The Last Dance

by Ed McBain

  The unfortunate spelling of Sharyn’s first name was due to the fact that her then thirteen-year-old, unwed mother didn’t know how to spell Sharon. This same mother later put her through college and then medical school on money earned scrubbing floors in white men’s offices after dark. Sharyn Cooke was black, the first woman of color ever appointed to the job she now held. Actually, her skin was the color of burnt almond, her eyes the color of loam. Off the job, she often wore smoky blue eye shadow and lipstick the color of burgundy wine. To work, she wore no makeup at all. High cheekbones, a generous mouth, and black hair worn in a modified Afro gave her the look of a proud Masai woman. At five-nine, she always felt cramped in the compact automobile she drove and was constantly adjusting the front seat to accommodate her long legs. It took her forty minutes to drive from her apartment at the farther reaches of Calm’s Point to St. Mary’s Hospital in the depths of lower Isola, close by the apartment building in which Maxie Blaine had been captured. St. Mary’s was perhaps the second-worst hospital in the city, but that was small consolation.

  A visit to Willis in the ER assured Sharyn that this wasn’t the stomach wound she’d been dreading, but some two to three percent of all fatal bullet wounds occurred in the lower extremities and the bullet was still lodged in his thigh, close to the femoral artery. She did not want some jackass fresh out of medical school in the Grenadines to be poking around in there and possibly causing severe hemorrhaging. She went immediately to the head of the hospital, a nonpracticing physician named Howard Langdon. Langdon was wearing a gray flannel suit with wide lapels that had gone out of style ten years ago. He was wearing a pink shirt and a knit tie a shade darker than the suit. He had white hair and a white goatee. He looked as if his picture should have been on a fried chicken carton.

  Langdon had once been a very good surgeon, but that didn’t excuse the way he now ran St. Mary’s. Sharyn herself was a board-certified surgeon—which meant she’d gone through four years of medical school, and then five years as a resident surgeon in a hospital, after which she’d been approved for board certification by the American College of Surgeons. She still had her own private practice, but as a uniformed one-star chief she worked fifteen to eighteen hours a week in the Chief Surgeon’s Office for an annual salary of $68,000. In this city, some twenty to thirty police officers were shot every year. Sharyn wasn’t about to let one of them languish here at St. Mary’s.

  As politely as she could, she told Langdon she wanted Detective Willis ambed over to Hoch Memorial, half a mile uptown—and three hundred light years away in terms of service and skill, which she did not mention. Langdon looked her dead in the eye and asked, “Why?”

  “I’d like him to be there,” she said.

  Again, Langdon asked, “Why?”

  “Because that’s where I feel he’ll receive the sort of care I want him to have.”

  “He’ll receive excellent care here as well,” Langdon said.

  “Doctor,” Sharyn said, “I really don’t want to argue this. The detective needs immediate surgery. I want him ambed over to Hoch Memorial right this minute.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t discharge him,” Langdon said.

  “It’s not your call to make,” Sharyn said.

  “I run this hospital.”

  “You don’t run the police department,” she said. “Either you have an ambulance at the ER door in three minutes flat, or I’ll have him nine-elevened out of here. Say, Doctor.”

  “I can’t let you do this,” Langdon said.

  “Doctor, I’m in charge here,” Sharyn said. “This is my job and my mandate. That detective is moving out of here now.”

  “They’ll think it’s because St. Mary’s isn’t a good hospital.”

  “Who are you talking about, Doctor?”

  “The media,” Langdon said. “They’ll think that’s why you moved him.”

  “That is why I’m moving him,” Sharyn said coldly and cruelly and mercilessly. “I’m calling Hoch,” she said, and turned on her heel, walked to the nurses’ station, and snapped her fingers at a telephone. The nurse behind the counter handed it to her at once. Langdon was still floating in the background, looking angry and defeated and sad and somehow pitiable. Dialing, Sharyn told the nurse, “Get an ambulance around to the back door, and wheel the detective out. I’m moving him.” Into the phone she said, “Dr. Gerardi, please,” and waited. “Jim,” she said, “this is Sharyn Cooke. I’ve got a cop with a thigh wound, he’s being transferred right this minute from St. Mary’s.” She listened, said, “Tangential,” listened again, said, “Nonperforating. It’s still in there, Jim, can you prepare an OR and a surgical team, we’ll be there in five minutes. See you,” she said, and hung up, and looked at the nurse who was standing there motionless. “Is there a problem, Nurse?” she asked.

