Dancing with the Dead (5 page)

“I remember her now!” Mel said, gazing wide-eyed at Mary. Death wasn’t part of his world, yet here it had dared to turn up, right here in the studio where even the slightest unpleasantness wasn’t supposed to intrude. It was as if the Antichrist had arrived in suede-soled shoes. “I remember her from about five years ago when I taught at a studio in New Orleans. God, she was my student!”

Mel seemed so stricken by surprise at the proximity of death that Mary didn’t know what to say. “Well, she’s dead,” she muttered stupidly.

“You say she was murdered?” Mel asked, not bothering to read the words that accompanied Danielle Verlane’s photograph.

“That’s what the paper says. Her husband wants the police to start questioning people who went to the same dance studio.”

“Huh? They don’t think a dancer had anything to do with her death, do they?”

“That’s what the husband thinks, according to Helen. What it says in this morning’s paper.”

“Well, that’s really weird.”

Mel dropped the paper back onto the bench and stretched his lean frame. He grinned, tossing off the news of his former student’s murder with an ease that astounded Mary, considering his previous apparent shock. What could it have to do with him? With smiles and balloons? With youth and life and promenade pivots?

“Time to dance, Mary.” He extended his arm for her.

“Keep your weight on the inner edge of your feet, dear,” Nick was gently admonishing Helen as Mel and Mary passed them. Helen was frowning in concentration, trying to shift her weight and rock her wide hips in the Cuban motion that was necessary for Latin dancing.

“We’ll work on mambo first,” Mel said. “That way we can use their music, if you don’t mind.” He moved close to Mary in dance position, tucked a hand around behind her back, then lifted her right hand and leaned slightly toward her.

Dancing to someone else’s tune, Mary thought, tightening her body and waiting for the beat. “I don’t mind,” she told Mel. What would it matter even if there were no music, as long as she was dancing and forgetting her boring job, her struggle to be competitive in Ohio, Angie getting older and more cunning at hiding bottles. And Jake and his fists and flowers. Jake.

What was it Angie had said about Jake being somehow beyond what Duke had been?

“Freeze completely on the one count,” Mel reminded her, rhythmically flexing his knees in time to the music. “ . . . two, three, four,
one.
That’s it—
freeze
!”

Then the music took them and they danced.

That night she dreamed she was dancing the tango, but not with Mel. They were in a vast, airy place and she couldn’t see the man’s face, but he was a beautiful dancer, leading her through steps she’d seen only Silver-ranked dancers do. She slipped into perfect tango rhythm, feeling it pulsate through her entire body, through her soul. The man was whispering something to her she couldn’t understand. What he said didn’t interest her anyway; only the way he danced, and how it made her feel. Her body was young and strong and supple, and she knew it was acting out flawlessly the patterns and elegant lines of her imagination. Her feet knew where to go and when. She held her counts when she was supposed to, snapped her head around with precision, whirled with perfect grace and poise.

Then suddenly she was aware of another couple on the floor, dancing with the same grace and precision. They whirled into sight. Jake dancing with Danielle Verlane. He was smiling over her shoulder at Mary.

When she awoke she lay silently in the dark. She was perspiring heavily and her heart was beating very fast. The whine of truck tires drifted all the way from Kingshighway into her bedroom. In the distance a dog was barking frantically and forlornly. Night sounds.

Wondering what her dream had meant, she lay awake till daylight.

F
RIDAY NIGHT
M
ARY
drove to Casa Loma. It was where several of the Romance dancers met occasionally outside the studio, fledglings venturing from the nest and testing their wings.

Casa Loma was a vast, art deco ballroom on the corner of Cherokee and Iowa in South St. Louis, and it had existed as long as Mary could remember. She could recall Angie and Duke going there at least once, long ago. Though it had recently been refurbished, the dance hall was little changed from those days. The spacious floor was worn but gleaming waxed wood, its perimeter surrounded by blue-clothed rectangular tables. At opposite corners were small bars that sold bowls of popcorn as well as drinks. The floor was encircled above by a balcony along which lights twinkled in sequence. The upper floor also contained tables, and Mary liked to sit alone up there sometimes and look down from the balcony at the dancers swirling in kaleidoscope patterns.

