Corpse de Ballet: A Nine Muses Mystery: Terpsichore

By Ellen Pall

Fast, witty, and literate, Corpse de Ballet marks the dazzling debut of the Nine Muses Mysteries featuring Juliet Bodine and Murray Landis.

It's not as if Juliet Bodine wishes that she'd stayed an English professor instead of becoming a successful romance novelist. It's just that writing, though interesting, is never easy, and she will do almost anything to avoid her desk. So she succumbs to the pleas of her friend Ruth, a renowned choreographer, to help translate Dickens' Great Expectations into ballet form.

Watching the magnificent dancers work is fascinating. But Juliet soon finds the company plagued by jealousies, subterranean liaisons, ugly sabotage, and-sudden death.

Could it be murder?

NYPD detective Murray Landis is skeptical. But Juliet-who is startled to recognize in Murray the budding sculptor who dated her college roommate years ago-disagrees, and turns her novelist's sense of plot and character to detection. Can she and Murray unmask the ruthless choreographer of a pas de death?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Aug 19, 2002
• ISBN: 9781466827813

Ellen Pall

Ellen Pall, a novelist whose prose has been praised as "precise, shrewd, and brightly amusing" (Kirkus Reviews), with sentences that are "good enough to eat" (The New Yorker), is the author of Back East and Among the Ginzburgs; she has also written many Regency romances under the pen name Fiona Hill. As a freelance journalist, she has written extensively on people in the arts for The New York Times and other publications. Slightly Abridged is the second in her Nine Muses Mysteries series. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and son.

Book preview

Chapter One

Like many marriages and most divorces, murder is more attractive on paper than it is in practice.

Who among us has not whiled away a happy hour planning the discreet dispatch of a superfluous colleague, or plotting the deft removal of a relative gone stale? In the quiet groves of thought, we may fondle harmlessly the garotte, the razor, even the bear trap. Smothering, poisoning, rabies, an opportune train, a gentle nudge—in soothing revery, all are ours to ponder.

Yet with murder, as Mark Twain once observed of life in general, it is easier to stay out than to get out. What begins with high hopes is apt to end in sorrow, in a welter of ugly details and frightening consequences. Or so, at least, thought Juliet Bodine, when in after-years she reflected on what she came to think of as the Summer of Too Great Expectations.

*   *   *

There was a curious gracefulness in the action of the hands that held the trim little hammer. Up and down it went, up and down, always precisely, always with a certain delicate care.

Beneath the silvery head, the cake of eyeshadow first cracked, then broke into a dozen tiny shards. The neat hands swept the remains together and resumed the process of gentle pulverization. Eyeshadow had been only one of a number of possibilities. Cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, Nesquik might also have done the trick. But after some experimentation, eyeshadow had won. It was simple and effective, the perfect solution for such a perfectly simple means of assault.

When at last the cosmetic had been crushed to a satisfactory fineness, a fork was introduced to mix in an equal amount of a snowy white powder. Then, a crisp page of paper was slipped beneath the resulting mound, curled into a funnel and raised to pour the compound into a small plastic jar. The screw-on cap closed with an easy twist.

There. The jar tumbled into the warmth of a pocket. Perhaps circumstances would fall out in such a way that it need never be used after all.

Or perhaps not.

*   *   *

It was a warm Tuesday evening in early July, and Juliet Bodine had decided to serve dinner to her old friend, Ruth Renswick, on the terrace of her apartment on Riverside Drive. Soft, brackish air drifted up to them off the Hudson, mingling with the fumes from the West Side Highway, the charcoal of the grilled shrimp before them, and the faint fragrance of roses in planters all around the terrace walls. Juliet, regretfully setting her fork down, sniffed cautiously at this New York potpourri and was flooded with memories of summers past. The sun had set, the dusk was gathering swiftly, and a mild coolness crept into the quickening breeze. Ruth gathered a black shawl up from behind her and pulled it over her bare shoulders.

The women had been talking about art and morality, which Juliet thought were completely unrelated and Ruth insisted had to be linked in some way. They started with Wagner and whether one might enjoy his music despite his historical legacy, then moved on through T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound to the reflexive xenophobia of the great English mystery writers of the 1930s. From there, they drifted to D’Annunzio, then Hergé, the Belgian author of the witty, delightfully drawn Tintin children’s books and an enthusiastic Nazi collaborator.

At last, Talent and ethics have exactly the same relationship as talent and height, Juliet declared. Which is to say, none. A tall man can be a dreadful poet and a short man can be a towering poet. A good man can be a terrible poet and a terrible man a wonderful poet. Coleridge was an opium addict who deserted his wife. Rod McKuen’s probably a saint.

