A Cat in the Wings: (InterMix) (14 page)

“Did I say something wrong?” Basillio asked, suddenly concerned that he might have irritated me or dissipated the glow that still hung in the air between us.

“Not at all, Tony. You’re making me think. It’s just so odd thinking of them as a vaudeville team.”

“Well, they did use stage names, didn’t they? We know ‘Lenny’ isn’t Dobrynin’s name. And Basil’s real name is Charlie Small. Right?”

It was absurd but true. After all, Dobrynin had been in the theater—why
wouldn’t
he have selected a stage name? But stage names often have some kind of personal or professional significance. Lenny and Basil . . . Basil and Lenny. The two names were linked somehow . . . weren’t they?

“Tony, don’t you think that if Dobrynin chose those names they must have some meaning—some relation to ballet?”

“I would imagine.”

Lenny and Basil. Basil and Lenny. I crunched them in my mind, trying to fit them into every ballet I could think of. No, that wasn’t it. Lenny and Basil weren’t characters in a ballet.

Suddenly the origin of those names became so clear to me that I burst out laughing.

“What the hell is the matter with you, Swede?”

“I know what the names mean now, Tony! I know what they stand for! It’s so simple, it’s almost unbelievable!”

“Well, tell me!”

“Did you ever hear of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo?”

“Vaguely. I think it’s mentioned in
The Red Shoes.
”

“It was the most famous company in the world for almost half a century. The last great impresario of the company was a man named De Basil. And the last great dancer-choreographer of the company was Leonid Massine—Lenny, for short.”

“Basil and Lenny,” Tony said. “Well, it fits.”

“How stupid of me not to have picked up on that. It couldn’t be anything else.”

“I think I know a way to doublecheck it,” he said.

“How?”

“If old Dobie was in fact a mental patient, I’ll bet he used the full stage name as a pseudonym: Leonid Massine. Check hospital records under that name.”

“Sometimes, Tony, you’re a very smart man.” I kissed him on top of his head and took a cab home.

Chapter 23

I really don’t know why I asked Rothwax the very next morning to run yet another computer search on Dobrynin—this time under the name of Leonid Massine. I mean, there was no rush. What did it really matter if he’d used that name? Perhaps I was just curious if my theory as to the origin of the stage names, and Tony’s as to the hospital admission, were correct. Or perhaps I really felt obliged to help Betty Ann. Or perhaps I couldn’t let Dobrynin alone. Who knows? But I made the call, and the information that Rothwax provided was unsettling.

A Leonid Massine had indeed been admitted to St. John’s Psychiatric Hospital, in Smithtown, Long Island, seven times during the past three years. Seven times!

The minute I discovered that, I picked up the phone to call Betty Ann Ellenville and give her the news. But then I hung the phone up as quickly as I had picked it up. Why tell her anything yet? Why not first find out how much more I could learn?

One thing was certain: I was going to go out there. I wanted to
know.
I wanted to play this thing out to the very end. So I called Tony and told him the news, then asked him to rent a car and drive me out to Smithtown.

He resisted at first. He didn’t understand why I wanted to go out. What did it matter if Dobrynin had been psychotic or not? He was dead. His murderer had been caught. What was the point?

“Humor me, Tony,” was all I could say. He hemmed, he hawed, he pleaded, he cursed. Then he rented the car.

***

As mental hospitals go, St. John’s Psychiatric was a breath of fresh air. It was large, freshly painted, rambling, and busy. Patients, relatives, and health-care workers choked the lobby. There was a coffee shop, a newsstand, a cafeteria. There were dozens of bulletin boards scattered everywhere, chockful of notices announcing AA meetings, GA meetings, meetings and parties and prayer meetings of all kinds.

But when we tried to get to see the physician who had treated Dobrynin, we ran into a stone wall of nurses and administrators. They shuffled us back and forth, suspicious, constantly reiterating that patients have rights, and that the hospital could release no information on them unless presented with a valid court order.

“Why are we here? Why are we doing this? Who cares?” Tony kept muttering in my ear.

Finally I turned on him in a fury. “Because when everything is said and done and Vol Teak has been convicted of murder, and when all the damn t’s have been crossed and the i’s dotted, we still won’t know a damn thing about Peter Dobrynin! So let’s find out
one
real thing before we close the case!
Okay
, Tony?”

My outburst quieted him. We kept on pushing, begging, moving from office to office until finally one administrator relented and sent us to Dr. Arnold Newmark, whose office was deep inside one of the locked wings.

He was a small, kindly-looking man with gray hair. He wore a white clinician’s coat over shirt and tie, and in his pocket were what appeared to be dozens of pens and a large spiral pad.

“Please sit down,” he said. “I understand you are looking for information on one of my patients. And I am sure you realize that there is very little I can tell you, legally.”

