Rehearsal for Murder (Maggie Ryan) (10 page)

“Christ! What happened?” asked Dwyer.

“They took him out. Serious-but-stable condition. Probably lying in his bed planning his police brutality suit.”

“Beats the drugstore business,” said Nick.

“Jesus, this town is crawling with make-believe John Waynes who don’t realize that thing in their hand shoots real bullets.” He replaced the little pistol. “And when they get in trouble, they blame the cops.” Perez sighed wearily and turned back to Nick, resigned, not a bull but a curly-polled ox hauling the massive machinery of police investigation to its useful conclusion despite a maverick citizenry. “Now, when you arrived at the building, did you see anyone?”

With an inward sigh he said it again. “No. The only person I know who saw anyone was the young woman. Carlotta something.”

“You didn’t hear footsteps or anything?”

“We were all the way around the corner. And even Carlotta didn’t see much, she said. The shadows were already pretty dark. We couldn’t see Ramona until we stepped right in next to her.”

Perez brought out a set of police photographs: young black men with Afros, so alike in the baleful boredom with which they regarded the camera that Nick had to focus consciously on the difference in features. “Recognize any of these people?”

Nick looked closely, but shook his head. “Sorry, Detective Perez. Guess I’m not much help today.”

“Well, thank you, Mr. O’Connor. Let me know if you remember anything more. Would you please ask Miss … let’s see, Miss Jaymie Price to come in next?”

Nick returned to the rehearsal, whispered to Jaymie that it was her turn, and took his place in the line. “Sixty-four years!” he sang exuberantly, years of technique and training hauling up an enthusiasm, an emotional memory, that he certainly did not feel today. He prayed that Ramona would have her sixty-four years.

After rehearsal Daphne leaped off the platform and strode angrily toward the door. “All right, Callie, I told you two to wait at Anna Maria’s!”

Nick saw the two girls then, pert Callie and a smaller child, skulking next to the door. Callie said impudently, “Hey, Aunt Daph, we saw all those cops coming out! Wanted to see if you’d been collared!”

“I’ll tell you who’s gonna get collared!” Laughing, Daphne cuffed Callie affectionately on the shoulder, then hugged the younger girl. “How’re you doing, Mellie?”

“Fine,” said the small one.

Larry, pausing at the door with his jacket slung over his shoulder, asked, “Callie and Mellie? How do you keep them straight, Daphne?”

“It’s tough, yeah. My cousin thought she was so musical. Calypso and Melody, she named them. But I don’t complain, chum. Gonna make them into dancers yet.” She sprang suddenly into a jumping jack, fingers splayed, and capered through a quick little tap step. The girls, grinning, mimicked her.

“Way to go!” Larry clapped enthusiastically. Nick found himself smiling too. Someday maybe he could teach Sarah to dance. Nick Balanchine.

“I’ll be dressed in a minute,” said Daphne to the girls, and loped away to gather her street clothes.

Callie was looking Larry up and down with frank interest. “Hey,” she said, “I know something about you.”

“Oh, dear. Hope it’s not one of my dirty secrets.” He grinned down at her.

She giggled and covered little Mellie’s ears. “And about that bitchy Ramona. And also about—”

“Calypso Weaver!” Daphne shouted from across the room. “Hush up!”

“How come?” Callie demanded indignantly. “Just cause she’s hurt doesn’t make it a lie.”

“Nope.” Daphne, sliding into her dashiki and clogs, tossed her other things into a tote bag and strode noisily back to the girls. “What makes it a lie is, she’s not bitchy. One bad day doesn’t make a monster. Else you two would both be bogeymen, right? Now, out!” She shepherded them through the door.

Edith, dressed now, bounced over to Nick. “Who were those fellows in the police photos?” she demanded.

“No idea,” said Nick. “I imagine they’ve connected the gun to one of the men.”

“But that was Ramona’s gun!”

“I thought it must be. Did she have more than one?”

“She only showed me one.”

Derek and Jaymie and some of the others had crowded around. Larry, instead of following Daphne out, joined the group too. “Did anyone recognize any of those photos?” Nick asked generally.

