Suspicion of Malice (13 page)

"It gets worse." Charlene's brows rose. "Nate Har
ris is on the short list of candidates for federal dis
trict court."

"You lie."

"Don't you keep up with anything? Tricky, tricky.
Cause problems for a judge, he will never forgive
you, and his friends in the civil division, before
whom you appear, will never forgive you either."

"What do I do now?"

"Oh, it's simple." Charlene laughed. "Send Bobby
to some other lawyer."

Bobby Gonzalez studied the photograph, then looked
up, openmouthed, at Gail. "Where'd you get this?"

Gail had cut out the photo—minus the name—and taped it to a plain piece of paper. "Never mind that
now. Are you sure it's him?"

"I'm positively sure."

"How are we coming with those notes?" Scratchy
handwriting filled two pages, and continued onto a
third.

"Fine, but I need to go pretty soon. I have rehearsal, and it's a long way back to the beach."

A hand on his shoulder, Gail said, "I'll be right
back. Maybe I can drive you." Leaving Bobby in her office, she went around the corner to her secretary's desk. Miriam had gone to lunch, and her size-two
sweater hung on the back of her chair.

Gail sat down and picked up the telephone, dialing a number from memory. When the receptionist answered, Gail told her that an emergency with a client
had arisen. "I'm so sorry, but I can't possibly come
in this afternoon . . . Yes, I realize that, but there's nothing I can do. Please tell the doctor I'm sorry. . . .
Well, could I come in early next week?"

The voice reminded her that if she rescheduled to
next week, the procedure would cost more.

"Yes, I understand. That's no problem."

Did she really want to do it? Was she having sec
ond thoughts?

"No, it's just not convenient
today.
Could you hold
on a minute?"

Quickly Gail flipped pages in the desk diary,
seeing what was on the schedule for next week. Something would have to be shifted. "God, what a
mess. I'm going to have to call you back later."

She hung up and sat for a minute with her fingers
pressed against her lips. Her breath had stopped, and a tremor had worked its way to her knees. She stared
at a box of pastel paper clips. A pencil jar Miriam
had decorated with lace. The heart-shaped photo
frame with her husband's picture in one side, their
toddler, Berto, in the other. A little stuffed teddy bear
to Miriam from Danny held up a rose.
I love you.

Karen would be home on Saturday, flying in with Dave on a flight from Puerto Rico. By then everything would be fine. Back to normal. As if this had
never happened.

Gail picked up the phone and called Charlene. Her
secretary said Charlene was on another call, but
hold on—

"No, don't disturb her. Just say . . . my appointment's been rescheduled. I'll call her later."

Gail drove Bobby Gonzalez to the ballet's rehearsal
hall on South Beach, and he asked if she'd like to
watch. He put a folding metal chair in the corner of
the large, high-ceilinged room. The wood floor
gleamed, and one wall was mirrored. A TV and VCR
were pushed to one side among the portable barres the dancers had used for their warmup. Sunlight
poured through big uncurtained windows. A few pe
destrians walked by, some pausing to look in.

The accompanist was playing runs of bright notes.
He stopped when the ballet mistress clapped her
hands. She explained a combination of steps by walk
ing through them, then called for one of the women
to demonstrate. The dancers tried it. She nodded,
then told them to find their positions for partnering
work. The accompanist turned a page in the sheet
music and brought his hands down on the keys.

Four men moved in a diagonal line across the
floor, the women coming toward them from the opposite side. The lines shifted, split apart, and dancers broke into pairs. Their eyes were glued to the mirror.
With no audience to play to, faces frowned in concen
tration. Lips moved, counting beats.

The dancers' clothes were rag-tag and worn. The ballerinas were thin, long-legged creatures. Their toe
shoes were frayed and stained, and one girl had a
rip in the side of her leotard. Nothing matched. The men wore tights or knee-length gym shorts, and soft, faded T-shirts, a few with gaping holes. Their bodies
were gorgeous, Gail decided. Powerful arms and
legs. And fabulous backsides. It was hard not to
stare.

Gail found herself smiling. They were all wonderful, but she felt a keen pleasure in watching Bobby. He was just as good, she thought, as the most accom
plished male dancer in this group, who must have
had ten years' more experience.

Leaving her building, Gail had offered to buy him
lunch, but he'd wanted only a Diet Coke at a drive-
through to go with the granola bar he'd brought in
his backpack. In traffic, the drive to the beach had
taken forty minutes, and Bobby had talked about
how he got into ballet. At the studio he introduced Gail to one of his former teachers, a woman about
fifty whose career as a principal dancer with the San Francisco Ballet had ended with a hip replacement.
While Bobby and the others did their warmup at the
barre, the teacher came over to where Gail sat and unfolded another chair. Bobby had confided in this
woman, and she knew who Gail was.

Robert Gonzalez was the fourth of five children.
His parents had rented a fourth-floor walkup in East
Harlem. Gloria had worked in a hardware store on
Second Avenue, and Willy had taken the 6 train downtown before dawn every morning to work as a street cleaner. Bobby had gone to Central Park East
Elementary.

Bobby had never considered dancing a particularly
feminine art. His father and uncles danced the
meren
gue
or mambo right in the small living room, and
every weekend they put on silky, open-necked shirts and gold jewelry and took their wives to a ballroom on West Fifty-eighth. A man who can dance, his father said, will always have women. One floor below
lived a man with the Dance Theater of Harlem—a very beautiful black man with elongated muscles,
who had seemed eight feet tall to the boy. He had laughed when Bobby imitated his movements, and
lifted him high in the air.

