The Last Dance

by Ed McBain

  “I know who did it,” he said, flat out.

  Carella looked surprised.

  “Yeah, I got lucky,” Danny said, and grinned. His teeth looked bad, too. He was clearly not taking good care of himself.

  “So let me hear it,” Carella said.

  “I think this is worth at least what the killer got,” Danny said, lowering his voice.

  “And how much is that?”

  “Five grand,” Danny said.

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “You think so?” Danny said.

  Carella did not think so.

  “I’d have to clear that kind of money with the lieutenant,” he said.

  “Sure, clear it. But I don’t think this guy’s gonna hang around very long.”

  “What can I tell him?”

  “Who?”

  “My lieutenant.”

  Five thousand was a lot of money to hand over to an informer. The squadroom slush fund sometimes rose higher than that, depending on what contributions went into it in any given month. Nobody asked questions about a few bucks that disappeared during drug busts hither and yon, provided the money went into what was euphemistically called “the War Chest.” But a big drug intercept on the docks downtown had slowed traffic in the precinct these past two months, and Carella wondered now if there was that much contingency cash lying around. He further wondered if the lieutenant would turn over that kind of money to a stoolie. Danny’s information would have to be pure gold to justify such an outlay.

  “Tell him I know who did it and I know where he is,” he said. “If that ain’t worth five grand, I’m in the wrong business.”

  “How’d you get this?” Carella asked.

  “Fellow I know.”

  “How’d he get it?”

  “Straight from the horse’s mouth.”

  “Give me something I can run with.”

  “Sure,” Danny said. “Your man was in a poker game.”

  “You talking about Robert Keating?” Carella said, surprised.

  “No. Who’s Robert Keating?”

  “Then who do you mean?”

  “The guy you’re looking for,” Danny said. “He was in a poker game this past Saturday night.”

  “Okay.”

  “Who’s Robert Keating?” Danny asked again.

  “Nobody,” Carella said. “What about this game?”

  “Your man was betting big.”

  “How big?”

  “Thousand-dollar pots. Came in with a five-grand stake, worked it up to twenty before the night was through. Big winner.”

  “Is he a gambler?”

  “No, he’s a hit man who just likes to gamble.”

  “He from this city?”

  “Houston, Texas. And heading back there.”

  “When?”

  “Sometime this Wednesday. You want him, you better move fast. Funny about Houston, ain’t it?”

  Carella did not think there was anything funny about Houston.

  “It must drive foreigners crazy,” Danny said. “The way words are spelled the same, but pronounced different. In English, I mean.”

  “How does this guy spell his name?” Carella asked, fishing.

  “Ho ho,” Danny said. “There’s a street in New York, you know, it’s spelled exactly the same as the city in Texas, but it’s pronounced House-ton Street. Instead, we say Youse-ton, Texas, after Sam Youse-ton, is the way he pronounced his name. Which is peculiar, don’t you think?”

  “How does this hit man pronounce his name?”

  “Ho, ho, ho,” Danny said, and shook his finger.

  “Who hired him?” Carella said. “Can you tell me that?”

  “I don’t know who hired him.”

  “Why was the old man killed?”

  “Somebody wanted what he had and he wouldn’t turn it over. So they took him out of the picture.”

  “They?”

  “Whoever.”

  “More than one person?”

  “I don’t know that for sure.”

  “You said ‘they.’”

  “Just an expression. All I know is the only way to get what they wanted was to have him dusted.”

  “The old man didn’t have a pot to piss in, Danny.”

  “I’m telling you what I heard.”

  “From who?”

  “My friend. Who got it straight from the hitter.”

  “He told your friend he killed somebody?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “But he told him enough.”

  “Like what?”

  “Drunk talk. Suppose this, suppose that.”

  “Suppose what, Danny?”

  “Okay, suppose there’s this old fart got something somebody else wants real bad and he won’t part with it? And suppose this something is worth a lotta money? And suppose …”

  “This is our man talking?”

  “This is him. Suppose somebody’s willing to pay a person five large to get rid of the old man and make it look like an accident? And suppose …”

  “Did he use that word? Accident?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And the price was five grand?”

