Last Dance Read online

  Other Books by

  Jeffrey Fleishman

  My Detective (A Sam Carver Novel)

  Promised Virgins: A Novel of Jihad

  Shadow Man

  Copyright © 2020 by Jeffrey Fleishman

  E-book published in 2020 by Blackstone Publishing

  Cover design by Alenka Vdovič Linaschke

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced

  or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the

  publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental

  and not intended by the author.

  Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-982517-34-2

  Library e-book ISBN 978-1-982517-33-5

  Fiction / Mystery & Detective / General

  CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  Blackstone Publishing

  31 Mistletoe Rd.

  Ashland, OR 97520

  www.BlackstonePublishing.com

  For Monsignor Terrance M. Lawler

  Chapter 1

  She lies pale and light as shaved ice. Her hair spreads like a black flame across the pillow. Classical music plays in whispers. Schubert, I think. The place is scattered with toe shoes, tights, diet pills, opioids, suitcases, dresses, scarves, and empty bottles of Stoli. I snap on gloves and kneel beside her, study the small, nude map of her body. Taut, muscled, delicate except for her blistered and misshapen feet. A ballerina’s feet. I want to cover her but I cannot change the scene, and so she lies among strangers—taking her picture, bagging her things, reconstructing the final moments of her life. She is a broken bit of magic fallen from a music box. I imagine her dancing, a flash in a spotlight on a distant stage, or maybe here across the polished floor of this Spring Street loft. I saw her face last night on the side of a bus when I arrived at LAX, her arms thrown back as if flying through a winter’s dusk. I rise. My eyes go back and forth over her. No bruise, no blood, but a slight frozen shiver on her face, as if she were bracing against a sudden wind. I walk to the large, arched windows. I press down a yawn and take a breath. The air is cool, and the light is the way it is in that fugue time of in between.

  “Name?”

  “Katrina Ivanovna. Russian or some shit, I guess,” says the uniform. “Here’s her passport. Think she might be famous.”

  I flip through it.

  “She’s been around,” I say. “What are you guessing?”

  “Smothered, maybe. Not an OD.”

  “Why?”

  “Face looks a little surprised, don’t you think, Detective? Not peaceful, you know.”

  “A lot of pills. Vodka.”

  “Yeah, but doesn’t feel that way.”

  “Who called it in?”

  “The guy who comes to feed the cat.”

  “I don’t see a cat.”

  “There is no cat.”

  “You sure?”

  “Hardly any furniture. Where’s it hiding?”

  “There’s a litter box in the corner.”

  “Cat shit but no cat,” says the uniform, eyes scanning. “Must have run out. Cats are like that.”

  “Where’s the guy?”

  “Antonio Garcia. In 503.”

  I cross the hall and knock. A slender man in a blue silk robe, white T-shirt, and tight gray pants opens the door. He blows smoke sideways from a cigarette and invites me into a loft of half-dressed mannequins, sewing machines, drawing boards, swatches of cloth, and boxes of sequins, lamé, and glitter. A pincushion rides like a watch on his wrist. His hand is shaking, and he takes another long drag on the cigarette, bites a lemon, and downs an already poured shot of tequila.

  “Did you see her?” he says.

  “Yes. I’m Detective Sam Carver.”

  “Poor girl. Do you know Katrina?”

  “A ballerina.”

  “Not a ballerina. One of the ballerinas.” He rubs his nose and wipes away a tear. “She moved in a few years ago. She’s not in LA much.” He flicks ash, looks over my shoulder and out the door to the cop faces in the hall. “Her Giselle opens next week. The Times did a feature on her. Do you know ballet, Detective?” He’s shattered but smug, his ponytail black and slick. He pours another shot. “We became friends. Soul mates, really. I advised her on costumes. I design, as you can see.”

  “You were feeding the cat?”

