Quickstep to Murder (10 page)

He smiled but shook his head. “I can practice with some of them, but not compete. I’m fully committed with my own ladies.”

Competitions were divided into heats by age, dance, and ability level (bronze, silver, or gold). Each heat lasted one to two minutes and each of a pro’s students might be entered into thirty-five, fifty, or even more heats during a weekend. It was a scheduling nightmare and I wasn’t surprised that Maurice couldn’t juggle another student at the D.C. event.

“I heard Vitaly Voloshin has moved to Baltimore,” he said.

“What! I thought he was in St. Petersburg.”

“He was, but his new partner—life partner, not dance partner—is an architect in Baltimore and Vitaly moved here after their commitment ceremony. Anya refused to come to the States to train with him,” Maurice added significantly.

Anya Karinska was Vitaly’s professional partner. He was a world-class dancer and if he was between partners . . . I didn’t have a moment to lose. I was racking my brain to find a way to get Vitaly’s phone number when Maurice passed a piece of paper across the table. “I thought you might be interested, so I got his number from a friend of a friend.” He winked.

“What would I do without you?” I beamed at him and picked up the phone.

“Fret yourself into a decline, run the business into the ground, and end up working as an Avon lady,” he said, rising to his feet and leaning across the desk to pat my cheek before he left.

 

Vitaly Voloshin arrived from Baltimore barely two hours later, eager to discuss taking on Rafe’s students and the possibility of partnering with me. Off the dance floor, he looked like someone you’d find behind the counter of a convenience store: thin face with a beaky nose, stick-straight blond hair with all the luster of dried hay, and a gangly body that seemed to be mostly arms and legs. Last time I’d seen him, he’d had crooked, tannish teeth. Now he flashed a smile that told me some dentist was vacationing on the Riviera with his profits from bleaching, capping, straightening, and/or crowning Vitaly’s teeth. They gleamed whitely and his smile broadened when he saw me staring at them. He tapped a front tooth with his fingernail. “My partner is taking me to the dentist as a wedding present. Very sexy,
da
?”

“Da,”
I agreed.

We warmed up in silence, stretching at the barre and marching in place as the sun warmed the quiet studio. I thought how strange it was to be here preparing to dance with someone other than Rafe. It sort of felt like I was cheating on him.

“We shall dancing now,” Vitaly announced. As I started the music and moved toward him, he was transformed. It was like he flipped a switch. Power and grace and charisma flowed from him and even if he’d never be conventionally handsome, he was striking in a way I knew the judges would notice. He led exceptionally well and we worked our way through all the standard dances—waltz, tango, Viennese waltz, foxtrot, and quickstep—before stopping.

“Now you will winning at Blackpool, Stacy Graysin,” he said confidently, “now that you are partnered by Vitaly. The Argentinean—he was not good enough for you. He was a—” The last word was unintelligible Russian, but I got the gist. His tone was cold and his gray eyes stony and I wondered exactly what had happened between him and Rafe.

“Let’s not count our chickens,” I cautioned, although the session had gone better than I dared hope. “We need lots of practice time if we’re going to compete together.”

His blond hair flopped into his eyes and he flung it back. “I am not concerning with the poultry. Only with the winning together.”

We set up a tentative practice schedule and discussed Rafe’s students. Vitaly agreed to take most of them on. “Except not the fat ones,” he said emphatically. “
Nyet
. Vitaly is not dancing with the—” He tossed in another Russian word.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“You is saying ‘hippies.’”

“Hippos,” I corrected him.

I deplored his attitude, but agreed to his demands. Only one of Rafe’s serious students was a larger woman and I knew Maurice would suit her well. Vitaly also agreed to compete at the Capitol Festival with the three students who had entered the pro-am events with Rafe.

“We will also competing,” he said definitively, pointing at me and then himself.

I knew we needed to compete as partners, make an impression on the judges, before Blackpool, but I didn’t know how we’d get costumes done, choreograph our dances, and practice sufficiently in one week.

“Vitaly is taking care of,” he said when I mentioned these obstacles. He made a brushing motion, as if sweeping aside the pesky details.

