Dead Man Dancing

by Marcia Talley

  Jay was propped up on three pillows, looking terrible. His eyes were dull and sunken, jittery in their sockets. His luxurious eyebrows had thinned, giving him an oddly surprised expression. In spite of the tan, his face looked ashen.

  I knocked lightly on the door frame. ‘May I come in?’

  Kay turned away from the food tray and said, ‘Hi, Hannah. We’re just having lunch.’

  From the amount of food left on his plate, it didn’t look like Jay was having much to do with lunch. I entered the room, and set a gaily-wrapped box of candy on the foot of the bed. ‘Maybe this will do for dessert?’

  Jay winced, then smiled wanly. ‘Thanks, Hannah. Maybe later.’

  ‘You were out of it last time I visited.’ I managed to dredge up a smile. ‘I’d come by to tell you how much I enjoyed your paso doble.’

  Jay raised a hand, waved it feebly, then let it fall on to the covers. ‘I really screwed it up big-time, didn’t I?’ He turned his head, trying to catch his wife’s eye. ‘I keep telling Kay I’m too old for this, but she doesn’t listen.’

  ‘Old, schmold! You guys were great. And the choreography you arranged for Hutch and Melanie knocked everyone’s eyes out.’ I patted Jay’s hand, and was surprised when he winced again, and jerked it away.

  Kay shot me a warning glance. ‘His skin’s really sensitive.’

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t know.’

  Jay managed a feeble grin. ‘Seems I’m always causing trouble.’ He turned his head on the pillow. ‘Kay, could you pour me some ginger ale, please?’

  While Kay filled a plastic glass with ice, popped open a can of ginger ale and began to pour, I filled them both in on the party a few nights previously. ‘And did you hear that Tom and Laurie won several firsts at the Sweetheart Ball? They were over the moon.’

  Jay nodded and replied with obvious effort. ‘Tom called to tell us. I’m pleased, very pleased. They’re hard workers, and super serious about dance. I’m referring them to Paul Pellicoro and Eleny Fotinos in Manhattan. I’ve done about all I can for them here.’

  ‘Pellicoro? Is that the guy who taught Al Pacino to tango in Scent of a Woman?’

  Kay answered for her husband. ‘Right. You may have seen them interviewed on TV.’ She popped a flexible straw into the ginger ale and held it for Jay while he took a sip, then another, then another. Swallowing seemed to be a problem. Jay held up a hand, and Kay moved the ginger ale away.

  ‘And while we’re talking about talent, do you think your future brother-in-law will give up the law for dance?’ Jay asked me.

  I grinned. ‘I doubt it. Ten years out, and he’s still paying off his student loans. But he’s gung-ho, full-steam-ahead for the Shall We Dance? competition.’ I explained as well as I could about the arrangements Hutch was making so that his firm could function for the months they’d be without him.

  Kay held out the glass. ‘More ginger ale?’

  ‘No thanks, sweetheart. I think I’ll take a nap now.’ He exhaled slowly and closed his eyes.

  ‘I’ve tired you out, Jay. I’m sorry.’ I started buttoning my coat and headed toward the door.

  Kay set the ginger ale down on the bedside table, leaned over her husband, adjusted his pillows, and smoothed a long, lank lock of hair out of his eyes. Suddenly she gasped, withdrawing her hand as if she’d received an electric shock.

  ‘Kay!’ I whispered. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Kay turned to me, her eyes wide and frightened, like an animal caught in the headlights. Tears welled up, spilling over on to her cheeks. Silently, she held out her hand. In it lay a hank of her husband’s handsome, blue-black hair.

  ‘He’s losing his hair?’ I glanced at the pillow where Jay’s head rested and noticed other strands that had separated from his head when he moved it. It can happen suddenly, just like that, with chemo. One night you’ve got hair, the next morning you’re standing in the shower and it’s falling out in clumps, swirling around the drain at your feet.

  But Jay wasn’t on chemo.

  As I stood there looking from Jay’s littered pillow to Kay’s ravaged face, I remembered something I’d read in an Agatha Christie novel written late in her career and not one of her best – The Pale Horse. Mark Easterbrook, the writer-hero realizes that somebody’s been poisoned with thallium. ‘But one thing always happens sooner or later,’ he says. ‘The hair falls out.’

