Dead Man Waltzing

  Dead Man Waltzing

  Ella Barrick

  The Grande Dame of the ballroom, Corrinne Blakely, has had a career in dancing for close to fifty years. She's seen, heard and experienced it all. Now she wants to tell all…but, someone out there will do what it takes to keep that from happening. Unfortunately, when she keeled over at lunch, her dining companion was Maurice Goldberg, one of the instructors at Graysin Motion Dance Studio.

  The studio owner, Stacy Graysin, is sad to hear of Corrine's passing but when she hears it was murder and that Maurice is the prime suspect, she knows she needs to start asking questions. Detective Lissy reminds Stacy what happened the last time. How could Stacy forget? She got shot and her studio was set on fire. Eh, minor details!

  Things have been getting back to normal but she just can't let Maurice take the rap for something he didn't do. Besides, she needs Maurice at the studio. Corrine had quite the notorious life during her career including finding time for seven ex-husbands and one of them was Maurice. One of them must have had an axe to grind… or not. Corrine didn't win so many competitions during her career without stepping on some toes.

  Can Stacy dance her way around the numerous suspects and motives to find the right one before Maurice takes his last step on the dance floor?

  What a fun series this one is becoming! I read the first book and really enjoyed it hoping the sequel would be just as good. It is! For cozy fans and for those who like to read a little behind the scenes in the dance world, this will be the perfect fit.

  Ella Barrick

  Dead Man Waltzing

  The second book in the Ballroom Dance Mystery series, 2012

  For my brothers, James and John:

  good brothers and better friends.

  I love you guys.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’m grateful to Dr. Terry McGee and William J. Loskota, PhD, MD, who provided me with the expertise necessary to knock off Corinne Blakely. They gave me enough information on pharmacology and the effects of readily available prescription medicines to kill off another eight or ten books’ worth of characters. Who needs a gun?

  Thanks also to my agent, the fabulous Paige Wheeler, and my editor, the insightful Sandy Harding. (They are both much more than fabulous and insightful, but I didn’t want to use my day’s adjective quota all at once.) I continue to be grateful to my writing buddies, friends, and others who don’t think I’m insane for wanting to be a novelist, and who indulge me by kicking around plot ideas, coming up with titles and character names, and listening to me babble about writing esoterica.

  Finally, thanks and much love to my husband, Thomas, my mother, and my girls for being part of my life. I am constantly astonished and uplifted by their love, generosity, imagination, and general wonderfulness.

  Chapter 1

  “ One, two, three, one, two, three,” I counted, landing heavily on the downbeat for the six elderly couples waltzing around me in my ballroom as rush-hour traffic honked outside in the Old Town Alexandria streets. “Waltzing” was a bit of an exaggeration, since collisions and missteps marred what should have been the graceful flow of the dance. Four of the six couples, though, were beginners, friends from a retirement community who had recently signed up for lessons, and I had hopes they would improve.

  “Keep your frame up,” I suggested, nudging one large man between the shoulder blades. He drew his shoulders back stiffly; all he needed was a blindfold to look like a prisoner facing a firing squad.

  “Better.” I sighed, thinking we could work on relaxing and getting into the feel of the waltz in another couple of weeks. This was only their second lesson.

  A short, plump woman in her seventies stopped moving, causing her even older partner to stumble. Mildred Kensington had been taking lessons at Graysin Motion for months, but hadn’t shown much improvement. Still, she arrived each week with a sunny, pink-lipsticked smile and lots of energy, frequently with a new friend or two in tow. I had a soft spot for the spunky old lady. “Can you show us how to turn again, Stacy?” she asked.

  “Of course.” I glanced toward the door, wondering for the third time where Maurice was. He was supposed to be coteaching this class with me, and it was totally unlike him to forget a class. Closing in on seventy, I suspected, although he looked ten years younger, Maurice Goldberg had worked as a cruise ship dance host before I hired him away to teach at Graysin Motion, my ballroom dance studio in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, just outside the nation’s capital.

