Baby Doll Games

by Margaret Maron

  "Doesn’t quite go with the rest of the desk, does it?” Eberstadt asked, automatically comparing the strict order of this corner to the rifled condition of the open bottom drawer. He knelt heavily and began dusting the wooden handle. Only vague smudges appeared, but he carefully transferred them to a white card just in case. The other two drawers were a repeat. While he worked, the telephone rang twice more. Each time the caller hung up as soon as the taped message began.

  Eberstadt removed the drawers and dusted the undersides of the handles but with no more luck than before. “Sorry, Lieutenant. The wood’s just too rough to take a good print. Want me to do any of the contents?”

  The bottom drawer contained crumpled envelopes, carbon paper, typewriter supplies, and other office odds and ends that seemed to hold little significance and had probably been handled by several in the company.

  Sigrid shook her head. "Don’t bother. Did you finish with the scaffold?”

  “Almost. Lowry’s up doing the top round now.”

  “Fine. When you’re through processing the stage, take a look around the rest of the theater, you know the drill. I understand the killer ran offstage on this side so see if there’s anything to indicate which way he went after that.”

  As Eberstadt packed up his fingerprint kit and left the room, Peters and Albee, the two officers who had handled the preliminary interviews, passed him in the doorway. Sigrid motioned them over. “What do you have so far?” she asked, taking a pen and notepad from the deep pockets of her shapeless white jacket and placing them on the neat desk top.

  Mick Cluett was sent back to the auditorium to help keep the witnesses separated, Bernie Peters co-opted one of the wooden straight chairs and straddled it backwards with his arms resting atop the back, and Elaine Albee brought over the tall stool from the drawing table and perched on it with the two-inch heel of one calf-length boot hooked over the middle rung while they discussed the murder.

  The younger detectives were both in their late twenties but Peters was already the father of two preschool daughters and a brand new baby boy, while Albee, a bright-eyed whiz kid with short blond curls, had kept herself unencumbered despite Detective Jim Lowry’s best efforts.

  They nodded agreement when Sigrid repeated Roman Tramegra’s opinion of the killer’s sex, so she leaned forward with her elbows on the desk, her slender fingers laced beneath her chin, and invited them to tell her more about the three male dancers.

  "My money’s on Cliff Delgado,” said Albee.

  “Wingate West,” said Bernie Peters with equal certainty.

  “That space cadet? Christ!”

  Sigrid fixed Elaine Albee with her calm gray eyes. “Why Delgado?” t “I could say feminine intuition.” Albee’s flippant remark was aimed at Peters, who possessed a latent streak of chauvinism, which he usually tried to hide from Lieutenant Harald. “But of the three possibilities, Delgado seems the most intense and impulsive and this does look like murder done on impulse, doesn’t it?”

  "If it was murder,” Sigrid answered mildly.

  "If?" snorted Peters. 'She didn’t just fall, Lieutenant. Everybody we’ve talked to says she was thrown, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Cold-blooded, deliberate murder’s what I say, and Wingate West may look spaced-out, but I’ll bet you he started planning this the day he found that fence.”

  “West is responsible for the fence?”

  “They were tearing down an old house on West Eighteenth between Eighth and Ninth last month and the wreckers gave it to West for a few bucks. He even got ’em to drop it off in the alley. The thing weighs a ton, but the eight of ’em managed to walk it onstage and bolt it down when they started rehearsing ten days ago.”

  “Nobody brings home a ten-foot-long iron fence for a murder weapon.” Elaine Albee’s blue eyes flashed scornfully. “And if West’d been planning to kill her that long in advance, why’d he wait till the spotlight was on her and they were in front of an audience?”

  Bernie Peters shrugged, “Who knows? You’re the one who keeps saying the guy’s spacey.”

  “Well, look at him!” Albee bounced from the stool and plucked a photograph from the wall. It was a three- quarter profile of Wingate West with his forehead resting on a window pane while rain beat against the glass outside. His features were attractively regular and perhaps someday he would mature into a handsome man, but the photograph revealed something childlike and unfinished about his wide mouth and, as Elaine Albee carefully pointed out, it wasn’t so much that his gaze was unfocused and dreamy. “There’s nobody home behind those eyes.” Sigrid remembered seeing cud-chewing cows on her grandmother’s farm with more presence in their mild brown eyes than appeared in West’s, but she left the thought unvoiced.

