A Motive for Murder Read online

  “Let’s all just get inside,” T.S. suggested. He and Herbert flanked their companions and waded through the crowd, ignoring the shouts of “Justice for Fatima!” that rang in their ears. As they neared the entrance doors they could hear applause behind them. They turned and watched as Ben Hampton hoisted his plump frame onto the ledge surrounding Lincoln Center’s magnificent fountain. It was a well-chosen pose. Sparkling lights thrown off the water plumes blazed behind him like a biblical endorsement, framing him in reflected glory. Flashbulbs popped and news cameras rolled as he held aloft a large photograph of Fatima Jones posed en pointe and looking ethereal as she held a classic arabesque pose, one long leg extended out behind her.

  “She had a dream!” Ben Hampton thundered, shaking her photograph at the crowd. “Yes, she had a dream and she worked toward that dream. But they have destroyed her dream!” He pointed to the Metro’s theater with an accusatory finger. Hundreds of gathered protesters and curious onlookers joined the crews of four local television stations in simultaneously turning to where he was pointing.

  His timing was impeccable. Auntie Lil and her companions were pinned in the glare of television lights right in the middle of the main doors to the theater. The next day a photograph of them would appear on the bottom of page one of two local tabloids, three of them caught with their mouths agape and incredibly guilty expressions plastered across their faces. Only Herbert Wong would emerge looking dignified, his calm expression in the line of fire making him appear like a particularly dapper modern Buddha.

  “What is going on?” Lilah asked in horror as a security guard appeared belatedly and escorted them inside to the lobby.

  “The press found out about Fatima Jones,” Auntie Lil explained miserably.

  “You didn’t... did you?” Lilah asked, knowing Auntie Lil.

  “No, I did not,” she promised emphatically.

  The mob scene inside the theater rivaled the one outside. The long walk to their seats involved wading through an overexcited crowd and a huge sea of noise. They were seated in the third row and had to battle their way to the front. As usual, Auntie Lil had insisted they obtain seats as close as possible to the stage. She had even declined the offer extended to all board members to observe opening night from backstage. She enjoyed seeing the dancers sweat, she had explained. It made their talent that much more amazing to behold. T.S.—who had wiped strange perspiration off his face from far too many talented dancers at far too many performances—had protested in vain. If he leaned forward, T.S. reflected, he risked being poked in the eye by the conductor’s baton.

  Once seated, they turned for a better look at the noisy crowd behind them. The audience was in a state of pandemonium, not because of the protest but because it consisted chiefly of adolescent girls and their overwrought mothers.

  “Tickets were a hundred dollars apiece for the premiere,” Auntie Lil said. “How can these young people afford it?”

  “They didn’t pay,” Lilah pointed out. “Their parents did.”

  Someone had paid, that was for sure. Beyond the first twenty center rows—which were largely occupied by Metro patrons and their guests—the opulent auditorium was a sea of raging female hormones. Girls whispered, squealed, wiggled, and elbowed each other as they waited in breathless anticipation for the emergence of Mikey Morgan. Chewing gum popped anonymously all around them in a maddeningly uneven rhythm. T.S. felt like he was trapped in a giant bag of popping corn.

  “That had better stop immediately,” Auntie Lil said grimly. “Or I shall have to insist on an announcement.” She began looking around for a microphone—Auntie Lil said very few things in jest—but when she noticed Lane Rogers at the far right edge of the main curtain, peering out from backstage, she sank lower in her seat and took a great interest in the hem of one of her trouser legs instead.

  T.S. sat stunned by the difference between the world churning outside the theater and the world percolating inside it. The well-dressed, pampered preteen crowd seemed oblivious to issues of race, talent, or culture. They, instead, had focused to the point of hysteria on one single burning goal: to catch a glimpse in the flesh of someone they recognized from the silver screen, to be able to say that they had seen Mikey Morgan in person. T.S. wasn’t sure what it all meant for the future of the world, but he knew clearly what it meant to him: despite the presence of Lilah, he really should have followed his better instincts and just stayed home in bed.