We sat, thankfully. I then lied to him outrageously. I said that Tony and I were private investigators, hired by Leonid Massine’s family. Massine had been reported missing three months ago. The police had failed to turn up any leads. All we wanted was some kind of information—any kind—that would help us in our search for this sad man.

It seemed Dr. Newmark was unable to withstand this solicitation of his kindness. “I’ll tell you what I can,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “I think the first thing you can tell us is why Mr. Massine ended up in a mental hospital.”

Dr. Newmark folded his hands on his desk. “Mr. Massine is a bipolar manic-depressive. And he rapid-cycles, which means simply that he moves between mania and depression with great speed and frequency. This disorder is treatable with lithium and antidepressants. The lithium keeps the individual from going through the ceiling, and the antidepressants keep him from going through the floor. But in Mr. Massine’s case, such treatment hasn’t worked. In fact, in about twenty percent of clinical cases of bipolar manic-depression, such treatment doesn’t work.”

Tony jumped in. “But I thought manic-depression was common. Most people who have it aren’t in mental hospitals, right?”

Dr. Newmark nodded. “Each time Mr. Massine admitted himself to this hospital he was experiencing a severe manic episode, during which he was dangerous both to himself and to others. In addition, he was exhibiting severe delusional thinking. Mr. Massine is a difficult patient. He is often in the quiet room.” When Dr. Newmark saw the stricken expression that came over my face at the mention of a “quiet” room, he explained: “It’s a more humane way of restraining violent patients—just an empty padded room.”

“His family told us that he was given Haldol,” I noted.

“Yes. The delusions generally vanish when the manic high wears off. In his case, the delusions persist. Haldol is indicated.”

“What
were
these delusions?”

“Quite strange—and very persistent.” He paused and held up his hand, as if he had remembered something important. “You know, I think I’ve saved something very interesting . . . a drawing Mr. Massine made for me.” Dr. Newmark left the desk and wandered over to his file cabinets. He opened and closed drawers, shuffled folders, and finally emerged with one large piece of white sketching paper.

“Look,” he said, handing me the paper.

I held the drawing and stared at it.

The blood seemed to drain out of my face. My whole body suddenly became weak. My fingers had trouble holding on to the paper.

The drawing obviously had been made by a psychotic individual. But even with the bizarre strokes, I knew I was looking at a drawing of a large and very malevolent torn.

I sensed Tony coming over, staring at the drawing over my shoulder. I heard him say to Dr. Newmark, “A cat? Was that his delusion—a cat?”

“Well,” the doctor replied, “that is part of his delusion, a large part. Mr. Massine seems to think that he is being stalked by a monstrous cat that is hunting him to exact vengeance on him. For what, he never states. But it seems the vengeance will be in the form of genital mutilation.”

“Ouch,” Tony mumbled. He removed the drawing from my hands and gave it back to Dr. Newmark, who then noted: “This delusional assailant of Mr. Massine’s also has a name, a very bizarre name. But I can’t recall it.”

I was frightened to say the name, but I knew it. Yes, I knew the name. I closed my eyes, and saw it written in red on the hearse in front of the church. “Anna Pavlova Smith,” I said quietly.

“Yes. How did you know?” Dr. Newmark asked. “I always found it a strange name for any cat, but particularly a male one.”

As we left, Dr. Newmark said: “You know, the name Leonid Massine always seems to jog my memory somehow. Why is it so familiar?”

He didn’t receive a reply

Tony took my arm when we reached the nurse’s station. “What’s the matter with you, Swede? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I found it hard to speak, hard to walk, to think. It had all fallen apart—all my work.

“We have made a terrible mistake, Tony. Vol Teak did not murder Peter Dobrynin.” And that was all I could say.

***

Tony stayed with me at my apartment that night. But it was a sleepless, agitated, loveless night for me. I finally left the bed at around four-thirty in the morning and fixed some coffee. I brought a cup into the living room and lay on the floor with the exiled Bushy.

Tony joined us in the living room just as it was growing light. He sat down beside me and said, “You’re working yourself into a frenzy over nothing, Swede. Believe me, nothing we learned out there at the hospital has any bearing on the real world.”

I managed to smile at him. “Dobrynin’s delusion, Tony,
was
his real world.”

“What does that mean?”

“We’ll both find out soon, I hope. But let me explain to you where I went wrong—where we all went wrong. The whole logic of the investigation was wrong. We concentrated on the symptoms rather than the cause. We concentrated on Dobrynin’s derelict years, the last three years of his life, when we should have been concentrating on the time period before he became Lenny the derelict. Do you understand what I’m saying, Tony? We messed up a good script. We put the wrong costumes on the wrong players.”

“I told you you have an academic bent, Swede. I don’t understand a word of what you just said. Forget all this ‘logic of the investigation’ garbage. Just tell me what’s going on with you! Did we all make a mistake? Okay, we did. Then who killed Dobrynin?”

