Dancing with the Dead (29 page)

She was about to ask about that when he said, “Why’d you choose tango as your main dance?”

“It’s the one that seems to come most naturally to me.”

“I can see why. It’s a sexy dance. There was a time not so long ago when it was banned by the Catholic church.”

“I know.”

“But then the church has had its head up its ass all through history. Hey, you’re not Catholic, are you?”

“Not as good a one as I oughta be.”

“You and so many others.” He threw back his head and she thought he was going to laugh, but he simply stared straight up at the night sky, as if searching for some meaning in the stars. What now, Mary wondered? Would he ask for her astrological sign?

“Tango comes natural to me, too,” he told her, looking at her again. “But I guess you think I’m feeding you a line, like I’m one of those human vipers that hang around places where there’re vulnerable women dancing.”

“No, why shouldn’t I believe you?”

“ ’Cause you’re a beautiful woman and I got you alone at last, and, in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re opposite sexes.” He broke stride and grinned down at her. “Pretty good reasons, huh?”

“Not good enough, though.” Keep it light, a joke. It wasn’t so bad being called a beautiful woman. “Anyway, I thought we’d settled that one.”

He didn’t answer.

She felt the chill of the wind skimming over the blacktop, heard the rustle of stirring dust and paper. Lonely sounds. The glow of victory and alcohol receded, and for the first time that night she was slightly afraid. All alone, opposite sex . . . what kind of talk was that from Benson?

But she knew what kind.

They stopped walking near the car, and his arms snaked around her, pulling her to him and pressing her tight against his body. Pain raged through her side. “Lemme show you a new tango step,” he whispered in her ear. He sounded amused, and that frightened her badly.

“Not this,” she pleaded. “Please! I wanna go back to the hotel.”

“Aw, why not make your big night complete?” he asked, his lips brushing her cheek. She smelled the alcohol on his warm breath and struggled desperately to get free, but he squeezed her tighter and made a clucking sound in her ear, as if chastising her for being a naughty girl. “You know you wanna do this, Mary. We’ve both known it all evening, so why make things difficult? Why make trouble?”

Jake! Duke! Christ, she hated Duke!

“Some things are destined to be, Mary. People can’t help themselves.”

He was right. She knew he was right!

Then she noticed the black car’s license plate. Iowa. Benson had said he was from Minnesota. It wasn’t his car at all. He’d tricked her to get her alone!

The world began to darken and collapse in on Mary, crushing every part of her.

“Mary, Mary . . .” Benson was crooning.

“You!”

Another man’s voice. From the direction of the street.

Benson released her and stepped back, staring toward the driveway.

In the shadows near the attendant’s booth, a darker shadow moved.

Benson wiped his arm across his mouth and glared down at Mary, weighing his options. His bared teeth flashed his fear, and perhaps hatred.

He said, “Fuck it!” and backed away from her. “You can goddamn walk back to the hotel.”

“Hey, buddy! Hey, you!”

“Screw you, pal!” Benson screamed, and he wheeled and ran out the back of the lot and down the dark alley. She heard his desperate footfalls long after the night had swallowed him.

The shadowy figure melted away from the wall and was moving toward her. “You okay?”

“Yes, I think so. Thanks! Thank you!”

Then she realized there was something familiar about the way the man walked.

“Y
OU JUST RELAX NOW,
Miss Arlington.”

She was sure he couldn’t see her plainly in the darkness, yet he knew who she was. He must have been watching her and followed her from the hotel, then Spectrum. She knew, but she didn’t want to admit, what that meant.

His built-up shoe dragged like sandpaper as he stopped and stood crookedly in front of her. “I was watching you dance earlier,” he said. “Thought you was a sight to see. If anybody deserved a pair of my shoes, you did.”

She almost thanked him, but said nothing. She couldn’t have spoken if she’d tried. Fear had taken root in her throat and threatened to cut off her air. There were only half a dozen places that offered an adequate selection of ballroom dance shoes for sale, and they did most of their business by mail. Albert Spangle would know the names and addresses of almost every ballroom competitor in the country, and he had an obviously innocent reason for attending various competitions, setting up his vending booth and selling dance shoes. He could research and select his victims at his leisure, and the only known connection between him and them would be the legitimate one of merchant and customer, the same connection he had with hundreds of dancers. If he was a murder suspect, so were the many other merchants who sold shoes, gowns, tuxedos, and a wide range of other dance accessories. It was perfect camouflage for a killer. Something in Mary turned cold and shriveled.

