A Cat in the Wings: (InterMix) (6 page)

Chapter 10

Tony raised himself on one elbow. “Well, well, well. If it isn’t the Florence Nightingale of the Great White Way! Is there a more compassionate woman alive? To what do I owe the honor of this visit, O tender-hearted golden angel of mercy?”

His bitterness startled me. He was obviously angry with me, but I hadn’t the slightest idea why. It had, after all, been his decision to try to defy gravity. It was that preposterous attempt to execute an impossible turn that had landed him flat on his back. I reminded him of this.

“Get a grip, Basillio,” I warned him. “I just stopped in to see how you were doing.”

“Empty-handed? No chocolates? No roses? No
Life
magazines?”

“Sorry. I’m just on my way to Melissa Taniment’s place. I have an appointment in twenty minutes.” Melissa lived only three blocks away, in an important-looking dual-purpose glass building—it contained both offices and luxury condominiums—on First Avenue.

“Well, what about my twenty-five hundred? Am I still getting paid even though I’m sidelined?”

“Oh, come on, Tony,” I teased. “You know I’m an enlightened employer.”

He turned his torso toward the nightstand, reaching for a cigarette, and suddenly grimaced from the pain, which seemed to have become localized in his lower back.

“Still bad?” I asked.

“It’s much better, but it hurts like hell when I make any kind of sudden movement.”

“Why don’t you go to the doctor, Tony?”

“For the same reason you don’t go to a drama coach.”

“Which is . . .? Never mind, don’t tell me. I don’t have time for one of your philosophical riddles right now.”

“So what happened with Beasley and his pet snake? Fill me in, boss.”

“Nothing much. Beasley thinks Lucia did it.”

“And does he know anything about our hero’s lost years?”

“He says no. Says he saw him three Christmases ago, and not again until Dobrynin was in his coffin. I’m hoping Melissa will be more helpful. Unlike Beasley, she seems positively anxious to talk to me.”

Tony finished his cigarette. “Listen, why don’t you come back to visit me after the interview?”

“Um, I don’t know, Tony. There’s so much work I ought to get to today.”

“Have a heart, Nestleton. Look upon me as another cat-sitting assignment. I’m a big, exotic, crippled—”

“We’ll see, Tony, we’ll see.”

I waved good-bye and headed out the door.

***

Like Louis Beasley, Melissa Taniment lived in an odd atmosphere. Her apartment was an enormous modern affair, bright from dozens of windows but with the discordant feel of a mausoleum. She’d filled it with truckloads of memorabilia—ballet photos and old toe shoes enshrined on bookshelves,,autographed sketches of herself done by a variety of artists. scrapbooks, and bric-a-brac, including a horrid old lamp featuring dancers cavorting on its base. The place was some sort of memory museum.

Her back ramrod-straight, she greeted me graciously. Her husband, she said, was away on business. She led me straight through the place into the big walk-through kitchen, which was spotless and cold.

I was astonished at how small she was. I towered over her. Why is it ballerinas seem so much larger than life onstage? I think perhaps its their broad shoulders—the elegance of their slope. And Melissa’s shoulders were impressively large, capped by a beautifully muscled neck. My earlier impression had been correct: retirement had not dimmed her loveliness.

I flushed, suddenly embarrassed as I realized that I was regarding her as some sort of relic. In truth, she was younger than I. And I don’t know that I would appreciate anyone’s assessing me in the same way.

Sitting across from her, I also felt a sense of relief—Louis Beasley’s characterization of all Dobrynin’s women as “shoehorns” couldn’t possibly be accurate. It seemed most unlikely that Melissa Taniment had ever been a shoehorn for anyone, at any time in her life. It seemed impossible that she would allow herself to be degraded.

“Now, Miss Nestleton,” she inquired in a pleasant tone, “how may I help you? What did you wish to ask me?”

That phrase of Tony’s—“our hero’s lost years”—sprang to mind. I forced myself not to use it, however. “I am trying to discover how Peter Dobrynin spent the last three years of his life, before . . . before his untimely death. Can you tell me anything about that?”

Melissa folded her hands on the countertop and waited a moment before answering.

“But I cannot help you answer that,” she said finally, speaking with a trace, just a trace, of that affected English one picks up from speech coaches. “How could I know?” she explained gently. “We’d completely lost contact these last years.”

“I see. It’s just that . . . I thought he might have come asking for your help at least once during that time.” It was my turn to lay on the long a’s and the smile of glass.

Melissa’s composure seemed not at all shaken. But I noticed that she did begin to look away from me more often. “Well, yes,” she said at length. “I did see Peter once. I suppose it was three years or so ago.”

“Around Christmastime?”

At last, I was beginning to pick up a faint trace of the chill I knew she was capable of emanating.

“I believe so,” she said, then continued, speaking very deliberately now. “Peter demanded money from me. He was drunk, and lewd, and thoroughly abusive. My husband put him out bodily.” She was staring past me by then. “That . . . is . . . all.”

“He never called or tried to see you again?”

“No.”

Melissa turned her gaze back to me then, and there was something much softer in it, something almost pained.

