Baby Doll Games

by Margaret Maron

  “All right, Kelsy. What did you know about Mandy?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t you care about catching the person who hurt your sister?”

  “She wasn’t hurt, Detective Albee,” Kelsy said brutally. “She was killed. K-I-L-L-E-D. And anyhow, she wasn’t my whole sister. She was my half-sister.”

  “ I see.

  “No, you don’t see. Look, I’m sorry Mandy’s dead but you guys won’t leave it alone. You keep coming and coming, and every time it makes my mom cry for hours and then she drinks too much and it just screws everything up.”

  Despite her tough words and her years-too-old makeup, a child's grief trembled behind that shaky facade. She clutched a fat pillow to her chest and Elaine flinched to see that her fingernails had been bitten into the quick.

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “Want me to go?”

  “Why’d you come here today anyhow?”

  “Someone else has been killed, Kelsy. One of the dancers at the theater where Amanda had classes.”

  "Yeah, I heard about it at school today. So?”

  “Your sister-sorry. Your half-sister wore her hair in two ponytails the day she died but only one ribbon was found. The dancer who was killed Saturday had the other ribbon on her person. We’re beginning to think she may have been killed because she learned who murdered Amanda.”

  “Oh.”

  Silence grew in the small room as Kelsy buried her chin in the pillow and contemplated her toes. Elaine glanced around again. There was nothing in the room to suggest a younger girl might have shared it, yet somehow Elaine knew that she had.

  As if reading her thoughts, Kelsy swung herself to the floor and pulled out the bottom drawer of a nearby bureau. It was packed full. The teenager pushed aside stuffed animals, some composition notebooks, and a unicorn music box, and brought out a flat wooden box with a hinged lid that locked with a tiny key which Kelsy kept hidden beneath the lamp atop the bureau. Inside the wooden box were a couple of birthday cards, a report card, a red satin ribbon with "Second Place” imprinted in gold letters, and a thick sheaf of familiar-looking black-and- white photographs. Many were blurred and under- or over-exposed, obvious discards which the child had salvaged and claimed for her own; but just as many were duplicates of pictures that still hung on the theater’s office walls.

  Kelsy thumbed through to a group photo of the whole troupe. “Which one was killed?” she asked. “Her?”

  “Yes,” said Elaine. “That’s Emmy Mion.”

  "Mandy liked her a lot. And this one, too. Helen somebody.”

  “Helen Delgado. What about the men?”

  "She had a crush on this guy.” Kelsy found a smudged four-by-six picture of Nate Richmond. There were tack holes in each corner as if the photographer’s own self-portrait might once have found a place on these walls that were now devoted to rock groups. “He let her help him in the darkroom once in a while. Big deal. She used to moon about him all the time. He looks like a wimp to me. Now this guy has sexy eyes, doesn’t he?”

  “This guy" was Wingate West.

  “Did Amanda like him?”

  “I guess. And that one, too. Eric? He’s part Chinese. That one there, though, she didn’t much care for him.”

  “Him” was Cliff Delgado.

  A sudden gust of wind outside rattled the sash and hurled rain against the window.

  “Why didn’t she like him?”

  Kelsy shrugged. “I don’t know. There was just something about him. She said he used to weird out. You know, laugh at things that weren’t funny sometimes. I think he scared her a little bit.” Her voice turned deliberately scornful. “She was such a scaredy-cat about everything anyhow. Afraid of the dark, afraid of ants, afraid of getting yelled at-I mean, just look at her!”

  The eight-by-ten photograph was a three-quarter figure. Hair that had been back-lighted so that its probable mousey brown appeared to be spun from gold. Twin ponytails tied with plaid ribbons. A shy smile that revealed brand-new front teeth. She was not especially pretty nor particularly photogenic, yet her eyes had looked straight into the camera lens and they had been filled with love.

  “Wouldn’t you think a scaredy-cat like that would have enough sense to run away?” Kelsy asked angrily.

  “You sure would, honey,” said Elaine and put her arms around the weeping girl and held her tightly.

