Dancing with the Dead

35

But he didn’t call. Not by lunch time anyway. The hours were getting heavy.

Probably, Mary told herself, it hadn’t been Rene who’d called the office that morning. How could he know the phone number? She didn’t recall telling him where she worked, but of course she might have mentioned it and forgotten. If so, what else might she have said and not remembered? If Rene knew where she worked, what else might he know about her?

By two-thirty she was almost worn out from praying each time the phone rang, feeling the emptiness in her when each call resulted in an ordinary business conversation. Instead of humming with passion, the line buzzed with talk of closing costs and adjustable rate mortgages.

At three o’clock, just after she’d worked up some figures with Victor on what it would take to finance a four-family, the phone didn’t disappoint her.

“Mary? This is Rene.”

“I know your voice.” She saw herself as if through the window, a conservatively dressed real estate employee talking on the phone, her hammering heart not visible. The closing woman. Amazing what went on beneath the calm surface of normality.

“Sorry about calling you at work, but I needed to talk.”

“It’s okay, really.”

“I tried your apartment last night, but you weren’t home. No one was.”

“Rene, the guy we talked about-Jake-he’s moved out for good.”

“It was your idea?”

“Yeah. Things weren’t good between us. They never were good, actually.”

“It sounds like you did the right thing.”

“I’m sure I did.” He didn’t say anything, but she could hear him breathing. “Rene, did I mention to you where I worked?”

“No. Why?”

“The phone number here. How’d you get it?”

“Oh! I figured you’d left for work this morning, and I didn’t wanna call again at your apartment. Then I remembered you said you worked at a real estate company, so I got a St. Louis phone directory at the library and started going down the list. Called each one till I got to Summers and asked for you, and a woman said you hadn’t come in yet, so I knew I had the right place. Is it okay? I mean, can you talk?”

“Sure, no problem.”

“Another woman’s died, Mary. Here in Kansas City.”

Whoa! She mashed the receiver harder into her ear, as if to press in the realization of what she’d just heard. “You’re in Kansas City?”

“Yeah, but not for long. The police don’t know I’m here yet, and I’m catching a flight back to New Orleans in a few hours.”

“The woman who was killed?…”

“She was a dancer, in her thirties, with dark hair. Like Danielle.”

Like me. “And you were in Kansas City when it happened.”

“I’m afraid I was. For the dance competition. Checking up on some of the names you gave me. I talked to a reporter with one of the papers, a man I met about five years ago at a convention here. Name’s Pete Joller. I told him about my theory of a sort of intercity Jack the Ripper who kills ballroom dancers. He thinks it makes sense, and he agreed to help me cross-check the names with a list of Kansas City female homicide victims the past five years. He called last night about midnight, and I expected him to let me know the results. Instead he told me he’d gotten word a woman had just been discovered with her throat slashed. He checked and found out she was a ballroom dancer-local, though, not part of the competition.”

“Had she?-”

“That’s all I know about it,” Rene interrupted, his voice tight. “But just the fact I was in town when it happened’ll get the police all over me again.”

Mary barely saw, barely heard, the cars swishing past outside the window on Kingshighway. The people in the cars were engrossed in their own problems, their own universe, and had no idea what kind of conversation was taking place so close to them; a different world behind every windshield. “You got any kind of alibi?”

“No. I was at the dance competition, but nobody’ll remember me. Then I went back to my hotel. The murder occurred about ten o’clock, when I was in my room alone.”

“What can I do?” Mary asked. She was beginning to grasp the dimensions of this, how it would look for Rene when the New Orleans police found out. And they would find out, especially if the woman had been violated after death. “Where were you?” they’d ask their prime suspect. The answer could prove fatal.

“I don’t want you to do anything,” Rene told her. “I’ll have to tell the police I was in Kansas City for the dance competition, hoping to learn something about Danielle’s murder.”

“That’s the truth.”

“You and I know it, anyway. The police’ll be skeptical. I won’t tell them about you giving me information.”

If you have to, go ahead. She thought it, heard it in her mind, but she didn’t say it. She was afraid of the police, of authority. Fear had been with her all her life, like a parasite in her bowels, sapping her of resolve and independence. The frustration, the curse, was that she knew it and could do nothing about it. That was the nature of fear.

“I just wanted to talk to you before you saw or heard about the murder on the news,” Rene said. “Wanted to assure you, no matter what you hear about me, no matter what anybody says, I never so much as laid eyes on that woman.”

“ ’Course you didn’t.”

