Dead Man Waltzing

Chapter 30

Friday afternoon I locked up Graysin Motion, shut off my cell phone, and took Corinne’s manuscript into my kitchen. Making a big pot of coffee, I sorted the pages back into order and sat down to read. The tale of Corinne’s life, her excitement as she fell in love and married, only to find herself restless and unsatisfied soon after; her love for baby Randolph, and her anguish as the son she loved turned into someone else under the influence of drugs; her dislike of the daughter-in-law Randolph brought her, a girl ten years his junior who was more interested in partying than in mothering the child who came along six months after they married; her ballroom dance successes and her drive to win more titles and recognition; and the stories about people she met along the way kept me glued to the manuscript as the level of coffee in the pot steadily declined.

Greta Monk’s story was here, along with Corinne’s confrontation with her about the embezzlement. Conrad Monk, Corinne said, had repaid the money his wife embezzled and spread hush money around liberally to keep her from being indicted. Corinne had gone along only to keep scandal from tainting the dance scholarship foundation and its good work. Marco Ingelido’s sordid story was here, a cautionary tale of lust run amok. She’d loved Marco, Corinne admitted, and had hoped to marry him before he got Phyllis, Sarah’s mom, pregnant. When he’d become engaged to Marian, Phyllis’s sister, Corinne had warned Marian, told her that Sarah was, in fact, Marco’s child. My eyes opened wide at that. So, Marco’s wife had known all along and never let on. I wondered whether the knowledge that her husband had slept with her sister, had fathered a child with her, had eaten at her over the years.

I made notes as I read, planning to pass my ideas along to Detective Lissy (whether he appreciated it or not) and Phineas Drake. Corinne gave Maurice’s story of cruise ship romance gone bad a humorous spin, and I wondered how he’d react to that. It didn’t seem to me, even forty-some years after the fact, that he found anything funny about the incident. I knew Detective Lissy would have latched onto the story already, so I didn’t include it in my notes. There were a couple of stories I hadn’t heard before, one featuring a ballroom dance judge who was a closet homosexual in the early 1970s who had been blackmailed by a former partner. Since he had died of AIDS in the late 1980s, I didn’t put him in my notes either. The other tale I was unfamiliar with involved Turner and cheating. He’d done more than cheat himself, according to his loving grandmother; he’d run a cheating racket that involved buying copies of tests, hacking professors’ computers, and selling the tests themselves and/or answers to a startling number of students. I wondered whether he could be prosecuted for the hacking; even if not, having the tale publicized was likely to ensure he never got admitted to another university. Not that failing to get a degree would matter much to his future, now that he had inherited Corinne’s millions.

Lavinia Fremont’s story came late in the manuscript, with great descriptions about their trip to England and the excitement of competing. Corinne described the attack outside the nightclub in horrific detail, and included a confession that rocked me back in my chair. I turned the last page over with relief and regret. I imagined the book would sell well. Draining the last bit of coffee from my mug, and feeling a caffeine-overdose headache coming on, I tapped my pen on the table and stared into space. My thoughts tumbled semiaimlessly. If I wrote a memoir in my seventies, would I have the same wealth of stories to tell that Corinne did? Would the people whose secrets Corinne laid bare in the book recover from the revelations? I thought about Mrs. Laughlin and her statement about greed and revenge being the only credible motives for murder. I’d thought all along that greed had twisted someone into a murderer. Maybe Turner or Randolph in order to inherit early, maybe Marco or Greta, who were greedy for acclaim and success and whose quests for those might be curtailed by Corinne’s brutal openness. Maybe even Mrs. Laughlin, greedy for autonomy and new adventures.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I became convinced that I was wrong. Greed hadn’t prompted Corinne’s murder.

Revenge had.