Baby Doll Games

by Margaret Maron

  “Copying his style, you mean?”

  "Yeah. But what the hell? Eric’s a smart-ass. He’s capable of dancing somebody dancing himself, okay? So it probably was Eric because Win’s brains are in his feet.”

  “What did you mean about Eric rubbing your noses in it?” asked Sigrid, although she suspected she knew the answer.

  “Just talk, okay?”

  She leaned forward on her elbows, her strong chin resting again on her laced fingers, and waited. It was a test of wills which Cliff Delgado was too impatient to win.

  “Okay, okay,” he said sulkily when the silence stretched too uncomfortably. “Eric couldn’t quit gloating that he was the only one in Emmy’s bed these days.”

  “So according to you, he had no reason to kill her?”

  “Who knows what goes through the inscrutable Oriental mind?” Delgado sneered.

  “What about David Orland?” asked Elaine Albee. Delgado raked her deliberately with those intensely blue eyes, but Albee had been mentally undressed by subtler men than he and did not rise to his bait by showing either embarrassment or irritation. If anything, she seemed openly amused and the dancer was left to stew in his own impotence.

  “He’s been in and out enough lately to know the moves,” Delgado admitted at last. “And he probably hates Eric enough.”

  “Did he hate Emmy enough, though?” asked Bernie Peters. “That’s the real question.”

  “Hate Emmy? Nobody hated Emmy, okay?” Delgado gave a sour laugh. “Except maybe my dear wife. And the only dance she can do is The Waltz of the Elephants’ with our refrigerator.”

  Chapter 6

  If Nate Richmond had been, as Elaine Albee suggested, a laid-back version of California dreamin’, Wingate West was, by contrast, practically comatose. In fact, Mick Cluett, sent to fetch West, was on his way backstage to tell Lieutenant Harald that their third male dancer had skipped out on them when he spotted West dozing peacefully on one of the side pews.

  Awakened and pointed toward the office, West appeared before Sigrid with tousled sandy hair, sleepy brown eyes, and a succession of such wide infectious yawns that Albee and Peters were soon unconsciously yawning along in unison.

  Sigrid fought off her own subconscious tendency to make it a chorus and told Cluett to send out for coffee all around; but long before it arrived, she realized that Wingate West was not going to contribute much to their investigation.

  Between yawns, the young man at first denied the existence of any tensions within the troupe. He did dredge up a memory of David Orland’s dismay at being replaced by Eric in Emmy’s affections last spring, and when pressed for information on current rivalries, sleepily admitted, "Yeah, I guess Cliff did have the hots for her.”

  "Ginger Judson, too?”

  "Probably. Everybody liked Emmy.”

  Peters pointed out that like and lust were two differing emotions but West was yawning too deeply to answer.

  He couldn’t recall if Emmy had seemed preoccupied when he saw her that morning, he denied knowing that she and Eric had quarreled, and he professed complete ignorance as to why anyone should have wanted to kill her.

  Sigrid was left with the impression that personal relationships passed right over West’s head and that the actions of his colleagues probably registered very faintly unless they were choreographed to music. He didn’t stop yawning until describing the first dance that afternoon and then told them more than they wanted to know about the dynamics of the scene, exactly how he’d covered when Cliff and Ulrike screwed up near the end and threw Ginger and Eric off, and how disappointing it was that they didn’t get to perform the goblin dance. “Emmy and Rikld and I had an incredible passage near the end like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Rikki? Ulrike Innes?”

  He nodded.

  “Then you must have recognized the dancer who killed Miss Mion,” said Sigrid, momentarily encouraged by such specific observations.

  He shook his head regretfully. “Somebody’d been messing with my things in the dressing room and I couldn’t find my mask at first so I didn’t get downstairs till the last eight bars of their piece. I got to my place just as he lifted her and after that, everything happened too damn fast. Before I got a handle on what was going down, he slammed her onto those spikes; then the lights went out and I felt somebody rush past me.”

  The three police officers took turns asking the same questions in different words, but to no effect. Although wide awake now and no longer yawning, Wingate West claimed that he couldn’t begin to guess who had rushed by him or which direction that person had taken, once past.