“No,” said Derek, “but I noticed that none of them looked particularly young. Do you suppose the witness was mistaken? That it was a teenager, I mean?”

Jaymie said slowly, “I might have seen one of them.”

“Really?” They all turned to her eagerly.

She shook her dark head, uncertain. “It might have been someone else. I’m really not sure. But I was walking toward Canal Street right after rehearsal, as usual. I saw someone across the street who might have been one of them.”

“Across the street? Are you sure?” Larry sounded dubious.

“No, that’s just it. I’m not sure. But there was a guy, and I remember because he looked so tense. But of course I never connected him with what happened to Ramona.”

“Still, if you’re right, it puts one of them in the area.” Nick found himself fired with eagerness to identify the criminal who had hurt Ramona and through her all of them, their families, even little Sarah. “Did the police tell you anything about him?” he added hopefully.

“No. They were pretty secretive.”

“Did anyone else see him?” asked Derek.

They all shook their heads. Cab said, “A lot of us went that direction, toward Canal. But I wasn’t paying a lot of attention.”

“Well, I wasn’t looking very carefully either,” Jaymie admitted. “But they’re going to ask me to look at a lineup tomorrow. Maybe I’ll know him.”

“Which way did Daphne go that night?” Nick wondered.

“I think she took Callie to Anna Maria’s.” Jaymie adjusted her paisley scarf.

“Is there a real chance she’ll lose the kids?” Nick asked.

“Well, the social workers favor the other relative. That schoolteacher. But she’s ahead, she thinks, because the girls prefer her, and because she’s got good character references from the head of her dance school and even from Ramona.”

“That’s good. She’s really good with them.”

“Yes. I don’t know what they’ve got against her!” declared Jaymie vehemently. “She’s a little unconventional, but she’s a wonderful mother! Sort of adopted me when I first came to New York.” Her voice was warm with gratitude. “She reminds me so much of Loreen. My nursemaid when I was little. And Daphne’s a terrific dance teacher of course. That’s why my mother signed me up at that school. But she’s also willing to hold your hand when you need it.”

“She backed you for this job, too,” Derek said.

“Yes, she’s loyal to her students. It seemed so lucky, because Ramona liked her, and I thought maybe this time …”

She trailed off, glancing at the floor, her eyes shadowed by her thick bangs. But most of her listeners could complete the thought. They too had had hopes for this time and had had to suspend hope and ambition for the moment, waiting for Ramona to wake up.

VI

Thursday evening

March 8, 1973

Susan in bed was a wild woman, small and tawny and enthusiastic about every inch of Steve’s anatomy. Even a bandaged foot. Just now she was mouthing his toes, affording him a glorious view of rump and thigh. He could wait no longer and hauled her close to wrap his arms around her. “God, Susan, you’re the most fantastic thing that ever happened to me!”

She was giggling. “Shut up, lover, and get down to business!”

To see her in the outside world you might not guess her appeal. First impression of Susan: short, pleasant, businesslike except for hair that was always a little mussed. Six months ago she had taken the seat next to his at the bar of a Boston convention hotel to order a beer. Steve, representing Avery Busby at a three-day conference, had looked her over surreptitiously. Not his type, but he’d seen worse. Then she’d asked, without preamble, “Do you think I ought to go to Caracas?”

“Not a question of ‘ought,’” Steve had answered. “Some people should, some shouldn’t. It’s a question of who you are.”

She had looked at him squarely then, blue eyes surprised, and something in him had stirred to their promise. “You’re right!” she’d exclaimed. “I’ve been trying to be logical about it. But logic is beside the point, isn’t it? I’m going!”

