Corpse de Ballet (35 page)

As Ruth came inside, first one, then another of the company who chanced to be near the front hall caught sight of her and began to applaud. Drawn by the sound, others appeared from the library and the living room, also clapping and cheering. As Juliet escorted Ruth past them and into the dining room, a sort of corridor of cheering dancers formed around them. Ruth laughed and bowed, as loose and happy as Juliet had ever seen her. But pleased as she was for her friend, Juliet's thoughts were still with Hart. He had stepped back and clapped with the rest of them, as had Elektra; but his blue, intelligent eyes struck Juliet as strange, freighted with a swaggering, bellicose, reckless triumph.

Ryder had come out from the dining room and saluted his wife with a calm, congratulatory kiss on the cheek, a far friendlier greeting than Juliet had seen in the past. She supposed his imminent move to Los Angeles had lessened the tension between them.

In the dining room, the applause at last died down and was replaced by ordinary party chatter.

“Oh, my God, I am so relieved!” Ruth whispered to Juliet as the others went back to enjoying themselves. “I wouldn't do this again for a million dollars. Where's the vodka?”

Juliet hastened to fetch food and drink, but her glance kept shifting uneasily to Hart, now standing by the bar with a newly poured highball in his hand. A moment ago, he had given her a quick, friendly smile, and she had tried to return it naturally, reminding herself that he could not possibly know her suspicions.

And yet … She wondered if Landis might be anywhere she could reach him by phone. She didn't know him well enough to guess what he would do to kill an hour or two in midtown in the middle of the night. She comforted herself with the fact that it was already well past one. If he was coming at all—and he'd said he was—surely it would be soon.

Before she went up for her longed-for smoke, it crossed her mind to enlist Teri's help with the cake she planned to serve at two. She had had it made specially, with sagging tiers and spun-sugar cobwebs, to resemble Miss Havisham's wedding cake. The bakery had done a spectacular job. She would gather everyone in the living room and make a little toast to Ruth before cutting it. But it would not be easy to round up the guests. After a brief search, she found Teri, conveniently already in the kitchen, where she had gone to alert Ames that the ice supply was running out upstairs. The three of them conferred as to the best way to herd the masses down into one room. Then, finally, Juliet went up to the terrace.

Once there, she found that some clever soul had located her Motown collection and substituted them for the CDs she'd left in the stereo. The terrace was flooded with Marvin Gaye's “Going to a Go-Go,” and the dancers (she recognized Olympia, Lily, Nick Sabatino, Alexei, Ryder, and others among them) were bumping and grinding at each other for all they were worth. Juliet, cigarette lit, leaned against the concrete wall and watched for a while, surprised at how down and dirty their dancing was. She supposed that even now, she had only a superficial understanding of the world of ballet.

“Care to cut a rug?”

It was Patrick, thoughtful and self-sacrificing to the last, who had taken pity and invited her merely mortal self onto the floor. She had finished her cigarette and for some time, her hips and shoulders had been twitching. She was longing to dance; but now that the possibility offered, she felt quite unnerved.

“It's all right, no one will watch you,” he encouraged. He leaned over to whisper in her ear, “They only watch themselves. Look at the way they linger by their reflections in the glass door. They can't help it; it's instinctive.”

Seeing he was right, Juliet smiled, slipped out of her shoes and allowed herself to move forward with him. In her devotion to Motown, Juliet Bodine held herself second to no man, and soon she was part of the gyrating mass, happily howling along with The Temptations. The embroidered skirt was not ideal for dancing, but at least the slit allowed for a certain freedom of movement, and she thoroughly enjoyed herself through the better part of a girl-groups compilation. Two
A.M.
was approaching when she finally retired, sweaty and joyful, from the floor. With the idea of fetching a couple of extra chairs (people had started to sit on the ground by the dance floor, their glasses perilously at their feet), she left the populated part of the terrace and went, still shoeless, around to the north-facing side of the wraparound.

