Chapter 8
Sigrid usually tried to approach each witness in a homicide case with as few preconceptions as possible, but by the time she was ready to question Helen Delgado, she knew that Emmy Mion had been a sexual magnet who seemed to draw every affection that wasn’t firmly committed elsewhere. Apparently the costume designer’s husband was included in that category. Cliff Delgado had smoldered with open jealousy of Eric Kee’s late monopoly on Emmy and Sigrid doubted if he’d hidden it from his wife since he spoke of her with such scorn.
Accordingly, as she waited for Mick Cluett to bring Helen Delgado to her, Sigrid braced for a drab neglected wife and another trying, emotional outburst. The woman who entered, however, came swathed in queenly serenity and, although considerably overweight, she wore vivid makeup and a flattering scarlet caftan and she moved with unexpected lightness of foot.
When asked to give her version of the murder, she faced Sigrid squarely and told her, “I’m sorry, Lieutenant, but that’s impossible. Your people separated us before I heard all the details and I never see a first performance if I can help it. Second performance, third-I’m right there watching from the back or in the wings. But never the first. I guess it’s a mixture of superstition and stage fright.” Helen Delgado's skin glowed above the high neckline of the scarlet caftan. Her glossy black hair was brushed straight back on one side to cascade down the other in a dramatic contrast of dark curls against a flawless complexion as she tilted her head to consider Sigrid's questions.
“It doesn’t really matter though. I couldn’t begin to tell you why Eric did this horrible-to hurt Emmy like that. He’s as temperamental as the others, of course, but still-” Her warm contralto voice trailed off as she shrugged her heavy shoulders in puzzlement. “So much for love, I guess.”
“Why do you think Eric Kee did it?” asked Sigrid. “Because Ginger said so.” A single earring of red stones dangled from her exposed ear and glittered brightly as she looked from Sigrid to Elaine Albee to Bernie Peters. “Didn’t she?”
“I’m told she did so initially,” Sigrid admitted. “She now claims she’s no longer sure and since Mr. Kee denies it, all three men are under equal suspicion.”
“All of them? Why?”
“Each appears to have had equal opportunity, and none can prove he was elsewhere.”
"Oh. So, does anyone know
why
Emmy was killed?”
“No,” replied Sigrid. “Do you?”
The designer crossed surprisingly trim ankles. Light flashed on her gold slippers and was reflected by the many rings on her plump fingers. “No. I couldn’t believe that Eric had flipped out like that, but if he’s not the one-no, I just can’t figure it. Everyone was crazy about her.”
“Nevertheless, she was killed,” said Sigrid, who was getting a little tired of hearing how universally beloved the murdered dancer had been.
A look of inexpressible sadness crossed Delgado’s plump face. She took a deep breath and said, “Not by Win. He doesn’t have enough passion.”
Sigrid let that pass for the moment. “And Eric Kee?”
“Eric has passion. And he was frustrated by coming so close to what he wanted.”
“Which was?”
“To possess Emmy completely. She wouldn’t let him. And she had already tired of his sulks.”
“So that he might have killed her to keep from losing her to someone else?”
“It’s happened.”
“What about your husband?”
“Cliff?” Her eyes met Sigrid’s, then settled on the toes of her golden slippers. “Yes, poor Cliff has enough passion, and he wanted Emmy so damn bad.”
“That didn’t bother you?” asked Sigrid.
Helen Delgado shrugged. “How could I expect him not to lust after her? She was so elfin and exquisite while I-” She flung out her arms. “This is hardly the body that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium.”
Her voice was light, but Sigrid, who was currently caught up in emotional entanglements of her own, heard something darker underneath.
“Then you did mind?” she persisted.
“I am a Jew. If you cut me, will I not bleed?” the designer parried.
“A simple yes or no will do,” Sigrid said quietly. “Nothing’s ever that simple, Lieutenant.”
“Try.”