When Ruth had no answer, Juliet at first imagined her adversary had conceded the argument. The silence went on for some moments, with Juliet feeling comfortably triumphant and Ruth apparently interested in a dust mote about three feet away from her in the darkening air. But suddenly, she dropped her head into her hands and groaned. After a moment, Juliet realized she was crying.

In the twenty or so years she had known Ruth Renswick, Juliet had never seen her cry. Scream, yes. Bully, threaten, rage, fume, sulk, manipulate—but weep? It was disconcerting, like seeing a cat out of breath.

What is it?

Sorry, Ruth muttered. Hurriedly, she dashed away the tears spilling onto her cheeks. "It’s this goddam ballet, this goddam Great Expectations. Damn Great Expectations anyway. I think this project is cursed."

Ruth lifted her face to look bleakly at the other, then dropped it again so that her graying bangs flopped into the remains of her salad.

Today, she went on, addressing her place mat, I spent six hours choreographing a pas de deux for Act One. And it’s all wrong. I think everything I’ve done is wrong. And now the Jansch has decided to have it performed at the gala that opens the season, for Chrissake. She started to sniffle again. Oh, shut up, Ruth, she snapped at herself. Damn. Hell!

Juliet studied the top of her friend’s head. When they had met in college some fifteen or twenty years before, Ruth had had no friends at all. She was a wiry, sallow girl—dark, broody, sullen, and nearly mute. It wasn’t until Juliet took a modern dance class (thus fulfilling a dreaded Phys Ed requirement) that she realized Ruth would reward attention. Juliet, small, round, and blond, a compulsive smiler with a misleading little-girl voice and a peaches-and-cream complexion, was astonished to see this human anchovy transformed by movement into a kaleidoscope of passion. Intrigued, she gently cultivated a friendship, advancing the intimacy by slow degrees until she came to see that Ruth, though she had the manners of a child reared by Siberian wolves, was, inside, a sterling person driven entirely by a need to dance. Through their twenties and into their thirties, Juliet had watched without surprise as Ruth rose steadily in the contemporary dance world, first as a performer, then (after two operations on her left knee and one on her right foot) as a choreographer. In spite of Ruth’s lengthy wanderings in Europe and California, they had stayed close, drawn together as much by a mutual, rather amused appreciation of the extreme differences between them as by the bond of trust they had established in school.

Now, as they sat across from each other in the gathering summer night, the women seemed mildly drawn caricatures of the girls they had been when they met. Juliet was still soft and fair, with round blue eyes and a short, pale halo of curling blond hair; if anything, in fact, she appeared softer and even less worldly than she had in college, and when she spoke, her breathy, childish voice suggested something approaching simplemindedness. For her part, Ruth had grown only more angular and unsmiling. Her short hair was streaked with silver, but her body had the same forbidding tenseness of old. If Juliet had been introduced to her now, at a party or on the street, she would have assumed something awful had just happened to her, a catastrophic medical diagnosis, perhaps, or a deep, sudden betrayal. On the rare occasions when she introduced friends to Ruth, she always warned them to expect her to be abrupt, distrait, or worse. Ruth, Juliet had been forced to admit as the years went by, was a bit of an acquired taste.

On the other hand, when Juliet’s marriage had gone to hell some years ago, it had been Ruth who kept her sane. Ruth canceled her own plans to listen hour after hour while Juliet sniveled on the phone or in a café or a bar. Ruth pulled her out of her apartment and dragged her to concerts and movies. Ruth even had the kindness to sleep in Juliet’s spare room a couple of nights, until Juliet got brave enough to face the apartment alone. In her fierce, wolfy way, Ruth loved Juliet. And she loved Ruth. So it was not merely rhetorically that Juliet asked now, Is there anything I can do?

Ruth looked up and blew her nose in her napkin. Make me smarter? she suggested. Turn back the hands of time? The unsettling tears started again to her eyes. I’m not sure anything can be done. I’m not sure I can pull this off. Entre nous, I’m so scared I puked on my way to the studio this morning. And I only have eight more weeks to finish.

Unsure whether to make light of her fears or give them their full due, Juliet settled for more information. How did this happen?

Ruth rubbed the tears away again. "Now, that’s the easy part. I made a mistake. When I wrote the synopsis, I assumed people knew the basic story of Great Expectations. But they don’t, as I now have learned. Some of the dancers never even heard of it. One of them identified it as the name of a male escort service."

So—change the synopsis?

