Corpse de Ballet (33 page)

“He also makes up his mind to set in motion his second plan, his ace in the hole. Just before the run-through, he'll slip a hit of Ecstasy to Mohr. Where did he get it? No problem: his roommate is the company drug dealer. Hayden can't just hand a pill to Mohr, so he's brought it in powdered or capsule form. During the little reception, he finds a pretext to get near Mohr and nimbly, surreptitiously drops the drug into his habitual Coca-Cola. Slipping the stuff in quietly is child's play for Hart, a famously graceful dancer whose current job is to leap up and down from tables, pretend to catch oranges, actually catch flying women—dancers are deft, agile, they're practically jugglers. So now, Mohr will wreck the run-through and Ruth will finally see the error of her ways. But instead—”

“Hold on a second.” Landis had been looking impatient for several minutes, and now he burst out at last. “I specifically asked Ruth about competition among the dancers. She says, and it stands to reason, that dancers are disappointed all the time. They're always competing. And Hayden himself admitted to me it bothered him not to be cast as first Pip. He was perfectly upfront about it. That type of frustration is their way of life. Ruth said so, and I have to believe her.”

“Yes, but that's where Ruth's very familiarity with the dance world played her false. Because what she didn't know is that, after this year, Hart Hayden will never dance professionally again. Max Devijian told me, in confidence, that his knees have had it. Another season could cripple him for life.

“And Hayden is one of those artists who truly are dedicated to their art. It wasn't only personal ambition that motivated him; it was devotion to ballet itself. The way he saw it, he could create a better Pip than Anton Mohr. He knew Pip, he understood him, and he believed it would be an irretrievable loss to ballet if he didn't define Pip in dance forever. Hart committed his crimes in the very name of dance. That's what was so misleading. I kept thinking dancers don't kill for a part, as you say. But one might—if his art was his life.

“I misjudged Hart. Maybe you did too. He's very smart and charming and controlled, but inside, he's one of those coiled-up people whose drive springs from horror of their own roots. He grew up an outcast, a weirdo isolated from his peers. He had transformed himself, but the core of rage he built up as a child never left him. In other words, he's a much, much more extreme personality than the persona he created for himself.”

Murray looked more interested than he had previously. “So talk,” he said, gesturing impatiently.

“Okay. So unfortunately, Anton dies. It's nothing Hart meant to happen, and it makes him plenty nervous. But what's done is done, and he didn't come all this way to lose his nerve now. Finally—finally!—Ruth makes him the first Pip. He throws himself into the part passionately, dances as if possessed, to quote Ruth. And everything is peachy. Until, hardly more than a week later, Elektra tells him she's three months pregnant.”

“She told him?”

Juliet nodded. “I called her this morning to ask. He's the only one she did tell. They're closer than brother and sister, I think, and she thought he deserved a heads-up. Oh, and by the way, I also asked her whether Ryder was auditioning for another company. I had a hunch that's why he was so secretive and jumpy. And he is; in the spring, he'll be moving to L.A. They had already agreed to divorce.

“Anyway, naturally, Hart tried to talk Elektra into an abortion. He said it was a mistake to have a baby with Ryder at this point, it wouldn't save their marriage, it would ruin her career and so on—Elektra didn't tell him Ryder wasn't the father—but she had already made up her mind.

“So Hayden looks ahead. Elektra was barely showing, if she was showing at all; but if she was already thirteen weeks along, by the time the season got under way, she'd be more than four months. No way could she dance Estella. And—this is important—no way could he dance with anyone else. Kirsten Ahlswede is half a foot taller than he is. Even if she could find one, Ruth's not going to start with a new Estella, and Hayden knows it. If Elektra doesn't dance, he doesn't dance. And Anton would have died for no reason. Hayden is like our friend Macbeth now—‘stepped so far in blood that, should he wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er.'”

“But what can he do?” asked Landis. “Black magic?”

