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  “I wanted to see Emmy’s dance, so I’d left my goblin hood on a chair here”-she touched the half-circle that Bernie Peters had drawn for a chair-“and I came around and put it on so I’d be ready, then sat there to watch.”

  “Did you see any of the others after that?”

  “Just Sergio. I poked my head around the masker to wave at him,” said Ginger, waggling her fingers in demonstration, “but after I sat down, it was between us.”

  “Could he have been the jack-o’-lantern?” asked Bernie Peters.

  “Sergio doesn’t dance,” Ginger giggled, her grief momentarily forgotten. “Have you seen him walk? He’s so skinny and clumsy he looks like a nearsighted stork.” Impulsively, she stood up, flexed her leg, and it was as if her supple flesh-and-blood joints had suddenly been replaced by rusty metal hinges. With elbows pointed toward the ceiling and her head dipping stiffly forward with each step, she did an impromptu and entirely convincing imitation of an awkward, myopic stork. Albee and Peters both laughed, but Sigrid watched without smiling or moving and the young redhead quickly resumed her seat like a child who expected to be scolded.

  “I'm sorry. I keep forgetting Emmy’s gone; that it’s not a scary scene that’ll soon be over. It really did happen, didn’t it?”

  Her bare feet were small and white and she placed them side by side flat on the floor before her.

  “You were watching from stage left,” Sigrid said quietly. “Are you sure you didn’t see any of the other dancers?” Ginger Judson shook her head and her long thick braid swung slowly from side to side. "None of them were in place when I sat down and the stage lights were so dim I didn’t notice after Emmy started dancing.”

  "How did the jack-o’-lantern enter?”

  “From stage right, directly across from me, where Eric was supposed to enter in the next dance. I think I saw him the same time Emmy did and I couldn’t figure out why he’d come on early and still in his pumpkin head. It was supposed to be a solo improvisation and she was dancing so beautifully. But Emmy was wonderful. Never let anything throw her. She looked a little puzzled at first, then I saw her turn her head away from the audience like she was trying to keep from laughing out loud.”

  Ginger Judson seemed puzzled herself. “He made the children laugh, too, but he wasn’t all that funny.” There was a hint of resentment in her voice which made Sigrid raise one eyebrow.

  Haltingly, the girl described the duet, then faltered as she neared the climax. “I was watching Emmy mostly,” she said in a tiny voice, “so I can’t say who he was. That’s what’s important, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Sigrid.

  “I thought it was an accident.”

  “Did you really, Miss Judson?”

  “Yes! I-” Her voice faltered before the police officer’s cool watchfulness. “No. You’re right. It wasn’t an accident. He did throw her.”

  "At first you thought the dancer was Eric Kee. Why?”

  “Only when he first came on. I thought maybe it was Eric’s way of making up.”

  “They had quarreled?”

  The girl nodded. “He was really mad at her and she laughed at him. It drove him up the wall that she wouldn’t fight back. She never did. Not with him, not with anybody”

  “What did they fight about?”

  Ginger Judson's pale face was suddenly suffused with red. “I don’t know,” she said. “All I know is that Eric was furious with her.”

  She tried to deny further knowledge, but Elaine Albee and Bernie Peters pelted her with questions until Sigrid held up a restraining hand and said, “You must have heard some of his words, Miss Judson.”

  “He was jealous,” the girl whispered. “He accused her of sleeping with somebody else.”

  “Who?”

  “Me.” Her chin came up bravely but her face was now crimson.

  “And was she?” Sigrid asked mildly.

  “That’s none of your business, is it?”

  “In the normal course of events, no. But as a motive for murder, I’m afraid it is.”

  The younger woman tried to return Sigrid’s dispassionate gaze, but a large fat tear slid down her freckled cheek. With as much dignity as she could muster, she said, “Eric Kee was premature in his accusations.”

  Chapter 5

  “I didn’t kill Emmy because of some freckle-faced baby dyke!” Eric Kee said angrily.

  As Sigrid would later learn, Emmy Mion’s lover was only one-quarter Chinese, and that quarter was evinced in his straight blue-black hair and high cheekbones. From an Irish grandmother, he had inherited shamrock-green eyes and a well-knit five-foot-ten frame. He had also inherited her blunt forthrightness.