Ruth made a rude noise indicative of scorn. The music was composed exactly according to my directions, Juliet, she said. I gave the composer a scene-by-scene breakdown and he followed it to the second. Two-minute duet for Pip and Estella, thirty-second transition for the corps, seventy-five-second solo for Miss Havisham. Et cetera, et cetera. Now it can only be changed in the most minuscule details. I left myself no space to establish the characters, even to convey the narrative. So how do I do it? I can’t use mime, it’s antediluvian. I can’t make things vague and impressionistic, because the Jansch is counting on a real story ballet to pull kids in, to sell tickets to families. And this stupid pas de deux today, which I thought would be so great…

Ruth subsided into frustrated silence and sat staring off into the deepening dark. For a moment, Juliet feared she was going to start to cry again. But a few seconds later, she suddenly straightened and spoke as if deeply struck.

You know, Juliet, maybe you could help me, she said. As a matter of fact, I really think you are the very person who could.

Juliet raised her pale eyebrows till they disappeared briefly under her curly hair. Ruth, dear, you saw me dance in Miss Lewis’s class. I haven’t improved. I really don’t think—

Of course I don’t want you to dance, Ruth said, with a contemptuous snort of laughter that Juliet tried to welcome as a sign of returning confidence. "I mean you could help with the storytelling, the characters, the synopsis. Why not? That’s what you do best. And you must know Great Ex backwards and forwards."

Oh!

For a moment, Juliet seemed to lose the power of speech. It was true that she was good at storytelling. The very shrimp they were digesting had been bought with the proceeds of the dozen historical novels she had written under the pen name Angelica Kestrel-Haven, not to mention the Spode dish they sat in, the hand-painted table on which the dish was placed, and the wraparound terrace sixteen stories above the Hudson River that supported the table, herself, and Ruth. No one had been more surprised by the success of Angelica Kestrel-Haven than A K-H herself. Her works were historical novels, drawing-room comedies set in the English Regency era, gentle, literate farragoes of love and misunderstanding that owed much to the romance writer Georgette Heyer. When she had written the first one (A Dandy Out of Fashion, it was called), Juliet had been at Barnard, teaching English literature with a feminist slant. Sheer loathing of academia, combined with a low liking for genre fiction and a rainy summer misspent ten years ago in a rented cottage on Prince Edward Island, had inspired her to try (as they said in the Regency) her pen. To her astonishment, that first effort sold promptly and for a good sum. She invested it all in Microsoft (then trading at two dollars a share) and, six novels later, thanks to a series of similar forays into the stock market, gladly quit teaching and left Academe forever.

Since then, there had been translations, book club sales, and several television movie options. Miss Kestrel-Haven was regularly asked to speak to groups of Anglophiles and futurophobes, aspiring writers and Societies for the Preservation of the English Regency. There was even a Kestrel-Haven Fan Club, complete with Web site and quarterly newsletter. Juliet seldom met a soul in Manhattan who had read or even heard of her, unless it was somebody’s mother visiting from out of state, yet somehow the thirst for escape to the world of Jane Austen so greatly afflicted the nation that book after book could not slake it. She purchased a duplex penthouse on Riverside Drive and hired a personal assistant. To share the wealth, she agreed to chair a committee at the Authors Guild, recorded books for the blind, and donated a healthy slice of her earnings to various causes and cultural institutions.

The abrupt explosion of a car alarm on the street far below coincided exactly with Ruth’s next words, so that Juliet had to ask her to repeat them.

I said, will you come in tomorrow?

Ruth’s tone was briskly impatient (for her, the nearest thing to imploring), yet Juliet hesitated. She herself could not have said why. Most days, she would jump at an excuse to escape her desk for a few hours. That very morning, she had reordered her sock drawer, written four thank-you notes, and alphabetized her future ideas file rather than get to work on London Quadrille, her current novel. Writing was interesting, but it was never easy, and Juliet now knew herself to be one of those many writers who will do almost anything rather than sit down to the terrifying, blank sheet of paper: run errands, make phone calls, pay bills, polish silver, chop vegetables, even scrub the floor.

