The Last Dance

by Ed McBain

  “Until your partner rediscovered the musical.”

  “Yes. We did a copyright search, found that all renewals had been made, located the current owners, and proceeded to license the rights. You can imagine how thrilled these people were! The bookwriter’s grandson works in the mail room of a publishing house in London. The lyricist’s granddaughter sells real estate in L.A. And the composer’s great-grandson drives a taxi in Tel Aviv! This revival is a godsend to them, an opportunity to make some very big bucks indeed. If the show is a hit, of course. Which I’m sure it will be,” he said, and rapped his knuckles on his desk.

  “When did you discover Hale had inherited the underlying rights?”

  “When our lawyers did the search. We weren’t expecting a problem, why would there have been a problem? In fact, we were already proceeding, assuming that rights to the play would follow as a matter of course. A new bookwriter was already working, we’d commissioned new songs and hired a director and a choreographer, everything was in motion. But finding Hale was another matter. As it turned out, he was right under our noses here in the city, but he’d moved around a lot in the past several years. Apparently he got fired from a nursing job in a hospital somewhere in Riverhead, molested a young girl in her room, or so she later said, who the hell knew? Or cared, for that matter? What we wanted were the rights to the mawkish little play Jessica Miles had written and inconsiderately willed to him.”

  “Are you saying it’s not a good play?”

  “It’s dreadful. The only thing that put it over was Jenny Corbin in the starring role. She was the mayor’s mistress at the time, you know, and quite a notorious personality. A stunning woman, from what I’ve been told.” He hung both huge hands on the air and outlined the ripeness of her breasts, nodding in appreciation. “But we needed the damn thing,” he said. “Without that play, we simply couldn’t proceed any further.” He sighed heavily, opened a cigar box on his desk, and fished a cigar from it. “Smoke?” he asked. “They’re Havanas.”

  “Thanks, no,” Carella said.

  Brown shook his head.

  Zimmer unwrapped the cigar, bit off one end, and struck a match. Puffing great clouds of asphyxiating smoke on the air, he waved them away with one big hand, and then settled back in his chair to puff contentedly. Without asking, Carella got up to open the window. Traffic noises flooded the room.

  “Well, I went to see the old man,” Zimmer said. “Never expecting a problem, mind you. Why should there be a problem? Who doesn’t want to make a fortune? I told him we were reviving the musical based on Jessica Miles’s play and wanted to license the rights from him. He flatly refused.”

  “Why?” Brown asked.

  “Because he was an idiot,” Zimmer said. “I tried to explain that he could make a lot of money if the show was a hit. No. I tried to tell him a hit show would play all over the United States, all over the world! No. At first, I thought he was holding out for a bigger advance, higher royalties. But that wasn’t it.”

  “What was it?” Carella asked.

  “He was protecting Jessica’s shitty little play! Can you believe it? He said she’d been unhappy with the musical … well, yes, I said, so are we! That’s why we’re having the book rewritten, that’s why we’re adding new songs. No, he said. I’m sorry. She would not want the musical revived. I would be dishonoring her wishes if I let you have her play. Three times, I went to see him. He simply would not listen to reason.” Zimmer shook his head, and blew a huge cloud of smoke at the ceiling. “So I went to see his daughter. Cynthia Keating. Mousy little housewife dominated by a legal-eagle husband who immediately appreciated how much money they could make if this show turned out to be a hit. I asked Cynthia to intercede on my behalf, go to the old man, talk some sense into him. No luck. He wouldn’t budge from his position.” Zimmer shook his head again, and looked across his desk at the detectives. “So I killed him,” he said, and laughed suddenly, like a choir boy who’d farted during a Christmas chorale.

  Neither Carella nor Brown even smiled.

  “That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?” Zimmer said. “That I had good reason to want him dead? Why not kill the stubborn son of a bitch? Be much easier to deal with the daughter, wouldn’t it?”

  The detectives said nothing.

  “Incidentally,” Zimmer said, and puffed on the cigar and then looked thoughtfully at the glowing end of it. “Cynthia knew her father was leaving her the rights to that play.”

  “How do you know that?” Carella asked.