  "No one’s accused you, Mr. Kee,” Sigrid said mildly. She had offered him the chair by the desk but Kee chose instead to perch with crossed legs and straight back in a semi-Yogic position upon a nearby table. He had discarded his sweatshirt and now sat impassively in his tight-fitting black leotard with a hand on each muscular thigh like a modem, streamlined Buddha. Only his lips and blazing green eyes moved.

  “Ginger told you I was the other dancer, didn’t she?”

  “As I said before, Miss Judson merely claims to have overheard a quarrel between you and Emmy Mion prior to the performance this afternoon,” Sigrid replied carefully.

  "She didn’t ‘overhear’ a goddamned thing; she was eavesdropping. Spying on us. Every time we turned around, there she was, mooning at Emmy with those bovine eyes. I was starting to feel I ought to check under the bed every time we made love.”

  "So you did quarrel?”

  "Emmy was cool but I may have lost it for a minute there,” he admitted. “It wasn't what Ginger thought, though. Emmy felt sorry for her and she gave the kid wrong ideas. I wanted her to quit letting Ginger take up so much of her time. Before it went too for.”

  Sigrid was skeptical. “Before what went too far, Mr. Kee? A simple friendship?”

  “For Emmy, that's all it was. But Ginger-! She was like a goddamned alley cat in heat.” As he spoke, the bronze melted away from Eric Kee's impassive Buddha and he became a lithe and sinuous feline who rolled and writhed and stroked herself across the long tabletop in a frantic sexual ecstasy that was almost indecent to watch.

  “So that’s what’s wrong with Tinker Bell!” exclaimed Bernie Peters, who had suddenly recognized his daughters’ pet in Kee’s vicious pantomime.

  Elaine Albee giggled and Sigrid repressed a sigh. Tliese dancers were too clever by half. “If you’re quite finished now, Mr. Kee.”

  “Right.” He did a slow rollover from the far end of the table and came up in a lotus position, all his angry emotions frozen in bronze again.

  “When did you last speak to Miss Mion?” ‘Twelve-thirty, maybe; a quarter to one. I ran up to that Italian restaurant on the comer for a couple of orders of pasta primavera. She was waiting for a phone call so we ate lunch in here.” He nodded toward the wastebasket where they’d disposed of the empty take-out cartons. “Was the call important?”

  “Enough to wait for, I guess, though not enough to mention after I got back. The phone rang a few times, but it was about the performance, lads wanting to check the starting time, things like that.”

  "Was Miss Mion worried about anything?” Sigrid asked. “Had she quarreled with any of the others?”

  “Emmy didn’t quarrel,” said Kee, and a rueful smile escaped the stolid facade he seemed intent on maintaining. “Not like you mean, anyhow. She gave her ideas, listened to yours, and if yours were better, she’d do it. If they weren’t, you could argue till the Hudson ran dry and she just didn’t hear you.

  “As for being worried-” He paused, as if to analyze something he’d never actually given much thought to before. “Emmy didn’t stew about things out loud, she’d just go away inside her head somewhere until she got it all worked out in her mind. And you know what?” Realization dawned in his voice. “She did have something on her mind today! Something more than-”

  He stop
ped abruptly and began again. “I put it down to the performance, but it couldn’t have been that because she never worried about performing; yet she didn’t hear half what I said about Ginger-I guess that’s why I got so uptight,”

  “Would you say her preoccupation stemmed from the professional side of her life or something more personal?” Eric Kee’s black hair gleamed with dull blue lights as his head moved almost imperceptibly. “Sorry, Lieutenant. I just don’t know. Whatever it was, Emmy wouldn’t talk about it until she had it straight in her own mind what she was going to do.”

  Too bad, thought Sigrid. “Did you see her again after that?”

  “She was standing at the top of the stairs just before we went on. She blew me a kiss and told us to break a leg, but I was still too ticked off to answer. 0 The stone face was back again.

  "After the first dance, the five of you exited stage left. Where did you go from there?”

