Murder Takes a Partner

by Haughton Murphy

  “He wasn’t all that fast,” the man continued. “So I kept up with him to the corner, when the cops grabbed him.”

  “How about the knife?” the sergeant asked.

  “Found,” said the woman officer. “Right in the gutter where he’d thrown it. Covered with blood and I’m sure some nice sticky fingerprints. We bagged it and sent it off to the Eighteenth Precinct with the officers who arrested the perp.”

  “You say this was a black kid?” the sergeant asked quietly.

  “Yeah. Black. Twenty years old maybe. Twenty-two at most. And I’d say a junkie by the way he was acting. Higher than a kite,” the woman said.

  “Okay, let me get back to asking some more questions here,” Sergeant Madden said, scanning the mute and fascinated group before him. “Who was the victim? You knew him?” he asked, turning to Frost.

  “Yes. Clifton Holt, Artistic Director of the National Ballet Company.”

  “Anybody see who did it?”

  “I … I don’t know,” Frost answered.

  “Who found him?” the sergeant asked.

  After a pause Vivian Felton, one of the Company’s smallest dancers (with one of the smallest voices) said that she had. A delicate wisp in the best of circumstances, she seemed, in her grief and nervousness, even smaller and more vulnerable than usual.

  “How did you find him?”

  “How? Like, what shape was he in?” Felton asked.

  “No, how, like how did you happen to be where the body was?”

  “I—I—I was going home after rehearsal. I walked out the stage door, and …” She was unable to finish and burst into a flood of tears.

  “Okay, miss, just tell me what you saw. Take your time, and don’t be nervous. We just want to know what happened.”

  Felton continued to sob; further questioning would have to wait until she regained her self-control. While he waited, Madden turned toward Frost and spoke to him out of the hearing of the others.

  “Excuse me, Mr.… um … Frost,” he said. “You said the victim was the director of this theatre?”

  “Yes, officer,” Frost answered coolly. “He was one of the greatest choreographers in America—probably in the world.”

  “Oh, boy. And stabbed by a street-punk junkie.”

  “Officer, is there anything more I can do for you right now?” Frost asked, anxious to get away and make some telephone calls.

  “You didn’t see anything yourself?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “Then I guess not. We’ll want to question the people here, though, who might have seen something.”

  “Fine. Shall I ask people not to leave?”

  “If you would.”

  Frost got the crowd’s attention—no easy task, given the emotionally charged conversations going on through the backstage area—and conveyed the policeman’s request.

  “Reuben, surely that doesn’t mean us!” barked Ambassador Franklin, who, with the other directors, had long since joined the backstage group and been briefed in whispers as to what had happened.

  “I suspect it probably does, Kenneth,” Frost replied.

  “But we didn’t see anything! We were upstairs in the Board meeting!” Franklin pleaded.

  “Kenneth, I’m sure all you have to do is tell the police that when they ask you. The crime was committed by a twenty-year-old black junkie who I am sure you do not resemble in any way. Besides, he’s been arrested, so put your conscience at rest.”

  “What are you trying to say, Reuben?” the angered commodities dealer/Ambassador shouted.

  “Nothing, Kenneth, nothing. Now please excuse me. I have some things to do.” Frost pushed past Franklin, only to run head-on into Andrea Turnbull.

  “What is going on, Reuben?” she demanded. “No one will tell me anything!” Jack Navikoff, who was at her side, was visibly shaking and, Frost thought, was pale, in spite of his assiduously cultivated year-round suntan. He said nothing as Turnbull pressed her question.

  “Andrea, you know as much as I do. Clifton Holt was stabbed outside the theatre by a young black.”

  “Did he kill him?” Turnbull asked.

  Frost thought he detected just a bit too much bloodlust in Turnbull’s question, but let the matter pass.

