Murder Takes a Partner Read online

  Murder Takes a Partner

  A Reuben Frost Mystery

  Haughton Murphy

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  FOR PHYLLIS AND MARY

  1

  REHEARSAL

  Reuben Frost walked briskly down Fifth Avenue, between Fifty-fourth and Fifty-third streets. He was quite content, having just finished a companionable lunch of Welsh rarebit at his club, the Gotham. Recently retired as a senior partner of Chase & Ward, the downtown Wall Street law firm where he had worked all his professional life, Frost had made a midday visit to the Gotham a part of his daily routine.

  It was a beautiful day, and as he walked, Frost savored the bright April sunshine. It made Fifth Avenue look splendid, he thought. His only regret was seeing the ever-increasing number of Senegalese peddlers along the Avenue hawking their Vuitton and Gucci rip-offs; they made stylish Fifth Avenue resemble the main thoroughfare of a Third World capital. An old friend of the Mayor’s, he had complained in the past about these peddlers, but had been told that the City’s law enforcement resources had to be allocated to the suppression of murder and dope-dealing rather than to an aesthetic cleanup of Fifth Avenue.

  Frost understood, though he did not share, the Mayor’s priorities. But in the long view, these priorities were probably correct. After all, the peddlers still could not ruin Fifth Avenue. The distinguished-looking men of affairs and smartly dressed women who crowded its sidewalks this early afternoon—coupled with the open-faced, clean-cut out-of-town tourists who stared in wonderment at it all—made the Avenue vital and attractive. The tourists, especially, were a good sign; New York, after its great fiscal crisis of the 1970s, had regained its élan and was once again a magnet for visitors. The City, like Frost himself, was in good health.

  At the corner of Fifty-third Street, Frost’s sense of wellbeing was momentarily interrupted as he lost his footing in one of those sloping indentations in the curb installed for people in wheelchairs. He recovered his balance without falling, but not before thinking, however briefly, that at seventy-five he was subject to the vulnerabilities of old age after all.

  As he regained his balance, Frost was aware of a strong, steadying hand on his forearm. He turned to find Hailey Coles, one of the most promising young dancers from the National Ballet Company, at his side. An absolute slip of a girl, weighing at most ninety pounds, she nonetheless held the old lawyer in a firm grip.

  “Are you all right, Mr. Frost?” she asked, a look of concern in her large green eyes.

  “Hailey! How are you? Yes, I’m fine,” Frost said. “These damned ruts in the curb. I know they’re for the handicapped, but my guess is they create more cripples than they help.”

  The young woman smiled, reversed her dance bag of rehearsal gear from left shoulder to right, and put her arm in Frost’s.

  “You’re not heading to the theatre, are you?” she asked.

  “Well, yes I am. We’ve got a directors’ meeting today and we’re also supposed to see a rehearsal of Chávez Concerto.”

  “Oh, yes, I forgot that was today,” the girl said.

  “You’re not in it?” Frost asked.

  “No, thank God,” Coles said, realizing too late that she was being indiscreet, especially to the Chairman of the Board of NatBallet (as it had been called for short ever since its founding in 1970).

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, Mr. Frost, I shouldn’t be telling tales out of school, but I don’t think rehearsals are going too well. The music’s awfully difficult, and Clifton’s playing cat-and-mouse with Veronica and Laura.”

  The young dancer was referring to Veronica Maywood, the reigning star of NatBallet since its founding, and her recent and formidable rival, Laura Russell. And to Clifton Holt, the Company’s Artistic Director and principal choreographer.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Frost said.

  “But don’t worry. We artists are very temperamental, but we always get the show on stage.” Hailey Coles squeezed Frost’s arm as she spoke. Frost looked approvingly at his eighteen-year-old companion as they approached the Zacklin Theatre.

  “I’ve got to run, Mr. Frost. I’m late for rehearsal. I hope you enjoy the new ballet.”

  “Thank you, Hailey,” Frost replied. “And thank you for keeping me upright on Fifth Avenue.”

