Marcia Talley - Dead Man Dancing

After I sat down, Don closed the door, dumped his duffel, and slumped in the chair opposite, sending it jittering back a few inches on the carpet. ‘This has been the worst week of my life!’

I smiled sympathetically, feeling like a shrink. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’

Don looked relieved, and it all came tumbling out. ‘I’m out on a five-day operation, see. I come back to base, I’m fresh off the truck and all I want is a cheeseburger and a hot shower. On my way to the shower, I’m stopped by my first lieutenant and this other officer I don’t recognize, but he identifies himself as a chaplain, and asks if we couldn’t go someplace quiet. So he takes me to the canteen, buys me a cup of coffee and sets me down. “Sorry, son,” he says. “I have some bad news for you.”

‘I knew right then that somebody’d died, but I thought it’d be my grandmother. She’s ninety.’ His fingers brushed vigorously over the stubble on his head as if he were trying to drive the bad memories away. ‘When the chaplain told me it was Melanie, my whole world crashed and burned. An hour later I’m sitting on a Medevac plane in a seat they’d saved for me, and now here I am, talking to you in a freaking funeral home. Totally unreal. Like punch me, it’s a bad dream, I gotta wake up.’

‘I’m so sorry, Don.’

‘Melanie’s going to be cremated,’ he continued. ‘She’ll be buried in the family plot up in Chilmark on Martha’s Vineyard.’

I was surprised to hear that. ‘Didn’t Melanie tell me she was from Kansas?’

‘She was, but her parents died when she was way young. My parents loved her like she was their own.’ A tear as big as the Atlantic Ocean slid down the big man’s cheek. ‘It’s Abel’s Hill, the same cemetery where they buried John Belushi. She’ll like that.’

‘Everyone loved Melanie,’ I said. ‘She was enormously talented. It’s a big loss for all of us.’

‘Yes ma’am. Except for the son-of-a-bitch who killed her. Begging your pardon, ma’am.’

‘Please, call me Hannah,’ I insisted, taking my time, not wanting to push the grieving young man, or cut him off prematurely.

Don blushed. ‘I’ll try, but they sort of drill the “ma’am” into us, if you know what I mean, ma’am.’

Don opened his duffel, rooted around for a minute, came up with an unopened bottle of water and held it out.

I raised a hand. ‘No, thank you.’

‘May I?’

‘Of course.’

He twisted off the cap, and took a long drink, draining half the bottle in the process. ‘OK… Hannah. I gotta tell somebody or it’s gonna drive me freaking nuts. I think I know who killed Melanie.’

Resisting the urge to leap out of my chair, I said calmly, ‘Tell me about it.’

‘We were very close, Melanie and me. She told me everything. Her worries, her fears. A couple of weeks ago, she picked up something at the dance studio, so she asked me about it. “What do I do, Don? Do I keep quiet about it, or do I tell?”’

I reached out and patted his hand. ‘When we had lunch that day, Melanie told me about it, too. I know she told Jay, but I think he died before he could tell anyone else, even if he’d wanted to, which I don’t think he did.’

Don looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean, she told Jay? No way she’d tell Jay! She told Kay.’

I sat up straight. Something wasn’t computing. ‘She told Kay?’

Don nodded vigorously. ‘Melanie picked up on something, I don’t know what, but whatever it was she was totally convinced that Jay was having…’ He paused, swiping at his glistening brow with the sleeve of his uniform. ‘I guess it’s what you’d call an “unnatural relationship” with this little girl he was teaching. Tessa Douglas.’

While I stared in disbelief, Don charged on. ‘Melanie suspected that Jay was just being nice to Tessa’s mother so that he could be near the little girl.’ He shook his head, screwed up his mouth as if being forced to eat something particularly horrible, like liver with onions, or haggis.

I sat back, shocked to the tips of my toes. I’d been convinced that Tess was Jay’s daughter, when all along… My gut twisted. Suppose Jay was a pedophile, attracted to the child because she resembled his sister. I felt ill.

Don blinked rapidly, fighting tears. ‘Melanie asked me what she should do, to protect Tessa and the reputation of the studio and all, and I told her to tell Kay. The wife is always the last to know, I said. Oh, sweet Jesus,’ he wailed. ‘It’s all my fault. What a rotten piece of advice that was! Now Kay’s up and killed my sweet little girl, too.’

Too . Don and I were definitely on the same wavelength.

‘Don, do you still have copies of those emails?’

‘Yes, ma’am. On my cell phone, and on the server, too.’

‘You need to print them out and share them with the police.’

If Jay had been abusing Tessa, that threat was now gone. But if Kay had killed Jay to protect the studio, and killed Melanie to keep her from her spilling the beans about Jay, what would keep Kay from silencing a nine-year-old girl?

‘Don,’ I added, laying a hand on his arm for emphasis, ‘you need to do it soon. If what you suspect turns out to be true, that little girl’s life may be in danger, too.’

‘On the other hand,’ I mused to my patient husband from the comfortable depths of our living-room sofa after we’d fed Melanie’s husband dinner and sent him up to our third-floor guest room for the night, ‘as much as I like Laurie, you have to agree she has a pretty good motive for wanting Melanie out of the way, too.’

‘Why don’t you ask her?’

‘Oh, right, sure. So I meet Laurie for lunch, ask her point-blank if she murdered Jay and Melanie, and would you like French fries with that?’

‘I think you know Laurie pretty well, and you’re good at reading body language.’ He wrapped an arm around me and pulled me close. ‘Before you do, though, make sure it’s in a public place and that Laurie knows you told me you were meeting.’

I took Paul’s advice, and arranged to meet Laurie the following day at the food court in the mall, the Johnny Rocket’s end. ‘Coolness,’ she said over the telephone. ‘Afterwards we can go shopping!’

I rang off, thinking that after our little chat Laurie might not be much in the mood for shopping.

At the appointed time, Laurie caught sight of me first. She stood on tiptoe near the escalator that led up to the movie theaters, waving and ‘yoo-hooing’. Judging from the bags from Ann Taylor Loft and Claire’s Boutique that she carried I figured she’d got a jump start on the shopping.

I visited Panda Express while Laurie went to Hibachi-San and we joined up again at a table near the escalator. ‘At least we’re on the same continent,’ Laurie commented (incorrectly), eyeing my shrimp-fried rice as she sat down.

Between bites, Laurie showed me the blouse she’d bought at Ann Taylor, and I described the shoes I was looking for to go with my new red skirt. I’d eaten my last shrimp, and she’d finished up her tempura, but I’d still not found a way to work SRS casually into the conversation, so I thought, screw it, and dove in with both feet.

‘Laurie,’ I said as I twisted my napkin to shreds on my lap underneath the table. ‘Before she died, Melanie told me something about you, and I’m just going to come right out with it and ask you if it’s true.’

As I spoke, a smile began tugging at the corners of Laurie’s mouth, and by the time I’d reached the end of my convoluted sentence, it had turned into a full-blown grin. She moved her tray aside, leaned across the table toward me and said, ‘She told you I used to be a guy.’