  I took Kay by the shoulders, soothing her, trying to calm her down, although under the circumstances saying, ‘There, there, it’s going to be all right,’ seemed pretty hollow.

  At least she’d stopped shivering. ‘Kay, have the doctors tested Jay for heavy metal poisoning? Arsenic? Or thallium?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she bawled, clutching the lock of her husband’s hair to her bosom with both hands.

  I located Jay’s call button on the end of a cord clipped to the bed rail, and punched it repeatedly. ‘When the nurse comes, you have to tell her about the hair.’

  Kay sucked in her lips and nodded silently, but I wasn’t sure my words were getting through.

  ‘Honey?’ It was Jay calling to his wife from the bed. ‘What’s wrong?’

  She rushed to his bedside. ‘Oh, Jay! Your beautiful hair is falling out. Hannah thinks it could be heavy metal poisoning.’

  With some effort, Jay raised a hand and rubbed it across his brow and over his temple, coming away holding a few strands of hair. ‘I’ll be damned.’ Under the circumstances, he was surprisingly calm.

  A nurse appeared in the door. ‘How can I help?’

  Kay stared, and pointed to me.

  I told the nurse what I suspected.

  The nurse, young, freshly-uniformed and scrubbed, considered me with cool, green intelligent eyes. ‘Of course. I’ll call the doctor right away.’

  ‘Heavy metal?’ Jay asked after the nurse had left. ‘Isn’t that how they murdered that Russian guy?’

  At the mention of murder, Kay gasped.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Kay. Who the hell would want to murder me?’ Jay turned back to me. ‘Thallium, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Alexander Litvinenko? They thought so at first, but it turned out to be polonium-210. Much more toxic,’ I hastily added, although from what I remembered of the newspaper accounts at the time, thallium poisoning could be pretty deadly, too, especially if you didn’t diagnose it in time.

  ‘Ha! Seems I’ve been poisoned by spies!’

  As sick as he was, the man hadn’t lost his sense of humor.

  Twenty-Four

  ‘Thankyouthankyouthankyou,’ Kay gushed into the phone the next day. ‘You were absolutely right, Hannah.’

  ‘Jay has thallium poisoning?’

  ‘Once they knew what they were looking for, they found traces of it in his urine. The blood work was complicated and took a bit longer, but it’s come back positive, too, so there isn’t any doubt.’

  I smiled into the phone. ‘It’s amazing the useful facts you can learn from reading mystery fiction.’

  ‘An Agatha Christie novel, you said? Who would have thought it?’

  ‘Christie was a smart old dame. A lot of research went into her books.’ Before we could drift off on a literary tangent à la Oprah’s Book club, I asked, ‘What do the doctors say, Kay? Is Jay going to be all right?’

  ‘No guarantees.’ Kay rushed on, breathless. ‘No one here is underestimating the seriousness of Jay’s condition, but they’re forcing fluids, and have started him on the antidote, a course of Prussian Blue. Fingers crossed he’ll respond and turn the corner . . .’ She paused. ‘He’s in such pain now that the simple weight of his hospital blanket is agony.’

  ‘I’ll keep you both in my prayers,’ I said, thinking that I needed to update Eva so she could add Jay’s dicey condition to her prayer list, too. Unlike some pastors, Eva never claimed to have a direct line to God, but it seemed to me that previous problems I’d referred to her had had a good record of being rubber-stamped ‘solved’, so why knock a good thing?

  ‘We
hope they don’t have to do dialysis,’ Kay continued, ‘but Jay says he’d happily let them cut off his left arm if it’ll take away the pain.’

  ‘Does Jay have any idea where he picked up the thallium?’ I’d been doing some research since my visit to the hospital, and I knew that thallium wasn’t that easy to obtain. Having been banned in the US since the mid-1980s, unless you worked for a company that manufactured thermometers, optical glass, semiconductors or green fireworks, it wouldn’t just be lying about.

  Colorless, odorless, tasteless, thallium rapidly deteriorates in the body after death. It’s such a perfect poison that some wag had nicknamed it ‘inheritance powder’.

  The other day Jay had jokingly dismissed the idea that anyone would want him dead, but perhaps he was wrong. Should Jay be out of the picture, Kay would get everything, including the studio. But, when all was said and done, who knew how much the business was actually worth, and whether it would be worth killing for. Except maybe Chance . . .

