Baby Doll Games Page 8

  An electronic beep signaled the start of a second message which tumbled out of her machine in a breathless and utterly familiar rush. “-so unless something comes up, I’ll be there all weekend.” As usual, her mother had been unable to wait for the beep. “Let’s have lunch together Monday at that dim sum place, okay? Twelve sharp.”

  Despite traces of a lingering southern accent, Anne Harald met life on the run and passing fifty had not slowed her down. If anything, she seemed to have picked up her pace, as if more had to be crowded into every interesting minute before her time ran out. Usually, she rattled on long enough for Sigrid to deduce most of the message by internal clues. Not this time though. Sigrid would have to wait until lunch on Monday to learn Anne’s weekend location.

  Another electronic beep was followed by a moment of silence, then an unfamiliar voice said, “Oh, never mind,” and hung up.

  By this time Sigrid had stripped to a lacy bra and underpants that were surprisingly frivolous when one considered the unflattering and severely tailored street clothes she usually wore, and she stood in front of her open closet wondering what to pull out for the evening. Nauman had said dinner when he called her from California last weekend, but the connection was poor and she wasn’t sure what he had in mind.

  Or what she wanted him to have in mind.

  The next beep made the question academic. “Siga?” Oscar Nauman’s voice was a rumbling baritone. “God, I hate talking on these damn machines. Look, a pipe’s burst-Connecticut-so I have to go-place could wash away and where the hell plumbers? Worse than doctors on a weekend. Sony I'll call.”

  Deflated, Sigrid sat on the edge of the bed, rewound the tape, and then lay back against the ivory linen coverlet as the short message played again. By now she was used to the way the artist’s speech turned to verbal shorthand whenever he was excited or upset and she had no trouble deciphering his diatribe about the impossibility of finding a plumber on a Saturday night.

  Nauman’s East Side apartment was a bachelor efficiency, little more than a place to sleep and change clothes during the week while he attended to his duties as chairman of the art department at Vanderlyn College. Connecticut was where he had his studio, where he actually painted, and where most of his notebooks and sketchbooks were stored, not to mention a cache of early works for which three museums were dickering. Early in their acquaintance Sigrid had visited Nauman’s Connecticut house to help one of his former students, and she was willing to concede that a broken water pipe on those premises probably constituted a true emergency.

  On the other hand, this was the second weekend in a row that Nauman had canceled their evening plans.

  Sigrid rolled to the middle of the bed and sat with her legs akimbo, an elbow on each thigh and her chin supported by cupped hands. It was her favorite position for serious thinking.

  Was Nauman avoiding an evening alone with her?

  They had met back in April during a homicide investigation in the Vanderlyn art department. He was chairman of the department, a world-famous artist, nearing sixty; she was a no-nonsense police officer, absorbed by her work and disinclined toward any emotional entanglements, much less with someone almost twenty-five years older than she.

  For reasons which she still hadn't fathomed, he had marched into her life and tried to change her dress, her palate, her resistance to intimacy. Nothing she did or said could drive him away, and as spring turned to summer and summer cooled into autumn, she continued to treat him much as an oyster treats an unwelcome and highly irritating grain of sand which has intruded beneath its reclusive shell and refuses to be dislodged: without realizing what was happening, she gradually accustomed herself to the unfamiliar and complex emotions which he aroused in her, emotions her heretofore orderly psyche had never experienced.

  It wasn’t until a young naval officer provoked him to a jealous outburst that she finally recognized how important Nauman s opinion of her had become. Until then, Sigrid had believed the mirrors which told her that her face was too thin, her nose too long, her mouth too wide; that her breasts were too small and her body too skinny; that nothing about her physical appearance fit the mold of standard beauty and sexuality.

  Suddenly reflected in the glare of Nauman s jealousy and frustration, however, Sigrid had abruptly realized that there might be other standards. For the first time in her life she began to feel desirable, a woman who could be cherished for very individual reasons by an exceptional man.

  Curious, and still more than a little awkward, she had lowered her defenses and waited to see what would happen next.

