The Last Dance

by Ed McBain

  They already knew where they could find Cynthia Keating. They knew that Palmer was staying at The Piccadilly because he’d mentioned it at Connie Lindstrom’s party. From the ever helpful Norman Zimmer, they learned that Felicia Carr was staying with a girlfriend here in the city. Because both Felicia and Palmer were leaving for their respective homes this weekend and time was running out, they split the legwork into three teams.

  Whether a person was guilty or not, he or she always seemed surprised—and a little bit frightened—to find policemen standing on the doorstep. Felicia Carr opened the door to her girlfriend’s garden apartment in Majesta, saw two burly men standing there flashing badges, opened her big green eyes wide and asked what seemed to be the trouble, Officers?

  “We’re investigating a homicide,” Meyer said, because that often caused amateurs to wet their pants.

  “A double homicide, in fact,” Kling said genially. “May we come in, please?”

  “Well … sure,” Felicia said.

  They followed her into a spacious, sunny living room overlooking the Majesta Bridge not far in the distance. The furniture was still wearing summer slipcovers, the fabric all abloom with riotous red and yellow and purple flowers against a background of large green leaves. The summery decor, the sun glaring through the big windows made the day outside appear balmy. But the temperature was in the low twenties, and the forecasters had predicted more snow either late tonight or early tomorrow morning.

  Felicia told them she was just on her way out …

  “So much to see here,” she explained.

  … and hoped this wouldn’t take too long.

  “Though I’m sorry to hear someone got murdered,” she added.

  “Two people,” Kling reminded her.

  “Yes, I’m sorry.”

  “Miss Carr,” Meyer said, “can you tell us where you were this past Sunday night?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “This past Sunday night,” he repeated.

  “That would’ve been the fifth,” Kling said helpfully.

  “Can you tell us where you were?”

  “Well … why?”

  “This is a homicide investigation,” Meyer said, and smiled encouragingly.

  “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “Most likely nothing,” Kling said, and nodded regretfully, as if to say I know you had nothing to do with these murders, and you know you had nothing to do with them, but we have to ask these questions, you see, that’s our job. But Felicia Carr was from the motion picture capital of the universe. She had seen every cop movie ever made, every cop television show ever broadcast, and she wasn’t about to get snowed by a song-and-dance team doing a dog-and-pony act.

  “What do you mean, most likely?” she snapped. “Why do you want to know where I was on Sunday night? Is that when someone got killed?”

  “Yes, Miss,” Kling said, trying to look even more sorrowful, but the lady still wasn’t buying.

  “What is this?” she said. “Los Angeles? The LAPD Gestapo?”

  “Do you know a woman named Martha Coleridge?” Meyer asked. Bad Cop suddenly on the scene. No more smile on his face. Bald head making him look like an executioner with an ax. Arms folded across his chest in unmistakably hostile body language. Blue eyes studying her coldly. Didn’t know he was dealing with Wonder Woman here, who’d sold three houses in Westwood only two weeks ago.

  “No, who’s Martha Coleridge?” she asked. “Is she the person who got killed last Sunday? Is that it?”

  “Yes, Miss Carr.”

  “Well, I don’t know her. I never heard of her. Is that enough? I have to leave now.”

  “Few more questions,” Kling said gently. “If you can spare a minute or so.”

  Good Cop with the flaxen hair and the hazel eyes and the cheeks still glowing from the cold outside, gently and persuasively trying to lead the lady down the garden path, not taking into account that she was from Tinseltown, USA, where if people ever walked anywhere they actually waited on street corners for lights to change.

  “I don’t think you’re allowed to do this,” she said. “Barge in here and …”

  “Miss Carr, have you ever been to Texas?” Meyer asked.

  “Yes, I have. Texas? What’s Texas got to …?”

  “Houston, Texas?”

  “No. Just Dallas.”

  “Do you know anyone named Andrew Hale?”

  “No. Yes. I never met him, but I know his name. Someone mentioned it.”

  “Who mentioned it?”

  “Cynthia, I think. He was her father, wasn’t he?”

  “How did she happen to mention it?”

  “Something about underlying rights? I really can’t remember.”

  “But you say you don’t know anyone named Martha Coleridge.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Didn’t you get a letter from her recently?”

  “What?”

  “A letter. From a woman named Martha Coleridge. Explaining that she’d written a play called …”

  “Oh yes. Her. I sent it back to Norman. Are you telling me she’s the same person who got killed?”

  “Norman Zimmer?”

  “Yes. Is she the one …?”

  “Why’d you send it to him?”

  “I figured he’d know what to do about it. He’s the producer, isn’t he? What do I know about a crazy old lady who wrote a play in 1922?”

  “Excuse me,” Kling said politely. “But what do you mean you sent it back to him?”

  “Well, it was addressed to me care of his office. He had it messengered to me here. I mailed it back to him.”

  “Didn’t try to contact Miss Coleridge, did you?” Meyer asked.

  “No, why would I?”

  “Didn’t write to her, or try to phone her …”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t you find her letter at all threatening?”

