Dance of Death

by Helen McCloy

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

When a prominent New York socialite is murdered by means of an overdose of medication, it takes Dr Basil Willing, a psychiatrist attached to the police department, to solve the case.

But mysterious accidents start occurring during his investigation, and Willing must look deeper to uncover the motive and prevent the murderer from striking again ...

Release date: October 14, 2013

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

KATHERINE JOCELYN,

slim, dark-eyed debutante, stepdaughter of Mrs. Gerald Jocelyn, who has spent her life preparing for her debut—looking out for her complexion and
figure, learning just enough French, dancing, and music to make her civilized without the taint of intellect.

RHODA JOCELYN,

Katherine’s attractive, young-looking, beautifully dressed stepmother with a low, dulcet voice and crisp brown hair flecked with gray, whose general
appearance of kindliness is spoiled when her face is turned and the obstinate line of her morbid mouth and shapeless lips is seen.

ANN JOCELYN CLAUDE,

gray-eyed, hollow-cheeked niece of Edgar Jocelyn, now secretary to Rhoda Jocelyn (Ann’s mother had been a Jocelyn but was disowned when she married
against the family’s wishes).

EDGAR JOCELYN,

Katherine Jocelyn’s tall, gray-haired uncle, her nearest relative, who has the pale Jocelyn eyes under black brows.

LUIS PASQUALE,

a South-American artist who looks like a middle-aged faun who has forsaken Arcady for air-conditioned drawing-rooms, and has acquired a gloss and paunch in
the process.

MRS. JOWETT,

the popular social secretary for coming-out parties. She doesn’t look clever but seems capable, and reminds one of the motherly type of woman who
inhabits sunny farm kitchens and hands out slices of freshly baked bread.

NICHOLAS DANINE,

the fantastically rich director of a German explosives company. He is of either Russian or Prussian descent but looks and talks like an Englishman.

PHILIP LEACH,

writer of a gossip column under the name of Lowell Cabot. He spent some time in Europe and returned to America on the same boat as the Jocelyns.

DR. BASIL WILLING,

psychiatrist attached to the district attorney’s office, has a thin-skinned temperament, is unusually sympathetic and a living proof that a doctor to
the mad must be slightly mad himself to understand his patients.

INSPECTOR FOYLE,

a small, compact, resilient man who regards the entire universe with the alert skepticism of a wire-haired terrier.

Grotesque

DR. BASIL WILLING, psychiatrist attached to the district attorney’s office, lived in an antiquated
house at the unfashionable end of Park Avenue, below Grand Central. After dinner, next evening, he was settled in the living room with General Archer, the Police Commissioner.

Firelight made the glass doors of the bookcases glitter, and brought a faint blush to the white paneling. Juniper, a soft-spoken Baltimore negro, who had been with Basil Willing since Johns
Hopkins days, served the Commissioner with coffee and brandy, murmuring hospitably, “He’p yese’f, suh, he’p yese’f!”

When he had gone, there was no sound but the whispering of the fire and the distant hooting of motor horns. General Archer twirled his big, bell-shaped glass, frowned, and continued an argument
that had flared up at dinner.

“I don’t know what you mean—there’s no place for psychology in detection. Police work deals with physical facts—nasty facts like dried bloodstains, greasy
fingerprints, and microscopic bits of dirt under a dead man’s nails. In half our murder cases we have no way of identifying the body at the beginning. It isn’t like detective stories
where a man gets murdered in his own library while there are a dozen convenient suspects in the house. When we start out, we hardly even know who anybody is—murderer, suspects, or victim. We
want a biologist or a chemist on the trail—not a psychologist . . . Why, just this morning— Did the evening papers have anything about a girl’s body found in the snow on 78th
Street?”

Deliberately, Basil rose and scanned the newspaper on the table. Tall and lean, he moved at a measured pace that was the antithesis of “hustle.” His mother had been Russian and that
accounted for many things—among them his thin-skinned temperament, more sympathetic, irritable and intuitive than that of races on whom the shell of civilization has had time to harden. He
was a living proof of the theory that a successful doctor to the mad must be slightly mad himself in order to understand his patients.

“Let me see . . .” Like most people who speak several other languages, his English was distinct and unslurred. “Three cases of death from exposure last night. An unemployed
man. A street walker. And the unidentified body of a girl. No details.”