  Nothing, Whether by coincidence or design, their schedules had immediately quit meshing. If she wasn't working overtime, he was jetting off into the sunset to jury a show or to some exhibit or other of his pictures. In the last ten days, there had been only one hasty lunch together in an overcrowded restaurant-hardly the time or place to make him aware she was ready to take the next step even if she’d known what the next step was.

  With the old insecurities beginning to nibble at the edges of her fragile new self-esteem, Sigrid slid off the end of her bed and hesitated before the mirrored closet door. Her body seemed all awkward angularity now and her left arm still carried the ugly red wound where a would-be rapist had slashed her earlier in the month. Not a very appealing sight, Sigrid told herself, and at that moment she even repented the giddy impulse which had cut off her hair. Instead of the sensible braided bun that had kept her dark tresses away from her face and out of her eyes for so many years, it was now a mass of layered waves that flopped across her forehead in frivolous disarray.

  Sigrid frowned at her reflection and decided that her long neck and short hair made her look exactly like one of those weird African cranes with their ridiculous feathered topknots that were always showing up on Channel 13’s nature programs.

  How long, she wondered, would it take for her hair to grow out to braidable length again?

  Gloomily, she reached inside the closet for a warm robe and barely noticed that it was a lovely black wool, banded in cords of red and gold, which Anne had brought her from Peru. Without Nauman around to make her self-conscious about it, clothes were merely something to warm her body or cover her nakedness and she did not linger before the mirror long enough to see how the black robe made her gray eyes lucent or how its graceful lines softened the imagined angularities of her thin figure.

  Instead, she wandered out to the green-and-white tiled kitchen she shared with Roman and peered into the huge, well-stocked refrigerator. When she lived alone, she had always known exactly what she’d find in her small refrigerator: a head of wilted lettuce, a piece of cheese, milk, juice, a stick of butter, and perhaps the remains from a carton of salad or something she’d hurriedly picked up at a corner delicatessen the night before.

  With Roman such an exuberant culinary adventurer, the possibilities were now perplexingly endless: assorted cheeses, three kinds of salad greens, leeks, chives, artichoke hearts, bottles of homemade dressing, mustards, pickles, and a dozen covered pots and bowls filled with leftovers which, in Sigrid’s opinion, ranged from the merely exotic to the totally inedible.

  She closed the refrigerator, pulled down one of the green-enamel saucepans hanging over the stove, and dumped a can of tomato soup into it. Had Roman been there, he would have insisted upon garnishing the soup with a sprig of dill or basil and a dollop of heavy cream and he would have brought out tins of imported crackers. Sigrid added half a can of water from the tap and rooted around in the cupboard till she found some plain saltines. In her present mood, she felt an obscure need to regain some of her former asceticism, to recreate a time when her choices were fewer and much less complicated, when it was her work that gave her puzzles to solve, not her persona] life.

  She poured the hot soup into a bowl and tuned Roman’s small portable television to a news program just as a video camera tracked the removal of Emmy Mion’s shrouded body from the theater. Dispassionately, Sigrid watched herself deliver a brief sta
tement that was shortened even further by a beer commercial. After eating, she carried The New York Times and a glass of ros£ into the living room and nestled upon the white linen couch as she opened the paper to the crossword puzzle.

  The apartment, a ground floor appendage to an industrial building on the Lower West Side, belonged to the sister of Roman Tramegra’s godmother and when it became available back in August, Sigrid and Roman had agreed that they would respect each other’s privacy and overlap only in the kitchen and the tiny walled garden (Roman’s giardino) in front. Accordingly, the living room basically reflected her own tastes: neutral-toned couch and chairs and uncluttered surfaces. But even though Roman had his own small sitting room in what had once been the maid’s quarters, he could not resist adding a few colorful touches out here: an oriental rug in soft red tones, a couple of needlepoint cushions for the white couch, lush floor pots of ferns, and hanging baskets of bright pink geraniums for the courtyard window behind the couch.

