Baby Doll Games

by Margaret Maron

  All the stage lights were on now and Detectives Lowry and Eberstadt had patiently begun dusting the steel scaffold. The matte black paint should yield usable fingerprints, but Sigrid pessimistically expected to learn that every dancer in the troupe had swarmed over those rungs today.

  Unlike the tree, the iron fence seemed less a part of make-believe than something scavenged from a real turn- of-the-century graveyard. A narrow band of ornamental cast-iron flowers and ivy twined across the bottom and each paling was tipped with an exceedingly sharp point.

  As she watched, Dr. Cohen turned to her. “If you’ve got all you need, Lieutenant, I’ll take her now.”

  “Eberstadt?” she asked.

  Matt Eberstadt, a tall, heavyset officer entering middle age, looked up from his task. “I already got her prints, Lieutenant.”

  “Guidry?”

  “Right here,” answered the young photographer, reappearing from the left wing of the stage with her cameras. She waited until Emmy Mions body had been gently lifted down and placed on a stretcher, then took several close-ups of the wounds.

  As ambulance attendants wheeled the sheeted form up the short aisle, Sigrid noted that the remaining members of the dance company had been dispersed in separated seats around the theater and that Detectives Bernie Peters and Elaine Albee had begun taking down preliminary statements. Most of the audience was gone, no very young children in view and only ten or twelve adults and adolescents.

  Her attention was suddenly snagged by a bright orange-and-yellow ascot worn by one of those adults, a tall and softly corpulent figure with hooded eyes and a sheepish expression on his familiar face.

  The last person Lieutenant Sigrid Harald expected to find at a homicide scene was the man with whom she shared an apartment, and she had to stop and rethink the probabilities raised by finding him here in this run-down theater. Ever since their first meeting back in early spring, Roman Tramegra had pestered her for background and “color” so that he could write an authentic-sounding thriller. For one perplexed moment, Sigrid wondered if he’d decided to gather information on his own and if so, how he’d arrived on the scene before she had.

  Almost immediately, however, she recalled that near the end of the summer he d occasionally spoken of writing a scenario for a semiprofessional dance troupe that had recently won some sort of grant. Since Tramegra supplemented his income from a small family trust with various oddball writing chores, she hadn t paid too much attention to his chatter. She now remembered thinking that he seemed disappointed when, in answer to his inquiry yesterday, she’d told him that she’d be working all weekend.

  Sigrid again scanned the mimeographed program Officer Papaky had handed her when she first arrived and read that this afternoon’s performance was the premiere of a dance commissioned by the 8th-AV-8 Dance Company with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Music was composed by a Sergio Avril; the dances were scripted by Roman Tramegra and choreographed by Emmy Mion.

  Accepting the inevitable, Sigrid stepped down from the stage and walked over to her friend, who stood up as she approached.

  “My dear, dear Sigrid! I’m so grateful you're in charge of this horrid ordeal.” Roman Tramegra possessed an extraordinarily deep bass voice but he usually spoke in italics with an accent that was half Midwest and half Piccadilly Circus. His flashy neck scarf was reined in by an English squire’s discreet brown corduroy jacket, complete with leather arm patches, and softly pleated brown wool slacks which helped disguise his girth. The impression he gave was not of obesity so much as the boneless softness of an overindulged Persian cat.

  As self-centered as a cat, too, but Sigrid knew he also possessed a feline curiosity that was as all-inclusive as it was instinctive. Surely Roman would have observed these people quite closely.

  Yet not closely enough. To her quietly blunt, “Who was the jack-o’-lantern dancer, Roman?” he gave a helpless shrug. “My dear, I simply cannot say. It could have been any of them.”

  She motioned for him to sit and propped her foot on the wooden pew in front of him. “So this is where you’ve been spending so much time lately.”

  “A poor place, but our own,” he intoned sonorously, carefully smoothing long strands of side hair up over the top of his bare head. As Sigrid expected, Roman had acquired the history of this three-story brick building on lower Eighth Avenue and was predictably pleased to instruct her.

