Dancing with the Dead

32

“Way I see it,” Helen said, “he’s killing his mother.”

She was sitting next to Mary on the Romance Studio bench. Mary hadn’t understood her because Helen had been bending down to buckle a dance shoe as she’d spoken. When the words did fall into vague meaning in her mind, she asked who was killing whose mother.

Straightening, face still flushed and mottled from being upside down, Helen swiveled on the bench and stared at her. “You okay, Mary Mary?”

“Been a rough day since morning,” Mary said, “but I’m all right.”

“Killed his mother is what I said.”

“Who?”

“The guy that murdered the dancers in New Orleans and Seattle. That’s why the two women looked something alike. They find this guy, I betcha dollars to doughnuts it turns out his mother was the same type as his victims. He hates her but he’s scared shitless of her, so he murders other women as a sort of symbolic gesture of his contempt. Kills her over and over again. That’s the way it works.”

“Sounds like talk-show psychology,” Mary said. Her gaze shifted to the office door, waiting for Mel to emerge so her lesson could begin. Waltz music was floating from the big Bose speakers, and tall Lisa and her instructor were gliding over the floor. Lisa did an elegant develope, holding the count and extending her pointed foot gracefully as she slowly raised and lowered her long, long leg.

“It’s a known fact mass murderers do that kinda thing because of their mothers,” Helen explained. “Like Ted Bundy and Son of Sam.”

“I don’t remember reading about them hating their mothers.”

“Well, you gotta admit they couldn’t have had a healthy relationship with old mom, or they wouldn’t have felt the way they did about women.”

Trapped, Mary had to agree. But she said, “The police aren’t even positive the same man killed both dancers.”

“Yeah, they are,” Mary said knowledgeably, “they’re just not clueing in the public. And can you blame them? You know how the news media is-jackals with microphones and typewriters. They’d make an investigation, then a trial, impossible. Cops are smarter’n a lotta people think, and in a case like this they use something called VICAP. I read about it in a magazine just this morning, part of a list of things where America still leads the rest of the world.”

“Vicap? Sounds like a cold medicine.”

“Stands for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program,” Helen said smugly. “It’s a central storehouse of information about crimes and criminals all over the country, so a computer can pick up similarities in them and print them out and the police can know about matching M.O. s-that means Method of Operation. So when those two women were killed, the cops’ computer linked up with VICAP and showed they were both humped by the killer after they were dead. See, that’s the common denominator in the two crimes, and you can bet there’s others they’re keeping secret. Other things that were done to those poor gals.”

“Why wouldn’t the computer point out the fact both women were ballroom dancers? The police don’t seem very interested in that.”

“Probably they’re not interested because that’s not the sort of information they’d feed a computer about a murder victim in the first place, that she knew how to dance. Or that she competed. Big deal. To them the only ballroom dancing’s the kind that goes on at proms or country clubs. They wouldn’t figure it’d matter anymore’n if she played racquetball or liked sour cream on her potato. The similarity’s not in the main data bank, so the cops disregard it. Cops think like that, you know.”

Mary didn’t know, but everyone else seemed to have a handle on how the police operated.

Still sitting down, she bent forward and slipped her street high heels into her dance bag. She saw on the carpet the scuffed toes of a man’s black leather dance shoes, and looked up at Mel.

He was smiling down at her, so young, gentle, anything but threatening.

“They’re playing a waltz,” he said. “We might as well do that. Can’t work on nothing but tango, or that’s all you’ll know how to dance in Ohio.” He held out a hand for her, palm up, like a beggar imploring for alms. Not a hand that could ever harm anyone.

She followed him onto the dance floor and he led her into some basic box steps to warm her up, then through some balance steps and spiral turns. For a second they swept close to Lisa and her partner. Mary and Lisa glanced at each other, and Lisa suddenly tightened her posture and tilted back her head farther to emphasize a long and graceful dance line. Mary responded, kicking from the hip to follow Mel’s lead. A spark. An instant of rivalry and competition that might not have occurred a few months ago, before the two women had begun grooming for Ohio. Lisa had gone to the in-house Romance Studios’ competition in Miami and returned with a first in rumba and a second in fox-trot. Buoyed by success, however bogus, she’d been expressing grandiose ideas about Ohio.