She could hear the band as she paused on the landing of the steps leading to the ballroom and paid her five-dollar admission to an elderly woman behind a cashier’s window. A drum pounded out a frantic, syncopated rhythm, then a trumpet’s wail rose like a melancholy sob as the rest of the band joined in.

Dangling her dance shoes in their drawstring bag, she climbed the rest of the steps, handed her ticket to an attendant, then passed through a small seating area and entered the ballroom itself.

The music was suddenly much louder, a waltz now. Beyond the tables, dancers were whirling about the floor in elegant rise-and-fall motion, their movements exaggerated as they swirled through the dappled light cast by a glittering mirrored chandelier. The band played their gleaming instruments in front of an elegantly draped royal blue curtain patterned with stars and a crescent moon. There was an unreal quality to all of it; or perhaps it seemed that way because it was so vividly real. Mary couldn’t decide which.

Casa Loma was crowded tonight, as it usually was on Fridays. Many of the dancers were older and had been regulars for decades, but there were also a lot of younger people, some of them in their twenties and even a few who looked like teenagers. Mary saw Helen dancing with Willis from the studio. He was slightly shorter than his partner, but the waltz was one of the wiry little man’s best dances, and they made a graceful pair.

Mary scanned the tables and spotted June sitting with big Curt, who was sipping a beer and gazing out at the dancers, no doubt wishing he’d taken lessons long enough to learn their moves. Most of the dancers at Casa Loma were at least somewhat skilled, which made it one of the few places where there was a proper counterclockwise line of dance, and a couple could do a waltz or fox-trot and not expect a collision.

As Mary moved toward the table she noticed equine Lisa, the fashion model, dancing with a dark-haired man. Mary didn’t recognize him, but he was holding Lisa close and rubbing up to her in a more than friendly way. Fridays brought out the hunters at Casa Loma; Mary made a mental note to refuse politely if the man asked her to dance. There were no instructors from Romance Studio dancing at Casa Loma. The no-fraternization rule applied. Mary understood why it should. One
paid
to dance with an instructor. Business did play a part in this; there had to be more to count than beats and measures.

“Over here, Mary!” June, smiling and waving, didn’t realize Mary had seen the Romance Studio table.

Mary squeezed between chair backs and the occupants of the next table. She nodded to Curt, who tore his gaze from the whirling dancers and grinned at her. “Band good tonight?” she asked.

“They sound fine to me,” Curt said, “for whatever that’s worth.” He hadn’t been taking lessons long enough to lose his self-effacing attitude. Give him another six months, Mary thought, and he’ll probably be telling all the women how to dance. Too many men were like that. Male-pattern boldness, she decided, and almost giggled at the thought.

As soon as Mary had slipped into her dance shoes, a tall, gaunt man named Jim, who used to be a student at an Arthur Murray studio, asked her to dance. He was wearing dark slacks, a gray sportcoat, and a red tie with a fresh stain on it. His long, pale face was somber, but she knew it often broke into slow smiles that suggested wisdom but possibly meant nothing.

She stood up and he led her out to the floor. They’d met at a Romance Studio guest party when he’d been invited by a former student, and she’d later seen him at Casa Loma. There was a kind of ballroom dancing subculture in St. Louis, as there was in most big cities. After a few years, the people who did this kind of dancing knew each other as those who communicated in a special language of the body.

“So how you been?” he asked, as he gathered her in for a fox-trot.

“Okay. You?”

“Same as always.” He assumed a rigid dance frame, waited for the one beat, then stepped forward. “I haven’t been taking lessons for a while, but I’m gonna go back soon as things slow down at work.”

“I’d never know you laid out.”

“Thanks.” He smiled. “Now I better not trip and fall.”

“I’m still out at Romance,” Mary told him, following his lead through a neat promenade pivot.

A couple in their twenties was doing swing near the edge of the floor, instead of toward the center where they’d be out of the way of the other dancers. The man led the woman through multiple underarm turns. Jim did a neat contrabody turn and guided Mary around them. He was smooth and had a confident lead, and he didn’t try to show off by taking her into intricate steps she might not know. Mary enjoyed dancing with Jim.