  Chapter 20

  Sigrid sat on the stool behind the drawing table where Emmy Mion used to choreograph simple dances for the children and more complex movements for the troupe. She had unpinned pictures from the wall and now the dancer’s small heart-shaped face smiled up at her, circled by photographs of Eric Kee, David Orland, Cliff Delgado, and Wingate West, the four male dancers.

  In a second outer circle she had fanned the photographs of Ginger Judson and Ulrike Innes, the two remaining female dancers, and of Helen Delgado, Nate Richmond, and little Amanda Gillespie.

  She had stared at these faces until she felt she knew their smiling surfaces intimately. Yet what lay beneath remained terra incognita, and it was getting late. She might as well go find Rikki Innes, hear her version of how Sergio Avril had erased the message tape that morning, and then call it a day Wearily she switched off the light over the drafting table and the shadowed eyes sprung into relief Eyes were supposed to be the windows of the soul, Sigrid thought, leaning forward with her elbows on the table and her chin propped in her cupped hands; but these eyes told her nothing.

  The only light in the office now was the desk lamp in the opposite comer and Sigrid sat so motionless that she must have blended into the background clutter, because when the children crept into the room, they seemed unaware of her presence.

  The situation instantly called up a memory that Sigrid had completely forgotten until that moment.

  Seated in a shaded part of her grandmother's herb garden on a late spring day, she had just finished solving a rather complex diagramless crossword puzzle and was enjoying that absurd sense of pleasure which comes from creating an ordered pattern out of random data when a rustle of dry leaves on the other side of the low stone wall caught her attention. Remaining absolutely still, she saw a mother bobwhite lead eight fuzzy chicks over the wall, through a bed of lemon-scented geraniums, and down the graveled path almost to Sigrid’s feet.

  Sigrid was neither a naturalist nor someone who automatically cooed over small baby animals, but that spring morning she had discovered that there was something unexpectedly fascinating about watching wild creatures when they don’t realize they Ye being observed, and she now experienced a similar fascination in watching the three children cross the room as noiselessly as some half-feral animals might cross a forest floor.

  She didn’t move; shed barely blinked; yet, as if they’d suddenly caught her scent, the children froze and three pairs of eyes immediately swung in her direction.

  “We weren’t doing nothing,” said the taller boy.

  “No?" Sigrid asked skeptically. She switched the draftsman’s light back on and the three, two boys and a girl, edged toward the door “Don’t go,” she said. “I want to talk to you.” One of the women had said that some children had been around and underfoot Saturday morning. These children?

  Once again she missed Tillie's help. She was always awkward with children but Tillie had three of his own and could usually achieve an instant rapport. For once, though, she got lucky. The Pennewelf children had grown accustomed to trusting most of the adults connected with the theater and they came over to her willingly enough. In fact, before she could stop him, the younger boy scurried up her legs and onto her lap as nimbly as a tame squirrel.

  “Billy want to see,” said the girl, standing on tiptoe herself to peer over the top of the high drafting table.

  Sigrid went completely rigid. Holding a child on her lap was well outside her normal range of activities.

  Billy didn’t seem to notice. He held up the picture of Emmy Mion for his siblings to see.

  “Em
my!” they chorused.

  He laughed, scooped up the rest of the pictures, and began to show them one by one as if he were a teacher conducting a sort of flash-card drill.

  “Cliff!” said the other two obediently. “Eric… Nate… David… Rikki… Helen!”

  They fell silent before the next picture and Billy turned it around so he could see. Unconsciously putting her hands around his waist so he wouldn’t slip, Sigrid looked over his shoulder and saw that it was the picture of Amanda Gillespie.

  “Do you remember her?” she asked them.

  The older boy and girl stared back silently until the child on her lap nodded.

  “Billy says it’s Mandy,” whispered the girl.

  “She died,” said the older boy.

  “And Emmy yelled about her,” said the girl.

  “Now Emmy’s dead “

  For a moment, Sigrid felt as if she were caught up in a Greek chorus.

  “Who did she yell at?” she asked. “And when? Saturday?”