  “Nishka. A stray she picked up in Cairo. I don’t know why she kept him. Black, short-haired. Not a pretty thing. She was often in and out. She gave me a key and asked me to feed him.” He lifts his shot and nods toward the window. “Katrina liked the street. When she was home, we’d sit over there and play games with the people below. How they moved. What they wore. Things you talk about over coffee.”

  He reaches for a tissue.

  “This is terrible,” he says.

  “You found her in bed like that?”

  “I thought she was sleeping.” He takes a breath. “She was beautiful. I stood there for a moment. I didn’t expect to see her.” He steps toward me. “She had perfect lines, Detective. I loved making clothes for her. I gave her a dress once as a gift. She put it on right away and took me out to dinner at one of those new places around Seventh, near the one that sells macaroons. Katrina loved macaroons. We once ate a whole box. She could be enchanting that way.” He steps back and crushes out his cigarette. He pours a third tequila and looks up at me. “When I came closer to her, she didn’t move. I touched her with a finger. She was cold. I wanted to put a blanket over her. But I ran back to my place and called 911. Nishka must have slipped away then. He’s always getting out.”

  “A lot of pills and vodka over there.”

  “I kept telling her she took too many. She wouldn’t listen. She had pain from years of dancing. It’s cliché, isn’t it? The artist’s overdose.” He lowers his voice. “I’m sorry, Detective. That sounded cruel, but I was scared of this.”

  “Did you hear her come in last night? Was anyone with her?”

  “I got home less than an hour before I found her. I was returning from Paris. The Louvre had a show of seventeenth-

  century couture. A minor display, but that fashion is so ornamental. It’s a favorite of mine. I had been there a few days.” He looks me over as if sizing me for a jacket. “I didn’t know if she was home. I was coming to check on Nishka.”

  “Do you have the plane ticket?”

  The request agitates him, but he flashes me the e-ticket and Uber receipt on his cell phone.

  “Did you have a relationship with her?” I ask.

  “Sexual?” He laughs. “Look around, Detective. What do you think?”

  “Did she have a husband? Boyfriend?” I say. “Anyone?”

  “There’s a cellist,” he says. “I don’t know much about him. He would come now and then and sit in the middle of her loft and play. She danced around him like a sad angel. I saw them once when I came to feed Nishka. They didn’t stop. They were in another world. He was tall, jet-black curly hair. Trim and well built. Hypnotic hands. I had never seen hands like that. So attuned to their craft. Sacred, almost. Do you know what I mean?”

  “You notice a lot about bodies,” I say.

  “I dress them,” he says with a glimmer of contempt. “I must.”

  “Did you get his name?”

  “No. I only saw him a few times. I’d hear the music coming from her loft as I passed. The soft scrapes of her feet. They did have a fight once. I heard yelling but couldn’t
make out the words. One was as angry as the other. They went on for a few minutes, and then the music began again.” He sighs. “The cello is the sound of sorrow, don’t you think?”

  “It’s the instrument closest to the human voice.”

  “Yes, I think that’s true.”

  I hand him my card.

  “Call me if you remember anything more about the cellist, or if something else comes to mind.”

  He lights another cigarette and closes the door. I cross the hall back to the white suits, gloves, vials, swabs, and simmering chorus of voices. They’re almost done. The crime scene is not a lived-in place. She was a vagabond. There’s no sense of settling in here, no photographs or paintings or even a full set of plates—just a few books, a bed, two chairs, and, along the right wall, a row of mirrors and a barre. She lived like a cat.

  Sun shines through the arched windows. The fifth-floor loft is an open stage to the street, and I imagine homeless and hipsters looking up and glimpsing her, a moth brushing against glass. I hear the crinkle, that sound that even after all these years still startles, the same as when a cartridge clicks into a chamber or a needle drops onto vinyl. She disappears into a bag, like the Stoli bottles and her pills, smartphone, laptop, and a couple of glasses. She is lifted and carried away. I walk to the bathroom: black-and-white tiles, the kind in old barbershops and speakeasies. A locket shaped like a swan hangs from the mirror. I hold it to the light, look around, slip it into my pocket. It is my one illicit urge, this thing I do to keep the dead a part of me, so I can see them as they were, feel their slight weight in my grasp.