  They let him go as Cluett returned with their coffee and West looked at the white foam cups disapprovingly as he passed. "Caffeine’s not good for you,” he said, drawing back from the cup which had been ordered for him. "Causes breast cysts. I’ve got a box of herbal tea bags. Want some?” ^ "We’ll take our chances with the caffeine,” muttered Bernie, already kiting the snap-off lid of his steaming cup toward the wastebasket.

  Ulrike Innes, last on their list of 8th-AV-8 dancers, was twenty-five, a tall slender Valkyrie with fair, almost silver hair that fell to her shoulders and was held back from her smooth forehead by a wide black elastic band. Except that the tip of her thin nose was pink and her eyes were red as from much crying, her long oval face and delicately contoured features could have come straight out of an early fifteenth-century Flemish altarpiece, thought Sigrid, who was partial to late-Gothic art.

  Like the other dancers in the troupe, Innes probably had a trim, well-conditioned body, but she had pulled on a pair of baggy gray warm-up pants while waiting her turn to be questioned and they combined with the oversized black sweatshirt to effectively disguise her form. She also wore soft leather slippers on her bare feet, yet she still shivered as she took the chair opposite the desk.

  “Emmy wondered if we ought to put the heat on,” she told them tremulously, hunching within the loose folds of her sweatshirt, “but we thought we could get through the weekend without it since heating oil's so expensive.”

  Her words made the three police officers aware that the office had gradually cooled over the past two hours. Without the hot stage lights and a large number of warm bodies to maintain the temperature, the theater was indeed growing uncomfortably chilly.

  “We shouldn’t be much longer, ” Sigrid reassured the dancer.

  In his earlier thumbnail descriptions of the company, Roman Tramegra had coupled the tall fair Ulrike Innes with short dark Nate Richmond. Joan of Arc meets Alberich, thought Sigrid, and then gave herself a mental shake. When tired, her subconscious sometimes drew stupid parallels where none existed. Even if he was an inch shorter than her own five-ten, Nate Richmond was nothing like the misshapen little dwarf in Wagner’s Ring cycle, she told herself firmly, and fixed her attention on Innes’s account of her last words with Emmy Mion.

  “We had a quick run-through rehearsal at ten this morning. Nate wanted to check some of the light cues.” Ulrike’s voice softened unconsciously at his name. “Emmy had some new ideas about lighting the goblin scene and they started bouncing suggestions off each other the way they always did.”

  “Did Miss Mion seem preoccupied or upset about anything?”

  The dancer shook her head. “No, no more than any other performance day. Everyone gets keyed up and a little excited. A little crazy, too, I guess.”

  “Crazy how?”

  “Just silly things.” Innes pushed herself far back in die chair, drew her feet up to the front edge of the seat, and clasped her jackknifed knees. “Win had misplaced his pumpkin head-he’s always losing things-and Ginger accused Eric of taking hers, not that it mattered. All the heads were exactly alike. Then a couple of the kids showed up even though they know classes are always canceled on performance days. And Helen had decided Emmy’s ghost dress needed more floating tatters so she was tearing around trying to get Emmy back to her workroom for a last-minute fitting.”

  “That’s Helen Delgad
o, your costume designer?”

  “And set designer and half a dozen other titles, if you’re keeping track,” said Innes, watching Sigrid’s pen move across the notepad. “We all wear interchangeable hats.”

  “Did you see Miss Mion after rehearsal?”

  “She was with Nate when I went in to tell him lunch was ready in the green room. Win had made a huge salad and Ginger’d brought in a loaf of her six-grain bread. There was enough for everybody, but Emmy said Eric had gone out for Italian and they planned to eat here in the office.”

  “I understand she was expecting a phone call. Did she discuss it?”

  “No.”

  Sigrid made a note to question the others about it, then asked Innes to continue.

  “We ate, then Ginger and I went upstairs to change,” said the dancer, stretching her long legs straight out before her with her feet together. “I was putting on my pumpkin head when I noticed that Ginger hadn’t closed the door. The stairwell acts like an echo chamber. If the office door is open, too, and someone speaks loudly down here, you can hear it upstairs.”