Helen Delgado sat back in her chair with a quizzical smile. “Are you actually as bloodless as you try to look?”
She turned to Albee and Peters, her earring swinging. “I’ll bet she’s a real pisser to work for, isn’t she?”
Bernie Peters choked on his coffee and Elaine Albee abruptly discovered something about her left boot that required her immediate, head-down attention.
Sigrid had hoped that Delgado would be as she'd originally appeared, a rational bystander who had somehow managed to stay above the tempestuous currents which swirled around her colleagues. Evidently that was not to be.
She turned her slate-gray eyes on Bernie Peters, who was red-faced and half-strangled, and coldly suggested that perhaps he should go get himself a drink of water. “And you might as well question that composer when you’ve recovered.” The three women watched the coughing detective leave.
“I’d love to see
him
in tights,” murmured Helen Delgado.
Sigrid said patiently, “Any time you you’re ready to get serious, Mrs. Delgado”
The woman arranged the folds of her scarlet dress. “Very well, Lieutenant. Yes, if pushed far enough, my husband is probably quite capable of murder. But if he killed Emmy out of frustrated lust, he killed the wrong woman.
I
was the roadblock on his highway to paradise, not Emmy. Emmy would screw with anyone who asked nicely.”
She settled her large body more comfortably in the chair. “You ask if I minded? Yes. I did mind. Less than you might think, but enough. And Emmy knew it. For such a thoroughgoing libertine, she was quite the born-again moralist at times. If I’d told her that the marriage was over, she’d have had Cliff on the green room couch ten minutes after I announced it; but until she knew for a fact that I didn’t give a tinker’s damn, she wouldn’t let him touch her. And that wasn’t just because I’m more valuable to the troupe than Cliff.”
She caught the skeptical look that passed from Elaine Albee to the lieutenant. “Don’t laugh, doll,” she told Albee. “I am, you know.”
It was a proud statement of feet.
“Cliff’s a very good dancer. Good, not great. Any casting call would turn up a half-dozen dancers just as competent. On the other hand, costume designers of my caliber don’t pop out of every box of Cracker Jacks. I’m a genius with a sewing machine but more than that, when it comes to stage design and making ten dollars’ worth of nothing look like a thousand, Nate Richmond and I are pure unadulterated magic. We could work anywhere we wanted.”
“Then why are you in this shoestring theater?” Albee asked curiously.
“Nate and I can work anywhere,” she repeated. “Cliff can’t. You’ll have to ask Nate what holds him here; Cliff’s my reason. We helped start this company because it gives him a chance to dance more often than he ever could anywhere else.”
“Ulrike Innes appears to doubt that the company can survive without Emmy Mion,” said Sigrid.
“She may be right,” nodded Delgado. The glittering stones brushed her rounded cheek. “Emmy took care of most of the business end-licenses, Insurance, the grant applications, billing the parents. The dance classes bring in a large chunk of our income and after that ghastly experience last winter, it was Emmy who-”
Sigrid held up a slender hand. “What ghastly experience?”
“Last February. One of our students was killed. So horrible. Her poor little body was stuffed in a snowbank near her apartment. It was nothing to do with us, except that she'd been on her way home from class when someone grabbed her, but mommies and daddies get real spooked real quick when something like that happens. I couldn’t blame them, but if Emmy hadn’t called a meeting and talked them around, 8th-AV-8 might have gone under then and there. God knows how they’ll react to this.”
“What was the child’s name?” asked Sigrid.
"Amanda Gillespie. Mandy.” With her loose caftan felling in graceful folds around her full body, Delgado moved over to the wall above the bookcase and began scanning the photographs tacked there. “You people still haven’t found her killer.”
The image of a child’s body stuffed in a snowbank triggered faint memories and Sigrid glanced inquiringly at Albee.
“I think Hentz and Lambeth caught that one,” Albee murmured, referring to the department's two most chauvinistic detectives. Competent police officers, but seldom interested in a woman’s view on any of their cases.
