Baby Doll Games (8 page)

Sigrid and Elaine nodded, so Helen Delgado continued, “This was last winter when they were still living together. David got us an incredible deal on some decent sound equipment and Emmy decided that the stuff had to’ve been stolen for that price. David said so what? He didn’t steal it, she didn’t steal it, so as long as they were clean, what difference did it make?
“He and Sergio finally had to wait till she was out, then they put a big dent on the console of the synthesizer and told her that was probably why it was so cheap- salvaged goods. Too late, though. I think that’s why she dumped him.”
“Not wanting to be a receiver of stolen goods is hardly a character flaw,” Sigrid said stiffly.
“Maybe not to a cop,” said Delgado with a throaty chuckle, “but when you’re trying to put together a dance theater on nothing, you can’t afford to be too picky about bargains. Maybe that was a bad example. Try this: it was Ginger’s turn to come down one Saturday morning last winter and put up the heat before the kids got here for the first class and she overslept. If she’d just
said
she’d overslept, Emmy would have bitched a little and that would’ve been the end of it. Instead, Ginger made up some cock- and-bull story about why she was late, and then forgot and let it slip that her clock hadn’t gone off. Emmy went right up in smoke and started preaching about liars and duty and obligations to the company and to the children. How Ginger's negligence left the children shivering in their little leotards. Big deal. So they had to warm up a few minutes longer. It wasn't all that cold inside and-”
She broke off as the door opened and the police officer who'd been stationed in the green room bustled in with a youth who held a cold wet towel to his face. There were cuts on his jaw and a bruise was already darkening around his swollen eye.
“David Orland,” the officer told Sigrid. “They’re saying he's the one killed that girl.”

Chapter 9

The minor cuts on David Orland's cheek had stopped bleeding and the swelling around his eye seemed to have peaked but the cut on his chin still needed the ice cube someone had provided.
“I want a doctor and I want a lawyer,” demanded the battered youth. His stubby fingers gingerly probed his square-jawed face for additional damages.
“That's certainly your right,” said Sigrid. “Albee, get Peters to help you escort the witness over for questioning.”
“Witness?” yelped Orland. “What witness? I wasn't even here. Listen, I left before the first scene was over-”
“Mr. Orland,” Sigrid said firmly, “you have the right to a lawyer when you're questioned, but if you choose to give up that right-”
“I’m not giving up nothing,” he said, thrusting out a belligerent jaw.
“Fine. Detective Albee?”
Elaine Albee slid her notes into her calfskin bag and slung it over her shoulder. “Okay, Orland, let’s go.”
He started to rise, then slumped back into the chair with a fatalistic, “Aw, what the hell?”
“Does this mean you forego the lawyer?" Sigrid asked, wanting his waiver on the record.
“Yeah, yeah, ask your questions. I got nothing to hide." He took the cloth-wrapped ice cube from his chin and examined it for fresh blood.
In assessing this fourth male dancer, Sigrid decided that David Orland was probably a stage name. The young man had a wiry and well-muscled body and his pugnacious attitude proclaimed him a street-smart Hispanic. Late twenties in age, about five-eleven in height, he had black hair and smoldering dark eyes, with light olive skin. He wore jeans and a denim jacket, but visible through the holes in his fashionably ragged white sweatshirt was a black tank top. Glancing down at his sneakers, Sigrid saw that his feet were sockless except for the stirrups on the black tights he wore beneath his jeans.
“Begin with your movements today, please,” she said. “Why you came here, when you left, who you saw.”
“You want it from this morning?” He pulled a worn address book from his back pocket and read them the precise address of the dance class he had attended up near Lincoln Center. “Class breaks before one and it’s a nice day, sun shining and everything, so I tell myself I’ll walk down Eighth Avenue to the Village. Listen, I wasn't even coming here, believe me. But I don't know-somehow I wind up getting here a couple minutes to two and I think what the hell? Might as well stick my head in, right? Count the house, see how they’re shaking down. The kid on the door knows me so I walk in and sit near the back,”
“You didn’t stay long,” Sigrid observed.
“I’ve seen them rehearse for the last three weeks and besides, all of a sudden, I remember a phone call I gotta make.”
“Whom did you call and what telephone did you use?” Sigrid asked, her pen poised.
“Two booths down the comer," Orland answered promptly. He shifted the cold compress from his swollen eye back to his cut chin, but even bruised and battered he couldn't resist turning straight narrative into animated pantomime with broad hand gestures. “One's out of order, see? And three people's waiting for the other one so I go in the deli there and get a pastrami till this fat lady quits yakking, only she don't and its not all that far to the guy I had to see, so I just walked it.”
