The Last Dance

by Ed McBain

  “Around nine o’clock.”

  All three detectives are thinking he was still alive at nine last night. Whatever happened to him, it happened sometime after nine P.M.

  Her father’s apartment is a forty-minute subway ride from where she lives across the river in Calm’s Point. Her husband usually leaves for work at seven-thirty. Their habit is to have breakfast together in their apartment overlooking the river. After he’s gone, she gets ready for her own day. They have no children, but neither does she work, perhaps because she never really trained for anything, and at thirty-seven there’s nothing productive she can really do. Besides—

  She has never mentioned this to a soul before but she tells it now in the cramped confines of the interrogation room, three detectives sitting attentively stone-faced on one side of the table, her husband and her attorney sitting equally detached on the other. She doesn’t know why she admits this to these men now, here in this confessional chamber, at this moment in time, but she tells them without hesitation that she never thought of herself as being particularly bright, just an average girl (she uses the word “girl”) in every way, not too pretty, not too smart, just, well … Cynthia. And shrugs.

  Cynthia is not one of the Ladies Who Lunch, but she nonetheless busies herself mindlessly throughout the day, shopping, going to galleries or museums, sometimes catching an afternoon movie, generally killing the time between seven-thirty A.M. when her husband leaves for work and seven-thirty at night, when he gets home. “He’s in corporate law,” she says, as if this completely explains his twelve-hour day. She is grateful, in fact, for the opportunity to visit her father. It gives her something to do.

  She does not, in all truth, enjoy her father’s company very much. She confesses this, too, to the pickup jury of five men who sit noncommittally around the long table scarred with the cigarette burns of too many long interrogations over too many long years. It is almost as if she has been wishing to confess forever. She has not yet said a word about Tampering or Obstructing, but she seems willing to confess to everything else she has ever done or felt. It suddenly occurs to Carella that she is a woman who has nobody to talk to. For the first time in her life, Cynthia Keating has an audience. And the audience is giving her its undivided attention.

  “He’s a bore,” she tells them. “My father. He was a bore when he was young, and now that he’s old, he’s an even bigger bore. Well, he used to be a nurse, is that an occupation for a man? Now that he’s retired, all he can talk about is this or that patient he remembers when he worked at ‘The Hospital.’ I don’t think he even remembers which hospital it was. It’s just ‘The Hospital.’ This or that happened at ‘The Hospital.’ It’s all he ever talks about.”

  The detectives notice that she is still referring to her father in the present tense, but this is not uncommon, and does not register as anything significant. They are patiently waiting for her to get to Tampering and Obstruction. That is why they are here. They want to know what happened in that apartment between nine o’clock last night and ten-oh-seven this morning, when she dialed 911.

  She has dressed for today’s weather in a green tweed skirt and turtleneck sweater she bought at the Gap. Low-heeled walking shoes and pantyhose to match the skirt. She likes walking. The forecasters have promised rain for later today …

  It is, in fact, still raining as she continues her recitation, but none of the people in the windowless room know or care about what’s happening outside …

  … and so she is carrying a folding umbrella in a tote bag slung over her shoulder. The subway station isn’t far from her apartment. She boards the train at about twenty to nine, and is across the river and in the city forty minutes later. It is only a short walk to her father’s building. She enters it at about nine-thirty. She remembers seeing the super putting out his garbage cans. Her father lives on the third floor. It is not an elevator building, he can’t afford that sort of luxury. His wonderful days at “The Hospital” left him precious little when he retired. As she climbs the stairs, the cooking smells in the hallway make her feel a bit nauseous. She pauses for breath on the third-floor landing, and then walks to apartment 3A and knocks. There is no answer. She looks at her watch. Nine thirty-five. She knocks again.

  The things he does often cause her to become impatient at best or exasperated at worst. He knows she is coming here this morning, she told him last night that she’d be here. Is it possible he forgot? Has he gone out somewhere for breakfast? Or is he simply in the shower? She has a key to the apartment, which he gave to her after the last heart attack, when he became truly frightened he might die alone and lie moldering for days before anyone discovered his corpse. She rarely uses the key, hardly knows what it looks like, but she fishes in her bag among the other detritus there, and at last finds it in a small black leather purse that also contains the key to his safe deposit box, further insurance against a surprise heart attack.

  She slips the key into the keyway, turns it. In the silence of the morning hallway—most people off to work already, except the woman somewhere down the hall cooking something revoltingly vile-smelling—Cynthia hears the small oiled click of the tumblers falling. She turns the knob, and pushes the door open. Retrieving her key, she puts it back into the black leather purse, enters the apartment …

  “Dad?”

  … and closes the door behind her.

  Silence.

  “Dad?” she calls again.

  There is not a sound in the apartment.

  The quiet is an odd one. It is not the expectant stillness of an apartment temporarily vacant but awaiting imminent return. It is, instead, an almost reverential hush, a solemn silence attesting to permanency. There is something so complete to the stillness here, something so absolute that it is at once frightening and somehow exciting. Something dread lies in wait here. Something terrifying is in these rooms. The silence signals dire expectation and sends a prickling shiver of anticipation over her skin. She almost turns and leaves. She is on the edge of leaving.