  “Not that I know every little peccadillo,” he cautioned, “but I believe it began life as a neighborhood movie house, then a nightclub devoted to sexual arousal, a disco, and God knows what else before the troupe organized as the 8th-AV-8 and scraped together enough money for a lease. My dear, you can t believe what they ask for a place like this! As you see, the old plush movie seats must have been ripped out years ago.”

  “And the pews?”

  “Left over from its days as The First Assembly of God Almighty,” sniffed Roman, who was high Episcopalian.

  Again Sigrid turned her steady gaze upon the small theater which, even with the pews packed, would barely accommodate more than a hundred fifty people. Officer Papaky had estimated today’s attendance at around thirty- five adults and perhaps forty-five children-hardly Lincoln Center or even PS. 122, but respectable for a low-budget operation which seemed to be held together with spit and string and the eternal optimism of youth.

  “My first foray into the art of Terpsichore,” mourned Roman, “and look what happens!”

  “What did happen here this afternoon?” Sigrid asked abruptly.

  “We called it Ghosties and Ghouls. I thought it should have been Fantasia for All Hallows Eve and Sergio wanted Scream Time, so we compromised.”

  “Sergio is the Sergio Avril listed in the program?” Tramegra gestured discreetly to a meek-looking skeletal man in thick gold-rimmed glasses, who leaned forward with his chin propped on his hands at the far end of the front pew absorbed by the action onstage. “A talented composer but totally unappreciated.”

  When conversing, Roman Tramegra liked to wander up and down hills and wallow in all the valleys. Sigrid usually preferred that he just skim across the peaks, but now she listened quietly.

  “Sergio has occasionally provided music for the dancers gratis-exposure is the only way to get discovered, is it not?-and Emmy asked him to create something original for them.”

  "Emmy Mion ran things?”

  Roman considered. “Let us say she was first among equals. It was supposed to be an egalitarian enterprise but, yes, hers was the moving spirit. She acted. The others usually reacted.”

  The company had received a rather large grant back in the spring for a children’s project and for the first time, there was money not only to commission Sergio Avril but enough to cover a scenarist as well, hence Roman’s presence.

  “We decided to do this autumnal fantasy. Sergio is a genius at the synthesizer. Quite deliciously eerie sounds. Our talents meshed so beautifully. I could visualize the whole scene the minute he began to play: an overgrown, deserted garden. Silent. Ominous.” Roman’s bass deepened dramatically.

  “A pale beam of moonlight moves down the aisle, picks its way through the cold iron fence while the music simply tiptoes along with the spotlight. A huge pile of pumpkins, then Bling! The spotlight widens, the music explodes and the pumpkin pile becomes a riot of dancing jack-o’-lantems. Wonderful!”

  “And then?” Sigrid prompted.

  “Then they exit, and the pumpkin patch becomes a graveyard. Emmy was quite good at improvisation, so we merely left it that this was to be a change-of-mood piece that she could dance any way she wished. Sergio gave her some marvelously sepulchral music for this passage and I sketched in some suggestions. She was supposed to be dancing alone here, giving the others time to catch their breath and get ready for the next scene with the stuffed goblins.”

  “Those figures I saw in the wings?” asked Sigrid. “How were they to be used?”

  “Like big puppets. You see, Helen Delgado-she des
igns the sets and the costumes and is, I might add, the consort of Cliff Delgado-” He paused and Sigrid nodded to show that she remembered reading the dancer’s name in the program.

  “Helen, you see, stitched together some tights and sweatshirts and stuffed them with excelsior, so they’re rather light but quite lifelike, especially with the masks. You must see the dance. Utterly postmodern! Puppets and people are dressed alike so that when everything is moving, you can scarcely tell which is which flying through the air. Marvelous!”

  Sigrid consulted the mimeographed program. “So Emmy Mion was supposed to be dancing onstage alone. Where would the others be then?”

  “Around." Roman threw up his hands. “There’s no particular drill. I suppose they would remove those pumpkin heads and towel off-dancers sweat like horses, you know. Perhaps get something to drink, then put on their hoods and masks.”

