Dead Man Waltzing

Chapter 26

I must have gasped, because Tav turned to look at me. “Stacy?”

“It’s gone,” I wailed. “But the woman said they hadn’t sold it yet.” I rushed to the desk, looking under it and around it, in case someone had moved the typewriter so they could examine the desk better. “It’s not here.”

“Stacy.” Tav hauled me to my feet. “Someone must have just walked out with it. If we hurry, maybe we can catch up with them at the cashier and make them an offer for it.”

“Good thinking.” I dashed out the door in front of him, saw the stairs clogged with people to my right, and headed left, hoping to find a lesser-used flight of stairs. Many of these old houses had servants’ stairs, I knew. This end of the hallway was quieter, empty bedrooms opening off to either side. I flung open a door at the end of the hall to find a narrow flight of stairs leading downward. With a triumphant smile at Tav, I took the stairs two at a time, erupting into what appeared to be a butler’s pantry near the kitchen.

“Excuse me,” I said, squeezing between two couples squabbling over an ugly china tureen ornate enough to have graced the table of Queen Victoria or some such.

Hoping Tav was still behind me, I threaded my way through the kitchen, its counters laden with stacks of china and serving dishes in three or four patterns, bins of silverware and stainless, glassware, small appliances, and all the other detritus that ends up in kitchen cabinets: linens, baskets, holiday-themed dishes, candlesticks, garlic presses and mandolins, and a George Foreman grill. A brief vision of the impeccable Corinne bent over a little grill on her patio flashed through my mind as I opened the back door to said patio and stepped outside with a sigh of relief. Fresh air! I hadn’t realized how confining the house felt with so many people panting for bargains.

“Over there.” Tav grasped my arm and pointed toward a young man disappearing around the side of the house, our typewriter tucked under one arm while he struggled with a standard poodle on a leash. We took off after him. My kitten heels sank into the soft turf with every step. I finally paused to slip them off and sprinted barefoot to catch up with Tav as he rounded the corner of the house. The grass was crisp and cool, and I would’ve enjoyed the opportunity to stand and scrunch my toes in it, but our typewriter was getting away.

“Sir, sir!” I called to the man, who had, luckily, stopped to examine a copper birdbath.

The poodle barked and the man looked up, light brown hair the color of the poodle’s curly hair falling into his eyes. He was in his mid-twenties, with a soft look about him like he didn’t exercise much and spent most of his time indoors. “Quiet, Tammy,” he told the dog, resting a hand on her head.

She curled her lip at us, but quieted. “Yes?” He looked from me to Tav inquiringly.

“My name’s Stacy Graysin,” I said with a winning smile, “and I came here today specifically to buy that typewriter for a friend of mine.”

The man’s arm tightened around the machine. “I’m buying this for my mother. She wants to write a book. A romance.”

“Wouldn’t she rather have a computer?” I asked. “Much easier for editing and such.”

“She doesn’t trust them.”

Oh, boy. Tammy the poodle growled at me, and I wished Hoover were here to teach her a few manners.

“How much are they asking for the typewriter?” Tav asked.

The young man righted the typewriter and checked a sticker. “Twenty-five dollars.”

“I’ll give you forty,” Tav said. Tammy nosed at his hand until he stroked her head.

“Done.” The man handed me the Smith Corona while Tav pulled two twenties out of his wallet.

“Thanks.” I tossed the word to Tav and the young man as I beelined for the cashier’s desk before anything else could happen. The way the morning had been going, I expected Turner to pop up and rip the typewriter out of my hands, telling me it wasn’t for sale, or for a sinkhole to open up and swallow the machine.

“I see you found it.” The woman we’d talked to earlier smiled when I reached the front of the line.

“You know,” I said, clunking the typewriter and my shoes down on the folding table, “I really only need the cartridge, and I think that man”-I pointed to the man with his poodle, still talking to Tav-“would like to buy the typewriter.” Popping the cartridge out, I wished I’d thought of it before we’d paid Poodle Guy the forty dollars.

“Two bucks.”

Handing her a fiver, I turned to look for Tav, waving the cartridge triumphantly.

Tav and the poodle guy were inspecting a display of framed movie posters, some of which looked like they were from the 1940s and 1950s, and I started toward them, tucking the cartridge and my shoes into my purse. Before I had taken two steps, though, I caught sight of a tall, skeletally thin man clad in a trench coat skulking at the edge of the property, half-hidden by a spiky-leafed hedge. Hamish MacLeod! What was he doing here? On impulse, I headed toward him, pretending to glance at the tables of knickknacks and pieces of furniture on the way. When I got to within hailing distance, I looked up-artistically, I thought-and pretended to spot him for the first time.

“Why, aren’t you Hamish MacLeod?” I said, heading toward him with a big smile. “I saw you at the will reading. You were husband number four, right? I work with Maurice, who was husband two.” I beamed at him.