“Here,” said Helen Delgado, returning to her chair with four photographs which she spread on the desktop before Sigrid. “That’s Mandy.”
Her index finger with its large topaz ring located the little girl in two pictures of a clustered class and again in two pictures where she was one of three or four children.
In the photographs, Mandy Gillespie appeared to be an ordinary child-cute enough, as were most children in Sigrids disinterested view, but nothing to make her an immediate standout among her peers. Her tentative smile hadn’t quite caught up to those new front teeth, but she had nice eyes and, given the chance, would probably have grown up to be an attractive woman.
“Poor little kid,” said Elaine, her eyes compassionate. “Yeah,” agreed Helen Delgado with a sigh. “We were really cut up about it at the time.”, “Was she sexually molested?”
“Not that we heard. He strangled her with one of her own hair ribbons. It was rough on the other children, too. Some of them had crying spells and nightmares. We finally had a psychiatrist come talk to them. Dr. Ferrell.”
“The same Dr Ferrell who was here this afternoon?” asked Sigrid, surprised. She was under the impression that the woman was an internist, not a psychiatrist.
“Why, yes. She has a nephew in the Monday-afternoon class so she occasionally comes to pick him up. She even makes most of the recitals.” Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Maybe we can get her to talk to the children again.” Retaining one picture of the Gillespie child, Sigrid stood up, flexed her stiff neck and shoulder muscles, and returned the rest of the photographs to their former wall positions.
“When did you last see Emmy Mion?” she asked as she walked back to the desk and drew her notebook toward her. “Did she seem different in any way? Was something bothering her?”
The designer sent her dangling earring swinging again as she slowly shook her head, and it snagged on the scarlet fabric. “No,” she said, removing the post from her ear and carefully untangling the sparkling bauble from the thread which had caught it. “Performance mornings are always hectic and today was no different. Emmy's little ghost dress wasn't quite right but she didn’t want to take the time to let me fix it. I finally had to sit on her. Metaphorically speaking, of course.”
A self-deprecating smile lit her face while her fingers played with the earring. “She and Nate were talking about the lights when I tracked her down and stitched on a few more cheesecloth tatters. She seemed the same as ever. Well, no, now that you mention it, maybe she was a little more preoccupied than usual, but Emmy could always hold two thoughts at the same time. I never knew a person more in touch with both sides of her brain.”
She threw out her hands, dramatically gesturing to the room in which they sat. “I mean, look at this office: sloppy creative choreographer on one side, spastically neat administrator on this side. And both were valid parts. Sometimes she d have trouble changing gears and we’d threaten to board her up in the executive board room. She'd hoot and mellow out again.”
“We were told she was expecting a telephone call," said Sigrid. “Did she mention it?”
“I think someone-Rikki? or was that Ginger?-said that was why she and Eric ate lunch in here alone, but Emmy didn't say anything to me about any phone calls. As far as I’m concerned, that's why we bought an answering machine.”
As the session drew to an end, Elaine Albee suddenly asked, “Did you like her?”
Delgado stopped playing with the sparkly earring. She looked at it blankly for a moment, almost as if she'd never seen it before, then said, “Good question, doll. I guess I liked the dancer part of her-maybe because
she
loved it so much. And I liked the bawdy, don’t-give-a- damn-’bout-nothing side of her when she’d kick back and open a bottle of champagne.”
She slipped the post of her earring through her earlobe and adjusted the bangle. “What I didn’t like was her preacher side. This place used to be a church, you know, and sometimes I’d think we still had a pulpit out front and center on the stage.”
“What did she preach about?” asked Sigrid.
“Oh Lord! I don’t know if I can give you an example off the top of my head. It was never over anything really big.” Delgado thought for a moment. "Okay, how’s this: one of our friends-has anyone told you about David Orland? How he and Emmy were together before she moved in with Eric?”