Quickstep to Murder (6 page)

My mouth felt dry, like I’d been eating baby powder, and I used my tongue to moisten my lips. “It’s not here.”

 

“I know the police think I killed Rafe,” I told Mark Downey Thursday morning at seven o’clock. We’d had a dance practice set up and I’d been too distracted by the night’s events to cancel, although I’d called the instructors and put a sign on the door saying classes were canceled for the day. Mark had arrived for our practice session, had seen the crime scene tape strung across the doors to the ballroom, and had sought me out in my office.

“My God, Stacy,” he’d said, rushing in without even knocking and jolting to a stop at the sight of me behind my desk. “I thought—I saw the tape and thought that you—” His light brown eyes glowed with concern and relief.

“Not me. Rafe,” I said, thrusting my fingers through the unwashed hair I had scraped back into a utilitarian ponytail. I knew my eyes were red and puffy from lack of sleep, and I frankly was surprised Mark didn’t run screaming from the room at the sight of me. I could’ve had a walk-on part in the latest zombie movie without needing special effects makeup. Instead, he pulled me up into a comforting hug. I clung to him for a second—he smelled like deodorant soap—but broke away as I started to sniffle again.

“Sorry,” I said, reaching for a tissue. I felt like I’d been crying nonstop since detectives Lissy and Troy finally left me alone at around two this morning. They’d pokered up and exchanged a meaningful glance when I discovered my gun was missing, and the questions had gotten a lot more pointed. They’d swabbed my hands with little towelette thingies, had taken my fingerprints—for elimination purposes, they said—and had asked if I knew if Rafe had a will. I gave them a copy. I could only be grateful they hadn’t hauled me off to jail.

“Rafe! What in the name of God happened?” Mark straddled the straight-backed chair facing my desk and rested his chin on its back.

Normally, I wouldn’t have considered Mark a confidante—he was a client more than a friend—but nothing about this morning qualified as “normal.” I slumped into my chair and told him what I knew about Rafe’s death—murder—which wasn’t much, and finished with my conviction that the cops considered me the prime suspect.

“Of course they don’t,” Mark said. “No one could possibly think you had it in you to kill someone.”

“That’s sweet of you,” I said. Deluded on at least two counts—the cops clearly thought I was more than capable of shooting my ex-fiancé, and pretty much everyone is able to kill under the right circumstances—but sweet. “I’m sorry, but I’m not up to—”

“Of course you’re not,” he said, rising immediately. “Just give me a call when you’re ready to practice. If there’s anything I can do . . . I know you and Rafe were close, that is, that you used to be—Oh, hell.”

He looked young and confused and earnest and I gave him a small smile. “Thanks, Mark. I appreciate it. I’ll call you later in the week.” If I wasn’t being fitted for a lurid orange prison jumpsuit.

He left and I rose to make sure the door had closed after him. I felt less secure than usual in the studio—big surprise—and gave into nerves by turning the dead bolt. Returning to my office, my gaze fell on the crisscrossed crime scene tape that barred the way into the ballroom where I’d found Rafe’s body. As if compelled, I walked to the open door and stood on the threshold, wondering how I’d ever dance in there again. Except for a stain—smaller than it had seemed last night—where Rafe had lain under the window, the room looked like it always did: sunny and serene. I frequently imagined ghostly Colonial-era dancers bowing and curtsying as they minced their way through a gavotte or quadrille; now there’d be another ghost dancing in the ballroom. At least, I hoped he’d be dancing.

I turned away, fighting back tears again. Maybe Danielle was right and I hadn’t been completely over Rafe. Wanting to distract myself from my incessant tears, I hurried into the studio, which the police had not put off limits, and turned on the stereo, not caring what music was cued up. A song from
Wicked
came on. I warmed up with some pliés and relèvés and then flung myself around the room in a whirling dance with no precision and little grace, intent on wringing the pent-up tension out of my muscles.

“You bitch.”

The venomous words caught me midleap and I half turned in the air, stumbling as I landed. Solange stood in the doorway, fury in every stiff line of her body. Even her red hair seemed to bristle with electric anger. She aimed the remote at the stereo, cutting Kristin Chenoweth off midsyllable.

“How did you get in here?”

She flung a key at me and it bounced off my cheek. “You killed him!”

