Dead Man Waltzing

Chapter 27

Seven o’clock that night found me at the Fox and Muskrat watching Maurice compete in a darts tournament. Anxious to get the typewriter cartridge to him, and to find out what Marco Ingelido had been referring to when he talked about a necklace disappearing on one of Maurice’s cruises, I’d finally gotten hold of Maurice and asked him to meet me for dinner. He’d countered with an invitation to the darts tournament. “I’ve been signed up for weeks, Anastasia,” he said. “I can’t back out now.”

Accordingly, clad in slim-fitting jeans and the red shirt I’d worn earlier, only with an extra button undone, I cheered for Maurice while he tossed darts at the target. Clumps of people gathered around the competitors aiming at two well-lit targets set on age-darkened beams. The rowdy participants included men and women and people of all ages, from a girl in a GWU sweatshirt who was maybe twenty, to a man who looked like he could have swabbed decks on the Titanic. Pretty much everyone was wearing jeans and sucking on a beer. Even Maurice had dressed down for the occasion, leaving his blazer at home to compete in a blue-and-yellow-striped rugby shirt and pressed jeans with loafers.

I’d been tickled to see that he had a little case containing his own darts. “You take this seriously,” I observed.

“There’s a lot riding on it.” By his tone, he might have been talking about the first space launch or the D-day invasion or a heart transplant. But then he winked at me and I laughed.

The “lot riding on it” turned out to be a free six-pack of English ale for the winner, and a free beer for Maurice, who came in second. I’d had no idea he was doing so well, since the scoring system totally mystified me. I clapped my hands as he rejoined me at a high-top table near the dartboards after collecting his winnings. Setting his beer on the table, he pulled out my chair. “Come on, Anastasia. It’s time you learned how to throw darts.”

Most of the crowd had dispersed, many of them leaving the pub, and no one was watching the twosome still tossing darts toward one of the targets. No danger of public embarrassment. “How hard can it be?” I asked, grabbing a hasty sip of my own beer before Maurice pulled me to a line on the wooden floor and handed me a dart. Showing me how to position my fingers on the ridged metal, he drew his arm back and pushed it forward to demonstrate the throwing motion several times. “Push the dart at the board. Don’t fling it. There’s no break in the wrist.”

I lobbed the feathered missile toward the board; it nicked the corner and clattered to the floor. Okay, so the game was more difficult than it looked. Maurice handed me another dart. “Not so hard. Relax into it.”

I tried relaxing and the dart nose-dived into the floor a foot in front of the target. I pouted.

“Not quite so relaxed,” Maurice said, hiding a smile.

I could see he was enjoying himself, maybe for the first time since his arrest, and I didn’t want to spoil his mood, but after another fifteen minutes of the darts lesson, during which I managed to sink most of my darts into the pockmarked beam supporting the target and a couple of them into the target itself (to extravagant praise from Maurice), I dragged him back to the table.

Squirming onto the bar stool, I said, “I’ve got some good news and a question.”

“Good news first,” Maurice said, signaling for another beer. He was drinking something dark and foamy that looked like it would hold a fork upright; I prefer a beer that light can penetrate, an India pale ale or the like.

Pulling the cartridge from my purse, I waved it aloft. “Ta-da.”

His brows climbed as he reached for it. “Anastasia! How did you acquire it?”

I told him about going to the estate sale with Tav and the stratagems we’d had to employ to secure the cartridge. “The Quest for the Cartridge ended in triumph,” I declaimed, “due to the perseverance and resourcefulness of the knight and his fair lady.” Whew. I’d had too much beer.

Maurice wiped away a foamy mustache and smiled. “Well done. Mildred and I will get started on deciphering it first thing tomorrow. I just hope that what it contains is worth all the money and effort you put into finding it.”

“If not”-I shrugged-“we’re no worse off than we were before.”

“You said you had a question?”

Someone plugged quarters into an old jukebox that had been turned off during the tourney, and a Kenny Rogers song drifted our way. It was incongruous in the British-feeling pub. “I talked to Marco Ingelido yesterday,” I said. “And to Sarah today.” Uncomfortable confronting Maurice with Marco’s story, I gladly wasted some time telling him about my conversation with Sarah.

“I can’t believe she broke into your house,” he exclaimed. “Good heavens!”

Fortifying myself with a swallow of beer and trying to block out the irritating chorus of “Wake Me Up before You Go-Go” that was now bouncing from the jukebox, I said, “Marco claims Corinne knew something about you that you wouldn’t want to see published.”

“Corinne knew many things about me I wouldn’t want to see in print, starting with my waist size,” Maurice said humorously, but I could see the uneasiness in his eyes.

“He mentioned a necklace.” I let the comment hang there.

“Ah.” Maurice stared into his beer.

