Dead Man Waltzing

by Ella Barrick

  “You know Virginia has stalking laws, right?” he greeted me.

  “I’m not stalking you!”

  “Hmph.” He turned away to applaud as a team of adolescent boys in red-striped shirts took the field. “My grandson,” he said proudly, pointing to a burly lad throwing balls from the pitcher’s mound. He sounded more human than I’d ever heard him.

  “Looks like he’s got an arm,” I said, parroting something I’d heard my dad say once about an Orioles pitching prospect.

  I’d hoped that praising his grandson would soften Lissy up, but he merely said, “Give it to me.” He kept his eyes on the field while I talked, turning his head to face me only when I’d finished.

  “You want me to arrest Lavinia Fremont?” he said incredulously. “The woman who benefited most from Corinne Blakely’s generosity, whose business was financed by Blakely?” He sounded as if he’d have had the ump throw me out of the game if it were possible.

  “It was blood money,” I said. “In her memoir, Corinne confessed to being the one who orchestrated the attack that cost Lavinia her leg. Listen.” I’d brought the page with me, and I dug it out of my pocket and unfolded it. “It’s from the next-to-last chapter.”

  I began to read. “‘This memoir would be neither complete nor honest without an accounting of what happened in London in 1964 when my best friend, Lavinia, was attacked outside a nightclub and subsequently lost part of her leg and the ability to dance.’” I looked up to gauge Lissy’s reaction, but his face was expressionless. “She goes on to explain about the dance competition and who all was there in London, and then says, ‘To my everlasting shame, I paid a man, a thug, to injure Corinne so she wouldn’t be able to compete. I told him where we’d be and even made sure we lingered at the nightclub until most of the patrons had left. I have regretted it from the moment he jumped out from behind that car. If I could have stopped it, I would have, but it was too late. I watched as he attacked Lavinia, watched as she crumpled to the sidewalk, and listened to her cries of pain. I could try to excuse what I did by talking about my passion for ballroom dance, and how badly I wanted to win the competition, but that would only make me more contemptible. I was so sick with grief and remorse that I could barely dance; indeed, I gave up dancing for several months after that. Everyone thought it was so I could be with Lavinia and help her, but it was because every turn, every chassé, reminded me of what I’d caused to be done. I swear, if I could have traded places with Lavinia on that operating table when the doctors removed her leg, I would have.’”

  I lowered the page, affected as I had been on first reading it by the honesty-belated-and the pain that quivered in the words. “Even though Corinne meant only to put Lavinia out of commission for a week or so, she’s the reason her friend had to have her leg amputated. She felt so guilty about it that she helped Lavinia financially-”

  “Helped her get on her feet,” Lissy said with mordant humor.

  I winced and continued. “She put up the money to start Lavinia’s design studio and did what she could to funnel business Lavinia’s way. All because she felt genuinely awful about what she’d done.”

  “Perhaps you’ll explain why Fremont waited until now to get her revenge?” Lissy asked, politely skeptical.

  “Because she didn’t know Corinne was behind it!”

  Cheers erupted around us, and the boys on the field headed for the dugout while a green-shirted team took up positions around the bases and in the outfield. The scent of hot dogs drifted our way, and I realized I was hungry, but not hungry enough to eat a hot dog.

  “And since the book isn’t published, she found out about the scheme how?” His tone was not-so-politely skeptical now.

  “Because Corinne told her.”

  He looked at me from under his brows. “Ms. Graysin-”

  “No, really. Corinne told each of the people mentioned in the book-well, maybe not all of them, but the major players-what she was writing about. Greta Monk knew. Marco Ingelido knew. Maurice knew. I’m sure her son and grandson knew something about what she was writing about them. She talked to everyone. She must have talked to Lavinia Fremont, but Lavinia didn’t mention that when we talked, which proves she had something to hide.” I finished triumphantly and leaned back, bumping into someone’s knees. “Sorry,” I muttered to the man behind me.

  “In each of those cases, Ms. Graysin, Blakely was revealing something negative about another individual; maybe you’re right and she felt some obligation to warn them. With the Fremont tale, however, she was confessing to something herself, not outing someone else’s secret, so I don’t see that she’d have the same motivation to discuss it in advance.”