  The girl laughed, dashed off toward the stage door, and waved back at Frost. He entered the theatre, now even more content than he had been walking down Fifth Avenue in the spring sunshine.

  Reuben Frost groped his way down the darkened aisle of the Zacklin Theatre and took his seat in row L. From long experience he knew that this row was far enough back to permit him to see both the choreographic patterns formed on stage and the dancers’ feet—exquisite or clumsy—as they performed.

  Frost had warm feelings about both the Zacklin and NatBallet. His wife, Cynthia, a distinguished star of American Ballet Theatre in the 1940s and ’50s, had been one of the founders of the Company. Her title had been simply “ballet mistress,” but she had been more than that—one of the subversives who had encouraged others to leave American Ballet Theatre, the New York City Ballet and other companies to join the slate-clean, brand-new NatBallet; one of the group who had defined the Company’s shape and purpose; and, together with her husband, one of the moneygrubbers who had amassed the considerable funding needed to start NatBallet from absolute scratch.

  Frost had always been supportive of his wife’s artistic efforts, onstage and off. He had met her on a double date in 1940 when he was a hardworking young Chase & Ward associate and she a young ballerina starting to attract the critical acclaim that was to increase steadily until her retirement from dancing, in 1956. Married at the end of World War II, after as stable a courtship as the War had permitted, the Frosts had, over forty years, become (if possible) steadily more devoted one to the other, notwithstanding the enormous statistical increase in divorce in the very circles in New York City in which they traveled.

  Frost had been drawn into the orbit of NatBallet affairs gradually. He had come to love the ballet through his wife’s determined efforts. With Cynthia beside him in the audience or before him on stage, his eyes had been opened to the beauties, the technical secrets and—yes—the tricks of the dance. As his own interest grew and became more sophisticated, he had been gratified to see the public’s interest in dance expand as well. Never a sports fan, he took considerable satisfaction from the fact that the total American audience for professional dance events now exceeded the combined live audience for all professional sports, notwithstanding the Refrigerator, Dr. J. and the rest of the country’s overpaid athletes.

  Frost’s interest in NatBallet had grown avuncular as Cynthia introduced him to more and more of the members of the Company. The older ones, who had taken a considerable professional risk in leaving established companies to join the new, untested (and precariously funded) NatBallet, were known as the “domestic defectors,” a title the press derived from the Western flights of Nureyev and other Russian dancers and teachers fleeing the artistic treadmills of the Kirov and the Bolshoi.

  Finally Reuben Frost’s attachment to NatBallet had become downright paternal as Cynthia drew him into even closer contact with the Company and its affairs. (Not that putting the bite on his friends and colleagues in the corporate and legal communities had been exactly passive. Anything but. Frost had called in intangible chits, twisted arms and in general performed the gentle extortion that passes in polite New York society under the name “fund-raising.”)

  It was largely through Frost’s efforts, and those of an old investment-banking client and colleague, William Burbank, that NatBallet now had its own theatrical home. Three years or more had been needed to marry to
gether the elements required to erect the Zacklin Theatre: straight-out commercial greed (Everett Zacklin’s desire to erect an enormous office and cooperative-apartment complex on West Fifty-third Street), artistic Lebensraum (the desire of the management of NatBallet for a larger stage, more seats and expanded space for rehearsals), civic do-goodism (the desire of the City Planning Commission, when selling its soul to the Great God Bulk, to command a price for it), and the amiable pragmatism of the City’s Mayor (eager to be both friend of the City’s real estate lobby and patron of the arts, a straddling act he was able to perform by encouraging the Zacklin colossus).

  A complex package of tax abatements, tax-exempt bonds, zoning variances, landmark waivers, Federal and state development grants, and sweetheart mortgages from the City’s leading banks had all been necessary to launch the Zacklin project. Not to mention the enthusiasm of one of the burgeoning investment-banking firms—enthusiasm enhanced after a lunch of the senior partners with the Mayor—for occupying most of Zacklin’s commercial floor space, and the seemingly insatiable desire of the possessors of flight capital or hit-record royalties for the deluxe duplex—or triplex or quadruplex—apartments that Zacklin had to offer atop his multi-use edifice.