  “Threatening?”

  “Yes. All that stuff about starting litigation …”

  “That has nothing to do with me.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “That’s Norman’s problem. And Connie’s. They’re the ones producing the show.”

  “But if the show got tangled up in litigation …”

  “That’s not my problem.”

  “It might not get produced,” Kling said reasonably.

  “So what?”

  “Come on, Miss Carr,” Meyer said sharply. “There’s lots of money involved here.”

  “I’ve got a good job in L.A.,” Felicia said. “It’ll be nice if Jenny’s Room happens. But if not, not. Life goes on.”

  Not if you’re Martha Coleridge, Meyer thought.

  “So can you tell us where you were Sunday night?” he asked.

  “I went to a movie with my girlfriend,” Felicia said, sighing. “The woman whose apartment this is. Shirley Lasser.”

  “What’d you see?” Kling asked casually.

  “The new Travolta film.”

  “Any good?”

  “The movie was lousy,” Felicia said. “But I like him.”

  “He’s usually very good,” Kling said.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you find him handsome?”

  “Extremely so.”

  “What time did the show go on?” Meyer asked, getting back in character.

  “Eight o’clock.”

  “What time did you get home?”

  “Around eleven.”

  “Girlfriend with you all that time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where can we reach her?”

  “She’s at work right now.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “You guys kill me,” Felicia said.

  The sky was beginning to cloud over as they headed uptown. Decked out for Christmas as she was, the city petulantly demanded snow. Store windows were decorated with fake snow, and there were fake Salvation Army Santas shaking bells in front of fake chimneys on every other street corner. But this was
already the ninth of December and Christmas Day was fast approaching. What the city needed now was a real Santa soaring over the rooftops, real snow falling gently from the sky above. What the city needed was a sign.

  “I think she was telling the truth,” Kling said.

  “I don’t,” Meyer said.

  “Where was she lying?”

  “She gets a letter threatening legal action, and she forgets the woman’s name?”

  “Well …”

  “Says she never heard of her, quote, unquote. Then all at once, comes the dawn! Oh yes, now I recall,” he said, doing a pretty fair imitation. “Martha Coleridge! She’s the one who wrote a letter that can only deprive me of early retirement.” He snapped the mobile phone from its cradle, held it out to Kling. “Call this Shirley Lasser,” he said, “tell her we’re on the way. Six to five her pal’s already been on the pipe, telling her they saw a Travolta movie together last Sunday night.”

  Kling began dialing.

  “I wonder which one it was,” he said.

  Knowing that Jamaicans slept ten, twelve to a room, Fat Ollie Weeks did not consider it beyond the realm of possibility that a Jamaican visitor from Houston, Texas, might have crashed with friends or relatives now residing in this fair city, ah yes. Further knowing that the Jamaican in question had picked up Althea Cleary in a diner in the Eight-Eight, he took a run at the precinct’s own Jamaican enclave, The Forbes Houses on Noonan and Crowe—and came up empty. Undaunted, but unwilling to do a door-to-door canvass of the city’s six other Jamaican neighborhoods, he headed for the largest of them, downtown in the Three-Two Precinct.

  Here in the old city, narrow, twisting little streets with Florida-sounding names like Lime, Hibiscus, Pelican, Manatee, and Heron ran into similarly cramped little lanes and alleys called Goedkoop, Keulen, Sprenkels, and Visser, named by the Dutch when the city was new and masted sailing ships lay in the harbor. Them days was gone forever, Gertie. Running eastward from the Straits of Napoli and Chinatown, Visser Street swerved to the north into what used to be an area of warehouses bordering the River Harb. Too far uptown to be considered Lower Platform, not far enough downtown to be a part of trendy Hopscotch, the newly erected projects here were officially called The Mapes Houses, after James Joseph Mapes, a revered former Governor of the state.

  All of the city’s projects were rated by the police department on a one-to-five scale ranging from “uncertain” to “chancy” to “risky” to “unsafe” to downright “hazardous.” The Mapes Houses were classified a middling three on the Safety Factor scale, although foot patrolmen assigned to the area considered this a conservative ranking. The cops of the Three-Two dubbed the project “Rockfort,” after a seventeenth-century moated fortress on the easternmost limits of Kingston, but perhaps that was only because eighty percent of the residents here were Jamaican.

  On Fat Ollie Weeks’s scale of personal safety, Rockfort ranked a dismal eight, which in his lexicon meant shitty, mon. He went in there alone early that Thursday afternoon, but only because it was broad daylight a few weeks before Christmas. Otherwise, he’d have requested backup and a SWAT team. Abandoning his usual swagger, which he felt might be a liability here among the Jamaican brethren, ah yes, his manner became almost obsequious as he went from door to door asking after a man some six foot-two or -three inches tall, with a fawn-colored complexion, deep brown eyes, wide shoulders, a narrow waist, a lovely grin, and a melodic Jamaican lilt to his voice. He did not mention the blue star tattooed on the suspect’s penis because many of the people he spoke to were women, and many of the men considered themselves Christians.