“That man do harm to you?” Spangle was asking.

“No,” she managed to breathe.

“He sure tried, though.” He was grinning knowingly. “You can’t trust nobody, Miss Arlington. ’Course, you did lead him on. I seen you.”

She willed herself to back away, but fear held her fast. Her feet were embedded in the blacktop. “Lead him on? How? I only had a few drinks with him, danced a few times.”

“I mean at the competition. I seen you in your black dress, the skirt slit up the side, shaking your hips.”

“Dancing. I was only dancing.”

“Sure was. I watched you tango, how you had your cunt right up against that fella’s leg.”

Dear God, it was beginning in earnest, the verbal dance she knew would end in her death. “But that’s the way it’s done in tango.” Even as she spoke, she knew he wanted her to protest. “The other dancers were doing it, too.”

“That ain’t much of an excuse now, is it? Other people doin’ it? Hear that one all the time. Even Jesus wasn’t the only one crucified, now, was he? And them wayward of Sodom and Gomorrah thought the same, like all of them that done the devil’s dance. Delilah and witches and warlocks. Ain’t history fulla such excuses by the worst people?”

“I . . . guess so.” He wasn’t making sense, but could she have expected him to be rational?

“It’s the way of the wicked, to wrap themselves in the deeds of others. Sin and abortion and abomination. But the godless reap the whirlwind.” He moved closer, his grin widening and going lewd, his teeth yellow in the flickering dimness. “It comes to that, always.”

This time her legs found strength. She spun on her heel and began to run. But his arm, surprisingly strong, wound about her waist, jerking her back around to face him. Pain jolted through her bruised ribs and she gasped.

“Guess you’d dance with most anybody,” he said, still grinning, feeding on her pain. “Even somebody like me.” His body was up against hers, his breath fetid and reeking of garlic. “The wages of sin’s about to be paid.”

Something stung the base of her neck, just above her breastbone. She tucked in her chin and stared down in terror at the long knife he held to her throat. A black worm writhed across the back of his hand. Blood! Her blood! “You . . .”

“I what?” He sounded amused, as Benson had. Benson, where are you now?

“You killed those women!” she spat out, wishing immediately she hadn’t spoken. But it wouldn’t matter. If he was going to kill her, his mind had been made up when he’d begun following her, stalking her as he must have stalked the others.

“And you don’t think they deserved it?” he asked. “Flaunters of cunt, carriers of sin and disease that twist bodies and rot souls?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“Well, they deserved it, just like you. Unsaved and unclean, moving the way they did, displaying their bodies and inflaming men’s blood.” He shuffled forward, shoving her back, the knife still against her, his other arm clamped around her waist. A strangely dreamy expression passed over his features and he began swaying in an obscene parody of dance. He jammed his leg painfully between her thighs and up against her pelvis. A tango. God, he thought he was doing a tango. “We don’t even need no music, do we?” She was aware he had an erection. He began grinding himself against her, and they staggered like a pair of desperate, grappling drunks.

For a second he loosened his grip, and she placed her palms against his chest and tore herself free from the macabre dance.

He’d been expecting it.

Tricked her.

He laughed as she felt his hand clutch her hair and jerk her head back. Without realizing she’d fallen, she was kneeling. She felt burning pain in her knees and inanely worried about having skinned them, as when she was a small girl. Torn pantyhose this time, though. Duke would be furious.

“End of the dance, Miss Arlington. Judgment be yours in the next world! Godless slut!”

“Please!” she begged. “Do it! Do it!”

She heard her shrieking intake of air, almost a scream, then the cartilage in her throat crackled as her head was yanked back even farther, straining her neck. Above her stretched the dark blanket of night sky, a distant and uncaring universe.

The knife point bit, then the pain faded and she felt the blade slicing into her throat.

An amazing calm came over her, a detachment from what was happening, like the paralysis of jungle prey in the jaws of a predator.

