Dead Man Dancing

by Marcia Talley

  ‘What do you plan to do, Hannah?’

  ‘Get one of them to confess, of course.’

  ‘And how will you manage that, pray tell?’

  I shrugged. ‘If I make Kay mad enough, it might happen. She’s going to be pissed off big-time when she finds out that I lied about the bag.’

  ‘Can I ask you something, Eva?’ I paused on the path while Coco strained after a squirrel, tugging at the leash, jerking my arm up and down. ‘After Roger was outed on NBC by PredatorBeware, did you ever feel like killing him?’

  Eva had jogged a few feet ahead, but she stopped and turned to face me. ‘I felt sickened and betrayed, but I can truthfully say I never once thought about murder.’ A bird sitting on a bare branch chose that moment to warble a greeting, and Eva smiled. “Vengeance is mine. I will repay, saith the Lord.” Romans 12.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ I said as we continued down the path together. ‘But sometimes I wish he’d hurry up and get around to it.’

  ‘Hah!’ said Eva. ‘I’m going to steal that line.’

  ‘I’m convinced the Baltimore cops are going to nail somebody sooner or later for Jay’s murder,’ I said a little breathlessly, thinking about the evidence that might have turned up when they analyzed the contents of Jay’s gym bag. ‘But, I am not going to let anyone get away with Melanie’s, and the local cops seem clueless.’ I told Eva about my conversation with Don, then added, ‘Accident, my foot! A spot on Shall We Dance? A husband who adores her and vice versa? That girl had everything to live for.’

  As we hurried on two cars drove by, but neither belonged to Kay. I had no idea what Shirley drove. We passed various pavilions named for trees – Red Maple, Sassafras, Sycamore, White Oak – trotted through the formal gardens, and up the stairs to the patio.

  I checked my watch. It was two fifty-nine.

  Kay was already sitting on one of the teak, Chippendale-style benches that surrounded an elaborate Victorian, three-tiered cast-iron fountain that looked like it should be flowing with wedding champagne rather than water.

  Sitting on the bench next to Kay was Tessa’s mother, Shirley Douglas.

  ‘Well . . .’ Kay flashed a smile like the snake in the Garden of Eden. ‘I see you’ve brought a friend along, and so have I.’

  Shirley glanced nervously at me. ‘Kay and I are not friends, not exactly. I’m not sure why she asked me here.’

  I fessed up. ‘Kay didn’t invite you here, Shirley. I did.’

  Kay turned a cool eye on her ‘friend’ Shirley. ‘Hannah probably wants me to tell you about Jay and about Tessa.’

  Oh, oh, I thought. Now the shit is really going to hit the fan.

  Shirley laced her fingers and flexed them nervously. ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Kay.’

  The look Kay sent Shirley dripped with malevolence. ‘Of course you do, Shirley. Melanie told me all about it.’

  ‘Melanie? What does Melanie have to do with anything?’

  ‘Melanie noticed Jay talking to Tessa. She watched them for a long time.’ Kay’s eyes narrowed dangerously. ‘That’s how Melanie found out that Jay was abusing your daughter.’

  Shirley leapt to her feet, her back rigid. She loomed over Kay, still seated on the bench, hands primly folded in her lap. ‘Abuse Tessa?’ Shirley screamed. ‘You are out of your fucking mind, lady! Jay wasn’t an abuser.’

  ‘Pimp,’ Kay snarled.

  ‘What?’ Shirley paled.

  ‘You disgust me. Don’t you have any pride at all? Using your daughter like that. It’s despicable. You’re no better than those so-called parents who allowed their kids to spend the night at Neverland and then sued Michael Jackson for the hanky-panky they knew was bound to take place.’

  ‘I . . .’ Shirley began, obviously reeling from Kay’s full-frontal assault.

  Kay seized the advantage. ‘Chance clued me in on the hush money Jay’s been paying you.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Does the name Michael Lombardo ring any bells?’

  Shirley shook her head, genuinely puzzled.

  ‘He’s Jay’s cousin, currently serving five to seven in the Texas State pen at Huntsville for robbing a pawn shop.’

  ‘So Jay’s cousin is a crook. So what?’

  ‘So why is Michael Lombardo on the J & K Studio payroll, and why is his paycheck being automatically deposited to a trust account in Tessa’s name at Bank Annapolis?’

  Shirley’s eyes widened. ‘Jesus.’

  Kay puffed air out through her lips, and turned to me. ‘You watch, Hannah. She’s going to pretend she didn’t know about it.’