He opened her into promenade position just as the music died, so he merely did a neat check, extending his right leg forward, then drawing it, and Mary, briskly back.

They stood somewhat awkwardly for a moment in the vacuum left by the suddenly silent band, then he thanked her for the dance.

“Gonna do any competition dancing?” he asked, as he escorted her back to her table.

“I’m sorta planning on Ohio in November.”

“The Ohio Star Ball?” He seemed surprised.

“Sure, why not?”

He shrugged and grinned. “I can’t think of any reason why you shouldn’t. Hell, you’re good enough, Mary.”

“I’ll have to train.”

“Everybody trains hard for that one. It means a lot to dancers all over the country.”

“The world,” Mary corrected him. “Some of the top Canadians and Europeans compete there, too.”

“Okay,” Jim said, laughing, “the world.” He squeezed her arm gently. “Take it easy, Mary. If you compete and lose, life won’t punish you.”

She sat down thinking that was an odd thing for him to say. Maybe he’d glimpsed some intensity in her she didn’t suspect was that obvious, a desire to compete and win. A desire that, burning bright enough, could be visible in people, like madness. She got up, and went to the bar for a diet Pepsi.

When she returned, Helen and Willis had joined June and Curt at the table.

“Saw you dancing with Jim,” Helen said, her smile made sly by violet eyeliner.

“Well, that’s why I came here,” Mary told her, “to dance.” She pried up the tab on her soda can, fizzing some of the cold liquid onto her knuckles, and poured Pepsi over the ice in her plastic cup. Helen could be irritating; she sounded like a teenager at times, every school’s overweight, gossipy sophomore.

The bandleader said something into the microphone that, where the Romance Studio people were seated, sounded like an echoing, indecipherable announcement at a bus terminal. Then the band began playing a rumba. Big Curt thought he could handle that one, so he stood up and asked Mary to dance.

She followed him out to the edge of the floor.

Curt had improved in the last few months, but he still couldn’t stay on the beat. Mary listened to him muttering under the music, “Slow, quick-quick; slow, quick-quick,” as he guided her through a series of simple box steps. She began back-leading to make it easier for him, and he grinned in appreciation. Affable Curt. “Not one of my better dances,” he said apologetically. He told her that about every dance, every time they danced.

About halfway through the rumba, Mary glanced beyond Curt’s hulking shoulder and saw something that surprised her. She back-led skillfully so she was facing the right direction, and made sure her eyes hadn’t tricked her.

They hadn’t. There was old Fred Wellinger, dancing with a woman about forty who was wearing a tight red dress that belonged on a woman about twenty. He had his gray hair plastered sideways over his bald spot and was grinning down at her, and she smiled and said something, then rested her head against his chest. Fred’s right hand slid down to the swell of her buttock, his fingers gently stroking the taut red material of the dress as she swayed her rear in Latin rhythm.

Fred, you bastard! Mary thought. What would Angie say if she knew?

Fred happened to glance her way. A shock of recognition played over his features. Seen a ghost, Fred? He quickly danced his partner out of sight on the opposite side of the crowded floor.

Well, at least he hadn’t dragged the woman over and introduced her as a platonic relationship.

Curt stepped on the very tip of Mary’s toe, pinching the nail and causing a jolt of pain that made her temporarily break rhythm. Immediately he faltered, shaking his huge shaggy head and apologizing as fervently as if he’d just insulted her and all her ancestors.

Mary told him not to worry, he hadn’t hurt her, it was her fault, really. One of the first things dancers learned was that it was always the woman’s fault if she got stepped on, some flaw in her technique.

Reassured, he danced on, and she concentrated on following.

After the evening’s last dance, a waltz Mary did with Jim, she changed her shoes, said her good-byes, and left the dance hall to cross the street to the lot where her car was parked.

The night was dark, and Mary was almost at the car when she noticed something odd. It took several seconds for her mind to accept it. Something, a bird, seemed to have alighted on the car’s antenna. At first she was amused, until she realized the bird was motionless and in an awkward position with its wings drooping, and she could see the antenna protruding a few inches
above
it.

Her stomach tensed and moved with revulsion as she stepped closer and saw that someone had broken off the antenna to a sharp point and then impaled a sparrow on it.