  Selecting the least rhythm-challenged of the men, I led him through the steps several times before encouraging the group to try it again. “Weight on your right foot when you offer your partner your left hand,” I reminded the men as I cued up the Strauss CD.

  “Hoover would pick this up faster than I am,” Mildred complained after another circuit of the room.

  Hearing his name, the Great Dane lifted his head and pricked his ears forward. White with black splotches, he usually lay quietly in a pool of sunlight under a window when Mildred came to the studio. No one had ever complained about him and I liked having him around, so he’d become almost a studio mascot. I gave him a surreptitious pat as I passed him, and he thumped his black tail on the floor, not, unfortunately, in tempo.

  “Stop that, Hoover,” Mildred complained. “You’re throwing me off the beat.”

  The class ended fifteen minutes later and the group lingered, poking fun at one another’s dancing as good friends do. The words “elephant,” “rhino,” and “diplodocus” occurred frequently. The early June sun still rode high at six o’clock and laid a yellow sunbeam road where it streamed through the street-facing windows onto the wood floor. Some of the boards showed blackened strips where a fire had charred them a couple months back. I’d asked my refinisher to save the boards, if at all possible, because they were original to the Federal-era town home my great-aunt Laurinda had left me. He’d had to replace some of the more heavily damaged planks, but many of them were the very boards James Madison might have trodden when the house belonged to his cousin.

  Urging the group to practice at home during the week, I shooed them out the door by my office. It led to an exterior staircase that allowed ballroom students to come up to my second-floor dance studio without going through my living quarters on the first floor. A darn fine arrangement. Before Great-aunt Laurinda had left me the house and I’d opened my own studio, I’d lived in an apartment nearly an hour from where I taught and danced, and the hideous commute had left me alternately drained and homicidal.

  I had barely closed the door behind the seniors when a brief knock sounded. Unusual… most students and the instructors walked right in. I opened the door and stood dumbstruck at the sight of the man standing on the small square landing.

  “Detective Lissy,” I finally said. “To what do I owe the”-imposition, intrusion, nuisance-“honor?”

  The man pursed his stretchy, too-red lips and crossed the threshold. Comb furrows tracked through his thinning, dishwater-colored hair, and his head seemed slightly too big for his thin neck. He wore an immaculate suit and a bland tie. He straightened the knot and the gesture slammed me back two months to when he had wanted to arrest me for shooting Rafe Acosta, my dance partner, coowner of Graysin Motion, and former fiancé. I shivered.

  “Ms. Graysin.” Lissy acknowledged me with a sour smile.

  “I’m guessing you’re not here for the Latin class?” I said.

  “Astute of you.” He stepped farther into the narrow hallway and I backed toward my office. “Actually, I’m looking for Mr. Maurice Goldberg and thought I might find him here.”

  “Maurice?” What in the world could the police want with Maurice? “I haven’t seen him this evening. Have you tried his house?”

 
“Now, why didn’t I think of that?” Lissy said with mock dismay. He passed me and poked his head into the ballroom.

  I followed, becoming a little annoyed. “I told you he wasn’t here,” I said. “Why do you need to find him?”

  “It looks much better than the last time I saw it,” Lissy said, ignoring my question. “I like the new drapes.” He gestured to the ivory velvet drapes I’d hung to replace the curtains incinerated by the fire. “Elegant.”

  His critique of my decorating efforts didn’t distract me. “Why do you want Maurice?”

  “You don’t mind if I look around?” Lissy started for the smaller room at the back of the house that we called the “studio” to distinguish it from the “ballroom.”

  “Actually, I do,” I said, stepping in front of him. “Unless you have a search warrant.” Being a murder suspect had taught me a few things.

  Lissy stopped, looking down his sharp nose at me. He was only a few inches taller than my five-foot-six, but he still managed to look down on me. It was an attitude thing more than a physical thing. The way the light from the hallway sconces hit him, I could see every little freckle across his cheeks and earlobes. “You don’t have anything to hide, do you, Ms. Graysin?”

