A Cat in the Wings: (InterMix)

by Adamson, Lydia

  I had had a little adventure getting up to her loft. She lived on the top floor of a seven-story building on Spring Street, in a converted factory. I had to quickly figure out how to operate the very old-fashioned elevator that sat waiting in the lobby. One had to yank chains and pull levers and manipulate cords to get the thing moving. I felt as though I were a room-service meal going up on a dumbwaiter.

  When I had finally reached her door and she had admitted me, I was delighted to see a wonderful fire roaring away in the fireplace, set in a gargantuan wall of exposed brick. It was the SoHo apartment of dreams—her place was marvelous.

  No sooner had she shown me to a spot on an exquisite art-deco sofa than she said, “I do not believe for a moment that Lucia killed Peter. Not for a moment. I can’t understand why the police don’t look for the killer among the wretched derelicts he knew. Why, he was probably murdered over a cheap bottle of wine! I mean, really! It’s all quite absurd.”

  “I know,” I said. Of course, it would be nice and neat to find the killer among the army of homeless. I chose not to point out to Betty Ann, however, that an argument over a bottle of wine would hardly lead to someone’s taping a gun under Lucia’s desk.

  While Betty Ann went on expressing her belief in Lucia’s innocence, I looked around the room. I saw over on the far wall an arresting head-and-shoulders photo portrait of Dobrynin.

  “That’s from a portfolio that appeared in Vogue,” she said, her gaze having followed mine. “He was beautiful, wasn’t he?”

  I nodded. The face was aquiline. Dobrynin looked like a proud hawk, his golden hair thick and shining on his skull. It was the face of a man who could have been eighteen or forty, a tunelessly handsome face that hinted at a life of debauchery—like that of many a British actor. Dirk Bogarde sprang to mind.

  The few moments we sat there in silence looking at the photograph were enough to change Betty Ann’s mood. Her face clouded over. It was apparent she had not yet recovered from Dobrynin’s death.

  “So many dancers,” she said. “So many great ones. Some even technically better. But Peter was unique. You measured all subsequent performances against his. It was impossible to do otherwise. And it didn’t matter who the choreographer was—Petipa or Balanchine or Ashton or . . . In a way Limon penetrated, caught his essence, more than any other—”

  She stopped in mid-sentence. “I’m sorry. I’m rattling on, aren’t I? You’re not here to listen to my theories. You’re here because of poor Lucia.” She took a candy out of a dish on the coffee table. “Please, ask whatever you like.”

  “When did you last see Peter—prior to the funeral, of course.”

  “Well, the last time was a very unhappy one. A pretty ugly situation. I hadn’t heard from him in over a year, but suddenly he showed up here. This was . . . oh, three years ago. He came here unannounced and I suppose he was drunk, or in some other awful state. He didn’t even ring the bell. He’d gotten into the building somehow and just started up on the elevator. He got stuck between floors and started an unholy row—pressing alarms and screaming. One of my neighbors ended up calling the fire department. Lord, it was a mess. Peter attacked one of the firemen with the extinguisher that hangs in the elevator. I didn’t even know who the madman was until I heard his voice. I got downstairs in time to see the police dragging him off. He was bleeding. And when he saw me he started to scream something about my being responsible for everything. Whatever that meant. He said I wanted to destroy him, to kill him. Then they took him away.

  “And just to put the final, absurd cap on the story, I had a house guest at the time: my mother. It was all so grotesque!”

  “And did you try to locate him after that?”

  My inquiry seemed to irritate her, as if I were questioning her loyalty to the dancer; as if I too were accusing her.

  She stood up and walked closer to the fire.

  “Of course I would have liked to locate him. But what could I do? The police had released him. I tried to find him. Many people did. I even filed a Missing Persons report. But the inquiry ended when it was discovered that his mother was getting postcards from him. The authorities said he obviously did not wish to be ‘found.’