  Before they could answer (or not answer if so decreed by the tyrannical little choragus on her lap), the spell was snapped by the sudden appearance of Jim Lowry and Elaine Albee, who both looked soaked to the skin as they noisily entered the office.

  Billy slipped through her hands like smoke and the three Pennewelf children vanished from the room.

  “Guess what, Lieutenant?” said Lowry, shaking water from his raincoat. “Emmy Mion called Mrs. Gillespie around noon Saturday, told her she thought she’d found something of Amanda’s, and asked her to call back.”

  “And Mrs. Gillespie finally returned her call late last night with a message that she didn't want whatever it was,” said Albee. She tossed one of the towels on the radiator to Jim and applied a second one briskly to her own head. The rain had turned her loose curls into tight frizz, but the short walk down Eighth Avenue had restored her equilibrium. “The message is probably still on the tape there.”

  “No, it isn’t,” said Sigrid and told them how Sergio Avril had erased it, supposedly by mistake, although she hadn’t yet heard Ulrike Innes’s account. “Was there a reason it took the Gillespie woman two days to respond?”

  “I think she didn’t want to have to talk to anybody here,” Jim said.

  “He’s probably right,” said Elaine and described their interview with the dead child’s mother and half-sister; from the incident of sexual abuse to young Kelsy’s festering grief. “She pretends she doesn’t care, but she’s kept a whole drawerful of Amanda’s favorite things.”

  Sigrid agreed that Amanda's crush on Nate Richmond was predictable, given the gentleness with which he seemed to treat all children, but she wondered if they ought to make too much of the child's latent fears of Cliff Delgado. “It might have been merely a case of his seeming so much more intense than the others.” She told them of her strange session with the Fennewelf children, and Jim was ready to go round them up again, but Sigrid was hesitant. “If you find them alone, fine. But if there are any troupe members around, let it go for now and just bring me Ulrike Innes.”

  Sigrid returned the pictures to the wall. She couldn’t remember the exact order, but doubted if it mattered. They seemed to have been placed there randomly anyhow. By chance this time, Ginger Judson’s wound up beside Emmy Mion’s.

  “Did you know that Mion had decided not to go through with her plans to move in with Judson?” she asked Elaine.

  The younger woman had just discovered the smear of makeup Kelsy Gillespie’s tear-washed face had left on her pale gray blouse and was dabbing at it with the damp towel. “I wondered about that,” she said, looking up. “She’d recently brought most of her clothes to the dressing room upstairs. Do you suppose that’s part of why Judson was so hysterical yesterday?”

  “Perhaps. Roman-Mr. Tramegra-” She turned to get another thumbtack and saw that Elaine was staring at her with bald curiosity. “You wanted to say something, Albee?” she asked icily.

  “No, Lieutenant.” Elaine hastily gave her attention to her soiled blouse.

  “As I’m sure I mentioned, Roman Tramegra is a personal friend. It might, however, prove awkward for him here should the company learn of our friendship, so I expect you and Lowry to keep silent about it.”

  “Certainly, Lieutenant.” Meekly, she spread the damp towel on the radiator to dry.

  Appeased, Sigrid relented slightly. “His presence here may even help us. He seems to think that Emmy Mion told Judson while they were dressing Saturday that she was going to camp out here in the theater for a while until she could find a place of her own.”

  Having dragged two chairs over to the radiator, Elaine draped her raincoat on one, Jim s on the other. “Even if Judson mentioned it to one of the men, what would be so urgent about Mion getting a place of her own that he had to get rid of her right then and there?”

  “Could it be the feet that she was going to camp here in the theater first?” Sigrid asked thoughtfully. “Is there something going on here that one of them wanted to prevent her from discovering?“Well, she got uptight when she thought their synthesizer was stolen property. Maybe it really was,” Elaine suggested. “Maybe this was a transfer point for bootleg electronic equipment?” Distracted, she ran her fingers through her damp hair. “But then, how would that fit in with the Gillespie child and the ribbon Mion found?”