He shrank back, practically wedging himself into the hedge, and his eyes darted from side to side. I got the distinct impression he wasn’t happy to see me. Too bad. “It’s sad, isn’t it,” I babbled on, gesturing to the crowds of people trampling the grass and making off with Corinne’s treasures. “Sad to see it all go.”

“It’s sacrilegious,” he muttered, his Scottish accent blurring the words. If I’d closed my eyes, I could have been listening to Scotty from Star Trek. “It’s like desecrating a saint’s resting place.”

I didn’t quite see the parallels: Corinne was no saint, and this wasn’t her resting place.

“These ghouls don’t appreciate who Corinne was,” he said, a bit louder. He inched out of the hedge with a rattle of branches and glared down his beaky nose at me. He must have been sweltering in the trench coat, because sweat beaded his forehead and slid down his temple.

“Were you here to get a memento?” I asked.

“Why would you ask that?” he shot at me, one hand sliding into his coat pocket. Only then did I notice the way the pockets bulged.

Hm. Perhaps the Reverend MacLeod was helping himself to mementos without paying for them. I said soothingly, “I’m sure it must be hard to see the things that were special to you and Corinne sold off like… like…” I couldn’t think of a comparison.

“They have no right! That vase there.” He pointed to a huge cut-crystal vase a heavyset woman was carrying in both hands. “That held the first offering of tulips I ever made to my gorgeous Corinne. It was the night after we met. She had told me tulips were her favorite flower, and I rounded up every one I could find in the city and gave them to her in that vase.” He turned away, as if the sight of the vase being sold was too much for him.

“Very romantic.” Clearly, the man had been gaga over Corinne. Completely unbalanced about the woman, in my humble opinion. If he had felt slighted by her, if she’d told him she was going to write something that dissed their relationship, how would he have reacted? Of course, I reminded myself, she’d divorced him and married twice more, and slights didn’t get much more “in your face” than that. The divorce hadn’t prompted him to harm her, so why would he poison her now? He hadn’t had the opportunity, either, as far as I knew.

“When did you last see Corinne?” I asked.

“I went to every competition and exhibition she participated in.” He straightened and threw his shoulders back, clearly waiting for me to applaud his devotion.

Uh-oh. Stalker city. “Don’t you have a job?” I asked.

He frowned at me. “I’m retired from the ministry. My time is my own.” I imagined he used that exact voice in the pulpit when he wished to emphasize a scriptural point. The effect was diminished somewhat when a small, faceted perfume bottle tumbled from beneath his coat and landed in the grass. We both ignored it.

“I guess you spend time with Randolph, too.”

He froze momentarily, then leaned toward me. Hunched over like that, with his long, skinny neck and beaky nose, he reminded me way too much of a vulture. “Why would you say that?”

“I was chatting with Randolph this weekend and someone mentioned you’d stopped by,” I said, forcing myself not to back away. What could he do to me on this grassy lawn with hundreds of bargain hunters nearby?

Some emotion flitted across his eyes; it looked like fear. “What I do and where I go is no business of yours, young lady.”

“I’m just trying to keep Maurice from being convicted of Corinne’s murder.”

“Whoever killed my beloved Corinne should be burned at the stake. It was an evil thing to do. Evil!”

He said it with an intensity that made me wonder whether he had all his marbles. “I think you have an ulterior motive for being here today,” I said, stooping to retrieve the perfume bottle. I held it on the flat of my palm, the way you feed a horse so you don’t get bitten, and he snatched it.

“As do you, young lady!”

His accusation startled me, and I gripped my purse tighter. Could he know about the typewriter cartridge? Was he here for more than the odd memento? Was he looking to retrieve the manuscript, too?

His next words dispelled that fear. “You’re here, like they are”-he gestured to the crowd-“out of vulgar curiosity. You’re here to feed on the beauty, the gentleness, the incandescent light that was Corinne. Scavengers, all of you! Ghouls!” He threw one arm up dramatically, and a foot-tall bronze figure of a dancer en pointe clink-clanked to the turf. Without another word, he bent, picked it up, thrust it into an interior pocket of his coat, and left. He strode rapidly across the lawn, trench coat flapping about his legs. I stared after him for a moment, not sure I’d accomplished anything by confronting him, then trotted toward where Tav and Poodle Guy were chatting by a pile of coffee-table art books.

Tav broke away from his conversation, joining me with a grin. I grabbed his arm and pointed to Hamish MacLeod as he disappeared down the driveway. “That’s Hamish MacLeod,” I said, “Corinne’s fourth husband.” I relayed our conversation and my conviction that the man was stealing easily portable items.

Tav looked after Hamish with interest. “Corinne certainly had eclectic taste in husbands,” he said.

