Dancing Made Easy (A Flap Tucker Mystery Book 4)

by Phillip DePoy

  “Everyone insisted.” I shrugged. “Plus, I thought it might help. It seems to be bummed up somehow, my so-called thingus. I thought maybe if I exposed it to a little more scrutiny …”

  “The third poison.” Foggy had stood up.

  We all looked at him.

  “You saw spiders and tangos — that’s the first two toxins. The third one’s still out there.”

  It seemed to take us all a little too long to follow his thinking.

  Dally was, as usual, the first to get there. “There’s going to be another murder.”

  24. Lobster Leash

  Only a few minutes later, still against everyone’s loud better judgment, Dally called Detective Huyne. It didn’t take long for him to come to the phone — once he knew who was calling.

  “Sorry to bother you,” she started quickly, “but you know about the three stolen toxins from the CDC. Flap’s come up with a plausible connection between two of them and the two hanging murders, so it occurred to us that —”

  He’d obviously interrupted her, and she shot me a look.

  Then: “That’s right.” She nodded. “I see. Well … there you are then.”

  She smiled at something else he was saying.

  Finally she nodded. “Okay, see you then.” And she hung up.

  “So?” I stared.

  “So he was way ahead of us. He’s having the perimeter of the park staked out so he can nab the people before they hang the third victim.” She blinked. “How’s that for … something?”

  “Good for the police,” Foggy began, “but of course —”

  “That will be just about one step too late for the actual victim.” I finished.

  “They’re already dead,” Foggy tried explaining to Mickey, “before they get hoisted.”

  “I know that.” Mickey sounded a little irritated. “You think I’m thick.”

  Dally smiled. “Before that line of conversation gets way out of control, may I suggest that Mr. Tucker has some further work to do?”

  We all looked at her.

  “She’s right,” Mick said. “You’ve got to figure out who will get iced next — before the actual event.”

  Foggy nodded. “You’ve got to prevent another murder.”

  Daniel gave his mute assent.

  I tried not to succumb to the urgency of the situation. That’s just the sort of thing that makes my little trick fly away like a scared night bird. But I could see, just on the periphery of my unconscious, another dancer swinging in the cold January air.

  “Do you have, maybe,” Dally suggested to Mick, “a quiet room where Mr. Tucker can get away from it all?”

  “Indoors or out?” He directed the question at Dally, like she was my agent.

  “Flap?” She went straight to me.

  “Anyplace is fine. It’s a little cold to go outside,” I said, “but look, I’m not sure it’ll work. It’s been kind of on the blink.”

  “Do your best. That’s all you can do.” Foggy was very philosophical, I thought, with my unconscious.

  “This way.” Mick indicated, and I followed.

  I followed him down a darker hallway to a small study that seemed set for a play; nothing in the room looked like it had ever been used for any real function. It was a set piece.

  Mick turned to me. “I always thought this room would be nice for a quiet moment — if I ever got around to one.”

  I nodded. He split.

  So. Stranger in a strange land, I sat on a nice thirties-style overstuffed chair facing out the window: bare black tree limbs, overcast sky — perfect.

  I breathed in through my nose, imagining the air curling upward through my skull and then subsiding, like a wave, into the pit of my stomach. In. Out. In. Out. The bare limbs seemed to sway in the same rhythm. The curtains on either side of the window seemed to flutter, though the window was closed. Gold began to steal into the corners of my eyes, and even when I blinked once or twice, it was still there.

  Suddenly there was a rush of images like one of those art film collages: barely discernible pattern; difficult-to-catch innuendo. Then it all slammed shut, and I was in the park with Joepye Adder at my side. He was holding a dog leash attached to a lobster that was trying to crawl away from him on the sidewalk.

  The corpse was swaying in an angular fashion. She was moving in a little box step, hanging from the lamppost in the icy morning air. I was staring up at it.

  “What exactly is that thing tied around her neck?”

  “That’s an apron, Flap.”