  She drew the line, however, when Roman tried to sneak in a three-foot-tall replica of a seated Balinese temple goddess. (It wasn t the goddess's bare breasts nor even its six arms that jarred her so much as its garish red-and-gold robes.) Sipping her wine, she settled into the puzzle, The daily ones were seldom difficult enough to occupy her for very long, but she relished clever word play and today's crossword contained several outrageous puns. It was finished much too quickly, though, leaving Sigrid with a restlessness which thoroughly annoyed her Why should this one empty evening be so much more difficult to fill than all the empty evenings before Nauman charged into her life?

  When Roman let himself in at ten-thirty, he was surprised to find Sigrid at the dining room table with an open briefcase and papers spread before her.

  “Working?” he boomed. “I thought you and Oscar-?”

  “He was called out of town,” said Sigrid, “so I thought I’d catch up on a few things.”

  From the kitchen came a low clunk, then silence as the washer switched itself off. Roman followed her out to watch while she transferred the load to the dryer. “And you waxed the floor! My dear Sigrid, you needn't have done that.”

  “I didn't feel like watching a program on African water birds," she said wryly.

  Roman hung his corduroy jacket on the back of one of the bar stools, smoothed a strand of thin brown hair across the top of his head, and began measuring coffee into a brass Italian espresso pot. “Had I known you were free, I'd have invited you to see our ghoulish little fantasy.” Sigrid straightened up with her hands full of wet lingerie. ‘Those people actually danced tonight?”

  “And danced marvellously! It was standing-room-only and critics were there. Someone said the Times, too, but that's undoubtedly wishful thinking.” He filled the pot with water and set it over a medium flame on the huge chrome-and-black-iron range.

  Sigrid started the dryer. “What did they do about Emmy Mion s solo?”

  “If I do say so myself, it was inspired]” Roman beamed. “Neither of the women wished to do it and I knew the men weren’t too keen on giving the spotlight to David Orland-after all, he is not a member of the troupe, you see, and the 8th-AV-8 would hardly benefit if critics took him to be its star soloist-” He paused to explain the difficulties in substituting Orland for one of the men in the first and last scenes.

  “So who did you use?" Sigrid asked.

  “No one” exclaimed Roman. “I wrote a few lines for Eric and at the end of the first scene, there was a blackout while he told the audience that the next dance belonged to Emmy and that they must imagine her small ghostly figure dancing for them one final time. Then the music started, Nate Richmond narrowed a pure white spotlight till the beam wasn’t much wider than my fist, and that little spot of light danced. It was sheer magic. My dear, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.”

  Water boiled up in the espresso pot and a rich aroma of dark-roasted coffee filled the kitchen. Roman poured them each a tiny cup and as they sipped the hot liquid, he said, “You didn’t tell anyone today that we are friends, did you?”

  “No, why?”

  “No reason,” he replied with suspicious airiness. “Roman?” she said sternly.

  “My dear, I shall be the soul of discretion. No one will suspect a thing” he pleaded. “Do say I can play Watson to your Holmes just this once. Think how useful I can be in your investigation if no one knows our connection.” He looked like a large anxious Saint Bernard who had sniffed a juicy T-bone steak just beyond his reach.

  “You’ll have absolutely no official status,” Sigrid warned him, “and the minute you do something foolish-”

  “I shall be more inscrutable than Charlie Chan,” he promised happily. “More invisible than the Shadow.”

  Chapter 11

  When Sigrid arrived at headquarters Sunday morning for the day's briefing, she found her office crowded. Bernie Peters was trying to rev himself up with a second cup of black coffee. His bloodshot eyes and deep yawns betrayed another colicky night with his new son. Mick Cluett sat off to one side, immersed in the sports section of the Sunday paper, while Matt Eberstadt absentmindedly fumbled in the box on Sigrid’s desk for another jelly doughnut as he read through the reports the patrol units had submitted.

  “I thought you were on a diet,” teased Elaine Albee, moving the doughnuts out of his reach and offering them to Sigrid as the lieutenant took her place behind the desk. “I didn't have any breakfast,” Eberstadt alibied. Sigrid glanced at the depleted choices and selected a squashed doughnut filled with raspberry jam. “What about fingerprints, Lowry?”

