Corpse de Ballet (32 page)

*   *   *

Macbeth
is not a very romantic play, and it wasn't particularly hard for Juliet and Murray to make their way home from it without surrendering to lust. The performance had been good and they had plenty to talk about.

Landis insisted on walking Juliet through the park and all the way to the door of her building. Then he stopped about five feet short of the awning, his arms folded against his lean chest, his strong hands tucked under his arms. He stood almost dancing with unease, nodding and smiling and saying, “Great to see you!” and “Thanks for coming on such short notice!” and eyeing the doorman as if terrified Juliet might throw her arms around him and smooch him good night. Juliet thought she might have been able to take him down by flinging herself at his ankles, but she certainly saw no way to get near his face.

Though she had been listening all evening for an explanation, nothing he had said tonight even hinted at why he had thought to offer her the extra ticket to
Macbeth
today, why he had called her now and not before. She didn't care to ask. His demeanor had been friendly, a bit more casual than before, perhaps, but otherwise unremarkable.

Keeping her distance, “Hey, when are you going to let me see your work?” she asked.

“Oh, God, sorry about that. I meant to call you and then I just … just never … just forgot, I guess…”

His words trailed off and Juliet thought he was not, perhaps, such a very good actor after all. He might have mixed feelings about letting her see his work, but he certainly hadn't forgotten to call her. Her idea that he was afraid to be alone with her was confirmed.

And, probably, with good reason. It had already occurred to her to offer him a drink; but a quick recollection of the heady thrill his gaze could elicit in her had made her think again. Better to follow his lead. The truth was, it had been so long since she had been strongly attracted to a man, just the smell, the shiver of sexual possibility in the air had been a pleasure. She thanked him again, waved, and went inside.

In the elevator, it occurred to her that a chaste, prudish man might make for an interesting Regency hero. Very interesting. Letting herself into her quiet apartment, she trotted up to her desk and jotted the thought down on an index card for her “future ideas” file. As she stood up to leave, she automatically hitched down her underpants. Clearly, she now had a raging yeast infection.

Yet, uncomfortable as the infection was, as vivid as
Macbeth
had been, as curious as she was about Murray Landis, she went to bed with her head full of the idea of a priggish Regency hero. Oh, yes, that would be fun! She lay awake for nearly an hour weaving a plot around the notion before she fell asleep.

*   *   *

In the morning, even before Ames arrived, Juliet called the pharmacy and asked them to deliver some Monistat ASAP. Then she made some tea and went to her study, where her reference section included an invaluable layman's guide to pharmacology. Did you have to use Monistat only at night? She seemed to remember some such requirement. Perversely, with the cure so close, the itch seemed worse now than ever. She didn't think she could stand to wait sixteen more hours. Maybe she could use it and work lying down?

Finding the book, she sat down with it in one of the leather armchairs and flipped through the pages. Librium, Lopressor, Luvox, Macrodantin, Mexitil, Mistenflo, Micronor, Modicon—

Mistenflo? For a brief, strange moment, the word seemed to hover in the air like a magic bird—a living thing that promised miraculous understanding.

Her breath quickened as she turned the pages back.

Like Cytotec, a brand of misoprostol. Inhibits production of stomach acid, protecting the lining … Patients who must take nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, such as those with acute, chronic arthritis, may use Mistenflo to avoid development of ulcers.… Contraindications: Because it can induce miscarriage, Mistenflo
MUST NOT BE TAKEN DURING PREGNANCY
.

Mistenflo, you conceited fool. Juliet dropped the book into her lap, her itch forgotten. Not
mistenflûte.
Anyway, now that she thought of it, ‘
mistenflûte
' meant a person, like ‘so-and-so.' Moreover, it had proved to be archaic. ‘
Truc,
' ‘
machin,
' that's what you said for ‘thingamajig.'

For a long time, she sat immobile, thinking. Slowly, as if the past two months were a large, much-folded map she could only now lay flat and study whole, she began to see the flow and pattern of events. Observations she had scarcely acknowledged heretofore joined with words she had heard Ruth say only yesterday—words she herself had said—and knitted together to make a simple story. She stood and, almost as if in a dream, went up the stairs to her desk, where she turned the computer on and went to Medline.

