Corpse de Ballet (20 page)

He wrote up his report for the day, took care of the press calls, divided the Jansch list into four sections, handed them out and went home. Mohr had died just a few minutes too late to make the tabloids' morning finals. As Murray left the subway and walked through a light rain past a newsstand on Broadway, he imagined the fun they would have with the story tomorrow. Would they go with
PAS DE DEATH
? Or,
BALLET STAR IN FINAL SPIN
?

Chapter Twelve

To Juliet's vexation, Murray Landis allowed nearly four days to go by before contacting her again.

Her distress had several causes. First, she was curious to know what, if anything, he was learning. Next, after their somewhat friendlier encounter at the Jansch, she had thought he might begin to consider her in the light of a helper. Finally, and minimally, she hoped he would stop suspecting her of murder.

Oh, all right, and it would have been polite of him to find he could think of nothing except her strange beauty and magnetic personality.

She might have called him, of course, but something made her hesitate. To her irritation, she had to acknowledge this had partly to do with being “the girl.” The girl did not call the boy; the boy called the girl. The ancient taboo, deeply impressed upon her in childhood by Maggie, the nanny who brought her up, had never lost its force. On a more sensible level, there was the issue of their formal roles, his official status as investigating officer, hers as witness (or, as she feared, suspect). That was for him, not her, to abridge or jettison if he chose.

And anyhow, why
was
he able to think of anything but her strange beauty?

In any case, she had her own pursuits to attend to during the intervening days. Ruth had asked her to come to rehearsal again—the Jansch rehearsed Tuesdays through Saturdays—but Juliet, though tempted, pled her health and stayed home. Fed up with the apparently inextinguishable cold she had contracted in Studio Three, on Friday morning she had asked Ames to run down to the Mid-Manhattan Library and borrow whatever books she could find on parlor games of the 1800s and the etiquette of duels. She needed to consult the parlor game books about a round of Speculation she had written into Chapter Eight. The duels were of interest because it looked as if Lord Morecambe really was going to challenge Sir Edward Rice. She might as well be prepared in case Rice accepted.

Meanwhile, she tucked herself firmly into bed, where she remained the entire weekend, learning, among other bits of information, how to write a “cartel,” or challenge (be brief, avoid strong language, give the cause of offense and the reason it is considered a duty to notice the matter, name a friend, and request the appointing of a time and place). She also observed with interest the similarities between Speculation—a game of property development—and the modern game of Monopoly. After the brief rain, the weather had turned brutally hot, so staying indoors was no sacrifice. By Sunday night, to her great satisfaction, her cold was a sniffle of its former self. On the minus side, however, she was—was she?—a bit raw about the netherbones. On Monday morning, she was definitely itchy. Yeast infection, she diagnosed. She ate a container of yogurt for breakfast and another for lunch, then crossed her fingers. And legs.

Meanwhile, the
Times
had run an obituary of Anton Mohr on Friday. It was poignant and very painful to read. The official formula, “due to an adverse drug interaction, according to a Jansch Company spokesman,” only magnified the terrible sentence that followed: “He was nineteen.” The list of his accomplishments was long, as was the roster of family members who survived him. Juliet made herself turn away from it and read the Weekend section movie reviews instead, but on Saturday they reprinted it, as they did sometimes with obituaries, and she stumbled on it again. There was also a short essay by a dance critic about how risky and high-pressured young dancers' lives could be; the writer cited a number of anorexia-related fatalities among ballerinas and several suicides, clearly implying that Anton had been one of the latter. Sometimes, Juliet thought she was better off in the nineteenth century, where the dead had been dead a good long time.

Ruth called her several times each day. The crowd of paparazzi and reporters lurking in the lobby of the Jansch building had only grown larger on Friday, and that evening, one of the latter managed to trail the choreographer to her apartment. Another somehow got hold of her unlisted phone number and a third snapped her picture as she entered a cab Saturday morning. The Internet gossip columns were evidently gripped by a happy frenzy of rumor and innuendo, and Ruth was beside herself: The title
Great Expectations
was being printed again and again, each time gaining notoriety and losing (she feared) any chance of ever being judged as a work of art. Despite the circus surrounding her, however, she reported making serious headway on the choreography. Then, on Sunday morning, when she finally had a moment to relax, Murray Landis showed up at her place.