  “That’s what I mean to find out right now,” Frost said, moving past Turnbull and the silent Navikoff toward the fire stairs. He quickly went through the fire-resistant door and took the stairs to the basement, where the Company’s offices were located. He found Holt’s office unlocked and went in and shut the door. He sat down in Holt’s beaten-up desk chair—Holt seldom used the office and cared not at all that it looked decrepit and was uncomfortable—and tried to organize his thoughts. He had to call the hospital; no question. And he probably should call Teresa Holt, Clifton’s much-put-upon wife. But first he would call Luis Bautista, the City homicide detective who had become his friend several months earlier when they had worked together in solving the murder of his late partner at Chase & Ward, Graham Donovan. Frost was reluctant to admit that the events of the past few minutes had left him tired and a little confused. Bautista could help him out, whether Holt was dead or not—and Frost’s quick look at Holt’s bloody form had not made him optimistic.

  Frost looked through his wallet for Bautista’s private number, which the detective had given him during the Donovan investigation. He retrieved it and dialed the number. His luck was good; Bautista himself answered on the first ring. Frost explained the circumstances and Bautista said he would meet Frost at Tyler Hospital.

  Frost next dialed Information (as he resolutely called it, despite the telephone company’s equally stubborn insistence that what it was providing was “Directory Assistance”), got the hospital number and dialed it. After what seemed an unconscionable amount of switching, he talked to the receptionist in the emergency room, who was set to stonewall him.

  “Mr. Frost, you are not a relative of the patient and therefore I can’t tell you anything,” she announced.

  “That is true, madam,” Frost replied, speaking slowly and deliberately, his voice signaling that the obstructionist to whom he was talking had better pay attention. “I am, however, the Chairman of the Board of the National Ballet Company, where Mr. Holt is the Artistic Director, and I—”

  “That doesn’t matter, Mr. Frost—”

  “And I am also a friend of Avery Jonas, who I believe is the chairman of your board of directors. If I have to call him I will, if you would be good enough to tell me your name.”

  The icy authority in Frost’s voice, and perhaps the substance of his threat as well, changed the woman’s attitude. She asked Frost to hold while she got a report. After three minutes, he thought she had put him into telephone limbo forever, but she came back on the line and reported that Holt was still alive, and that the doctors were working on him in the operating room. She did not have anything additional to tell him.

  Frost put down the telephone and dialed Information again, to get Teresa Holt’s home number. It was, as he feared, unlisted. Frost argued with the operator about the necessity of putting a call through; but again resistance was the order of the day. He hung up on the Directory Assistance operator and, as he did so, spotted Holt’s Rolodex on the desk. Thumbing through to “H,” he found, under “Holt,” an entry for “Teresa” and a number. He dialed it, but reached an answering service that informed him that Mrs. Holt was out of town and would not be back until Friday. At this point he did not feel up to penetrating a third security barrier, so he thanked the answering-service operator and hung up. Besides, the most important thing now seemed to him to be to keep a vigil at the hospital and to see Bautista.

  Frost turned out the overhead light in the office and went out. He hurried toward the fire stairs and then hesitated—did he really want to confront Mrs. Turnbull, Ambassador Franklin and the other members of the Board? The answer was no, so he stopped, got his bearings and figured out how to leave the theatre through the orchestra. Not entirely sure
of himself, he worked his way through dark backstage warrens to the rehearsal stairs connecting the stage with the orchestra. With the grotesque stabbing of Holt fresh in his mind, the dark and unfamiliar territory seemed both sinister and menacing to him. He was glad when he had reached the exit doors on Fifty-fourth Street, and relieved to find that they opened from the inside.

  Sergeant Madden had said no one should leave; but he already felt under the special protection of his friend Detective Bautista. He walked into the street and hailed a cab. Whether Clifton Holt was dead or alive seemed at the moment much more important than answering the routine questions of the police in what was patently an open-and-shut case.