  At Sigrid’s questioning gaze, he elucidated. “In the next scene, when they were to dance with the goblin puppets. To further the similarity between illusion and reality, everyone wears a black hood and a goblin mask, those cheap plastic things from the dime store that children wear for trick or treat.”

  Black hoods and goblin masks. To go with baggy sweatshirts and pumpkin heads and athletic women dancers who were probably as strong as the men. That’s all we needed, thought Sigrid, absently rubbing her left arm where she’d been knifed two weeks earlier. It was healing nicely and no longer required a sling, yet considerable tenderness still lingered. “So you weren’t exaggerating when you said that the jack-o’-lantern could have been any of them.”

  “Exaggerate? Dear child, when do I exaggerate?” Roman asked indignantly.

  “A figure of speech, sorry. But any one of those five could have thrown her?” She peered again at the names of the dancers listed in her crumpled program. “Cliff Delgado, Ulrike Innes, Ginger Judson, Eric Kee, or Wingate West?”

  “Well, no, not any of them,” Tramegra admitted. “But if they were all dressed identically in that first scene-”

  "They were, they were! But you’re forgetting anatomy.” Although Sigrid had given the five dancers only cursory glances thus far, she had immediately noticed their similarity in build. “In a group, you might spot small differences in height or thickness of legs, but dancing alone, Roman? With a bright orange pumpkin head?”

  “While it is true that pumpkins and paper streamers and loose black sweatshirts form an effective disguise for the upper half of the torso, you are overlooking a fundamental feet," Roman said magisterially. “They were all wearing tights, my dear, and I do not exaggerate when I say they were quite, quite tight. The jack-o’-lantern who threw Emmy Mion onto those spikes was undeniably male.”

  Chapter 3

  Backstage, lights had been turned on everywhere. The walls immediately abutting the stage were painted black, but beyond the audience’s view, the bare brick walls had been inexpertly sloshed with white paint. Sergio Avril’s sound equipment and Nate Richmond’s electronic light board stood inside the front wing of stage left, partitioned from the rest of the backstage area by one of the threadbare maroon velour curtains, which, according to Roman Tramegra, had been purchased thirdhand from a cinema up in Harlem. A folding metal chair held one of those eerie goblin puppets that looked strangely human in their cheap plastic masks.

  Curious, Lieutenant Harald lifted the mask and was vaguely disconcerted to find only a featureless black smoothness beneath.

  Walking past the light board, she saw that one could turn right, down a short flight of steps, and open a door to the audience or step out into an alley; or one could turn left where a spiral iron staircase led to dressing rooms on the second floor. Beyond the stairs, a wide hall opened onto several rooms behind the stage.

  The backdrop for today’s performance was a simple canvas screen painted midnight blue to suggest a Halloween sky. At the rear of the stage was a brick fire wall and, since the theater contained no other large practice space, the stage side was lined with mirrors. A narrow passageway had been left between backdrop and mirrored wall and, on the other side of the wall, a wider hallway held storage rooms of various sorts, a three-cubicle unisex rest room, and Helen Delgado's workshop.

  The layout of stage right was similar to stage left except that there was only a single door down to the audience and a wider straight flight of steps comprised the stairway.

  The large corner office beyond the stairs belonged primarily to Emmy Mion; and as soon as Lieutenant Harald stepped inside, she immediately sensed a duality in the dead woman’s nature.

  The left side served as the troupe s business office, while the right side was apparently Emmy Mion’s personal work space, complete with a cluttered drawing table where she had worked out the movements for music played on a nearby tape deck. At least twenty tape cassettes were heaped beside the player amid a rat’s nest of papers covered with the obscure hieroglyphics of choreography. Towels were draped on a rusty radiator, along with jeans, leotards, and rainbow-striped leg warmers; and the walls were layered with pictures of the troupe and sensitive pictures of small children, usually barefooted and in practice leotards. A jugful of autumn branches shed its leaves among the notepads and pens on the work table, and an adjacent bookcase was jammed higgledy-piggledy with paperback novels, bulging manila file folders, and a dozen or more tattered dance books.