“At ten
A.M.
,” she complained to Juliet, phoning her as soon as he'd left. “Unannounced. Don't you think he could have called first?”

Juliet, who was still enjoined from telling Ruth that Murray was an old acquaintance, brushed this objection aside. “What did he want? Did he tell you anything?”

“Tell? No. Just asked. Asked about Anton, about the talcum powder thing, why did I cast him, who liked him, was he upset about anything, what did Greg say when I told him about the rosin, you name it.” Ruth yawned. “God, I hadn't even finished my coffee.” She yawned again, mightily. “Oh, did I tell you the Jansch is planning a memorial service for Anton? His body is being flown home.”

“No, I didn't know.”

“They're going to dance, some of them. It'll be at Cadwell Hall, a week from Monday.”

“That should be interesting,” Juliet said distractedly. Why didn't Landis visit
her?
Did she really seem so sinister? “And how is Hart working out?”

“Oh, he's a demon.” Ruth's whole voice leaped up a few pitches. “He's really quite wonderful. I never dreamed he had so much in him. He actually seems almost”—Ruth paused, then found the word she was looking for—“almost possessed.”

“Really! How wonderful,” echoed Juliet automatically, although something about Ruth's words had struck her as strange. She tried to refocus her attention, but the impression receded as she went on, “And Elektra?”

Now Ruth's voice dropped into its usual register and lost the unwonted enthusiasm. “Elektra seems—I don't know. Distracted. She's cooperative enough, but I don't get the feeling her full attention is with me.”

“Hm. That's a shame,” said Juliet, still distracted herself. Politely, she asked about several of the others—Ryder, Lily, Victorine, Olympia. But Ruth now had eyes only for her stars, and thoughts only for
Great Ex.

“They're all right, I guess. They just seem normal. Not that anything is truly normal over there. A ballet company is like a—I guess like a giant family, almost. An event like Anton's death knocks the spirit out of it for a while. Life goes on, but nobody's quite got the heart. If you came in yourself this week, you could see,” she pointed out.

But Juliet did not promise. It sounded as if Ruth's work was moving forward nicely, and she had work of her own to do. She had enjoyed her weekend of research—she always enjoyed doing research—and for once was looking forward to applying some of it at her desk tomorrow. As for the mystery surrounding Anton's death, the police were on the case. Though she still felt stung by Landis's use of the words “playing private eye,” Juliet judged she would be wisest to go back to being simply Angelica Kestrel-Haven once again.

*   *   *

Landis finally resumed contact with Juliet that Monday night at about nine
P.M.
though not by phoning. Instead, he turned up at her apartment unannounced, just as he had done with Ruth. Juliet had lightly dismissed her friend's squawks of protest about his lack of ceremony, but she had to confess it was inconvenient when it happened to oneself.

Especially since she had gotten into her pajamas at seven o'clock that evening. This was a luxury she often enjoyed. She was dreamily eating peach ice cream on the terrace, looking across the river and thinking about the thousands of mysterious lives being lived in the silent, twinkling habitations of New Jersey, when the house phone buzzed. She dropped her spoon.

“Go away,” she snarled aloud on her way to the intercom. Life wasn't chockablock with sensual perks for single women, but surely private snacks en deshabille ought to be among them.

“Murray Landis is here to see you,” the doorman—Marco, from the sound of his voice—blandly informed her. His tone suggested she must be expecting him, a circumstance so far from the truth that she almost blurted back, “So what?”

Instead, she took a moment to dither, acutely aware of how far short of gravitas her sleeveless, pink-and-white striped cotton PJs fell. In movies—old black-and-white movies, anyway—the heroine always had some fabulous peignoir to slip on, with feathers and a flowing sash. Never mind movies; during the Regency, boudoir apparel was a genus unto itself. Juliet's robe, on the other hand, was made of lavender terrycloth, and when she tied the thick cord around her waist, she had roughly the silhouette of a not particularly athletic koala.

“Ask him to give me a minute before he comes up,” she finally told Marco, then resentfully hurried down the stairs to change.

It was with a perverse feeling of satisfaction that she opened the front door to him a few minutes later wearing an especially ragged pair of cut-off jeans and a National Writers Union sweatshirt. If he wanted fancy, he should have given her some notice.