  Either Shirley was a consummate actress, or she really didn’t know. She took a step backwards, a strategic retreat, as if to gather her thoughts.

  But Kay wasn’t finished with Shirley yet. She stood up, too, so she could look Shirley straight in the eye. ‘You must be blind. Either that, or an enabler. Melanie told me.’

  If Shirley was intimidated by Kay, she certainly didn’t show it. She stood her ground, puffed herself up and played her trump card. ‘You’re the one who’s blind, Kay! Jay didn’t abuse Tessa. Tessa was his daughter!’

  I grabbed Eva’s hand and squeezed. It felt good to be right about Jay. He wasn’t a pedophile after all. He was a father.

  Kay gasped, put a hand to her chest, staggered backwards, catching her heel on a brick. She would have fallen had she not reached out to steady herself on the rim of the fountain. ‘You’re lying!’

  I was dumbfounded. ‘Kay didn’t know,’ I whispered to Eva. ‘I don’t know how it’s possible, but she really didn’t know!’

  Shirley took the offensive then, quickly closing the gap between Kay and herself. ‘Why do you think we stuck with your studio all these years when there were other, better studios in the area? Loyalty, that’s why. Jay always looked after Tessa.’ She paused to draw a breath. ‘Besides, he wanted to spend time with his daughter.’

  She fixed Kay with a look of pure venom. ‘It’ll all come out in his will, you know. He’s leaving his half of the studio to Tessa.’

  Kay’s face grew dangerously red. ‘The hell he is!’

  Shirley folded her arms and glared Kay down. ‘You don’t know anything. Jay loved me. Me! He loved Tessa. You were too selfish to give him kids.’ She smoothed her hands over her narrow hips. ‘Boo-hoo-hoo. Might spoil your figure for dancing.’

  Kay stood galvanized, rapidly blinking.

  ‘When I got pregnant, Jay was overjoyed. He wanted to tell the whole world, but I wouldn’t let him. He’s . . .’ Her voice caught. ‘He was one of the most unselfish men I’ve ever known.

  Kay suddenly revived. ‘I don’t believe that Tessa is Jay’s child. You’ll have to prove it.’

  A sly smile crept across Shirley’s face. ‘There’s DNA.’

  Kay laughed out loud. ‘DNA? How? Jay’s been cremated. In a couple of hours, I’m taking his ashes back to Texas.’

  I was thinking that comparing Lorraine’s DNA to Tessa’s would probably do the trick when Shirley crowed, ‘We had a paternity test done when Tessa was born. I was married to Link, so we had to be sure.’

  Eva breathed into my ear, ‘Sounds like Jay didn’t trust Shirley much, either.’

  Eva’d said it quietly, but Shirley must have overheard because her eyes darted in our direction. ‘And before you ask, Link knew all about it, but agreed to raise Tessa as his own. Link had a severe case of mumps as a kid, so he could never father children. It was the perfect solution for all of us.’

  The perfect solution? I thought back to the day I’d comforted Tessa as she huddled miserably on a cold tile floor, hunched over the commode. Tessa was the glue that held that marriage together, but at what cost?

  Kay stumbled to the bench and lowered herself down on it. ‘Melanie was wrong?’

  I handed Coco’s leash to Eva and moved closer to Kay’s bench. ‘I don’t know what Melanie thought she saw, Kay, but whatever it was, it w
as clearly misinterpreted.’

  Kay’s eyes swung from me to the red bag and back again. ‘That’s not Jay’s bag, is it?’

  ‘No, it’s not. The police have Jay’s bag. They’ve had it all along.’

  Kay rested her head against the back of the bench and closed her eyes. ‘Jay was from a big Catholic family. He wanted children, lots of children.’ Her eyelids fluttered open and, for some reason, she was looking again at me. ‘I couldn’t give them to him. It’s complicated, but I just couldn’t.’

  ‘Kay . . .’ Shirley began.

  Kay waved a tired hand, cutting her off. ‘About the will.’

  Shirley went on alert. Had she been Coco, her ears would have quivered. ‘The will? What about the will?’

  Kay’s head lolled slowly to the other side until she was looking directly at Shirley. ‘Tessa’s not getting the studio. The studio comes to me. Everything comes to me.’ She drew a deep breath and exhaled it slowly. ‘But I guess where I’m going, there won’t be any need for a studio, or a house, or anything else.’

  ‘But the will?’ Shirley wouldn’t let the matter drop.