The address was near St. Vincent’s Hospital, less than a ten-minute walk away. It was all very loose, thought Sigrid, looking at the rough timetable. The chances of finding anyone who could confirm Orland’s wait by the telephone were remote. They'd check the friend, of course, and the deli-see if he and his pastrami sandwich were remembered and if so, try to put a specific time on the transaction.
Time was their problem. They were talking a leeway of minutes. Less than fifteen minutes after Orland left the auditorium, Emmy Mion was dead.
“Do you have a key to the alley door?” asked Sigrid. “No way, Jose,” he answered fliply.
“You came back this afternoon. Why?”
“No reason.” His brown eyes met hers, then darted away. “Nothing else to do. Everybody's usually up after a show and it’s fun to sit in, hear them critique it. When I get here, there's a photographer from the
News
just leaving and he says what’s happened. Listen, I’m freaking and the cops won't let me in sa I walk around to the alley and come in that way.”
“I thought you said you didn't have a key.”
“I don't. The door's unlocked.”
Sigrid looked sharply at Elaine Albee.
“I'll find out,” Elaine promised, making a mental note of it. ^ “Hey, Lieutenant, don't you believe me?” Orland asked cockily.
Sigrid ignored his gibe. “When did you last see Emmy Mion?”
“Yesterday morning. I'm out for orange juice and the
Times
and she’s passing by my corner, coming here, so we stop and talk a minute.”
“Did she seem concerned about anything? Upset?” He shook his head. “Nope, she's just like always- revved up about today's performance, happy about the way things are going here. She gives me a copy of the program and I’m telling you: getting killed by one of those bastards is not on it, believe me,” he said bitterly.
“Who do you think did it?” asked Sigrid.
“Listen, Lieutenant, if I know that-” He made a helpless, palms-up gesture. “She also tells me she's gonna move out on Eric, move in with Ginger or maybe live alone awhile. ‘Feature me as a nun, David?”she says. Believe me, she was never a nun. Moving out though, yeah, that’d frost him.”
“Wingate West?”
“Naw, he’s too ditsy, but Cliff Delgado? Listen,” he said, leaning forward with the ice cloth in his hand, all flippancy gone from his face, “that’s a volcano looking to erupt, believe me.”
By five-thirty, Sigrid was ready to disband her troops and call it a day. All the major witnesses had been questioned, wheels had been set in motion at headquarters and computer nets cast. Follow-up on the audience could start tomorrow. The whole theater had been thoroughly searched for potential leads, right down to the letters Emmy Mion had sealed and stamped only a few hours earlier. Ulrike Innes had been called back for that chore since she seemed to be the one most conversant with Mion’s office routines. Sigrid had hoped they might cast light on the dead girl’s frame of mind, but the envelopes held only routine end-of-the-month dance class bills.
With nothing solid to give them a handle on why Emmy Mion had died, Sigrid dismissed her officers. “We’ll pick it up in my office tomorrow morning.”
With the dramatic onstage murder immediately interrupting local radio broadcasts and an early television news program using it as the leadoff story at five, the theater’s telephone rang nonstop. Roman Tramegra had written a new message for the answering machine and Ginger judson had taped it so that callers now heard that the weekend’s performances would continue as scheduled in tribute to the troupes late colleague, “whose joyous vision brought the 8th-AV-8 Dance Theater into existence.” (Gingers tremulous voice had broken on the word “joyous” and Cliff Delgado, who was handling the mechanics of the taping, refused to let her do a tape-over. “It’ll tug at their heartstrings,” he told her cynically.) In the green room, Eric Kee and David Orland established a wary truce and, to Roman's wonder, everyone seemed to take it as a matter of course that Orland would dance tonight. In fact, the six dancers had begun to discuss the mechanical problems caused by substituting a male dancer for a female.
“Who’s dancing Emmy's solo?" asked Helen Delgado in her rich contralto. She had changed into her working clothes, a thigh-length paisley tunic over black stretch pants, and carried a half-bolt of gauzy white cheesecloth. “It’ll take me at least an hour to whip up another ghost costume. Rikki? Ginger?”
Roman noticed that both women seemed instinctively opposed to the idea.
“David’s the logical choice,” said Ulrike.
