Marcia Talley - Dead Man Dancing

‘You’re welcome. I’m sorry that I didn’t think of it myself, but I really and truly forgot.’

The detective passed Jay’s bag to his associate. ‘It happens to the best of us,’ he said. ‘If necessary, we’ll be in touch.’

For some reason he handed me his business card. ‘And if you think of anything else…’

After the police left, I apologized again to Hutch. ‘I’m sorry if I embarrassed you in front of the police.’

‘Not a problem.’

‘You know,’ I said, ‘it’s probably a good thing I didn’t give the bag back to Kay before Jay died.’ I described what had happened at the Giannotti home in Gingerville the previous afternoon. ‘If we had returned the bag and there was evidence of thallium poison in it, and Kay is involved, like O.J.’s bloody knife, that bag would have been history by now.’

Hutch sighed and reached for his mug, sipped the liquid, probably cold by now, and made a face. ‘The cops won’t be happy about chain of custody issues – anybody could have added to or taken from that bag between the time it left the Hippodrome dressing room area and today. But it’s better than nothing.’

From her chair across the room, Ruth bristled. ‘You two are taking this awfully calmly. Kay is supposed to be doing your choreography for Shall We Dance? , Hutch. What if she gets arrested? What if you get arrested?’

Hutch smiled benignly. ‘Cool your jets, Ruth. This is still February. The competition isn’t until April. Surely things will be settled by then.’

‘Maybe you need a lawyer, darling.’

‘I don’t need a lawyer, I am a fucking lawyer!’ Hutch raised a hand. ‘I know, I know. You don’t have to say it. A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client.’

‘I’m just worried, that’s all.’ I recognized the tone. Ruth was struggling to remain cheerful. ‘This is your big chance, sweetheart. Maybe we should hire another choreographer to work with you and Melanie.’ Ruth patted the arm of her chair, and Hutch, like an obedient little fiancé, closed the distance between them, settled his lawyerly buns on the spot she’d indicated, and snaked his arm behind her shoulders. Hutch examined the top of Ruth’s head, located a spot where the gelled-up spikes might prove less lethal, and planted a conciliatory kiss there. ‘And here I thought I was going to make my name in wills, trusts and estates.’

I blinked. ‘Surely you’re not giving up the law?’

Hutch chuckled. ‘Of course not. But I’ve been scrambling to settle what I can settle, and reassign ongoing matters to my long-suffering associate so I can be free for a couple of months. She hates me now, but it’ll be character-building for her to fly solo.’

‘What happens if that Market House thing blows up?’ I asked. ‘There was something about it in the Pos t again this morning.’

Hutch represented one of the heirs in a never-ending battle over the historic Annapolis market, built in 1784, and deeded to the city on the condition that unless the property be used ‘for the reception of sales and provisions’ it would revert to the heirs of the original owners. The gourmet market sat on valuable property at water’s edge and was now being run, unprofitably it seems, by an out-of-town management company. There was talk – again – of tearing it down.

‘That market’s been putting shoes on the children of lawyers for three hundred years, and it’s not going to stop now. Any attempt to tear it down will be blocked by Hysterical, er, Historical Annapolis,’ he said with a grin. ‘I’m not worried.’

‘To change the subject for a moment,’ Hutch continued. ‘I have information for you, Nancy Drew.’

‘You do?’

‘I talked to my buddy up at the Medical Examiner’s…’ He paused, I swear, just for the dramatic effect.

‘Stop it! You are making me crazy!’

He raised his free hand. ‘OK. The autopsy’s done.’

‘So soon?’

‘Homicide put a rush on it. The report won’t be official for a couple of days, not until it’s typed up and the M.E. signs off on it, but they did a segmental analysis of Jay’s hair, and it turns out that his exposure to thallium had been going on for quite some time, perhaps more than a year.’

‘Oh my God! Well, that shoots my thallium in the Tylenol capsules theory all to hell.’

‘Exactly.’

Hutch drained his mug and set it down on the end table. ‘What was in Jay’s gym bag, Hannah? Do you remember?’

‘You didn’t look into it?’

‘I didn’t see any reason to.’

I stared at the bright floral drapes and tried to picture the bag’s contents. ‘Clothing, running shoes, socks, hair goo, talcum powder, bottled water…’

Hutch looked thoughtful. ‘Could have been in the water, I suppose, the dose that sent him over the edge.’

‘Or…’ Several thoughts were niggling the back of my brain: Jay’s powdery footprints on the floor of the studio, and something I’d read on the Internet. I sent my cerebral messenger down to retrieve them, and a few seconds later, the little fellow came up trumps. ‘I think I know how it could have been done!’

Hutch stopped toying with Ruth’s fingers, and sat up straight. ‘How?’

‘Thallium is a white powder. Somebody put it in Jay’s talcum powder.’

Ruth made a face. ‘You don’t have to swallow it?’

I shook my head. ‘Thallium can also be absorbed through the skin. Even more quickly, I would think, through hot, sweaty dancer’s skin.’

‘How would anybody know that?’ Ruth wondered.

‘The same way I do, from reading about it on the Internet.’ I leaned forward, resting my forearms on my knees. ‘Two articles come to mind. Back in the sixties, the CIA hatched a plot to discredit Castro by putting thallium in his shoes when he set them outside his hotel-room door for a shine. They didn’t want to kill him, just embarrass him silly by making his trademark beard fall out.’

‘Makes me proud to be an American,’ Hutch quipped.

‘The other side in the Cold War wasn’t so bright, either. Not long ago, a group of Russian soldiers discovered an unlabeled bin of the stuff lying around a dump in Siberia, so they said, what the heck, rolled it up in their cigarettes and used it to powder their feet.’

‘Not much in the way of entertainment in Siberia, I’d guess. No USO.’

Ruth punched her fiancé on the arm. ‘Be serious for once.’ She turned to me and asked, ‘Did the soldiers die?’

I shook my head no. ‘They became desperately ill, but eventually recovered.’

Hutch regarded me seriously. ‘It’s an interesting theory, Hannah, but it’s simply that, a theory.’

Personally, I thought my theory was brilliant and fit the facts as I knew them, but far be it from me to say so. ‘Will the cops let us know if they find anything suspicious in Jay’s bag?’

Hutch snorted. ‘We’ll probably read it first in The Sun , but I have a couple of contacts in Homicide who owe me favors, so perhaps we can get a head’s up.’

I smiled at the two of them snuggled up like teenagers and said, ‘Well, for what it’s worth, lovebirds, I’m betting all my money on the grieving widow.’

Jay’s departure from this world had been agonizing and slow, so it was only right that he be carried off to heaven in a proper, gentler way.

The Capital obituary was laudatory and long, highlighting Jay’s raised-by-his-own-bootstraps journey from oil rig roustabout to ballroom dancing star. The obit in the Sun had been edited with a heavy hand, but both papers invited friends and family to a rosary service at Kramer’s Funeral Home on Monday night at seven, followed by a funeral mass at St Mary’s at ten the following day.