  Kay smiled blandly. ‘Jay intended to make a will favoring Tessa, but I found a draft on his computer and put a stop to it. I thought you found out about the abuse and were blackmailing him.’ Her head lolled back. ‘I made a mistake there, too, didn’t I?’

  Something rustled the ornamental hedge behind me, and suddenly he was there: Don Fosher, a mountain in cammies, waving a dull gray pistol. ‘Move away from her, everyone. I have no beef with you.’

  I stood rooted to the bricks. ‘Don . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Ives. I came back for my stuff, and I overheard you arranging to meet this, this . . .murderess!’ He steadied the weapon with his left hand, and pointed the barrel directly at Kay’s head. At a distance, Don could probably shoot the eyebrows off a fly. At close range, Kay didn’t stand a chance.

  Tears coursed down Don’s face, but his grip on the gun didn’t waver. ‘Why did you kill her? Why? Tell me why?’

  I would have been petrified, but Kay didn’t even blink. ‘Melanie said . . . oh, what does it matter? It’s a little late for me to be sorry about it now.’

  That wasn’t the right answer.

  Deep down, the horrible scream began, rumbling up through Don’s chest and out through his mouth, a cry of such agony, such desolation that my heart nearly broke. His finger twitched on the trigger.

  ‘Stop!’ someone yelled.

  We all froze as a figure shot past, tripped over Coco’s leash, and dived like a missile at the feet of the gunman. Big as he was, Don Fosher went down, his gun bouncing and skittering along the bricks.

  ‘Thou shalt not kill!’ Kay’s rescuer shouted.

  Over Coco’s frantic barking, Eva yelled, ‘Sweet Jesus, it’s Jeremy!’

  ‘Get the gun!’ Jeremy screamed, but Don’s arm clamped over his throat, cutting off his air. Don was trained in hand-to-hand combat; Jeremy was no match for him.

  Yet somehow Jeremy squirmed free, and fell on Don’s back like a human cinder block. Don rolled over, throwing the smaller man off, while Coco nipped at his heels.

  While the two men wrestled, I searched frantically for the gun, but it must have slipped under one of them. First Don was on top, and then Jeremy. Don roared, flipped Jeremy like a pancake, straddled him, and pinned him to the bricks.

  ‘It’s over,’ said the big man, back in control of the gun and pointing it at Jeremy’s head.

  Jeremy squeezed his eyes shut. ‘“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, he makest me to lie down . . .”’

  ‘Shut up!’ Don screamed, and clipped Jeremy in the temple with the butt of the gun.

  Jeremy’s glasses flew into the air, the Lord’s Prayer silenced. Blood began to pour from a gash in his head and puddle on the bricks.

  Don reared back in horror. ‘Oh, God, what have I done?’

  I took advantage of the lull to push firmly on Don’s shoulder, catching him off balance and causing him to topple sideways, unresisting.

  I knelt at Jeremy’s side. He was still breathing, but his pulse was ropey. I found a wad of tissue in my pocket left over from Jay’s funeral, and I used it to press against Jeremy’s wound, staunching the flow. Time had slowed; seconds became minutes, minutes, hours.

  Behind me, I could hear the beeps as Eva dialed 9-1-1.

  I heard Shirley say, ‘I’ve got the gun,’ and didn’t feel anything but relief, until a few seconds later when the explosion of a gunshot deafened me.

  Keeping the tissue firmly pressed to Jeremy’s head, I twisted around.

  Kay lay slumped on the bench, a dark stain beginning to leak between the buttons of her camel hair coat. Don Fosher bent over Kay. First her mouth moved, and then his. I couldn’t hear a word, but after a moment his body language said it all.

  Kay Giannotti was dead.

  It seemed obvious at first. Don had killed her.

  Then I saw it was Shirley Douglas who held the gun.

  Epilogue

  It took a while for the dust to settle. First, I had to apologize to Paul a million times for pig-headedly (his word, not mine) undertaking a dangerous mission with only my spiritual advisor along for support.

  Shirley Douglas got out on bail. Link’s connections on Capitol Hill had netted Shirley a hotshot criminal lawyer with a win-lose record of sixty and nil, who wore his hair in a ponytail. Word was, she’d get off light.

  Alas for Tessa, production of Tiny Ballroom was postponed indefinitely following a boycott of the show’s sponsors by Citizens Against Childsploitation. As a diversion, Tessa’s father enrolled her in a gymnastics class. Tessa excels on the parallel bars and hopes to be ready for the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

  Shirley’s victim’s ashes were flown to Texas by a second cousin once removed, where they were interred in the Giannotti plot next to her husband of twenty-five years, Jerome Ignatius Giannotti.

