The Last Dance

by Ed McBain

  “Have you got a card or anything?”

  “Don’t you want to know about Althea?”

  “Sure, I do. Have you got a card? I’ll give you a call, you can teach me five songs sometime. Do you know ‘Night and Day’?”

  “Yes, I do. You should understand, however … I normally teach classical piano. To children, mostly.”

  “That’s okay, all I want is five songs.”

  “Well,” the woman said, and sighed, and opened her handbag. She fished in it for a card, found one, and handed it to Ollie. The name on the card was Helen Hobson.

  “How much do you charge?” he asked.

  “We can discuss that,” she said.

  “Maybe you can give me a flat rate for just the five songs,” he said. “Did she work nights or what?”

  His change of direction was so abrupt that Helen actually blinked.

  “You said she was home a lot,” Ollie said.

  “Oh, yes. She worked nights. At the telephone company.”

  Ollie hated the telephone company. He could easily imagine some irritated subscriber stabbing Althea Cleary in the chest half a dozen times.

  “I liked her a lot,” Helen said. “She was a very nice person.”

  “Who you used to have cappuccino with every now and then.”

  “Almost every day.”

  “But today when you went down, you found her dead.”

  “The door was open,” Helen said, nodding.

  “Standing wide open, you mean?”

  “No, just a crack. I thought this was odd. I called Althea’s name, and when I got no answer, I walked in. She was in the kitchen. On the floor there.”

  “What’d you do then?”

  “I went up to my own apartment and called the police.”

  “What time was this, Miss Hobson?”

  “A little after two. My lesson ended at two, I don’t have another one till four. So I came down to see if Althea wanted to come with me to Starbucks.”

  “How’d you come down?”

  “By the stairs. I’m only one flight up.”

  “See anybody on the way down?”

  “No one.”

  “Anybody outside her apartment?”

  “No.”

  “When did you notice the door was open?”

  “Immediately.”

  “Before you knocked or anything?”

  “I didn’t knock at all. I saw the door standing open maybe an inch or two, so I called her name, and went in.”

  “Thanks, Miss Hobson, we appreciate your help,” he said. “I’ll call you about the lessons. All I want to learn is five songs.”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  “‘Night and Day,’ and four others. So I can impress people.”

  “I’m sure they’ll be very impressed.”

  “Hey, tell me about it,” Ollie said.

  “You got this under control here?” Monoghan asked.

  “Soon as the technicians get here,” Ollie said. “What’s holding up traffic? Is the Pope in town or something?”

  “You gonna tell a Pope joke now?”

  “I only know one Pope joke,” Ollie said.

  “Maybe this lady here can teach you four more,” Monroe said. “Then you can really impress people. You can play five songs on the piano, tell five Pope jokes, and maybe five Irish jokes if there are any Irishmen in the crowd.”

  “Sounds like a good idea,” Ollie said. “You know four Pope jokes, Miss Hobson?”

  “I don’t know any Pope jokes at all,” she said.

  “I need four more Pope jokes,” Ollie said. “I’ll have to get them someplace else, I guess.”

  “Can I leave now?” she asked.

  “You want some advice?” Monroe said.

  “Sure, what’s that?” Ollie said.

  “There are lots of Irishmen on the job. I wouldn’t go telling any more Irish jokes, I was you.”

  “Gee, is that your advice?”

  “That’s our advice,” Monroe said.

  “You think telling Irish jokes might be politically incorrect, huh?”

  “It might be downright dangerous,” Monroe said.

  “Gee, I hope that’s not a threat,” Ollie said.

  “It ain’t a threat, but you can take it as one if you wish.”

  “Can I leave now?” Helen said again.

  “Cause you know,” Ollie said, “I don’t give a rat’s ass about what’s politically correct or what ain’t. All I want to do is learn my five songs and my five Pope jokes, is all I want to do, and maybe in my spare time find out who stabbed this little girl. So if you got no further advice to dispense here …”

  “Is it all right if I go?” Helen asked.

  “Go already, lady,” Monoghan said.

  “Thank you, Officers,” she said, and hurried out of the apartment.

  “What if I told you I myself was Irish?” Ollie asked.

  “I wouldn’t believe you,” Monroe said.

  “Why? Cause I ain’t drunk?”

  “That’s the kind of remark can get you in trouble,” Monoghan said, wagging his finger under Ollie’s nose.

  “I once bit off a guy’s finger, was doing that,” Ollie said, and grinned like a shark.

  “Bite this a while,” Monoghan said.

  “Good thing the piano teacher’s already gone,” Ollie said, shaking his head in dismay.

  “Who’s in charge here?” one of the technicians asked from the doorway.

  “Well look who’s here!” Ollie said.

  “Keep us advised,” Monoghan said.

  You fat bastard, he thought, but did not say.

  That Wednesday morning, at a few minutes past eleven, Arthur Brown knocked on the door to Cynthia Keating’s apartment.

  “Yes, who is it?” she asked.

  “Police,” Brown said.

  “Oh,” she said. There was a long silence. “Just a minute,” she said. They heard a latch turning, tumblers falling. The door opened a crack, held by a security chain. Cynthia peered out at them.

  “I don’t know you,” she said.

  Brown held up his shield.

  “Detective Brown,” he said. “Eighty-seventh Squad.”

  “I already spoke to the others,” she said.

  “We have a few more questions, ma’am.”

  “Is this legal?”

  “May we come in, please?”

  “Just a second,” she said, and closed the door to take off the chain. She opened it again, said, “Come in,” and preceded them into the apartment. “This better be legal,” she said.

  “Ma’am,” Kling said, “do you know a man named John Bridges?”

  “No. Let me see your badge, too,” she said.

  Kling fished out a small leather holder, and flashed the gold and blue-enameled shield.

  “Excuse me,” she said, and went directly to the telephone on the kitchen wall. She dialed a number, waited, listening, and then said, “Mr. Alexander, please. Cynthia Keating.” She waited again. “Todd,” she said, “the police are here. What’s your advice?” She listened again, nodded, kept listening, finally said, “Thanks, Todd, talk to you,” and hung up. “Gentlemen,” she said, “unless you have a warrant for my arrest, my attorney suggests you take a walk.”

  There was something very comforting about being alone at last in the dead girl’s apartment. First of all, the silence. This city, the one thing you could never find anyplace was peace and quiet. There were always sirens going, day and night, police or ambulance, and there were car horns honking, mostly taxicabs, foreigners from India or Pakistan leaning on their horns day and night because they were remembering how fast their camels used to race across the desert sands where there were no traffic lights. Noisiest damn city in the entire universe, this city. Ollie much preferred the silence here in the dead girl’s apartment.

  He sometimes felt if he hung around a dead person’s apartment long enough, he would pick up the vibrations of the killer. Get into his or her
skin somehow. He had read a story once—he hated reading—where the theory was the image of a person’s murderer would be left on the person’s eyeballs, the retina, whatever. Total bullshit. But the silence in a victim’s apartment was almost palpable, and he gave real credence to the notion that if he stood there long enough, in the silence, the vibrations of the killer would seep into his bones, though to tell the truth this had never happened to him. Nonetheless, he stood stock still at the foot of the dead girl’s bed now, imagining her as he’d first seen her on the kitchen floor, knife in her chest, trying to feel what the killer had felt while he was stabbing her, trying to get into his skin. Nothing happened. Ollie sighed, farted, and began his solitary search of Althea Cleary’s apartment.

  What he hoped he definitely would not find was her parents’ names. He did not want to have to call them personally and tell them their daughter was dead. He wasn’t good at such stuff. To Ollie, when a person was dead he was dead, and you didn’t go around wringing your hands or tearing out your hair. He couldn’t think of a single dead person he missed, including his own mother and father. He guessed if his sister Isabelle died, he would miss her a little, but not enough to be the one who got up and said some kind words about her at the funeral service because to tell the truth he couldn’t think of a single kind thing he might care to say about her, dead or alive. Like most living people, Isabelle Weeks was a pain in the ass. She once told him he was a bigot. He told her to go fuck herself, girlfriend.