At first, being Angelica had been illicit fun, a quasi-decadent escape from her real-life job as a professor. But as Angelica had become her professional identity, writing had begun to feel like work. It was the difference between an affair and a marriage. Now, whole months sometimes went by without Juliet writing a page, months when the thought of whipping up even a dollop of literary froth made her want to go to sleep. At such times, almost anything seemed pleasant and easy by comparison. While avoiding Duke’s Delight, she had picked up a working knowledge of spoken Chinese. Present Love, one of Angelica K-H’s earlier novels, provided an occasion to learn how to sight-sing. Juliet felt guilty and furtive about these apparent detours, but she preferred not to term them writer’s blocks—an ugly word, she thought. Instead, she tried to see them as necessary bends in the circuitous, mysterious road to achievement. And, as she often argued to herself, she did almost always find inspiration in her absences, as if invention were a pot that could not boil while watched. She worried—worried constantly—about meeting her deadlines. Yet, somehow, she always did. Writing down a hundred thousand words did not take very long in and of itself, she sometimes observed. It was choosing the words that was time-consuming.

She squinted at the translucent shrimp tails on her plate and tried to block out the racket of the car alarm. It was the kind that sounds like a German klaxon alternating with a fire siren, and she had been a little depressed to notice a few months ago that she’d gotten so used to the pattern, she’d almost come to enjoy it. Surely a visit to the Jansch studios would be rather fun?

Besides, it was Juliet Bodine’s general policy to help friends in need immediately and without stint. Her mother having died when Juliet was three, friends had become her family. She had no siblings. Her father was a freewheeling, high-flying, mercurial cad who probably ought never to have married in the first place. Always successful in business, Ted Bodine had provided his small daughter with a capable nanny, a plush room in a handsome apartment over Park Avenue, and the best private schooling available. But he had given her little in the way of personal contact. For personal contact, Ted Bodine preferred a series of women in their twenties. Juliet grew up feeling herself a cross between Sara Crewe and Eloise, with a soupçon of Christie Hefner thrown in for irony. Her father still lived across town, and they met for dinner now and then. But for her, the Upper East Side of Manhattan was a haunted place. The alley formed by the tall buildings along Park Avenue was her Valley of the Shadow of Death, and the very epaulets on the doormen threw a cold chill into her heart.

But as a grown-up, nesting in her own roomy, airy place on the Upper West Side—a region she considered a different city from the Upper East Side—Juliet had collected a family of her own. Her agent, Kimmy Lauer, her neighbors June Corelli and Suzy Eisenman, her dear e-mail correspondent and fellow connoisseur of unfamiliar words (naumachia, anarthria), Simon Leff, her writers’ group, her former classmates (Ruth being one) and academic colleagues, as well as various others formed the core of a virtual cult of friendship by which she lived. The world, she believed, was cold and hard; the least friends could do was work to be kind to each other.

And yet, petitioned by Ruth for aid—Ruth, who would have chewed off her own paw if Juliet had needed help—she hesitated. She had a funny feeling, a notion that going into the Jansch would mean crossing a boundary into a world that was … that was what? She couldn’t possibly think ballet was dangerous?

Her hesitation lasted only a few seconds, and she hoped it had not troubled her friend. With a smile at her own ridiculousness, she shook herself mentally, looked up, and said, Absolutely. Don’t worry. We’ll fix you up in two little shakes.

*   *   *

At exactly 11:55 on the morning of the next day, Juliet stepped out of the elevator and into the sleek little lobby of the Jansch Repertory Ballet Troupe headquarters. After some thought, she had decided not to change out of her habitual jeans and T-shirt for this visit. But as she gave the receptionist her name, she regretted the decision. She felt out of place in this stylish bandbox of chrome and leather and hoped the receptionist—Gayle Remson, according to the nameplate sitting on her desk—would wave her on at once. But alas, instead of pointing her straight to Ruth, Ms. Remson (petite, fortyish, dressed in a neat summer sheath and crowned with a shining helmet of apricot-colored hair) asked her to sit down, then told an intercom, Miss Bodine is here.

Eight seconds later, Max Devijian, executive director of the Jansch, sailed down the hall and into the lobby, his arms raised, his carefully tended hands stretched before him, as if Juliet’s head were a particularly gorgeous hat he could not wait to try on. Juliet, familiar with his habits, attempted to turn away strategically, so that he could salute only one cheek. But, as was his way, he seized her skull regardless and soundly bussed her left and right.

Max Devijian was a slender, compact man with huge, dark eyes, a receding hairline, and that effusive, embracing sort of energy which can neither be fully resisted nor entirely trusted. As executive director of the Jansch, it was his job to kiss and cozy up to people like Juliet, New Yorkers with money who were well disposed to the lively arts. And he was very good at his job. In the four or five years since his arrival at the Jansch, he had transformed it from a large, shabby, second-rate company—a company with excellent dancers but a musty repertory that had barely changed since the late Florence Jansch founded the group in 1934—into a large, revitalized, increasingly first-rate troupe. Like all good fund-raisers, he took it as a given that people wanted to hand their money over to someone; they just didn’t know who. In his former post, at Lincoln Center, he had been known for efficiency, zeal and—his only weakness, perhaps—a certain impatience with those whose good opinion he did not need. Since that included the company’s artistic director, support staff, rehearsal pianists, ballet mistresses and masters, even most of the dancers, Devijian was a more popular man outside than inside the organization he served.