Eric and Cliff protested, but Rikki overrode them. “It’s less complicated. That way, we five can dance the first scene as we’ve rehearsed it, David improvises the solo, and the only place we’ll have to make changes is when he comes in at the middle of the goblin dance”
“Listen, you don’t want me to solo, I understand,” said David Orland, tensing again. “I can probably fake the first scene.”
Eric and Cliff looked at Win, who shrugged. “Up to you, guys.”
“Rikki’s right,” Eric said reluctantly. “We just don’t have time to rework both scenes before eight o’clock tonight.”
“Okay,” said David. He propped his foot on the edge of a chair and began untying his sneaker laces. “I’ll need to listen to the tape a couple times and then maybe we can do a quick run-through from where I come in with the goblins?”
“Tape first,” Helen Delgado said decisively. “Sergio can bring it to my room and you can listen while I rig a new ghost costume.”
“Certainly,” said the composer, who had sat wordlessly behind his thick glasses until commanded by Helen’s flashing dark eyes. All bony arms and legs, he scurried out to set up a tape player in her workroom.
The others began to murmur about supper, but Helen paused in the doorway to remind them of the horrible but unavoidable task that had to be performed before the show could go on. “There’s an extra scrub bucket under the sink,” she told them.
Eric Kee's honey-colored face turned pasty as he realized the meaning of her words. “No,” he moaned. “God, no! I couldn’t!”
Roman Tramegra’s own stomach roiled and he sat very still, hoping no one would suggest that a scenarist might pitch in at this point.
“Men! You’re all a disgusting bunch of babies.” Scornfully, Ginger Judson jumped down from her crosslegged perch atop a table. Her orange freckles stood out against the sudden pallor of her face but she tried to carry it off with bravado. "Women always get stuck cleaning up the messes you make.”
She jerked open the doors beneath the sink and one of them slammed into Cliff’s shin.
“Now just a goddamned minute, okay?” he snarled, but Ginger was past caring.
With tears streaming down her face, she banged a yellow plastic bucket into the sink, dumped in a half-bottle of pine-scented liquid cleanser, and turned the faucet on full.

Chapter 10

The little red message light on the answering machine connected to her bedroom phone was blinking when Sigrid got in shortly past six-thirty. She executed the playback sequence, then kicked off her sensible flat-heeled shoes and stepped out of her gray wool slacks as she listened.
The first message was another wrong number
from
a private elementary school on the Upper East Side, only this time, instead of an acerbic female, the recorded voice was sorrowfully masculine. It regretted to inform her that “your son Jason missed two unexcused days of school last week.”
Similar messages had begun appearing on her tape soon after classes started in September and Sigrid had phoned the school three times before giving up. No wonder Jason continued to skip, she thought, unbuttoning the black cotton shirt. As long as the school's machine kept calling her machine, his parents would assume he was safely tucked away on that college prep assembly line. She could hope Jason was using his freedom to visit the zoo or the planetarium or one of the city’s many museums, some place that would actually plant a seed; but experience told her he was probably holed up at a laser tag maze.
An electronic beep signaled the start of a second message which tumbled out of her machine in a breathless and utterly familiar rush. “-so unless something comes up, I’ll be there all weekend.” As usual, her mother had been unable to wait for the beep. “Let’s have lunch together Monday at that dim sum place, okay? Twelve sharp.”
Despite traces of a lingering southern accent, Anne Harald met life on the run and passing fifty had not slowed her down. If anything, she seemed to have picked up her pace, as if more had to be crowded into every interesting minute before her time ran out. Usually, she rattled on long enough for Sigrid to deduce most of the message by internal clues. Not this time though. Sigrid would have to wait until lunch on Monday to learn Anne’s weekend location.
Another electronic beep was followed by a moment of silence, then an unfamiliar voice said, “Oh, never mind,” and hung up.
By this time Sigrid had stripped to a lacy bra and underpants that were surprisingly frivolous when one considered the unflattering and severely tailored street clothes she usually wore, and she stood in front of her open closet wondering what to pull out for the evening. Nauman had said dinner when he called her from California last weekend, but the connection was poor and she wasn’t sure what he had in mind.
Or what she wanted him to have in mind.
The next beep made the question academic. “Siga?” Oscar Nauman’s voice was a rumbling baritone. “God, I hate talking on these damn machines. Look, a pipe’s burst-Connecticut-so I have to go-place could wash away and where the hell plumbers? Worse than doctors on a weekend. Sony I'll call.”