  “It’s just …” the nurse said, and looked helplessly across the counter to where Langdon was standing. “Dr. Langdon?” she asked. “Is it all right to order an ambulance?”

  Langdon said nothing for several moments.

  Then he said, “Order it,” and walked away swiftly, down the long polished tile corridor, not looking back, turning a corner, out of sight.

  Sharyn went to Willis where he lay on a wheeled table behind ER curtains, an oxygen tube in his nose, an IV in his arm.

  “I’m getting you out of here,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “You’ll be uptown in five minutes.”

  He nodded again.

  “I’ll be with you. Do you need anything?”

  He shook his head.

  Then, quite unexpectedly, he said, “It wasn’t Bert’s fault.”

  Section 125.27 of the Penal Law stated that a person was guilty of murder in the first degree when he caused the death of a police officer engaged in the course of performing his official duties. Maxie Blaine hadn’t killed anyone, but he’d opened fire indiscriminately on a roomful of cops armed with an arrest warrant. This meant they had him cold on five counts of attempted murder one, a Class A-1 felony punishable by fifteen to life as a minimum on each count. In this city, you didn’t shoot a cop and walk. No self-respecting D.A. would even consider a plea when he had four other police officers ready to testify that ole Maxie Blaine here had repeatedly pulled the trigger of the gun that downed a fellow police officer. If they needed civilian corroboration, they were sure they could get that from the eighteen-year-old girl who’d been screaming in Maxie’s bed, and whose lawyer had advised her to remain silent until he saw which way the wind was blowing here.

  The girl’s lawyer—whose name was Rudy Ehrlich—didn’t yet know the wind was blowing toward lethal injection, the penalty for first-degree murder in this state. So far, all Ehrlich knew was that his client’s “friend” had wounded a police detective, and that she’d been a possible witness to the shooting. In such cases, Ehrlich’s motto was “Speech is silver, silence is golden.” As a matter of fact, this was Ehrlich’s motto in any criminal case. He got a lot of money for this advice, which was only common knowledge to any schoolyard kid who’d ever been frisked for a firearm.

  Maxie Blaine knew instinctively and through bitter experience on his meteoric rise through Georgia’s criminal justice system that “Silence Is Golden” was really and truly a terrific rule to follow whenever you were dealing with law enforcement types. He also knew that he had just now popped a cop, and he knew in his secret heart of hearts that a month or so ago he had killed a man the media had later identified as a police informer, so long, Ratso. He suspected the reason the cops had come a-rappin on his door at two in the morning was they needed desperately to know had he really done that little rat bastard. Which he wasn’t ready to admit since he wasn’t pining just yet for a massive dose of Valium.

  In an instance such as this, where they already had him on inadvertently plugging a cop in a moment of panic, the damn girl shrieking like a banshee and all, Blaine shrewdly calculated that maybe there was a deal to be made if he played his cards ri
ght. So whereas he asked for a lawyer—no experienced felon ever did not ask for a lawyer when he was in custody—he nonetheless figured he’d answer their questions until he saw where they were going. The minute he figured out what they really had here—he didn’t see how they could possibly tie him to the pizzeria shooting—why that was when he could maybe squirm his way out of this, maybe talk the D.A. into covering everything he’d done including the Guido’s thing for a plea that might grant him parole in twenty years, maybe even fifteen. In other words, he thought the way many criminals think: he thought he could outsmart two experienced detectives, a lieutenant who’d seen it all and heard it all, and even his own attorney, a man named Pierce Reynolds, a transplanted good ole boy from Tennessee, who naturally urged silence.