  4

  VIGIL

  Reuben Frost’s cab pulled up in the circular driveway at the emergency entrance of Tyler Hospital. Stepping out, he was momentarily disoriented by the bright neon lights shining against the somber walls of the building. Recovering himself, he walked toward the glass doors marked “EMERGENCY” and pushed one open, his equilibrium being disturbed again by the wails of the sirens of two approaching ambulances.

  As he made his way to the receptionist behind a glass partition, two young doctors in white coats, with stethoscopes around their necks, rushed to the door. Frost correctly took them to be interns; both had been summoned by separate emergency calls to meet the ambulances screeching up to the entrance. Before he could get to the reception desk, orderlies wheeled the newly arrived patients in on rolling stretchers—a wizened old white woman looking more dead than alive and a groaning young black man bleeding prodigiously from a head wound.

  Three people were in line ahead of Frost at the reception desk: a young girl, in obvious pain and clutching her wrist, laboriously answering what seemed to be an endless number of questions being asked by the plump woman filling out a form on the other side of the partition, and two young men staggering and swaying as they waited their turn.

  Frost was impatient. He was, after all, seeking not medical attention but guidance and information. He resented the extensive questioning of the girl at the head of the line—why on earth didn’t they take care of her injured arm instead of subjecting her to a cross-examination?—and realized that he would have to wait, however unwillingly, for the young men in front of him to complete the same process.

  His young male companions did not share his impatience. Both seemed almost asleep as they swayed back and forth. Frost observed them with both curiosity and distaste and concluded that the one nearer him was petrifyingly drunk—a condition Frost recognized—and the other was strung out on some drug—a condition with which he was much less familiar but one he thought he recognized.

  Frost’s good nature was soon stretched further by the arrival of a young black woman carrying a screaming baby, who took her place in the line behind him. The mother was approaching hysteria, and as her panic increased, her tiny child screamed louder and louder. Frost could not see anything manifestly wrong with the youngster, but the combined outcries from the baby and its mother indicated that something was very much amiss.

  Fortunately, Frost was soon facing the woman at the reception window; the first swaying young man had been given a paper cup of liquid—methadone?—on surrendering a pink card that he carried, and the drunk had been summarily told to take a seat—pending ouster by the hospital security staff.

  “Yes?” the fat receptionist officiously said to Frost while, at least in Frost’s imagination, looking him over for symptoms that would justify his incursion on her emergency-room turf.

  “Good evening, madam. I’m here to see about Clifton Holt. I believe he was brought in here around forty-five minutes ago.” He did not make a reference to his intimidating telephone call from the Zacklin.

  “What’s the name?”

  “Holt. H-O-L-T.”

  “Are you next-of-kin?”

  “No, I’m a friend.”

  “Who brought him?”

  “Um, an ambulance. He was stabbed.”

  The woman gave Frost a “What else is new?” look, but consulted a list on a clipboard at the side of the counter where she sat.

  “Clifton Holt?” she asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “I haven’t much to tell you. He’s in surgery now and was in pretty bad shape when he came in.”

  “I want to wait,” Frost said. “What should I do?”

  “I don’t know what to tell you. You can wait here if you like.”

  Frost glanced over at the crowded waiting room: crying babies; men and women in obvious pain clutching the distressed parts of their bodies; nervously smoking wives and husbands, fathers and mothers, waiting for some word from the reaches beyond the room’s institutional-green walls.

  “Do I have a choice?” Frost asked.

  “Not really,” the receptionist said, in her flat voice.

  “Mr. Holt, you know, is—”

  “Oh, Holt. A dancer or something?”

  “Yes, in a manner of speaking.”

  “There’s a reporter here asking about him. And a photographer. You’re a friend of his?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just a moment.”

  The woman picked up the telephone at her side and dialed an internal number.

  “Julie?” she asked. “There’s a man here about this fellow Holt. What’s your name, sir?”

  “Reuben Frost.”

  “Reuben Frost. Says he’s a friend.”