  “Straight up those steps to the men's dressing room. Win was right behind me. I didn't feel like talking and I went on down the hall to the bathroom and put my head under the spigot. Then I remembered that Td left my goblin hood here in the office so after I toweled off, I came downstairs and got it.”

  Using Bernie ’s sketchy floor plans, Sigrid could easily follow Kee’s narrative. The rear wall of the stage rose the full two stories to leave a backstage area that was basically the same both upstairs and down, from the wall which formed one side of the wide hall to the row of rooms along the opposite side.

  The men s dressing room was at the head of the spiral iron staircase, directly above the prop-storage room. Two doors down was another three-cubicle, two-basin rest room, identical to the one next to the office below. At the far end of the hall, the women s dressing room lay above the comer business office. The wide staircase that connected the floors at that comer must have made it convenient for Emmy Mion to run back and forth in her varied roles of dancer, choreographer, business director, and teacher.

  Roman Tramegra had told Sigrid that the second dance was timed to run exactly six minutes; he’d estimated that the jack-o’-lantern had joined Emmy Mion some three or four minutes into her dance and had probably been onstage less than two minutes total, an estimation which agreed with Ginger Judson s account.

  How long did it take, Sigrid wondered, to splash water over one’s head, towel off, come downstairs, and locate a masked hood? Two minutes? Three?

  “Was anyone here in the office when you came in?”

  “No.”

  “Did you open any of the desk drawers?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Just answer the lieutenants questions,” rasped Bernie. “No, I did not snoop through any drawers,” said Kee with exaggerated patience.

  “What did you do after you found the hood?” Sigrid asked.

  “Put it on, of course, and went out to wait in the wing. It was almost time for our cue. I got there just as Emmy was following that bastard up on the scaffold.”

  “Was there anyone else in the wing when you arrived?” Eric Kee continued to sit in his yoga position, but as the questions came down to Emmy Mion’s last few minutes, the police officers saw his open hands clench into white-knuckled fists on his brawny thighs.

  “I’ve been trying to remember, but I can’t be sure. You know the way maskers are hung?”

  Sigrid frowned at the sketch and Bernie Peters leaned over her shoulder to point out the squiggly lines that represented the angled curtains, two on each side of the stage, which kept the audience from seeing into the wings.

  “The stage lights were dim blue except for the baby white following Emmy so it was pretty dark in the wings. We three men were supposed to enter from this side, the other two women from stage left. My place was in the middle between the two curtains. Win was upstage, Cliff down from me; Ginger was directly across and Ulrike was opposite Win.”

  “You actually saw them in their correct positions?” asked Sigrid.

  “I didn’t look,” replied Kee, frustration in his voice. ‘I was so surprised to see someone on with Emmy that I didn’t notice anything else. I sort of remember looking past Win to see Emmy when I passed his spot but-”

  A startled expression swept Kee s face. “It must have been his dummy!” he exclaimed. “Win s never been early for a cue in his life.”

  Those goblin dummies were really going to be a problem, Sigrid thought. She’d noticed before that at least one had occupied each wing position, either hanging from a hook on the curtains or slumped on a chair. Unless one looked closely, the poor light would make it difficult to differentiate between a living goblin and a stuffed one, especially if all had their masked hoods in place.

  “When Miss Mion fell-”

  “When she was thrown," Eric Kee interjected bitterly. “When she was thrown, then,” said Sigrid impassively, “who did you think the other dancer was?”

  “There really wasn't time for me to get a fix on him. He didn’t quite move like Cliff but Win would never horn in on someone’s solo.”

  “This is hardly a case of someone hogging the spotlight,” Sigrid reminded him dryly. Kee stared back at her stonily as she straightened her notes on the desktop. “Now then, Mr. Kee: what did you do when the lights went out?”

  “At first, nothing." The young man abruptly flexed his legs and then re-bent them so that he was sitting on his bare feet. “Everything had happened so fast I couldn’t believe what I d seen. The next thing I knew, I was rushing over to Emmy, the house lights came on, and that cop started yelling at us to keep away.”

  “Us who, Mr Kee? Exactly whom did you see when the lights came on?”