This part of the terrace was a mere four feet wide. It was not lit. Juliet chiefly used it for storing extra chaise lounges and garden supplies. Just by the far wall, on the other side of which was her neighbor's terrace, she kept a half-dozen spare occasional tables and chairs. Enjoying the respite from the loud music (“You Haven't Done Nothing” was not nearly so audible here as she would have expected—maybe she would not incur the wrath of all her neighbors?), she went along the narrow corridor between the side of the building and the waist-high concrete wall to disentangle two spindly chairs from the rest. She was awkwardly starting back with them when a short, slender figure appeared in front of her, coming from the main terrace. It stopped, silhouetted against the light. Her mood of exhilaration promptly evaporated and a shiver of dread forked through her chest like lightning. She set down the chairs. She had been wondering where he was.

“Hart?” She noticed the quiver in her own voice and hoped that he would not.

The figure came toward her in silence.

“Hart, is that you?”

She had an impulse to yell for help. Instead, she backed away a few steps toward the restraining wall. She ordered herself to be calm, be a grown up. He could not know her thoughts, even though they seemed to her to announce themselves like the telltale heart.

Yet in fact, when he spoke it was only to say, “Miss Bodine, I've been wanting a word with you.” He smiled. “I want to thank you for helping Ruth get through all that.”

He came closer to her and again, she instinctively took another step back, only to feel her tailbone smack the restraining wall. His Southern accent was unusually strong, almost a drawl. A reek of rum came off him, accompanied by fragrances of cologne and shampoo.

He brought his pale, ascetic face near to hers, so near she could feel his warm breath. “I know
Great Ex
wouldn't be half so fine except for your contribution.”

“Well, thank you, but I'm sure Ruth would have managed,” said Juliet, striving to remove her uneasiness from her tone. But she, too, had been drinking, and her mind was not at its clearest. She tried to move forward as if casually, toward the lighted end of the narrow terrace. “I was just going down—”

But Hayden had planted himself in front of her. He cut off her words. “Will you allow me to kiss your hand?” he asked, still smiling. His white teeth gleamed amid the shadows.

“That's not necessary.”

“Oh, but it would give me such pleasure.”

He made a little bow, a very courtly, balletic little bow, and reached out for her left hand with his right.

Try as she might, Juliet could not stop herself from flinching away. It was only a slight gesture, just the tiniest hesitation before she let him take hold of her hand. But he saw it. She knew at once that he had.

His strong fingers wrapped around her wrist, Hart was suddenly very still. He looked questioningly at her. His smile faded.

“Now, what—?” he began.

Too late, Juliet realized that though he could not read her thoughts, English was not his native language anyway. Body was. He spoke the language of the body fluently; it was his life. He could read every breath and tremble in her, every shift in posture, to the last flutter of her eyelid.

He adjusted his hold on her wrist to make it firmer. Juliet thought of him lifting Elektra into the Madonna pose and a new thrill of fear ran through her.

“You're very nervous,” he observed, gazing straight into her eyes. “Now, what could be troubling you?”

Juliet felt her fear visible on her face. She tried to will it away, tried to smile as she answered, “Oh, it's the party, I guess. I just want it to go well. You know, hostess jitters.”

“Is that so?” drawled Hayden slowly, musingly. “Why, you're as jumpy as a jackrabbit.”

Around the corner, even as he spoke, the Stevie Wonder song wound down to silence. Suddenly, blessedly, Juliet heard Teri's whistly voice call over the ensuing quiet, “Everybody downstairs for cake, please! Everybody down to the living room! No more music till after the cake is cut!”

Juliet's tight chest loosened as there followed a murmur of voices, some complaining, others celebratory, and a general shuffling of feet. “Listen, I have to go inside now,” she said. “I'm going to make a toast to Ruth.”

“She'll wait. Tell me what's on your mind.”

“I really think I should—”

Again, she tried to move past him. His fingers tightened around her wrist, crushing the orchid in her old-fashioned corsage.

“She'll wait,” he repeated. “Right now, you are going to tell me exactly,
exactly
what is in your mind. What have you been busy at, Miss Bodine?”

