Dancing with the Dead (6 page)

She moved along the car and slumped against the rear fender, nauseated and trembling.

Something touched her shoulder and she jumped, almost shrieked.

“Mary?”

It was Jim.

“What’s wrong, Mary? You sick?”

She nodded toward the dead bird, frozen in its macabre imitation of flight. Heard Jim say, “What the hell?”

He walked closer to the bird, shook his head, then returned to her. “Don’t worry, I’ll get rid of it for you, Mary.”

She said nothing as he went to his car and returned with a wad of Kleenex in his hand. She turned away, and when she looked back, the bird was on the ground.

“Kids, I guess,” he said, dropping the Kleenex near the bird. “Probably saw a dead bird in the street and thought they’d give somebody a scare. Guess they managed.”

She knew that was what the police would say. No crime had been committed here. There was no victim other than a sparrow. There was no proof someone was trying to terrorize Mary and had sent her a sick and frightening message. Even she couldn’t be sure. Maybe the marks on her door and the dead bird were in no way connected. Maybe.

“Want me to follow you home, Mary?”

She told him no, she’d be okay. He moved close and strapped his arm around her.

“I’ll be all right,” she said. “Thanks, Jim.” She squirmed. Right now she didn’t want a man hugging her.

He sighed and removed his arm, smiled his slow smile. “Okay. Go home, have a drink, and try to forget this. Can you do that?”

She nodded, thinking a drink was the last thing she wanted.

Avoiding the dead bird, she climbed into her car and started the engine.

Jim stood watching as she drove away.

M
ORRISY WAS TO MEET
Waxman at a Cajun restaurant a block off Bourbon Street to talk before Waxman went off duty. Morrisy loved Cajun food, had loved it even before it became a fad. He was eating blackened redfish when Waxman slid into the seat opposite him in the booth.

Waxman was wearing a neat gray sportcoat, paisley tie, blue slacks. He looked fresh, not as if he’d been slogging around all day in the heat. “How can you get to sleep after eating that stuff so late at night?” he asked.

Morrisy finished chewing a bite of fish and swallowed, took a slug of Dixie beer. “Helps me doze off,” he said. “How’d you make out with Verlane today?”

“He gave me the same answers, wanted to know why I was asking the same questions. He’s getting plenty testy. Keeps trying to make a big deal of the fact his wife did ballroom dancing.”

“I used to dance myself,” Morrisy said. “Used to do the twist.”

“No shit? Hard to imagine.”

“Means nothing about nothing,” Morrisy said. “Just ’cause a witness said the victim was dancing at that lounge don’t mean any more’n me getting down and screwing up my knees when I was young and dumb. People dance, people play golf, tennis, then they go out and get themselves killed anyway and so what?”

“Think maybe hubby wants us to go off in some direction other’n him?” Waxman asked.

“What do you think?”

“My thought is he’s extremely tense. I told him lots of people besides his wife were dancing at the lounge that night, and they’re still alive. Thought he was gonna poke me. He’s that tightly wrapped.”

“Good. You want one of these peppers?”

“God, no.”

Morrisy smiled. He got to why he’d wanted to meet Waxman. “I talked with Schutz today.”

Waxman nodded. Schutz was a police psychiatrist. The young blond waitress who’d waited on Morrisy sashayed over and Wax-man ordered a cup of decaf.

“What he told me dovetailed with some of our conclusions,” Morrisy went on. “Autopsy report shows the perpetrator was skillful with the murder weapon, a very sharp knife, used in a way that suggests the perp knew exactly how much pressure to apply and at what angle. Way we reconstruct the crime, he almost certainly took precautions not to get any of the victim’s blood on him, as if he knew about arterial blood spurting. Schutz looked over the evidence and said the killer did the Verlane woman with a deliberateness that indicated detachment and planning. Work of a bona fide sociopath.”

“I coulda told you that,” Waxman said, sipping steaming black decaf.

“And our guy has a pathological hatred of women.”

“Coulda told you that, too.”

“But not using all that psychology jargon like Schutz,” Morrisy said. “Upshot of it is, Schutz sees psychological signs, we see physical signs, that the killer’s done his thing before. Us and Schutz together, we’re seldom wrong about something like that.”