  “I can see this guy forgetting to catch her, but to throw her down deliberately? No way!” Albee left the photograph on the desk top, returned to the stool, and crossed shapely legs beneath a skirt of russet suede that matched her boots. “Believe me, Lieutenant, Delgado’s got the temperament. Besides, Ginger Judson said if the jack-o’-lantern wasn’t Eric Kee, it had to be Cliff Delgado.”

  “What’s his motive?” asked Peters, his usually mild face betraying his exasperation. He tugged at the plain maroon wool tie he wore with a navy-and-maroon plaid shirt.

  Seated, Bernie Peters appeared to have the build of a six-foot athlete, but when he stood, he was no taller than the lieutenant’s five-ten, for his torso was long in proportion to his legs. He had no problem with jackets-the navy corduroy he wore today, though off-the-rack, fit perfectly- but he often grumbled about the cost of getting his trousers altered. If they fit his trim waist, they were always three inches too long, and his wife was too busy with a full-time job, the kids, and the house to add tailoring to her chores, no matter how pinched their budget “So what's West’s motive?” Albee challenged.

  Sigrid held up her hand to stop their not-quite- amiable bickering. "What about the third man? Eric Kee?” ‘They were lovers and he really seems torn up,” Albee said positively, and Peters agreed.

  “He's an actor as well as a dancer,” Sigrid reminded them crisply.

  “That’s no act,” said Peters. “The guy's really hurting, Lieutenant.”

  “So it's either West or Delgado?” asked Sigrid, tapping her pen against her blank notepad. “No possibility that it could have been one of the others, the composer or what's his name? The light designer?” She fished through her pockets for that program she’d misplaced.

  “Nate Richmond,” said Peters. “Couldn’t have been him. Richmond was working the lights from a second-level booth at the back of the house.”

  “And Sergio Avril might know how to dance,” Albee said, swinging one foot with a doubtful air, “but he was supposed to be at the sound controls. He couldn’t have changed to street clothes and made it back with the others by the time the lights came on.”

  Sigrid found the crumpled program, smoothed it out, and read through the names again. “Nate Richmond had a spotlight on the whole scene. I’ll start with him,” she decided.

  Chapter 4

  “I wish I could help, Lieutenant Harald, but it was Emmy’s dance. I kept the baby white on her, tight and focused, and left him in a general blue." Nate Richmond wore a thin gold wire ring in his left ear and throughout his account of Emmy Mion s last performance, he lounged on the straight wooden chair with his left elbow supported by his right arm so that he could turn the dime-sized gold earring slowly, with a certain absent- minded persistence, as if calmed by the repetitive circular motion of the smooth metal through the hole in his earlobe.

  “Weren’t you surprised when one of the jack-o’-lanterns returned to dance with her?” Sigrid asked.

  Richmond’s long thin fingers hesitated, then resumed their treadmill monotony. “Not really. There’s always a lot of improv. Even if we rehearse it one way, they’ll usually do something different.” A gentle smile crept across his small pointed face as if he were remembering felicitous variations.

/>   “How old are you, Mr. Richmond?” Sigrid asked curiously, for she was finding it difficult to get a fix on him. Usually she could place a person within a couple of years, but Nate Richmond was different. An inch shorter than she, with a slender, childlike frame, he wore the ordinary uniform of a jeans and leather vest over chains, and sneakers. His frizzy brown hair was clipped short on the top and sides, then allowed to cover the nape of his neck in the back. There was only a hint of crinkles around his sea-green eyes but they looked as if they’d seen more years than his gnomish face would indicate.

  “I’m thirty-three and, yeah, I knew Emmy before we came to New York, if that’s what you mean. Out in California. I worked lights for an improvisational theater near the campus while she was finishing up her master’s at UCLA. She used to come backstage, ask a lot of questions. We worked out some stuff together. When she was ready to do her thesis dance, she asked me to light it for her and I did. We had a lot of fun.”

