there, alone, in summer and winter, perhaps starving, perhaps abused?”

“Young woman,” he began—I suppose I
am
young, in relation to Louis Beasley—“I am not a sentimentalist.” I might have argued with that, but I said nothing.

“Young woman,” he continued, “wherever Dobrynin was, you may be sure that he was neither alone nor starving. And if there was any abuse taking place, he was not on the receiving end of it.

“In addition, the individual in filthy clothing who attacked me on the street that winter night was no longer Dobrynin the dancer, Dobrynin the god. He was an apparition. He was a hobo.”

“Then you have no thoughts as to who might have shot him?”

“Well, of course I do.”
Of course I do, you silly cow
, he might as well have said.

“Who?” I asked.

“Any one of a thousand women he seduced and abandoned. Any of his shoehorns.”

Vol Teak spoke for the first time: “When a person degrades you, why, naturally you want to pay them back in kind,” he said matter-of-factly. “Don’t you think? Or, don’t you?”

“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know, as I’ve never been ‘degraded’ by anyone,” I said, a bit prissily I’m sure. “Certainly not to the point of wanting to commit murder.”

“Ah,” he said, giving me a little Mona Lisa smile I hated. “Perhaps the rich can never be degraded.”

“Rich? I am far from rich. So far that I’m poor.”

“Well,” he said patronizingly, “certainly not spiritually? After all, you
are
an actress of some acclaim, we hear.”

***

My fifteen-minute interview with Vol Teak alone—while Beasley himself made the damn pot of coffee—had turned out to be even less enlightening—more worthless, so to speak—than the talk with the culture czar Beasley.

As I walked the cold Village street, turning around now and then to admire the majestic Christmas tree under the arch at Washington Square, I mulled over Beasley’s fixation on women. Had Dobrynin never degraded
men
? Hadn’t he ever used one of them as his shoehorn of the evening?

Why was it that Louis Beasley couldn’t even conceive of a
man
firing a bullet into the great dancer’s head?