“I did, however, attempt to reach him once,” she said.

“When was that?”

“Two years ago Peter’s mother died. She lived in Connecticut, near Hartford. Family friends there called me, thinking I might be able to reach him and tell him of her death. But of course I was unable to do so.”

“When you say you tried to contact him—where exactly did you look?”

“Nowhere, in fact,” she answered dully. “I had no idea where to begin to look for him. He was lost to me.”

By now, strangely enough, her pleasant manner had begun to return.

“You see, I really cannot help to answer your questions, but I
am
happy you’ve come today,” she said, smiling.

Now I was truly confused.

“As you can see, I don’t need any more . . . things. Or money,” Melissa went on. “I’m surrounded by things. But the idea that Peter left something for me is so touching . . . no matter what it is. I know I’ll be grateful to have it.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,” I said sincerely. “Didn’t Peter Dobrynin die a pauper?”

Her face congealed. “But you said you were here representing an attorney. I assumed there was an estate . . . or letters . . . or something.”

“Where did you get that idea?”

The ballerina was on her feet now, and this time she seemed to loom powerfully over me. “You are here under false pretenses, Miss Nestleton! You said you were in the employ of the same attorney who represents Lucia Maury!”

“No,
you
misunderstood,” I protested. “Lucia’s attorney has indeed retained me, but to investigate Peter Dobrynin’s murder.”

“Please go!” She turned the wrath of those mysterious eyes on me.

I started to speak again.

“Liar!” she cut me off.

As I left, she spat the word again.

Chapter 11

Betty Ann Ellenville had the look of the middle-aged woman who lives alone in a pretty town, spending her days doing serious organic gardening and occasionally throwing interesting pots on her woodshed wheel. She was short and pleasantly round-faced, with a careless, home-done haircut, and she greeted me in an old pair of overalls with a starched white shirt beneath the straps. No one would ever think, on meeting her for the first time, that she was one of the most respected dance critics in New York.

I had had a little adventure getting up to her loft. She lived on the top floor of a seven-story building on Spring Street, in a converted factory. I had to quickly figure out how to operate the very old-fashioned elevator that sat waiting in the lobby. One had to yank chains and pull levers and manipulate cords to get the thing moving. I felt as though I were a room-service meal going up on a dumbwaiter.

When I had finally reached her door and she had admitted me, I was delighted to see a wonderful fire roaring away in the fireplace, set in a gargantuan wall of exposed brick. It was the SoHo apartment of dreams—her place was marvelous.

No sooner had she shown me to a spot on an exquisite art-deco sofa than she said, “I do not believe for a moment that Lucia killed Peter. Not for a moment. I can’t understand why the police don’t look for the killer among the wretched derelicts he knew. Why, he was probably murdered over a cheap bottle of wine! I mean, really! It’s all quite absurd.”

“I know,” I said. Of course, it would be nice and neat to find the killer among the army of homeless. I chose not to point out to Betty Ann, however, that an argument over a bottle of wine would hardly lead to someone’s taping a gun under Lucia’s desk.

While Betty Ann went on expressing her belief in Lucia’s innocence, I looked around the room. I saw over on the far wall an arresting head-and-shoulders photo portrait of Dobrynin.

“That’s from a portfolio that appeared in
Vogue
,” she said, her gaze having followed mine. “He
was
beautiful, wasn’t he?”

I nodded. The face was aquiline. Dobrynin looked like a proud hawk, his golden hair thick and shining on his skull. It was the face of a man who could have been eighteen or forty, a tunelessly handsome face that hinted at a life of debauchery—like that of many a British actor. Dirk Bogarde sprang to mind.

The few moments we sat there in silence looking at the photograph were enough to change Betty Ann’s mood. Her face clouded over. It was apparent she had not yet recovered from Dobrynin’s death.

“So many dancers,” she said. “So many great ones. Some even technically better. But Peter was unique. You measured all subsequent performances against his. It was impossible to do otherwise. And it didn’t matter who the choreographer was—Petipa or Balanchine or Ashton or . . . In a way Limon penetrated, caught his essence, more than any other—”

She stopped in mid-sentence. “I’m sorry. I’m rattling on, aren’t I? You’re not here to listen to my theories. You’re here because of poor Lucia.” She took a candy out of a dish on the coffee table. “Please, ask whatever you like.”

“When did you last see Peter—prior to the funeral, of course.”

“Well, the last time was a very unhappy one. A pretty ugly situation. I hadn’t heard from him in over a year, but suddenly he showed up here. This was . . . oh, three years ago. He came here unannounced and I suppose he was drunk, or in some other awful state. He didn’t even ring the bell. He’d gotten into the building somehow and just started up on the elevator. He got stuck between floors and started an unholy row—pressing alarms and screaming. One of my neighbors ended up calling the fire department. Lord, it was a mess. Peter attacked one of the firemen with the extinguisher that hangs in the elevator. I didn’t even know who the madman was until I heard his voice. I got downstairs in time to see the police dragging him off. He was bleeding. And when he saw me he started to scream something about my being responsible for everything. Whatever that meant. He said I wanted to destroy him, to kill him. Then they took him away.