  After a pause, the woman said “Okay” and hung up. “Miss Froelich will be right down, Mr. Frost. She’s our public relations officer. Meanwhile, you can wait over there.” She pointed to the waiting room Frost had earlier viewed with distaste. But his reluctance to go there was diminished by the screams of the baby in its mother’s arms behind him.

  Frost did not sit down on the single remaining plastic seat in the waiting area, but instead stood, awkwardly, leaning against the wall beside the entrance. This is a world I never made, he thought, as he observed the pain, misery and anxiety around him. He reflected on his good fortune in never having been in the emergency room of this or any other hospital. His musings were soon interrupted by an attractive young brunette.

  “Mr. Frost?” she asked, having singled him out instinctively from the wretched group in the waiting room.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Julie Froelich. I’m a public relations officer here at the hospital.”

  “I’m pleased to meet you,” Frost replied.

  “You know Mr. Holt?”

  “Yes. What can you tell me about him?”

  “Not much, I’m afraid. He was in critical condition when he arrived and is now being operated on. We won’t know anything until Dr. Young or one of the other doctors working on him comes out of the operating room. But he’s in good hands, Mr. Frost. She—Dr. Young—is the best.”

  “She?”

  “Yes, Mr. Frost. Abigail Young, our chief surgeon.”

  Frost felt guilty for having asked his question. It had been entirely innocent, but it seemed clear that Ms. Froelich had interpreted it as a sexist one.

  “I see. So what do I do now?”

  “Why don’t you come with me to my office. The press is here, you know, and I want to ask you some questions about the patient.”

  “How did the press find out about this?”

  “How do they ever find out, Mr. Frost? A policeman, or some tipster, must have called them.”

  Frost followed the woman out of the emergency waiting area with relief, though the scene on the other side of the door into the hospital proper was scarcely more comforting—a man having his head bandaged, another having an I.V. inserted in his limp arm, other people groaning on stretchers as they awaited attention. Ms. Froelich guided him quickly through the carnage to a large institutional elevator, not unlike the one backstage at the Zacklin.

  When they had arrived at the woman’s tiny office, she asked Frost to sit down in the metal chair beside her desk. It was soon made evident that she knew Holt was impo
rtant—the arrival of the reporter and the photographer had confirmed that—but it also became clear that she was not quite sure why. Frost enlightened her, using for the second time that evening the phrase “one of the finest living choreographers in America,” and Ms. Froelich seemed duly impressed.

  “Where is this reporter?” Frost asked.

  “Down the hall in one of our reception rooms. He’s from the Press.”

  “Not Arthur Mattison?” Frost asked, thinking with some distaste of the Press’s jack-of-all-trades critic of all the arts, including dance.

  “Stratton. He’s a police reporter who’s been here many times before.”

  “There’s no real reason I should see him, do you think?” Frost said.

  “None at all, Mr. Frost. Unless, of course, you want to.”

  Ms. Froelich’s telephone rang and she picked it up. After a conversation in monosyllables, she reported that Holt was still in the operating room, but that the attending doctors had requested more blood.

  “Not a good sign,” Frost said.

  “No.”

  “Miss Froelich, could I make some calls? I tried to reach Mr. Holt’s wife earlier but was not successful. And there are one or two other calls I should make as well.”

  “Please feel free. I have a couple of other things to do, so you can have this office to yourself for the moment.”

  “How about long-distance?” Frost asked.

  “Just direct-dial on the outside line. The third button.”

  “Thank you very much. Oh, and one other thing. I’m expecting a detective from the Police Department named Luis Bautista. How will he know where to find me?”

  “I’ll call down to Reception and alert them,” the woman said. She did so, and then walked out of the room.

  Left alone, Frost called the backstage number at the theatre and talked to Moira Burgess, NatBallet’s publicity director.

  “I’m afraid Clifton is in a very bad way,” Frost explained. “He’s been in the operating room over an hour now, and they’ve just asked that more blood be brought in. And there’s a reporter here. Some fellow named Stratton from the Press. I think you should get over here. And why don’t you bring Jeb along for moral support?”