  The interrogation started in the lieutenant’s office at six o’clock on that morning of December 2, by which time Blaine’s attorney had arrived and consulted with him, and Blaine had been read his rights and verified that he understood them. To protect his own ass in any subsequent client-lawyer law suit, Reynolds went on record as having advised Blaine to remain silent and Blaine went on record as having been so advised. All the bullshit out of the way, the questioning proper began at six-fifteen A.M. with Detective-Lieutenant Peter Byrnes himself eliciting from Maxwell Corey Blaine his full name, address, and place of employment, which was a pool parlor in Hightown, or so he said, but then again he wasn’t under oath.

  If Blaine was in reality breaking heads for someone linked to the Colombian cartel, as Betty Young had informed them, he couldn’t very well tell the cops this was his occupation. Not if he hoped to outfox them and cut a deal later. There was no official police stenographer here as yet, and no one from the District Attorney’s Office. Blaine figured the deck was stacked in his favor. The cops figured they could nail him on shooting Willis whenever the spirit moved them. Getting someone to ride uptown from the D.A.’s Office was a simple matter of making a phone call. But they were angling for bigger fish. They were looking for Murder One.

  Byrnes opened with a laser beam straight to the forehead.

  “Know anyone named Enrique Ramirez?”

  Blaine blinked.

  “Nossir,” he said, “I surely do not.”

  “I thought you might have done some work for him,” Byrnes said.

  “Is that a question?” Reynolds asked.

  “Counselor,” Byrnes said, “could we agree on some basic ground rules here?”

  “What basic rules did you have in mind, Lieutenant? I thought I was familiar with all the rules, basic or otherwise, but perhaps I’m mistaken.”

  “Mr. Reynolds,” Byrnes said, “we don’t need courtroom theatrics here, okay? There’s no judge here to rule on objections, there’s no jury to play to, your man isn’t even under oath. So why not just take it nice and easy, like the song says, okay?”

  “Does the song say anything about a cop getting shot tonight?” Reynolds asked. “Which is why my client is here in custody, isn’t that so?”

  “Well, Counselor,” Byrnes said, “if you’d let him answer my questions, we could maybe find out why we’re here, okay? Unless you want to call the whole thing off, which is your client’s right, as you know.”

  “For Chrissake, let him ask his goddamn questions,” Blaine said. “I got nothing to hide here.”

  Famous last words, Byrnes thought.

  Reynolds was thinking the same thing.

  So was Kling.

  Brown was wondering if the son of a bitch was going to claim police brutality cause he’d smacked him upside the head back there in his apartment.

  Blaine all of a sudden thought he had to be very careful here because somehow they’d learned about his relationship with Enrique Ramirez, and that was a road that led directly to Guido’s Pizzeria and a lot of spilled tomato sauce.

  Byrnes was thinking he had to walk a very careful line here because they’d promised Betty Young sanctuary, they’d asked her to trust them, and he couldn’t now reveal her name or how he’d come into possession of the information she’d given them.

  “This pool parlor you work for?” he asked. “Who owns it?”

  “I got no idea.”

  “You don’t know who the boss is?”

  “Nope. The manager pays me my check every week.”

  “What’s the manager’s name?”

  “Joey?”

  “Joey what?”

  “I haven’t the faintest.”

  “How’d you get this job?”

  “Friend of mine told me about it.”

  “What’s your friend’s name?”

  “Alvin Woods. He’s gone back home to Georgia.”

  Go find him, he was thinking.

  Doesn’t exist, Byrnes was thinking.

  “Know a man named Ozzie Rivera?”

  “Nope.”

  “Oswaldo Rivera?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “How about a man named Joaquim Valdez?”

  “Nope.”

  “That wouldn’t be the Joey who pays you your check every week, would it?”

  “I don’t know what Joey’s last name is.”

  “Rivera had both his legs broken last April. Were you living in this city last April?”

  “I surely was. But I don’t know anything about this Ozzie Rivera or both his broken legs. That sure is a shame, though.”

  Like to smack him again, Brown thought.

  “What were you doing on the morning of November eighth?” Byrnes asked.

  Here we go, Blaine thought.

  “November eighth, let me see,” he said.

  “Take all the time you need,” Byrnes said.

  “Would that have been a Saturday morning? Cause Saturday’s my day off. I sleep late Saturdays.”