  “And what did you and Miss Judson hear?”

  “It didn’t mean anything,” said Ulrike Innes, looking uncomfortable.

  “Then it won’t matter if you tell us,” said Sigrid. “His words weren’t clear, but Ginger went out on the landing and left the door ajar so I could tell that Eric was yelling about something. In just a minute or so, Emmy came upstairs to change and I heard Eric call Ginger a couple of ugly names.”

  “Was Miss Mion angry or upset when she came in?”

  “Not the way you’d think,” Innes said slowly, as if trying to choose the exact words to describe her dead colleague. “She didn’t get mad because Eric was trying to pick a fight with her, but she did tell him to bug off when she thought he was being unfair to Ginger.”

  “Was he being unfair?”

  Ulrike Innes folded her arms across her chest and studied the tips of her slippers. “Maybe, maybe not. The point is that Emmy was almost neurotic about playing fair and doing the right thing-all that truth, justice, and American way of life they try to teach you in Girl Scouts. She actually believed in it. I know that probably sounds unreal because she didn’t care what you did to yourself- for yourself-drugs, sex, stuff like that. That was your own private business as far as she was concerned. But the bedrock stuff that hurt somebody else-cheating, stealing, or hurting someone on purpose-she positively, absolutely wouldn’t stand for it.”

  Her blue eyes filled with tears and she fumbled fruitlessly in her pocket for a handkerchief. “I don’t know if we can hold together without Emmy.”

  There was a box of tissues on a nearby shelf and Bernie Peters handed it to Innes, who took one and blew her nose with a firmness that tried to deny the grief which threatened to overwhelm her. “We all help Helen paint flats and stitch costumes; we all help Nate hoist lights and string extension cords; and we all take turns at housekeeping chores, secretarial duties, or teaching the dance classes. That’s the whole point of being in a repertory-slant-improv company-just like we all take turns dancing the lead.

  “Emmy had the solo today, but she wasn’t what you’d call the star- of 8th-AV-8.” Fresh tears glittered on her long mascaraed eyelashes and her voice trembled. “I think she was its heart, though.”

  Emotion and sentiment always made Sigrid awkward. She pushed back in her chair, mentally distancing herself from the unhappy dancer, and her voice became brusque as she inquired about the last hour of Emmy Mion’s life.

  According to Innes, she and Ginger Judson had finished dressing and, as they went downstairs to join the men, Emmy had followed them onto the landing and told them to break a leg. That was the last time Ulrike Innes heard her speak.

  Their dance had lasted eight minutes and she saw Emmy standing at stage right, ready to slip into her place as soon as Nate killed all the stage lights and everyone exited stage left.

  “Where did you go?”

  “Up the spiral staircase and along the hall to the women’s dressing room.”

  “Did you see any of the others?”

  Innes sat up straight in the chair. “Ever since it happened, I’ve been trying to remember as clearly as possible; but it’s weird. Things we did at rehearsal keep getting mixed in with what we did this afternoon.” She looked at them anxiously. “I don’t want to give any wrong impressions.”

  “We understand,” Sigrid said in a neutral tone.

  With her feet flat on the floor and her hands folded in her lap, almost as if she were testifying from a witness stand, Ulrike Innes said, “To the best of my knowledge, then, Eric and Win went up the stairs ahead of me. I don’t know what Cliff did. Win went into the men’s dressing room at the head of the stairs and Eric went on down to the bathroom.”

  “How did you know who was which?” Sigrid asked. “Weren’t they still wearing those pumpkin heads?”

  “Win took his off as he opened the dressing room door and-I don’t know-there was something about the way he walked down the hall in front of me that made me assume it was Eric and not Cliff. Am I wrong? Was it Cliff?”

  “No, Eric Kee’s' account agrees with yours about that.”

  Reassured, Innes described picking up her goblin hood, then how she’d come back down the other stairs to watch the end of Emmy’s dance.

  “Did you see any of the men between the time you left your dressing room and the time you took up your position at upper stage left?”