  He did not strike pay dirt until three that afternoon, by which time it was beginning to snow and the skies above were dark enough to cause him to consider going back uptown.

  Cynthia Keating did not seem surprised to find Carella and Brown on her doorstep yet another time. She didn’t even threaten calling her lawyer. She asked them to come in, told them they had ten minutes, and then sat opposite them, crossing her legs and folding her arms across her chest. It had begun snowing, and the window behind her was alive with wind-driven flakes.

  Carella got directly to the point.

  “A woman named Martha Coleridge,” he said, “mailed some letters to Norman Zimmer’s office, asking that they be forwarded. One of them was addressed to you, as owner of the underlying rights to Jenny’s Room. With it was a photocopy of a play Miss Coleridge herself had written. Did you ever receive that play and the accompanying letter?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  Progress, Carella thought.

  “How’d you feel about it?”

  “Concerned.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it seemed to me there were similarities between her play and Jenny’s Room.”

  “What kind of similarities?”

  “Well, the premise, to begin with. An immigrant girl comes to America and falls in love with someone of another faith while at the same time she’s falling in love with the city itself—which she finally chooses over the man. That’s identical in both plays. And the conceit. We see her love affair with the city through the window of her room, which is really a window to her heart. That’s the same, too. Reading it was … well … alarming.”

  “So what’d you do?”

  “I called Todd. He …”

  “Todd Alexander?”

  “Yes. My lawyer. He advised me to forget about it.”

  “And is that what you did?”

  She hesitated for the briefest tick of time. Carella caught the hesitation, and so did Brown. Their eyes revealed nothing, but they had caught it. Her fleeting inner debate apparently led to a decision to tell the truth.

  “No, I did not forget about it,” she said.

  But the truth inevitably led to another question.

  “What did you do instead?” Brown asked.

  Again, the slight hesitation.

  “I went to see her,” Cynthia said.

  The detectives did not know why she was telling the truth—if indeed this was the truth. The woman they were here to inquire about was dead, and anything that had transpired between her and Cynthia Keating could neither be confirmed nor contradicted. But the path of evident truth was the one Cynthia seemed to have chosen, and they thanked God for small favors and plunged ahead regardless.

  “When was this?” Carella asked.

  “The day after I received the play. I called her, and we arranged to meet.”

  “And when was that?”

  “The Thursday before Connie’s party.”

  “Where’d this meeting take place?” Brown asked.

  “Her apartment. Downtown on Sinclair.”

  “What’d you talk about?”

  “Her letter. The play. I wanted to find out exactly what she had in mind.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Her letter said she was looking for ‘appropriate compensation.’ I wanted to know what she considered appropriate.”

  “You went there expecting to deal, is that it?”

  “As I told you, I was concerned. Her play couldn’t have been a fake, she’d sent us a program with the name of the theater on it, the date the play opened, how could she have faked all that? And if she wasn’t faking, then her play was the model for Jenny’s Room. There was no question in my mind about that.”

  “So you went there to deal?”

  “To explore a deal.”

  “Even though your lawyer advised against it.”

  “Well, lawyers,” she said, and dismissed the entire legal profession with a wave of her hand.

  “What did she have in mind exactly?” Brown asked.

  “A cash settlement of one million dollars.”

  “She asked you for a million dollars?”

  “That was the total sum she wanted from all of us. The ten people she’d sent the letter to. A hundred thousand from each of us.”

  “What’d you tell her?”

  “I told her I couldn’t spea
k for the others, but that I’d give it some thought and get back to her. I had no intention of doing that. I thought her demand was absurd. Todd was right. I shouldn’t have gone there in the first place.”

  “Did she seem serious about that price?”

  “Non-negotiable, she told me. One million dollars.”

  “Did you talk to any of the others about this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “Norman Zimmer and Connie Lindstrom. They’re our producers. I should have turned it over to them from the beginning.”

  “What’d they say?”

  “Forget it. Same as Todd.”

  “How about the others who received the letter? Did you talk to any of them?”

  “No.”

  “None of the creative team?”

  “No.”

  “The other rights holders?”

  “Felicia and Gerry? No.”

  “Didn’t mention it to them at the Meet ’N’ Greet?”

  “No.”

  “Even though you’d met with Miss Coleridge just a few days earlier?”

  “I didn’t see any need to.”

  “How come?” Brown asked.

  “I told you. I’d been advised to forget about it. So I forgot about it.” She shrugged airily. “Besides, it was a party. The hell with her.”

  “What’d you expect would happen?”

  “I had no idea. If she sued, she sued. But I wasn’t about to hand her a hundred thousand dollars I didn’t even have.”

  “Ever see her again after that Thursday?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t go back to talk to her again?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t call her?”

  “No.”

  “Had no further contact with her, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Do you know she’s dead?”

  Cynthia was either stunned into silence or else was hesitating again, debating whether or not to tell the truth.

  “No,” she said at last. “I didn’t know that.”

  “It was in the papers,” Brown said.

  “I didn’t see it.”

  “On television, too,” he said.

  “So that’s why you’re here,” she said.