  “The same five he brought into the poker game.”

  “When did he tell your friend all this?”

  “Saturday night. After the game. They went back to his hotel room, had a few drinks, smoked a few joints.”

  “Who supplied them?”

  “The drinks?”

  “The drinks, the pot.”

  “The hitter. It was his party. I gotta tell you something, Steve. When a guy makes a big score, and then he quadruples it in a card game, he wants to talk about it, you dig? He’s proud of it. That’s the way these guys’ minds work. They want to tell you how great they are. My friend lost his shirt in that game Saturday night. Well, winners like to shit all over losers. So your hitter took pity on my friend, asked him to share a bottle and a couple of joints with him so he could tell him how fuckin terrific he is, gettin five grand to dust an old fart.”

  “But he didn’t tell him that.”

  “The five grand, yes. The actual dusting, no.”

  “Then you’ve got nothing to sell.”

  “Oh, I’ve got plenty to sell. Remember what you told me on the phone? You asked did I hear anything on this old man got doped with R2 before somebody hung him in the closet. That ain’t the kind of detail a person forgets, Steve. Well, before my friend left the hotel room—I think they had sex, by the way. My friend and the hitter. He’s gay, my friend. Anyway, the hitter handed him a little present. A gift for the loser, you know? A consolation prize. Said it’d help his sex life. Grinning, right? It’ll help your sex life, Harpo, give it a try. That’s my friend’s name, Harpo. So Harpo figured the guy was laying a Viagra cap on him. But instead, it was this.” Danny reached into his coat pocket. He opened his hand. A blister-pack strip of white tablets was on the palm, the word Roche echoing over and over again across its face. “Roach,” Danny said. “Same as your hangman used.”

  “Who gave you that?”

  “Harpo.”

  “Harpo what?”

  “Marx,” Danny said, and grinned like a barracuda.

  “Let me get this straight.”

  “Sure.”

  “Poker game Saturday night …”

  “Right. On Lewiston Avenue.”

  “Guy who killed Andrew Hale comes into the game with five grand, leaves it with twenty. Invites your friend Harpo up for a drink, some pot, a little sex, starts boasting about the hit, lays a strip of roach on him before they part company.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “And you say the hitter’s leaving town the day after tomorrow?”

  “From what I understand.”

  “This isn’t any high-pressured bullshit, is it, Danny?”

  “Me? High-pressured?”

  “I mean, he really is going back to Houston this Wednesday?”

  “
Is what Harpo told me.”

  “And he also told you the guy’s name …”

  “He did.”

  “… and where he’s staying.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Out of the goodness of his heart.”

  “He’s a friend. Also, I’ll probably pass a little something on to him if your lieutenant comes through.”

  “I’ll have to get back to you on this,” Carella said.

  “Sure, take your time,” Danny said. “You got till Wednesday.”

  “I’ll let you know,” Carella said, and started to move out of the booth, suddenly remembering how cold it was outside on this eighth day of November. You got to be forty, and suddenly it was cold out there. He was sliding across the leatherette seat, swinging his legs out, starting to rise, Danny doing the same thing on the other side of the table, when the first shot pierced the din of the abnormally crowded room, silencing it in an instant. Even before the second shot sounded, people were diving under tables. It took a moment for Carella to spot the two gunmen advancing swiftly toward the booth, one black, one white, equal opportunity employment. It took another moment for him to realize Danny Gimp was their target.

  His coat was already unbuttoned, he reached across his waist for a cross-body draw, the nine-millimeter Glock snapping out of its holster with a spring-assisted click. There were more shots. Someone screamed. Danny was scrambling across the floor on his hands and knees, trailing blood. A man running for the entrance doors knocked over one of the serving counters, and pizza toppings spilled all over the floor, tomato sauce running into anchovies and mushrooms and grated cheese and slippery slices of pepperoni. Carella upended a table, and ducked behind it. There was more screaming, two more shots very close by, footsteps pounding. He raised his head in time to see the gunmen running toward the front of the place, leaped to his feet, began chasing after them. There was still too much background for him to risk firing. He followed them out into the street, thought he had a clear shot, but they turned the corner in that instant and were gone.