Not a perfect childhood. They were poor. Gloria
explained away her bruises as a fall on the stairs.
When they had to take food stamps, she wept. Bobby's oldest sister became pregnant at fourteen. Bobby
shared a mattress on the floor with his brother, and in the winter they slept in their coats.

A man by the name of Eliot Feld, a former dancer and choreographer for the American Ballet Theater, offered tryouts in elementary schools. He wanted to
pull out the ones with potential and give them a
chance at his ballet school. One afternoon, with noth
ing better to do, Bobby tagged along with one of
his sisters. The next week Feld himself showed up,
ignoring the sister and calling Bobby aside. What had
they seen in this child? His energy, his speed, his body type—long supple limbs, a certain proportion
of torso to leg.

At ten years of age, Bobby Gonzalez started formal
training in ballet. His bones were still soft enough. A dancer who starts too late will not develop turn
out. The foot must arch properly, the hip sockets
must be mobile enough to allow for the outward ro
tation of knees and thighs. Without this, he might
become a modern dancer, but he would never suc
ceed in classical ballet. At twelve Bobby went to Har
bor Junior High for the Performing Arts, where he
was known as a show-off. The girls fought to dance
with him. At thirteen he was the young prince in a
local dance school's production of
The Nutcracker.

In January of that year, Willy Gonzalez was fired from his job. He came home drunk, and when Gloria yelled at him, he broke her jaw. Willy spent a few weeks in jail, then left for San Juan. Gloria's brother
in Miami offered to take them in, and they moved
to his old two-story stucco house in a largely Puerto
Rican section of the city. Gloria promised Bobby he
could continue his lessons, but he knew it was hopeless. There was no money, even if there had been a
ballet school in that neighborhood.

The first time Bobby mentioned ballet on his street, the other boys laughed, and the biggest attacked him. Bobby scarred his knuckles on the boy's teeth, but
never talked about dancing again. He threw away
his practice clothes. He acquired tattoos, a swagger,
and a string of arrests. The police had his photo on file at the station.

At fifteen, on the point of being sent to the alternative school for delinquents, Bobby was herded with the rest of his homeroom into the auditorium at Edison High. The Miami City Ballet was giving a demonstration of classical dance—girls in tutus, men in slippers and tights. Some of the kids in the audience slept. Boys snickered. Girls whispered to friends and passed notes. What must Bobby have thought, sitting in the dark auditorium, eyes fixed on the stage? One
of the male dancers took a microphone and talked about the ballet school. There would be tryouts for
scholarships in a month. When the students clattered out of the auditorium, had Bobby lingered behind?
Had he gone outside to watch the dancers leave through the stage door, get into their cars, and
drive away?

He let a week go by, in which he hardly slept. One night, telling no one, not even his mother, he took a bus to Miami Beach. He looked through the windows
of the old studios on Lincoln Road, seeing a rehearsal
of what he knew was the
pas de deux
from the last act of
The Nutcracker.
When it was over he walked
to the beach a few blocks away. It was cold that night, and a wind blew off the ocean. He stood on
the firm part of the sand and stripped to his boxers.
And danced. If anyone saw, he didn't care.

Two years away from ballet, how hard had it been?
His legs must have ached. How tender were his feet? He wouldn't have practiced where anyone could see.
He'd have waited till late at night and gone behind
the house, or he'd have sneaked into an empty
building.

He showed up at the school three weeks later to
try out for one of two places open, and borrowed a pair of slippers from a box of discards in the dressing room. The teacher who talked to Gail had been there that day.

She said, "There were twenty boys trying out.
Some had been dancing steadily for years, and they were all good. Bobby fell a couple of times simply
because he was trying so hard. He had such a raw
edge. So tough. It was quite compelling, really. We
all started watching him. Here was this boy we'd
never seen before, with a tattoo and a horrible haircut, but with this perfect body, perfect proportions. Very strong, very quick. Other boys in the group had more finesse, more training, but Bobby . . . when it's there, you
know.
Someone must have called Eddie,
because he came downstairs to see."

Laughing softly, the teacher leaned closer to Gail. "When Bobby was trying out, he was so serious. At the first class, after he'd been accepted in the school,
he couldn't stop smiling. There was a discoloration
on his front tooth, and I asked him, what is that?
You should get that fixed. The next day, that one
tooth was so white, and I said, Bobby, come here, let
me see. He'd painted it with Liquid Paper because
he didn't have money for a dentist. Well, we have a dentist on the board of directors, and he fixed it. But that's Bobby. He makes do—sometimes to his own detriment. He doesn't eat well. I feed him sometimes.
He doesn't get enough rest because he's always
working. His mother has some kind of disability, and
his sister is on her second or third baby, and the younger ones are always after him for things. The
men in the family think he ought to get a real job,
and Bobby has that to contend with. We pay better than most regional companies, but it's still hard. He makes a little extra money teaching in the outreach program. The students like working with him, I suppose because he speaks their language. He's lucky he came to Miami. It's hard to get noticed in New York, even when you have a great deal of talent, as Bobby
does. The top of the pyramid is so tiny. So few of
them make it."