Baby Doll Games Read online

  Margaret Maron

  Baby Doll Games

  Sigrid Harald 5

  MYSTERIOUS PRESS EDITION

  Copyright O 1988 by Margaret Maron All rights reserved.

  To Paula Coyne Carlton for all tbe shared laughter since those first absurd days in tbe Pentagon pool

  My thanks to Dr. Martha Wingfield of Chapel HiU, NC for her helpful comments on certain psychiatric technicalities.

  Prologue

  July

  In Darlene Makaroff’s shabby apartment on the Lower East Side, the ancient window air-conditioning unit wheezed into silence shortly after noon. By nightfall, a humid, almost suffocating heat had built up in the cramped rooms until Darlene was driven to a drunken search for a hammer and screwdriver with which to pry open windows that had been painted shut for years.

  Bourbon usually made the seductive young woman cheerfully affectionate, but tonight she was sweaty and irritable. It didn’t help that four-year-old Corrie kept whining about being hungry even though Darlene had sent Tanya down to the deli for heroes and a bag of potato chips only a couple of hours earlier “Why don’t you let ’em get an ice cream?” asked Ray Thorpe, pouring himself another two inches of amber liquid.

  From her bottle, Darlene noted resentfully.

  “You so loaded with money, Mr. Gotrocks, you put out for ice cream.”

  Her daughters looked at the big man hopefully. Still something of a kid himself, the twenty-year-old construction worker was occasionally made generous by alcohol. Once he’d given Tanya a ten-dollar bill and told her to buy all the chocolate she and Corrie could eat.

  But that was when he first started coming around, when he wanted to be alone with Darlene and was embarrassed by two little wide-awake girls there in the apartment. Now their presence no longer bothered him.

  He just pulled Darlene into the bedroom and shut the door.

  He wanted to go into the bedroom now, but Darlene was in a contrary mood and petulantly eluded his caresses. She kept mouthing about what a steam bath the place was while Corrie whimpered ever more fretfully. The younger child was tired and sleepy but so hot that her short brown hair was curled into tight ringlets by perspiration.

  Finally nine-year-old Tanya went out to the kitchen, rummaged around under the sink filled with dirty dishes, and came back with the tools her mother wanted.

  ‘That’s my good little honeybunch,” crooned Darlene, giving the child a sweaty hug. She wasn't wearing a bra and the thin cotton shirt clung to her ripe curves.

  “I’ll do it,” said flay, eyeing her hungrily.

  “Over my dead body. This is my house and I’ll open my own goddamned windows.”

  Darlene drained her glass and moved unsteadily to the nearest window. Carefully placing the screwdriver where the window sash met the sill, she began to tap the handle with her hammer. It took her several minutes to chip around the entire window, then she gave a strong shove but it wouldn’t budge.

  “No woman knows how to use a hammer,” Ray jeered, flexing bulging biceps. He wore jeans and a dark red cut-out tank top and as he held out his hand for the hammer, his muscles glistened in the light cast by bare bulbs from a broken fixture overhead. “Let a man do it, baby.”

  Instead of laughing as she usually did when Ray joked about what women were good for, Darlene snarled a curse and started hammering directly on the window sash, trying to break the seal.

  Slender and small, with her long brown hair tied back in a bouncy ponytail, she looked younger than her twenty- four years and her bitchy stubbornness fueled the big man’s machismo. He wrested the hammer from her hand and the tip of the screwdriver caught his arm, grazing a bloody red line from wrist to elbow.

  His temper flared at that and he shoved Darlene aside and tried to use the screwdriver like a crowbar to lever the window open. The ancient wood creaked and splintered but refused to give. As Ray and Darlene cursed and shrieked at each other in the simmering, airless room, the little girls cowered together on the greasy, dilapidated couch, once again forgotten by the two adults who raged around them.

  “Shut your stupid face!” Ray shouted with a threatening lift of his big fist.

  He had punched her once or twice before, but when Darlene was drunk, she was fearless. Ray’s incompetence with the window suddenly seemed a hilarious repetition of his shortcomings in bed early that morning and she pointed out the parallels in increasingly graphic language.

