“Just for a little bit.”
“What did he ask you?”
“Nothing much … the standard questions … where were you on the night of May twenty-seventh kind of thing.”
“Such an awful thing to have happen,” said the husband of the murdered woman with startling conventionality; well, at least he wasn’t hypocrite enough to pretend to be grief-stricken. “I suppose everybody’s told him we weren’t getting along, Ella and me.”
“I didn’t,” I said, righteously, “but obviously he knows. He wanted me to say that you hated her … I could tell by his questions.”
“He practically accused me of murder,” said Miles; I felt very sorry for him then not only because of the spot he was in but because I was quite sure that he had murdered her … which shows something or other about mid-twentieth-century morality: I mean, we seem to be less and less aroused by such things as private murders in an age when public murder is so much admired. If I ever get around to writing that novel it’s going to be about this sort of thing … the difference between what we say and what we do—you know what I mean. Anyway, I didn’t make the world.
“Well, you are a perfect setup,” I said, cold-bloodedly.
“Setup?”
“Everybody in the company knew you wanted a divorce and that she wouldn’t give it to you … I heard all about it my first hour with the company.”
“That doesn’t mean I’d kill her.”
“No, but a cretin like Gleason would think that you were the logical one … and you are.”
“I’m not so sure of that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, there are others.” He looked purposefully vague and I felt very compassionate; he was in a spot. “Who?”
“Well, there’s Eglanova.” That did it; my instinct was right. Miles had cut the cable and then planted the shears in Eglanova’s wastebasket. I wondered if he had managed to implicate her in his interview with Gleason.
“What did she have against Sutton?” Not that I didn’t know.
“She was being retired against her will and Ella was the only available dancer with a big enough name to head the company … All the others are either tied up with contracts or else cost more than Washburn will pay. With Ella gone, he would have to let Eglanova dance another season.”
“It seems awfully drastic,” I said mildly.
“You don’t know much about ballerinas,” said Miles Sutton with the exhausted air of one who did. “Eglanova doesn’t want to retire, ever; she feels she’s at her peak and she would do anything to stay with the company.”
“But that’s still going a bit far.”
“She hated Ella.”
“So did just about everybody; they didn’t all kill her … or maybe they did … formed a committee and …” But, no, this was getting a little too feckless, even for me. I subsided.
“Besides, who else could have done it? Who else would benefit as much by her death?” Well, you would, lover, I said to myself, you you you, wonderful you in the shadow of the electric chair. He must’ve read my mind, which isn’t as difficult a feat as I sometimes like to think. “Aside from me,” he added. “So far as we know.”
“So far as I know, and I should know … I was married to her seven years.”
“Why wouldn’t she let you have a divorce?”
He shrugged, “I don’t know. She was like that … a real sadist. She married me when she was just a corps de ballet girl and of course I helped her up the ladder. I suppose she resented that. People usually resent the ones who help them.”
“Why didn’t you just go ahead and divorce her?”
“Too complicated,” said Miles, evasively, looking away, tugging at his wiry orange beard. “By the way, will you be at the inquest tomorrow?”
I said no, that this was the first I’d heard of it.
“I have to be there,” said Miles gloomily. “The funeral’s after that.”
“Church funeral?” I made a mental note to call the photographers.
“No, just a chapel in a funeral home. I got her a lot out at Woodlawn.”
“Very expensive?”
“What? No, not very … the funeral home handled everything. Awfully efficient crowd.”
“It’s a big racket,” I said. “I know, but it saves all sorts of trouble.”
“Open or closed casket at the service?”
“Closed. You see there was an autopsy this morning.”
“What did they find?”
“I don’t know. Gleason didn’t say. Probably nothing.”
“You know,” I said, suddenly struck by a novel idea, “it might have been an accident after all.”
Miles Sutton groaned. “If only it were! No, I’m afraid they’ve already proved that those shears did the trick. Gleason told me that the metal filings corresponded to the metal of the cable.”
A cold chill went up my spine, and it wasn’t the Polar Bear Airconditioning Unit for Theaters, Restaurants and Other Public Places. “What about fingerprints?”
“They didn’t say.”
“Fingerprints are pretty old-fashioned now, anyway,” I brazened. “Every kid knows enough not to leave them around where the police might find them.”
“Then Jed Wilbur could have done it,” mused Sutton. “He never got along with Ella.”
“But, as I keep pointing out, even in a ballet company dislike is insufficient motive for murder.”
“Maybe he had a motive,” said Miles mysteriously, kicking up some more dust. I’ll say this for him, if Miles did his act with the police the way he did with me he’d keep them busy for a year untangling the politics and private relationships of the Grand Saint Petersburg Ballet.
“Well, motive or not, he’s not the kind of person to endanger his career. That gentleman is the opportunist of all times. If he was going to knock off a dancer he wouldn’t do it on the opening night of his greatest masterpiece …”
“Even so,” said Miles, reminding me of the giant squid in those underwater movies … spreading black ink like a smoke screen at the first sign of danger. “And what about Alyosha Rudin?”
“What about him?”
“Didn’t you know?”
“Know? Know what?”
“He was Ella’s lover before she met me. He got her into ballet when she was just another chorine.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.” This was a bit of gossip I hadn’t heard.
“He’s been in love with her all these years … even after she married me.”
“Why would she marry you to get ahead when she had the regisseur of the company in love with her?”
Miles chuckled. “He wouldn’t help her … thought she couldn’t dance classical roles worth a damn … which was quite true, then. She was just another little girl who hadn’t studied enough. But he didn’t take into account her ambition, which I did. I got her solos in spite of him and she was always good. She was one of those people who could do anything you gave her to do well, even though you might have thought she’d fall flat on her face.”
“And Alyosha?”
“He was surprised how well she turned out.”
“And he stayed in love with her?”
“So she always said.”