“Misoprostol,” she typed.

Up it popped, along with dozens of other abstracts: “The Brazilian Experience with Cytotec.”

Juliet read. “In Brazil, where abortion is illegal, the synthetic prostaglandin misoprostol has been used, with and without medical supervision, since the early 1980s to induce abortion quietly and inexpensively…”

Brazil. Her mind raced back to the first day she had visited the Jansch. How could she have been such a dolt as not to have seen it before? Still, she would have to ask Elektra Andreades one question—no, two—just to be absolutely sure.

Chapter Eighteen

It was 9:50 in the morning when Juliet phoned the Jansch.

“Gayle, I'm hoping to put together a little first-night celebration for Ruth,” she improvised, when the receptionist answered. “Is there any chance I could talk to Elektra Andreades for a minute?”

As she had hoped, Elektra was there and class had not yet begun. Soon, she was on the line.

“Listen, I'm sorry to bother you,” Juliet began, “and I'm really sorry to seem to be sticking my nose into your business, but…”

She asked. The answers were as she expected. Promising to explain later, she hung up and dialed Landis, home number first. His machine picked up. She left a message and tried him at work.

“Detective Landis is out,” said a hurried voice.

“Do you expect him back today?”

“I got no idea.”

She left a message there, too, carefully saying it had to do with official business, then decided it wouldn't hurt to do a little library research until he got back to her. Four or five years ago, when she was writing
Marianne, or, The Actor's Stratagem,
about a governess hired by a great lady of the Regency stage, she had done some research on Sarah Siddons in the theater collection of the Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. There, she had noticed other researchers leafing through thick files of clippings on living actors. Another phone call informed her that there was indeed a dance collection of such files, too; an hour later (pausing only long enough to use an applicatorful of the newly delivered Monistat, and the hell with whether you were supposed to stay horizontal), she had filled out a little slip of paper and handed it to the librarian.

In return, she received a fat sheaf of reviews, features, programs, photographs, and press releases collected by farsighted New York Public Library employees over the past fifteen years. The early photographs among these documents showed a small, rather scrawny youth with pale, lank hair around a heavily airbrushed face, a youth who (the accompanying texts explained) had grown up in Fort Pillow, Tennessee.

Slowly, Juliet leafed through the clippings, studying the bits of frail newsprint as closely as if they had been relics of a forgotten civilization. There was no native-son-makes-good piece that she could find from the Nashville
Courier,
or even the Fort Pillow
Star.
There were no interviews with proud parents or siblings either, and only a brief word from a retired, former ballet teacher in Memphis. So that was that. Juliet looked up to find herself gazing into the eyes of a bust of Nijinsky. She shivered a little in the library's air-conditioned air.

Yet even as she worked out the details—even as, in her mind, she explained it all to Murray—she was aware that no court would consider the evidence she had in hand proof of anything, let alone felony assault, manslaughter two, and (if her memory served, at least) murder. She handed the file back to the incurious clerk behind the window and headed home, as Angelica K-H might have put it, plunged in thought. The weather had turned breezy and the ozone alert had been lifted at dawn, so she decided to walk. Her cell phone rang just as she entered Riverside Park.

She sat down to answer on a bench not far from where a man lay stretched out asleep in the shade of a giant oak. From another tree, a bold squirrel squarely eyed her, evidently mistaking her for some human friend of his.

“Murray, it was Hart,” she said into the phone. “Hart Hayden killed Anton Mohr.”

*   *   *

He said he would meet her in ten minutes on the top of Mount Tom, the rocky outcrop at the corner of Eighty-third Street and Riverside Drive that Edgar Allan Poe, in his “Raven”-writing days, was said to have climbed in order to gaze at the Hudson River. Glad she was wearing sneakers, Juliet walked the remaining half mile, then picked her way up the mount (called by locals “Rat Hill,” for good reason) over broken glass, empty potato-chip bags, and spent condoms.

