Ella Barrick - Quickstep to Murder

“Because you think my brother might have been bribing judges?” Tav sounded skeptical.

I couldn’t much blame him; telling the story out loud made it sound pretty unlikely. I nodded unhappily. “Might,” I emphasized. “I don’t really think he was, but he did seem to be in a real financial bind lately, and maybe that drove him to…”

“How much money could he win at a ballroom dance competition?” Tav asked. The way he relaxed back into the chair made me think that he believed me and I let out my breath, unaware until then that I’d been holding it. “It’s hard to say,” I said, “because there are so many prize categories. But if we’d taken home the top studio award and a few division prizes, maybe ten to twelve thousand-not a fortune by any stretch. The money in ballroom dancing is in teaching and competing with amateur students… or getting a gig on Ballroom with the B-Listers .”

“Hardly seems worth bribing judges,” Tav said, almost to himself. He stood and held out a hand to pull me up. “Let us begin.”

“Begin?”

“Our search.”

It wasn’t until half an hour later, when we had gone over every inch of the living room and were pulling utensils out of kitchen drawers and checking the ice tray in the freezer for the thumb drive that I thought to ask, “Hey, what are you doing here, anyway?”

Tav looked up from where he was systematically removing spices and canned goods from the lazy Susan in a low cupboard and smiled. “When I picked up Rafael’s effects, his keys were among them. The police had no objection to my staying here. A week in a hotel in this area would eat my profits for the month.”

“Were you here yesterday morning?”

“No. My plane did not land until late last night and I did not get the key until this morning. Why?”

I told him about my visit yesterday and the intruder who had hidden in the closet and snuck out while I was in the bedroom.

“You thought it was me?” Tav said, a smile lurking in his brown eyes. “I am not much of one for hiding in closets.”

No, he was more the type to grab a knife and confront an intruder. I washed my hands after sorting through the cleaning supplies under the sink and accidentally shifting a roach motel.

“Who do you think it was?” Tav asked, brow furrowed.

We headed toward the bedroom and began rifling through the drawers and closet, and I gave him the thoughts I’d already hashed out with Danielle. It felt weird to be in Rafe’s bedroom, which still smelled like Rafe, with a man who looked so much like Rafe but wasn’t Rafe. I remembered the last time I’d woken up in here, dawn just creeping through the slatted blinds and striping the cherry chest of drawers and Rafe’s chest and arms as he snored softly. A plip-plip sound had drifted in from the kitchen as the automatic coffeemaker kicked on. The smell of coffee followed moments later. The scent had half awakened Rafe and he’d turned to embrace me, his beard stubble rasping my face as he kissed me. I’d still had a ferocious case of beard burn when I walked in on him and Solange later that afternoon. I couldn’t face the bed with its rumpled sheets, so I drifted into the bathroom to search while Tav tore apart the bed, seemingly unaware of the conflicted thoughts and images chasing one another through my head.

We gave up forty minutes later without having found my love letters-Rafe must have trashed them-or the flash drive. Either the police had taken it along with the computer, Rafe had put it somewhere else (possibly planning to return it to Sherry), or someone else had lifted it. I discounted the possibility that Sherry Indrebo was wrong about where she’d left it; she didn’t strike me as a woman who got details confused.

“I will ask the police about it,” Tav said, offering me a glass of water in the kitchen when we’d finished.

Leaning against the sink, I swallowed it in one long gulp-rifling someone’s condo was hard work-and said, “Just don’t make them suspicious.”

“Never fear.” He grinned.

“Did they give you Rafe’s car keys, too?”

Tav nodded.

“Is the Lexus in the garage?” I didn’t see how Rafe’s car could be in its slot below the condo building when he’d been shot at the studio.

“No. My rental is parked in his space. Why?”

I explained my thinking and he disappeared into the bedroom momentarily, emerging with Rafe’s key ring in his hand. He lobbed it at me and I caught it. “You’re giving me Rafe’s keys?” I felt a spark of warmth at his trust.

“It is not his car, correct? So I have nothing to lose if you turn out to be a clever car thief.”

“Oh.” His prosaic logic deflated me.

“Search the car if you come across it, or return the keys to Ms. Indrebo,” Tav said.

I pocketed the keys. “I should go.”

“Let me buy you dinner. I would offer to cook for you, but my brother did not keep the refrigerator well stocked.” Pulling the fridge door open, he gestured at the mostly bare shelves that featured only a bottle of salad dressing, a carton of take-out Chinese, and some yogurts. “You can tell me about your compulsion to chase after aging punk rockers. I hear Rod Stewart is between wives again.”

I punched him on the shoulder. “Just for that, you can pick up the check.”

Over a delicious seafood dinner at a casual restaurant two blocks from the condo complex, I confessed to my initial assault on the mysterious limo and my conviction that its occupant knew something about Rafe’s death. “Or, if not his death exactly, something about why he was so worried these past weeks, why he needed money.” I sawed a small slice of bread from the crusty loaf the waiter had brought and ate it dry, watching jealously as Tav ripped off half the loaf and slathered it with butter. Watching my weight like a jockey was part of the price I paid for being a professional dancer.

“The limo’s license plates started with DPR,” I said, “which means it belongs to a diplomat.”

“From Argentina,” Tav said, setting his knife down slowly, his attention caught. “PR is the country code for Argentina.”

“How do you know that?”

“I was at the embassy earlier today, dealing with issues related to shipping Rafael’s body back to Argentina. The cars all had plates starting with SPR or DPR.”

“S for staff, D for diplomat,” I said. “See, it proves that limo had something to do with Rafe.”

“I must return to the embassy tomorrow,” Tav said. “Perhaps I can ask around and find out why someone from the embassy might be meeting with Rafael.”

“That’d be great.” Our food arrived then and we ate our meals-sole for me, crab cakes for Tav-in silence for a few minutes. I broke it to ask, “So what happened between you and Rafe that you didn’t keep in touch?”

Tav looked up from his plate, his dark eyes serious. He seemed to be looking at something past me, but after a moment, his expression lightened and he focused on me. “It wasn’t so much what happened between me and Rafael as what happened between our parents. My father took up with Rafael’s mother, Suzette, when I was only three. She was in Argentina to study tango-she was a dancer, too-and it was love at first sight for her and my father.” His grimace betrayed what he thought of that. “He divorced my mother to marry her. I split my time between the two households, spending the school year with my mother and my summers with my father, Suzette, and Rafael. When I was nineteen and Rafael was sixteen, my father and mother decided that they were meant to be together after all and he divorced Suzette to remarry my mother. You can see that Rafael came by his womanizing honestly,” Tav said with a wry smile.