“That’s the one. The girl. Only she didn’t die from exposure. We kept the details from the papers purposely.” Archer finished his brandy. “We have absolutely no
clue to her identity and I ask you what good psychology—”

“How did she die?”

Archer was lighting one of Basil’s cigarettes. He inhaled deeply before he answered, “Heat stroke.”

“But—that’s impossible!”

“That’s the trouble with police work. The impossible is always happening. The body was found about six this morning by men shoveling snow. Remember how cold it was? The body was
lying under the snow and there were no footprints, so it must have been there some time. But the men swear it was hot when they found it. Not just warm, but hot as a fever patient. By the time the
Precinct men got there it was still warm. They call it the ‘Red Hot Momma Case.’ ”

“They would!”

“Inspector Foyle got an assistant medical examiner to do an autopsy at once. Just before I left the office this evening, Foyle brought me a preliminary report. A lot of technical gibberish
about being unable to assign the exact cause of death, and then he says: ‘the condition of the internal organs, especially the lungs, heart and liver, strikingly resembles that in cases
of death from heat stroke.’ ” Archer snorted. “Heat stroke! And it was nine above zero last night! The thing’s grotesque!”

“I’m not so sure.” Basil picked up the poker unhurriedly and frowned at the logs as he pushed them apart. “You say it was lying under the snow? A deep snowdrift
conserves heat. Ice forms a thinner layer than usual on a lake protected by snow, because the snow keeps the water warm. Some Eskimos build shelters of snow to keep warm. If this dead body were
unusually hot to start with the snow might delay its cooling.”

“But how could it get unusually hot to start with?” demanded Archer. “People can’t get heat stroke on a winter night!”

“I don’t suppose your doctor meant to say that the girl died of heat stroke. He was just using the term to describe her condition. What about chemical analysis?”

“No results so far.” Archer sighed. “The laboratory fellows can always tell you what a thing isn’t. But they can’t always tell you what it is.”

“Then you’ll have to fall back on psychology.”

“But psychology couldn’t possibly help when we don’t even know who the girl is! That’s the point.”

“Are there no clues at all?”

“Precious few. She was about twenty, the doctors say, and a virgin. Rather unusual face—gray eyes, dark hair and lashes. No one fitting her description is listed at the Missing
Persons Bureau. Her fingerprints are not on file. Her teeth have never been filled. Her nails are absolutely clean, except for a trace of soap—it might be any soap. Her clothes are poor
quality—the sort of thing that’s turned out by the gross. Mass production is the modern detective’s biggest handicap. Her coat is poor stuff, too, but it has a French
label—Bazar something or other. No laundry marks. It’s a pity so many police reporters have told the world we keep a file of 6,000 laundry marks.”

“No signs of violence?”

“None, except two marks made after death—the shovel of the man who found her struck the body in digging.”

Basil laid down the poker gently. “I’d like to talk with the fellow who did the autopsy.”

Archer’s eyes twinkled in the firelight. “I thought you told me your official duties consisted in answering just one question: ‘Say, doc, is this guy nuts?’
”

Basil smiled. “Perhaps I might see this man—unofficially.”

“All right. But remember—one good fingerprint is worth all the psychology in the world!”

“Every criminal leaves psychic fingerprints.” Basil was still smiling. “And he can’t wear gloves to hide them.”

“You’re incurable!” Archer rose to go. At the door he paused. “One thing I forgot to mention—if you’re really interested. When the medical examiner washed off
the girl’s make-up he found the face underneath stained yellow. Not sun tan, but a canary yellow. Odd, isn’t it?”

Nude

“DR. WILLING? From the district attorney’s office? The Commissioner phoned you’d be here this morning. My
name’s Dalton, assistant medical examiner. I did the autopsy.” The brisk, business-like young doctor was chewing gum. He trotted down a corridor, and Basil ambled after him. The room
they entered was bare and chill, smelling of disinfectant. “No. 17, Sam!” called Dr. Dalton.

“O.K.,” responded the attendant.

“All there but the viscera and the brain.” Dalton’s jaws moved rhythmically.

The first thing Basil noticed was the extreme thinness of the nude girl. The dead face was free of make-up, and a vivid yellow stain covered it as far as the throat, ending in an irregular line.
The rest of the skin was a warm ivory. The vacant eyes were gray, pale in contrast to feathery black lashes, and black brows plucked to a diagonal line like the brows of a Javanese doll. Muslin
bands were about the abdomen where incisions had been made for the autopsy.

