Dead Man Waltzing Page 8

  Her focus was past me now, past the display window with the lavender gown, past the view of the busy street outside, all the way back to the 1960s. “We were the best. Absolutely the best. Corinne and her partner were good, but not as good as Ricky and I were. The four of us were invited to the first Professional Latin Championship at Blackpool. Nineteen sixty-four, that was.” She tucked a strand of auburn hair behind one ear and rubbed her fingers together like she wished she had a cigarette. The sun slanting through the window deepened the lines and hollows of her face in a mean way.

  “What happened?” I asked softly.

  “To make a long story short-it’s too late for that, isn’t it?-the four of us were coming out of a nightclub in the wee hours of the night before the competition started. A man jumped us. Corinne screamed. I barely caught sight of him before something slammed into my leg and I fell. The guy took off and Ricky chased him. He didn’t catch up with him, though.

  “At the hospital, the doctors said my leg was broken. I couldn’t dance in the competition. I was devastated. So were the others, Corinne especially. She kept saying, ‘This was your championship, Lavvy. This was your time.’”

  “Did she win?”

  “Corinne and Donald? No. The winners were a married Swiss couple named Kaiser. I’m sure worrying about me distracted Corinne and Donald and cost them their chance at the title, too.”

  “How awful.” I looked at the seventy-year-old woman in front of me, imagining her as a young twenty-something anxious to set the world on fire with her ballroom dancing, excited about competing overseas. She’d been beautiful, I was sure, with glowing auburn hair and the lithe, athletic figure she still had to some degree.

  “Change,” she ordered, unzipping the pink gown.

  I shrugged out of it behind the curtain, draped it over the hanger, and quickly donned my own clothes.

  “Yes, well. It got worse when my leg got infected. The doctors couldn’t get it under control, and eventually they had to amputate below the knee.” She moved away from the dressing room and I heard the ka-thump, ka-thump as she unrolled the fabric bolt on the cutting table. Her voice was brisk as she said, “My dancing career was over, of course. Prosthetics in those days were nothing like they are today. I keep up with that, you know; I read the articles about what they’re able to do for our soldiers who lose limbs in Afghanistan or Iraq and I’m just amazed. The technology these days is wonderful.”

  I popped out from behind the curtain, tucking my blouse in. “Did they ever catch the guy?”

  She shook her head. “No. The police never caught up with him. Their theory was that he was attempting a mugging and panicked, that he hit my leg by accident.”

  “You didn’t agree?”

  “I wasn’t sure. Corinne always maintained that he’d hit me on purpose. And then in the nineties, when that awful Harding person arranged for someone to injure Nancy Kerrigan, hoping to keep her from skating in the Olympics, I began to think about it again. It sounded just like what had happened to me, although of course the Blackpool Dance Festival was not a sporting event on a par with the Olympics, at least not as most people viewed it. That was thirty years after the fact, though, and I didn’t spend much time thinking about it. I’d made a name for myself as a designer by then-Corinne and her first husband loaned me the money to get started and supported me while I went to school and then did an apprenticeship with a fashion house in Paris-and I had almost convinced myself that the attacker had done me a favor. One can work as a designer, you know, for far longer than one can be a competitive athlete of any sort.”

  “Absolutely,” I said, as if my reassurance mattered to her one little bit.

  She gave me a wry look, acknowledging my intent, I thought, and picked up a sketchbook. Her pencil whisked over the page and a dress began to take shape. I peered over her shoulder.

  “I should not have burdened you with my sad history,” she said, concentrating on the page. “It’s not something I think about normally. Just with Corinne’s death…”

  “It’s like part of your history has died,” I said.

  “That’s it,” she said, arching thin brows. “Ricky died years ago-lung cancer-and Donald passed away four or five years back. Now it’s like I’m the only one left who knows that part of my story. Memory is a slippery thing, Stacy. When we’re young, we’re sure that things happened as we remember them, that our recollection is true. As we age… well, I think most of us trust our memories less and, maybe, if we’re honest, admit that ‘truth’ depends on one’s perspective. Now my memory of that time is the only truth left. It’s a strange feeling.”