  “I wish I had,” she says now.

  Her father is hanging on the inside of the bathroom door. The door is opened into the bedroom, and his hanging figure is the first thing she sees when she enters the room. She does not scream. Instead, she backs away and collides with the wall, and then turns and starts to leave again, actually steps out of the bedroom and into the corridor beyond, but the mute figure hanging there calls her back, and she steps into the bedroom again, and moves across the room toward the figure hanging on the inside of the bathroom door, a step at a time, stopping before each step to catch her breath and recapture her courage, looking up at the man hanging there and then looking down again to take another step, watching her inching feet, moving closer and closer to the door and the grotesque figure hanging there.

  There is something blue wrapped around his neck. His head is tilted to one side, as if it had dropped that way when he fell asleep. The hook is close to the top of the door, and the blue—scarf, is it? a tie?—is looped over the hook so that her father’s toes are an inch or so off the floor. She notices that he is barefoot and that his feet are blue, a blue darker and more purplish than the fabric knotted around his throat. His hands are blue as well, the same dark purplish-blue that resembles an angry bruise all over the palms and the fingers and the backs of the hands, open as if in supplication. He is wearing a white shirt and gray flannel trousers. His tongue is protruding from his mouth. It appears almost black.

  She steps up close to his body hanging there.

  She looks up into his face.

  “Dad?” she says, disbelievingly, expecting him to stick his tongue out farther, perhaps make a razzing sound, break into a grin, she doesn’t know what, something, anything that will tell her he’s playing a game, the way he used to play games with her when she was a little girl, before he got old … and boring … and dead. Dead, yes. He does not move. He is dead. He is really and truly dead and he will never grin at her again. She stares into his wide-open eyes, as
green as her own, but flecked with pinpricks of blood, her own eyes squinched almost shut, her face contorted not in pain, she feels no pain, she doesn’t even feel any sense of loss or abandonment, she has not known this man for too long a time now. She feels only horror and shock, and anger, yes, inexplicable anger, sudden and fierce, why did he do this, why didn’t he call somebody, what the fuck is the matter with him?

  “I never use such language,” she tells the five men listening to her, and the room goes silent again.

  The police, she thinks. I have to call the police. A man has hanged himself, my father has hanged himself, I have to notify the police. She looks around the room. The phone. Where’s the phone? He should have a phone by the bed, he has a heart problem, a phone should always be within—

  She spots the phone, not alongside the bed but across the room on the dresser, would it have cost him a fortune to install another jack? Her mind is whirling with things she will have to do now, unexpected tasks to perform. She will have to call her husband first, “Bob, honey, my father’s dead,” they will have to make funeral arrangements, buy a casket, notify all his friends, who the hell are his friends? Her mother, too, she’ll have to call her, divorced five years, she’ll say, “Good, I’m glad!” But first the police, she is sure the police have to be notified in a suicide, she has read someplace or seen someplace that you have to call the police when you find your father hanging from a hook with his tongue sticking out. She is suddenly laughing hysterically. She covers her mouth with her hand, and looks over it like a child, and listens wide-eyed, fearful that someone will come in and find her with a dead man.

  She waits several moments, her heart beating wildly in her chest, and then she walks to the telephone and is about to dial 911 when something occurs to her. Something just pops into her mind unbidden. She remembers the key to the safe deposit box in the little black leather purse, and she remembers her father telling her that among other things like his silver high school track medal there is an insurance policy in that box. It isn’t much, her father told her, but you and Bob are the beneficiaries, so don’t forget it’s there. She also remembers hearing somewhere, or reading somewhere, or seeing somewhere on television or in the movies—there is so much information out there today—but anyway learning somewhere that if somebody kills himself the insurance company won’t pay on his life-insurance policy.

  She doesn’t know if this is true or not, but suppose it is? Neither does she know how much he’s insured himself for, it probably isn’t a great deal, he never did have any real money to speak of. But say the policy’s for a hundred thousand dollars, or even fifty or twenty or ten, who cares? Should the insurance company get to keep all those premiums he’s paid over the years simply because something was troubling him so much—what the hell was troubling you, Dad?—that he had to hang himself? She does not think that is fair. She definitely does not think that is fair.

  On the other hand …

  Suppose …

  Just suppose …

  Just suppose he died in his sleep of a heart attack or something? Just suppose whoever it is who has to write a death certificate finds him dead in bed of natural causes? Then there’d be no problem with the insurance company, and she and Bob would be able to collect on however much the policy is for. She thinks about this for a moment. She is amazingly calm. She has grown used to the silence of the apartment, her father hanging there still and lifeless. She looks at her watch. It is a quarter to ten. Has she been in the apartment for only ten minutes or so? Has it been that short a time? It seems an eternity.

  She is thinking she will have to take him down and carry him to the bed.

  She moves up close to the body again. Looks into his dead green eyes, studies the pores on his face, the pinprick points of blood, the ugly protruding tongue, summoning the courage she needs to touch him, thinking if she can stand this close to death without vomiting or soiling herself, then surely she will be able to touch him, move him.

