John Lutz - Dancing with the Dead

Lowering her toast from where she’d lifted it halfway to her mouth, she set it next to her steaming cup, then she walked into the living room and crossed the carpet to the door.

She looked through the fisheye peephole and saw no one in the hall. Leaving the door on the chain, she opened it a few inches and saw the package on the mat. It was wrapped in brown paper and had a UPS sticker on it.

She closed the door briefly to unfasten the chainlock, then quickly brought the package inside. There was the return address in blue felt-tip pen: Spangle Soul Shoe Co., Chicago.

The Latin dance shoes she’d ordered! She wanted to look at them now. Though she didn’t have a lot of time to spare, she’d open the package before leaving for work. Life had its priorities.

She carried the package into the kitchen, got a steak knife from a drawer, and sat down at the table. After a sip of coffee, she used the knife to cut the tape on the package and peeled away the wrapping paper. Then she opened the box and lifted out one of the shoes from its cushion of crinkled tissue paper.

It was white satin, with what appeared to be two-and-a-half-inch heels. Mary was pleased. The shoes looked much like their catalogue illustration, and they’d do just fine for her rhythm dances in Ohio after she had them dyed black to make them appear more Latin, as Mel had advised.

Now came the big question: would they fit? It was difficult getting anything through the mail that actually fit. And there was no selection of ballroom dance shoes in St. Louis, which was why she’d sent away to Chicago. This would be the third pair she’d tried, and she didn’t want to send them back as she had the others.

A folded paper in the shoebox caught her eye. A brief handwritten note in with the shoes, expressing the hope that Mary would be satisfied. Personal service was important in the small world of mail order dance supplies, which was why it was so easy to return merchandise to the seller. Returns and exchanges were almost expected.

She took off her street shoe and slipped one of the dance shoes onto her foot.

As she stood up and put weight on the foot, she felt it spread in the new shoe. Maybe this pair would be too tight. She couldn’t be sure; she needed to put on both shoes and go through a few dance steps, on the carpet so she wouldn’t mar the suede soles in case she decided to return them. Had to find out if they pinched.

But there really was no time for that now, she cautioned herself; she’d better get to work and shuffle the necessary papers for this afternoon’s closing at the title company.

She returned the shoe to the box with its mate, then worked her street shoe back on her foot. Hurried a few bites of toast and a long sip of scalding coffee. Ready for the day. Sure.

As she took the stairs to the street, she brushed crumbs from her hands, then from the front of her coat.

It was eight-twenty when she got to work. There was one phone message for her, abbreviated in the receptionist’s precise handwriting, red ink like blood on the memo sheet:

“Man/8:10/wdnt lve nme/wil cal bk.”

But he didn’t call. Not by lunch time anyway. The hours were getting heavy.

Probably, Mary told herself, it hadn’t been Rene who’d called the office that morning. How could he know the phone number? She didn’t recall telling him where she worked, but of course she might have mentioned it and forgotten. If so, what else might she have said and not remembered? If Rene knew where she worked, what else might he know about her?

By two-thirty she was almost worn out from praying each time the phone rang, feeling the emptiness in her when each call resulted in an ordinary business conversation. Instead of humming with passion, the line buzzed with talk of closing costs and adjustable rate mortgages.

At three o’clock, just after she’d worked up some figures with Victor on what it would take to finance a four-family, the phone didn’t disappoint her.

“Mary? This is Rene.”

“I know your voice.” She saw herself as if through the window, a conservatively dressed real estate employee talking on the phone, her hammering heart not visible. The closing woman. Amazing what went on beneath the calm surface of normality.

“Sorry about calling you at work, but I needed to talk.”

“It’s okay, really.”

“I tried your apartment last night, but you weren’t home. No one was.”

“Rene, the guy we talked about-Jake-he’s moved out for good.”

“It was your idea?”

“Yeah. Things weren’t good between us. They never were good, actually.”

“It sounds like you did the right thing.”

“I’m sure I did.” He didn’t say anything, but she could hear him breathing. “Rene, did I mention to you where I worked?”

“No. Why?”

“The phone number here. How’d you get it?”

“Oh! I figured you’d left for work this morning, and I didn’t wanna call again at your apartment. Then I remembered you said you worked at a real estate company, so I got a St. Louis phone directory at the library and started going down the list. Called each one till I got to Summers and asked for you, and a woman said you hadn’t come in yet, so I knew I had the right place. Is it okay? I mean, can you talk?”

“Sure, no problem.”

“Another woman’s died, Mary. Here in Kansas City.”

Whoa! She mashed the receiver harder into her ear, as if to press in the realization of what she’d just heard. “You’re in Kansas City?”

“Yeah, but not for long. The police don’t know I’m here yet, and I’m catching a flight back to New Orleans in a few hours.”

“The woman who was killed?…”

“She was a dancer, in her thirties, with dark hair. Like Danielle.”

Like me. “And you were in Kansas City when it happened.”

“I’m afraid I was. For the dance competition. Checking up on some of the names you gave me. I talked to a reporter with one of the papers, a man I met about five years ago at a convention here. Name’s Pete Joller. I told him about my theory of a sort of intercity Jack the Ripper who kills ballroom dancers. He thinks it makes sense, and he agreed to help me cross-check the names with a list of Kansas City female homicide victims the past five years. He called last night about midnight, and I expected him to let me know the results. Instead he told me he’d gotten word a woman had just been discovered with her throat slashed. He checked and found out she was a ballroom dancer-local, though, not part of the competition.”

“Had she?-”

“That’s all I know about it,” Rene interrupted, his voice tight. “But just the fact I was in town when it happened’ll get the police all over me again.”

Mary barely saw, barely heard, the cars swishing past outside the window on Kingshighway. The people in the cars were engrossed in their own problems, their own universe, and had no idea what kind of conversation was taking place so close to them; a different world behind every windshield. “You got any kind of alibi?”

“No. I was at the dance competition, but nobody’ll remember me. Then I went back to my hotel. The murder occurred about ten o’clock, when I was in my room alone.”

“What can I do?” Mary asked. She was beginning to grasp the dimensions of this, how it would look for Rene when the New Orleans police found out. And they would find out, especially if the woman had been violated after death. “Where were you?” they’d ask their prime suspect. The answer could prove fatal.

“I don’t want you to do anything,” Rene told her. “I’ll have to tell the police I was in Kansas City for the dance competition, hoping to learn something about Danielle’s murder.”