“Not getting you at a bad time, I hope,” said Murray mechanically—probably his standard alternative greeting to “Police! Freeze!” Juliet thought.

She smiled politely. “Come up to the terrace.”

He followed her up the stairs, but since she held the terrace door open for him, it was he who first observed the pint of Häagen-Dazs now melting on the restraining wall. Muttering, she whisked it off around the corner of the wraparound terrace and chucked it into the narrow, north-facing side, where she stored her gardening things.

Returning, “Can I get you a drink?” she offered.

Murray declined, admired the view, then sat down at the very end of a chaise longue. “I thought you'd be interested in knowing what we've found out so far about Anton Mohr,” he said.

Suppressing an impulse to reply, “Oh yeah? What took you?” Juliet seated herself uncomfortably on a wrought-iron loveseat she had long regretted owning. If he wasn't particularly chummy, at least Landis didn't seem to regard her as public enemy number one.

“First of all,” he briskly announced, “it turns out Mohr had a drug connection right inside the company itself. A member of the corps named Frank Endicott, do you know him? He deals to beef up his income. I gather the dancers don't make very much.”

“A member of the Jansch corps deals drugs?” Juliet was shocked all over again at this evidence of the dancers' human frailty. “Maybe I know his face. I don't recognize the name.”

“He's not in
Great Expectations,
so you might not. He shares a two-bedroom with Hart Hayden—platonic, so they say. He also claims Hayden's not one of his customers. Endicott's a big, tall guy, very skinny? Long head, pale blond hair, those white kind of eyebrows and eyelashes you can hardly see. He wears a couple of silver rings in one ear.”

Juliet nodded as a face appeared in her mind's eye. She had seen him several times, in the lobby mostly, hanging out and chatting with Gayle.

“He's pretty small potatoes as a dealer,” Landis went on, “but he kept Anton supplied with grass and hash.”

“Oh. But not—”

“And Ecstasy,” added Landis. “Endicott says he sold him a dozen hits early in the spring. And Mohr's recent phone records show frequent calls between them,” he added. His voice warmed. “I'm sorry, Jule, I know you didn't think he was the type, and I know you don't like this ending to the story, but there's every good reason to think Mohr was responsible for his own death. His therapist wouldn't say much, but he did tell me Mohr had tried suicide once before. I mean, tried it once,” he amended, as Juliet opened her mouth to object. “Still, this probably was an accident. The Nardil was working, but he'd only been on it a couple of months, and it seems neither the therapist nor the psychopharmacologist who officially prescribed it thought to warn him off illegal substances.”

Juliet said nothing. For the first time, she entertained the possibility that she was wrong altogether. She did not like to be wrong. And, in fact, she was not very often wrong. But maybe the powder in the rosin had been intended for someone else. Or maybe it had been aimed at Anton but unconnected to the fatal Ecstasy.

“What about his soda? Any useful prints on it?”

He shook his head. “The good news about the Coke is that we found someone who saw Mohr buy it, and that person stayed with him all the way from point of purchase to inside the studio. You were right, it came from the vending machine in the lounge. So if anything happened to it, it happened in Studio Three.”

“Who saw him?”

“Your friend Teri Malone. We were lucky, she was one of the first ones we interviewed. You don't think there's any reason to doubt her word, by the way, do you?”

Juliet shook her head.

“Didn't think so. She seems to have climbed out from inside an ear of corn. Those wide open eyes—whew! Powerful vacuum.

“Anyway, she had lunch in the lounge that day and she happened to be sitting near the machine when Mohr came in. She remembers it because he'd never talked to her before, and that day he asked to borrow a quarter. She was thrilled, she doesn't try to hide it. He took the quarter and bought the Coke and she walked with him to Studio Three, apparently delivering a little lecture as they went about how Coke is a diuretic and not a good choice for a dancer about to go to work. That reception or whatever it was that your friend Ruth had arranged was under way when they got there, and Malone says Mohr sat right down and started stretching and never left till the run-through started. She remembers that because she was excited about finally having made contact with him. She positioned herself within easy view and was hoping he'd say more to her. But he didn't. I wouldn't be surprised if she'd planned never to wash the fingers he brushed when he took the quarter. Anton Mohr may have been screwed up, but he sure must have had charisma. Anyway, Malone says she had her eye on him all the time.”