Miss Bodine, he now pronounced, his tone implying that it was a tremendous satisfaction to him simply to say her name. He had an odd, distinctively raspy voice, a little high for a man. He released her head, but took hold of her arm as he drew her toward a nearby sofa.

Juliet stiffened involuntarily. She had cut her work short to be here today. Of course, it was lovely to be out of her office and in such an unfamiliar setting—an unearned release, like cutting high school or getting out of jury duty early. But now that she was here, she was eager to go in to Ruth, not sit and have her favor curried.

But Max was adamant. When Ruth mentioned you were coming, I insisted on having a moment with you. I must fill you in on our new season, he said firmly.

Juliet tried to make herself relax. She had known Max for some years now, ever since she volunteered some money to rescue a failing arts-in-the-schools program he had initiated. Once he had made up his mind to fill you in on something, nothing stopped him.

It’s going to be marvelous, he declared. Best ever. He then presented a flowing summary of each planned production, oozing on about this dancer and that set designer. He crowed about grants he had managed to get, then backtracked to make sure she knew the Jansch could still use more funding. He asked what she was writing, whether she planned to travel this summer, how she knew Ruth. Great Expectations, he said, would not only open the season, it would be the centerpiece of the Jansch’s year, the focus of all possible attention.

The music is splendid, you know, he added. Have you heard it?

Juliet shook her head. She knew that the composer was Ken Parisi, an Englishman known mainly for composing the music for various Masterpiece Theatre productions. Ruth had been dubious about his ability to write for dancers, but it turned out he had experience in that area as well, and in fact the music pleased and excited her very much.

Inevitably, Max burst out in a string of superlatives describing Parisi’s music, ignoring, as he went on, a youthful man who had hesitated as he entered the reception area, then come to within a few steps of Juliet. Here he stood, clearly waiting to have a word with her. He was slight and graceful, about thirty-five years old, with a long face, small blue eyes, and a short, thick mass of kinky red hair. Juliet recognized him as Ruth’s assistant, Patrick Wegweiser, whom she had met at performances of Ruth’s work once or twice before. With a dancer’s poise, but something also of a human being’s impatience, he stood listening quietly to Devijian’s vague description of music he himself, as Ruth’s aide-decamp, had been listening to and discussing for the past six months. When at last Max paused for breath, Juliet hopped up from the sofa and firmly took Patrick’s arm. An instant later, Max also jumped up suddenly, as if at a pleasant surprise—as if Patrick had been invisible until Juliet touched him. With a faint feeling of disgust, she finally extricated herself from Devijian’s chatter, said good-bye, and turned to follow Patrick down a corridor into the mazy studios.

The Jansch troupe was headquartered in three floors of a former upholsterer’s warehouse on Amsterdam Avenue, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. South lay Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, north the great food emporia of Fairway, Citarella, and Zabar’s. From the polished uppermost floor, where the lobby and executive offices were located, spindly metal staircases at either end of the building spiraled down into the grimier works of the place. A dancers’ lounge, small offices, and rehearsal rooms occupied the middle story; on the lowest floor were the company’s big rehearsal studios and the dancers’ locker rooms.

Though the architects would seem to have had plenty of space to start with, the various rooms on all three stories felt jumbled and crammed in, as if they had been modeled on dice spilled at random. Dim, narrow corridors ran at peculiar angles among them, and the staircases seemed to Juliet, as she descended first one, then the next, in Patrick’s wake, unnecessarily slender and rickety.

Devijian had so delayed her that now, as Patrick explained, the first hour of rehearsal was in full swing. (The dancers’ mornings were devoted to warm-ups and classes.) Piano music drifted from behind doors along the hallways as she and Patrick reached the first floor, bits of Sleeping Beauty and Giselle, but the windows in the closed doors were too high and small for Juliet to see through without stopping.

Ruth’s in Studio Three, Patrick murmured, pointing her to the left as they came to a four-way intersection of halls. A dancer apparently dressed in rags leaned against a wall here, her eyes closed, her slim right leg extended, foot severely pointed before her. Juliet hurried by, all of a sudden acutely aware of the comfortable cellulite pouches on either side of her own thighs. She was relieved when Patrick interrupted her