Corpse de Ballet (19 page)

Fales shook his heavy head in agreement. For some reason, Juliet wanted to strangle him.

“Now, why don't you come back with us and peek in the window and tell us a little who's who, okay?” Landis went on. “I'll keep an eye out for anyone passing by.”

Juliet did not move and he came close enough to put an arm lightly around her shoulders. “It's very rough, it's rough, I realize that,” he said. “It's a terrible thing to see a human being come apart. I'm truly sorry. I'll help you. Now, come with me.”

Gently but inexorably, he began to walk her toward the door to the hallway. His Doc Martens thumped on the floor. Fales's loafers scuffled behind them. Intellectually, Juliet appreciated Landis's sympathetic words, but in her stomach, she wished he would take his arm away from her shoulders. She didn't feel like being mollified. She felt like screaming—screaming bloody murder.

“Boy, I sure wish you hadn't taken that bottle home with you last night.” Murray sighed as he turned the doorknob with his free hand. “It's not going to be much use as official evidence, I'm afraid. Oh yeah, and that reminds me, Jule,” he added casually, letting Fales hold the door for them as he walked her out, “have you ever been fingerprinted?”

Chapter Eleven

Murray Landis had never enjoyed examining the residence of a homicide victim. If the body was there, you wanted to run away. But you had to go close instead. You wanted to cover it up. But you had to observe and probe.

Still, for him, it was even worse if the victim had died somewhere else. Especially if it was someone who lived alone. You unlocked the door and there was the box of Total still out on the table. There was the bowl in the sink, the last flakes dried in the last drops of milk. There was the
Daily News,
opened to whatever, an ad for a car, a sports column. Maybe you'd find a note scribbled in the margin: “Buy light bulbs.” Everything screamed, “This guy woke up, went out the door and fell off the edge of the earth.” Murray thought he would rather watch three autopsies than enter the dwelling of one dead guy who lived by himself.

However, police work was not a series of options. It was a series of imperatives: You had to see the guy cut up, you had to go into his place. In the beginning, he had enjoyed having people's private affairs be his business. He was an inquisitive person and this gave him a reason to ask lots of questions. But in the past few years, the answers had started to bother him. Did you know this lady you raped? Did you know it's illegal to enter the playground without a child? Are you aware of the laws regarding firearms in this state? What kind of answers could you expect to questions like that?

This shadow series he had started, a lot of it had to do with crime and criminals. The dark side of people, what they tried to hide. But he preferred to think about it as an aesthetic development, kind of a joke about form and content. Also about the surface, the illusion of depth, the two-dimensionality of painting. And about materials. And monetary value, collectibility. It was playful, but the shadow pieces were also sometimes really evocative. They grabbed your eye and baffled it, made you uneasy, made you think about how your brain wants to decipher meaning from an image. At least they made him think of that. He was experimenting now with multiple light sources, so some shadows were darker than others.

There weren't any shadows to speak of in Anton Mohr's apartment the afternoon he and Fales walked in. The place had only two smallish windows facing a dark courtyard. Anyway, the day was hot, sultry, and the sky overcast. It would probably rain in an hour or two.

Mohr might be the king of ballet, but he had been renting a one-room apartment on the third floor of a five-story walk-up, the same place another dancer from the Jansch used to live. A Jansch administrator named Anita Perez had gotten Mohr's immigration papers in order and helped him settle down in New York, and had known this place was about to be vacant. She had probably never seen it, Landis figured. She probably only knew it was in a decent neighborhood and charged reasonable rent. It was not the kind of place you would recommend to a person with a history of depression, or any person you wished well. It was small. The floor was cheap linoleum and the ceiling lower than average. The kitchenette was supposed to be hidden behind folding, slatted wooden doors, but half of one door had sustained an accident that left a dozen or so slats missing. The windows were obscured by businesslike, black antiburglar gates. The air was as hot and still as if no one had been in here in months. Murray couldn't help comparing it to the last apartment he'd visited, Bodine's place. Boy, was she sitting pretty.