  Everyone agreed it was Don Fosher who’d brought the gun – unregistered – to the park, but the sergeant remembered nothing about the incident until he ‘came to’ and found himself scuffling with a total stranger for control of the weapon. Post-traumatic stress was mentioned. After counseling at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, DC, Sergeant Fosher was back in Iraq. He has extended for another year.

  In March, Ruth’s attacker, Kenneth Parks, a sixteen-year-old student from Annapolis High was apprehended. Fresh out of Ruth’s cash, he attempted to use her cancelled VISA to buy a laptop computer on the Internet, asking that it be shipped to his home address. Needless to say, Kenny’s parents’ car didn’t sport a ‘My child is an honor roll student at . . .’ bumper sticker.

  Eventually, we learned that lab analysis had identified the formulation of the thallium contained in Jay’s talcum powder as identical to Jardines Rat-a-Tué which hadn’t been sold in the US since 1978.

  I was thinking about this one day while staring at Eva across her kitchen table.

  Eva raised any eyebrow. ‘What? Do I have spinach on my teeth?’

  ‘Not your teeth. Your hair. I’m remembering your roots.’

  ‘Roots?’ She tugged on a lock of silver bangs and stared up at it, cross-eyed. ‘Thanks to Wally, I don’t have any roots.’

  ‘But when you did, wasn’t it because you used some off-brand hair dye that was years past its sell-by date?’

  Eva laughed. ‘In Stanley, Utah, rotating stock was an alien concept. They never took stuff off the shelves in the stores. I saw thirty-year-old merchandise gathering dust, still wearing their original price tags.’ She grinned. ‘Never know when you’re going to need a tube of Ipana toothpaste.’

  ‘Maybe Hard Bargain, Texas has some old-fashioned farm supply stores, too,’ I mused.

  I made this suggestion to the nice detective who’d given me his card when he drove all the way down from Baltimore, Maryland to relieve me of Jay’s gym bag. He’d said, ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ which I figured was nicer th
an ‘buzz off’. Nevertheless, he called later on to report that a clerk at Finkel’s Fair Store in Hard Bargain, Texas, had said yes-indeedy-do, Miss Kay Giannotti had bought some of that there Rat-a-Tué for her mother-in-law’s mouse problem, why it must have been over a year ago now, and they only had two cans left at $2.95 and should he hold them?

  I paid a call on my spiritual advisor at her home in the parsonage to report on this interesting development. Eva invited me into the kitchen, and together we rustled up some tea while the gray Chartreux watched with round, copper eyes from her basket near the stove. ‘Hello, Bella,’ I said, kneeling down to give the animal a good scratch behind the ears.

  ‘I’ve changed her name,’ Eva told me. ‘She now answers to Magnificat.’

  ‘Certainly appropriate for a church-going cat,’ I said, getting to my feet, ‘but quite a mouthful. I can’t see you standing in the back yard calling, Here Magnificat, here Magnificat!, can you?’

  Eva shook her head. ‘That’s why she’ll be Cat for short, although her breeder in Fulton, Maryland might think the name’s a bit undignified for such a fine, blue-blooded feline.’

  As Eva poured hot water into our cups, she asked, ‘I know you talked to Don recently, and I’m curious. What was it that Kay said to him just before she died?’

  ‘It was a line from the movie, Dirty Dancing. “Nobody sticks Baby in a corner.”’

  Eva plopped a teabag into her cup. ‘Poor thing. Thinking her husband was having an affair must have gnawed at her, but being told he was a pedophile would have sent anybody over the edge And I should know.’

  ‘Jay didn’t exactly win any prizes for faithfulness, but from everything I hear, he really loved her. And speaking of love,’ I continued with a grin, ‘how’s Jeremy?’

  ‘Fully recovered. He emails that during his hospital stay God came to him in a dream and suggested that he might not be cut out for life in the fast lane with a priest for a wife.’

  Eva set the kettle back on the stove, and sat down. ‘Looking for guidance, Jeremy opened his Bible, closed his eyes and stabbed his finger down at Solomon 2:16: “My lover is mine and I am his; he browses among the lilies.” Believe it or not, Jeremy’s now dating a lovely girl who works as a sales associate in the greenhouse at Homestead Gardens. God has spoken, what more can I say?’