“I’m afraid the police’ll buy into the importance of the dancing connection now, after three murders. After all, it’s what I’ve been trying to convince them of all along. I should stay away from dance competitions. I’ve been hanging myself and didn’t know it; it never occurred to me a woman’d be murdered while I was in the same city. The police’ll think I have some mental problem about dancers who look like Danielle. I don’t, of course. Sweet Lord, I do some dancing myself. My mother was a ballroom dancer. A dancer’s the very last person I’d hurt.”

“Maybe this murder’s not even connected. Maybe the dead woman did just happen to take dancing lessons.”

“And get her throat slit the way Danielle did?”

“It could have happened that way. People get murdered all the time, ten times more often than they win the lottery. Almost one every day here in St. Louis.”

“I hope that’s the way it is, despite the fact this murder fits with my theory. I haven’t seen the victim’s photo yet. Pete didn’t even know her name when he called. I hope she’s black or Oriental and her husband’s already confessed. But I doubt it; I’ve got a feeling I was right about this, and the killer came to the competition to scout a victim. It builds up in someone like that, someone mentally tortured. The pressure gets worse and worse. It was time for him to kill again, and I happened to be in the same city when he acted out his sickness. It’s not really that much of a coincidence, you stop to think about it. Christ, it’s something I should’ve taken into account.”

Mary gathered her courage until it encased her heart like cold, hard armor. “Rene, if you have to, go ahead and tell the police about why you went to Kansas City, about the information I sent you. Honest, I don’t care.”

“I do care. I promised I’d keep you clear, and I meant it. Your name stays out of this. Which is another reason I called, to tell you I won’t talk with you again till this is over. If I try to contact you, the police’ll almost certainly know. If they were watching me before, they’ll be hiding in every shadow now, using every kind of electronic eavesdropping gadgetry. They’re merciless and relentless, and they’d close in on you like wolves.”

“Rene, it doesn’t matter-”

“It does to me, Mary. I won’t have you dragged through this kinda crap.”

“Don’t worry, any problems it causes can be worked out.”

“But it doesn’t need to be that way. Not on my account, anyway. It was never my intention to mess up your life, Mary. I won’t let it happen.”

“Rene-”

“Bye, Mary. I’ll talk to you again when this is over. A promise.”

“But-”

The receiver clicked in her ear.

“Mary?”

She hung up the phone and stared at Victor, standing before her desk and frowning down at her. The bright light from outside was behind him, creating a blinding aura around him, making him seem slim and tall and making her squint.

“Something wrong, Mary? I hope not your mother?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing, Victor. Please!”

“Please what?” He looked perplexed.

She sighed. What could she tell him? What could you ever tell someone like Victor? “You call that four-family buyer about closing figures?”

“Sure did. I’m leaving now to meet him at the Maplewood property. I just thought I’d stop by your desk and let you know.”

“Good, Victor. Fine.”

Still looking puzzled, he shrugged into his coat, shot her a quizzical smile, and went outside.

Mary immediately switched on the small portable radio she kept in her desk drawer.

The rest of the afternoon she played with the radio dial, jumping from station to station. She heard mostly music, a smattering of news, a few minutes of a heartfelt debate about cellulite, but nothing about a murder in Kansas City. Maybe the police were keeping it secret for now. No, that couldn’t be-that reporter, Pete something, had phoned Rene, so the press must know. Probably it simply wasn’t a big enough story to make the national news. It wouldn’t become big enough until the police realized Rene had been in town, or until they made the connection between the Kansas City victim and the women murdered in New Orleans and Seattle.

Assuming there actually was a connection.

Rene had learned about the murder around midnight, so the story might be in the papers. Newspapers reported crime more thoroughly than radio or television; crime seemed to get more complex, unlike how it sounded or looked, the longer it was covered.

As soon as five o’clock arrived, Mary hurried from work and drove to a drugstore, where she bought a Chicago Tribune and a St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

In her car, with the lowering sun beating through the windshield and giving her a headache, she examined the papers and finally found the news item on page four in the Post.

She sucked in her breath. The victim’s photograph accompanied the story, and her name, Vivian Ferris. The story had made the St. Louis paper because of the relative nearness of Kansas City and the viciousness of the crime. The victim’s throat had been deeply slashed, her breasts and genitalia mutilated, and the speculation was that she’d been raped.

Mary was sure the autopsy would reveal intercourse had occurred after death.

She felt dizzy. Death and sex, sex and death. Marriages and funerals. Lady-killers and lovers’ leaps. Was death so much a part of the danger and allure of sex?

Despite the grainy black-and-white newspaper photograph, she was positive she and Vivian Ferris could have passed for sisters.