Roaches scattered as Fales flicked on the glaring overhead light.

At least Mohr had done what he could to perk up his dwelling place. A four-poster double bed, set so that it angled out on a diagonal from one corner, formed the centerpiece of the room. It was covered with black-and-white sheets and a satiny black quilt. Sheepskin rugs were scattered around it, and framed ballet posters (some featuring Mohr) hung on the walls. A small wall unit held a handful of books about dance and fitness, an answering machine, a small television set and a stereo system, plus a sizable collection of jazz and classical CDs. A black lacquered Chinese folding screen created a small alcove Mohr had used for exercise: there were a set of weights, some mats and some rather exotic gizmos for stretching and the like. Near the kitchenette was a single table that served, by the look of it, as coffee table, desk, and dining table. Though most of the place was tidy enough (the inevitable cereal bowl sat upside down in a dishrack beside the sink), this table was covered with piles of paper, much of it unopened mail.

The light on the answering machine was flashing and Fales, with a nod at Landis, went to play back the messages. There was the usual whirr and click, then the mechanical announcement: “Three messages.”

The first confirmed a dental appointment scheduled for next Monday.

“Jeez I hate dead guys,” said Landis, a ridiculous comment but one he could not help making. Why did their ends have to be so abrupt?

“Next message,” said the mechanical voice.

“Anton, it's Frank. Listen, I have something I think would interest you. Give me a call if you're up for it.”

The detectives exchanged glances. Murray had worked with Fales before on two or three homicides. He was lazy—he never did anything Murray didn't specifically ask him to do—but he was smart.

“Dope dealer?” Murray asked.

“Ten to one,” Fales agreed.

Meanwhile, a woman's voice had replaced Frank the dealer's.

“Hi Anton, this is Amanda,” she began (or, more accurately, “Hi Anton, this is Amanda?”). “A friend of mine, Courtney? We're going to Club Paradiso this Saturday night, about midnight.” (“About midnight?”) “Want to come? I thought maybe we could all three have some fun together.” Her voice dissolved into giggles as she finally made the statement, then conveniently left her number. When she hung up, the phone clattered for a while, as if she had missed the cradle.

“At least he didn't let his depression keep him home at night,” observed Fales, after the two men had traded glances again.

“Look, Tom, what do you say you take his outside life and I do the ballet company?” Murray suggested, starting to paw through the papers (bills, letters, ballet programs) on the single table. “You talk to Amanda there, and the dope dealer, assuming that's who Frank is, and I'll start bringing the dancers down to the station.”

“You're not going to investigate this?” Fales asked.

“Yeah, I am. I'll start, anyway. Put a day or two in.” Landis's accent was thick as he said this, his voice blunt as a hammer. He didn't want Fales to think he was willing to jump however high Juliet Bodine said to. But he didn't believe she was at all likely to be involved in any wrongdoing. And he did, in fact, have a certain respect for her opinion. Though he'd seldom thought of her since college, he remembered her clearly. Indeed, a lush, tantalizing wave of interest had swept through him at first sight of her. It came back to him that, in college, if he had not been involved with Mona, he'd have tried to get involved with her. She had that kind of soft, well-cared-for beauty that always got to him, that smell of sheltered abundance. Murray had always, God help him, been drawn to the daughters of affluence.

And invariably resented them, too.

In any case, Juliet Bodine always had been smart. And she had been right about the Coke for sure. “If there's nothing there, we'll drop it,” he added now. “I just don't want to go too fast and miss something. You know what I mean?”

Fales's eyebrows twitched and Landis could see that he wanted to say No, I do not know what you mean. But he didn't say anything. That was another good thing about Fales.

“I'm going back to the studio, get a couple of lists, maybe talk to a couple of people,” Landis went on. “You'll sift through this crap?” He held up a handful of Jansch schedules and junk mail. “And get the phone records and follow up. I'll check his locker over at the Jansch. I want to call the I.N.S. too, see if they know something, maybe even get them on to Interpol, what the heck. For a nineteen-year-old, the guy traveled a lot. Oh, and I'll try his shrink.”