Deflated, Sigrid sat on the edge of the bed, rewound the tape, and then lay back against the ivory linen coverlet as the short message played again. By now she was used to the way the artist’s speech turned to verbal shorthand whenever he was excited or upset and she had no trouble deciphering his diatribe about the impossibility of finding a plumber on a Saturday night.
Nauman’s East Side apartment was a bachelor efficiency, little more than a place to sleep and change clothes during the week while he attended to his duties as chairman of the art department at Vanderlyn College. Connecticut was where he had his studio, where he actually painted, and where most of his notebooks and sketchbooks were stored, not to mention a cache of early works for which three museums were dickering. Early in their acquaintance Sigrid had visited Nauman’s Connecticut house to help one of his former students, and she was willing to concede that a broken water pipe on those premises probably constituted a true emergency.
On the other hand, this was the second weekend in a row that Nauman had canceled their evening plans.
Sigrid rolled to the middle of the bed and sat with her legs akimbo, an elbow on each thigh and her chin supported by cupped hands. It was her favorite position for serious thinking.
Was
Nauman avoiding an evening alone with her?
They had met back in April during a homicide investigation in the Vanderlyn art department. He was chairman of the department, a world-famous artist, nearing sixty; she was a no-nonsense police officer, absorbed by her work and disinclined toward any emotional entanglements, much less with someone almost twenty-five years older than she.
For reasons which she still hadn't fathomed, he had marched into her life and tried to change her dress, her palate, her resistance to intimacy. Nothing she did or said could drive him away, and as spring turned to summer and summer cooled into autumn, she continued to treat him much as an oyster treats an unwelcome and highly irritating grain of sand which has intruded beneath its reclusive shell and refuses to be dislodged: without realizing what was happening, she gradually accustomed herself to the unfamiliar and complex emotions which he aroused in her, emotions her heretofore orderly psyche had never experienced.
It wasn’t until a young naval officer provoked him to a jealous outburst that she finally recognized how important Nauman s opinion of her had become. Until then, Sigrid had believed the mirrors which told her that her face was too thin, her nose too long, her mouth too wide; that her breasts were too small and her body too skinny; that nothing about her physical appearance fit the mold of standard beauty and sexuality.
Suddenly reflected in the glare of Nauman s jealousy and frustration, however, Sigrid had abruptly realized that there might be other standards. For the first time in her life she began to feel desirable, a woman who could be cherished for very individual reasons by an exceptional man.
Curious, and still more than a little awkward, she had lowered her defenses and waited to see what would happen next.
Nothing, Whether by coincidence or design, their schedules had immediately quit meshing. If she wasn't working overtime, he was jetting off into the sunset to jury a show or to some exhibit or other of his pictures. In the last ten days, there had been only one hasty lunch together in an overcrowded restaurant-hardly the time or place to make him aware she was ready to take the next step even if she’d known what the next step was.
With the old insecurities beginning to nibble at the edges of her fragile new self-esteem, Sigrid slid off the end of her bed and hesitated before the mirrored closet door. Her body seemed all awkward angularity now and her left arm still carried the ugly red wound where a would-be rapist had slashed her earlier in the month. Not a very appealing sight, Sigrid told herself, and at that moment she even repented the giddy impulse which had cut off her hair. Instead of the sensible braided bun that had kept her dark tresses away from her face and out of her eyes for so many years, it was now a mass of layered waves that flopped across her forehead in frivolous disarray.
Sigrid frowned at her reflection and decided that her long neck and short hair made her look exactly like one of those weird African cranes with their ridiculous feathered topknots that were always showing up on Channel 13’s nature programs.
How long, she wondered, would it take for her hair to grow out to braidable length again?
Gloomily, she reached inside the closet for a warm robe and barely noticed that it was a lovely black wool, banded in cords of red and gold, which Anne had brought her from Peru. Without Nauman around to make her self-conscious about it, clothes were merely something to warm her body or cover her nakedness and she did not linger before the mirror long enough to see how the black robe made her gray eyes lucent or how its graceful lines softened the imagined angularities of her thin figure.
Instead, she wandered out to the green-and-white tiled kitchen she shared with Roman and peered into the huge, well-stocked refrigerator. When she lived alone, she had always known exactly what she’d find in her small refrigerator: a head of wilted lettuce, a piece of cheese, milk, juice, a stick of butter, and perhaps the remains from a carton of salad or something she’d hurriedly picked up at a corner delicatessen the night before.