I hadn’t expected him to go tearing after MacLeod and accuse him of theft, but his comment seemed anticlimactic. “Why do you suppose he was visiting Randolph at Hopeful Morning?”

Shrugging, he looked down at me quizzically. “Probably not for any nefarious reason. Perhaps you are so caught up in keeping Maurice out of prison that you are seeing suspicious behavior in very ordinary activities?”

His words stung a bit. “Well, I don’t call thieving ‘ordinary’ activity,” I said huffily.

We had reached the driveway by this time, and I stopped to put my shoes back on, using a hand on Tav’s shoulder to balance myself. I tried to slip him forty dollars, but he shook his head. “I want credit for doing my part in keeping Maurice out of jail. I only hope this cartridge contains something useful after all the hassle we went through to get it.”

The sun highlighted yellow flecks in his brown eyes as I smiled up at him. “You and me both.”

Since Tav was late for a meeting, I dropped him off at the Metro station before returning to the studio. Vitaly and I taught an international standard class at Wednesday lunchtime, and I had to hustle to get back for it. We introduced the Viennese waltz-harder than the regular waltz-to applause and groans.

“I don’t know how you manage to look like you’re floating, Stacy,” one woman said. “I feel like I’m wearing cement shoes.”

“Practice,” I said with a smile. “It’s all about practice. You can float, too; I promise.”

The class wrapped up at twelve thirty, and Vitaly stayed in the ballroom to coach an amateur-amateur pair who were excited about entering their first competition. I descended to my kitchen and called Maurice, leaving a message to let him know we’d finally acquired the typewriter cartridge. My hand was still on the phone when it rang, startling me.

“Stacy, I’ve got the CD with your proofs on it,” Sarah Lewis said when I answered. “I’m going to be at Tate Slade’s Fine Arts this afternoon, taking photos for a brochure for their new exhibition, and I can drop it by afterward, if you like.”

“How ’bout I meet you at the art gallery,” I said, feeling restless. “It’s on Royal, right, near the Episcopal church?”

I mopped the kitchen floor and then changed into white cotton slacks with a thin red stripe and a red peasant blouse before scooting upstairs to tell Vitaly I was leaving and to ask him to lock up when he finished. Walking the few blocks to the art gallery, I felt myself relaxing, sinking into the moment. I deliberately put aside thoughts of Corinne’s murder and the studio’s precarious financial position to enjoy the beautiful day. A calico cat looked down on me from his perch in a bay window, bricks herringboned the sidewalk in a hypnotic pattern, and the drone of an airplane high overhead made me glance up briefly. Reaching the gallery before I was ready to, I strolled past it to linger in front of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, letting the sand-colored stones of its Gothic revival facade warm me, and admiring the swooping arches that fronted the church. Reluctantly, I retraced my steps to the art gallery and went in.

Dimness cloaked me, and I blinked while my eyes adjusted. The space was largely open, with bleached wooden planks on the floor, white panels for walls, and lighting provided by stainless-steel fixtures directed toward the paintings. A thin man on a stepladder and a minion struggled to hang a wall-sized painting that seemed to consist of little more than a canvas painted off-white with a wavy blue line bisecting it.

“We’re closed to set up for the exhibition. The opening’s Friday night,” the man on the stepladder called.

“I’m looking for Sarah Lewis,” I said, wandering closer to see whether the painting offered anything more up close. Nope. I peered at the discreet price tag on the wall and almost gasped: twenty thousand dollars. Eep.

“Back there.” The man jerked his balding head toward the rear of the gallery. As he spoke, a flash of light told me where I’d find Sarah.

“Thanks.” I wended my way around the panels and past more paintings as monochromatic and inscrutable as the first one. I like my art to have recognizable objects in it-people, dogs, flowers-or at least to feature bright colors. As far as I was concerned, these paintings took minimalism, or monochromatism or whatever the style was called, to heights of boringness seldom scaled by an artist. I left off critiquing the paintings as I rounded a corner to find Sarah Lewis adjusting a light on an aluminum pole.

“Do you think you could hold this just so?” she asked, spotting me. “It keeps slipping.”

I obligingly wrapped my fingers around the cool metal, and watched as she checked a light meter and then took a few photos of the canvas in front of us.

“Thanks.” Letting the camera hang from a strap around her neck, she reached into a multipocketed duffel and withdrew a CD case. “Let me know which ones you want. Eighty dollars each.”

I took the case from her, noting that she seemed a bit stiffer than when we’d last met. She broke eye contact almost immediately to shift the strap around her neck.

“Vitaly and I will look at them and let you know,” I said. I hesitated, wanting to ask her about Marco, but feeling awkward about it.

“Look,” she said as I was on the verge of leaving. Her head snapped up and her eyes met mine squarely for the first time. “Marco told me about your visit yesterday.”