  “And the truth is he really wasn’t ‘lost.’ People regularly claimed to have seen him. Some said they caught sight of him in the street—begging near Columbus Circle. Others said that he sometimes slept in one of those shanties in Riverside Park. It was insane. One didn’t know what to believe.”

  Betty Ann poked at the crackling fire.

  “Do you mind,” I said, “if I ask a personal question of you?”

  “What question?”

  “Did you have . . . Did you ever sleep with Dobrynin?”

  Betty Ann burst into laughter then. I stiffened, startled—and a little insulted.

  She walked over to lay a consoling hand on my arm. “Oh, please don’t think I’m laughing at you. Believe me, I’m not. I was just thinking of a joke people used to tell. I don’t recall the whole buildup, but the punchline had to do with the technical aspect of the word ‘sleep.’ Peter had truckloads of lovers, but probably very few of them actually slept with him. Like me.”

  She smiled then. “How could you spend time with Peter and not have sex? He was a satyr. The interesting thing was that even though you knew it was just a throwaway for him, you weren’t offended. You looked on it the same way he did—as an amusing way to pass the time. What’s the phrase, ‘a sport and a pastime’? He made you feel good, as if you were rendering a direly needed service.”

  She turned back to the photograph then.

  “Peter was a little too big on throwaways, though. He went too far. And eventually he threw away his career . . . and his art . . . and his life.”

  I could no longer see Betty Ann’s face. She had walked up to the photo and was staring at it intently.

  “I really miss him. His lunacy as well as his art. Lord, was he crazy! He made a small fortune doing a series of sweater ads. Or jeans—whatever. Anyway, he went out and bought a forty-thousand-dollar Jaguar the morning after the check cleared. He left it idling in front of a bar one afternoon. And of course the car was promptly stolen. So what did Peter do? He bought another car—a jeep, for fifteen thousand. Which was towed for illegal parking. When he came out of the restaurant and found it was gone, he borrowed twenty dollars and went home in a cab. Never made the slightest effort to retrieve either of those cars.” She was shaking her head as she came back to join me.

  “Did he have male lovers as well?” I asked. “Sleepovers or otherwise.”

  “I should be very surprised if he didn’t. He was an affirmative-action satyr, if you will. All were welcome.”

  I started to respond with a remark that might not have been in the best taste, but Betty Ann saved me from myself. She held up her hand to interrupt. “It’s time I showed a few manners,” she said. “I have one of those high-tech espresso contraptions. May I offer you some cappuccino?”

  “To be honest, I thought you’d never ask.”

  Off she went. Soon I heard the fierce and bizarrely comforting sucking sounds of the machine at work.

  While she was busy in the kitchen, I went over to get a closer look at the satyr. Dobrynin seemed to be looking just over my right shoulder. I wondered if his sexual liaison with Betty Ann had been the pure fun for her that she had painted it to be. Perhaps he’d looked upon it as akin to going to bed with his kindergarten teacher. I even found myself wondering whether, if I’d known him, I too would have succumbed to his blandishments, become one of his famous shoehorns. I’d always thought of myself as immune to the type. But as the song goes, one never knows, does one?

  The cappuccino was delicious. I drained it greedily. There were still one or two things I wanted to go over with Betty Ann.

  “Tell me,” I said, “do you have any idea how a
derelict with no shoes and no ticket could have gotten into the ballet?”

  She laughed that delightful laugh again.

  “My dear, haven’t you ever heard of second-acting? Why, I thought you were a sophisticated New Yorker.”

  I told her that I was neither sophisticated nor a New Yorker. “But,” I said, “I do know what second-acting is. It’s how students with no money get into the Broadway shows. At the end of the first act, everyone goes out onto the street for a cigarette. When the bell sounds for Act Two, they just walk right in with the crowd. It’s an old gimmick. But Dobrynin was murdered during the first part of the ballet, before there was an intermission.”

  “But what I actually meant,” she explained, “is that there is a way to get into the ballet—as at the theater. A lot of starstruck kids sneak into the State Theater through the maze of underground garages beneath Lincoln Center. From what I understand it’s impossible to get into the Met that way, but the State Theater and Avery Fisher hall are no problem for the initiated.”