  “We’re wrapping up, Detective,” says the uniform, C. J. Alvarez. “You got everything?”

  “Not much here. Anything in those books? Envelopes? Letters?”

  “No. We did bag a paper napkin from that new place over on Olive. The NoMad. Nothing on it though. Think there’d be a phone number or something. Why take a bar napkin with nothing on it?”

  “We’ll run it for DNA.”

  “Kinda calm, you know, Detective? That quiet after the vic’s gone.”

  “You catch a lot of homicides?”

  “I was in Compton for a while after the academy. Saw my share. When they take away the vic, and the yellow tape goes up, there’s an empty-church silence.”

  “Catholic?”

  “Born and raised,” he says.

  “A medical examiner I know calls that silence the final equinox.”

  “Weird and peaceful.”

  “Don’t get mystical.”

  “Just saying.”

  “I get it.”

  “You been working downtown a while, huh?”

  I start to answer, but C. J. Alvarez gets a call and disappears into the hall. I take the elevator down. The sidewalks are quiet except a few dog walkers, a homeless guy talking on a pretend phone, and a weepy man with a trumpet, barely making a sound on the curb. I walk to the coffee shop on the corner and order an espresso and a glass of water. I sit and pull out my notebook and write ballerina. I scribble some notes of the scene and look out the window. I sip. The espresso is bitter. A bus passes, and I see her face again, flying through the streets of my neighborhood and toward the edges of where I need to go.

  Chapter 2

  “Shit, Carver, you looked wrecked.”

  “Only back a few hours when I caught the case.”

  “OD, maybe suicide,” says my boss, Captain Manuel Ortiz, who’s too awake for the hour. His espresso cup rattles, and he bites a croissant, brushing crumbs from a blue blazer I’ve seen too many times. “Stopped by her loft. Not much there. What are you thinking?”

  “A lot of vodka and pills. I don’t think that was it though.”

  “She’s somebody. I Googled her. There’ll be reporters and shit. You a ballet guy? You like classical stuff.”

  “I’ve been once or twice.”

  “Don’t know how they do it.”

  “What?”

  “Jump around in those slippers. Gotta hurt.”

  “They’re not slippers. They’re toe shoes.”

  “Whatever.” His eyes roam over the café. “Espresso’s acidy. I don’t know why it’s so hard for these places to make a decent cup. How difficult can it be?”

  “You have to have the right machine. It’s an art.” I sip, make a face. “Why you here?”

  “I was up. Saw the call come in. Figured I’d come see you. You were gone two months.”

  He stirs in a sugar. Then another.

  “You’re checking on me,” I say.

  “You haven’t been right for a while, since, you know . . .”

  “I keep—”

  “Don’t go there, Carver. It’s been what, a year? She’s gone. It happens, you know that.”

  “I thought I’d run into her in Europe. On a street. In a museum. I felt I was being watched once or twice. She’s over there, or maybe Argentina. Somewhere with great architecture.” I sip and pat myself for a cigarette I know I don’t have. “I still hear her voice in my ear.” I look out the window and back to Ortiz. “I thought she was going to kill me that night. Circling me, talking and crying. I was waiting for it. But she kissed me and left. ‘Bye, Sam.’ That was it. The words came out like when a marriage ends. I didn’t even know her, but I hear those words every day.”

  “She knocked you out and tied you to a chair. It’d be wise to let it go.”

  Ortiz shakes his head. He knows the story, the strange, recurring prayer of mine.

  “She was obsessed with you,” he says. “In that screwed-up mind of hers, you were her savior. The one who would understand. Dylan Cross was a clever, messed-up, vicious broad.”

  “She had her reasons.”