“Computer check showed no similar killings in this or any other parish,” Waxman reminded him.

Morrisy relished the last bite of redfish. “Still, my feeling is our boy’s had practice. Experience. Another thing Schutz said: The killer himself might not know he’s committed the murders. He might be blanking out the experiences in his mind, his way of coping so he can live with his conscience. Schutz says that happens.”

“Happens a lot in court,” Waxman said, “when guilty parties are trying for insanity pleas and light sentences.”

“Hmph. Go ahead, try one of these banana peppers.”

He made it sound so much like an order that Waxman took a cautious bite from the tip of one of the tiny green peppers that had rested in hot sauce on Morrisy’s plate. Morrisy watched as Waxman scalded his tongue gulping coffee to squelch the greater fire.

“Jesus!” Waxman gasped. He was pale.

“Everybody’s agreed the guy’s killed before,” Morrisy said, “so naturally the next question is—”

“Will he do it again?” Waxman finished.

He waved the waitress over and breathlessly asked for some water. She smiled, apparently used to the request, and hurried away. Morrisy watched her, noticing she had a pretty good ass.

“Actually,” Morrisy said, “there’s not much doubt in my mind. He’ll do it again.”

“So we need to collar him before he does,” Waxman said, sort of wheezing. He was still having difficulty talking and breathing at the same time, and the waitress was nowhere in sight with the water.

Morrisy slid his half-full stein over to Waxman, said, “Wash down that pepper with some cold brew, why doncha?”

Waxman did. His breathing smoothed out, but his eyes were still watering.

Morrisy said, “Starting tomorrow, let’s find out
every
goddamn thing about the husband, and I mean all the way back to when the bastard was potty trained.” He stared hard at Waxman when he said this, making it plain it was something to bear down on, a career maker or breaker.

“Gotcha,” Waxman said.

The waitress arrived with a glass of water with ice in it. Waxman drank that, too.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
was hot. Mary awoke eager to climb out of the perspiration-damp bed. She slapped the alarm clock button down, and in thick silence padded to the air-conditioner and switched it on, twisting the thermostat dial all the way to Coolest. The air-conditioner hummed and gurgled impotently for a few seconds, then the compressor
thunked
on and the blower’s tone became deeper and more powerful.

Mary stooped low so the flow of cool, chemical-smelling air flowing through the brown plastic grill washed over her face and evaporated perspiration. Then she straightened up, stretched her back, and went into the living room and switched on that window unit so the rest of the apartment would be cool when she emerged from the bathroom.

After showering, she dressed methodically, taking care to avoid snagging her pantyhose with a fingernail, choosing from her closet a lightweight gray skirt and blazer and matching medium-heeled shoes. Checked out Ms. Businesswoman in the full-length mirror and was reasonably satisfied.

When she went into the kitchen, she found it was too warm in there, almost as if there were something baking in the oven. Sunlight slanted in golden, syrupy rays that traversed the kitchen and lay in glimmering warm pools on the linoleum. The heat stifled what appetite she had, so she stuffed a filter into Mr. Coffee, spooned in some decaf, and ran water through it. Then she poured herself a glass of grapefruit juice and carried it and a cup of black coffee into the living room, where it was cooler.

She sat down on the sofa, set the glass and cup on the coffee table, and used the remote to switch on the TV and tune to the weather channel.

Eighty-five degrees at the airport, and it wasn’t even eight o’clock. No wonder the apartment hadn’t cooled down during the night. The temperature was expected to reach the high nineties today, the forecaster said, with what seemed to be barely disguised sadistic satisfaction. God, St. Louis in the summer was a city something like hell. She thumbed the remote to tune in CNN, downed the glass of sour grapefruit juice abruptly, as if it were medicine, then settled back on the sofa with her steaming coffee.

Trouble in the Middle East, said the anchorman. Tape showed a horde of raggedly dressed youths hurling rocks at some kind of armored vehicle. Doors sprang open in the side of the thing and soldiers poured out, carrying their weapons low and running in a cautious crouch. The stone-throwing youths scattered, and the tape ended. Mary sipped her coffee while another tape showed a drug bust in Washington, screaming cops battering down the front door of a shoddy house and shoving the startled occupants up against a wall and frisking them. Was it a real world out there? she wondered. Had all this actually happened? Somehow she couldn’t relate to any of it, any more than she could grasp the true meaning of the federal deficit or the trade imbalance. Did any of it really mean anything, or was it all floating around in her life in the abstract, like astrology or Einstein’s mathematical theories, so that it touched her only indirectly, if at all?