  “I wonder what Martinez has in store for us tonight?” Lilah said to T.S., referring to the Metro’s temperamental artistic director.

  This was a very good question. The Nutcracker had as many interpretations as it had productions. In an effort to attract an audience and captivate new generations, ballet companies all over the world had put their own spin on the rather macabre Christmas story of a young girl gifted with a wooden nutcracker and her subsequent dreams of toy soldiers, a Mouse King and his troops, the Sugar Plum Fairy, and other exotic creatures. Versions ranged from the classical, featuring rich turn-of-the-century costumes, to the romantic, with long flowing gowns and nearly lawless improvisations. The world of modern dance had even weighed in with one particularly memorable version by Mark Morris called Hard Nut, which featured a sixties-era American setting, complete with stoned party guests, undertones of adultery, and a stage full of bell-bottomed dancers doing the bump. How Martinez intended to top these versions and draw an audience in the creative and fiercely competitive New York City area remained to be seen.

  “I think his ‘vision,’ as he calls it, is going to be along the lines of ‘more is more,’” Auntie Lil confided. “I was able to sneak into one rehearsal and they were practicing the toy-soldiers-versus-the-mice battle scene. There were enough dancing rodents on stage to make me queasy. It was an infestation more than anything else.”

  Flooding the stage with dancers was not, at first glance, a bad move on the artistic director’s part. The more students he could use from the Metro’s ballet school, the more tickets he could sell to proud relatives. And perhaps even score some points for pageantry along the way.

  Or perhaps not.

  As the curtain rose on the main set it was obvious that Auntie Lil had been right. Martinez was going for quantity over quality. He chose to begin the ballet with a meaningless preface staged on the proscenium in front of a painted backdrop depicting the stately home where the central story would unfold. Buckets of snow fell from the rafters above, wafting over the orchestra and causing the French horn player to look up in alarm. T.S. expected Nanook of the North to come pirouetting by at any second accompanied by a team of prancing huskies. Instead, a troop of children emerged out of this flurry of plastic flakes and headed for center stage like well-trained lemmings. There, they executed a dizzying array of leaps and turns before entering a front door cut into the simulated house front. Scores of adult dancers depicting their parents scurried across the stage and followed them inside the door, each stopping first to exhibit their poise and control with a determined ferociousness that quickly turned the scene into a dance contest that would have made even Dick Clark nervous.

  As the backdrop rose out of sight an ostentatiously furnished parlor set was revealed. Perhaps Clara and her family were bunking down at the Trump Plaza. The usual Christmas tree was curiously missing from the stage. But the excess space was easily filled with dancers pantomiming their roles as excited children and parents at a Christmas party. Auntie Lil searched through the crowd for a dark face, but she did not really expect to see Fatima Jones. She had heard that the young girl had declined an offer to dance a lesser role, and had rather admired her spunk.

  The party scene deteriorated into a turn-of-the-century Woodstock with waves of dancers whirling and parting and forming again, taking turns dominating the stage. How anyone could find their mark given the crowded conditions, Auntie Lil could not fathom.

  The young lady who had replaced Fatima Jones as Clara—Julie Perkins, according to the program—was not bad, but she had
no sparkle. Her body was certainly a perfect example of the long and lean frame favored in American ballet, but her dancing lacked passion. Good ballet, Auntie Lil believed, combined skilled movement with real emotion. Julie Perkins possessed one of these traits quite admirably, but completely lacked the other. Her blond hair had been carefully wound at the nape of her neck in an older style that most Claras wore. The reason why became obvious when Herr Drosselmeyer entered the party. Martinez was playing up a romantic relationship between Clara and this mysterious friend of her family.

  He’d done this for a very good reason. As promised or, more accurately, threatened, Martinez had combined the parts of Drosselmeyer and the Prince, awarding both to Mikey Morgan. In this manner, the young teen idol would be onstage for a maximum amount of time, delighting the audience and, if one stretched a point, playing two romantic roles. Not coincidentally, he could also dance part of his first-act role cloaked in a black, floor-length cape, thus disguising his ineptitude.