His shrewd, drink-reddened eyes narrowed as he peered at her, and she seemed to see behind them his sharp mind whirring, sorting, piecing things together. “You know,” he said deliberately, “my roommate Frank told me a policeman phoned him just a week ago to ask if he had missed some drugs. Did you know that?”

A second went by, then another. Juliet only stared at him, her heart thumping. “Let go of me,” she finally said, her voice dry, hoarse.

“I think you did know that,” he went on, ignoring her. “I think that was the same policeman you sat next to at Anton's memorial.”

Juliet felt herself go paler. She remembered glimpsing Hart there, but had not realized he had seen her.

“That man interviewed me,” he said. “Victorine mentioned he phoned her last week, too, to ask if she was missing some medicine. I think you've been giving that detective ideas. Now, haven't you?”

His grasp on her wrist tightened yet more. Then he twisted her arm up and, frighteningly, bent it behind her.

“Let me go.” Her voice came out as no more than a whisper, her mouth dry, her throat clenched. “I want to go inside now.”

“I don't think so.”

Somehow, with some dancer's art Juliet would never be able to explain, Hart caught hold of her waist with his free hand and lifted her up. Before she knew it, she was sitting unsteadily on the wall, both her arms bent painfully behind her back, Hart's fingers clamped around each of her wrists. He was so close to her that she could feel the tense rise and fall of his chest in her own.

“You've been waiting, haven't you?” he said. “You know something. Or you think you do. But you've been waiting till the show opened, so you wouldn't wreck it for your friend. What is it?”

He leaned even closer to her, leaned so that she was tipped back, began to lose her balance. If he let go suddenly, she thought, she might topple backward. She thought of what Murray had said about letting a suspect stew, about how long Hart had been alone with his guilt, dreading discovery (and maybe hoping for it, too?), suspecting every odd glance from his friends and colleagues.

It occurred to her to raise her legs and slam her feet into his chest, but without even her high heels to spike into him, she might only succeed in catapulting herself backwards. Her heart seemed to thud in her ears as loudly as if it were inside her skull. A sort of cloud descended in front of her eyes and she began to feel dizzy. But here, now, that could be disastrous—

“Hart?”

The voice was a woman's. Elektra, Juliet realized a moment later, her heart calming slightly. She was coming toward them, alone.

“I was looking for you, there's a cake downstairs,” Elektra said. But her tone was distracted, her mind not on her words, and her small face, Juliet saw as her sight cleared and her momentary vertigo abated, was alive with puzzlement.

She came a few steps closer and stopped, peering at Hayden through the gloom.

“Hart, what are you doing?”

“Nothing, just having a talk,” he said. “Why don't you go downstairs ahead of me?”

“A talk? Is that Juliet Bodine? Why are you holding her like that? What's the matter with you?”

She stood staring at her partner of so many years, her attention gradually more focused, her eyes increasingly serious. Hayden had still not released the pressure on Juliet's wrists, had not stopped tilting her backward. Juliet wanted to speak but, as in a nightmare, now seemed unable to make a sound.

“Lek, there's no reason for you to be a part of this. Please go downstairs. Now.”

Hayden was becoming increasingly agitated and, no doubt without his realizing it, his voice had gotten louder. Elektra had come nearly halfway down the narrow terrace. Several yards behind her, Juliet suddenly saw a neat blond head appear around the corner from the main terrace, then disappear almost at once. Hart, who evidently had not seen it, renewed his grip on Juliet and spread her arms apart, raising them as if preparing to force her finally over the side. Juliet began to pray. How surprised God must be to hear from her after all this while.

Yet He must have remembered who she was, because in the very next moment, she found her voice.

“Hart killed your baby, Elektra,” she said, her already aching arms stretched like wings behind her. “He caused your miscarriage. Those raisins he fed you that day had medicine in them, an abortion drug—”

Hayden, enraged, gave her arms a sudden jerk. Juliet squawked in terror. Elektra leapt forward and grabbed her partner by the elbows, pulling him back. She couldn't make him let go of Juliet, but she changed the balance, hampering him. Upper-body strength, thought Juliet, teetering on the wall but still alive. The ballerinas had been working out.