  “No, this would’ve been a Monday morning.”

  “Then I’d’ve been at the pool hall.”

  “Doing what? What do you do at this pool hall, Maxie?”

  “I’m a table organizer.”

  “What’s that, a table organizer?”

  “I see to it that there’s a flow.”

  “A flow, uh-huh. What’s that?”

  “I see to it that the tables are continuously occupied. So we don’t have people waiting for tables or tables not being played. It’s an interesting job.”

  “I’ll bet. Did you ever hear of a man named Danny Nelson?”

  “Sorry, no.”

  “Danny Gimp is another name he went by.”

  “No. Never heard of him.”

  “Would you be surprised if I told you he’d stiffed your boss on a minor-league dope deal …”

  “My boss? Who’s supposed to be my boss?”

  “Enrique Ramirez. Who owns the pool hall you work for.”

  “I don’t know anybody named Enrique Ramirez, I already told you. Nor Danny Gump, neither.”

  “Gimp.”

  “I thought you said Gump.”

  “Gimp. It means a guy who limps.”

  “Has all this got to do with some sort of drug violation?” Reynolds asked.

  “Two keys of cocaine,” Byrnes said, nodding. “Worth forty-two large.”

  “You know,” Reynolds said, “I really think you people should either charge my client with a specific crime or else …”

  “Ramirez paid a man named Danny Nelson to deliver two keys of coke to a dealer in Majesta,” Byrnes explained genially. “Danny never showed up and neither did the coke. You don’t do that to Enrique Ramirez.”

  “I don’t know anything about any of this,” Blaine said. “I especially don’t know this Enrique Ramirez person, who I guess you’re saying is somehow involved with dealing dope.”

  “El Jefe?” Byrnes said. “Ever hear him called that?”

  “No. Is that Spanish, what you said?”

  “We think El Jefe hired you to kill Danny Nelson,” Byrnes said.

  “Ooops, that’s it, Lieutenant,” Reynolds said.

  “No, that’s okay,” Blaine
said, grinning. “I don’t know any of these people he’s talking about, so just relax, it’s okay. I’ve got nothing to worry about here. Nice and easy, okay? Like you said, Lieutenant.”

  Smack him right in the fuckin eye, Brown thought.

  “On the morning of November eighth,” Byrnes said, “did you tell a friend of yours you were going out for some pizza?”

  Kling looked at him. So did Brown. The lieutenant had just come dangerously close to revealing Betty Young’s identity. If Blaine walked out of here today …

  “No,” Blaine said. “What friend?”

  “Excuse me, lieutenant …,” Kling said.

  “What friend?” Blaine insisted.

  “A friend you told you were going out for pizza, on the morning Danny Gimp …”

  “Lieutenant …”

  “Did you tell a friend you were going out for pizza?”

  “This is Betty Young, right?” Blaine said.

  Oh Jesus, Kling thought. The Loot just gave her up.

  “Never mind who it is. Did you …?”

  “It’s that fuckin bitch Betty, ain’t it? Who else could it be? What else did she tell you?”

  “I would suggest …”

  “If you don’t mind, Counselor …”

  “Mr. Blaine …”

  “What did you mean when you said you were going out for pizza?” Byrnes asked.

  “I meant I was going out for pizza, what the fuck’s wrong with that? Oh, I get it. She spotted me on the tape, right? She’s going for the re …”

  “What tape?” Byrnes asked at once.

  Blaine suddenly shut up.

  “Are we finished here?” Reynolds asked.

  “Unless Mr. Blaine has something else he wants to tell us,” Byrnes said.

  “We’re finished here,” Blaine said.

  “You heard him. In which case …”

  “Like what?” Blaine said.

  “Come on,” Reynolds said. “Let’s go.”

  “No, like what?” Blaine insisted. “What would I want to tell you?”

  “That’s up to you,” Byrnes said. “You think it over. Meanwhile, we’re gonna hold you here for a few hours while we assemble some witnesses from the pizzeria. Run a little lineup for them, see if they can recognize you a little better in person than on that tape you were just talking about. The law allows us …”