A Motive For Murder (36 page)

Auntie Lil was quiet, mulling over the information.
She thought she knew who the girl had to be. “I have some very
important questions for you, Rudy,” she said. “And you must tell me
the truth.”

Rudy nodded solemnly.

“Why were you and your friends talking about me?” she
asked. “Why did you say Mikey’s friends knew who I was?”

“He said you were trying to find the killer but...”
His voice trailed off.

“But what?” Auntie Lil prompted.

“I don’t think Mikey really wants you to find out who
it is,” he whispered. “He said you were way off base and he sounded
glad about it.”

“When did he say that?” Auntie Lil asked.

“Last week,” the young boy replied.

“My next question is this: Did anyone else overhear
what Mikey and his father were arguing about? Think carefully.”

Rudy’s face scrunched up as he concentrated. “We were
on the steps,” he finally said. “So I don’t really know. They had
dropped their voices and I don’t think anyone else onstage could
hear them anymore. But maybe someone on the third floor might have
been able to hear. I didn’t see anyone.”

“Was anyone on the catwalk?”

Rudy thought hard. “I don’t think so. Sometimes
parents go up there to watch their kids because Mr. Martinez never
notices them when they’re on the catwalk. When he sees them
watching backstage, he yells, so they sneak up there.”

“But the door to the catwalk was open, so someone may
have been there?”

Rudy shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s hard to see if
there’s anyone on the catwalk when you’re standing right below
it.”

“My final question is the most serious,” Auntie Lil
said. “Did you or any of your friends help Mikey hurt his
father?”

“No,” Rudy said, shaking his head emphatically. “I
would never do anything like that.”

“But would any of the other boys? Maybe some of them
wanted to prove to Mikey that they really were his friends?”

Rudy’s voice was less emphatic. “I don’t think so,”
he said.

Auntie Lil thought of the day she had seen a cluster
of boys gathered around a rope near the spot on the stage where
Mikey’s father had died. They had been pointing and laughing. “Are
you sure that you are telling me the truth?” she asked again.

“Rudy is telling you the truth,” Emili said firmly.
“I would not allow my son to lie.”

 Auntie Lil sat alone in the dancers’ lounge,
her spirits low. Emili Vladimir had returned to her studio,
escorting Rudy back to class along the way, satisfied that her
moral obligations had been fulfilled.

Was Emili being genuine about her motives? Auntie Lil
did not know. But she did believe what Rudy had to say.

And if Rudy were telling the truth, then there was
something so careless about this case that her soul hung heavy at
the thought. Did no one think about the impact of their actions on
others anymore? Was she just too old for the way the world had
evolved? When had the search for self-fulfillment turned into a
lifestyle of sanctioned selfishness? Mikey Morgan was a boy; he
should never have had to face certain truths about his father, at
least not quite so soon. And, in return, Bobby Morgan owed his son
respect, if not his love. Meanwhile, Julie Perkins, despite her
seeming maturity, was still a young girl. Bobby Morgan should have
had more class.

She rose, distressed and anxious to bring the matter
to an end. It would be an easy matter to find out the truth now.
Julie Perkins would tell her the truth, if not in words then in
other ways. She walked slowly down the hallway, peering in windows
until she found the young girl.

Julie was in a room at the end of the hall, moving
gracefully in tandem with three other girls. She was pale and
skinny, perceptibly thinner than she had been last week. Her bony
shoulders protruded from her now loose leotard. Paulette Puccinni
stood careful watch nearby, clapping her hands while Jerry
Vanderbilt filled the room with music. Rudy Vladimir waited with
three other boys at the barre behind the ballerinas, awaiting his
turn. Every person in the room was lost in effort, faces frozen in
concentration, all thoughts focused on nothing but movement and
music.

Now would be a good time.

Auntie Lil hurried down the hallway, passing no one.
She reached the back stairwell and paused before going upstairs.
The door to Raoul Martinez’s office was shut. She wondered what
today had been like for the couple, if knowing that they had been
prepared to go to jail to protect one another had made any
difference to either of them. She doubted it; Raoul and Lisette
thrived on hurting one another.