  On the end wall above the bookcase, surrounded by smaller pictures, was an unframed poster-sized black-and- white photograph of Emmy Mion and two of the dancers Sigrid had noticed before: the tall, redheaded girl and the Asian boy. All three were in midair crossing leaps and the photograph radiated a joyous delight in lithe movement.

  In sum, it was a slapdash happy-go-lucky area which seemed to overflow with creative energy.

  The office side of the room was painfully organized: a dented file cabinet, every drawer tightly closed, stood at either end of a bank of open steel shelves upon which office supplies were precisely aligned; a corner table held a covered electric typewriter, two accountant's ledgers, and an Out-basket with a neat packet of stamped envelopes; and the desk, while battered and scuffed, was completely bare except for a pencil jar, telephone, stapler, ®id tape dispenser Even notes and snapshots and newspaper clippings had been thumbtacked to the wall above the book shelves in an orderly fashion.

  Sigrid, who had an orderly mind herself, was drawn to that part of the room. “We'll set up here,” she told Detective Cluett, pushing an extra chair over to the desk.

  As she spoke, the telephone gave a low, almost inaudible ring, then the answering machine cut in with a taped message. Sigrid leaned across the desk and turned up the volume. A woman’s lilting voice said, “Eighth-Avenue- Eight Dance Theater. Our two o'clock matinee performance is the world premiere of Ghosties and Ghouls. Repeat performance at eight tonight and Sunday at four. Tickets available at the door. Four dollars for adults, three for children under twelve. If you’re calling about something else, leave your name and number at the sound of the tone and one of us will get back to you. I promise.”

  There was a beep and then another voice spoke with the deeper tone of an older woman. “Helen Delgado? This is Flashy Trash over on Seventh Avenue. You said to let you know when we had some cheap rhinestones. We got in a new batch yesterday, so if you’re still interested, drop by. We’re open till six-thirty.”

  Sigrid returned the volume to its original setting and as she circled the desk, she saw that the bottom drawer had been pulled out as far as it would go. On the other side of the room, she wouldn't have given it a second thought; on this side, it seemed out of character.

  “Better get Eberstadt or Lowry in to print this,” she said to the older detective who had propped himself against the door frame.

  “Right,” said Cluett and lumbered off to summon help.

  Detective Second Grade Michael Cluett, pushing sixty if he were a day, had been specialled in from Brooklyn to help cover her department’s temporary depletion of manpower. Among the m
issing was Detective Charles Tildon, who’d been sidelined earlier in the month by a near-fatal explosion and who wasn’t expected back on active duty before January. Sigrid would have preferred to work alone till his return; but her boss, Captain McKinnon, had saddled her with Mick Cluett with unusually brusque orders that gave her no choice in the matter.

  She hadn’t realized how much she’d come to depend on Tillie’s cheerful and unobtrusive helpfulness until she had to do without him. Although his weakness for giving equal weight to every little detail in an investigation had often irritated her, at least he wasn’t lazy. In fact he was almost like a terrier doubling back and forth across a case. Cluett, on the other hand, reminded her of a sag-bellied phlegmatic basset. If he'd ever possessed any detective skills, they seemed to have receded with his hairline. He was like the poet’s old dog that barked backwards without getting up. Oh, he did whatever he was asked to do willingly enough and if he resented taking orders from a younger woman, as did so many of the old-timers, he didn’t show it; it was just that he never anticipated a request and seldom volunteered an action.

  He reappeared, trailing Matt Eberstadt, and though Eberstadt was in his late forties, the contrast between the two men was more striking than their similarities. Both had iron-gray hair, but Eberstadt s had retreated to the top of his head where it stood up in tight wiry curls like a steel-wool halo, while duett’s lay flat; both were overweight but, unlike Cluett’s flaccid girth, Eberstadt’s extra pounds seemed solid and he was still fighting a rearguard action against adding more. More importantly, Matt Eberstadt expected to earn his pay.

  "Got something for me, Lieutenant?” he asked briskly. “These drawers,” said Sigrid, stepping back from Emmy Mion’s desk.