“Um.”

“He said you know.”

“I didn’t know you knew.”

“Since I was eighteen.” She tossed her head so her dark braid slipped over her shoulder. “He and Mom took me aside to tell me that I wasn’t my father’s daughter, that I was Marco’s daughter. They thought I should know the truth for medical reasons and what have you. Great birthday present, huh?”

“It must have been hard to hear.”

She met my gaze, unsmiling. “The hardest. Not only did I have to come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t who I thought I was, but my mom wasn’t the person I thought she was either. All her blather about integrity and living authentically was just so many words. Great for spouting in the classroom but without any applicability to real life. We didn’t talk for a couple of years.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling intensely uncomfortable in the face of her anger and grief.

“Yeah, well, a lot of therapy has gotten me-us-through the worst of it. But then Corinne Blakely told Marco she was publishing her memoir, and that she was including the story of their romance and why she broke it off.” Sarah popped the lens off the camera and stowed it roughly in the duffel. She was silent for a moment, searching for a new lens and fitting it to the camera body. She mumbled something I didn’t catch.

“What?”

“I said I didn’t want Dad to find out that way. He loves my mother; he still thinks I’m his biological daughter. It would break his heart.” She looked up, her chin tilted a bit, defiantly. “That’s why when Marco told me you had the manuscript, I broke into your house to find it.”

My jaw dropped. “Say what? It was you?”

She nodded. “It wasn’t hard. I bought a crowbar at a hardware store and waited till I thought you’d be asleep. The waiting was the hardest part. I pried the door open and started searching, but then you woke up.” She loosed a long sigh. “I’m sorry I knocked you down. I hope you weren’t hurt?”

“I’ll live.” This conversation felt surreal. This woman had broken into my house with burglary on her mind, and now she was looking at me with concern. I tried to muster some anger, but the fact that it was my own lie that led her to break in kept me from working up any righteous indignation.

“Were you telling the truth when you told Marco you don’t really have it?”

I nodded.

“Then what am I to do?” Tears filmed her eyes.

“I think it’s totally possible there isn’t really a manuscript,” I said, relating what Mrs. Laughlin, Corinne’s housekeeper, had told me.

“Really?” Sarah stood a little straighter. After a beat, she added, “So someone killed Corinne for nothing?”

“Why would you assume Corinne was killed over the memoir?” I asked.

“Because the thought crossed my mind. And if it occurred to me, chances are someone else thought of it, too.”

I stared at the woman in front of me, so like me in many ways: She was close to my age; she worked for herself in an arts-related field; she was single (I thought) and childless. Had she just confessed to planning a murder?

“I didn’t do it, of course,” she said, perhaps reading my face. “I couldn’t. I couldn’t kill someone, not even to save Dad pain and keep my parents from divorcing. But I can’t really blame whoever did it-Corinne was asking for it.”

The tight expression on her face dared me to contradict her. Tap-tapping and a muffled “Damn!” floated over the nearest panel, and I started at the reminder that we weren’t alone.

“Do you suppose it crossed Marco’s mind?” I asked.

There was a barely perceptible hesitation before she burst out, “He wouldn’t! Marco’s a good man.”

Evidence of a daughter fathered on his wife’s sister to the contrary. I raised my brows.

“Sex is different from murder!”

No argument there.

“Just because he and my mom had an affair thirty years ago doesn’t mean he killed Corinne to keep it secret. Or that my mother did, either,” she added.

Hm, now there was a suspect I hadn’t thought of. Would Sarah’s mother kill to protect her marriage… or her job? It might be worth learning more about Phyllis Lewis. Except how would she have put epinephrine in Corinne’s pills? I decided Phyllis didn’t get a priority rating on my suspect list, although I might mention her to Phineas Drake.

“Are you going to tell the police?” Sarah asked in a low voice.

My thoughts were jumbled; I didn’t know what was best. “My concern is Maurice Goldberg. He’s my friend, and I’m not going to sit by and watch him go to prison for a crime he didn’t commit.”

I hadn’t really answered her question, but she nodded. “Fair enough. Look, I know it’s costing you time and maybe money to get your door fixed and all. Just pick the photos you want and I’ll get you another disk that’s not copyright protected-you don’t owe me anything.”

I regarded her somewhat cynically, recognizing a bribe when I heard one. “I’ll let you know.” I wasn’t sure what I’d let her know, but it sounded good.

We eyed each other awkwardly for a moment, not sure how to part, but then she half nodded and turned away to fiddle with the light stand again, and I slipped silently around the nearest panel. Out of sight of Sarah, I took a deep breath, blew it out, and hurried for the door, raising a hand in acknowledgment when the gallery owner called, “Don’t forget! Friday evening. There’ll be wine and cheese, and you can meet the artist in person.”

Whoop-de-do.