With Roman such an exuberant culinary adventurer, the possibilities were now perplexingly endless: assorted cheeses, three kinds of salad greens, leeks, chives, artichoke hearts, bottles of homemade dressing, mustards, pickles, and a dozen covered pots and bowls filled with leftovers which, in Sigrid’s opinion, ranged from the merely exotic to the totally inedible.
She closed the refrigerator, pulled down one of the green-enamel saucepans hanging over the stove, and dumped a can of tomato soup into it. Had Roman been there, he would have insisted upon garnishing the soup with a sprig of dill or basil and a dollop of heavy cream and he would have brought out tins of imported crackers. Sigrid added half a can of water from the tap and rooted around in the cupboard till she found some plain saltines. In her present mood, she felt an obscure need to regain some of her former asceticism, to recreate a time when her choices were fewer and much less complicated, when it was her work that gave her puzzles to solve, not her persona] life.
She poured the hot soup into a bowl and tuned Roman’s small portable television to a news program just as a video camera tracked the removal of Emmy Mion’s shrouded body from the theater. Dispassionately, Sigrid watched herself deliver a brief statement that was shortened even further by a beer commercial. After eating, she carried
The New York Times
and a glass of ros£ into the living room and nestled upon the white linen couch as she opened the paper to the crossword puzzle.
The apartment, a ground floor appendage to an industrial building on the Lower West Side, belonged to the sister of Roman Tramegra’s godmother and when it became available back in August, Sigrid and Roman had agreed that they would respect each other’s privacy and overlap only in the kitchen and the tiny walled garden (Roman’s
giardino)
in front. Accordingly, the living room basically reflected her own tastes: neutral-toned couch and chairs and uncluttered surfaces. But even though Roman had his own small sitting room in what had once been the maid’s quarters, he could not resist adding a few colorful touches out here: an oriental rug in soft red tones, a couple of needlepoint cushions for the white couch, lush floor pots of ferns, and hanging baskets of bright pink geraniums for the courtyard window behind the couch.
She drew the line, however, when Roman tried to sneak in a three-foot-tall replica of a seated Balinese temple goddess. (It wasn t the goddess's bare breasts nor even its six arms that jarred her so much as its garish red-and-gold robes.) Sipping her wine, she settled into the puzzle, The daily ones were seldom difficult enough to occupy her for very long, but she relished clever word play and today's crossword contained several outrageous puns. It was finished much too quickly, though, leaving Sigrid with a restlessness which thoroughly annoyed her Why should this one empty evening be so much more difficult to fill than all the empty evenings before Nauman charged into her life?
When Roman let himself in at ten-thirty, he was surprised to find Sigrid at the dining room table with an open briefcase and papers spread before her.
“Working?” he boomed. “I thought you and Oscar-?”
“He was called out of town,” said Sigrid, “so I thought I’d catch up on a few things.”
From the kitchen came a low clunk, then silence as the washer switched itself off. Roman followed her out to watch while she transferred the load to the dryer. “And you waxed the floor! My dear Sigrid, you needn't have done that.”
“I didn't feel like watching a program on African water birds," she said wryly.
Roman hung his corduroy jacket on the back of one of the bar stools, smoothed a strand of thin brown hair across the top of his head, and began measuring coffee into a brass Italian espresso pot. “Had I known you were free, I'd have invited you to see our ghoulish little fantasy.” Sigrid straightened up with her hands full of wet lingerie. ‘Those people actually danced tonight?”
“And danced
marvellously!
It was standing-room-only and critics were there. Someone said the
Times
, too, but that's undoubtedly wishful thinking.” He filled the pot with water and set it over a medium flame on the huge chrome-and-black-iron range.
Sigrid started the dryer. “What did they do about Emmy Mion s solo?”
“If I do say so myself, it was
inspired]”
Roman beamed. “Neither of the women wished to do it and I knew the men weren’t too keen on giving the spotlight to David Orland-after all, he is
not
a member of the troupe, you see, and the 8th-AV-8 would hardly benefit if critics took him to be its star soloist-” He paused to explain the difficulties in substituting Orland for one of the men in the first and last scenes.
“So who did you use?" Sigrid asked.
“No
one\”
exclaimed Roman. “I wrote a few lines for Eric and at the end of the first scene, there was a blackout while he told the audience that the next dance belonged to Emmy and that they must imagine her small ghostly figure dancing for them one final time. Then the music started, Nate Richmond narrowed a pure white spotlight till the beam wasn’t much wider than my fist, and that little spot of light