“Ah, now that's the clever part. You see, Hart has danced with the Ballet Rio. I knew he had some connection to them, because he was wearing a Ballet Rio T-shirt the first time I met him. When I looked him up at the library just now, I found he was a guest artist there three years ago. And in Brazil, a drug called misoprostol, a synthetic prostaglandin, is commonly used as an abortifacient. It's a well-known resource; he could easily have learned about it from any of the dancers.

“Now, misoprostol, which is known in this country by the brand-names Cytotec and Mistenflo, is used here to prevent the development of ulcers. It's quite commonly prescribed and widely available—unlike, for example, RU-486. No doubt Hart would have tried that if he could have gotten hold of some. But misoprostol is far less high-profile. Elderly people with chronic arthritis often take it, because the medication they need for the arthritis tends to cause ulcers.”

“And dancers tend to get arthritis,” Landis filled in.

“Precisely. In this case, it was Victorine Vaillancourt—”

Juliet faltered momentarily. During most of her recital, she had kept her eyes on the river, the park, the sky. But she had just felt Landis's eyes on her and had taken another glance at him. The look on his face now showed keen, pure, appreciative admiration. It was very pleasant to her.

A moment passed before she could look away again and finish, “Victorine Vaillancourt takes Mistenflo.”

“And how did you know that?”

“Ruth happened to mention it to me the day of the talcum powder incident.”

“And how would Hayden have known?” Landis's eyes, too, were once more on the scenery.

“Why shouldn't he? He's worked with Victorine for years and years. And Mistenflo is taken with meals. He must have seen her take it dozens of times, maybe hundreds. All he had to do was steal a couple of pills from her. Which I happened to hear him doing.”

Juliet described the afternoon some five weeks before when she had gone to Victorine's door planning to make use of the privacy of her office. The familiar rattling inside, she now knew, had been the sound of the pills spilling out of the bottle. And she had smelled Hayden, too, though she hadn't stopped then to analyze the sensation.

“Paco Rabanne, Neutrogena, and his particular sweat,” she told Murray. “That was him.”

“Can you really tell that?”

Juliet closed her eyes and sniffed. “Ivory soap,” she said, “Mennen deodorant. And … what are you wearing that's made of leather, new leather? Shoes?” She opened her eyes.

“It's a new wallet,” said Murray, producing it, half incredulous. He shook his head. “Amazing. And how did you know that the rattling pills were Mistenflo?”

“Oh, that.” Juliet was annoyed to feel herself blush at this reminder of her error and her fatuous self-congratulation about it. “Later that afternoon, I happened to hear Victorine muttering to herself in French as I went down the hall past her door. I thought she was saying, ‘Now where are my thingamajigs?' But I made a little translation mistake.” Her blush deepened. “What she really said was, ‘Where are my Mistenflos?'”

“Hm,” said Murray. He sounded less than convinced.

“You can easily ask her if any were missing,” Juliet pointed out. “Anyway, now Hayden had to get the Mistenflo into Elektra's system. And there he was lucky again. He has a routine of feeding his partner little bits of food. That first day I met them, I saw him give her something—it looked like a Rice Krispie or a sunflower seed, something tiny. Evidently, he broke up the Mistenflo and put the fragments into raisins, because that's what I saw him feeding her in the dancers' lounge later that day. And that's what she complained the next day he'd been forcing her to eat. She had a cold, too, don't forget.

“By the way, all this took a toll on Hayden's nerves. The day he stole the pills, he actually dropped Lily Bediant. Anyhow, by the end of the next afternoon, the medicine had done its work. Elektra miscarried.”

Landis gazed at the rock, his expression thoughtful. “According to the most recent court decisions, killing a fetus is legally considered murder, you know,” he said.

“Yes, I thought I remembered reading that.”

There was a longish silence.

“And that's it?” Landis finally asked.

“What's what?”

“That's your theory, that's why you phoned me today?”

Juliet felt a stirring of anger and forced it down. “Yes,” she said evenly.

Landis finally raised his eyes and looked at her directly. “Well, it's an interesting story,” he said, his accent dropping into Brooklynese, “an ingenious story, an elegant story, and you tell it very well. That stuff about the Brazilian abortion pills was especially entertaining.”