She was Susan Norwood, it turned out, a junior manager for a New Jersey oil company. The position in Venezuela, overseeing employee facilities, could make or break her career. Steve, who had so recently wrestled with a similar decision in his thwarted attempt to go to Japan, knew exactly what she was feeling. The sympathetic discussion in the bar had progressed naturally to a pleasant night, and early morning, in her room. Nothing serious, Steve had told himself as he flew back to New York the next day. Just another one-nighter, like a couple of others back during Elaine’s difficult pregnancies. He prepared for this one to join them in the realm of pleasant but unimportant memories. He loved Elaine. He loved Muffin. His life was just about perfect. And anyway, Susan, though pleasant, really wasn’t his type.

This happy delusion had lasted four days. But at lunchtime Tuesday he had suddenly realized that he was standing in the checkout line of a bookstore, holding a stack of illustrated books on Venezuela. A hundred dollars’ worth. Ridiculous, he’d thought, replacing the books firmly. He already had everything he’d ever wanted. Susan was just a pleasant adventure on the road. Nice, but next to Elaine’s beauty, a bit frowzy. Dumpy, almost. Still, he thought as he reshelved the last book, he was mooning over her like a teenager. Better see her here on home territory. Cold light of day. Get her out of his system. From a booth he’d called her office, got her extension, coolly set up a date for a drink after work.

She’d been as tousled as before. As untamed. Twice as fascinating. Steve, dazed, found himself arranging to see her for lunch Friday at her place. Heard himself claiming to be in the process of getting a divorce. And over these last six months, watched himself grow from a typical serious suburban executive on the verge of middle age, into a passionate, adventurous, complete man. Young at heart. And yet—

And yet, he loved Elaine. Truly. They’d been through so much together to achieve their home, their child, their comfortable intimacy. He was an adult, with a reasoned adult love. And he kept an adult grip on reality. He knew the difference between love and mere infatuation.

Therefore, said logic, his feeling for Susan had to be far more than infatuation.

Far, far more. Anything that would lead him to consider leaving a beloved wife, inflicting tragedy on the family he loved deeply, truly, maturely, had to be a passion of fateful proportions.

Susan felt it too. Just last month she had snuggled up to him one lunch hour and confessed, “Steve, you bastard, it’s because of you I’m going to Venezuela. And now because of you I don’t want to leave.”

“God, Susan, then stay!” He pulled the sheets up around them, her green-and-yellow jungle-print sheets.

“What you told me in that bar in Boston was right, though.”

“I retract it, then! On sober reflection.”

“Sober!” She laughed. “We’re a couple of giddy kids, Steve!”

“Well, I love it. I don’t want you to go away. I want things to be like this forever.”

“Well, I don’t!” She’d swung around to sit on the edge of the bed, the short sensuous curve of her back to him. “You know why I’m divorced, Steve? Basically because Bill wouldn’t let me grow. Wouldn’t let me find out what I can do. It was stifling.” She looked at him, unexpected shrewdness in the silvery blue eyes. “You know what I mean, Steve. You’re stifled too.”

“No, I just like the way things are.”

“No, you don’t. Otherwise why tell me you’re getting a divorce?”

God, she could walk in and out of his mind as though she lived there. He remembered stammering, “Well—”

“Oh, you don’t have to lie again, Steve. I never believed that anyway. Any guy who only sees me at lunchtime and maybe an hour after work is not trying to get rid of a wife. I ain’t that dumb, honey. I know you don’t want to leave her. You just want to play around. Well, fine, that’s all I wanted too.”

He’d seized hungrily on the past tense. “Wanted? What do you want now?”

“Caracas. Money. Power. Adventure.”

“This is adventure! It’s not playing around, Susan. It’s love.”

“Maybe.” The remembered sadness in her eyes still gave him a pang. “We know each other pretty well, Steve. Not all the surface details maybe. I don’t really want to hear about your wife and all that. But we know each other deep down. You knew from the minute you saw me that this move was right for me. You cut right through the tangle and said it was a question of who I was. I’ll always be grateful for that.”

Dismayed, Steve had swung around to sit beside her. “But we can’t give each other up! This is so right!”

“Maybe.” She’d kissed him briskly on the forehead and stood to dress. “But I’m not about to give up my future to stay around and have a lunchtime affair. And I don’t hear you saying that you’re coming to Venezuela.”