The second-floor dressing rooms were empty. The
benches were littered with discarded towels and bits of wrapping
tape. Auntie Lil noticed that Lisette Martinez’s locker remained
undisturbed from the night before. The lock still hung crookedly
from its hinge.

She found the locker for Julie Perkins near the end
of the fourth row, well into the room. No one could see her from
the doorway. She removed the screwdriver from her purse and
inserted the tip between the small lock’s metal arch. Using the
door as a fulcrum, she pried the lock until it snapped open.

Julie’s locker was the mess she had expected of a
teenage girl. Clothes were jammed into the upper compartment with
no regard for whether they were clean or not. Auntie Lil went
through them carefully: cotton leotards, leggings, and pastel
T-shirts. None had pockets and the shelf beneath the heap of
clothing was bare. A pair of jeans and a thin turtleneck sweater
hung from one of the side hooks. She found a few dollars in one
pants pocket and a subway token in another, but nothing more.
Julie’s tapestry handbag dangled from the other hook. Auntie Lil
undid the macramé handles and searched inside, taking each item out
so she could examine it in the light.

She discovered a makeup bag crammed full of powders,
lipsticks, and three tubes of heavy mascara; loose change; a
paperback romance novel, and a small photo album with only two
photos inside it. One was of a pretty, slender woman posed against
the backdrop of New York Harbor. The woman had long brown hair that
fluttered in the wind and her thin features resembled Julie’s. She
looked to be in her late thirties, but her face was tired and grim.
She stared into the camera without smiling, her eyes vacant, as if
focused on something far away. The other photo showed a younger,
plumper version of the woman sitting on a lawn chair with a grill
behind her and a tendril of smoke silhouetting her head. She was
laughing and holding a fat pink baby immaculately dressed in a
ruffly blue jumper and a matching hat that topped blond curls. In
this photo, the woman’s eyes were bright and lively. The two photos
showed two very different views of Julie Perkins’s mother—for
Auntie Lil was sure that was who she must be. She knew she had left
her family four years ago. Did she ever write to her daughter? The
next few items in the purse confirmed that she did. A small stack
of postcards bound with a rubber band had been carefully tucked
into a zippered side pocket.

Each postcard showed a different scene, most of them
from towns along the coast of California or Oregon. Each message
was brief and a slightly different version of the first one: “I’m
thinking of you my darling, my precious girl—every day. One day you
will understand. Don’t give up the dancing, you are too good to
quit. Do it for yourself, if for no one else, my darling. Love,
Mom.” Auntie Lil held the stack in her hand, thinking of her own
long-dead mother, of a stiff cold woman whose rigid bearing had
masked any emotion beneath it. And yet Auntie Lil had felt loved.
Had Julie?

The last object of importance in the purse was a
small gold lighter crafted in an unusual flat oval shape. Auntie
Lil turned it over in her palm. No engraved initials or dedication
marred the surface, but that didn’t matter. She remembered it well.
She had seen Julie Perkins use it to light a cigarette on the path
outside the Metro’s theater a few days after Bobby Morgan had
died—and she had seen it in Morgan’s hand in the photograph from
the Los Angeles charity ball. Had he given it to Julie as a token
of whatever emotion he’d felt for the girl? Had she stolen it when
he wasn’t looking as a reminder that her lover was real? It was the
kind of thing a young girl might do.

Or—and the thought disturbed Auntie Lil because it
should have occurred to her before—had Julie taken it after Bobby
Morgan’s death as a souvenir of a different kind?

 She returned the purse and turned her attention
to the bottom of the locker. Toe shoes were heaped on the floor,
along with a pair of leather street flats. Auntie Lil examined the
dance shoes. Two pair were white. She held them up to the light.
One set was new, the canvas still stiff and in need of breaking in.
Auntie Lil had seen the dancers struggle to soften new pairs
before: they bent the sheath, slammed the shoes in doors, stomped
on them, rubbed them with oils, even put them in plastic bags and
pounded them with hammers until they achieved the preferred
consistency. The other pair of white toe shoes was softer and worn
at the ends. The ribbons that wrapped around the dancer’s ankles
were soiled. The right shoe of this pair had shorter ribbons than
the left, with ends that were ragged and torn.