“I did not!”

She stalked toward me, clearly intent on beating a confession out of me. I squared up to her but held up my hands placatingly. Heaven knows there’d been a time when nothing would have given me more pleasure than scratching Solange’s smug face or pulling her hair out of her scalp, but I didn’t think a catfight was a dignified way of grieving for Rafe. “How did you find out?” I asked.

“The police were on my doorstep first thing this morning,” she said, slitting her eyes. “They told me Rafe was dead, that he’d been shot! How do you think it felt to hear my fiancé had been killed?” She managed a little sob.

Fiancé! I saw her lying face through a red haze. “About like it felt to find him in bed with a morals-free trollop.” Whoops. That comment wasn’t going to do much to head off a catfight. But, damn, it felt good to say it.

Solange stopped dead for a moment, then resumed pacing toward me, looking for an opening. I figured I could take her: She was fit, with killer abs bared by a crop top and skintight jeans that just cleared her pubic bone, but I was taller, with a longer reach, and I wasn’t wearing gladiator sandals with four-inch heels. I wasn’t recovering from an ankle injury, either.

“Let’s not do this, Solange,” I said. “I’m sorry for what I said.”

“I’ll make you sorrier.”

Without warning, she kicked at my knee. Her stiletto heel grazed the side of my leg. “Ow!” Before she could pull her leg back, I grabbed her ankle with both my hands. Her eyes widened as she hopped on one foot.

The temptation to upend her was almost overwhelming. Instead, I backed up a step and watched her teeter precariously as she was forced to hop toward me. “I didn’t shoot Rafe.”

“Liar. Lying bi—”

I jerked her foot an inch higher, almost to my shoulder, and she didn’t even wince. Ballroom dancers have to be darn flexible. “Stop saying that. I didn’t kill Rafe. And I don’t know who did. Although—” The key she’d thrown glinted as a sunbeam stroked it. “How long have you had that key?”

“Rafe gave it to me a few months back so I could use the studio to practice when I needed to.”

Great. How many other people had Rafe given keys to? I was having the locks changed today.

“
Would
you let me go? You’re going to hurt my ankle.” Exasperation beat out anger in her voice and I could see she’d calmed down. I dropped her foot. She bent to fuss with her sandal strap.

“I don’t see a ring,” I said, my gaze on her left hand.

She knew immediately what I was saying. She straightened and her face was rosy, either from bending over or from my question. “We were more, like, engaged to be engaged. We were going ring shopping this weekend.”

Sure they were. Talk about being a liar. I felt better knowing Rafe hadn’t proposed to her. I don’t know why it made a difference to me, but it did. “Look, the studio’s closed today. I’ll keep this”—I stooped to retrieve the key—“and I’ll call you later this week to let you know what the studio schedule is going to be. What with Rafe—” I stopped, suddenly realizing that we would be short a teacher. And the Capitol Festival! I’d just lost my partner for the upcoming competition and for Blackpool, too. How could I dig up a new partner on such short notice? All the good dancers were already committed and—

“I said I could teach Rafe’s classes for a couple of weeks.”

I tuned back to Solange to see her looking at me strangely. “You could?” A helpful Solange was new to me . . . and suspect. “Why would you?”

“To . . . to honor Rafe’s memory,” she said with a pious, self-sacrificing air.

She didn’t fool me for one second. She had an ulterior motive. Which didn’t mean I wouldn’t take her up on her offer because she had teaching experience and I was in a bind. Not wanting to make a decision on the spot, I said, “I’ll let you know, okay? Right now—”

Heavy footsteps thudded in the hall. “Acosta!” a man bellowed from just outside the studio door. Solange and I turned as one to see a man burst into the room with such force that the door banged against the wall. Emotion twisted his face and inflamed a bulbous nose. “Where is he?” the man asked loudly. “Where’s that cowardly spic who got my daughter pregnant?”

I gaped at the stranger as a dozen questions flitted through my head. Who are you? Who’s your daughter? How do you know she’s pregnant? The only one I verbalized was, “You mean Rafe?”

“Señor Rafael Acosta.” The man oozed sarcasm and butchered the first word by pronouncing it “senior.” A shade under six feet tall, he had shoulders that almost filled the doorway and hands clenched into fists the size of grapefruits. He rocked back and forth on the balls of his booted feet, a bull about to charge.