The silence lengthened, broken only by the dulcet tones of Wham!, and I pleated a bar napkin.

“I was young,” Maurice started, still gazing into his beer as if it were Dumbledore’s Pensieve. I wondered what memories it contained. “But that’s no excuse.”

I stiffened. Was Maurice going to confess to theft? I didn’t really want to hear it.

“It was my second cruise. The ship was called Starlight Maiden. I only ever sailed on her the one time. Anyway, our second night out, I asked a woman to dance. That was my job, you know-to ‘entertain’ unaccompanied ladies of a certain age on the dance floor, or even accompanied ones, if it looked like their escorts would be relieved if someone else danced with them. This woman’s name was Julia. She was maybe sixty to my thirty. Attractive, self-assured, from Oklahoma. Oil money.

“You may have heard jokes about dance hosts being little better than gigolos?” He didn’t wait for me to answer, but hurried on. “In this case… we ‘hooked up,’ as the kids say today. For the remaining seven nights of the cruise. It was fun. I was attentive; she was generous.”

I squirmed in my seat, intensely uncomfortable, appalled that I had forced Maurice into reliving this. “You don’t have to-”

“Midway through the cruise, she bestowed a necklace on me, a ruby pendant, a smallish one, set in gold. She said she was tired of it, that I should give it to my mother or my sister. I tucked it away, planning to do just that, and didn’t think any more about it until after the passengers debarked back in Florida and it transpired that Julia had told the purser her necklace was stolen. Before I could come forward, the crew’s quarters were searched and the necklace was found in my suitcase.”

“Bitch.”

Maurice pursed his lips. “A very troubled woman, at the least. The cruise line fired me immediately, and I was in danger of going to jail. Corinne saved me.”

“How?” I envisioned the dancer going toe-to-toe with the mysterious Julia, pulling out her fingernails one by one until she agreed not to prosecute.

“She hired a private investigator. He discovered that Julia had pulled the same trick three times on separate cruise lines. Gotten three dance hosts fired. One went to prison. Corinne presented this information to the appropriate authorities and the charge was withdrawn; in fact, Julia was prosecuted. I was still fired, though, for ‘fraternizing’ with a passenger.”

“My God, Maurice.”

“Not an incident I look back on with pride. You’d better believe all my future dealings with passengers were strictly on the dance floor.” He gave me a strained smile.

Leaning across the table, I hugged him awkwardly. “I’m sorry I brought it up.”

“No, it needed to come out. I suppose I should tell Drake, let him advise me as to whether or not I should give the information to the police. It wouldn’t do to have them stumble across the old arrest somehow. Or to get a copy of Corinne’s manuscript or outline and find the tale in there.” He tapped the cartridge on the table.

It was well past nine o’clock by now and the crowd had thinned out. A waiter came by and we both shook our heads at him. He collected our glasses and swiped at the table, leaving a damp swirl on the polyurethaned wood. Tucking the cartridge under his arm, Maurice slid off his stool. I followed suit. We headed for the door and Maurice collected a few “congrats” and “good nights” from the remaining drinkers. “See you in the morning,” I said, trying to sound natural and spritely.

“À demain,” Maurice said, walking me to my car and declining a ride home. I watched from behind the steering wheel as he started down the sidewalk toward his house, shoulders slumped just a little, stride a bit less sure than usual. Striped by a car’s headlights, he crossed a street and I lost sight of him.

Vitaly stomped into the studio the next morning for our practice, tossed his designer sunglasses on top of the stereo cabinet, and announced, “John is being a total fanny.”

I had to think about that one for a moment. “Ass?”

“Da!” He nodded, adding a phrase in Russian that probably translated to something ruder than “ass.”

He marched in place to warm up, each foot pounding down in a way that suggested he was envisioning his partner’s head under his heels. I’d never seen him so worked up. His thin cheeks were flushed, and his strawlike hair flopped as he marched. He had moved from Russia to live with John in Baltimore three or four months back, and I’d met John several times since Vitaly and I had become partners. He was a bit older than Vitaly-in his forties, I’d say-and seemed like a steady, kind man. I carefully didn’t ask what John had done to merit being called an ass, since getting involved in Vitaly’s love life-even peripherally-seemed like a bad idea.

“You is wanting to know how John is being an ass, yes?” Vitaly said, launching himself across the room in a series of deep lunges. “Well, I am telling you. He is insist we must kennel Lulu when we is vacation in France next month.”

My brain worked to dredge up Lulu. Their boxer puppy. “Um,” I murmured, going through my own warm-up routine. Frankly, it didn’t seem too ass-ish to me. A not-yet-house-trained puppy in a hotel on the Côte d’Azur sounded like a big pain in the ass to me.

“Lulu is being lonely without I and John. She is not like living in a box.”