  “Shut up!” cried Ray in a towering rage. “Shut up- shut up-SHUT UP!”

  With every shut upt his fist came down on Darlene's head, but it wasn't until Corrie and Tanya started screaming and blood splashed on his bare arm that Ray realized he still had the hammer in his sweaty fist.

  “Oh Jesus!” he moaned, and his eyes locked with little Tanya’s in an instant of horrified awareness as Darlene slid to the floor The hammer fell from his grip, unheard beneath Corrie’s wails, and Ray fled from the apartment, banging the door locked behind him.

  Chapter 1

  Saturday, October 31

  In an improvisational dance theater on lower Eighth Avenue, children watched silently as the friendly yellow moonlight of the last scene faded to a cold blue-white and the pumpkin patch was transformed into a graveyard. Pale blue lights swirled like mist across the stage through a section of sharply spiked cast-iron fence and picked out a row of cardboard tombstones at the rear of the stage. As taped electronic music quickened its eerie tempo, a narrow white beam flitted around the sketchy cemetery. The spotlight mimicked the nervous staccato of woodblocks, skittered away at an unexpected clash of triangles, and settled at last on a slender white form as it pushed aside a cardboard slab and rose like a hesitant spirit uncurling from the grave.

  In the audience. Dr. Christa Ferrell felt a tug on her sleeve and inclined her head.

  “That’s Emmy,” whispered the five-year-old beside her on one of the low-backed wooden pews which served as seating in this shoestring theater.

  Dr. Ferrell smiled at her nephew to show she'd heard and turned back to the stage with renewed interest. She had met the dancer but had never seen her perform. The famous Emmy Mion! Emmy Mion, who could run like the wind, turn endless cartwheels, leap tall buildings in a single bound, then walk on her hands and water, too, to hear Calder tell it.

  Ruefully and somewhat clinically, Christa Ferrell acknowledged to herself the twinge of jealousy she’d felt when she realized that Emmy Mion was the object of young Calder’s awakening sexual awareness. For five years the psychiatrist had shared a special closeness with her brother’s son, and while she could intellectualize his sudden ardor for the dancer, she couldn’t completely quash her own feelings of displacement aroused by his uncritical admiration for the woman.

  In the opening scene of this Halloween dance fantasy for children, five dancers, identically clad in black tights and baggy black sweatshirts, had worn grotesque and comical jack-o’-lantern heads of papier-mache with brown crepe paper streamers to suggest cornstalks. If Emmy Mion had been one of the pumpkins, Calder hadn’t been able to distinguish her, and Christa rather doubted it since there hadn’t been time for a change into the white leotard and tattered draperies she now wore as a wistful little ghost dancing (and dancing very beautifully, Christa generously admitted) through the deserted graveyard.

  According to the mimeographed program, the movements in this solo scene were to be improvised. If so-and in Christa Ferrell’s experience, improvisation was seldom as exciting as reasoned-out choreography-Emmy Mion possessed an imagination equal to her technical virtuosity as she danced loneliness and curiosity, now peering through the iron palings as if seeking company, now trying to entice to her outstretched hand an owl silhouetted among the bare branches of a stylized tree.

>   Not much taller than a slender child herself, the dancer wore her dark brown hair in a ragged, gamin cut which suited her rounded chin and wide-eyed look of wonder.

  As the indeterminate electronic music slowed to isolated percussive plonks and pings, the young ghost was unexpectedly joined by one of the jack-o’-lanterns, who immediately set the children in the audience to giggling as he clumsily tried to imitate some of Emmy’s intricate movements. Failing, he invited her to a dance which first parodied a cheek-to-cheek tango and then turned increasingly athletic as the music picked up tempo.

  The jack-o’-lantern appeared to hide in the shadows, the ghost sought him out. They played hide-and-seek among the tombstones, then he fled to the tree, swung himself up into the bare branches, and the ghost followed. As the music built to a crescendo, the jack-o’-lantern clamped his leg around a craggy tree branch to anchor himself and invited the little ghost to fly into his arms for a soaring lift.