Unless Vitaly had a magic wand, I didn’t know how he was “taking care of,” but I went with it. I reached out to shake hands good-bye, but he caught my hand in his and brought it to his lips in a courtly gesture. “Vitaly is—”

“Not wasting much time replacing your dead fiancé, are you, Miss Graysin?” an abrasive voice said from the doorway.

I jerked my hand away and spun to see Detective Lissy looking deceptively nondescript but precise with each mousy hair Brylcreemed into place and his tie meticulously knotted. Two uniformed police officers hovered behind him.

“Vitaly is having work visa,” the suddenly agitated dancer said, apparently mistaking Lissy and his posse for immigration officers. He darted toward his dance bag and fished through its pockets.

Cold stole through my body, making my fingers and toes tingle. Detective Lissy’s gaze stayed glued to my face, even when Vitaly danced forward, waving a form he’d extracted from his wallet.

“Miss Graysin, you need to come with us to discuss the murder of Rafael Acosta,” Lissy said. The uniformed cops moved toward me, one of them dangling handcuffs from his hand.

This couldn’t be happening. I started shivering and Vitaly looked at me with an expression of mingled surprise and approval. “But—”

“You have the right to remain silent . . .”

Humiliation is not my cup of tea, but humiliation is what I felt as the cops marched me to their squad car and slid me into the back, where the molded plastic seat still smelled faintly of vomit from the last person who bummed a ride with them. I ducked my head, hoping none of my neighbors were watching. I felt more embarrassed than the time, as a neophyte dancer, I’d danced the samba walk backward. Terror blanked my mind as detectives Lissy and Troy marched me into the large all-brick building on Mill Road. I took in only the foggiest details: uniformed cops, laughter, scents of coffee and pizza, harsh fluorescent lighting. Snippets of conversations bounced off my eardrums without sinking in. “. . . since the Redskins traded for McNabb . . . court appearance tomorrow . . . can’t believe she slept with . . . vacation days this year.” None of it made sense. My being here didn’t make sense. I hadn’t killed Rafe.

I clung to that thought as the very polite policeman who had cuffed me led me to a small room with a square white table, three plastic chairs, and bare tan walls. He removed the handcuffs and left, ignoring me when I said, “Don’t I get one phone call?” As the sound of his footsteps faded, I rushed to the door and tried it. Locked.

My brain refused to focus, dwelling on depressing images of life as an inmate and speculating about how the world would be changed when I got out of prison as an octogenarian. I stewed for half an hour before the door opened. Scrambling nervously out of the uncomfortable chair I sat in, ready to leave, I sank back down as detectives Lissy and Troy came in.

“Thank you for making time to talk to us, Miss Graysin,” Detective Lissy said. He pulled out the chair across from me and sat the way my great-aunt Laurinda did, feet flat on the floor, knees together, spine erect. Troy stayed near the door, shoulders propped against the wall.

“It didn’t seem like I had much choice,” I said. “Am I under arrest?”

“We found this yesterday, in the sewer near your house,” Lissy said, thunking a plastic bag with a gun in it onto the table. He aligned it so the bag’s edges paralleled the table’s sides and slid it over to me. “Look familiar?”

I studied the gun through the gallon-sized baggie. “It looks kind of like mine,” I said cautiously. “Mine was silver on top like that, and black on the bottom.” I pulled the bag closer to me with one wary finger. “And mine had that P22 stamped on it, too.”

Troy choked on what sounded like a laugh, then hammered his chest with a fist. “Getting a cold,” he explained.

Lissy didn’t even glance at his partner. “It’s a Walther P22,” he told me. “They all have that stamped on them. Nice little semiautomatic pistol. Ballistics tells us it’s the gun that killed Rafael Acosta. Guess whose fingerprints are on it.”

“Um, the murderer’s?” I asked hopefully.

He smiled, an unpleasant, tight-lipped smile. “Exactly, Miss Graysin. Yours.”

I gasped.

“So why don’t we go over that evening again,
hmm
? We’ve learned a lot about your fiancé in a couple of days, Miss Graysin, and frankly, I’m sure you had good reason to shoot him. What happened? Did you argue about the business or about his girlfriends? Did he want to get back together? Attack you? If you tell us the truth now, you’ll likely get a lighter sentence. Maybe it was even self-defense?”

“No!”

“No, it wasn’t self-defense? Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“No is just no. It wasn’t self-defense because it wasn’t anything. I didn’t kill Rafe.”