  “And if a starstruck kid can do it, why not a canny derelict who knew the place like the palm of his hand?” I wondered aloud.

  I talked with Betty Ann for another forty-five minutes—until all the hard information she had on our hero had been exhausted and her fond reminiscences took over again. I found all of it instructive.

  I rode down to street level in the creaky elevator, mulling over all I’d learned. I liked Betty Ann. I found her forthrightness charming. I hoped she hadn’t killed Peter Dobrynin.

  Chapter 12

  This is where it had all begun.

  I was alone in Mrs. Timmerman’s apartment. I wasn’t sure where the family had gone. I hadn’t been paying very close attention when she phoned to ask me to come. And of course I wasn’t totally alone. There with me was the object of my visit—Belle.

  Belle is a white manx. And as she hippity-hopped around the place, I couldn’t help believing in the lunatic theory that somewhere, deep in the primeval past—very deep—there was a biological connection between Manx cats and rabbits.

  “It’s all your fault, you beauty,” I scolded her as I prepared her meal in the kitchen. “If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have boasted that I could get tickets to that blasted ballet.”

  But she was accepting none of the blame. Nor was she concerned with eating just then. Instead, she let me know that her interest lay in playing her favorite game: kamikaze-leaping off the kitchen table and snagging Aunt Alice’s stockings in the process.

  Despite the occasional strafing, I liked Belle a great deal. Even if, in her attitude toward me, she vacillated between extreme friendliness and extreme enmity. But then, that could have been due to a misconception on Belle’s part; perhaps she thought I was one of the Timmerman children grown up.

  “Okay, Belle,” I announced, sidestepping her claws. “If you’re not going to eat, I’m not going to keep you company in here.”

  I started out of the kitchen. Then I caught a glimpse of Belle on the table, positioning herself for another jump. For the first time I realized that she was a “stumpie” and not a “rumpie.” That is, she wasn’t completely tailless. She had the slightest stump of a tail, but a tail it was.

  “Some day I’ll have to introduce you to Bushy,” I said. “He’s got the rest of your tail, you know.”

  On my way out of the apartment, I stopped to look at a framed photograph that seemed to dominate all the others atop the piano. It showed the Timmermans as newlyweds, arms linked, both dressed in summer white in front of a little stucco guest house at some unnamed beach resort. I was unaccountably touched by the sweetness of their young faces. Then I thought of the hungry strength I’d seen in the face of Dobrynin. The juxtaposition suddenly wearied me. I sat down on the flocked sofa and placed one of the small throw pillows on my lap.

  I knew that I would soon have to report to Lucia’s attorney on the progress of my investigation. There was precious little I could tell Mr. Brodsky. Peter Dobrynin was out of my league, out of my range of experience. All his adoring friends had loved him, they said, pitied him, mourned for him—and ultimately refused to help him. They had probably all had a sexual relationship with him. So if sex was some part of the motive for murder, any one of them could conceivably have killed him.

  But so what? If Dobrynin had indeed been as promiscuous and irresponsible as everyone said, then the list of suspects might well fill up several pages on a legal pad. Any one of the dots in what our mayor had called the “gorgeous mosaic” of New York could have pulled the trigger.

  As for his three lost years, if his closest friends had been unable or unwilling to find him, he must have really covered his tracks with a vengeance. If he had indeed become a classic derelict and been murdered by a peer for a motive as ordinary as a swig of Ripple—as Betty Ann Ellenville had suggested—it was doubtful the killer would ever be found. And that was the worst possible scenario for Lucia Maury.

  The pillow in my lap was brocaded. I ran my palm over the raised design. There were so many questions that kept popping up. Sure, the derelict theory was attractive, and logical in some respects. After all, derelicts do kill other derelicts. The milieu itself is violent. But how many derelicts would be able to muster the skill and foresight needed to plant a weapon so fastidiously? And even if so, why under Lucia’s desk? This “derelict” would have had to have known that Lucia and Dobrynin had been fractious lovers in the past. But while I could picture two derelicts sharing a bottle on some frozen street corner, I couldn’t see them revealing to each other biographical details of their pre-derelict love affairs.