  “She had vengeance. Killed two men who raped her, left a third chained in her basement. Vanishes. She wins.” Ortiz smooths his mustache. “Probably be a Netflix special on her one day. You know, those long serial real-crime things they’ve been doing. I hope they don’t. I hope I’m retired by then.” He leans closer. “You know, they’re cutting back on overtime and pensions. All this shit the Times has been writing about abuse. They better not touch mine.” He takes a breath, studies his hands. “I hate that any doer gets away, but after what those pricks did to her, it doesn’t bother me so much.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You ever trace the email she sent you after?”

  “Tried, but it was impossible.”

  “What’d it say, again?”

  “‘Somewhere, someday.’”

  “Like that old song.”

  “A time and a place for us.”

  “Whatever. Okay, Carver. Past is past. We got new shit bearing down. Dead ballerina. Real-time case. Drink another one of these things. Jolt yourself and do what you do. A man’s got to have attitude, know what I’m saying? Not flailing around and thinking what-ifs.” He swipes a yawn away. “It’s Sunday. I got church with the wife. Bishop’s at the cathedral. She likes the bishop. A mass for immigrants and DACA kids, or some shit. I’ll let you know what I hear on the ballerina’s bio. Katrina something, right? And what the crime lab pulls from her phone and laptop. If she’s a Russian national, the consulate will get involved, and you know what kind of deep-shit complication that is. Christ.”

  Ortiz looks at me hard for a few seconds and leaves. It’s odd to be back. I order another espresso—the barista’s a surly, tattooed Asian hipster in a white apron—write in my notebook, and gather myself. I didn’t know whether I’d return to LA. When I was in Berlin, I felt I could live there, wander the Tiergarten, drink beer at Zwiebelfisch, take the S-Bahn east, and get lost amid the galleries and ragged streets of Kreuzberg. A good life. A slipping of the skin. One day, maybe. Or perhaps Rome. Lisbon. Bucharest. I like to think so. I want something new, but I may be too grooved to the self already made. A couple kisses in the window and twirls aw
ay past an old man hurrying across Sixth Street with the Sunday paper. I’d like to sit here with a whiskey, read Milosz or Eliot, and let the day spin away—a man with a bit of money and no cares. Can’t do that. That is pretend. I’m back with a new case. Dylan Cross is out there, though, strolling the ruins of an old continent, drawing buildings in the sweet air, as if in a film or hallucination.

  Her words linger: “Bye, Sam.”

  Chapter 3

  It’s still early. No one’s around. I enter through the backstage door and walk past curtains and ropes to the wings, where I see Andreas Stein sitting alone center stage in a spotlight, scrolling on a laptop and listening to music. He’s oblivious to the empty seats and the shadows around him. I had read about Stein in the Times—an indolent eccentric who made a name for himself years ago at the Joffrey but has since bounced through the ballet world like a lost boy wonder. He is a man of tantrums and tenderness, or so dancers and critics say. He wears a sweater and a scarf and tight jeans. His face is lean, like Beckett in his later years, and his hair is bristly gray-black. A shorn figure from his own mythology. The scent of cologne drifts off of him. His eyes are closed, a slight smile of contentment on his lips. I stand for a moment, watching. He opens his eyes, startled, and hops up.

  “Jesus, man! Who are you? Sneaking around like a phantom.” He smiles at the allusion. “Are you the lighting fellow? These lights are terrible, not one decent beam.” He studies me closer. “You don’t look like a lighting man. No. The lawyer, perhaps. As I’ve said, I’m not signing until we fix the indemnity clause.” He shakes his head. “But you don’t look like a lawyer either. Hmm . . . You know what you look like? And don’t take offense: a cop. A relatively suave one—I can see a bit of style in you. That’s a smart shirt. Yes, I think you’re a cop.” He winks. “Have we burglars? Some untoward sexual mischief in the wings? My dancers are not here. Alas, I am alone for you to question.”

  “I’m Detective Sam Carver.”

  “No? I’m right, then? Wonderful. I like guessing about people. A proclivity of mine. I’m quite good at it, most days.” He laughs. “Do you have a badge?”