Then there was shouting.

Soles shuffling on blacktop.

Grunting and ragged breathing.

She was lying flat on her stomach, feeling the warm spread of blood beneath her cheek. Still there was no pain.

And Spangle was lying beside her, also on his stomach, his arms twisted awkwardly behind him. Someone was tying his wrists together, twisting what looked like a leather belt around and around them. He was ranting incoherently and glaring madly at her, blood bubbling from his mouth.

“Had to stab him!” a faraway voice said. “Bastard’s crazy strong!”

Men’s large black shoes next to her face. Wing-tips.

“Better call the cops!”

Running footsteps. “You’re
looking
at the cops, goddammit!”

“How’d you—”

“It doesn’t matter!”

A hand touching her shoulder, gently laying back her hair.

“Ah, Christ, Pete, look what he did! Get an ambulance. Dial nine-one-one. Sweet Lord, look what he did!”

Rene’s voice? She tried to speak but made only a hissing, gurgling sound, like the old steam radiator in her childhood bedroom. She was so weak. In slow motion she moved a hand to feel her neck. Probed with her fingers. Wet, warm, a flap of something. Skin.

Nausea and terror rose in her. A hand gently gripped her wrist and pulled
her
hand away. She waited for Mother Superior’s voice to say, “Mustn’t touch.”

No voice, though. Something soft was pressed against her neck. Someone was sobbing.

She fell away from the sad, sad sound.

Into velvet blackness.

I
T WAS
A
LBERT
S
PANGLE
who died in his hospital bed from knife wounds, at the moment Chicago police were searching his flat and discovering gruesome souvenirs of his crimes. He’d murdered six women. In his freezer they found his diary, and the wrapped and frozen uterus of each of his victims.

Spangle had cheated justice, but his capture and death had liberated Rene from suspicion and police harassment.

It was, after all, Rene who’d tracked him down, though Morrisy had caught up with Rene, and along with Columbus police had closed on the struggle in the parking lot and made the arrest.

Rene’s projection of the killer’s pattern suggested the Ohio competition might be the next place he’d murder. Worried about Mary fitting the victims’ profile, Rene had traveled to Columbus with reporter Pete Joller as his constant companion and alibi. Surreptitiously the two had watched Mary and the other dancers, and followed her the night after her victory in the tango. They’d been about to interrupt Benson’s zealous advances when Spangle had beaten them to it. They’d then observed Spangle from a distance, assuming at first he was only talking with Mary. When they’d realized they were mistaken, they’d been able to stop him just in time as he’d attacked with the knife.

For the rest of her life Mary would bear a long scar on the left side of her throat. She affected colorful neck scarves to conceal it, and in time thought they lent her a distinctive and dashing style.

Rene devoted full time and tender attention to her; he was nothing like Jake. She was sure it was because he was sorry for her, and he felt guilty about her injury. But it was a happy time in Mary’s life. Angie’s cancer went into remission and she was released from Saint Sebastian. Jake had become a memory kept at bay. And in early summer Mary married Rene and moved in with him in his house in the New Orleans Garden District.

She wasn’t sure if she’d ever feel at home in New Orleans, where the hours flowed slowly and magnolias perfumed the air, and the deceased were interred above ground as if their mortal remains hadn’t made the final surrender to death. But Rene truly loved her, or seemed to. And she loved him and was secure in their marriage. The prayed-for miracle had occurred, beginning with her tango win in Ohio. Her life had turned around.

At least once a week she’d talk for hours with Angie on the phone. Angie, who’d contemplated death and understood, and who’d seen her daughter finally escape the deadly cycle of abuse at the hands of Jake. New hope and life vibrated in Angie’s voice. And why not? The family curse was broken.

Mary never for a moment missed Jake. Her world was far better than it had ever been, even when Rene began giving presentations at financial seminars around the country, traveling frequently.

Mary had no trouble passing time alone. During the long, warm days, she’d sometimes ride a streetcar to the French Quarter and sit watching the great river sliding muddily toward the Gulf. Evenings she’d spend by herself in the big stucco house, or walking the garish streets of the Quarter and listening to music drifting from inside the old buildings with their open shutters.