  She was held aloft in his strong hands for a triumphant finale, high above the stage, the wispy tatters of her dress fluttering in the spotlight almost as if she were truly flying.

  It was a magical moment and the audience had begun to clap in spontaneous delight when, with an abrupt and unexpected flip of the jack-o-lantern's hands, the small ghost was hurled from her precarious perch and thrown with such brutal force that her body slammed into the sharp pointed spikes of the iron fence directly below.

  For one horror-filled instant, the pure white spotlight followed her tom body, then the theater was plunged into utter darkness.

  But not before everyone had seen the bright red fountains of blood jetting from the motionless white form.

  Chapter 2

  A commanding voice cut across the horror and bewilderment building among the spectators. “Everybody stay in your seats, please, till we can see what we’re doing. I’m a police officer. Who’s working the board? Could we get a little light down here, guy?”

  A moment later, two ceiling fixtures at the back blazed on, and under their harsh brightness, the shabby theater was immediately stripped of any shadowy glamour invested by the stage lighting.

  People blinked, disoriented by the sudden return to ordinary surroundings after that incredible scene onstage. A few parents frantically tried to distract their children, while the rest stood and craned for a better view of the darkened stage.

  A confused babble arose as they tried to make sense of it.

  “What happened?”

  “Did she slip?”

  “Dear God! He did it on purpose.”

  “No, she must have fallen.”

  “Look! She’s not moving.”

  “He did throw her-I saw him!”

  “Mother of Jesus! That poor kid!”

  The stage lights were still doused and the jack-o’- lantern dancer had disappeared, but Emmy Mion’s body remained impaled atop the fence. Her white dress was now drenched in red; blood pooled on the floor beneath her dangling feet.

  Four horrified members of the dance troupe rushed out to the limp form and two of the men started to lift her down, but Officer Papaky, the off-duty policeman who’d spoken before, quickly moved to prevent them. “Everybody stay off the stage,” he roared. “Nobody touch nothing and I mean it.”

  He hoisted himself to the edge of the proscenium and scanned the small crowd which gaped back at him, a stocky man with a receding hairline, who spoke with an authority that commanded temporary obedience. “I’m a police officer,” he repeated. “Is there a doctor here?” Christa Ferrell had already given her stunned nephew instructions to stay put and was pushing her way to the stage. “I am,” she called.

  Papaky cast a doubtful look at the very attractive blonde, then reached across the footlights to give her a hand up. “If there’s any chance of saving her, Doctor, we’ll get her down,” he said in a low voice for her ears only, “but if she’s already gone-”

  “I understand.”

  Reassured by Dr. Ferrell's competent air, Papaky next directed his wife to find a phone. “Call the station. Tell them it’s a possible homicide.”

  At the rear of the audience, he recognized a heavyset middle-aged blade man who managed a nearby grocery store where the Papakys frequently shopped. Papaky asked him to guard the front entrance. No one was to enter or leave. The manager nodded and immediately stationed his bulk in front of the lobby door.

  Behind Papaky, Christa Ferrell struggled to maintain a professional detachment as she examined the broken dancer in the dim light. It seemed unlikely that anyone could survive a spike through the carotid artery, but she went through the motions: no pulse in wrist or ankle, no reflexes from the open eyes, no indication of life at all.

  Other members of the troupe had joined the five dancers who were still clad in their black leotards and loose sweatshirts. Like anxious shadows, they bunched in the wings to watch her. “Doctor?” pleaded a husky male voice.

  “I’m sorry,” Christa said, shaking her head gently.

  “God, no" The man shook off the others’ restraining hands and started toward her, only to be driven back again by a determined Papaky.

  “Right now, till we find out what really happened, this stage is off-limits, guy," he told.the distraught dancer. "Nobody messes with it till the investigators get here.” He escorted Christa Ferrell down a short set of steps at the side of the stage and allowed her to rejoin her nephew, but requested that the rest of the company wait with him on the steps until the police experts arrived.

  “Police experts?”asked one of the white-faced girls. “For an accident? Didn’t Emmy slip?”

