Ella Barrick - Dead Man Waltzing

Lissy slid his eyes my way and said, “You’re not really interested.”

He had me there. I relapsed into semisulky silence, irritated at having my sleep interrupted and irritated with his high-handed, secretive behavior. What in the world could possibly have come up that would make a homicide detective kidnap me at the crack of dawn? Maurice! I sat up straighter and was about to ask Lissy whether our field trip had anything to do with Maurice when we crossed the Arlington Memorial Bridge and I realized we weren’t headed toward Maurice’s house.

I had just raised my cup to my lips for a sip of coffee when Lissy jolted into a pothole. Coffee splashed out of the cup and onto my blouse and I yelped.

“Don’t get it on the seat,” Lissy said, reaching over to liberate napkins from the glove box.

“I’m fine, thanks,” I said. “Second-degree burns-nothing to worry about.” Blotting coffee off my yellow blouse, I didn’t notice we’d arrived until Lissy parked at the curb. An ambulance, doors wide, and a couple of police cars were parked askew in the narrow street fronting Lavinia Fremont’s studio and apartment. Oh, no. “What happened?” I whispered.

“Why don’t you tell me?” Lissy said. When I didn’t say anything, he opened his door and got out. I followed suit, scrambling onto the sidewalk and staring as EMTs carried a stretcher down the stairs from Lavinia’s apartment. The sheet-shrouded figure lay still except for movements induced by the jostling descent. The sheet covered her face, but I knew it was Lavinia.

A young cop looked at me curiously, and I realized I was holding the coffee cup so loosely that coffee was dribbling to the sidewalk. I chucked the cup into a nearby trash can and moved to join Lissy at the door. “Don’t just stand there,” he said, starting up the stairs. “And don’t touch anything-put your hands in your pockets.”

I did as he said. When we entered Lavinia’s apartment, I glanced around, expecting to see signs of mayhem. But everything appeared as it had last night: orderly, warm, cozy. It didn’t look like a homicidal maniac had gone rampaging through the place. I looked a question at Lissy, whose gaze hadn’t left my face since we came in. Finally, it seemed, he was ready to tell me why he’d dragged me down here.

“You will have gathered that Ms. Fremont is dead,” he said. He paused a moment, as if waiting for me to argue with him. When I didn’t say anything, he went on. “It looks like a heart attack, not an unusual occurrence for a seventy-three-year-old. A neighbor found her-”

“At six in the morning?”

“They walk together every day at five thirty, apparently,” Lissy said. “As I say, her death would normally not have occasioned much remark, except…” He paused for emphasis. “Except that last night you were on me like paparazzi on Angelina Jolie, trying to convince me that the now-dead Ms. Fremont murdered Corinne Blakely. To top that off”-he raised a hand to stop me as I opened my mouth-“your fingerprints are all over the apartment, and the video camera at the jewelry store down the block shows you passing by at seven thirty-eight last evening. “So I ask you again, Ms. Graysin: What happened here?”

Damn . No good deed goes unpunished, as they say. I came down here to help Maurice by prodding Lavinia into a confession, and I ended up as a murder suspect. “Should I call Phineas Drake?” I asked.

“Hell, no,” Lissy said, wincing. “You’re not a suspect.”

“I’m not?” Then what was with the gestapo routine, the visit to Lavinia’s?

“The same camera that showed you arriving caught you leaving forty-five minutes later. Shortly after that, Ms. Fremont called her doctor’s office to cancel an appointment for today. The camera and the doctor’s answering machine have accurate time stamps. It’s pretty clear that it was suicide. She took a few handfuls of the same medicine that triggered Corinne Blakely’s heart failure-the packets are in her bathroom, and only her fingerprints are on them. Judging by the prescription meds in her medicine cabinet, she had much the same heart condition as Blakely, so the result was identical: myocardial infarction and death. At least, that’s what it looks like pending autopsy. Plus, there’s a note. I just want you to tell me how it came about.”

“A note?”

Lissy beckoned to a white-overalled woman who obligingly produced a note in a plastic bag. It was handwritten on cream-colored stationery with a stylized LF at the top. “Life without friends isn’t worth living. The friendship I believed in all these years was a lie. No one should be blamed for Corinne’s death except Corinne herself. And no one should be blamed for mine except me.” There was no signature.

I looked up from the grim words to find Lissy still staring at me. “I came here last night,” I said, “hoping to goad Lavinia into confessing to murdering Corinne. I wasn’t expecting… this.” The weight of responsibility crashed down; I felt like someone had dropped a grand piano on me. I had pushed Lavinia Fremont over the edge, nudged her into committing suicide. I struggled to be objective. Of course, Lavinia had a murder weighing on her conscience, too. Even though her note made it clear she thought Corinne deserved to die, I knew guilt must have been eating at her.

“It’s not your fault,” Lissy said dispassionately. “She was depressed over her best friend’s death, perhaps overwhelmed by what she’d done. Did she admit to killing Blakely?”

“Pretty nearly.” I related as much of the conversation as I could remember. “When she first learned Maurice had been arrested, I remember that she seemed upset about it, so I implied that his case was desperate, that he was likely to get convicted. I thought her conscience might get the better of her if she thought an innocent person was going to go to jail for what she’d done.” And it had, but not in the way I’d imagined. “Can I go home now?” I whispered.

“Yeah. I’ll have a uniform take you back. Thanks for your assistance.”

“Maurice?”

He puffed out his cheeks. “I’m sure the DA will want to review the charges in light of recent events.”

That was good news, at least. I tried to focus on that as I descended the stairs, trailing one hand against the wall to steady myself. I felt dizzy, off balance. It was going to take me a while to process all this. A good long while.

Friday evening, almost a week later, the DA had dismissed all charges against Maurice, and he, Vitaly, Danielle, and I were gathered in the ballroom, celebrating. Only Tav was missing, still on his business trip. He’d be back tomorrow, and I was looking forward to our date with equal parts anticipation and anxiety. I looked around the now-empty ballroom, weary but content. We’d hosted our monthly social dance, where students and others paid a fee of seven dollars and came here to dance for fun and practice their steps, and the last straggler had just left. We’d had a good turnout tonight-nineteen people-and I was tired, but not so drained that I turned down the glass of champagne Maurice offered me. He’d brought along a couple of bottles to celebrate the good news from the DA.

“To Maurice,” we toasted, raising our glasses to drink.

“I still can’t believe it was Lavinia,” Maurice said for about the twelfth time. “Lavinia!”

“She felt betrayed,” I said.

“Revenge is powerful motivationer,” Vitaly said, downing his champagne in two glugs and holding out his glass for more. “I had an uncle once who wanted revenging on the man who is having affair with his wife, my aunt Magda. Uncle Sergei is spending ten years in the planning, but he is destroying man’s business-canning the fishes-and strangling the man outside where he gets his hairs barbered. The police is not catching him, but in the family, we know. We Russians is knowing how to hold the grunge.”