“So the dance group paid you nothing?” I asked. I opened my padfolio and scribbled notes.
She sighed. “Well, Beyo owned the loft, but other than that, we all pooled whatever money came in from performances and did odd jobs on the side. But, we were a small operation, and we did what we could. So, I had no money, no assets, nothing really, and I’m looking at Facebook, people in my age group, closing on their first houses, getting married, having babies left and right... but my life was so intertwined with Ghoti, I couldn’t see where Ghoti began and I ended.”
She took a sip of the mini water bottle on the table. I stopped taking notes and watched her quiet motions. Everything with her was graceful and poised even in this environment. It always had been. She had grown up in cotillion and took ballet all the way through school. It was no wonder she chose a nontraditional lifestyle.
“Besides that,” her voice started to choke up a bit. “Beyo was a very jealous man. He was very controlling and had a dark side. He had the whole charismatic leader thing. You wanted to buy into it. And when he was good, he was good. When he was bad…”
She shuddered and stared off for a moment. “I started looking for a way out of Ghoti. I didn’t know how, so I started talking to people on Facebook, and through a friend of a friend, I met Gabriel.”
She smiled at the man next to her, who cracked the slightest lip upturn he could given the present circumstances.
“We talked for a few months,” she said. “Eventually Beyo found out, and he lost it. I don’t want to talk about what he did. But, he lost it. That was when I decided I was really going to leave. I talked Beyo into doing a national tour. We had done tours on the east coast, but we hadn’t ventured out much beyond our little corner of the country.
“So we arranged a six-week tour,” she said. “We did dates all through the midwest, and then that was when I worked on my plan. I booked a date back in Sedona, which Marvin Iakova was all over. That was something. Marvin Iakova. Geez. I thought about changing my plan just for that. But, I knew I had to quit.”
“You were going to quit the group that night?” I asked.
“I had it all set up.” She nodded. “With Gabriel in Sedona, the plan was to simply disappear. We got a hotel down by the Grand Canyon. We would spend a weekend there and then come home to Sedona forever. It would be morning by the time he realized I was missing. By the time he put all the pieces together, I would be far away enough that there would be nothing he could do.”
“You didn’t think he would send out a missing person’s report or anything?” I asked.
“I planned to send him a text, and then drop my phone into the Grand Canyon,” she said.
“Symbolic and practical,” I said.
“Exactly,” she said. “It would have gone according to plan, if Beyo hadn’t gone for a smoke break before the show. He saw Gabriel and I packing my bags into his car. He confronted us, and he figured it all out. We got into a huge fight, and he tried to grab my bags and lock them into his dressing room. He only got my knapsack, and he thought my wallet and money were all in there, so he thought I would have to go through him to get my stuff. But the only thing I had in there was a change of clothes, and well, one other thing.”
She smiled weakly and sighed. “We stopped at an antique shop on the road, and I had bought this really nice Chinese dagger. I was going to give it to Gabriel, because he’s into stuff like that. When I bought it, it was really a big deal, everyone was talking about it, and handling it. I didn’t explain to them really why I had bought it. But, everyone knew it was mine.”
“The murder weapon,” I said.
“Yeah,” she sighed. “When Beyo took the bag, it was in there, and I knew that if I went back to get the bag, Beyo would find a way to make me stay. He can be very convincing, and if he can’t find a way to persuade someone, he will find another way, like blackmail. He’s just like that.”
“Did he have anything to blackmail you with?” I asked.
“Not that I know of,” she said. “But you never know with him. He finds things, or he can even make them up. So, I decided I would just chalk it up as a loss. I thought maybe, once everyone was gone, there was a chance I could go back to the PAH and see if it was still there. I had no idea it would be used as a murder weapon. We were almost out of Sedona when we were picked up by the police. I swear, I know nothing about the murder. Beyo was a jealous man, and he had his faults, but I never thought he deserved this.”
I stopped taking notes and looked up at them. Julianna was crying now.
“Okay,” I said. “We’d have to find out who the killer really is. Do you have any idea who might want Beyo dead?”
She sniffed. “No. But there were protestors that night, and there was one lady going around throwing paint on everyone.”
“Paint?” I repeated.
She nodded. “She had buckets of green paint, and she was going around throwing it on us and yelling about covering our nakedness. That’s why the