  “No luck, Lieutenant,” Jim Lowry replied, confirming what they had feared. The iron scaffolding from which Emmy Mion had been flung was covered with overlapping fingerprints of all six dancers. “I even found a clear set of Orland's prints on the lower rungs. But up near the top, where they say that jack-o’-lantern was standing when he threw her, nothing but smudges.”

  To add to their lack of leads, Bernie Peters reported a less than fruitful interview with the composer, Sergio Avril. “The guy's blinder n a bat. Lieutenant. Claims he can barely see across the stage even when it's all lit up, so he’s got no idea who the jack-o’-lantern was.”

  Sigrid set her coffee mug down fatalistically. “I suppose he can't say if Kee or Delgado were in their places across from him?”

  Peters shook his head and Eberstadt chimed in, “That's the skinny little guy with the thick glasses, right? If it tells you anything about the condition of his eyes, I saw him mistake one of those stuffed goblins for a person.”

  They all agreed that those life-size puppets were not going to make life any easier.

  “What about the alley door?" Sigrid asked Elaine. “David Orland was right. It was unlocked when I examined it. I asked our boys in blue if they’d checked it earlier. No one remembered.”

  “So Orland could have walked out the front and come back in through the alleyway,” mused Jim Lowry.

  Mick Cluett lowered the sports section to listen phlegmatically as the others batted possible theories back and forth, but if he had theories of his own, he didn’t offer them.

  For the next few minutes, the others tried the glass slipper on every foot without really knowing what would make a perfect fit: there was Eric Kee’s possessive jealousy, Cliff Delgado’s lust, David Orland’s spurned love, and Wingate West’s what?

  “Laziness?” suggested Elaine. “Maybe they were going to can him for Orland.”

  “No,” said Eberstadt, folding the empty doughnut box into a neat square and carefully depositing it in Sigrid’s wastebasket. He hoisted his belt to tuck in his bulging shirt. “West may act goofy offstage but everybody says the guy can dance.”

  Eventually they became aware that Sigrid wasn’t with them and Bernie Peters said, “What do you think, Lieutenant?”

  “I think we’re going at this wrong,” Sigrid said bluntly. “Stop focusing on who for the moment and think why.” Albee had been dabbing at a drop of jelly which had
fallen on the skirt of her dark blue sweater dress and she lifted her blonde head. “Motive?”

  Jim handed her another napkin. “Or who profits?” Eberstadt nodded sagely. “And what changes now that she’s dead.”

  “That, too,” Sigrid agreed. “But even more, why was Emmy Mion killed yesterday afternoon on a spotlit stage in front of a hundred people? Those four men were her friends. Any one of them could have maneuvered her into a dark alley, someplace deserted and without any witnesses.”

  “Hey, that’s right!” said Lowry, his rugged face animated as the alternatives sank in. “Why didn’t he kill her Friday? Or wait till after the second show last night?”

  “He could have poisoned her champagne or brained her with the empty bottle when no one was looking,” nodded Peters.

  "Instead,” Albee concluded triumphantly, “he killed her in the most public place possible. On stage, front and center.”

  "They’re all performers,” said Lowry, “but that’s carrying performance-a bit far.”

  Whenever the lieutenant sat so quietly watchful with her thin fingers laced on the desktop before her, something about her erect carriage stirred subconscious memories in all her officers of certain intimidating teachers they’d each had in grade school. Even though the severe, old-maidish bun had recently been replaced by a much shorter and softer hair style, no one equated it to a softening of her manner; and when her cool eyes silently moved from one speaker to the next, even a latent chauvinist like Bernie Peters suddenly started feeling as if he ought to raise his hand and wait to be called on before speaking.

  “Maybe he couldn’t wait till after the show?” he offered diffidently.

  The lieutenant gave a half-nod of approval. “Why not?”

  Peters shrugged, but Albee glimpsed the direction Lieutenant Harald was moving toward. “That phone call!” she exclaimed. “Maybe Emmy Mion learned something dangerous and she let it slip just before the show started and he had to kill her before she told the others. Or us,” she added, thoughtfully running her fingers through her blonde curls. “Several people mentioned how rigid she was about some things-especially anything illegal.”