  The fabric around his neck looks like the belt from a robe. She sees that her father knotted the ends so that it formed a loop and then slipped the loop over his head and around his neck. He must have used a stool or something to climb onto when he put the loop over the hook, and then he must have kicked the stool away in order to suspend himself. But where’s the stool? Or did he use something else? She can’t worry about that just now. However he did it, he did it, and unless she can take him down and carry him to the bed, she and her husband will lose out on the insurance, it’s as simple as that.

  She does not in these next few moments even once consider the fact that she is doing something that will later enable her to commit insurance fraud, she does not for an instant believe she is breaking the law. She is merely correcting an oversight, her father’s stupidity in not realizing that committing suicide might negate the terms of the insurance policy, if what she heard is true. She’s sure it must be true, otherwise how could she have heard about it?

  Well, she thinks, let’s do it.

  The first touch of him—his face against hers as she hunches one shoulder under his arm and with her free hand hoists the belt off the hook—is cold and repulsive. She feels her flesh puckering, and almost drops him in that instant, but clings tight in a macabre dance, half-dragging, half-carrying him to the bed where she plunks him down at once, his back and buttocks on the bed, his legs and feet trailing. She backs away in revulsion. She is breathing hard. He was heavier than she expected he would be. The belt is still looped around his neck like a wide blue necklace that matches his grotesque blue hands and feet. She puts one hand behind his head, feels again the clammy coldness of his flesh, lifts the head, and pulls the belt free. She unfastens the knot, and then carries the belt to the easy chair across the room, over which the matching blue robe is draped. She debates pulling the belt through the loops on the robe, starts to do that, her hands trembling now, loses patience with the task, and simply drops it on the floor, alongside his shoes and socks.

  She looks at her watch again.

  It is almost ten o’clock.

  Somewhere a church bell begins tolling the hour.

  The sound brings back a poignant memory she can’t quite recall. A Sunday sometime long ago? A picnic preparation? A little girl in a flowered sunsuit? She stands listening to the tolling of the bell. The sound almost causes her to weep. She continues standing stock still in the silent apartment, the church bell tolling in the distance. And at last the bell stops. She sighs heavily, and goes back to the bed again.

  Her father is lying crosswise on it, just the way she dropped him, on his back, his legs bent at the knees and trailing to the floor. She goes to him and lifts the legs, turning the body so that he is lying properly now, his head on the pillow, his feet almost touching the footboard. She frees the blanket from beneath him, draws it down to the foot of the bed. She knows it will appear odd that he is in bed with his clothes on, knows a safer pretense would be to disrobe him before pulling the blanket up over his chest. But she has never seen her father naked in her lifetime, and the prospect of undressing him, the horrible thought of seeing his naked body cold and blue and shriveled and dead is so chilling that she takes an involuntary step backward, shaking her head, as if refusing even to consider such an act. The horror, she thinks. The horror. And pulls the blanket up over him, to just beneath his chin, hiding all but his face from view.

  She goes to the phone then, and dials 911, and calmly tells the operator that she’s just found her father dead in bed and asks her to please send someone.

  “The girl was in shock,” Alexander said. “She didn’t know what she was doing.”

  “She just told us she was planning insurance fraud,” Carella said.

  “No, she didn’t say that at all. She doesn’t even know what the policy says. Is there really a suicide exclusion clause in that policy? Who knows? All she knows is that there’s a policy in her father’s safe deposit box. What kind of policy, in what amount, she doesn’t know. So how can you
say she was planning insurance fraud?”

  “Well, gee, Counselor,” Carella said, “when someone tries to make a suicide look like a natural death …”

  “She didn’t want the world to believe her father killed himself,” Alexander said.

  “Bullshit,” Lieutenant Byrnes said.

  One of the female officers had taken Cynthia Keating down the hall to the ladies’ room. The three detectives were still sitting at the long table in the interrogation room. Alexander was standing now, facing them, pleading his case as if he were facing a jury. The detectives looked as if they might be playing poker, which perhaps they were. Carella had taken the lead here, questioning the Keating woman, eliciting from her what amounted to a confession to at least two crimes, and perhaps a third: Attempted Insurance Fraud. He looked a bit weary after almost twelve hours on the job. Meyer sat beside him like a man holding a royal flush in spades, wearing on his face a look of supreme confidence. The lady had told them all they needed to know. Alexander could do his little dance from here to Honduras, but he couldn’t tap his way out of this one. Sitting with cards like these, Meyer knew the lieutenant would tell them to book her on all three counts.

  “You really want to send that girl to jail?” Alexander asked.

  Which was a good question.

  Did they?

  She may have been contemplating insurance fraud while committing certain criminal acts in order to establish a later claim, but until she actually submitted the claim, she hadn’t actually committed the fraud, had she? So was what she’d done really too terribly harmful to society? Did they really want to send her to prison with ladies who had cut up their babies and dropped them down the sewer? Did they really want to send a nice Calm’s Point housewife to a place where she’d be forced to perform sexual acts upon hardened female criminals who’d murdered liquor store owners or garage attendants? Was that what they really wanted?

  It was a good question.