Solitary Dancer by John Lawrence Reynolds Page A

And they make Ricky Chow.”
    The pencil stopped. “Ricky what?”
    â€œRicky Chow.” Stana held her hands side by side in front of her, palms facing the floor, and moved them up and down. “You know, bedsprings go Ricky Chow, Ricky Chow, Ricky Chow . . .”
    Donovan erupted in laughter, embarrassing Stana even more. His next few questions were interrupted by snickers and he mimicked her, muttering, “Ricky Chow, Ricky Chow,” over and over. “What’d she keep up in her bedroom, among the pottery?”
    Stana blinked. “Pottery?”
    â€œThe vases in her bedroom, up on the shelf near the ceiling. Something was screwed into the shelf on the corner and it looks like something else was fastened along the wall near it. Whatever it was, somebody pulled it out recently. Might’ve been the guy who killed her.”
    She shook her head. “I don’t dust pottery, I don’t dust ceiling. Too high.”
    Donovan rose from his chair. “Thanks for your help Mrs., uh . . .”
    Stana pronounced her last name for him, rising from her chair too. The police officers were waiting in the short hall near the apartment door.
    â€œAnything else you want to tell us?” Donovan asked her, shrugging into his topcoat.
    Stana held her hands together in front of her ample stomach and shook her head. Then, almost without thinking, she blurted, “She was not nice woman.”
    Donovan looked back at her, waiting for her to continue.
    â€œNot nice,” Stana repeated.
    â€œThat’s no reason for somebody to kill her,” Donovan said. “Just because she wasn’t the nicest person in the world, right?”
    â€œBad,” Stana tried to explain. She looked away, searching for the words a man once used to describe Heather Lorenzo as he stormed from Heather’s apartment, his words shouted in anger. “Wicked and vicious,” Stana blurted. Those were the words she had heard the man use. And they were true, Stana remembered. Heather had been wicked and vicious. When she had caught Stana on a ladder admiring the collection of pottery and the thing behind the pottery, black and shiny, she had shouted at Stana, telling her never to touch them again, the vases. “Wicked and vicious,” Stana repeated, turning to enter her kitchen again, leaving the men to find their own way out. She would make a fresh cup of tea and drink it, and then she would clean her apartment, ridding it of evidence of those men, the cruel-mouthed red-haired one and the two police officers who touched everything with their hands.
    Gregory Weiner was perhaps forty years old. He wore his chestnut hair in a heavily sprayed, perfectly coiffed pompadour at the front and trimmed square across the back of the neck. His mustache looked as though it were shaped with a scalpel. His front teeth were oversized and his cheeks were round and full, giving him the appearance of a somewhat effeminate chipmunk, but his eyes were wary and conniving. He greeted Tim Fox by rising from the chair behind the oversized parson’s table that served as a desk and extending a hand toward the black detective while his eyes scanned Fox’s suit, shirt and tie in silent approval.
    â€œThis is terrible,” Weiner said, turning his fingertips under and rubbing them against the palms of his hands. “Perhaps if I had listened to Heather . . .”
    â€œListened to her?” Tim Fox sat in the ladder-back chair facing Weiner’s desk. Behind the desk loomed a bleached oak armoire with carved pediment, the doors open, the shelves crowded with small ceramic figures, silk scarves, embroidered pillows and antique photographs in pewter frames.
    â€œShe was
frightened
,” Weiner said. “And yet she was laughing it off, as if it were a joke.” He shook his head. “I realize now, of course, that it wasn’t. She really was quite terrified of this man the other day.”
    â€œShe