She sat forward suddenly, sloshing hot coffee over her thumb.

Danielle Verlane’s photograph was on the TV screen, the one that had been in the newspaper. Mary’s interest quickened. Maybe, she thought, she was fascinated by the murder because of the victim’s connection with Mel. The same Mel Mary danced with, the Mel who held her close as he must have held Danielle Verlane. Mel and ballroom dancing were two things Mary and the dead woman had in common, and Mary couldn’t put that out of her mind. The anchorman was talking about the murder in New Orleans. The victim had been mutilated with a knife. Police said there were no leads in the case, but the investigation was continuing.

The scene shifted to a sprawling, cream-colored stucco house with a red tile roof, red awnings, and decorative black wrought-iron railings. A shiny gray convertible was parked in the driveway. After the exterior shot of the large house with its lush green shrubbery and lawn, the camera moved inside, where a TV journalist was interviewing the victim’s husband.

The camera showed only the back of the interviewer’s blow-dried hair. The husband, Rene Verlane, was seated on a gray and white striped sofa. Behind him was an arched window with flowing white sheer curtains.

He was a slender, crudely handsome man about forty, wearing a well-tailored pale suit. His black hair looked wet and was slicked back. His eyes were a very light blue that matched his shirt, and he had thin lips and a deep cleft in his chin. He seemed angry yet composed.

“What I object to,” he was saying with a hint-of-molasses Southern accent, “is the way the authorities are implying my wife was doing something immoral simply because she was seen dancing with several men the night she was murdered.”

“Do you care to name anyone specifically who’s implying that?” the interviewer asked hopefully.

“I won’t name names at this point,” Verlane said, “but what people don’t understand is that Danielle was an avid ballroom dancer. She competed and won trophies. Dancing was very, very important to her. A sport. An art. Not simply a social skill. Or a . . .”

“Means to meet men?” the interviewer helpfully suggested.

“That’s what the police seem to be implying,” Verlane said, his accent suddenly thicker. A quick, bright anger came and went in his pale eyes. Something about him; he was watchable as a film star.

“So Danielle danced to keep her skills honed,” the interviewer said, backing off a bit.

“Exactly. That’s not uncommon in the world of people who take ballroom dancing seriously. There are competitions held all over the country, and many of the same dancers attend them, thousands of people. It’s a subculture that isn’t widely understood, or even known about, but my wife was part of it, and that’s important. To imply that since she danced often and with different partners meant she was somehow less than a perfect wife is misguided, judgmental, and a hindrance to the investigation into her death. It’s the world of ballroom dancing the police oughta be delving into, not snooping around as if my wife were somehow unfaithful—which she definitely wasn’t.”

A frontal shot of the interviewer, a perfectly groomed mannequin from third floor Menswear, looking intelligent and interested. “So you’re unhappy with the police work in your wife’s case?”

“Yes. And with the way the media have treated this.” Verlane squirmed on the sofa and knitted his fingers together, squeezing. “As if Danielle did something wrong. As if somehow what happened was
her
fault and she
deserved
it.”

Exterior shot again. The newsman was standing before the big stucco house with its arched windows. An elaborate black iron fence was visible now. He was leaning against it casually, loosely holding a microphone a few inches from his lips. “So Rene Verlane, whose wife Danielle was brutally murdered two days ago, is unhappy with the way local authorities have handled this case, and especially with how he feels the victim has been portrayed. This is—”

Someone was knocking on the door.

Mary placed her cup on a magazine so it wouldn’t leave a ring on the table, then got up and crossed the living room. She stood close to the door and peered through the fish-eye peephole at the distorted figure standing in the hall.

Jake.

A
SINGLE RED ROSE
this time, held like something injured in his huge rough hand and backed by an embarrassed smile. He said, “I heard someplace a rose by itself meant I love you.”