Baby Doll Games Read Free Page A

and Elaine Albee had begun taking down preliminary statements. Most of the audience was gone, no very young children in view and only ten or twelve adults and adolescents.
Her attention was suddenly snagged by a bright orange-and-yellow ascot worn by one of those adults, a tall and softly corpulent figure with hooded eyes and a sheepish expression on his familiar face.
The last person Lieutenant Sigrid Harald expected to find at a homicide scene was the man with whom she shared an apartment, and she had to stop and rethink the probabilities raised by finding him here in this run-down theater. Ever since their first meeting back in early spring, Roman Tramegra had pestered her for background and “color” so that he could write an authentic-sounding thriller. For one perplexed moment, Sigrid wondered if he’d decided to gather information on his own and if so, how he’d arrived on the scene before she had.
Almost immediately, however, she recalled that near the end of the summer he d occasionally spoken of writing a scenario for a semiprofessional dance troupe that had recently won some sort of grant. Since Tramegra supplemented his income from a small family trust with various oddball writing chores, she hadn t paid too much attention to his chatter. She now remembered thinking that he seemed disappointed when, in answer to his inquiry yesterday, she’d told him that she’d be working all weekend.
Sigrid again scanned the mimeographed program Officer Papaky had handed her when she first arrived and read that this afternoon’s performance was the premiere of a dance commissioned by the 8th-AV-8 Dance Company with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Music was composed by a Sergio Avril; the dances were scripted by Roman Tramegra and choreographed by Emmy Mion.
Accepting the inevitable, Sigrid stepped down from the stage and walked over to her friend, who stood up as she approached.
“My dear, dear Sigrid! I’m so grateful you're in charge of this horrid ordeal.” Roman Tramegra possessed an extraordinarily deep bass voice but he usually spoke in italics with an accent that was half Midwest and half Piccadilly Circus. His flashy neck scarf was reined in by an English squire’s discreet brown corduroy jacket, complete with leather arm patches, and softly pleated brown wool slacks which helped disguise his girth. The impression he gave was not of obesity so much as the boneless softness of an overindulged Persian cat.
As self-centered as a cat, too, but Sigrid knew he also possessed a feline curiosity that was as all-inclusive as it was instinctive. Surely Roman would have observed these people quite closely.
Yet not closely enough. To her quietly blunt, “Who was the jack-o’-lantern dancer, Roman?” he gave a helpless shrug. “My dear, I simply cannot say. It could have been any of them.”
She motioned for him to sit and propped her foot on the wooden pew in front of him. “So this is where you’ve been spending so much time lately.”
“A poor place, but our own,” he intoned sonorously, carefully smoothing long strands of side hair up over the top of his bare head. As Sigrid expected, Roman had acquired the history of this three-story brick building on lower Eighth Avenue and was predictably pleased to instruct her.
“Not that I know every little peccadillo,” he cautioned, “but I believe it began life as a neighborhood movie house, then a nightclub devoted to sexual arousal, a disco, and God knows what else before the troupe organized as the 8th-AV-8 and scraped together enough money for a lease. My dear, you can t believe what they ask for a place like this! As you see, the old plush movie seats must have been ripped out years ago.”
“And the pews?”
“Left over from its days as The First Assembly of God Almighty,” sniffed Roman, who was high Episcopalian.
Again Sigrid turned her steady gaze upon the small theater which, even with the pews packed, would barely