  Sigrid caught the wistfulness in his tone. Beyond his shoulder, she saw again that large photograph of Emmy Mion, her whole being electric with delight as she poised in midair. She wasn’t really pretty-her eyes were small and too closely spaced, her chin too childishly round-but the radiance of her smile seemed to come from deep within and did not appear to be a surface accessory turned on and off for the camera.

  And now that she looked, Sigrid saw the dancer’s face in dozens of the photographs pinned around the room: Emmy Mion in various combinations with the other dancers of the company, alone or surrounded by young boys and girls, her tiny figure scarcely larger than theirs. In none of those pictures, however, did Sigrid immediately see one of Emmy and Nate Richmond together; yet in looking at that small vibrant form, she sensed that in their California days they might have played off each other like two children.

  In and of themselves, though, the photographs interested her. Her mother was an award-winning photojournalism so she recognized their quality. “These pictures are quite good. Who’s the photographer?”

  “I play around with cameras some,” Richmond answered. “No big deal. The kids like them, though, and the parents like them enough to buy, so it brings us in a little extra money.”

  He looked around the walls with something like nostalgia. “The children change even as you look at them,” he said wistfully. “They’re so dawn-of-the-world, aren’t they? God! This has been a happy place and Emmy was so gentle with the kids.”

  “Were you in love with her?” Sigrid asked.

  Until that question, Nate Richmond had seemed dreamily detached from the then and there of reality. Suddenly he dropped both hands to his lap and his attention focused upon the police officers. “She was good. Damned good. She shouldn’t have been killed.”

  “Who was it, Mr. Richmond?” Sigrid asked, leaning forward to study him intently.

  For a moment Nate Richmond stared back just as intently, then the intensity ebbed away. He shrugged his thin shoulders once more and slumped back in the wooden chair to resume absently twisting the gold ring in his ear again. “I had the baby white on Emmy,” he repeated. “It was her dance.”

  “But you’ve known these guys,” Bernie Peters interrupted impatiently. He flipped through the notes he’d taken earlier. “You’re an original member of the company, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you’ve been seeing them dance for the last two years,” said Elaine Albee, sharing Peters’s impatience.

  “I was concentrating on Emmy," he repeated, a defensive edge in his voice.

  “The killer was able to blend in with the others when you doused the lights, Mr. Richmond,” Sigrid said. “Why did you do that?”

  “Was it to give him time to get away?” asked Peters.

  Richmond’s bewildered eyes swung from one face to another and rested on Elaine Albee. “I had to turn them off,” he told her plaintively. “The blood-it wasn’t right to let everyone see her like that-so much blood.”

  Impulsively, Albee patted his hand. “We understand. But if you could just make a guess as to who-”

  Richmond jerked his hand away and put it behind his back. “I can’t guess. I won't guess!”

  And from that they could not move him. So far as Nate Richmond was concerned, as least so far as he was willing to confide, 8th-AV-8 was a happy, thriving group with no internal animosities. Emmy Mion loved everybody and everybody, including the three male dancers, had loved her back-from the smallest child in the dance classes that helped eke out the rent, to the owner of a hardware store next door who gave them wholesale prices on hardware supplies in exchange for classes for his three grandchildren.

  If anyone had a reason to kill her, Nate Richmond claimed to be completely unaware of it. After another pointless round of questions, they let him leave.

  “Comments?” asked Sigrid as her pen filled several lines on her notepad.

  “I bet he does know who the jack-o’-lantern was,” said Bernie Peters, stretching his short legs straight out from the chair. He propped his own notepad on the chair back. “Two years these people have worked together and for him not to recognize somebody he’s seen every day practically-” He shook his head derisively.

  “He struck me as just a little too much California dreamin’ to be real,” said Elaine Albee, her pretty face thoughtful. “Could he be on something?”

  “In which case, his perceptions would be dulled?” asked Sigrid.