  ‘Rat poison,’ Kay snapped, jolting me out of my reverie.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Thallium used to be an ingredient in rat poison, they tell me. Ant poison, too. It’s illegal now, but there might be some old cans of it lying around somewhere.’

  I thought about the moldy boxes with unreadable labels cluttering the shelves of the tool shed behind my father’s house, about the dented, rusting cans stacked on the concrete floor in the basement, each containing who-knows-what, and said, ‘Did Jay garden?’

  ‘Are you kidding? Jay grew up in the desert. He wouldn’t know a geranium from a tulip.’

  ‘Hold on a minute, Kay. Even if you had a whole vat of contraband rat poison out in your garage, how would it have gotten from the vat and into your husband?’

  ‘That,’ Kay said, ‘is the million-dollar question.’

  I pondered Kay’s comment with growing dread. It seemed to me there were three possibilities.

  One: accidental ingestion. Easy to do with a chemical that’s colorless, odorless, and tasteless. I remember reading that attempts had been made to add bittering agents or ‘adversives’ to thallium products to make them less palatable and therefore safer, but it seems that rats had turned up their whiskers at bittering agents, too, so manufacturers had scratched that plan.

  Two: somebody slipped the thallium to Jay, in which case we were looking at a particularly vicious case of murder.

  Or, three: he took the poison himself.

  But even if Jay had been suicidal – and I’d seen nary a sign of that – I couldn’t imagine him, or anyone, ingesting thallium on purpose. Swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills, jumping off the center span of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, shooting yourself in the head with an antique rifle, all would be quicker and less painful ways to bid ‘goodbye cruel world’ than going through the agonizing, long-term torture of thallium poisoning.

  ‘What do you think happened, Kay?’

  Kay sighed, sounding weary, resigned. ‘Oh, I don’t know, Hannah. I’m so worn out, I can’t think straight.’

  ‘Go home and get some sleep, Kay. You must be exhausted.’

  ‘I am. Thank God Jay’s sister is flying in from Texas tonight to help out. We’ve never gotten along particularly well, but under the circumstances, I’ll just bite my tongue and put up with her fussiness.’

  ‘If you need me . . .’

  ‘Thanks, Hannah. I’ll remember that.’

  A phone call after midnight is rarely welcome, even if it brings good news, so I wasn’t overjoyed when the bedside telephone jolted me out of a deep sleep at 2:17 the following morning.

  Next to me Paul snorted, ‘I’ll get it,’ knocked the phone off the table with a flailing arm, then tripped over the handset when he swung his legs out of bed to look for it. While he answered with a bleary, ‘Hello,’ I checked the digital clock and groaned.

  ‘It’s for you, honey,’ Paul said, cradling the base of the phone in one hand and handing me the receiver with the other. ‘It’s Kay, and I don’t think it’s good news.’

  I sat up, fumbled with the receiver, pulled my knees up to my chin, and took several deep, steadying breaths while trying to gather my thoughts. ‘Kay?’

  A word here, a ragged gasp there. I could barely understand what she was saying, and then: ‘He’s gone. Jay’s gone.’

  ‘Oh, Kay, I’m so sorry!’

  ‘They started the treatment, but it was too late. All too late!’ she wailed.

  Over the next five minutes, alternating between hysterics that segued into gasping hiccups, punctuated by two short conversations with Jay’s sister, Lorraine, I learned that by the time the antidote kicked in, the damage to Jay’s liver and kidneys had been too severe. His body gave out on him, he slipped into a coma and died of massive organ failure.

  ‘The sons of bitches have ta-ken Jay a-way!’ Kay sobbed.

  I knew what that meant: an autopsy. The office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore was going to be deeply interested in exactly what had sucked the life out of Mr Jay Giannotti, dance instructor, of Annapolis, Maryland. And I would bet my new dancing shoes that Baltimore’s homicide detectives were already on the case, too.

  ‘Idiots! The doctors are idiots!’ Kay screamed. ‘They screwed around with test after useless test until it was too late, and now they won’t even tell me when I can bury him!’