Basil began to analyze the face according to the method originated by Bertillon, through which a French policeman learns to recognize a face he has never seen from a spoken description:
“General contour—oval. Profile— rectilinear. Nose—root depth, short; base, horizontal; height, projection, and size, small; tip, pointed; nostrils, distended; partition,
well-defined . . .”

Suddenly, he paused. In life, this face had been beautiful. The dull, gray eyes had been shining. The dry, parted lips had curved deliciously when they smiled. Why was he so sure? Slowly, there
rose in his mind a conviction that he had seen this face before. But where? The girl was too young to be anyone he had known long ago. Yet if he had met her recently, why couldn’t he recall
her?

He lifted one of the limp hands. Long-fingered, narrow at the knuckles, soft and well-kept. Cuticle, unbroken. Nails, oval. Not the hand of a woman who did her own washing. Yet there were no
laundry marks.

“Say,” broke in Sam, “couldn’t that there yeller stain be a kinda disguise-like?”

Dalton shook his head. “It’s internal. The conjunctivae are yellow and all the internal secretions. At first I thought it might be jaundice. But some of the other symptoms
didn’t fit. All the signs of heat stroke were there—congestion and edema of the lungs, scattered ecchymoses in various organs, separation of liver lobules, renal tubular degeneration,
and marked fragmentation of the heart muscle.”

“Painful,” said Basil. He studied the jaws. “No fillings. No caries. Only the rich care for their teeth like that.”

“But her clothes were cheap!” protested Dalton.

“That’s just the point. Are they still here?”

“Yes, sir,” said Sam. “Shall I get ’em?”

“Please.”

Basil studied the shabby, black dress with touches of green at neck and wrists, the high-heeled papery shoes, and the flimsy rayon underthings. They were not in bad taste, but they were all
machine-made and shoddy.

“She doesn’t look like a girl who would dress like that.” He turned to the coat—a coarse, black cloth with no fur. In the lining was a label: Bazar de
l’Hôtel de Ville. “That’s the most inexpensive department store in Paris,” he remarked. “I wish I could see your full report.”

Dr. Dalton shifted his gum to the other cheek. “I’ll send you a carbon if you like.”

“Thanks. I suppose you’re testing the viscera for poison?”

“Not me. Lambert, the city toxicologist, has that job.”

Basil looked up. “Not ‘Piggy’ Lambert?”

“They call him ‘Piggy.’ Know him?”

“Yes—if he’s the ‘Piggy’ I mean. Where’s his lab?”

“Bellevue.”

Outside, a pale sun cast light without heat on snow piled two feet high in the gutters. Basil breasted the north wind as he walked the short distance from the mortuary to the hospital. He had
not come in contact with the city toxicologist before. His work for the district attorney consisted chiefly in testing the sanity of accused men and the reliability of witnesses. But he recalled
vaguely having seen the name “Dr. Lambert” in newspaper accounts of murder cases. Could it be the “Piggy” Lambert he had known at Johns Hopkins? Years of study in Paris and
Vienna had left Basil out of touch with friends of student days.

“I’m from the district attorney’s office. Where can I find Dr. Lambert?”

“Fourth floor.”

The laboratory wasn’t very large or very new. The walls were splashed with acid. Chairs and tables were stained and scarred. The only clean, bright things here were the microscopes,
scales, separators, and other instruments.

Just then a man at the other end of the laboratory looked up. “Basil Willing! Well, I’ll be—”

It was Piggy, all right, looking more like a pink and white hog than ever. Lambert tipped a volume off a kitchen chair onto the floor, and pushed the chair toward Basil.

“I read that blasted book of yours,” he informed Basil. “You might just as well be an astrologist or a snake doctor. How long were you in Vienna? Six weeks?”

“I was in Paris, London, and Vienna nearly eight years.”

“Expatriate, eh? Well, let me tell you the Freudian theory is absolutely repudiated by the medical profession in this country! And don’t smoke! Just like a psychologist to pull out
matches the minute he gets in a lab!”

“Still the same old Piggy with the same old charm of manner!” Basil put away his cigarette case. “Not so very long ago the medical profession was ‘repudiating’ the
germ theory.”

“That’s different!”

“Oh, yeah?” returned Basil, proving that he was not an expatriate. “I didn’t come in here to talk psychology. I came to get information about one of your
cases.”