  Snap.

  I was right out of the the scene and back into Mickey’s unused study. I stood and beat it to the door.

  “Dally?”

  They all heard the sound of my voice, and the urgency in it, and they all appeared in the hall.

  “What?” She got to me first, hand on my shoulder.

  “Is Joepye still in the lockup, did Huyne say?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Joepye?” Foggy’s face betrayed a mild disbelief.

  I tried to take them all in, standing in the darkened hall. “Joepye had something more to do with all this than I thought.” I shot a look at Dally. “And our friend Minnie is somehow involved too.”

  Paul’s voice was quiet. “You got all that in two minutes?”

  “Let me sit down, and I’ll explain it, if I can.”

  We all adjourned back into the parlor, took our seats, and I caught a few deep breaths.

  “Remember,” I began, facing Dally, “my little bit of esoterica about the French writer Gerard de Nerval?”

  “The guy who hanged himself by an apron string, right.” She nodded.

  Everyone else just looked confused.

  “Do you remember the first time,” I asked her, “that I brought it up?”

  “Should I?”

  “When Minnie was over at your place one night last year — don’t remember when — and she was telling us about this idea for her show, the photo exhibition built around the Billie Holiday tunes.”

  “Really?” She sounded skeptical.

  I nodded. “You told her she should include ‘Strange Fruit,’ one of the few songs Billie actually wrote herself, and I brought up the ancillary image of Nerval hanging from a lamppost.”

  “Last summer.” She nodded slowly. “After the party at her place.”

  “I guess.” I shrugged.

  “Man” — she looked at me — “I would never have remembered that.”

  “That’s the benefit of my little gag,” I explained, tapping my forehead. “It’s all up there, you just have to get at it.”

  “How is this about Joepye?” Mick seemed impatient. “I thought we believed he had nothing much to do with all this.”

  I squinted. “Joe’s been drinking for a good while now, and he can barely see straight anymore. And he was loaded the night he took me to find the first dancer. But he's the one who saw that she was hanging by an apron string.”

  “And your eyesight, in fact your perception in general, is far superior to his, you’re saying.” Foggy nodded.

  “At least,” I confirmed.

  “Joepye already knew it was an apron.” Dally’s voice was very cold.

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” I told her, “and I’ve got to believe he somehow knew about the Nerval deal. Maybe I told it to him or maybe — here’s a farfetched notion — Minnie told him about it.”

  “Who is this Minnie?” Paul wanted to know.

  I turned to him. “She’s a kid from the Atlanta College of Art, over at the High Museum —”

  “And the second victim.” Dally finished, still very chilly-sounding.

  “Well, I’ll be.” Daniel nodded.

  “What?” I said.

  “Well, in my poking around about Joepye and Beth Dane being at my party? It could be just a coincidence, but Beth Dane? One of her odd jobs when she wasn’t … entertaining? She was a life model at the Atlanta College of Art.”

  Foggy leaned in Mic
key’s direction. “She would pose in the nude for the students.”

  Mickey turned to me. “Do you see why I might want to bust this guy in the head? He’s always treating me like I don’t know shinola.” Then he looked at Foggy. “I know what a life model is, Ignatz.”

  “Ignatz?” Foggy was amused. “Is that supposed to be some sort of insult?”

  “Take it how you like.” Mick’s voice was harsher.

  “Boys.” Dally jumped in. “Put a collar on all that for two seconds, could you?” She whipped her head around to face me. “I already know what you think of coincidence. Didn’t you mention some charcoal sketches at Beth’s hovel?”

  I was right with her. “There’s a connection between Minnie and Beth … and Joepye. Even if it’s just that they met when Minnie was sketching Beth in life class at college, right?”

  “I’ll admit,” Mickey said slowly, “that I don’t quite get all this. Are you saying that Joepye is the murderer?”

  “Not likely.” I started slowly. “I still think he doesn’t have the wherewithal to manage this kind of a scene, let alone think it up in the first place. Still, he had something to do with all this.”