  In the background I could hear Lorraine’s soothing voice, trying to calm her sister-in-law whose rant now included the words ‘malpractice’ and ‘lawsuit’. Eventually Lorraine was able to pry the cell phone from Kay’s grasp, and I learned that funeral arrangements would be handled by Kramer’s, an Annapolis funeral establishment tucked away at the bottom of Cornhill Street in a grand Georgian mansion once belonging to a colonial tea merchant. I hadn’t been to Kramer’s since my friend, Valerie, died, and I wasn’t looking forward to visiting it again. Funeral services held in funeral homes always struck me as odd, like sending a loved one off to heaven from the lobby of a Holiday Inn, so I was relieved when Lorraine added that Jay’s funeral mass would be held at St Mary’s Catholic Church on Duke of Gloucester Street, ‘at a later date’. I thanked her, reiterated my offer to help out in any way I could, jotted down her cell phone number on my bedside pad, said goodbye and left Kay and Lorraine to mourn Jay’s passing together.

  Then with Paul’s comforting arms around me, I buried my face in my pillow and bawled.

  Twenty-Five

  I was up early that morning, eyes red, lids puffy. Paul had already made coffee – fresh ground Columbian, I love that in a man – and I inhaled the first cup gratefully.

  As I stood barefoot at the kitchen counter shivering in my pink-flamingo nightshirt, pouring cream into a second cup, Paul came up behind me, wrapped his arms around my waist, and nuzzled my neck. ‘I have to go to class, sweetie. Are you going to be all right?’

  ‘I’m going to lay low today and busy myself with a little research. Maybe some righteous indignation will keep the tears from coming back.’

  Paul reached over my shoulder, lifted the mug out of my hand, turned me around and pulled me close, resting his chin against the top of my head in a way that always gives me goose bumps. ‘Promise me you won’t do anything dangerous or foolish.’

  I promised. I didn’t plan to take the face I’d glimpsed in the mirror that morning out anywhere; it would startle the pedestrians or frighten the horses.

  After the phone call, I had talked to Paul about my growing suspicion that Jay had been murdered, and in a cruel, calculated way. I could almost understand strangling someone, I’d said, or shooting them, or clobbering them with a baseball bat in a fit of jealous rage, but what kind of monster feeds someone a poison so lethal that it slowly, ever so slowly, shuts down all the body’s organs? So painful that even touching the hairs on the back of the victim’s hand can cause exquisite pain? Disfiguring, too, and by the time your hair falls out, and you go bald, it’s almost always too late. Even if you survive past that point, you can
have paralysis or neurological problems for life.

  ‘Jay could have been poisoned accidentally,’ Paul suggested, continuing our conversation of the night before precisely where we left off when he started snoring and I, comfortable in his arms, eventually dropped off to sleep. ‘There was the recall of pet food from China, remember? Where the manufacturers added melamine to artificially up its protein content and ended up killing a lot of dogs and cats.’

  ‘Jay wasn’t eating cat food, you dope.’

  ‘That’s just an example. Who knows where our food comes from these days.’

  ‘Or our medicines,’ I added. ‘I wonder if Jay was popping any Chinese herbal remedies. I read an article—’

  Paul clamped a playful hand over my mouth. ‘Hannah, if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, but do you ever listen? You do not. Butt out, and let the police do their job.’

  ‘Yes, Mother,’ I teased.

  Years ago, when my younger sister, Georgina was in a spot of trouble, I’d had my first encounter with the Baltimore homicide detectives made famous on the HBO series Homicide: Life on the Street. I own all seven seasons on DVD – 122 episodes plus a made-for-TV movie. Don’t know why I always got the serious, no-nonsense-ma’am ones rather than the callous, smart-mouthed cops who always made me laugh, but maybe cops were only funny and irreverent on television. Maybe this time it’d be different.

  ‘I’m serious.’ Paul tipped my chin up so I was looking right into his dark, luminous eyes. ‘But you’re not going to listen to me, are you?’

  ‘If I hadn’t been an avid reader of mystery fiction, Jay’s doctors would still be scratching their heads and saying “huh?”.’ I started to cry. ‘But he’d be just as dead, wouldn’t he?’

  Using his thumbs, Paul wiped away the tears that began trickling down my cheeks again. ‘I’m glad you’re staying home today.’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe I’ll visit the kids,’ I said, changing my mind. ‘I can wear dark glasses. Take Coco for a walk in Quiet Waters Park. That always clears my head.’ Coco is a labradoodle, the sixth member of the family living at my daughter’s on Cedar Lane in Hillsmere Shores, a quiet waterfront community of modest homes that adjoined the popular county park.