“Sorry you’re stuck with this duty, but I think it’ll be over in a couple of days. In the meantime, do you mind running me over to West Sixty-fourth Street for an hour?”
“No problem.”
I got in and we drove to the studio on the West Side. It was near Lincoln Center, where one of the retired dancers from American Ballet Theatre gave lessons which I tried to attend on Saturday mornings and occasional weekday evenings, whenever my unpredictable schedule allowed it.
William and his six other students were surprised to see me when I arrived a few minutes into the barre exercises for the ten-thirty class, but the necessary silence of the participants during the workout was one of the extra benefits of ballet. I never needed to explain my personal circumstances or my trial results or the day’s dealings with the cases they had read about in the daily tabloids.
For close to an hour, as I stretched and plied and glissaded across the smooth wooden floor to the familiar music of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, the demands of concentration needed to perform the required steps pushed all other business from my mind. I sweated and ached like the other women who surrounded me in the class and was unhappy only when the recording stopped and William bowed to the group with his customary “Thank you, ladies.”
I exchanged greetings with the other exhausted dancers and cooled down before going out to the radio car for my escorts to get me back home. They let me out in front of Grace’s Marketplace, a fabulous emporium of gourmet foods, so that I could buy dinner for Jed and me. There is a section of elegantly prepared dishes which I relied on regularly complete meals that need only to be reheated and served and I knew that he would be too exhausted from the long day’s travel to want to go out again that evening. Veal francese roasted new potatoes, string beans, and a salad, and I was on the express checkout, back in the car, and dropped off at my front door minutes later. “That’s it for the day, ladies. I’m not going out again. My boyfriend will be here later that’s all the action you’re going to get today. Thanks.” I left the pair at their steady post in the driveway and went upstairs to put away my packages and get into the shower.
The only message on my machine was from Nina, phoning from her car on one of the freeways on her way to Isabella’s funeral.
“I’ll call back, after the show.
Don’t forget to watch C-SPAN is carrying the service.
Word in the biz is that there’ll be a lot of crocodile tears Sharon, Demi, Nicole all the girls who want to scoop up her scripts and incomplete projects will be front and center, in their deepest black, feigning grief. Later.“
It was almost one o’clock, so I settled into my sofa in the den to watch Isabella’s memorial service, broadcast from Forest Lawn. The commentator came on first, describing the arrival of the movie stars as if it were Oscar night at the Chandler Pavilion. Among the hundreds of celebrity mourners I was able to spot Nina and her husband, Jerry Baum – a literary critic and screenwriter, whom she had met and married when we were still at Wellesley.
The service consisted of a series of speakers who gave their favorite memories of Isabella. There was lots of talk about her great beauty and her screen talent, but very little was said that made one think she had ever done a kind thing or had a generous thought about another human being. I sat forward, scouring the crowd as I imagined Luther Waldron would have done at a Mafia don’s funeral looking for the furtive glance of a killer or the inappropriate smirk on the face of an ex-lover.
Some of the speakers had familiar names. Most had worked with Isabella on one project or another- producers, directors, her agent, a couple of co-stars. Then Richard Burrell introduced himself and began to talk about the private Lascar. I tried to make something of the fact that he wasn’t emotional enough about the death of a woman he loved, but it was clear that she hadn’t been easy to love, and emotion was visibly lacking from the entire ceremony.
The last salute was what the crowd had been waiting for. I couldn’t stop myself from breaking into a huge grin as Kirk Douglas moved up to the podium. I was tempted to pick up the phone and call Mike at home, but figured he must have been watching, too. As a serious movie buff, Douglas was one of his favorites. Mike could imitate him in almost any role, from The Vikings to Spartacus to last year’s remake of Blue Lotus, in which Douglas played Isabella’s father and won another Oscar nomination for supporting actor.
If there wasn’t any warmth to add to the portrait of the deceased, at least Kirk Douglas closed with the histrionic conviction that the fans wanted to hear. He conjured up every celluloid image of the young star in each of the roles she had played, and invested her professional life with the dignity of his unique voice. ‘… And the final irony, the fatal one, is that Isabella a name which means “beautiful little island” met her death in just such a place, a beautiful little island, where she went for solitude, for safe haven…“
Yeah, Kirk, that’s the bullshit she gave me, too.
A final prayer and the recessional, with six Johnny Gorilla lookalikes carrying out the coffin and probably having good cause to be sadder than anyone else in the chapel and I clicked off the television.
Joan Stafford called a minute later, still stunned by the spectacle.
“It’s hard to believe Isabella’s dead, isn’t it? She was so vibrant, so magnificent. It’s oh well, what do you think, Alexandra? Who did it? Could have been anyone in the first two rows, from the looks on their faces.”
I caught her up on yesterday’s trip to the Vineyard, told her about my plans for the evening with Jed, made a dinner date with her for later in the week and, hung up the phone.
Then I called Air France and learned that the flight from Paris had been delayed two hours at takeoff because of weather en route. Jed would arrive closer to six o’clock.
I tried to escape into the new le Carre novel that I had just bought a week ago but my thoughts raced back and forth between trying to solve the real murder that had presented itself in my life and fantasizing about making love to Jed.
I didn’t get very far on either course.
I picked up the receiver again and dialed the number for Special Victims at the Twentieth Precinct.
“Squad.”
“This is Alexandra Cooper. Who’s this?”
“Hey, Alex. It’s Frank Barber. Whaddya need?”
“I was just looking for Mercer, to see if there’s anything new on the pattern the Con Ed rapist.”
“Mercer swung out yesterday at four. Doesn’t come back until Monday afternoon. But I got the sheet in front of me.
All quiet on that case no developments, no new hits.“
“Anything I should know about, Frank?” Strange business, I acknowledged to myself. I’m looking for news of a good rape case to serve as a distraction from a murder investigation and my own love life.
“Two things, but nothing we were gonna bother you about at home. I got bad news and I got good news. Give you the bad first, okay?”
“Ready.”
“Got a 61 last night…” Frank started, referring to the police complaint report made in every case, which gets its name from the designated number of the police document, a Uniformed Force Number 61. “Twenty-third Precinct. Victim is sixty-eight years old. Lives in an old railroad flat with four bedrooms. She’s a widow, rents out rooms to boarders. Guy she’s been renting to for a couple of months comes home loaded last night. Mrs. Zalina goes down the hall to the bathroom and this scumbag drags her into his room and tells her to suck his dick. ”She says no, so he punches her in the mouth. She still says no, so he hits her again. He’s got her on her knees, trying to make her do it when another renter hears the commotion and tries to help old Mrs. Zalina. The perp has the good sense to run out and never come back.“
“How’s Mrs. Zalina, Frank?”