  “No, but that doesn’t mean anything because I walked between the wall and the stage screen. Win wasn’t in his place yet when I passed by it, but I glanced across the stage and saw Sergio at the sound board, and Ginger was already in place with her goblin hood on. She liked to watch Emmy improvise, too.”

  The dancer’s voice wobbled, then steadied again.

  “I must have gotten there a few bars before the jack-o’-lantern came onstage because Emmy was dancing alone when I crossed behind the screen and I watched her a minute and then there was a brief instant while I put my hood on and got my mask in place because when I looked again, he was there and she was dancing with him.”

  Sigrid pushed Bernie Peters’s sketch of the stage toward her. “From where you stood. Miss Innes, you should have been able to see all three of the men.”

  "But I couldn’t,” argued the dancer, pointing to Bernie’s representation of the iron fence and scaffold tree. “These blocked my view of Cliff and Eric and I’ve already told you that Win wasn’t there. He doesn’t miss cues but he’s never been a second early either.”

  “Then who was the other dancer?” Sigrid asked bluntly. “Which one of them wanted her dead? And why?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know!" cried the young woman and her shaky composure dissolved into choked sobs.

  Dismayed, Sigrid looked at her two assistants for help.

  “I’ll get her a glass of water,” said Peters, cravenly fleeing for the door while Elaine Albee offered more tissues and soothing words.

  The young woman was obviously too shattered to answer further questions at the moment, so Sigrid nodded when Albee suggested that they continue with Ulrike Innes another time.

  Detective Cluett returned with Peters and as they escorted Innes from the office, Sigrid decided she could use an emotional break and called, “Send in Dr.-what was her name? Dr. Ferrell?”

  Cluett paused in the doorway. “Oh, she left a halfhour ago, Lieutenant. Said she’d catch you later.”

  Resigned, Sigrid rubbed her aching arm and said, “Very well. Let's have Helen Delgado, then.”

  Chapter 7

  Out in the auditorium, as the number of witnesses awaiting their turn to be questioned dwindled and the temperature became increasingly chilly, Roman Tramegra decided there was really no reason he should continue to sit alone on a hard cold pew, especially as he fancied there was warmth and company to be had elsewhere in the theater. Accordingly, he eased his bulk along the row, smiled encourage
ment at poor Sergio Avril, still huddled uncomfortably on a front pew, and when challenged by a uniformed officer stationed at the door which led backstage, said loftily, “It's quite all right, my good man. Lieutenant Harald has already questioned me to her complete satisfaction.”

  Police activity on the stage was winding down as he passed along behind the wing curtains. Such as it was seemed to involve meticulous measurement with a tape rule, the numbers repeated to a young detective busy with a sketch pad.

  Tramegra reached the rear hall just as a tearful Ulrike Innes emerged from the corner office. “Oh, my dear child!” he said and opened his arms to her.

  At the sight of his familiar and sympathetic face, Ulrike pulled away from Peters and collapsed upon his broad chest, her sturdy body wrenched with sobs.

  “There, there,” he soothed, patting her back with one hand while locating his handkerchief with the other. “I shall take care of her,” he told Peters and Cluett and, murmuring reassurance, guided the distraught girl into the bathroom where he washed her fece and smoothed her silver-blond tresses.

  She stood as docilely as a small child, an unexpected turn of character, thought Roman as he straightened her black headband. Ulrike Innes had previously struck him as the troupe s most mature and self-sufficient member, without an ounce of temperament in her makeup. Completely and utterly devoted to Nate Richmond, of course, but with a tranquil, almost maternal devotion which did not disrupt the company and keep it on edge the way Emmy M ion’s artlessly bestowed affection had.

  He soaked a paper towel in cold water, folded it in a long thin pad, and handed it to Ulrike. “Hold this across your eyes for a few minutes and the redness will soon go away.”

  Mutely, she followed his instructions.

  “I never cry,” she said from beneath the wet brown paper. “Never.” She took the towel from her face and leaned across the washbasin to inspect her eyes more closely. “All those questions. And that police lieutenant trying to make me say whether it was Eric or Cliff or Win who hurt Emmy-and suddenly it hit me like a twenty- pound sandbag that Emmy’s dead!”