Juliet was immediately outraged by his choice of the word ‘entertaining,' but even more to hear him deliberately pronounce the preceding word ‘ekspecially.' A Harvard graduate! Really, that was taking folksiness too far.

Meantime, he was going on, “But Jule, I gotta say, what you've got here is mainly guesswork. Women miscarry. Elektra could have lost the baby on her own. Anton could have taken the E himself. Practically anyone could have rigged the rosin box.”

“I realize that, but who could have done all three? Who would have?” She struggled to keep her tone neutral, dispassionate. “That's what made me see it. It's like three transparencies. If you lay all three down, one over the next, the only suspect whose trajectory, whose storyline, hits the mark all three times is Hart Hayden.”

But Landis only shrugged.

“Look,” he said, “your brainwork is impressive. But the key to making a charge stick is evidence, okay? If you're right, the Mistenflo ought to have shown up in Elektra's blood tests. I'll check with the doctor at St. Luke's. I'll ask Victorine Whosy if she lost some pills. I doubt Frank Endicott would even notice a couple of missing hits of Ecstasy, but I can try him, too. Assuming anything turns up positive, I can call Hayden in, give him a little extra going over. But I have to tell you, without some kind of physical evidence, you don't have a case. Are you ready to swear out a written statement? Face him in court?”

Juliet had not quite considered this consequence before. It was one thing to work matters out intellectually and tell Landis about it, another to become a formal witness in criminal proceedings. She thought of Ruth, who had asked her for help with
Great Expectations,
not to derail it at the last moment by demanding the arrest of her leading man.

Then she remembered Elektra, inert, the pool of blood spreading around her.

“Yes,” she said, “I am.”

*   *   *

Landis called her that evening, at about seven
P.M.
There was no hope any trace of Mistenflo would have shown up in the samples of Elektra's blood taken at the hospital, he reported: Not only would a routine screening have failed to show such a thing, Dr. Chen had explained that the only lab she knew of that could even test for it was in Montreal. Besides, the substance would have been entirely metabolized within about two hours of Elektra's ingesting it.

Victorine Vaillancourt did remember wondering, one afternoon a month or so ago, if she'd somehow misplaced a couple of Mistenflo tablets. But she had later decided she must have transferred them to the pill-case she carried in her purse. She kept quite a bit of Mistenflo about her, at home, in her office, in several pocketbooks she used, because she needed it so regularly. She certainly could not swear at this late date that even one pill had been stolen.

As for Frank Endicott, he had actually laughed when Landis asked him about a missing hit or two of Ecstasy. Then, remembering he was talking to the law, he had explained more soberly that (in those old, old days when he had dealt in illicit drugs), he did not keep such detailed inventories of his stock.

And that was that.

“I'm sorry to say it, Jule, 'cause I like your theory, I really admire the way you put it together,” said Murray. “You could even be right. But what you got is what we police call bupkis. Anyway, even if Victorine knew she lost some pills, I never heard of a smell-witness.”

“Yes, that's very amusing.”

“Don't take it out on me, sweetheart. I'd grill the guy all night if we had a smidge of real evidence. If you had gotten that dunce Peltz to take the dance bag with him, we'd of had a clear chain of evidence and, who knows, maybe we could of used what we found there to—”

“But I never tampered with anything—”

Landis had ignored the interruption and was continuing, “—to build a case. But as it is, it could be tainted evidence, and I got no cause to pursue him. I'm sorry, Jule,” he said. “Sometimes the bad guys win.”

Chapter Nineteen

On the morning of Tuesday, September seventh, the day of the gala opening of the Jansch Repertory Ballet Troupe's sixty-second season in New York, Juliet sent Ruth a dozen roses and a card wishing her triumph on a Dickensian scale.

Ruth called just before noon. “Thanks for the flowers. Do you know what projectile vomiting is?”

“Why?”

“Because that's the point I'm about to reach. I'm so nervous I could—I don't know what. So nervous I could scream.”

“Why don't you?”

There was a pause. Then, “Hold the phone away from your ear,” Ruth instructed.

Juliet obeyed just in time to save herself from receiving the full force of an ear-piercing shriek.