  “He told her. Said when he died she’d be getting twenty-five grand in insurance plus the rights to this miserable little play. Forgive the editorializing, but this entire matter pisses me off a great deal.”

  Gee, imagine what it does to us, Carella thought.

  “Tell you what,” Zimmer said. “We’re having a Meet ’N’ Greet tomorrow ni …”

  “A what?” Brown said.

  “Little gathering for the usual suspects,” he said, and grinned. “Why don’t you stop by?”

  Carella wondered what had happened to those simple cases where you walked in and found a guy with a smoking gun in his fist and a bloody corpse at his feet. Zimmer had suggested that he himself was a good suspect. Carella agreed. But so was Cynthia Keating, or her greedy little attorney husband, or any one of the copyright inheritors in London, Tel Aviv, or Los Angeles. Not to mention all the people now involved with the current show—the new bookwriter and composer, the director, the choreographer, Zimmer’s partner. Anyone who wanted this show to happen could have hired the Jamaican who’d hanged Hale on the bathroom door like a wet towel.

  “What time tomorrow night?” he asked.

  “You want a mystery?” Parker asked them. “Here’s a mystery for you.”

  “We don’t want a mystery,” Carella said.

  “We already have a mystery,” Meyer said.

  “Two mysteries,” Kling said.

  “Too many mysteries,” Brown said.

  “Here’s a mystery for you,” Parker said. “I stop this guy the other day, he just went through a red light, I’m standing right there on the corner. I flag him down cause I’m a conscientious cop …”

  Brown blew his nose.

  “… and I ask to see his driver’s license and registration. So he pulls all this shit out of his wallet and his glove compartment, and guess what’s there with it?”

  “What?” Kling asked.

  “His marriage certificate.”

  “His what?”

  “Yeah,” Parker said.

  “Why’s he carrying a marriage certificate?”

  “That’s the mystery,” Parker said.

  “Was he recently married?”

  “No, the certificate was ten years old.”

  “So why’s he carrying it around with him?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why it’s a mystery.”

  “I hate mysteries,” Carella said.

  The Meet ’N’ Greet was supposed to start at six P.M. in Connie Lindstrom’s penthouse apartment on Grover Avenue, overlooking Grover Park, a world away from the Eighty-seventh Precinct station house, but only a mile and a half farther downtown. If Brown and Carella had gone to work that Saturday, they’d have been to the party in ten minutes. But they were coming down from their homes in Riverhead, and so they allowed themselves forty minutes, Brown picking up Carella at twenty past five. By that time, a fierce snow storm had started in the city and they hit its full force just as they were crossing the bridge over the Devil’s Byte. They did not get to her building until six-thirty. As it was, they were not overly late. Most of the guests, similarly held up by the storm, were just arriving. The detectives had dressed up for the occasion, both of them wearing unaccustomed suits, Brown’s blue, Carella’s gray. They needn’t have bothered. Half the guests were wearing blue jeans. One of them, an actor, asked them what they did. When they told him they were police detectives, he said he had once played a cop in a summer stock production of Detective S
tory.

  The show’s new songwriter, a man who introduced himself as Randy Flynn, told Carella that the term “Meet ’N’ Greet” was usually reserved for the start of rehearsals, when the full cast met the producers and the creative team for the first time. “Connie’s new in the business, though,” he whispered. “She sometimes gets the lingo wrong.” Flynn, a man in his sixties with several hit shows to his credit, wore a look of extreme smugness that attested to his worldwide fame. Puffing incessantly on a cigarette, he told Carella that he’d been contacted by Zimmer early in July, when they’d first acquired the rights to the original show’s music from the composer’s great-grandson in Tel Aviv. “He’s not here tonight,” he said, “but the others are.”

  The original lyricist’s granddaughter had been flown in from Los Angeles, where she worked at Coldwell Banker selling real estate. Her name was Felicia Carr, and she was possibly thirty-three years old, a reddish-blonde wearing the only long gown in the room, a silky green number that clung to her like moss. She was listening intently to Naomi Janus, the choreographer, who had on her head the same black rustler’s hat she’d been wearing this past Tuesday. Naomi was telling a man named Arthur Bragg that she planned some startlingly sexy dance sequences for the speakeasy number, whatever that was. Brown surmised that Bragg was the show’s musical director, whatever that was. He decided there were too many people here. Felicia said she couldn’t wait to see the dances, she just loved musicals that had a lot of sexy dancing in them.