The wind sighed voluptuously through the leaf-laden trees, dusty now at the end of summer and thick with a worn heaviness. Murray, looking un-coplike in black Levis and a white T-shirt, was already waiting at the peak of the hill. Their eyes met, then skidded away; as if by tacit, mutual consent, neither tried to greet the other with anything more personal than a spoken “Hi.” Murray had spread a denim jacket out over the rough, dirty schist, and he gestured to Juliet to sit here, then seated himself cross-legged on the bare rock a few feet away. Below them, the strip of trees sighed and the highway hummed. A red tug pulled a laden barge up the churning river.

“So spill it,” Murray said.

“Okay.” She closed her eyes, then fixed them on the barge as she tried to get her thoughts in order. “As motives for murder go,” she started, still gazing at the river, “it was rather a noble one. And so simple, it was hard to spot.

“I just visited the Library for the Performing Arts. Hart Hayden grew up in rural Tennessee, the youngest of six kids on the family chicken farm. He was short, he was scrawny, and he had a case of acne bad enough to scar his face forever. His real name, if you'll believe it, was George Washington. His sexuality was, I imagine, ambiguous. And he adored ballet. You can guess what his adolescence must have been like.

“But he had grit. He got himself to a local dancing school and he got himself out of Tennessee. On scholarship at a prestigious arts academy in North Carolina, he met Elektra Andreades, a girl petite enough to make him look tall. He changed his name, invented Hart Hayden. With ambition and talent, he and Elektra made themselves stars of American ballet. Elektra married, but Hayden lived for dance, setting aside his sexual life, his personal life, aspiring to nothing more. His height was a disadvantage, but, thanks to Elektra, he coped with it well. There was only one lack in his career: No choreographer ever found him inspiring, no one ever created a dance on him, for him. When he retired, he would leave behind no permanent mark. And that prospect, after all he'd done, all he'd given up, haunted him painfully.

“Enter Ruth Renswick. A few years ago, she came to the Jansch and remounted an old piece of hers called
Cycles.
Hayden had just the look she wanted, and she used him prominently. He was great. Flash forward a couple of years. The Jansch commissions Ruth to create a full-length
Great Expectations.
Now Hayden's prayers are answered: who would Renswick cast for Pip but him? For once, his size and slightness were on his side. He was Pip. He even came from a similar background. And he knew Ruth liked him.”

Juliet paused and stole a look at Murray to see if he seemed interested. He was frowning at the promenade, apparently watching a couple of kids on bikes there, his dark face, with the strange, flat cheekbones, unreadable.

Juliet made herself go on, switching to the present tense in hopes it would liven things up. “But when the time comes,” she recommenced, “Ruth announces the first Pip will be Anton Mohr. Hayden is stunned. But he's a scrapper, and he makes up his mind to show her her mistake. He does have the part of second Pip, and luckily, she's choreographing with both casts. From the start, he extends himself for her, works tirelessly, offers inventions, solutions. But she doesn't see it. Weeks go by, and Anton—despite his relative ineptness as a classical ballet partner—is still her darling.

“So Hayden gets a bright idea—a bright, nasty idea. He buys some powdered pigment or grinds up some brown cosmetic, eyeshadow probably, and mixes it with talcum powder. This he takes to the Jansch. He waits for his moment. It arrives when Anton is scheduled to dance alone in Studio Three just after a full ensemble session. During the changeover, Hayden dumps the powder into the rosin box. Mohr takes his fall, injures himself and—voilà, Hayden's chance to shine.

“Again, he works his tail off for Ruth. He even takes the trouble to cultivate me, her friend and advisor, to get me to like him. But Ruth still doesn't get the picture. Anton is her star, and as soon as he's healed, she not only reinstates him, she makes Hayden teach him what he missed—the very steps Hayden himself devised. He's seething, but he does it. He also thinks up a second plan.

“Now it's the day of the run-through. Good news for Hart at the start of rehearsals: Mohr knows the steps, but he stinks. Hope springs. Maybe Ruth will ask Hayden to dance Pip in the run-through after all? But after the break, Anton suddenly catches fire. He gives a magnificent performance; everyone in the studio stops and stares. Ruth is delighted. At the lunch hour, Hayden goes off to the farthest little studio alone and, writhing with envy, relieves himself by dancing Iago's first-act solo from
Othello.