  That wasn’t exactly the way Albee would have put it, but she nodded. “If he was high this afternoon-I don’t know, maybe it would have looked to him as if she were dancing with her shadow or something. Even if Richmond had widened the spotlight when they were touching, he’d be taking his cues from her and not really watching what-”

  The door was opened hesitantly and Detective Cluett peered in. “Lieutenant, Dr. Ferrell’s asking to see you.”

  “Who?”

  “Dr. Ferrell. She was in the audience when it happened and she’s the one told Papaky there was no need to hurry with an ambulance.”

  “What does she want, Cluett?”

  “She didn’t say.” Evidently, Mick Cluett hadn't thought to ask, either.

  Sigrid looked to the others for information and received equally blank looks. Dr. Ferrell’s name had not arisen in their brief preliminary interviews with members of the dance troupe.

  “Ask her to wait, please, Cluett, and send in Ginger Judson.”

  Leaving the door ajar, the stolid Cluett departed silently, mimicking the silence of the telephone on the desk before Sigrid. Lights occasionally flashed on one of the four buttons at the bottom of the instrument, but an extension was now being answered by a uniformed officer in the theater’s green room two doors down the hall and no bells disturbed them here.

  While they waited, Peters and Albee filled Sigrid in on the few facts they had gathered about the red-haired dancer.

  “She’s twenty-three, grew up in Miami, moved to New York to study dance. Joined the troupe when it was formed year before last,” Elaine Albee said briskly. “She’s the youngest member.”

  “Seems like a nice kid,” Bernie Peters observed. “Very forthcoming.”

  “Did she come forth with anything useful?” Sigrid asked dryly.

  “Well, she’s the only one to claim she watched the whole dance,” said Peters, tearing a sheet from his notebook. “She sat down here with one of those goblin figures off to the side of the stage.”

  Jim Lowry, who was more skilled, would eventually draw a detailed rendering of the crime scene to scale, but in the meantime, Peters handed Sigrid the rough sketch he’d made of the stage for his own use. After some initial confusion, he’d realized that when the dancers referred to “stage right” or "stage left” they meant right or left as they faced the audience, so he’d marked each side of his sketch accordingly.

  Two small rectangles just off stage left were labeled “lights and sound” and a wavy line separated them from a half-circle that represented Ginger Judson
's chair. A similar wavy line lay between the chair and the back entrance to the stage and there were two identical lines in the wings of stage right. The four lines were angled down from the back of the stage.

  “What are those?” asked Sigrid. “Curtains?”

  “Side curtains, yeah. They’re called maskers,” Bernie said, but as he started to elaborate, the door was pushed wide by the youngest dancer.

  The girl’s long copper hair was braided into a single thick plait which bounced on her straight back as she crossed the room with that curiously graceful, splayfooted walk acquired by most dancers. Her eyes were red, her mascara smudged, and, across her nose, a few light freckles had popped through her stage makeup. For the most part, however, her complexion was of the pale translucence so often found in redheads and it was enhanced by the loose-fitting black sweatshirt and black tights.

  She took the chair vacated by Nate Richmond and, when Sigrid asked her to repeat her name and address for the record, did so with a wobbly smile.

  “You danced in the first scene?”

  “That’s right.” The girl nodded earnestly, her copper braid echoing each movement of her head. “All of us except Emmy. She had the solo dance between our ensemble pieces.”

  To satisfy a point of personal curiosity, Sigrid asked, “Didn’t those pumpkin heads make dancing difficult?”

  “Not really. They’re very light and the neck’s pretty wide, so there’s freedom to move.” She touched an inconspicuous black band that had been sewn around the neckline of her sweatshirt like a fuzzy ribbon. “This Velcro holds the head in place, yet I can take it off or put it on in a flash. The goblin hoods, too, for that matter.”

  “I see. Now, Miss Judson, when that scene was over, in which direction did you exit?”

  “We all came off stage left.”

  Peters’s rough sketch lay on the desk between them and Ginger leaned forward to point to her position with a stubby index finger. “Some of the others went directly up the spiral staircase-that’s where the dressing rooms are- and one of them, I think it was Cliff, went down to the watercooler at the end of the hall.