  I’d been through it fifty times in my mind and I knew I was right. Frustrated with what I saw as Lissy’s deliberate obtuseness, I started, “Detective-”

  “Ssh!” His grandson had come up to bat. I resigned myself and watched as the kid whiffed the first pitch, fouled the second one, and then connected with the third one to send the ball skittering between first and second bases. When he arrived, panting, at first base, he turned to grin at his grandpa, and Lissy gave him a thumbs-up. If I’d thought his pleasure in his grandson’s accomplishment would soften him up, I was in for a disappointment.

  “Go away, Ms. Graysin,” Lissy said. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do for your friend, but you have no evidence. Nada. Nothing but a story made up of speculation and wishful thinking.”

  “But-” I stopped. “What if I had proof?”

  “If you had evidence, we could talk.” His tone made it plain he didn’t think we’d be conversing anytime soon.

  * * *

  Without giving a lot of thought to what I was going to do next, I pointed my Beetle toward Washington, D.C. At this hour on a Friday evening, most of the traffic was crawling out of the city, so I didn’t hit any major traffic jams. As a result, I slid into a curbside parking space a block from Lavinia Fremont’s shop at half past seven. The sun was low on the horizon, still providing plenty of light, but stretching shadows halfway across the street. A Middle Eastern restaurant offered sidewalk tables, and the scent of falafel mingled strangely with exhaust. Diners laughed, and a belly dancer emerged as I made my way toward Lavinia Fremont’s studio.

  The door was locked, and a “closed” sign hung in the window. I bit my lip. I’d rushed over here without a real plan, in my usual impulsive way, and now I didn’t know what to do. I stepped back on the sidewalk and craned my neck. A light shone from the windows above the shop; I thought Lavinia lived up there. A taupe-painted door to the left of the shop had a sign above its doorbell that read, PRIVATE RESIDENCE. NO SOLICITATION. I wasn’t a salesperson. I rang the bell.

  Nothing happened for several minutes. I was about to give up and go home to formulate a better plan-heck, any plan-when I heard footsteps descending the stairs. “Yes?” Lavinia called from inside the safely closed door.

  “It’s Stacy Graysin, Lavinia. May I talk to you for a moment?”

  The door eased open a crack, stopped by a chain, and half of Lavinia’s face appeared. She was makeupless, and her severely red hair made a stark contrast with her pale, tissue-frail skin. “Stacy!” She sounded astonished to see that it was really me. “What on earth-”

  “I know it’s late, and I shouldn’t bother you at home, but it’s about Corinne. May I come in?”

  She hesitated long enough for me to know she considered my appearance on her doorstep an imposition, and then pulled the door wider after removing the chain. “I suppose so.” Her voice was querulous; she sounded a lot like my Nana Graysin did once she decided she was old and decrepit, not like the vibrant Lavinia I was used to.

  She wore a gray chenille robe, and I followed her up the stairs, conscious of her one bony, blue-veined ankle bare above a black, moccasin-style slipper, and the hard, too-uniform flesh color of the prosthetic. Her apartment door stood open, light spilling onto the landing, and she gestured for me to precede her inside. I looked around
curiously, noting a sofa and love seat covered in pale green velvet, with striped pillows and a patterned rug providing contrast. Framed photos were the only art on the walls. I moved closer to study them, smiling at the 1960s hairdos and fashions of the ballroom dancers. An auburn-haired dancer in an ice blue gown caught my eye. I half turned to Lavinia, who stood watching me. “You?”

  She nodded. “Me and Ricky.” I realized with a start that there were no dance photos in her design studio, no photos of her at all. Glancing at the collection on her walls, I also realized that all the displayed pictures predated the attack in London. Suddenly uncomfortable, I backed away. A dining nook beyond the seating area held a round table and four chairs in a warm wood of some kind, and a single bowl of soup and glass of wine sat on the shiny tabletop.

  “I interrupted your dinner,” I said, feeling worse and worse about my invasion. “I’m sorry.”

  Lavinia shrugged as if to say, You’re here now, and offered me some soup. “Chicken barley,” she said. “A family recipe.”

