Baby Doll Games by Margaret Maron Read Free Book Online

something he’d never actually given much thought to before. “Emmy didn’t stew about things out loud, she’d just go away inside her head somewhere until she got it all worked out in her mind. And you know what?” Realization dawned in his voice. “She did have something on her mind today! Something more than-”
He stopped abruptly and began again. “I put it down to the performance, but it couldn’t have been that because she never worried about performing; yet she didn’t hear half what I said about Ginger-I guess that’s why I got so uptight,”
“Would you say her preoccupation stemmed from the professional side of her life or something more personal?” Eric Kee’s black hair gleamed with dull blue lights as his head moved almost imperceptibly. “Sorry, Lieutenant. I just don’t know. Whatever it was, Emmy wouldn’t talk about it until she had it straight in her own mind what she was going to do.”
Too bad, thought Sigrid. “Did you see her again after that?”
“She was standing at the top of the stairs just before we went on. She blew me a kiss and told us to break a leg, but I was still too ticked off to answer. 0 The stone face was back again.
"After the first dance, the five of you exited stage left. Where did you go from there?”
“Straight up those steps to the men's dressing room. Win was right behind me. I didn't feel like talking and I went on down the hall to the bathroom and put my head under the spigot. Then I remembered that Td left my goblin hood here in the office so after I toweled off, I came downstairs and got it.”
Using Bernie ’s sketchy floor plans, Sigrid could easily follow Kee’s narrative. The rear wall of the stage rose the full two stories to leave a backstage area that was basically the same both upstairs and down, from the wall which formed one side of the wide hall to the row of rooms along the opposite side.
The men s dressing room was at the head of the spiral iron staircase, directly above the prop-storage room. Two doors down was another three-cubicle, two-basin rest room, identical to the one next to the office below. At the far end of the hall, the women s dressing room lay above the comer business office. The wide staircase that connected the floors at that comer must have made it convenient for Emmy Mion to run back and forth in her varied roles of dancer, choreographer, business director, and teacher.
Roman Tramegra had told Sigrid that the second dance was timed to run exactly six minutes; he’d estimated that the jack-o’-lantern had joined Emmy Mion some three or four minutes into her dance and had probably been onstage less than two minutes total, an estimation which agreed with Ginger Judson s account.
How long did it take, Sigrid wondered, to splash water over one’s head, towel off, come downstairs, and locate a masked hood? Two minutes? Three?
“Was anyone here in the office when you came in?”
“No.”
“Did you open any of the desk drawers?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Just answer the lieutenants questions,” rasped Bernie. “No, I did not snoop through any drawers,” said Kee with exaggerated patience.
“What did you do after you found the hood?” Sigrid asked.
“Put it on, of course, and went out to wait in the wing. It was almost time for our cue. I got there just as Emmy was following that bastard up on the scaffold.”
“Was there anyone else in the wing when you arrived?” Eric Kee continued to sit in his yoga position, but as the questions came down to Emmy Mion’s last few minutes, the police officers saw his open hands clench into white-knuckled fists on his brawny thighs.
“I’ve been trying to remember, but I can’t be sure. You know the way maskers are hung?”
Sigrid frowned at the sketch and Bernie Peters leaned over her shoulder to point out the squiggly lines that represented the angled curtains, two on each side of the stage, which kept the audience from seeing into the wings.
“The