  He had already looked through the dead girl’s address book and appointment calendar, but he hadn’t found any listings for anybody named Cleary. There were a few names for people in Montana, which wasn’t either Ohio or Idaho or Iowa as the super had guessed, but these weren’t Clearys, and he didn’t plan on calling somebody in Montana just to find out if they were related to a dead black girl he didn’t want to tell them about in the first place. Her appointment calendar wasn’t much help, either. She probably was new here in the city, which maybe explained why she had cappuccino all the time with the lady upstairs who taught piano, Ollie would have to give her a call. “Night and Day,” he thought. And maybe “Satisfaction,” which was one of his favorite songs, too.

  He went to the girl’s dresser now, and opened the top drawer, looking for he didn’t know what, anything that would tell him something about either her or whoever had been with her on the night she died. There were cops who went by the book, canvassed the neighborhood first, asked Leroy and Luis, Carmen and Clarisse did they see anybody going in or out of the apartment, but up here in Zimbabwe West, nobody ever saw nothing if you were a cop. Anyway, he preferred getting to know the vic first, and then getting to know whoever knew her. Besides, Ollie liked dead people much better than he did most living ones. Dead people didn’t give you any trouble. You went into a dead person’s apartment, you didn’t have to worry about farting or belching. Also, if the vic was a girl, you could handle her panties or pantyhose—like he was doing now—without anybody thinking you were some kind of pervert. Ollie sniffed the crotch of a pair of red panties, which was actually good police work because it would tell him was the girl a clean person or somebody who just dropped panties she had worn right back in the drawer without rinsing them out. They smelled fresh and clean.

  Being in her apartment, sniffing her panties, going through the rest of her underwear, and her sweaters and her blouses and her high-heeled shoes in the closet, and her coats and dresses, one of them a blue Monica Lewinsky dress, going through all her personal belongings, trying to find something, wondering what kind of person could have stabbed the girl it looked like half a dozen times and then left a fuckin bread knife sticking out of her chest, opening her handbag and rummaging through the personal girl things in it, he felt both privileged and inviolate, like an invisible burglar.

  Carl Blaney was weighing a liver when Ollie got downtown at four o’clock that Wednesday afternoon. It was still raining, though not as hard as it had been earlier. The morgue and the rain outside both had the same stainless steel hue. He watched as Blaney transferred the liver from the scale to a stainless steel pan. Personally, Ollie found body parts disgusting.

  “Is that hers?” he asked.

  “Whose?” Blaney said.

  “The vic’s.”

  “That’s all we’ve got here is vics.”

  “Althea Cleary. The little colored girl got stabbed.”

  “Oh, that one.”

  “What do you do here, you just go from one liver to another?”

  “Yep, that’s all we do here,” Blaney said dryly.

  “So what’ve you got for me?” Ollie asked.

  There was nothing Meyer liked better than to irritate Fat Ollie Weeks. The man was calling to talk to Carella, but Carella was down the hall. Meyer could not resist the temptation.

  “Do you plan to sue this guy?” he asked.

  “What guy is that?” Ollie asked.

  He had never sued anybody in his entire life. He figured the lawyers of the world were rich enough.

  “This guy who wrote this book with a lot of police stuff in it.”

  “What guy?” Ollie asked again.

  “This Irishman who wrote a book. You’re famous now, Ollie.”

  “The fuck is that supposed to mean?” Ollie said.

  “On the other hand, it does say in the front of the book that the names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.”

  “Wonderful,” Ollie said. “Tell Steve I called, okay? I got to see him about something.”

  “‘Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons is entirely coincidental,’” Meyer quoted. “Is what it says. So I guess it is just a coincidence.”