  “It smells delicious,” I said, accepting.

  Limping into the galley-style kitchen, she ladled soup into an eggplant-colored bowl and handed it to me. “Wine?”

  “I’m driving.”

  Without asking, she poured me a glass of water, carried it to the table, and seated herself. “I assume you’re not here to talk about dresses?” she said with a hint of asperity. She sounded more like the usual Lavinia, and I relaxed a tad.

  “No. I wanted to talk about Corinne.”

  Lavinia nodded. “There’s something about a funeral that brings out the need to tell stories, isn’t there?”

  That wasn’t exactly it, but I nodded. “You were best friends.”

  Lavinia spooned up soup and didn’t reply.

  “It’s amazing what she did for you after your accident.”

  “I wouldn’t call it an ‘accident.’”

  “The attack.” I let the words sit, trying to prod her into saying something. No joy. We ate for a moment in silence, and I glugged some water, beginning to wish I’d accepted the wine. Finally, I said, “I read Corinne’s manuscript.”

  That brought Lavinia’s head up. She observed me through narrowed eyes. “I heard she never finished it.”

  “Oh, she did,” I said. “Her housekeeper-Mrs. Laughlin-took it over after Corinne’s death.”

  “Stole it?” Lavinia wasn’t one to pussyfoot around with euphemisms.

  “I guess so. She finished it up, added a bit, and sent it off to the publisher. I guess the book’ll come out in time for the holidays.”

  “Merry Christmas,” Lavinia said in an unjolly voice.

  “She’s got a whole chapter about the trip to London,” I prodded.

  Lavinia downed the rest of her wine and rose to fetch the bottle, her limp more pronounced than earlier. “What does she have to say about it?”

  “I think you know.” There. I said it. I kept my eyes fastened on Lavinia; her gaze flitted to my face and then refocused on the wine bottle as she poured the last of the straw-colored liquid into her glass.

  “I suppose I do know,” she said, and I felt a brief flare of triumph before she continued. “I was there, after all.” Did her steady gaze hold a hint of mockery?

  I expressed my frustration by dropping my spoon into my bowl with a clatter. “She admits to paying some thug to attack you.”

  Lavinia drew her breath in sharply and said, “Oh, my.”

  “‘Oh, my’? You learn your best friend was responsible for an attack that cost you your foot, your ability to dance, and you say, ‘Oh, my’?” Scraping my chair back, I got to my feet. “I think you knew. I think she told you.”

  Lavinia faced me calmly, only her whitened knuckles around the wine bottle’s neck betraying tension. “I’m just surprised that she confessed to it in writing,” she said. “I’ve known for years.”

  “I don’t believe you.” I knew I sounded like an eight-year-old on the playground, but I couldn’t help it. She was skillfully, deftly, cutting the ground from under my feet. By saying she’d known for years, she was building a defense based on Lissy’s logic: Why would she seek revenge all these years after the fact? “I think she told you not long ago, like she told everyone else about what she was writing. I think you felt angry, stunned, betrayed. I think you went off the deep end, that you…” I found I couldn’t utter the accusation out loud.

  “That I killed her?”

  I nodded, taken aback by the grief in her voice.

  “We buried my best friend today, and you show up here accusing me of causing her death. I didn’t think you were so callous, Stacy.” Before I could respond, she asked, “Have you ever experienced betrayal?”

  An image of Rafe in bed with Solange, of her red hair splayed across my pillows, of pale skin, gasps, and the scent of sex, overpowered my mind. I nodded.

  As if reading my thoughts, she said, “Oh, men. Men don’t count.” Finally putting down the wine bottle, she walked to the table and gathered up our bowls and spoons, transporting them to the sink. The sound of rushing water played over her next words. “I mean betrayed by a friend. By someone you trusted, someone you shared secrets and dreams with, someone you thought believed in you, supported you, loved you.”

  I thought of Danielle, my mom, my good friends from high school and beyond. There’d been the usual sniping and making up, the waxing and wanings of friendship, but no scar-making betrayals. Unless you counted my mom deciding she would rather hang out with her horses than with us. “No.”