Someone knocked on the door and Troy opened it a crack. A brief, whispered conversation followed before Troy swung the door wider with a rueful look at his partner. “Her lawyer,” he said.

“My lawyer?” It was news to me that I had a lawyer. I turned to the door and saw a huge grizzly of a man with a full beard, vest stretched taut by a heavy paunch, and graying hair brushed back and wavy to his shoulders like in pictures I’d seen of General Custer. He looked to be in his late sixties and carried a slim leather case.

“Phineas Drake,” he announced in a rumbling voice, not offering to shake anyone’s hand. He didn’t even glance at me as he told Lissy, “Ms. Graysin has nothing further to say at this time.”

Lissy rose, at a distinct physical disadvantage before the ursine Drake. “Perhaps you’re unaware that the murder weapon has her fingerprints on it. We have enough to arrest her.”

I wasn’t under arrest? That was news, too—good news. Phineas Drake laughed, a sound like rolling timpani. “She owns the gun. Of course it has her fingerprints on it. Are hers the only prints on the gun?”

“Acosta’s were on there, too, but since this clearly wasn’t a suicide, that’s not germane.”

“Any others?”

Lissy squirmed. The lawyer seemed to enjoy the detective’s discomfort.

“I am not obligated to share details of an ongoing investigation with you.”

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes,’ ” Drake said good-humoredly. “Clearly, the gun was stolen and someone else used it to murder the unfortunate Mr. Acosta. Even a first-year law student could trump that argument, Detective. She had no GSR on her hands that night and no motive for killing Mr. Acosta.”

“No motive?” Lissy laughed a slight
heh-heh
. “I’d call becoming sole owner of the business a fine motive.”

“But I didn’t,” I said, glad for the first time that Rafe had changed his will. All three men looked at me. “His . . . A relative gets Rafe’s half of Graysin Motion.”

Lissy flushed an ugly puce shade. “You gave us a copy of his will, Miss Graysin, that named you as the beneficiary.”

“It was an old one,” I said airily.

“There you have it,” Phineas Drake said with an approving nod at me. “Let’s go, Ms. Graysin.”

“Jenkins was checking to make sure the will was the most current one,” Troy told Lissy. From the look on Lissy’s face, I felt sorry for Jenkins for not coming up with the more recent will.

“His name is Octavio Acosta,” I supplied helpfully. “He said he talked to you.”

“He didn’t mention inheriting the dance studio,” Troy put in as Lissy’s color deepened.

“Perhaps you forgot to ask,” I said sweetly, rising with as much self-possession as was possible in the tangerine leggings and sweaty tank top I’d worn to dance with Vitaly.

Phineas Drake held out a peremptory hand and escorted me from the room before I could antagonize the detectives further. He said nothing as he ushered me through the police department and out the doors into a day that had clouded over and was sticky with humidity. A white limo idled at the curb and he gestured me to it, climbing in after me.

“Thank you very much, Mr. Drake,” I said as he settled his bulk on the rear seat and reached for a bottle of champagne chilling in a silver bucket. The limo was so big I was surprised it didn’t come with a steward. Drake popped the cork silently, releasing a faint aroma of pear to mix with the scent of expensive leather perfuming the limo’s interior. I accepted the glass he handed me, watching the bubbles ascend through the cut crystal.

“Thank your uncle.”

“Uncle Nico?” I stared at him in astonishment. “How did he know I was here?”

“As I understand it, a Mr. Maurice Goldberg called your mother and she called Mr. Papadakis at his vacation home in Spain. He asked me to wander over and liberate you.”

“Do you work for Uncle Nico?” I asked.

The big man smiled. “From time to time.”

“You look expensive,” I said frankly, taking a gulp of champagne. The beverage might be meant for sipping, but I’d had a morning that required swigging. “I probably can’t afford you.”

“Don’t worry about it. Your uncle is taking care of my fees. As a favor.” He smiled, crinkling his cheeks below his eyes.

I knew what that meant. Uncle Nico was all about tit for tat. I’d owe him one. A big one. The thought gave me a moment of unease, but I was so glad Phineas Drake had gotten me out of the police station that I let it drift away. Time enough to worry when Uncle Nico showed up to claim his favor.