  Dally squinted. “But he had help, you’re implying.”

  “Yes.” I said it like I knew what I was talking about. “Somebody who could think it all up, manage to move around a lot of the paperwork involved at the police station, for example, hustle things through the system — an operator.”

  “Who?” Mick looked suspiciously at Foggy.

  Foggy returned the look in spades.

  But Dally’s eyes gradually got bigger. “You’re not suggesting …” She turned her head my way like the slow and certain advent of dawn. “It couldn’t be.”

  “Yes, it could.” I stood and moved for the door. It suddenly all made sense: why he’d be so hot with me for no apparent reason. “It could very well be that not-so-secret-admirer of yours, Burnish Huyne.”

  25. An Actor Prepares

  Ordinarily I like to think of myself as a live-and-let-live sort of person. But when someone’s living interferes with someone else’s being alive, I occasionally get involved.

  And in this particular case, I felt I had to speak directly with the man in question. Dally did all manner of insisting, but in the end I dropped her off at the club and went home to call Huyne on my own. Better to aim your arrows without anyone looking over your shoulder.

  So:

  “Huyne.” He sounded tense.

  “Detective.” I tried to sound jolly. “It’s Flap Tucker.”

  “What is it? Ms. Oglethorpe already called and told me your news flash, like everybody in town didn’t already know there could be a third murder in the offing.”

  Ah, so he was still not in the best of moods. “Well,” I began soothingly, “maybe I have something else to offer.”

  He obviously wasn’t buying. “Like you said, I can look it up. Now, if there’s nothing else —”

  “As a matter of fact, there is.” What the hell, I thought, dive in. I’ve often gotten brave and stupid confused. Since I was on the phone where he couldn’t get at me right away. I was wrong he’d maybe laugh. I was right he’d probably come after me. Even better. Then I could maybe trick him up and finish our tale as the hero. So I dove: “I have the crazy idea in my mind that you yourself have something to do with these murders.”

  Silence. He didn’t immediately object. So I dug a deeper hole. “I don’t say this out of any malice. I just think that hustling paperwork through the police bureaucracy seems to have played a key part in all these proceedings — what with the laughable assertion that these kids are suicides, for example, and you’re at the heart of that possibility.”

  Still no response, which only meant trouble, I thought. But I kept hammering. “Not to mention, on a personal level, your strange change of heart in our relationship as I got closer and closer to the actual foundation of the events.”

  Long moment of silence.

  “Finished?” He didn’t even sound perturbed.

  “Well …” because I wasn’t finished.

  “Before you go on. I want you to know that I think this is the first honest conversation we’ve had since the other night over at Easy. Now, as long as we’re sharing, I think that your main beef with me has something to do with Dalliance Oglethorpe and not a genuine suspicion of murder.”

  He was wrong, but I let him go on.

  “Now, I also think it’s interesting that you and I have come up with some relatively similar theories about what’s going on, and we’ve each suspected the other of being more involved than either of us probably is.”

  “Diction aside” — I smiled coldly into the phone — “I’m with you.”

  “So let me assure you that if I were on the outside looking in, I’d suspect me too, or somebody here in the office. Not of the murders, maybe, but of complicity, most assuredly.”

  “Okay.” I thought I sounded like I believed what he was saying. “So are we back to being pals?”

  “We were never pals,” he said, “but I think we can probably drop all the crap and try working together again — to get all this swept up. It’s a big mess now.”

  “Now?” I had to laugh. “It wasn’t a mess before?”

  “It’s a whole lot more confusing now than it was when this was just another hooker suicide.” I heard the strangeness in his voice.

  “Yes. Well.” I took a deep breath. “You certainly are full of surprises, I’ll give you that.” Turning up the disingenuity: “Why, I half expected you to explode through the phone and come after me with a big police gun.”

  “Could still happen,” he said easily. “But for now I think we have to go to work, don’t you? Save the fun for later. Can you meet me around five-thirty?”

