Her focus was past me now, past the display window with the lavender gown, past the view of the busy street outside, all the way back to the 1960s. “We were the best. Absolutely the best. Corinne and her partner were good, but not as good as Ricky and I were. The four of us were invited to the first Professional Latin Championship at Blackpool. Nineteen sixty-four, that was.” She tucked a strand of auburn hair behind one ear and rubbed her fingers together like she wished she had a cigarette. The sun slanting through the window deepened the lines and hollows of her face in a mean way.
“What happened?” I asked softly.
“To make a long story short-it’s too late for that, isn’t it?-the four of us were coming out of a nightclub in the wee hours of the night before the competition started. A man jumped us. Corinne screamed. I barely caught sight of him before something slammed into my leg and I fell. The guy took off and Ricky chased him. He didn’t catch up with him, though.
“At the hospital, the doctors said my leg was broken. I couldn’t dance in the competition. I was devastated. So were the others, Corinne especially. She kept saying, ‘This was your championship, Lavvy. This was your time.’”
“Did she win?”
“Corinne and Donald? No. The winners were a married Swiss couple named Kaiser. I’m sure worrying about me distracted Corinne and Donald and cost them their chance at the title, too.”
“How awful.” I looked at the seventy-year-old woman in front of me, imagining her as a young twenty-something anxious to set the world on fire with her ballroom dancing, excited about competing overseas. She’d been beautiful, I was sure, with glowing auburn hair and the lithe, athletic figure she still had to some degree.
“Change,” she ordered, unzipping the pink gown.
I shrugged out of it behind the curtain, draped it over the hanger, and quickly donned my own clothes.
“Yes, well. It got worse when my leg got infected. The doctors couldn’t get it under control, and eventually they had to amputate below the knee.” She moved away from the dressing room and I heard the ka-thump, ka-thump as she unrolled the fabric bolt on the cutting table. Her voice was brisk as she said, “My dancing career was over, of course. Prosthetics in those days were nothing like they are today. I keep up with that, you know; I read the articles about what they’re able to do for our soldiers who lose limbs in Afghanistan or Iraq and I’m just amazed. The technology these days is wonderful.”
I popped out from behind the curtain, tucking my blouse in. “Did they ever catch the guy?”
She shook her head. “No. The police never caught up with him. Their theory was that he was attempting a mugging and panicked, that he hit my leg by accident.”
“You didn’t agree?”
“I wasn’t sure. Corinne always maintained that he’d hit me on purpose. And then in the nineties, when that awful Harding person arranged for someone to injure Nancy Kerrigan, hoping to keep her from skating in the Olympics, I began to think about it again. It sounded just like what had happened to me, although of course the Blackpool Dance Festival was not a sporting event on a par with the Olympics, at least not as most people viewed it. That was thirty years after the fact, though, and I didn’t spend much time thinking about it. I’d made a name for myself as a designer by then-Corinne and her first husband loaned me the money to get started and supported me while I went to school and then did an apprenticeship with a fashion house in Paris-and I had almost convinced myself that the attacker had done me a favor. One can work as a designer, you know, for far longer than one can be a competitive athlete of any sort.”
“Absolutely,” I said, as if my reassurance mattered to her one little bit.
She gave me a wry look, acknowledging my intent, I thought, and picked up a sketchbook. Her pencil whisked over the page and a dress began to take shape. I peered over her shoulder.
“I should not have burdened you with my sad history,” she said, concentrating on the page. “It’s not something I think about normally. Just with Corinne’s death…”
“It’s like part of your history has died,” I said.
“That’s it,” she said, arching thin brows. “Ricky died years ago-lung cancer-and Donald passed away four or five years back. Now it’s like I’m the only one left who knows that part of my story. Memory is a slippery thing, Stacy. When we’re young, we’re sure that things happened as we remember them, that our recollection is true. As we age… well, I think most of us trust our memories less and, maybe, if we’re honest, admit that ‘truth’ depends on one’s perspective. Now my memory of that time is the only truth left. It’s a strange feeling.”
I didn’t answer, feeling completely incapable of saying anything worthwhile in the face of her nostalgia and grief. I thought I understood a little of what she was saying, though, since I’d had similar feelings since Rafe’s death. After a respectful moment, I said, “You know, the police arrested Maurice Goldberg for Corinne’s murder.”
Lavinia’s pencil clattered to the floor. “What?”
I picked up the pencil and handed it to her. “They’ve released him for now and he’s got a good lawyer, but-”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said angrily. “Maurice! Why, he’s the best thing that ever happened to Corinne. I let her have what-for when she told me she was divorcing him, but she’d made up her mind.”
“You knew her better and longer than anyone,” I said. “Did she have any enemies that you know of?”
“Not before she started writing that memoir,” Lavinia said. “The police asked me the same thing.”
“So there was no one…?”
She hesitated, doodling some background around the sketch. “Well, Greta Monk won’t be grieving about Corinne’s death.”
“Who’s she?”
“She calls herself a patroness of the arts,” Lavinia said in a tone that conveyed what she thought of such pretension. “She and Corinne ran a dance scholarship charity for several years. It dissolved when Corinne caught her embezzling.”
“I never heard about that.”
“The board kept it hush-hush, made a deal where Greta repaid the money and avoided prosecution. Something like that. Anyway, the timing of Corinne’s tell-all couldn’t have been worse for Greta, because she’s in line for a position on the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center, something she’s been lobbying for for decades. A scandal now would mean she could kiss that good-bye.”
“And Corinne was including the embezzlement story in her book?”
“She was never happy that Greta got away with it in the first place.”
Hm. And if what Marco Ingelido said was right, Corinne would’ve made a point of “warning” Greta that she had a starring role in the upcoming book.
“There.” Lavinia thrust the sketchpad toward me.
The dress was perfect: tight through the bodice, with off-the-shoulder straps and a skirt that floated away from the body like mist. “It’s divine.”
“I’ll work something up for Vitaly.” The suggestion of a grin erased years from her face. “That man! Can you pick the pink dress up Sunday afternoon? I know you’re dancing on Monday, but I can’t have it any earlier.”
“Sure,” I said, straightening. “Thank you, Lavinia.”
“Of course, Stacy. Always a pleasure.”
I left, shutting the door carefully behind me to keep the air-conditioning in. Turning to wave as I passed the display window, I saw that the seat by the drawing table was empty.
Chapter 12
Danielle lived in a block of apartments west of me, in a quiet area off of Taney Road. The complex was spread over several tree-lined streets and consisted of rectangular, yellowy-tan brick buildings so alike that Danielle had once tried to get into her apartment well after midnight and found herself confronting a pissed-off man holding a baseball bat. She’d been in the wrong building. She never admitted it, but I thought too many margaritas might have been a factor. Parking in the lot outside her building and double-checking to make sure it was her building, I trotted up the stairs to her second-floor apartment and rang the bell.