  Belle peeped around the corner. I waved her in. She moved up onto the coffee table, settling on Leni Riefenstahl’s photographic study of the Masai. The cat’s cute, near tail-less rump made me smile. Somewhere in the past I had read about the number of vertebrae in the tail of the average feline. I wondered how many were missing from Belle’s truncated tail.

  She leapt onto my lap. “You lack a good twenty to twenty-five vertebrae, my beauty,” I teased her. “Eat your heart out.”

  She boffed my right shoulder then, only playing—her claws were held in check.

  This white-paw attack was completely harmless, but for some odd reason it resurrected the terrible sight of Peter Dobrynin’s corpse. And in a split-second I realized why. White, bare feet. Clean white feet at the end of long legs, stretched out for all to see on the illumined expanse of the balcony.

  I felt a surge of adrenaline.

  Many derelicts go shoeless, even in winter.

  But his feet were clean.

  There was only one conclusion to be drawn: Dobrynin had entered the State Theater wearing shoes.

  The murderer had removed them.

  A bottle of wine was a stupid enough motive for murder. Was a pair of shoes a better one?

  Or was there some much more convoluted explanation?

  I had no answers yet. But that pumping adrenaline was a very good sign.

  I gathered my things and scooped up the unalert cat for a kiss she rejected. “Belle, my belle,” I told her, “there just may be a little caviar in your future.”

  Chapter 13

  I saw the little red light blinking. Only one call had come in. One was enough.

  “The ballistics report has been submitted.”

  It was the soft, modulated voice of Frank Brodsky.

  “The bullet that killed Mr. Dobrynin on Christmas Eve was fired from the weapon found taped beneath the desk in Lucia’s office. A .25–caliber, semiautomatic, Czech-made handgun.”

  The attorney had spoken the words calmly, as if he were a TV newsreader forecasting mixed clouds and sun.

  I felt a little sick to my stomach. I looked unhappily at Tony, who had hobbled along with me to Brodsky’s office. But Tony seemed more interested in the impressi
ve array of Hudson River paintings than in police ballistics reports.

  “There is no doubt in my mind that the grand jury will indict now,” Brodsky pronounced. “And given the circumstances, it will be for Murder One.”

  “What circumstances?” I asked, a bit too aggressively, almost as though the lawyer and I were not on the same side. Then I tempered my response with: “After all, Lucia says it isn’t her gun. She doesn’t own a gun.”

  He went on, in even more measured tones. “Ah, but the weapon—the murder weapon—was found in her office, secreted there, the prosecution will say. And of course there was, how shall we say, a troubled history between the two. The grand jury will be made aware that Lucia and the dancer had a romantic involvement years ago. That the affair ended badly. They’ll say Lucia brooded and became increasingly despondent—and vengeful. That she lured Mr. Dobrynin to the theater and murdered him there.

  “Given these factors, and given the predisposition of juries to be severe in their judgments of people with wealth and power, the grand jury will surely find premeditation.”

  He pronounced the word “premeditation” as if he were borrowing it from another, more vulgar, language.

  “And so,” Brodsky continued, “your investigation becomes even more crucial. The process must be stepped up, if you will.”

  He smiled at me and at Tony, as if in deference to our newly declared importance. An awkward silence ensued, until I realized the attorney was simply waiting for my report.

  But what did I have to report? That I had constructed an incomplete biography of the victim? That it looked as if the murderer had made off with Dobrynin’s shoes? I didn’t think that was what Mr. Brodsky wanted for his money—or rather, Lucia’s money.

  “I’ve interviewed several of Dobrynin’s closest friends,” I started. “They all paint a picture of a talented man of insatiable appetites—and utterly out of control.”