  “When did you fly east?” Brown asked her.

  “Yesterday,” she said. “On the Red Eye.”

  “And you go back when?”

  “Oh, not for a while. I’m planning to do some Christmas shopping.”

  “This must be very exciting for you.”

  “Oh yes, it is!” she said. “I can’t wait for it to open!”

  “When will that be?”

  “Next fall sometime,” Naomi said. “Provided there’s a theater available.”

  “That seems a long way off.”

  “Well,” Naomi said, “the show’s been lying dormant since it closed in 1928, so I guess it can wait a few months more.”

  The bookwriter’s grandson was a Brit named Gerald Palmer. He was in his early forties, Carella guessed, a clean-shaven man in need of a haircut. Like the two detectives, he, too, was wearing a suit, though his seemed somewhat out of fashion, an impression possibly created by its British styling. The suit was blue, the shoes he wore with it brown. In his Cockney accent, he explained to Carella, unnecessarily, that the bookwriter wrote all the words spoken onstage, as opposed to anything sung or danced. “He’s sometimes called the librettist,” he said. “My grandfather wrote an absolutely wonderful libretto for the original musical. I don’t know why they hired someone to rewrite it.” Carella guessed he hadn’t been told that the original book was “hopeless.”

  At just that moment, the man who’d revised the book joined them. He was tall and ungainly, in his late fifties, Carella supposed, wearing jeans, a blue shirt open at the throat, and a green shawl-collared cardigan sweater over it. “Clarence Hull,” he said, and shook hands with both of them. He immediately told Palmer—almost by way of apology, it seemed to Carella—that his grandfather’s libretto had been “quite artful for its day,” his exact words, but that the new millennium required something more immediately engaging, which was why he’d chosen to place the show’s opening not on a farm in the East Midlands, where the original had started, but instead in London, “so that the heroine isn’t a simple farm girl coming to America but is instead someone rather more sophisticated moving from one big city to another, do you see?” Palmer told him that his grandfather had once written a straight play as well, “A comedy, actually,” he said, “about soccer,” which he thought might make a good musical, given the current American obsession with the sport. Hull told him flatly that the only sports musical that had ever made it was Damn Yankees, and then excused himself to go refill his champagne glass.

  Palmer told Carella that for the past fifteen years he’d been working in the “post room,” as he called it, of a publishing house called Martins and Grenville, “the last publisher in Bedford Square, d’you know it? A highly prestigious firm.” He said he was thrilled they were doing his granddad’s show again. “I hope it’ll come to London one day.”

  “When did you get here?” Carella asked.

  “Flew over on Wednesday.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “The Piccadilly. Sounded a lot like home,” he said, and grinned. He’d shaved too close. There were razor nicks on his chin.

  “When will you be going back?”

  “Not till next Sunday. I’m taking a little time here, enjoying the city. Plenty of time for work later on, eh?” he said.

  Cynthia Keating was wearing a simple black cocktail dress. Her husband Robert was another of the men wearing a suit. Brown figured anyone not intimately connected with show business had dolled up for the occasion. He was beginning to feel somewhat like a horse’s ass. The suit Keating had on was a severe pinstripe. He looked as if he might be trying a case for IBM. Cynthia was telling Rowland Chapp, the show’s director, that the original play Jessica Miles had written was “perfectly wonderful,” something Chapp accepted with a distracted nod that indicated he knew precisely how dreadful the play was. Brown wanted to go home.

  Champagne and canapés were coming around on trays, served by a pair of wannabe actors who were dressed in black and white tonight, earnestly playing witty waiter and flirtatious waitress. Snow swirled past the penthouse windows, the flakes illuminated by corner floodlights that made them appear as sharp and as swift as tiny daggers.

  Connie Lindstrom tapped on her champagne glass.