  “Oh no,” replied Ginger, her tall red-haired colleague. “I saw the whole thing. Eric threw her badly.”

  “What do you mean Eric threw her badly?” asked the youth who’d had to be restrained before. “This was supposed to be Emmy’s solo scene. I was upstairs when it started.”

  The redhead looked puzzled. “Then who danced with Emmy? You, Cliff? Win?”

  The two men seemed equally puzzled as each denied his involvement “I think,” interposed Officer Papaky, “that it would be better if you people didn’t talk about it right now.”

  Papaky was not surprised that none of the men owned up to partnering Emmy Mion. That had been no accidental drop. In his mind there was no doubt that the girl had been thrown deliberately.

  Upon joining the force four years ago, Papaky had formed the habit of carrying a pocket-size notebook even when off duty. He pulled it out now while he waited for backups to arrive. After entering the time and place and a condensed version of what he’d observed, he took down the.names and addresses of the light and stage designer; the composer; a plump and flashily dressed woman who said she designed the costumes; and the five remaining dancers, two women and three men. One of the men had the same last name and address as the designer. “Husband and wife?”

  The woman, whose plumpness made her appear older than the man, nodded.

  The theater was so small that the audience could hear Papaky’s questions and the company’s replies; and most of the adults, still stunned by what had happened, were willing to sink back into their seats and watch quietly, as if Papaky’s actions were a continuation of the interrupted performance. Several children questioned their parents in fearful whispers and scattered among them were at least six or eight, like litde Calder Ferrell, who realized that Emmy Mion would never dance with them again and who now sat with tears streaming down their innocent feces.

  After several minutes, one anxious mother with two sobbing children raised her voice to ask how much longer they had to wait and subject their kids to this. “Couldn’t you at least pull the curtain?”

  Male rumbles supported her growing distress.

  Fortunately, new movement at the rear of the theater quelled the mutiny as uniformed men from the precinct finally arrived. Those who claimed no personal connection with Emmy Mion were allowed to leave after giving their names and addresses and showing some proof of identity to the offi
cers who guarded the door.

  More officers came in, plainclothes now, who spread out across the stage, measuring, photographing, examining everything in minute detail. Among them, directing their activity, was- a woman with watchful gray eyes and short dark hair She wore a loose off-white corduroy jacket, badly tailored gray slacks, and a nondescript black shirt. Although there was nothing particularly prepossessing about her, she seemed to be the still, quiet center from which order radiated. Her cool voice was seldom raised, yet when she did speak, the others listened.

  Dr. Christa Ferrell paused as she gave her name to the officer at the door. “Who's that woman up there on the stage?”

  “The tall skinny one? Lieutenant Harald.”

  “Sigrid Harald?”

  “Yeah. You know her?”

  “It’s been years,” Christa replied. Her mind raced with the possibilities this chance meeting might produce, “Look, Tm the doctor who first examined the body of-” Abruptly she became aware of Calder s stricken face. “I have to take my nephew home first,” she said, “but I think I ought to come back and speak to the lieutenant.”

  “Sure, Dr. Ferrell,” said the officer He made a notation by her name. “Remind me when you get here and I’ll pass you back in.”

  Up on the stage, Lieutenant Sigrid Harald and her team had quickly debriefed Officer Papaky. They listened to his account of the dance performance, his observations about Emmy Mion’s fall, and what he’d heard the other dancers say. Then, while the others fanned out to process the scene in their usual routine, the lieutenant watched quietly as an assistant medical examiner completed his examination of the young dancer. Officer Guidry had already photographed the tom body from every angle and now pointed her cameras at potentially significant details turned up by the other detectives.

  Lieutenant Harald’s eyes swept over the stage, noting exits, the position of the curtains and lights, and the sketchy scenery, but she kept coming back to that iron fence and skeleton tree.

  The ten-feet-long, six-feet-tall section of cast-iron railing ran parallel to the front of the stage and was bolted securely to the floor at both ends. Vertical stability had been increased by anchoring it to the “tree,” a rectangle of open steel scaffolding four feet square and approximately eight feet tall, which had been transformed with cardboard limbs and twigs, then spray-painted black.