  As far as Frost was concerned, the important rabbit that emerged from the builder’s capacious hat was the theatre, the construction of which was a condition to the zoning variances Zacklin needed. Zacklin had originally resisted the grandiose plans Clifton Holt had devised, aided and abetted by both Cynthia and (as his enthusiasm grew) Reuben Frost. Then Reuben, shrewdly sensing the solution after a dinner with Zacklin and his wife, Rhoda, suggested naming the theatre the Zacklin. (Frost had in fact been revolted by the idea, but Mrs. Zacklin had thought it just fine and persuaded her husband to accede to the physical, acoustic, artistic and aesthetic wishes of Clifton Holt in designing the new theatre—the new Zacklin Theatre. Frost had suppressed his reservations and maintained a longer perspective on the whole matter. It was clear to him that Holt’s reputation would continue to grow. He had already received the Handel Medallion, the City’s highest award for cultural achievement, and it seemed only a question of time before he became one of the “honorees” (hateful word) at the Kennedy Center in Washington. Coupled with the four Oscars that the choreographer had already won for motion-picture direction, it seemed obvious to Frost that this heap of honors would fuel a movement to rename the Zacklin Theatre after Holt—possibly at a very public ceremony at which Rhoda Zacklin would preside over the change.)

  All the tenants in both the commercial and residential space professed to be pleased with Everett Zacklin’s development. There had been some minor rumblings from the apartment owners, whose chandelier-lined entryway stood beside the alley leading to the stage door. This minority felt that the ragtag assemblage of dancers in rehearsal clothes often seen emerging from the theatre was undignified; but other apartment owners thought just the opposite, and liked the idea of their proximity to NatBallet’s glamour and artistic prestige.

  Those at NatBallet were pleased, too. Dreams of clean, well-lighted studios, air-conditioned dressing rooms, storage space for scenery, a stage floor that all dancers who used it pronounced the best in America, and wing space that permitted dignified—and safe—stage exits were all realized. (No more need for stagehands to grab a male dancer in mid-flight as he leaped into a grand jeté from the stage into nonexistent landing space in the wings; no more forty-minute intermissions while the simplest scenic drops were trundled back and forth from temporary quarters across the street.)

  Reuben Frost’s part in the Zacklin negotiations had been the culmination of his legal career, and had helped allay his reservations about retiring. Under the inexorable rules at Chase & Ward, he had been required to retire as the firm’s Executive Partner in 1978 and to retire altogether as a partner in 1982. He was, of course, still “of counsel” to the firm—a quite luxurious title, in actuality; while it did not permit him to share in the firm’s considerable profits, it did allow him to have an office, to carry on legal work for those who still called for his personal services, to keep a secretary, and to get assistance when necessary from the firm’s pool of bright young associate lawyers.

  The Zacklin negotiations had enabled Frost to remain active, giving him the supportive feeling that he was still capable of performing well as a lawyer. They involved just what he liked: complex financial arrangements, the chance to draft difficult legal documents in clear and straightforward language, the opportunity to use to the fullest the negotiating skills developed over almost a half-century of practice.

  The directors of NatBallet, in part in recognition of his work in procuring the Zacklin Theatre and in part knowing a good and available commodity when they saw it, had prevailed upon Reuben to become Chairman of the Board. It was another welcome affirmation of his usefulness, and his wife, aware of his occasional sadness at being retired and growing old, urged him to take the job.

  Normally the Theatre and the rehearsal studios were dark on Monday—the Company performed on a Tuesday-through-Sunday week—but Holt, ever the demanding taskmaster, had insisted on extra rehearsals for his new work, set to the music of César Chávez’ Piano Concerto. Frost had reluctantly agreed to Holt’s request, though knowing painfully well the damage this would do to the Company’s budget (and perhaps to the rehearsals necessary to sustain other ballets already in the repertory); but Holt, as NatBallet’s Artistic Director, had final say in such matters, subject only to restraint from the Board if his proposed actions threatened the Company with insolvency. The stage rehearsal of the second movement of Chávez Concerto had been scheduled as a prelude to the Board meeting—or perhaps as a peace offering for the strain rehearsing the work had placed on the Company’s budget.