  But not even the cape could mask Mikey Morgan’s melodramatic sense of emotion. Making the leap from the silver screen back to the stage had apparently triggered a histrionic reflex in the young film star. He interpreted the admittedly creepy Drosselmeyer as if he were the greedy landlord in an old vaudeville play. He stalked around the stage, leered at Clara, waved the toy nutcracker around like it was a bomb, and frequently whipped his cape in the face of the other dancers. All that was missing was a twirly black mustache. None of this dampened the enthusiasm of his audience, however, since squeals and sighs continued to rise from the darkened rows with religious fervor.

  In one particularly ill-chosen pas de trois, Drosselmeyer demonstrated a series of steps to Clara and her little brother. This had the unfortunate effect of directly comparing Mikey Morgan’s lack of technique with the talents of better dancers. There would be no need for either Auntie Lil or T.S. to loudly complain about his lack of finesse at intermission. It would be obvious to anyone that the years spent in Hollywood had eradicated any discipline or ballet aptitude that the young man might once have possessed.

  This inescapable fact was confirmed when Morgan shed his cloak for a pas de deux with Clara a few moments later. The grace of this classic ballet partnership was ruined when he hoisted her into the air as if she weighed five times more than he and then set her down like he was planting fence posts. Worse still, his appearance in tights made it obvious that he was not in top physical condition, and toward the end of the passage, Julie Perkins began to favor her right foot as if she had been injured by all the manhandling.

  As the party scene progressed it became clear that this particular interpretation of The Nutcracker would go down in history for all the wrong reasons. At one point, the boys separated from the girls and mounted wooden hobby horses for what was intended as a charming showcase for the talents of the corps de ballet. Unfortunately, so many young male dancers occupied the stage that they stampeded across it like Custer’s charge, with equally ill-fated results. Then, during a Punch-and-Judy segment where puppets entertain the party guests, Martinez let so many young dancers ad-lib unmercifully that it triggered an instant dislike for child dancers in the many audience members who had, until then, convinced themselves that child dancers were at least a cut above child actors.

  The one bright spot in the confusion was the debut of Rudy Vladimir as the Nutcracker. If the young man was upset at being bumped from the lead role, he did not show it. Instead, his love for dance shone through. As Clara unwrapped her oversized gift Rudy burst from the box onto center stage with the assurance and mastery of dancers twice his age. As if out of respect, the cluttered corps stepped back to give him more room. He used every inch of available space as he whirled, leaped, and bounced his way through a two-minute solo that came close to bringing the curtain down. Every movement was breathtaking yet reined in just enough to convey the feeling that he was, indeed, a wooden creature. Even the starstruck girls in the audience burst into wild applause when he was done.

  “Fancy bit of footwork, there,” T.S. whispered hopefully to Auntie Lil, painfully aware that his vocabulary as a critic lacked finesse.

  “It only makes the rest of them look worse,” she whispered back. “This is a catastrophe.”

  But the real catastrophe still waited in the wings. As the act drew to a close it became obvious why the Christmas tree had been missing from the set. There was no room at the inn. Martinez had chosen to make the tree so huge and the corps de ballet so large that physics forbade their occupying the stage at the same time. Instead, he had reserved the appearance of the tree as a kind of climax for the Act I curtain. Members of the corps began to melt off to the side, leaving Clara and her family alone on the stage, where they clustered, bidding Drosselmeyer good night. Suddenly lights appeared behind a transparent scrim that masked a rear series of simulated windows. The window frames appeared in stark relief and the shadows of departing guests could be seen crossing in front of the windows. A gasp rose from the audience as a twenty-foot, brightly lit Christmas tree began to descend from above the stage, framed by the backlit windows. The base of the tree inched downward majestically in time to the music, but when it reached halfway, true disaster struck.

  The supporting weight controlling its descent apparently snapped, sending the tree crashing to the stage floor in a frightening explosion of breaking lights and crashing limbs. The dancers jumped back, startled, and the well-lit windows were left barren at center stage. Out of nowhere, the shadow of a man hanging from the neck by a rope swung in silhouette behind the windows. It was grotesquely realistic, sweeping in from stage right in a full arc before swinging back again. Worse, it grew and shrank in size as it swung, thanks to a spotlight set front right.