“Maybe Lulu’s afraid of flying,” I said. Damn, I hadn’t meant to get involved.

“You think?” Vitaly looked struck.

“There are lots of very good pet sitters who stay in your house and take care of your pets. Walk them, feed them, keep them company.” In for a penny, in for a pound. “I’m sure if you asked around, some of your dog-owning friends could recommend someone.”

“John should have thinked of this,” Vitaly announced. “I will telling. Now, we dancing.”

He pulled me toward him and spun me away and we sprang into the jive, spending a sweaty hour practicing our side-by-side figures and our lifts. Our timing still wasn’t quite right on some of our lifts-we’d been working together only a couple months, after all-and if I didn’t want to end up on my nose when he swung me up so my heels kicked toward the ceiling, I had to hit his hands just right with my pelvic bones, my hands and locked-elbow arms bracing against his shoulders. Our foreheads clunked together at one point, but we kept going until our trembling arms forced a break.

I was collapsed on the floor sipping a bottled water, and Vitaly was downing his usual grapefruit juice, when I heard the outside door squeak open. WD-40, I reminded myself as Hoover bounded in. His toenails clicked on the ballroom’s wood floor and he skidded to a stop in front of me, licking my face and then sniffing at the bottle I held.

“Hi, Hoover.” I patted his head, edging away from the strand of drool about to decorate my tank top. The Great Dane trotted over to see whether Vitaly’s bottle held anything more tempting than water, and Mildred entered the room, a beatific smile on her face.

“Hello, everyone,” she said as if Vitaly and I were a crowd of dozens. “We have news!”

“We” turned out to be her and Maurice, who entered moments after her, looking more his usual self than when we parted last night. I smiled at him. “The cartridge?” I asked.

“Yes, Anastasia, the cartridge.” Maurice held up the black plastic case, which now had a loop of ribbon hanging from its pointy end.

“We have decoded it,” Mildred announced importantly, waving a thin sheaf of paper. Her white hair bounced happily around her plump cheeks. “We have divined the mysteries of Corinne’s manuscript.” She flourished one hand into the air like a fortune-teller announcing messages from the great beyond. “All is revealed.”

Vitaly looked confused. “What is this cartridge?”

Taking turns and talking over each other, Maurice, Mildred, and I explained what the cartridge was and how we had gotten it. “Now,” I finished, “they’re going to tell us what they learned.”

Vitaly and I turned expectant gazes on the older pair.

“It’s not quite what we were hoping,” Maurice hedged. “It turns out this must have been a new cartridge, because there were only a couple pages’ worth of material on it. That’s why we were able to copy it off pretty quickly.”

“So tedious,” Mildred put in. “Letter by letter. I don’t understand why dear Corinne”-I didn’t think she’d ever met Corinne Blakely, but Mildred was the kind of person who made friends immediately, even with a dead woman-“didn’t use a computer. I can’t imagine life without a computer.”

That was rich, coming from a woman who’d lived more than half her life before the invention of the silicon chip.

“Why, it’s so much easier to keep up with my sorority sisters and friends with Facebook. I remember when one had to write letters by hand and hunt for one’s address book to address them, and then wait for the postal service to deliver them, and the friend to find time to write back-phah! Twitter’s the way to go. I have seventy-four followers, you know.” She beamed at us.

“The manuscript?” Maurice nudged her gently.

Hoover settled beside me, his heavy head on my lap, as Mildred began to read. “It starts in midsentence. ‘… lucky to have lived most of my adult life in the world of dance, surrounded by friends and family who venerate the art form. Although it might seem, from some of the reminiscences I’ve shared with you, that the world of ballroom dance is rife with scandal and backbiting and skullduggery, I suggest that this passion finds its way into the dance and makes it the art form that it is. In every walk of life, there are husbands who cheat, children who disappoint, friends who betray. In dance, at least, there is also beauty and movement, expiation and forgiveness in the sweat and rigor and partnership. In dance, it really does take two to tango, so relationships become paramount.

“‘As I pen these words, the International Olympic Committee is deciding whether or not DanceSport should become an Olympic event. If you’ve stuck with me through the last two hundred some-odd pages, you know how I hope the vote comes out! But even if DanceSport does not receive the IOC’s blessing, it has still blessed my life in innumerable, immeasurable ways. And I am thankful for it.’”

Mildred glanced up from the page and wiped a tear from her eye. “So beautiful.”

I locked eyes with Maurice. “But… two hundred pages! This isn’t an outline-it’s a final chapter.”

“Just so, Anastasia,” he agreed.

“Then… then there is a completed manuscript.”

“Unless she is starting at the end?” Vitaly suggested.

I considered it briefly before shaking my head. “No, the page count makes it sound like she’s already written the whole thing.” I jumped up, dislodging Hoover. “Mrs. Laughlin lied!”