Ella Barrick - Dead Man Waltzing

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.”

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 had 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.