  I balled my hands on my hips. “Tell me why you want Maurice, or say good night.”

  “Perhaps you know Corinne Blakely?” he asked, watching me closely.

  I nodded. Who in the ballroom world didn’t know Corinne Blakely, the grande dame of American ballroom dancing, a former champion, teacher, judge, and competition organizer who was leading the push for ballroom dancing to be admitted as an Olympic sport?

  “I thought so.” He made it sound like I’d admitted something criminal.

  “Good night, Detective,” I said, leading him back toward the door.

  His voice came from just behind me. “Perhaps you haven’t heard that she’s dead?”

  I whirled to face him. “No!”

  “Yes.”

  “How?” Corinne must have been in her seventies; maybe she’d had a heart attack. But that wouldn’t explain Lissy’s presence. I cringed inwardly, awaiting his answer.

  “Murdered.”

  Chapter 2

  Detective Lissy and I stared at each other for a moment, my green eyes meeting his gray ones. Apparently, neither of us wanted to be the first to speak, so the M-word dangled in the silence between us. I cracked first. I frequently wish I had more self-control, but my impulses rule me more often than not.

  “What happened?”

  “That’s what we’d like to talk to Mr. Goldberg about,” Lissy said. Putting an index finger to the framed dance photo on the wall, he straightened it with a little push.

  “Why Maurice?”

  “He was lunching with her when she collapsed. He brought her to the emergency room.”

  Relief flitted through me. “Well, there! If he took her to the ER, he couldn’t have wanted her dead. And if she keeled over while they were eating, maybe it was a heart attack or a stroke. Maybe”-I tried to think of medical conditions that resulted in sudden death-“an aneurysm.”

  “You’ve acquired a medical degree since we last spoke?” Lissy asked, gently sarcastic.

  I glared at him.

  He moved toward the door. “If you see or speak to Mr. Goldberg, please let him know that I’d like to talk to him at his earliest convenience.” He put a dig in the last word. “It’s in his best interest to explain his… disappearance from the hospital as soon as possible.”

  “Of course,” I said, holding the door wide. “Good-bye.” I couldn’t make myself go with a polite, Nice to see you again.

  “I’m sure we’ll chat soon.” He stepped onto the landing and turned to give me a look. He was the kind of man who should’ve had a fedora; he had a 1950s kind of air about him, despite the modern clothes. “Don’t go sticking your nose into this case,” he said. “And you don’t need to bother with that ‘Who, me?’ look. Remember what happened last time.” He started down the stairs with a heavy tread.

  “I caught a murderer and cleared my name,” I called after him.

  He didn’t reply, just lifted a hand in farewell or dismissal, and strode toward his car parked at the curb. It was up to me to add in a whisper, “And got shot and got my studio set on fire.”

  * * *

  Locking the shiny new dead bolt after him and turning out the lights in my office and the ballroom, I walked to the end of the hall where a door marked, PRIVATE, led downstairs to my living quarters. Going downstairs was a bit like leaving the twenty-first century to enter the 1930s; I didn’t have money for new furniture or redecorating, so everything was as it had been when Aunt Laurinda lived here. A fusty lavender velvet settee was near the marble fireplace in the “parlor,” as my great-aunt called it. Scattered about the room were a tarnished silver bowl and porcelain knickknacks, and old-fashioned paintings in heavy frames, including one of Aunt Laurinda as a 1923 debutante. The kitchen was no better, with its mismatched appliances, cracking linoleum floor, and turquoise-tiled countertops, the result of a misguided redecorating experiment in the 1960s. As soon as I had money to spare-in another decade or so-I was redoing the kitchen.

  Finding some leftover salmon from last night’s dinner in the rounded front fridge that Aunt Laurinda probably bought when the Beatles first stormed the States, I worried about Maurice. He was not a murderer. No way. Detective Lissy, as usual, had the wrong end of the stick. I thought how pathetic it was that I could attach the phrase “as usual” to a murder investigation. Considering I lived in an upscale area that I couldn’t hope to have afforded without my aunt’s bequest, I’d come into contact with a lot of homicide cases recently. Okay, two might not count as “a lot” to a police officer, but it seemed like two too many to me.