  “I have a treat,” she said. “Randy?”

  There was applause, and then a hush as Randy Flynn went to the grand piano in one corner of the room, sat, and lifted the lid over the keys. Behind him, snowflakes rushed the night.

  “I’m going to play the show for you,” he said. “Including the three new songs I wrote. We’ve kept the original conceit, the entire musical takes place in Jenny’s room. The window in her room is a window on the city. We see the city, we see everything happening in the city through her eyes, from her point of view.”

  He began playing.

  Carella could not determine where any new songs had been added; to him, the music flooding the air in Connie Lindstrom’s penthouse apartment sounded seamless. As Flynn sang in his raspy smoker’s voice, Carella floated back to another time and place, this city in the year 1928, when everything seemed fresh and innocent to a young girl named Jenny, fantasizing in her room all the way downtown, in an immigrant area then called—as it still was—The Lower Platform.

  But, oh, the differences between then and now.

  Flynn sang of a young girl’s yearnings and awakenings in a wondrous island bordered by confluent rivers and spanned by magical bridges. He sang of golden towers rising into the clouds, interlaced with immaculate streets, humming belowground with subways not yet sullied by time or wear. He sang of promise and hope for a population of immigrants that had brought with them customs to treasure and to nourish. As he sang, his voice became a choir of voices, the voices of a hundred tribes with as many different backgrounds, joining together in this shining new land, to become at last a single strong united tribe.

  Here beyond the windows in Jenny’s room …

  Ah, what a wonderland there had been.

  Flynn struck the last chord of the last dance.

  It was still snowing.

  Carella looked across the room to where his partner stood solid and big and black against the white flakes swirling outside. Randy Flynn rose from the piano bench, placed the palms of his hands together like a guru, and bowed in transparently false modesty, accepting applause from the assembled guests. Brown’s eyes scanned the room. So did Carella’s.

  Almost anyone in this room could have killed Andrew H
ale.

  There was no way the detectives who caught the murder down in Hopscotch could have connected it with the murders uptown. No way. The first victim uptown had been a sixty-eight-year-old white man who’d been hanged from a door hook and then transported to a bed. The second one had been a nineteen-year-old black girl stabbed in the chest with a knife grabbed from her own kitchen counter. The prior ingestion of a drug called Rohypnol was the only connecting link between them—if, in fact, it was a link and not the sort of coincidence that plagued police work.

  Except when they were reading novels, the cops in this city rarely came across serial killers. Serial killers in novels were enormously popular these days, but that did not mean they were running rampant all over the United States. Current estimates maintained that only some thirty-five to fifty of them were out there loose. In order for a murderer to qualify as a bona fide serial killer, he had to have killed three or more people within a relatively short period of time. On the other hand, a serial killer was not someone who killed Uncle George and two days later killed Cousins Mandy and Maude because they’d seen him commit the first murder. That was merely a careful murderer.

  The cops in this city investigated some 2,000 homicides annually. Even if the detectives catching the downtown squeal had remotely suspected a connection between the Hale murder, the Cleary murder, and this new murder, they would not have jumped to the conclusion that a raving lunatic serial killer was loose in the city. The detectives catching the squeal early that Monday morning might have heard about the Hale murder from television, but they most certainly had not heard about the murder of an obscure little black girl in Diamondback. So it never once entered their minds that this new murder was somehow related to the previous two, serially or otherwise.

  According to a birth certificate they found in a candy tin in the top drawer of her bedroom dresser, the victim’s name was Martha Coleridge and she was ninety-eight years old. A thin, birdlike creature, she lay in her nightgown at the foot of the bed, her neck apparently broken. The detectives—an experienced First named Bryan Shanahan, and a newly appointed Third named Jefferson Long—went through the lady’s belongings, sifting through browned letters and diaries, knowing they wouldn’t find any clues in all this stuff, but going through the drill anyway. What they figured was that some junkie burglar had come in here, stolen the old lady’s grocery money, and then snapped her neck for good measure. They kept looking through her old papers, tossing them onto the bed while the ME examined the body. One of the things they found was a blue binder with a typed label on it. The label read: