I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [163]
Subsequent investigation confirmed that the bodies in the North Carolina fire pit were Annette, her three children, and Lobelia. Brad Jr. and Leo had disappeared. Brad Jr. was the prime suspect in the murders.
I followed every news development avidly. The authorities believed that the two women and the three children had been bludgeoned. Evidence showed that one of the women had locked herself in the bathroom and was trying to open the window when the door was smashed. All over the bathroom were bloody fingerprints. Lobelia’s.
Maybe Brad Jr. had been kidnapped, been killed, and his body left somewhere else. And what about the dog? What happened to Leo?
Carrie and I searched for an answer. Could this have been some monstrous revenge for Brad Jr.’s actions as a spy in Yugoslavia or Africa? Was Brad Jr. forced to watch the death of his family and then taken off to be killed and buried?
The police believed that the murders had taken place Monday, March 1, 1976. We would have been staying at their home. Had Carrie and I been with them, would we have added our blood to the house? Would we have been in the fire pit? Or would our presence somehow have deflected or deferred the killings?
Investigators reported that Brad Jr.’s credit card had been used at a North Carolina store on March 2. There was a story of a waitress at a diner describing a man “acting strange and nervous.” After an altercation with another patron in the diner, he had used Brad Bishop’s credit card to pay the bill, and fled. The waitress exclaimed, when shown a picture of Brad Jr., “That’s the man!”
I called André Eglevsky on Long Island. He had retired from performing and had started a ballet company there. For months, we were both terrified that Brad Jr. would show up on our doorstep—a fugitive, and mad. Months turned into years, and there were no new developments. The story faded from the papers but remained buzzing ominously in my brain engine.
Amazingly, no one ever came to talk to us. The police must have found the letters we had exchanged, our plans to stay with them that night. A friend of mine at the Washington Post informed me that for several years the paper had assigned some of their reporters to do nothing but try to track down Brad Bishop Jr., without success.
In the late 1970s, it was reported that a member of the State Department had gone to the restroom in a restaurant in Italy and, at the urinal, recognized a bearded Brad Bishop Jr. He stared and mumbled, “Brad? Is that you, Brad?” The man fled. “Brad, wait. Brad!”
Some twenty-three years after the murders, in the spring of 1999, Carrie viewed a news item on television. A couple who had worked with him spotted Brad Jr. at a train station in Switzerland. Their train had stopped next to another train, parked on a parallel track, and while gazing out of the window of her compartment, the woman saw, staring back at her through the other train’s window, Brad Bishop Jr. She called her husband over, “I think that’s Brad? Isn’t that Brad?” The two parties stood there, staring, their faces inches away from each other, separated only by the panes of the two train windows. As Brad Bishop’s train slowly pulled out of the station, he smirked and held both hands up—a “Don’t shoot” gesture—as if he was a bad boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar: a “You got me.”
Horror stories—the ones that raise the awful thought that no one is what they seem—forever cling to the dark shadows of the human mind. Dwelling on them, you begin to trust no one—those closest to you? yourself? Paranoia and madness threaten to crack through the earth and darken your soul. Order and civilization collapse, fly apart. In defense, a door in the brain snaps shut.
I had played and been friends with a boy who grew into manhood to slaughter his entire family.1
The Years Leading to Balanchine’s Death, Continued
By 1982, as I approached