  She nodded, as if I’d confirmed something. “No. So you can’t possibly hope to understand how I felt when Corinne told… When I discovered that she paid someone to hurt me.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “No one could understand who hasn’t been through it,” she half whispered, and I wondered whether she was thinking of juries.

  Part of me wanted to comfort her, and part of me wanted to snap, Get over it already. We all have to deal with betrayals of one kind or another, with disappointment, with tragedy. So I stood there like a dolt, not knowing what to do or say.

  “Corinne helped me come to terms with the loss of my foot. She set me up in business. She held me while I cried, got me to AA when I took to drinking to deal with the disappointment of never dancing again.” She saw me glance at the wine bottle, and half laughed. “I don’t think I was really an alcoholic-just headed that way. I’ve drunk socially for decades now with no problem. So it was like finding out that my whole life was built on quicksand when she told me. I knew how old-time explorers must have felt upon learning the world was round; their whole worldview was called into question, everything they believed turned overnight into a lie, a falsehood.”

  She slid a cutting board and knife into the soapy water, and her hair swung forward as she scrubbed them, hiding her face. “I think I could have forgiven the attack,” she said, her voice little more than the rasp of an autumn leaf against a window. “It was the lying. The years and years of lying. The friendship I believed in, counted on, was a big pile of lies, no more substantial than clouds seen from an airplane window, seemingly so thick and soft they look like they’d cushion you when you jump into them. But when you make the leap, you fall straight through them. To the ground. To death.”

  The intensity in her voice creeped me out a bit. “So you ground up some cold tablets and put them in her heart medicine. You were her friend-you knew what kinds of meds she was on. I’m sure it wasn’t hard to find an opportunity to slip the bottle out of her purse and doctor a few pills. Or maybe you did it on a visit to her house, sneaking the bottle out of the medicine cabinet.”

  “There was no guarantee it would kill her.”

  That sounded perilously close to an admission of guilt. My brief flash of elation was cut short when she turned to face me, a large chopping knife in her hand. My gaze froze to it and I stumbled back a step. Lavinia looked confused for a moment, then startled. “I’m not a murderer! I wouldn�
�t hurt you.” She laid the knife on the counter and I breathed again, conscious of my heart still going thumpity-thump against my ribs.

  I needed to get out of here. I’d pushed as much as I could push, and Lavinia hadn’t cracked. I was completely convinced she’d killed Corinne, but I didn’t have any more solid evidence to offer Lissy than I’d had when I walked in here. “Maurice shouldn’t have to pay for what you did, Lavinia. He’s going to trial, and there’s a good chance he’ll be convicted.”

  “The evidence is only circumstantial,” she said, a hint of uncertainty in her voice.

  “It’s the painting,” I improvised, playing on that uncertainty. “It’s motive. He was with her when she died, he could have substituted the poisoned pills for her heart medicine anytime over the weekend, and she left him a painting worth millions. Means, opportunity, and motive, as the cops say. He’s screwed.”

  I waited a beat, hoping… for what? That she’d leap in a taxi and drive straight to the nearest police station to confess? After a moment, it became clear she wasn’t going to say anything more. Feeling tears start to my eyes, I hurried to the door, glancing back when I reached it. Lavinia stood by the sink, tugging her robe around herself as if she were cold, and tucking her hands into her armpits.

  I left.

  Chapter 32

  A rude pounding on my door woke me early Saturday morning. I glanced at the digital clock on my bedside. Six twenty-eight. Who in the world was at my door at this ungodly hour? My mind leaped to my mom, my dad, Danielle. Something had happened to one of them. Swinging my legs out of bed, I grabbed my robe and shrugged into it as I made for the door. A peek out the slit of a window beside the door showed me Detective Lissy. Oh, no. A homicide cop on my doorstep at this hour wouldn’t be good news.

  Fumbling with the lock, I jerked the door wide, anxiety making my heart pound in my chest. “Is it my sister? My mom or dad? What’s happened?”

  Lissy showed me an irate face, not one pulled down by having to impart tragic news. He was immaculately turned out, even at this hour, in a dark suit, crisp shirt, and patterned tie. “Your sister? What? Oh. No, your family is fine.”