  Washing my plate in the sink-no dishwasher-I put it in the dish drainer to dry, trying to think where Maurice might be. If he’d been lunching with Corinne Blakely when she fell ill, and had taken her to the hospital, where would he be now? He didn’t have a wife, or any kids that I knew about, so he hadn’t taken refuge with family. I trusted that Detective Lissy had checked at his house, so he apparently wasn’t there. I tried to put myself in Maurice’s place. If I’d seen my lunch partner pitch facedown into the bouillabaisse and had to hang around an ER that smelled of various body fluids, desperation, and nose-singeing cleaners, I’d need a drink.

  I’d met Maurice once, shortly before I hired him, at a little pub around the corner from his house. I thought I could find it again, although I couldn’t quite remember the name. The Fox and Hen? Fox and Hound? I was pretty sure it was something to do with foxes. Pulling the ponytail elastic from my blond hair, I shook it free, ran a brush through it, and changed out of my dance gear into capris, a tank top, and gold sandals. A shower might’ve been a good idea, too, after three hours of back-to-back classes, but I didn’t want to take the time. Within seven minutes, I was out the back door and getting into my yellow Volkswagen Beetle parked under the carport that abutted my tiny courtyard.

  * * *

  Maurice lived west of Old Town proper, in an area dominated by streets named for trees: Linden, Maple, Cedar. Starting from his house on Walnut Street, which had a patrol car parked in front of it-very subtle-I circled the area, searching for the pub. I finally located the Fox and Muskrat on a corner four blocks from Maurice’s place. The parking looked to be on the street, so I found a spot and slid into it, then walked back. The pub anchored a block of stores dropped into the middle of a residential area. Mature trees overhung cracked sidewalks, and the stores, like the pub, all looked like they’d been open since the Woodstock era. I passed a wine store, an antique books and maps shop, and a place selling fabric and sewing supplies that had a lovely quilt patterned with stylized mountains in the window.

  A wooden sign with a top hat-wearing fox poking his cane at a weaselly-looking muskrat swung from a wooden arm over the pub’s door. Why a muskrat? I craned my neck to study the sign, but h
ad to move aside when a patron exited the bar, letting a burp of air-conditioning escape. I caught the door before it could close and went in.

  The place smelled like cigarettes, even though Virginia had a no-smoking law on the books. It took me two seconds to realize the odor wasn’t new; it seeped from the walls, the beamed ceiling, and the wooden floors. In the fifties and sixties, probably every drinker in the place had a cigarette going, and the smoke had, over time, sunk into every fiber of wood in the place. My fascinated mind wondered whether smoke from one of the founding fathers’ pipes still lingered here.

  A small place, the Fox and Muskrat was picturesque veering toward shoddy. It could have been transported in its entirety from an English roadside, complete with pint glasses, snug booths, and scarred oak tables. The dim glow from electric candles centered on each table provided insufficient illumination, and two big-screen TVs over the bar didn’t help much. Two men tossed darts in a desultory way on the far side of the bar. Once my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I spotted Maurice on a stool at the end of the bar, a half-empty yard of ale in front of him, his gaze lifted to the nearest television, where an obscure channel broadcast a cricket match.

  I made my way past a group of thirtyish men arguing about whether Bud or Miller Lite commercials were funnier. They paused, midargument, to eye me as I passed. I ignored them, used to the attention. When you’re blond, stacked, and move like a dancer, men tend to notice you. I slid onto the stool beside Maurice and said, “Hey.”

  After a too-long moment, he lowered his gaze from the television to note my presence. It took another moment before he said, “Anastasia.”

  No matter how hard I try, I can’t convince him to leave off calling me by my real name and use Stacy like everyone else does. He blinked twice, looking perplexed by my presence, and I began to wonder how many yards of ale he’d already drunk.