  “Where?”

  “You know the overpass bridge by the small lake at the park?”

  It was a place generally littered with boys’ underwear and used condoms. “Only in passing. You want to meet there?”

  “It’s one of our stakeout points.”

  “Oh. Okay.” I tried to sound convinced. “See you there at five-thirty.”

  We hung up.

  I had never been so completely convinced of my mistrust of another person in my entire adult life. That bridge was too obviously the perfect place to rub out a person such as myself who had stuck his nose in where it didn’t belong. And I called up Dalliance Oglethorpe, as I’d promised to do, and told her just that.

  “And he wants you to meet him where? Under that lovers’ bridge?”

  “Right,” I nodded, “just a little over an hour.”

  “You’re not thinking of going. It’s obvious —”

  “Of course I’m going.” I was firm in that resolve. “How else am I going to get the goods on the guy? Action, that’s what we want now.”

  “Not by yourself, you’re not going, Mr. Action.”

  “Yeah, well.” I shifted the phone to my other ear. “I was thinking I’d give Daniel a call. He’s handy in a situation like that.”

  “Oh, that's a good idea.” Her voice was dripping with what literary types still refer to as irony. “Take a hood to a dark bridge at sunset and gun down a cop. Get arrested and go to prison. See do I care. I won’t wait for you if you get more than twenty years. I’ve told you that before.”

  “You certainly are jumping to a boatload of conclusions.” I was calm. “I just want Daniel to hang around on the periphery … in case. And all I have in mind is confronting the detective with his own evil ways. I’ll also tell him you know all about it, and that’ll give him pause, see? Plus, I’ll use that tape recorder you gave me awhile back to memorialize our little confab.”

  “You’ve still got that little pocket recorder I got you for your birthday?”

  “Sure,” I told her. “Why do you sound so surprised? I love your gifts.”

  “But you never use them. When’s the last time you used those expensive antique file cabinets?”
<
br />   “It’s holding up a fine small wine rack even as we speak.”

  “For your files, Flap. When’s the last time you used them for your files?”

  “Oh. Well, truth be told, that hasn’t taken hold yet —”

  “Never mind. I’m glad you’re using the tape recorder.”

  “It’s neat.”

  “I could leave Hal in charge of the club this evening,” she slipped in. “We’re not that crowded.”

  “You know how much you worry about me in situations like this? Well, I worry about you twice as much. Mostly because I’m a bigger worrier. You’re a much more stable person. Besides, I’ll need someone to phone in case I get shot up. And if you’re all shot up too, who do I call?”

  “This is making me feel better.” More of that irony.

  “You know what I’m saying?”

  “I do,” she said, “and I don’t like it.”

  “Okay, don’t like it then. I’ll call you the second it’s all over.” I could hear the background noise in the club. “Besides, it sounds like you’ve got work to do.”

  “That’s just the boys finally getting the new men’s room door to close all the way.” She sipped something. “We’re celebrating.”

  “Okay, have one for me, and I’ll call you in a few hours.” I almost hung up. “Dally?”

  “What?” She was trying to sound like she was calm.

  “This isn’t that big a deal. Huyne might be evil, but he doesn’t seem to be stupid, does he? He’s not going to pop me in the park — not when you know all about it, and that’s going to be the first thing out of my mouth when I see the guy. So.”

  “Okay.” She did sound a little better.

  Which only proves that maybe I should have stayed in the theatre-life. I was just that good an actor.

  26. Blackbird Bridge

  At five twenty-five the sun was just beginning to go down behind the bare tree limbs. I’d parked over by the bathhouse and walked deliberately toward the lake and the bridge. I hadn’t seen any evidence of a stakeout, but then, if the guys had been doing their jobs, I guess I wouldn’t. So I tried to pretend that everything was jake.

  Daniel Frank had been out when I’d called him, so I was solo. I didn’t feel I had time to waste looking for him.