Baby Doll Games (16 page)

“Me? Nope. But the phone’s been on automatic most of the time since Saturday and who knows whether anyone’s listened to the message tape yet?” She balanced the tray with the plastic juice pitcher on one hand and opened the door to the green room with the other. “Eric and Rikki and I’ve been splitting the clerical work-even Sergio’s taken a whirl-but none of us seem to have Emmy’s flair for it. I guess she took more of the load than we realized.” Hearing his name as they entered, Sergio Avril looked up like a startled rabbit from the conversation he and Roman Tramegra were engaged in while seated upon that rump-sprung green couch.
“The lieutenant wants to know if that telephone call Emmy expected Saturday ever came,” Helen explained, handing the tray to Roman, who carried it over to the sink and began to rinse out the pitcher.
“Oh, dear,” said the composer. He turned pink, stood up, and nervously cleared his throat. He was so shy and self-effacing in a threadbare suit too large for his thin frame that Sigrid had carried an impression of smallness. In truth, he was taller than she and even skinnier, with a questing, forward thrust of his head as if continually trying to get his myopic eyes closer to the object in view than his body could decently permit itself.
He cleared his throat again. “Rikki didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?” asked Helen, her hands resting on her generous hips.
“She was showing me how to work the message tape this morning-you
know
Fm no good with things like that,” he bleated.
“Let me guess, doll.” She shook her glossy black head in mock disbelief. “You erased the tape.”
His face even pinker, the composer nodded. “Not all of it. At least I don t
think
all of it, but-”
“Don’t you compose on an electronic synthesizer?” Sigrid asked curiously. “That seems much more complex than a message machine.”
“It
is
,” Avril sighed, turning his nearsighted gaze toward her voice. “Half the time, what I do is instinctive. Before I met Nate, I could never rely upon duplicating something a second time. He’s helped me enormously with programming my compositions. And I know how to work my own tape player, of course, but a telephone’s totally different. I
thought
I understood Rikki’s instructions but-”
“Okay, okay!” Helen said, holding up an impatient hand. “No need to blither on about it. If it’s urgent, people’ll probably call back. Don’t sweat it, doll.”
Relieved, Avril sank back upon the dilapidated couch, removed his glasses, and began polishing them with a less-than-immaculate handkerchief.
“I know you’ve been asked several times already, Mr. Avril,” said Sigrid, “but are you sure you formed no impression of who might have joined Miss Mion onstage Saturday?”
Across the room, Roman pursed his lips at her and shook his head. Sigrid shot a glance at Helen Delgado, but the designer was intent on Avril’s answer and didn’t see.
Avril stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket and looped the gold frames around his ears, although as far as Sigrid could tell, the lenses were as smudged as before. “I wish I could say, Lieutenant, but everything’s a blur at that distance.”
“No wonder,” Helen snorted. Deftly, she removed his thick glasses and carried them over to the sink, where she dipped them into the pan of hot soapy water Roman had been using. “I’ve told you a hundred times that a handkerchief picks up grit in your pocket and scratches the lenses. And a
dirty
handkerchief-how can you be such an idiot?”
“You’re right, of course,” he said meekly, but Sigrid thought she detected a sly smile that came and went so quickly that she couldn’t be sure.
On the other hand, she knew there were men- women, too, for that matter-who pretended to be more incompetent than they actually were. Perhaps this was Avril’s way of making himself noticed?
“It’s too bad about your eyesight,” she said mildly. “You were directly across from Delgado and Kee. It would certainly help if you could alibi even one of them.”
"The fence and the tree were between us,” he reminded her as his now-shining spectacles were returned to him. “Thank you, Helen. You’re very kind.”
Helen smiled at him indulgently, a smile that turned to annoyance when her attention focused on the tools atop the refrigerator which Roman had forgotten until that moment.
“I tore the prop room apart looking for that mask yesterday morning,” she said, “Where the hell was it?”
“Under the spiral stairs,” said Roman. “Cliff must have left it on the steps and it fell off.” Archly, he held the rigid cupped plastic shape over his nose and mouth. The filter lining was missing but his words still sounded muffled as he spoke through the air holes. “Don’t worry about the operation,
mein liebchen.
I studied under ze famous Dr. Frankenstein.”
“Where’s the strap?” asked Helen, unappeased, reclaiming her equipment. “If Cliff’s broken it, I’ll strangle him.”
“No sign of a strap,” Roman told her. “Your tack hammer was up in the women’s dressing room. Along with Nate’s pliers. The tape dispenser was in the men’s dressing room. I’ll just return it to the office.”
“If you don’t mind, Mr. Tramegra, I’ll come with you," said Sigrid. “There are some questions I wish to ask.”
“Certainly, Lieutenant.”
Once inside the corner office, Sigrid went straight to the answering device on the telephone while Roman pointedly closed the door with a conspiratorial flourish.
“How long has Avril been connected with the company?” she asked when she’d zipped through the answering tape and found nothing of import in the three remaining messages.
“He came in last spring after they got that
fabulous
grant. I
told
you about that.”
“That’s right; I remember now. And you said he brought you in because you two had collaborated on some poetry readings last winter at the Y.”