  While he waited, Frost looked around the semidarkened theatre, still feeling a slight sense of wonder that it had ever been built. The interior was not entirely to his liking; the red velvet plush was, he thought, reminiscent of faded and tacky movie palaces of the ’20s; but then, so was the principal auditorium of the Kennedy Center in Washington. Everything else about the theatre was fine—excellent acoustics, clear sightlines from any location and a 3,500-seat capacity that accommodated NatBallet’s growing audience.

  Frost’s reverie was broken by the arrival of Andrea Turnbull, one of his fellow directors and a perpetual trial to him. Turnbull, a wealthy widow from Syracuse, had moved to New York City two years earlier, apparently with the intention of making a name for herself within the City’s artistic establishment. Her bountiful donations—two large annual contributions that the Company hoped would become a habit and the generous underwriting of two new productions (Chávez Concerto being one of them)—had easily won her a place on NatBallet’s Board.

  But while her neat, large checks were attractive, Andrea Turnbull was not. Frost, if the truth were known, found her just this side of repulsive. She was overweight, with straggly brown hair and clothes that looked as if they had been purchased in a thrift shop. While other wealthy women of her age—Frost guessed her to be roughly fifty-five—were often obsessed with face-lifts and the latest treatment designed to smooth out wrinkles, Andrea Turnbull could not even be bothered to have the simple electrolysis that would have removed the slight but noticeable mustache above her upper lip.

  Not much was known about Mrs. Turnbull except that her husband had left her a substantial fortune, earned in a profitable farm-equipment and automobile dealership in Syracuse, augmented by shrewd plunges in the stock market. As far as was known, she had no friends, or at least any who would publicly acknowledge their friendship. The result was a fanatical devotion to NatBallet and a seemingly endless amount of time to meddle in its affairs. Unlike the other directors, who deferred almost without question to Clifton Holt’s artistic judgments, she was constantly giving Holt advice on all subjects—what ballets to have in the repertory, what dancers to feature and promote, even what the design of the Company’s program should look like.
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br />   Holt was not a notably patient man, and he had more than once caused Mrs. Turnbull to threaten to snap her checkbook shut. But each time Frost, as a reluctant but effective peacemaker, had resolved the conflict. He had grown battle-weary in the process and now groaned inwardly as the woman approached; he knew from the expression on her face that a new storm was brewing.

  “Reuben, thank God I’ve caught you here alone. I must talk to you,” she said as she pushed in front of Frost, making clear that she wanted to sit next to him.

  “Fine, Andrea What is it this time?” Frost asked, trying to keep a tone of resignation out of his voice.

  “Did you see Paganini Variations Friday night?”

  “No, we weren’t here on Friday.”

  “Disgraceful! Clifton let that Cassidy boy dance the lead. He’s not ready for a part like that. He should be learning basics in the corps, not attempting lead roles for which he is not suited.”

  Paganini Variations, one of Clifton Holt’s earliest works, had become the “signature” ballet of the Company. Universally praised by NatBallet’s followers—and grudgingly admired even by those who were normally critical of the Company and Holt as a choreographer—its performances were often used by Holt to signal to the public which dancers were then in favor. Veronica Maywood had begun dancing the major female role when she had been promoted to principal dancer twelve years before. She was considered the authoritative interpreter of the part, though she had had a number of partners in the ballet, most recently Aaron Cassidy, a strikingly handsome twenty-year-old who was steadily advancing to the top ranks of the Company—advancement that was well deserved in the opinion of most, though apparently not in Andrea Turnbull’s.

  “The role calls for a noble prince, Reuben,” Turnbull went on, pressing her case. “Cassidy is a colt and dances like a colt. He’s clumsy and awkward, and I—”