  I didn’t answer, feeling completely incapable of saying anything worthwhile in the face of her nostalgia and grief. I thought I understood a little of what she was saying, though, since I’d had similar feelings since Rafe’s death. After a respectful moment, I said, “You know, the police arrested Maurice Goldberg for Corinne’s murder.”

  Lavinia’s pencil clattered to the floor. “What?”

  I picked up the pencil and handed it to her. “They’ve released him for now and he’s got a good lawyer, but-”

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said angrily. “Maurice! Why, he’s the best thing that ever happened to Corinne. I let her have what-for when she told me she was divorcing him, but she’d made up her mind.”

  “You knew her better and longer than anyone,” I said. “Did she have any enemies that you know of?”

  “Not before she started writing that memoir,” Lavinia said. “The police asked me the same thing.”

  “So there was no one…?”

  She hesitated, doodling some background around the sketch. “Well, Greta Monk won’t be grieving about Corinne’s death.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “She calls herself a patroness of the arts,” Lavinia said in a tone that conveyed what she thought of such pretension. “She and Corinne ran a dance scholarship charity for several years. It dissolved when Corinne caught her embezzling.”

  “I never heard about that.”

  “The board kept it hush-hush, made a deal where Greta repaid the money and avoided prosecution. Something like that. Anyway, the timing of Corinne’s tell-all couldn’t have been worse for Greta, because she’s in line for a position on the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center, something she’s been lobbying for for decades. A scandal now would mean she could kiss that good-bye.”

  “And Corinne was including the embezzlement story in her book?”

  “She was never happy that Greta got away with it in the first place.”

  Hm. And if what Marco Ingelido said was right, Corinne would’ve made a point of “warning” Greta that she had a starring role in the upcoming book.

  “There.” Lavinia thrust the sketchpad toward me.

  The dress was perfect: tight through the bodice, with off-the-shoulder straps and a skirt that floated away from the body like mist. “It’s divine.”

  “I’ll work something up for Vitaly.” The suggestion of a grin erased years from her face. “That man! Can you pick the pink dress up Sunday afternoon? I know you’re dancing on Monday, but I can’t have it any earlier.”

  “Sure,” I said, straightening. “Thank you, Lavinia.”

  “Of course, Stacy. Always a pleasure.”

  I left, shutting the door carefully behind me to keep the air-conditioning in. Turning to wave as I passed the display window, I saw that the seat by the drawing table was empty.

  Chapter 12

  Danielle lived in a block of apartments west of me, in a quiet area off of Taney Road. The complex was spread over several tree-lined streets and consisted of rectangular, yellowy-tan brick buildings so alike that Danielle had once tried to get into her apartment well after midnight and found herself confronting a pissed-off man holding a baseball bat. She’d been in the wrong building. She never admitted it, but I thought too many margaritas might have been a factor. Parking in the lot outside her building and double-checking to ma
ke sure it was her building, I trotted up the stairs to her second-floor apartment and rang the bell.

  “Come in!”

  I pushed open the door, saying, “Good grief, Dani, this is D.C. Don’t you keep your door locked?” I stood in the two-foot-square foyer delineated by faux-wood flooring to distinguish it from the attached living room, which had the kind of pale brown carpet apartment managers think won’t show dirt or damage. There was a gaping hole where the sofa had sat against the far wall, and the walls themselves were a deep aqua green that made me think of mermaids for some reason, instead of the boring taupe they’d been last time I visited.

  “This is a safe neighborhood.” Her voice came from the kitchen and I tracked her down. She sat on the vinyl floor surrounded by images torn from various decorating magazines and looked up when I came in. With her red hair in a ponytail and no makeup, she looked about fourteen.

  “I am not, not, not going through home fashion magazines,” I said. I’ve never been much of one for obsessing over fabric swatches or room layouts or the kind of makeovers they show in such magazines. Dani, though, has always loved poring over the pages, even as a teenager, when the most she could hope to talk Dad into on the redecorating front was a new bedspread for the room we shared.

