Stuart Kaminsky - Dancing in the Dark

I nodded in understanding and sipped my Pepsi.

“What I said in the ballroom,” he went on. “I was hot. I’m not killing anybody, you, the fat guy with the glasses, the two actors. I’ve got one person to kill. That’s whoever murdered Luna. Cops are going to look for the killer. I’m gonna look for the killer. You are gonna look for the killer. One of us is gonna find the killer fast. You find him and you get five thousand cash.”

“I’ve got a client,” I said.

“Now you’ve got two clients,” Forbes said, a note of irritation creeping into his voice as he took an envelope from his jacket pocket and pushed it toward me.

“Can’t,” I said. “Fred Astaire’s my client and his case is mixed up in this. I’d need his permission.”

“I can fix it so you’ll never learn to play the harpsichord,” said Forbes.

“I can always do war drums with my fist,” I said.

“I think you don’t understand, Peters. I think Kudlap will have to explain it to you.” Forbes nodded.

I turned, fingers around the now-empty Pepsi bottle as the Indian took a step toward me. I started to get out of the chair. Singh put the envelope in my shirt pocket as someone knocked at the door. Kudlap Singh stopped and looked at Forbes, who said, “Who is it?”

“Room service.”

“I don’t want room service,” Forbes said irritably.

“Then I’m Admiral Nimitz,” the voice beyond the door said.

I recognized the voice. I raised an eyebrow at Forbes. He looked at me and with a deep sigh said, “Let him in.”

Kudlap Singh went to the door, opened it, and Fred Astaire strode in, glanced around, and plunged his hands in his pockets. He was wearing a tweedy sport jacket, a white shirt, and a blue handkerchief tied around his neck. Kudlap Singh closed the door and put his back to it.

“Mr. Forbes, I-” Astaire began.

“How’d you find me?” Forbes cut him off.

“When Mr. Peters hung up in the middle of our telephone conversation, I came right over here, inquired, and found a maid whose name will be forever a secret who gladly exchanged the number of the room you were in for the promise of an autographed photo of me and Ginger.”

“You came to rescue Peters,” Forbes said.

“To try,” Astaire said, patting down his remaining hair and looking around the room, his eyes coming to rest on the portrait on the wall. “Jefferson was supposed to be a superb minuet dancer,” said Astaire admiringly.

“I know,” said Forbes. “Now we cut the shit. Luna’s dead. You were supposed to teach her to dance. Now she’s dead. She had a big mouth. She was a pain in the ass, but she was a good kid and a great. . cops are gonna be all over me and my people and my wife.”

“I’ll be happy to talk to your wife and the police,” Astaire said sincerely. “Miss Martin’s death may well have something to do with my refusal to teach her. I can’t help thinking that she might be alive if I had come and faced her directly.”

“It was hard to say no directly to Luna,” Forbes said.

“You can’t believe Peters or his associates had anything to do with this,” Astaire said.

“I can believe what I want to believe,” Forbes said, finally moving his arms. “And I know I want you to tell Peters to start looking for Luna’s killer. The cops give me a choice-go big with this and look for the killer, knowing that the papers will get it; or go small, keep the publicity down, and maybe never find him. Or, if they do like they do in Detroit, they find someone, shoot him in an alley with two guns in his hands, and lay every murder in the last year on his bloody chest. You want headlines like, ‘Astaire Involved in Investigation of Murdered Blonde He Was Teaching to Dance’?”

“It’s too long for a headline, but you have a point,” Astaire said.

“You want your wife, your kids, the studio to know you got involved in something like murder?” Forbes continued.

Astaire’s hands were out of his pockets now, but Forbes was unimpressed.

“You don’t know much about me, Fingers,” Astaire said.

Forbes shook his head and said, “Five-nine, weigh a hundred and thirty-eight or thirty-nine pounds fully dressed. Brown eyes. When you’re not working, you wear two-piece underwear. When you do a dance number, you wear a union suit. You’re mild-mannered and hard to burn, but when you blow you’ve got a bad temper and you break furniture and anything handy. Might something handy include a big-mouthed blonde who wants you to teach her to dance and won’t take no for an answer?”

“Look, Forbes,” Astaire said angrily, not noticing that Kudlap Singh had stepped away from the door and toward us.

“Maybe we should-” I began, but Forbes went on, pushing: “Your shirts, underwear, pajamas, and dressing gowns are monogrammed and you have a hell of a time each morning deciding what tie to wear. You and your wife sleep in separate beds. You wear silk, usually blue, pajamas, and you wiggle your toes in your sleep. Your wife’s name is Phyllis and your kids-”

“You son of a bitch,” Astaire said, frail body shaking, hands in a fist.

Forbes seemed amused.

“You want a career, feet, a family,” he said, pointing at Astaire, “see to it that he finds who killed Luna because I’m gonna tell you something personal about me. I loved Luna and I don’t like it that someone killed her. I don’t like it at all. I want the bastard caught and brought to me. I don’t care who finds him. That’s what I want.”

“You two-bit Capone,” Astaire said as I stepped between him and Forbes, who didn’t even get up.

“Capone, between you and me, was a publicity-seeking blowhard who didn’t control half of what we had in Detroit.” Now Forbes rose, let out a sigh, and straightened the creases in his trousers. “Sit down, calm down, and think things over,” he said, moving past me and Astaire and toward the door with the Indian. “You’ll hear from me.”

And then they were gone.

“He threatened me, my wife, and my children,” Astaire said, his face a distinct shade of red. “That fart-faced-”

“He’s on his way to owning half of Los Angeles,” I said.

“And I know the people who own the other half,” Astaire countered hotly, now pacing the room. “And I think I’ll have a talk with some of them.”

“I think we should consider carefully before we say anything more,” I said, pointing to the metal box on the table in the corner.

Astaire kept pacing and glancing at the box.

“That’s not a listening device,” he said. “It’s a wire recorder. It has a microphone inside the box so you can record on spools of wire.”

“You know how it works?” I asked, moving to the machine.

“Yes,” he said, striding impatiently to my side, unhooking a clasp on the side of the box and lifting the lid.

There was a microphone inside with a wire wound round it and a spindle with a spool the size of a salt box fitted over it. Gray metal, most of it with thin lines across it, covered the spool.

“Would you say Luna recorded something on this wire?” I asked, looking at the thing.

“Somebody recorded something,” Astaire said. “I’d guess Luna was copying songs from the radio.”

“Or. .” I said.

“Can’t hurt,” he said, and turned the machine on.

The quality wasn’t bad.

There were two songs at the start of the recording. Astaire asked me if I knew what steps they were. I didn’t. He told me they were a fox-trot and a rumba. After the second song, I said, “Let’s go.”

“We’re here,” he said. “We’ve got nothing better to do but find a killer and talk to the police. The least we could do is hear the lady out.”

I shrugged and moved back to lean against the wall as an announcer said, “Hello, we’ve been waiting for you. It’s time to play ‘Truth or Consequences.’ ”