Mel guided Mary to the edge of the dance floor and they stood for a second watching Helen and Nick waltz past and swirl into a parallel hesitation step. Helen was improving fast, too, and had plans to compete and succeed in November. A few competitive volts had also passed in her glance at Mary. The bulldog was coming out in the ladies.

“What we’re gonna do now,” Mel said, “is practice how to get on and off the floor. That’s important, ’cause when we walk on, it’s the judges’ first impression of us. When we’re gonna dance rhythm, you take my arm”-he extended his right arm and she wound her left through it-“and you look at me while I lead you out onto the floor. Sometimes I won’t be looking at you, ’cause I’m the one watching where we’re going. We walk fast, with a sense of purpose. I’ll choose our spot, probably toward the center of the floor, where the judges are most likely to pay attention to us. Main thing is, we need to seem confident.” He grinned, then bumped her lightly with his hip. “No problem for us, huh? We are confident.”

And he was right; she was surprised to feel a confidence that matched his own. Why couldn’t the competition start tomorrow? Or in five minutes?

He led her onto the floor as he’d described, and she almost pranced with eagerness.

As they were dancing, she watched Helen glide through a series of waltz pivots. She decided she could do them better.

For several measures all three whirling couples swept across the floor, rising and falling in unison on invisible waves of sound. It all clicked into place for Mary, as it had been doing lately, and she felt beautiful, whole, and without care. It was what dancing was about, finding oneself by losing oneself.

When they stopped, Mel told her everything would be fine if she danced that way in Ohio.

He walked over to the drinking fountain, and she followed. She felt so close to him at that moment, and had an overwhelming compulsion to confide in him. Right now, he might understand and be interested in her as a person, a woman as well as a student.

“I broke off my relationship with the guy I was living with,” she began. Just making conversation, her tone suggested; how ’bout those Cardinals? Playing great baseball!

“That whatsizname? Jake?”

It encouraged her that he remembered Jake’s name. “Yeah, he wasn’t treating me the best.”

“That so?” Mel leaned down and sucked water from the stainless steel spout’s feeble offering. She waited while he straightened up and wiped his forearm across his wet lips.

“It was what I needed to do,” she said.

“What we need to do,” Mel said, “is put our problems aside and practice some more.” He grabbed her hand and led her to the center of the studio, looking beyond her.

They assumed dance position.

Later that night, though she was exhausted, Mary practiced tango before the mirror in her apartment. She was beginning to feel as if the image in the glass were someone else, a very real other Mary whose body she controlled, and whose smoothness and precision far surpassed her own.

She was interrupted by the telephone. She seldom used her answering machine to screen callers these days. There was the slim possibility Rene might call. Of course, it might be Jake on the phone, but she was sure now she could handle that.

She quickly lifted the receiver, hoping as always.

Not Rene. Not Jake. Fred.

“I thought you better know Angie’s back in Saint Sebastian,” he said. Something in his voice. Bitterness? No. Fear?

“Alcohol again?” Mary asked. She knew the answer.

Only thought she knew.

“Cancer,” Fred said flatly. “They removed some polyps or something from her cervix that turned out to be malignant.”

Mary’s insides went cold. This was completely out of left field, the place this kind of news always seemed to come from. “What? Whoa? Are you telling me my mother’s got cervical cancer?”

“I’m afraid that’s what it is, Mary.”

“I’m driving down there,” she said, as distant as if the woman in the mirror had spoken, the other Mary who didn’t have to feel.

“Now, Mary, there ain’t much point in that. Angie might even be asleep by the time you get here. I think they gave her a sedative or something.”

“I’m leaving right now, Fred.”

He sighed. “Room four-oh-five, Mary.”

She hung up, feeling dizzy, and grabbed her blue windbreaker from the closet, hearing the wire hanger ping against the floor. Then she walked directly out the door without bothering to turn off the lights or the music.

Cancer. The dreadful word. She didn’t want to say it, or even to have it unsaid and crawling around in her mind.

With a rush of guilt, she realized her sense of impending doom was for herself, not Angie. Loneliness was gathering around her like a cold fog, affording only glimpses of a terrifying future.

Selfish! she admonished herself.

As she descended the creaking stairs, she repeated Angie’s name softly, each utterance rending her heart. “Angie, Angie. Mother.”

A terrible apprehension had taken form in her breast, an organic, destructive engine racing and fueled by fear.

She couldn’t stop trembling.