  This is really going too far, T.S. thought. This is supposed to be a children’s show.

  The audience murmured uneasily when the dancers onstage continued to stare at the swinging shadow. Suddenly the young dancer playing Clara’s little brother screamed and pointed up toward stage right. As if he had summoned its presence, the body of a man hanging from a thick brown rope swung into view, this time in front of the windows, hurtling across the stage until its feet touched the fallen Christmas tree and the body swung back.

  The audience held its breath and the dancers stepped back in unison, crowding together like frightened sheep. When Mikey Morgan broke free of the group and dashed off stage left, a buzz ran through the audience. What was this? The body was swinging slowly to a stop, barely visible at the edge of the stage-right curtain. The dancer playing Clara’s father approached the body slowly and laid a fingertip of his right hand on the cheek of the hanging man. The dancer paused then began to shout, waving his hands frantically to someone backstage. Chaos broke out onstage. Julie Perkins abandoned her Clara facade and began to scream. Two older dancers dragged her offstage. A stagehand streaked across the set to the hanging figure, followed by a group of younger dancers still dressed as party guests. They crept toward the body and several began to cry, causing a group of older dancers to scurry out from backstage to collect them. The stagehand gesticulated wildly to an unseen cohort until the curtain began to descend. A young girl in the audience screamed, and like a town full of dogs picking up the cry at twilight, young girls all over the vast auditorium echoed her sound. “Lights!” someone shouted, and the adults took up the cry, adding to the pandemonium. “Lights! Lights! Lights!”

  Abruptly, the houselights blazed. T.S. blinked in the glare, confused by what he had seen. “What is this?” he asked Herbert.

  Herbert turned to him, eyes wide. “Lillian is gone,” he said.

  Auntie Lil had insisted she sit on the aisle and now the aisle seat was most assuredly empty.

  “Something’s wrong,” Lilah whispered. “This doesn’t seem right.”

  “I’ll say,” T.S. agreed.

  Auntie Lil found the side steps easily in the darkness; she had marked them as her escape route earlier, just in the obnoxious gum cracking from all the s
quealing young girls had continued. Scurrying up, she slipped behind the heavy velvet side curtains and followed the sound of anxious voices.

  “Cut him down!” someone was insisting. “He may still be alive.” Others argued to leave him as he was until the police arrived.

  Auntie Lil brushed past another curtain and came abruptly on a macabre tableau. Costumed dancers crowded in a circle around the crumbled figure of a man slumped on the floor, his head bent back grotesquely. A thick rope encircled his neck, and coiled on the floor beside him lay the ragged end where the rope had been hastily sawed in two seconds before.

  “He’s dead,” a male dancer announced, removing his fingers from the man’s throat. “Very dead.”

  Auntie Lil pushed through the crowd and knelt beside the body, taking care not to touch anything. Her eyes were drawn first to the man’s neck. The knot cut savagely into the neck just below the windpipe. She adjusted her reading glasses and bent so close that some in the crowd thought she was attempting to revive the victim. There, caught in the fibers of the deadly rope, were minute wisps of a fluffy white substance that looked like cotton. Finally, she looked up to confirm who was so very much hated that he should be killed in such a public manner.

  Just as she had suspected when the body first swung into view, the murdered man was none other than Bobby Morgan, agent—and very much deceased father—of Hollywood’s biggest child star.

  3

  There was little else Auntie Lil could uncover before the police arrived. Wisely, she had slipped out a side stage door and made her getaway before she was detained for questioning. If any of the dancers had reported her presence backstage to the detectives, they had not caught up with her yet.

  On the other hand, she had very little information to go on when it came to the identity of the killer. Only that someone had fashioned a very professional-looking noose around the neck of Bobby Morgan without being noticed in the middle of a busy backstage—and then given him a few good shoves to send him swinging when it became obvious he was going to hover on the sidelines unless he got a little help. She was certain that he could not have swept across such a spectacular portion of the stage without a deliberate push.