She examined the thin strips carefully. The ribbon
clearly matched the scraps she had found on the floor of the
third-floor storage room. Either Bobby Morgan had been strangled
with a similar ribbon before he was strung up on the bigger rope,
or someone had killed him in another manner and used such a ribbon
as part of a revenge fantasy that Auntie Lil could only imagine.
But who?

There were dozens of white shoes in the company, of
course. But this pair belonged to Julie Perkins. And Julie Perkins
had been Bobby Morgan’s lover. Someone close to Julie, if not
Julie, had done the deed.

Auntie Lil held the slipper in her hands and examined
the outer covering more closely. Toe shoes were notoriously
disposable; she doubted this pair would last another performance.
It was not the pair Julie had worn during
The Nutcracker.
Those had been blue, Auntie Lil recalled. That meant these shoes
could have been used during the murder of Bobby Morgan if he had
been killed just before or after the curtain went up. But how could
she be sure? She compared the shoes again and noticed that the toe
of the right shoe was scruffed and torn, far more so than the left.
She pulled her reading glasses from her purse and scrutinized the
square, reinforced tip. Small, evenly spaced indentations marred
the
satin.         

Auntie Lil realized with sudden clarity—and equally
sudden horror—that the indentations were teeth marks.

Bobby Morgan’s teeth marks, she was sure. Who could
have accomplished such a task? Had several boys held Morgan down
while Mikey stuffed the shoe in his mouth, suffocating him? Or had
a larger person been the murderer and the shoe been used only as a
prop? It was such a stylized form of revenge; would it have been
one that a boy would choose?

“I had to put it back,” a deep voice said from the
other side of the room.

Auntie Lil dropped the shoes in surprise and looked
up to find Andrew Perkins blocking the end of her row on the door
side of the room. “I knew Julie needed those shoes the next day for
rehearsal,” he explained. “She’d miss them if they were gone and
figure out what I had done. So I had to put them back. I was going
to take them as soon as they wore out and throw them away. I don’t
like to leave loose ends lying around.” He stared at Auntie Lil,
his gaze steady and determined. He looked exhausted. His lean frame
had grown gaunter in only a week, puffy pouches hung beneath his
eyes, and age lines had appeared from the sides of his nose in deep
grooves to his mouth. His hair was unkempt and he needed a shave.
His clothes looked as if he had slept in them. A nearly empty pack
of cigarettes poked from his front shirt pocket and he held a lit
one in his hand.

Auntie Lil tried to remain calm, but her voice
quavered when she spoke. “I think your daughter has already figured
out what happened,” she said. “That’s why she moved out, isn’t it?
The day after the funeral she realized that you had killed Bobby
Morgan—and why.”

“My daughter will never be able to understand why I
killed Bobby Morgan,” Perkins explained with a voice as emotionless
as if he were describing a boring vacation. “No one can understand
what it was like for me to live on the same planet as that man. He
had to go.”

“I can imagine what it was like,” Auntie Lil
disagreed. She had to keep talking, she needed to buy time. “Always
having him there, competing with you. Always winning.” If she could
keep him occupied, someone would come along. It was nearly three
o’clock in the afternoon. Classes would break soon. Her eyes slid
to the wall, searching for a clock.

“He didn’t always win,” Perkins said sharply. “I was
the one that carried the show in the early days. He was an amateur.
I had the experience. I got twice as much mail as him the first
year.”

“But not later,” Auntie Lil said. “Not after
that.”

“I grew older,” Perkins said angrily. “That’s what
happens when you’re a child star. I expected it to happen. I
welcomed it when it happened. I was ready to move on.”

She opened the clasp on her pocketbook under the
cover of her other hand. If she could keep eye contact with him,
perhaps she could slip her hand inside. The screwdriver was still
there—and its shaft was long. She might be able to fend him off
with a weapon long enough to keep him at bay until someone came
along. “I don’t believe you,” she said, locking her eyes on his. “I
think you lived for that attention. I think you never got over
being fired from the show. I think you’ve always blamed Bobby
Morgan for it and hated him because of it. I think you’ve been
waiting to murder him for twenty years.”