“Who are you?” Solange thrust herself into the conversation. She had her hands balled on her hips, with her chin jutting out.

“Leon Hall.”

My face must have shown my shock and dismay because Hall nodded with grim satisfaction. “That’s right. Taryn’s dad. She’s pregnant. By that wetback.”

Solange gasped. “Rafe wouldn’t do that! He and I were seeing each other, almost engaged. He wouldn’t ch—” She broke off, eyes darting to me and then to the floor.

I took little satisfaction in her stricken expression as I asked Hall, “How do you know? That it was Rafe, I mean?” Rafe liked his women on the sophisticated side; I had trouble seeing him romantically involved with an inexperienced teenager.

“My daughter told me so this morning. So tell the miserable child molester to come out from wherever he’s hiding”—his voice rose to shouting level, as if he were trying to scare Rafe out of a closet or hidey-hole—“so I can kill the sorry bas—”

“Someone beat you to it,” I said quietly.

It took several moments for my words to penetrate his shell of anger.

“Wha—?” He looked confused, glancing from me to Solange. “You’re telling me he’s dead? Acosta’s dead?”

I nodded. “Maybe we should discuss this in my office.”

Solange pulled a cell phone out of her purse and started punching in a number. “I’m calling the police,” she announced, her green gaze fixed on Hall. “Obviously, you killed Rafe.”

Unease flickered across Hall’s face. “You’re crazy. I didn’t even know he was dead.”

“So you say.”

A voice squawking into her ear distracted Solange. As she talked, I led Hall away. The door to the outside stairs was ajar, leading me to believe Solange had left it open when she came in and Hall had taken advantage of that. I’d had enough surprise visitors for one morning, so I locked it again before ushering Hall into my office and gesturing him toward the love seat under the window.

He shook his head, remaining by the door. “I’ve got to get to work.”

“So you just stopped by to beat Rafe up on your way to the office?”

He looked at me wearily, drawing a meaty hand over his face. “What will Taryn do now? I was gonna make him do right by her—”

“You mean marry her? I thought you wanted to kill him.” I eyed him skeptically. The way he tossed around terms like “wetback” didn’t lead me to believe Rafe would have been a welcome addition to the Hall family.

“That was just an expression,” he said, thoughts of the police obviously troubling him. “I wanted him to do the right thing, marry my Taryn and give her baby a name. Now . . .” He looked around the office as if confused about where he was, his gaze lighting on the Blackpool trophy on the corner of my desk, the framed caricature of me and Danielle we’d paid fifteen bucks for at a carnival, the sunny yellow afghan my grandma had knitted draped over the love seat’s back. “I’ve gotta go. The foreman’ll dock me.”

“But the police—” I called to his retreating figure.

He didn’t bother to answer. I heard the door slam shut and his footsteps clomping down the stairs. Sighing, I left the office to lock the door
again
, and went looking for Solange. She was nowhere to be found. Huh. She must have slipped out while Hall and I were talking.

 

Returning to my office, still sweaty from my earlier dance workout and exhausted from a sleepless night, I tried to concentrate on business tasks I needed to accomplish in the wake of Rafe’s death. The police would notify his family in Argentina, Detective Lissy had said, but I needed to tell his dance partners, our staff and students, our lawyer and accountant, the bank, the Capitol Festival and the Blackpool organizers . . . I drew up a list and stared at it, weary before I started. Did I need to write an obituary? What about funeral arrangements? I supposed his family would take his body back to Buenos Aires. Well, then, a memorial service?

My mind slid away from the dreary list and latched on to the subject that had been uppermost since the detectives left me last night: Who killed Rafe? Who hated him enough to shoot him to death? Leon Hall, obviously. My list ended there. I couldn’t think of any dance student or partner who would want Rafe dead. Okay, maybe Sawyer if Rafe really did get Taryn pregnant. I flipped through a mental Rolodex of the people Rafe saw regularly. Maurice and Rafe got along fine. There were professional rivalries, of course, and dancers who resented Rafe’s success. A British dancer came to mind. The flamboyant newcomer had lost the American Smooth Champion title to Rafe last year and had tried to get him disqualified. But as far as I knew, he was in England, running a studio in Manchester.