  “Just look at this…”

  I scrunched my eyes closed as she held up a page with a jagged edge where she’d torn it out of some magazine.

  “Fine.” She sounded disgruntled but not surprised. Rising from her cross-legged position, she preceded me back to the living room, nudging magazines out of her path as she went.

  We spent forty-five minutes rearranging furniture and talking about possible color combinations before her phone rang and she trotted to the bedroom to answer it. I sat in the worn recliner I’d been urging her to get rid of so she didn’t have to match her new couch to its beige-and-maroon-striped upholstery-ick-and picked up an open photo album from the end table. It took me only a second to realize I was looking at pictures from our last family vacation to Jekyll Island. Mom’s invitation had obviously started Dani on a trek down memory lane.

  Flipping through the pages, I paused at a photo of me and Dani and Nick crouched over a dead jellyfish on the beach, the backs of our legs covered with sand. We’d been arguing about whether the creature was dead or whether we should “rescue” it. Nick’s idea of rescuing it was to put it in the bucket and keep it forever, despite Mom telling him it would die in the car halfway home, and she wasn’t having a bucket of water sloshing around in the backseat, anyway. Dani wanted to return it to the ocean. I was convinced it was already dead and said so repeatedly. In the end, we scooped it up on a shovel and plopped it back in the water, on the off chance. As I looked at more photos, I saw signs of parental tension I hadn’t noticed at the time. In all the family photos, Mom and Dad were at opposite ends, with us three kids between them. We had plenty of photos of Dad reading on the beach or showing Nick how to snorkel, and Mom building sand castles with me or inspecting a butterfly with Dani, but no pictures of the two of them together. I hadn’t thought anything about it at the time, but Dad had slept in the hammock outside, saying he wanted to enjoy the stars, while Mom had the bedroom to herself.

  I felt tears welling and sniffed them back. We’d gone through a couple of hard years after Mom left, but we were fine now. If this album proved anything, it proved that we weren’t by half as happy as I’d thought we were while Mom was still living with us.

  “It was a great vacation, wasn’t it?” Dani said quietly from behind me.

  “It was fun. I’m not sure it was as fun as we thought it was, though, at least not for Mom and Dad.”

  “What do you mean?” Danielle bristled.

  I pointed out what I’d seen in the photos, the tension between our folks, but Dani wasn’t buying it. She was annoyed with me for daring to suggest that the vacation she had convinced herself was perfect in every respect hadn’t been. Taking the album from me, she slapped it closed and slotted it onto a bookshelf. There was a moment of awkward silence before I said, “So, I think a white sofa would really look good against that aqua wall.”

  “Are you insane?” Dani asked, reverting to normal. “White? Do you know how hard that would be to keep clean?”

  We spent the rest of the evening drinking strawberry daiquiris from a frozen mix Dani had left over from a party several months back, and discussing her sofa options. I even broke down and looked at some sofa photos in her decorating magazines. Jekyll Island didn’t come up again.

  Chapter 13

  Friday morning found Tav and me setting up a Graysin Motion table at the expo center for the bridal fair. There wasn’t much setting up for us to do, in truth, not compared to some of the other vendors. Florists had colorful, pungent displays of corsages, bouquets, and flower arrangements bursting with carnations, orchids, roses, lilies, and a host of blooms I couldn’t identify. Bakeries had multitiered cakes on display, some with layers canted at strange angles and iced in every color imaginable, although white predominated. My favorite stood twelve tiers high and looked like a sunset, with tangerine, pink, and yellow layers decked with fresh flowers in the same colors. Mannequins from wedding dress stores wore gowns with skirts wider than Marie Antoinette’s, slim sheaths, and mermaid-style skirts that belled at the bottom like an upside-down champagne glass. Jewelers displayed rings in glass cases. Deejays and bands played discs that showcased their talents and added a festive sound track to the buzz of a thousand brides-to-be, grooms, mothers, wedding planners, and heaven knew who else.