  “Sergio Avril and Ulrike Innes,” he said promptly. “Cliff Delgado, Ginger, and then Win.”

  “Wingate West was the last to arrive?”

  Kee nodded. “But that doesn’t mean a damn thing. Win’s always the last to arrive.”

  “Were they all wearing their hoods?”

  “Just Win. I pulled mine off when the lights went out and I guess the others did, too.”

  Sigrid leaned back in her chair and nodded to Albee and Peters.

  “Did you happen to notice if any of the others were breathing harder than usual?” asked Elaine Albee.

  “No, but by then we were all pumping adrenaline.”

  “If it wasn’t you. or West or Delgado,” said Bernie Peters, “could some other dancer from outside your troupe have slipped in?”

  “Friends drop by all the time to watch us rehearse, but I don’t think anybody could just walk right on unless-”

  He hesitated and then shook his head. “No, he would never hurt Emmy.”

  “Who wouldn't?”

  “David Orland. He and Emmy used to-well, they lived together for a while till Emmy moved in with me this spring. No hard feelings, though. They were still friends.”

  “Then why wasn't Mr. Orland part of the troupe?” asked Elaine, jotting down the name.

  “He was working steady at the time. A revival of West Side Story. It closed last month, so he's been around more lately. But it's crazy to think he'd kill Emmy.”

  “Yet if this David Orland suddenly appeared onstage,” said Sigrid, leaning forward to rejoin the interrogation, “would she have danced with him?”

  “Oh sure,” said Kee. “They were always terrific together.”

  He stood up on the table, put one foot on the bookcase against the wall, and bent to unpin a small black-and-white photograph, which he handed to Sigrid.

  In it, Emmy Mion was being held high above the head by an unfamiliar but very well-muscled male dancer.

  “TTiat's David Orland,” said Kee and, as he stood there balanced between tabletop and bookcase and looked around at the many images of Emmy Mion upon the walls, that impassive, deliberate mask dropped over his features again.

  “I grabbed a drink of water, visited the john, then went immediately to my place between the front curtain and the first masker,” said Cliff Delgado, pacing before the desk, too
keyed up to sit in the chair they had offered him. “And no, I didn't see any of the others and I certainly didn't speak to them, okay? We screwed up at the end of the first dance. I was supposed to do a back roll over Ulrike and our timing was off. It was such a stupid mistake I could have killed her!”

  His passionate words hung in the air. He flinched and added uncomfortably, “That's just a figure of speech, okay?

  My God! If men were sent to the gallows every time they felt like strangling a clumsy bitch-”

  "Sit down, Mr. Delgado,” said Sigrid, in a cold voice that brooked no argument.

  Delgado threw up his hands in exasperation, but did as he was told.

  “Were you in place when the jack-o’-lantern appeared onstage?”

  “Yes, yes, but don’t ask me whether it was Eric or Wingate because I didn’t give a damn who the showboater was. It was supposed to be a solo, for God’s sake! A delicate, wistful interlude, okay? And that jackass was turning it into such a farce, I couldn’t watch.”

  “That fence and scaffold’s less than ten feet from where you were standing,” snorted Bernie Peters. “You had to see him.”

  “And I tell you I didn’tl” Delgado shrilled, springing from his chair to glare down at Peters.

  Cliff Delgado had been Elaine Albee’s first candidate for the role of murderer, and the young man did radiate a near-psychotic intensity and impulsiveness, thought Sigrid. His dark blue eyes shot sparks; his short, punk-clipped yellow hair stood on end as with static electricity; and his dancer’s body seemed poised for motion even when he was standing rigidly defiant.

  “Sit down, Mr. Delgado,” she said patiently. “You must surely understand that the only way we can discover who killed Miss Mion is by a process of elimination and that-”

  “Okay, okay” he snapped and sat down with a long- suffering sigh. “Just no goddamned lectures, okay? Truth is, okay, yeah, it had to be Win or Eric. The moves were familiar and yet they weren't. I didn’t catch on at first. I figured it was Eric, rubbing our noses in it. But then-I don’t know-it was more like somebody dancing Eric, okay?”