“Good luck,” said Fales, rolling his eyes. He had tried to get shrinks to talk three or four times, but no way. Patient confidentiality. Civil rights, thought Fales disgustedly, sitting down on the bed to read.

*   *   *

There were sixty-three dancers in the Jansch Repertory Ballet Troupe, plus four ballet mistresses, two ballet masters, four company pianists, the press director and her three underlings, the production manager and his staff of twenty electricians, carpenters, wardrobe assistants, and so on; the artistic director, the executive director, the part-time physical therapist and her massage therapist, the receptionist, the bookkeeper and a dozen or so assorted secretaries, administrative assistants, and gophers. Not every single one of these people had been on the premises on Wednesday, July 14, but the list of those who had topped a hundred. And that was not to mention the day's visitors: a couple of board members, a couple of messenger boys, three volunteer fund-raisers who came in to make calls, a writer from
Dance
magazine who had interviewed Max Devijian, an air-conditioning repair man and his crew of two, a woman who said she was the wife of one of the soloists but turned out to be an incensed girlfriend, the vendor who stocked the food-and-drinks machine (Landis made a tick against his name), all the guests for the run-through, and Juliet Bodine.

Landis had no problem with interviewing all hundred-whatever of them, but he wished he felt more convinced there was something to interview them about. He sat at his desk for a moment, thinking, then picked up the phone and called the Jansch.

“This is Detective Murray Landis. Public relations, please.”

When Gretchen Manning herself came on the line, “Listen, could you put together copies of whatever press files you maintain for the company members?” asked Landis. “PR, features, brochures, whatever. I know it's a lot of copying, but it would help.”

Manning eagerly answered that she would be thrilled to messenger any number of photocopies to Detective Landis, immediately or sooner. Landis was pretty sure she would also have named her firstborn after him, or flown him to Tahiti, or done any other little favor likely to keep him happy and quiet about the case. It was after four
P.M.
by the time he phoned her, and the press was all over this story. Dozens of messages from the P.D. press office regarding calls from various media outlets had been sitting on his desk when he got back. Some bright spark from the
Post
had even managed to get out to Mohr's apartment and waylay Landis when he left Fales there. Manning and her organization were taking the line that Mohr's death was the result of a bad drug interaction, but that any further details were private and up to his family to release. Now she told Landis she'd spoken to Herr Heinrich Mohr, Anton's father, who assured her that no information would be forthcoming from their end. The Jansch was hoping the whole thing would be a non-story by the time (inevitably, she supposed) the facts became public, she added. And didn't Detective Landis think that would be for the best?

Landis had met Manning earlier in the day, when he had returned to the studio to take a second look around. He had met Max Devijian too, and Fleetwood and a couple of others. He didn't think much of Fleetwood. The guy was too much pose and not enough substance. His dimwit flyer about the “malicious incident” looked pretty damn half-hearted to Murray, the kind of thing bureaucracies do so they can say they did something. Plus it turned out he never had told Mohr about the talcum powder after all—didn't want to “unbalance” him, he claimed, didn't want to “burden” him. Landis would look into that. But he had liked Manning, appreciated her obvious dedication to her job—though he thought she was being a wee bit optimistic about the press. Devijian was a type he knew well, both from his experience as an investigator at various theaters and museums and from his own career in the arts: slick but soulful, phony but sincere, high class but (since he was always asking for money) not. Which was not to say Landis didn't approve of raising money for the arts. Noble profession.

Mohr's locker, when they had unlocked it for him, had not turned up much of interest. More Nardil, this time in the pharmacy bottle with the doctor's name on it. Landis already had a man on that, who had learned an hour ago that the prescribing doctor was a psychopharmacologist who had only met Mohr twice. She had supplied the name of the therapist who referred Mohr to her and Landis had left a message on the guy's machine a few minutes ago. Landis wondered which of them was responsible for failing to warn Mohr about interactions with illegal drugs. He supposed the prescribing doctor was the one who was legally liable, but who knew? This was America. Anyone could sue anyone—give it a shot, anyhow.