  Dani and I had attended a bridal fair like this one soon after I got engaged to Rafe. Before I found out he was cheating on me. Before I broke it off. Before he died. I’d strolled from table to table, sampling cakes, sniffing bouquets, and generally brimming over with excitement that I was going to be a bride, a wife. Watching the excited brides-to-be flitting from display to display, I wondered sadly how many of them would never walk down the aisle, at least not with the man they were currently engaged to.

  “Weddings are big business,” Tav observed as he fanned a handful of Graysin Motion brochures across the table.

  “The biggest.” I propped up a life-size, 3-D cardboard image of Rafe and me that had been used to advertise our presence at a fund-raising exhibition a couple years back. “Have you ever been married?” I asked impulsively.

  Tav straightened, looking handsome enough to pose for one of the tuxedo ads plastered in the space next to ours. “Once. A long time ago.”

  “Really?” I don’t know why I was surprised. “What happened?”

  “She decided she did not want to be married. It lasted seven months. We were both twenty, far too young to get married.”

  “Are you still in touch with her?”

  He shook his head. “Last I heard, she was working for a television producer in Australia. You?”

  “Nope. Rafe’s as close as I ever got, and you know how that turned out.”

  “My brother was a fool,” he said.

  I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I set the foot-shaped cutouts on the floor in front of our table in a simple waltz sequence. A young brunette who might have been of Indian or Pakistani extraction watched me. “Are you her?” she asked, pointing with her chin at the 3-D stand-up.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m not that flexible,” she said dubiously.

  In the photo, I had my left ankle on Rafe’s shoulder, right leg extended behind me as he dragged me. “That’s the paso doble,” I said. “Probably not what you had in mind for your wedding. The waltz is much easier. Want to try?”

  She shook her head and hurried past.

  “We will get clients from this,” Tav said, noting my disappointed expression. “That dress was an inspired choice.”

  I smoothed the deep orange skirt of the gown I used to wear for international standard competitions. Cut almost to the waist in back, with crisscross straps, it was eye-catching. I’d worn my hair up, like for a compe
tition, but gone easy on the makeup, skipping the false eyelashes that I wore to compete.

  “Orange stands out,” I agreed.

  We weren’t as mobbed as some of the bakery or wedding dress vendors, but a steady trickle of people stopped by to take brochures. Several couples actually signed up for lessons, prompted by Tav’s smooth patter. One or two embarrassed couples even gave it a go, using the cutouts on the floor and my encouragement to guide their first tentative steps.

  Shortly before lunchtime, a bride who looked close to my age stopped in front of the table, dragging her fiancé to a halt beside her. “Drew, doesn’t this look like fun?”

  His expression suggested he’d rather wrestle alligators. “I don’t know, Hailey…”

  “C’mon.” The woman laughed. “It can’t be that hard.”

  “It’s easy,” I assured him, holding out my hand. “I’ll show you.”

  “I’ve never danced,” Drew said, backing away.

  “Even someone who has never danced before can learn to waltz. Look.” I turned to Tav with a mischievous twinkle. “Tav will demonstrate.”

  He looked taken aback but came around to the front of the table.

  “But he’s a dancer,” the groom-to-be objected.

  “Not even close,” Tav said. “Football is my game.”

  “He’s my business partner,” I said, “not my dance partner. Here, we’ll show you.” I grabbed Tav’s left hand and raised it to the proper position, then laid my other hand across the back of his shoulder, arching my back.

  “Did I not mention once that learning to dance in front of a crowd does not appeal to me?” he whispered. He didn’t sound angry, although the look in his eyes promised retribution. His breath against my ear made me shiver.

  “Think of it as growing the business.” I smiled up at him and felt his hand tighten against my back. We hadn’t been this close since we agreed to be partners and I’d given him an impromptu lesson in my kitchen. With his nearness creating a fog in my brain, I remembered why I’d kept my distance. Dancing with Tav undermined my determination to keep our relationship strictly business.