It was best, I realized, to keep my own counsel, for what I was thinking at that moment was very strange . . . quite unbelievable. It was best just to proceed . . . to say nothing . . . to do what had to be done. I felt that I had to be careful. That no one could be trusted; even, oddly, myself.

“Tony,” I need your help. Think back on what you know of Dobrynin, what we learned about him from our research. I’m talking about when he was still dancing, before he dropped out and into his crazy world. What would you say characterized his life?”

“Women—sex.”

“Besides that.”

“Booze.”

“Would you say he was an alcoholic?”

“If he wasn’t, no one is. He seemed to spend all his time in bars or cafés or at parties. He probably drank himself into his psychosis. But you know what they say about Russians and booze.”

“He was only half-Russian. But as regards his drinking, I agree with you. Now tell me, don’t most alcoholics have their favorite bars?”

“Sure.”

“What were Dobrynin’s favorite bars? Who are the bartenders who knew him? Who let him drink when he was temporarily out of cash? Who listened to him talk? Who heard his pre-psychotic musings?”

“In other words, you’re going bar-hopping.”

“But to which bars, Tony? How will I find them?”

“All those gossip columns, I guess. Go back and look at them again. You know how they do it: So-and-so was seen with so-and-so at such-and-such trendy new bistro.”

Yes, that was the way to go. But still my thoughts were spiraling wildly.
Anna Pavlova. Anna Pavlova Smith. Cat. Nude tapes.
Checking back through old celebrity-peeping columns in the daily papers might be the perfect, mundane antidote for a disordered state of mind.

“Help me on this one, Tony!” I said desperately.

“On
what
? Help you on
what
?” Tony demanded loudly. “I don’t know what you’re getting at. You look like
you
belong in that hospital now.” He bounded out of his chair. “All right, all right! Sure. I’m in this with you to the bitter end. But once you get in these crazy cat moods, nothing ever—” He stopped in his tracks, looked at me, and laughed wildly. “It was Anna Pavlova Smith who murdered Dobrynin! Right?”

“In a way, Tony,” I said calmly.

He raised his eyes reverently to the ceiling and brought his hands together in a prayerful gesture.

***

We spent three days in the library going over the microfiche, viewing hundreds of gossip and “about town” columns in newspapers and magazines.

Tony worked as hard as I did, but he kept muttering and complaining and sometimes outright taunting me. He kept saying, “Come on, Sweet Alice, tell me what you have. Tell me what that stupid cat drawing really meant. Tell me all about the mysterious Anna Pavlova Smith. If you have something, share it with your partner.”

I told him nothing. It was all too inchoate, at that point. It was a bunch of little things that were slowly falling into place in my head. Dobrynin feeding stray cats . . . Dobrynin thinking a cat was hunting him with a view toward emasculation . . . Dobrynin’s infatuation with that name, Anna Pavlova Smith. Oh, there were so many things. Things Tony wouldn’t understand. He would just think my lifelong obsession with cats was dovetailing nicely with Dobrynin’s psychotic delusion about one nonexistent monster cat. No, it was best to keep my mouth shut.

At the end of the three days we consolidated our notes. Going over them together, we noted that there were really only two kinds of references to the dancer in the columns. Two genres of gossip. The first had to do with Dobrynin the bad boy, as he played out his assigned role of enfant terrible of the ballet world. These always seemed to mention well-known Manhattan bars and night spots such as P.J. Clark, or the Algonquin, or a host of whimsically named SoHo and Tribeca bars.

The other type simply noted that the dancer had been seen in such-and-such a place with such-and-such companion. That was all.

What was very interesting about the two types of references was that in the second sort Dobrynin was always in a totally different kind of place than he was in the first. Which is to say, places like the piano bar of the Hotel Carlyle, the Polo Bar of the Westbury, or a whole host of small, elegant cafés that radiate out from Madison Avenue in the Sixties and Seventies and are the stomping ground of the quietly rich East Side denizen, the older European tourist, and very old New York money.

It was as if he had divided his drinking life into two distinct parts, one wild and one sedate.

“So what?” Tony asked, after we’d discovered the pattern.

“So, Tony, you and I are going to produce and star in a little costume drama. We’ll dress up and spend some time in some of those genteel
boites
where the rich get soused.’”

“But why?”

“Simple. I want to find a confidant of Dobrynin. Maybe a kindly old-world bartender who fed him drinks and tapas—and listened to him.”

“Fine. And what is Dobrynin supposed to have told this confidant—that he secretly wanted a career as a cat portraitist?”

“No, dear. He told him the murderous secret of Anna Pavlova Smith.”

***

If we were going to move, even briefly, among Manhattan’s quiet rich, Tony and I would have to create roles for ourselves. And I dreamed up two of them so delicious that even Tony, appalled at the fact that I was continuing the case, found them amusing.