“Which one?”

“Girl whose body was found in the snow—still warm.”

“Oh, the ‘Red Hot Momma Case.’ What do you want to know?”

“Cause of death.”

“Frankly, I haven’t the remotest idea—yet.” Lambert thumbed rapidly through a pile of typewritten reports on the table. “Most poisoners are so conservative. They
stick to the old stand-bys—arsenic, morphine, strychnine, cyanide, or hyoscine. So we get in a rut, and when anything new comes along we’re stumped. Here’s a copy of
Dalton’s report on the autopsy. What do you make of it?”

Basil glanced at the first page and sighed. “Autopsy reports always remind me of the doctor who said: “What a beautiful ulcer!” Just listen: ‘Cut section
surface of left lung purplish red . . . kidney surface smooth, medium reddish brown . . . liver grass green . . . spleen a rich, dark purple . . . bile, pale, golden yellow . . .’ Who
would ever suspect Dalton of such esthetic enthusiasm? . . . Could it be some liver poison? Chloroform? Or phosphorus?”

“I thought of that. But some things—like the marked destruction of blood cells—aren’t in the picture. The anemia, thinness and enlargement of the spleen rather suggest
chronic malaria. But though malaria makes the skin dark and sallow, I never heard of it turning the face canary yellow and leaving the rest of the body a normal color.”

“And though malaria causes high fever it could scarcely account for the extraordinary heat of the body after death,” added Basil.

“Nothing I can think of offhand would account for that!” admitted Lambert. “Heat stroke in December! It’s just screwy!”

Basil was looking at a photograph of the dead girl clipped to the report. “It’s queer, but I’ve a hunch I’ve seen this girl somewhere before.”

Lambert stared. “That,” he said, “is damned queer. Because I have the same hunch myself. She makes me think of surf-riding, and I don’t know why. I haven’t been to
the seashore for years.”

During his solitary dinner, Basil’s thoughts turned to the dead girl’s face, with its wide, gray eyes and long, black lashes. As a rule, he could climb through the
jungle of associated ideas with the agility of a monkey until he traced a thought or memory to its lair. But tonight he was tired. The memory of that tantalizing face seemed always just ahead of
him. Then, when he pounced, it slid out of his mental grasp, as if snatched away by a physical force with a will of its own opposed to his. Once again he realized that the unconscious mind is not a
mere word or convention, but something living and human.

After dinner, Basil went into the living room and sat down in a wing chair. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate. At last the word magazine floated into his mind. He saw dozens
of magazines every week. Mostly scientific journals that had little to do with girls. Or surf riding. “Juniper! Where is that old magazine you were reading Sunday? The one with the girl
riding a surf board on the cover?”

Juniper stared. “Why, it’s in the kitchen, suh.”

It was the May number of a sensational fiction magazine. The surf-rider wore a scarlet bathing suit and she was as blonde as a daffodil. She did not resemble the dead girl in any way.

Basil glanced at the illustrations inside. Then the advertisements. Why should he connect the dead girl’s face with this magazine? He turned it over and looked at the advertisement on the
back cover. There she was—a photograph in colors showing her just as he had imagined her in life. The wide, gray eyes—black-lashed. The diagonal black brows. The hollow cheeks. The
smooth waves of dark hair. And the skin a warm ivory with no hint of a yellow stain.

Of course it was difficult to be sure. He was comparing a dead face with the photograph of a living one. But the picture showed her face at three-quarters—the best angle for
identification.

Like all women in advertisements, she was inhumanly sleek and slim. She had been photographed in evening dress—a deep, cream color that seemed to be satin. Her only ornament was a long
rope of pearls—fabulous had they been real. But of course they couldn’t be real—in an advertisement.

Poor girl! What a rotten life it must have been— selling her face and figure and seeing them blazoned on every magazine and billboard. But doubtless she had no choice. . . . At last, Basil
read the words printed below the picture:

Miss Catharine Jocelyn, lovely debutante daughter of Mrs. Gerald Jocelyn of New York and Paris, whose coming-out party this winter promises to be the most brilliant
event of the season. Miss Jocelyn—‘Kitty’ to her intimates—is famous for her svelte and willowy figure. Read what she has to say about SVELTIS:

I like SVELTIS because it’s ABSOLUTELY SAFE. Now I’ve begun to reduce the SVELTIS WAY, I can cat all the chocolates and . . .