“And just to put the final, absurd cap on the story, I had a house guest at the time: my mother. It was all so grotesque!”

“And did you try to locate him after that?”

My inquiry seemed to irritate her, as if I were questioning her loyalty to the dancer; as if I too were accusing her.

She stood up and walked closer to the fire.

“Of course I would have
liked
to locate him. But what could I do? The police had released him. I tried to find him. Many people did. I even filed a Missing Persons report. But the inquiry ended when it was discovered that his mother was getting postcards from him. The authorities said he obviously did not wish to be ‘found.’

“And the truth is he really wasn’t ‘lost.’ People regularly claimed to have seen him. Some said they caught sight of him in the street—begging near Columbus Circle. Others said that he sometimes slept in one of those shanties in Riverside Park. It was insane. One didn’t know what to believe.”

Betty Ann poked at the crackling fire.

“Do you mind,” I said, “if I ask a personal question of you?”

“What question?”

“Did you have . . . Did you ever sleep with Dobrynin?”

Betty Ann burst into laughter then. I stiffened, startled—and a little insulted.

She walked over to lay a consoling hand on my arm. “Oh, please don’t think I’m laughing at you. Believe me, I’m not. I was just thinking of a joke people used to tell. I don’t recall the whole buildup, but the punchline had to do with the technical aspect of the word ‘sleep.’ Peter had truckloads of lovers, but probably very few of them actually
slept
with him. Like me.”

She smiled then. “How could you spend time with Peter and
not
have sex? He was a satyr. The interesting thing was that even though you knew it was just a throwaway for him, you weren’t offended. You looked on it the same way he did—as an amusing way to pass the time. What’s the phrase, ‘a sport and a pastime’? He made you feel good, as if you were rendering a direly needed service.”

She turned back to the photograph then.

“Peter was a little too big on throwaways, though. He went too far. And eventually he threw away his career . . . and his art . . . and his life.”

I could no longer see Betty Ann’s face. She had walked up to the photo and was staring at it intently.

“I really miss him. His lunacy as well as his art. Lord, was he crazy! He made a small fortune doing a series of sweater ads. Or jeans—whatever. Anyway, he went out and bought a forty-thousand-dollar Jaguar the morning after the check cleared. He left it idling in front of a bar one afternoon. And of course the car was promptly stolen. So what did Peter do? He bought another car—a jeep, for fifteen thousand. Which was towed for illegal parking. When he came out of the restaurant and found it was gone, he borrowed twenty dollars and went home in a cab. Never made the slightest effort to retrieve either of those cars.” She was shaking her head as she came back to join me.

“Did he have male lovers as well?” I asked. “Sleepovers or otherwise.”

“I should be very surprised if he didn’t. He was an affirmative-action satyr, if you will. All were welcome.”

I started to respond with a remark that might not have been in the best taste, but Betty Ann saved me from myself. She held up her hand to interrupt. “It’s time I showed a few manners,” she said. “I have one of those high-tech espresso contraptions. May I offer you some cappuccino?”

“To be honest, I thought you’d never ask.”

Off she went. Soon I heard the fierce and bizarrely comforting sucking sounds of the machine at work.

While she was busy in the kitchen, I went over to get a closer look at the satyr. Dobrynin seemed to be looking just over my right shoulder. I wondered if his sexual liaison with Betty Ann had been the pure fun for her that she had painted it to be. Perhaps he’d looked upon it as akin to going to bed with his kindergarten teacher. I even found myself wondering whether, if I’d known him, I too would have succumbed to his blandishments, become one of his famous shoehorns. I’d always thought of myself as immune to the type. But as the song goes, one never knows, does one?

The cappuccino was delicious. I drained it greedily. There were still one or two things I wanted to go over with Betty Ann.

“Tell me,” I said, “do you have any idea how a derelict with no shoes and no ticket could have gotten into the ballet?”

She laughed that delightful laugh again.

“My dear, haven’t you ever heard of second-acting? Why, I thought you were a sophisticated New Yorker.”

I told her that I was neither sophisticated nor a New Yorker. “But,” I said, “I do know what second-acting is. It’s how students with no money get into the Broadway shows. At the end of the first act, everyone goes out onto the street for a cigarette. When the bell sounds for Act Two, they just walk right in with the crowd. It’s an old gimmick. But Dobrynin was murdered during the first part of the ballet, before there was an intermission.”

“But what I actually meant,” she explained, “is that there is a way to get into the ballet—as at the theater. A lot of starstruck kids sneak into the State Theater through the maze of underground garages beneath Lincoln Center. From what I understand it’s impossible to get into the Met that way, but the State Theater and Avery Fisher hall are no problem for the initiated.”

“And if a starstruck kid can do it, why not a canny derelict who knew the place like the palm of his hand?” I wondered aloud.

I talked with Betty Ann for another forty-five minutes—until all the hard information she had on our hero had been exhausted and her fond reminiscences took over again. I found all of it instructive.

I rode down to street level in the creaky elevator, mulling over all I’d learned. I liked Betty Ann. I found her forthrightness charming. I hoped she hadn’t killed Peter Dobrynin.