As Sigrid had only known Roman since the spring, she hadn’t attended those readings of his haiku poems set to electronic music. It was not an experience she regretted missing. Although she was receptive to most poetry- especially poetry with enough formal structure, metrical rhythm, and felicitous attention to language to satisfy her sense of order-haiku had never appealed to her. Nor was she much enamored of electronic music. Nauman had tried to educate her ear as well as her eye, but with small success in bringing her very far into the twentieth century. “Teddy Bears’ Picnic,” by Peter Klausmeyer, a contemporary American composer, made her laugh each time she heard it, and his “The Cambrian Sea” stirred her emotionally-the rest was simply so much sound and fury with little significance as Bur as Sigrid was concerned.
She clicked through the tape again, then abandoned it to fix Roman with her piercing gray eyes. “Do you think Avril would deliberately erase the tape to protect someone in the troupe?”
“Surely not!” he protested. “I fear that Sergio is something of a cultural snob. He is not ungrateful for their commission-the money has allowed him to continue work on his
serious
music-but he would not consider that a
children’s
dance company had purchased his immortal soul. Or even his loyalty.”
“If he’s that snobbish, why’s he still here so much?”
“They feed him,” Roman answered simply. “Ginger washes his shirts, Helen mends the tears in his clothing, Win sends him home with vitamin pills and bags of oranges, Nate helps him understand the machinery that David and Eric have procured so that he can work here. Few electronic composers make even a
subsistence
living with their music. I’ve never visited Sergio’s rooms, but I daresay they do
not
offer the physical comfort he has here.”
He paused and looked at the telephone thoughtfully. “He scorns the level of intellect here, yet these same creature comforts
clearly
offer an inducement to preserve the status quo.”
“So that if he heard something on the tape which he thought would wreck the company-?”
“He might indeed erase it deliberately,” Roman concluded. “If-and it’s a large if, my dear
-if
he could figure out how to
manage
the erasure with Rikki standing right there watching. He truly is
frightfully
incompetent with unfamiliar mechanical contrivances.”
“I’ll speak to Innes,” Sigrid said. “In the meantime, have you learned anything I should know about?”
“Alas, no. Ah, but wait a moment! Something Ginger said this morning makes me think that Emmy was
not
going to move in with her as she’d thought.”
Sigrid was puzzled. “Mion was going to stay with Kee?”
“No. Evidently she told Ginger while they were getting dressed Saturday that she planned to camp out in one of the storage rooms upstairs until she could find a place of her own. A
single
place.”
An interesting tidbit, thought Sigrid after Roman left her-“If I stay too long, it will look
suspicious.”
he had whispered with relish-but she couldn't see that it advanced their knowledge of why Emmy Mion had been killed. Except that it was one more piece in the puzzle.
She looked around the large office and once again wished that Tillie were working this case with her. He would have seized on so many details about the room: the pictures of dancers and children, the books on choreography, the slapdash messiness of Emmy Mion's creative area as opposed to her managerial orderliness. He would have seen significance in the way her desk had been ransacked while her drawing table seemed to have been left untouched.
Most of what he noticed on a case was irrelevant. Sigrid knew she usually discarded eighty-five percent of what he diligently brought to her attention, but at least she would have considered each point and would not now be sitting here with the uneasy feeling that she was overlooking something obvious. Well, sighing over Tillie's absence wouldn’t help, she scolded herself. She got up and walked around the office, consciously trying to look beneath the surface of each object that met her eyes.
Roman had left the door ajar when he left and some twenty minutes passed before Sigrid heard sounds in the hall. A child appeared in the doorway. “Is Nate here?" it asked.
"Down here, Calder,” she heard Nate Richmond call from further along the hall, as she caught sight of Christa Ferrell rounding the comer from the stage.
“Ah, there you are, Sigrid. Don’t disappear on me, Calder. I shouldn’t be more than a minute.”
Christa Ferrell closed the door. “I let the session ran longer than I expected,” she said, consulting the delicate gold watch on her wrist as she tugged down the sleeves of her green sweater. "We made a good beginning though. The children were quite forthcoming. There’s a lovely trust between them and the company.”
“You let the dancers stay?”
“Oh, yes. This is a group process, you understand. We’re not trying to resolve every conflict in their individual lives; we’re merely allowing them to validate and deal with this particular trauma. The dancers can speed up the process by helping to channel the responses, so to speak. Get their emotions about Emmy Mion out in the open more quickly so we can see where we stand.”
“And where
do
you stand?”
“Well, there’s the expected grief and bewilderment; also the guilt.”
“Guilt?”
“Oh heavens, yes! A young child always feels guilty when something goes wrong in his world. He thinks that if he’d been a better child, obeyed all the rules, this wouldn’t have happened. It’s a perfectly normal response. Counseling and therapy help him understand that bad things can occur independent of his personal behavior.” She glanced at her watch again. “Sigrid, I'm sorry, but I really do have to run or I’m going to be late for my session with Corrie Makaroff. And did your mother tell you?
I'm so
pleased she’s going to use Corrie and Tanya”
“I’m glad you reminded me,” said Sigrid. “I’ll send you all the details if you want them, but one of my officers told me today that Ray Thorpe was apprehended last weekend and has already been arraigned. He’s pleaded guilty. The Makaroff children won t have to testify.”