  “Her timing on leaving Kee and moving in here could still be sheer coincidence,” said Sigrid. “We’ll have to-” She broke off as Jim returned with Ulrike Innes. “Sorry to have taken so long, Lieutenant, but Miss Innes had to help the hardware dealer from next door find his three grandchildren.”

  “Those Fennewelfs, ” said Innes, shaking her fair head ruefully. “They’re like little mice the way they dart in and out. Especially Billy. At least the other two are in school most of the day. He only goes a half-day. His grandfather’s always over here looking for him. Take your eyes off him for a moment and he scurries through any little mouse hole.”

  She paused and a pleased smile lit her oval face. “Emmy had already sketched out most of the choreography for our Christmas recital. Billy will be perfect for ‘Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.’ We’ll let him keep scurrying all over the stage so that the narrator has to read the line twice as if to drum it into the mouse that he’s supposed to be still. The children love that sort erf silliness.” The dancer suddenly seemed to remember that she hadn’t been invited to the office to discuss the Christmas recital. “Sorry. You wanted to ask me something, Lieutenant Harald?”

  “Yes, about the telephone message tape. Mr. Avril tells me that you were instructing him on its use when he erased all the messages this morning.”

  “Yes?” she asked with an air of cautiousness.

  “Would you say it was an accident or deliberate, Miss Innes?”

  “A complete accident,” she answered promptly even though her china-blue eyes shied away from Sigrid’s steady gaze. “It was all my fault. I know Sergio’s bad with machinery, but he insisted on helping me this morning and I’m afraid I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

  To demonstrate how it had happened, Innes leaned across the desk. “He was there at the phone and I was over on this side. I told him to press the right button, meaning the one on his right as he faced the machine, and he thought I meant my right. By the time I realized what had happened, half the tape must have been cleaned and if there were any messages on it…Her long hands flew up in a gesture of resignation. ‘Too late.”

  “I see,” said Sigrid. It could have happened that way. On the other hand, if Sergio Avril had wished, he might have willfully misunderstood her directions. By itself it proved nothing.

  “One more thing, Miss Innes. Would you describe for us what happened in the dressing room Saturday shortly before the performance?”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean,” said Innes, nervously pleating the folds of the oversized blue sweatshirt she wore over her leotard and tights.

  “Didn’t you witness a co
nversation between Emmy Mion and Ginger Judson?”

  Y-yes.

  “Is there some reason not to repeat it?” Sigrid asked patiently.

  The young woman seemed to consider. “I guess not,” she decided. “There wasn’t much to it. Emmy merely told Ginger that she’d decided not to take her up on her offer. Emmy wanted to move out of Eric’s place and Ginger had offered to share her place. Emmy said yes and then I suppose she changed her mind.”

  "And how did Miss Judson react to M ion’s announcement?”

  “Well, she got a little upset and ran out of the room,” Innes glanced over at Elaine Albee. “I suppose you told her about Ginger falling apart yesterday?”

  Elaine nodded.

  “Dancers can be as temperamental as actors at times'” said Innes defensively. “It doesn’t mean a thing in the long run. Honestly.”

  “Did she mention it to any of the men, do you think? About Miss Mion’s plans to camp here in the theater for a few days?”

  “I really don’t know. You’ll have to ask her, won’t you?”

  But by the time they were finished with Innes, Ginger Judson had already left and she didn’t answer her telephone.

  “I suppose we might as well call it a day, too,” Sigrid said.

  It was almost dark when they stepped outside, and the rain had thinned to a fine mist that kept the sidewalks wet enough to reflect the gaudy neon lights that flashed and glowed up and down the avenue.

  “Drop you, Lieutenant?” offered Jim. ‘The car’s only a couple of short blocks up.”

  “No, thanks,” she said, slightly disappointed to find the hardware store next door locked tight, its interior dark. She had hoped to see the Pennewelf children again. “I feel like walking.”

  “See you tomorrow,” they called and turned uptown.

  Eighth Avenue was clogged with rush-hour traffic heading north from lower Manhattan. Taxis duked it out with buses at every intersection and there seemed to be more horns and squealing brakes than usual, or was it, Sigrid wondered, because sounds carried better in damp air?