John Lutz - Dancing with the Dead

Mr. Coffee had begun gurgling. Mary padded barefoot back into the bedroom.

Jake was still asleep, lying on his stomach with one arm draped over the side of the bed so his hand lay palm up on the floor. Mary looked at the clock. Quarter to eight. She’d be able to call someone at Summers Realty soon.

She didn’t feel like going back to bed, so she decided to take a shower and get dressed. After calling the office, she’d phone Saint Sebastian Hospital and find out what time she should pick up Angie. She thought that past ten o’clock or thereabouts, and Angie’d be charged for another day in the room. Blue Cross might bitch about that. Nobody wanted trouble with Blue Cross.

Mary went into the bathroom and douched, then turned on the shower. She let her nightgown puddle to the floor and stepped out of it, naked and cool.

When the water was warm enough, she climbed into the shower and washed away some of what Jake had done to her, soaping her genitals and rubbing gently, feeling some of last night happening to her again.

Jackie Foxx, one of the more aggressive salespeople at Summers Realty, answered on the second ring. Mary explained that her mother was ill and had to be checked out of the hospital, and she wouldn’t be able to get to work until that afternoon. She’d go directly to the title company for the scheduled closing on a piece of commercial property out in Chesterfield. Jackie Foxx asked if there was anything anyone could do to help, but Mary assured her everything was under control. “Everybody’s mother gets sick sooner or later,” Jackie said in a sympathetic voice, then hung up and left Mary trying not to think about where that line of logic ultimately led.

Mary called Saint Sebastian and was told her mother would be ready to leave anytime between nine and ten o’clock. Past ten, and the room rate for that day kicked in. Like a motel, Mary thought glumly, only there were two ways to check out.

She didn’t have to leave for at least half an hour, so she used the remote and switched on the TV. She tuned in “Good Morning America” at low volume, so it wouldn’t wake Jake, then sat back and sipped her coffee.

When her cup was half empty, there was a TV journalist standing in front of the Verlane house in New Orleans again. Network news shows had now fallen in love with this case. And why not? It had everything: murder, anger, mystery, the victim’s husband at odds with the authorities.

Mary’s thumb eased down on the remote’s volume button. “… perhaps a new development,” the bland-featured journalist was saying. Wind was gusting in New Orleans, riffling his hair and causing a strand of it to keep getting stuck in the corner of his earnest eye.

A tape of Rene Verlane was shown again, this time soundlessly, while the journalist talked about how police were now speculating that the murder of a woman a month ago in Seattle, Washington, might somehow be linked to Danielle Verlane’s death. The similarities of the two murders were more than what the police called obvious modus operandi. Though both women’s throats had been slit, there apparently was something more, a mysterious and grotesque something the police were keeping to themselves, that connected the two homicides. The journalist also said that for the first time Rene Verlane himself might be considered a suspect in the eyes of the police.

Fade to an interior shot of the handsome Verlane seated on his white sofa with his legs crossed. He was wearing a cream-colored suit with a white shirt and flowered tie. Behind him the pale sheer drapes undulated in the breeze like the gowns of dancing angels; at least that was how Mary saw them.

Verlane was explaining that he, too, thought his wife and the woman in Seattle were probably murdered by the same person. The Seattle woman, Martha Roundner, had been a dark-haired, 35-year-old aerobics instructor who’d also been taking ballroom dancing lessons. The police, it seemed, were making light of that correlation and concentrating instead on whatever pertinent fact they were keeping secret.

As Verlane talked, Mary studied his face, searching for some flicker of guilt, but there was none. She hadn’t considered before that she might be looking at the killer of a woman, or women, who’d borne a superficial resemblance to her, who’d been “her type” and who’d danced. There was about Verlane a smooth kind of brutality that strangely intrigued her. Merely watching the man on television, Mary could feel his magnetism.

“It isn’t fair,” he was saying in his syrupy accent, “that the New Orleans police, and now the Seattle police, are keeping some key piece of evidence from the husband of one of the victims. Sure, I understand they want a trump card to play on the suspected killer-if the investigation ever reaches the point where they have a suspect-but a husband has the right to know everything possible about his wife’s death.”

The interviewer, now with his hair neatly combed, was professionally noncommittal about that, and tactful enough not to point out that the spouse was traditionally the prime suspect in a murder case. Was Verlane putting up a front? Talking like a guilty man? Let the viewers draw their own conclusions.

“What, if anything, do you intend doing about it, Mr. Verlane?” he asked smoothly.

The camera zoomed in for a tight close-up. Verlane’s strong dark features were set (Mary wondered how he shaved the deep cleft in his chin without cutting himself; it was a ravine), and his lips barely moved as he spoke. “Since I can’t get anywhere with the New Orleans police, I plan to travel to Seattle and find out what I can about the Roundner woman’s murder.”

“Do you intend to conduct your own investigation?”

“Why not? The police don’t seem to be making progress, either on my wife’s case or on that of the murdered woman in Seattle. There’s certainly no law against my trying to learn what they won’t tell me. I’ll go wherever necessary, and I’ll do whatever’s necessary, to find my wife’s killer, and the police be damned!”

Somewhat unnerved by the vehemence of Verlane’s response, the interviewer thanked him and turned to face the camera squarely, addressing the New Orleans station whose tape was being used on the network news.

Mary found herself sitting on the edge of the sofa, leaning forward and staring at Rene Verlane, who was still visible behind the reporter. She sat fascinated by him until the picture faded and a commercial came on the screen, an aerial view of cars speeding in formation across the desert.

She decided to buy a Post-Dispatch on the way to the hospital, not only to read more about the Seattle murder, but to see if there was an accompanying photo of Martha Roundner. She wondered how strongly the Seattle victim, like Danielle Verlane, resembled her. And might there be some other connection? Had Mel also instructed this woman?

It was strange, this powerful compulsion to satisfy her curiosity about the deceased, almost as if she hungered to learn about a sister she’d never met.

She sat for a while longer with the TV turned off, sipping coffee and listening to Jake’s snores drifting like muted thunder from the bedroom.

When her cup was empty, she left the apartment, still thinking about the dead woman in Seattle.

There was no photograph of the victim, in fact nothing about the Seattle murder, in the newspaper Mary bought in the hospital gift shop.

She managed to check Angie out of Saint Sebastian without incident, though Angie had to agree to see the gently persistent Dr. Keshna the next week. In the interim, the doctor would phone with the results of Angie’s tests. A young volunteer in a candy-striped uniform brought Angie down to the lobby in a gleaming chrome wheelchair while Mary got the car. Angie didn’t need the wheelchair, but she didn’t object; she had been here before and knew it was standard check-out procedure.