  “What is just a coincidence?” Ollie asked.

  “His name being so similar to yours and all,” Meyer explained.

  “Whose name?”

  “This guy.”

  “What guy?” Ollie asked for the third fuckin time.

  “This guy in this police novel written by this Irish journalist.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite,” Ollie said.

  “Fat Ollie Watts,” Meyer said, drawing the name out grandly. “Not that anyone ever calls you Fat Ollie,” he added at once.

  “They better not,” Ollie said. “What do you mean, Fat Ollie Watts?”

  “Is the name of a character in this book.”

  “A character? Fat Ollie Watts?”

  “Yeah. But he’s just a minor character.”

  “A minor character?”

  “Yeah, some kind of cheap thief.”

  “Some kind of cheap thief?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Called Fat Ollie Watts?”

  “Yeah. Pretty close, don’t you think?”

  “Close? It’s right on the fuckin nose!”

  “Well, no. Watts isn’t Weeks.”

  “It ain’t, huh?”

  “It’s even spelled differently.”

  “Oh, is that right?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “On your block, Fat Ollie Watts ain’t Fat Ollie Weeks, huh? Then what is it?”

  “It’s Watts.”

  “Who the fuck is this guy?”

  “Fat Ollie Watts,” Meyer said. “I just told you.”

  “Not him! The guy who wrote the fuckin book! Don’t he even know I exist?”

  “Gee, I guess not.”

  “He’s writing a book about cops and he never heard of me? A real person? He never heard of Oliver Wendell Weeks?”

  “Oh, come on, Ollie, relax. This is just another Thomas Harris ripoff serial-killer novel. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “Does this fuckin guy live on Mars, he never heard of me?”

  “He lives in Ireland, I told you.”

  “Where in Ireland? In some booth in a pub? In some stone hut by the side of the road? In some fuckin smelly bog?”

  “Gee, I’m sorry I even mentioned it.”

&nbs
p; “What’s this guy’s name?”

  “I told you. Fat Ollie …”

  “Not him,” Ollie said. “The writer. The fuckin writer!”

  “I’ll tell you the truth,” Meyer said, grinning, “I’ve already forgotten it.”

  And hung up.

  The two men met in a bar at five that afternoon. Both were officially off duty. Carella ordered a beer. Ollie ordered a Harvey Wallbanger.

  “So what’s this about?” Carella asked.

  “I told you on the phone.”

  “Some girl got stabbed …”

  “Black girl named Althea Cleary. Eight times, according to the ME. Knife was still in her chest. Weapon of convenience. Matches the set in her kitchen. Thing that made me think of you was Blaney telling me …”

  “Which Blaney?”

  “I don’t know. How many Blaneys are there?”

  “Two. I think.”

  “Well, this was one of them,” Ollie said. “He told me the girl had maybe been doped. With guess what?”

  Carella looked at him.

  “Yeah,” Ollie said.

  “Rohypnol?”

  “Rohypnol. Hey, bartender!” he yelled. “Excuse me, but did you put any vodka in this fuckin drink?”

  “I put vodka in it,” the bartender said.

  “Cause what I can do, I can take it down the police lab, we’ll run some toxicological tests on it, see if there’s any alcohol in it at all.”

  “Everything’s in it supposed to be in it,” the bartender said. “That’s a good strong drink you got there.”

  “Then whyn’t you make me another one just like it, on the house this time, it’s so fuckin good.”

  “Why on the house?” the bartender asked.

  “Cause your toilet’s leakin and your bathroom window’s painted shut,” Ollie said. “Those are both violations.”

  Which they weren’t.

  “You’re sure she was doped?” Carella said.

  “According to Blaney.”

  “And he’s sure it was roofers?”

  “Positive.”

  “What you’re suggesting is a link to my case.”

  “By George, I think you’ve got it.”

  “You’re saying because they were both doped …”

  “Yep.”

  “… and later murdered, there’s a link.”