  Shit, he thought.

  The last two shots Carella heard had been fired at close range into Danny’s head. The shot near his cheek was fired with the muzzle of the gun almost touching the skin; there was a cluster of soot on the flesh but hardly any gunpowder around the wound itself. The shot closer to Danny’s chin was fired from a few inches away; gunpowder particles were diffused over a two-inch diameter and the wound was encircled by a small area of soot. Danny was already dead when Carella knelt beside him.

  A patrolman pounded into the pizzeria with his gun drawn, scaring the patrons even further, yelling “Stand back, everybody keep back,” like an extra in an action-adventure movie. Tables and chairs had been overturned in the mad rush that virtually cleared the place of customers. But many of the patrons still lingered, either curious to see what a bleeding body looked like close up, or else hoping to wave to the television cameras if and when they got here. There was nothing jackasses liked better than to grin and wave at the camera while tragedy was unfolding in the foreground.

  “I’m on the job,” Carella told the patrolman. “Get an ambulance here.”

  A second patrolman entered the place now, his gun also drawn, his eyes wide, his face pale. He had never seen a dead body before except for that time in a funeral home when his uncle Pete died of sclerosis of the liver. The first patrolman, similarly inexperienced, was already on his mobile phone, telling Sergeant Murchison at the Eight-Seven that there’d been a shoot-out in the pizzeria on Culver and Sixth, Guido’s, the place was called. “There’s one person down, better send a meat wagon,” he actually called it, causing Murchison to wince.

  The television cameras arrived some five minutes before either the ambulance or a second car from adjoining Charlie Sector angled into the curb. A woman wearing a fake fur that looked fake told the roving reporter that all at once these two big guys came in and started shooting at the man lying on the floor over there, at which point the camera operator panned over to where Danny was lying in an ocean of slippery pizza toppings, blood and tomato sauce mingling to create an op-art camera op. The second patrolman told everybody to keep back; he was wondering if he should put up some of those yellow CRIME SCENE tapes he had in the trunk of the patrol car. Two teenagers wearing woolen watch caps, ski parkas, and baggy pants tried to position themselves behind the victim so they could grin and wave at the camera, but they were too late. The camera operator had already turned to the entrance door, where a pair of detectives from the Eight-Seven were walking in looking very official and busy, shields pinned to their overcoats, faces raw from the biting cold outside. Behind them, an ambulance was pulling in, which made for another good shot, the detectives with long strides and flapping overcoats, the flashing red lights on the ambulance, this was the camera operator’s lucky day.

  Arthur Brown, one of the responding detectives, would later tell everyone in the squadroom that even before Carella informed him, he knew the guy laying on the floor there was dead. The detective with Brown was Bert Kling. The minute he spotted Carella, he went over to him and asked, “What happened?”

  “Two hitters nailed Danny Gimp,” Carella said, and got to his feet, his coat sleeve stained with blood from Danny’s wounds, the knees of his trousers soiled from all the pizza shit on the floor.

  They all stood around while the stretchers came in.

  The paramedics realized at once that there wasn’t any urgency about getting Danny aboard.

  3

  SINCE THERE were two homicides on the table this Tuesday morning—an unusual circumstance, even for the Eight-Seven—Lieutenant Byrnes told the detectives assembled in his office that he’d be skipping over all the usual shit and getting directly to the murders, if nobody had any objections. Andy Parker didn’t think the murder of a two-bit stool pigeon should take priority over a drug bust he’d been trying to set up for the past two weeks, but he knew better than to challenge the lieutenant when he was wearing what Parker referred to privately as his “Irish Look.”

  Hal Willis wasn’t too tickled to be passed over, either. He’d caught a burglary yesterday where the perp had left chocolate-covered donuts on his victim’s pillow. This looked a lot like what the Cookie Boy used to do, but he’d jumped bail in August and was now only God knew where. So this guy was obviously a copycat, which similarity might have made for a little early morning amusement if the lieutenant hadn’t pulled the chain. Like teenagers invited to a party and then requested not to dance, please, the two detectives slouched sourly against the wall, arms folded across their chests in unmistakable body language. They didn’t even sniff at the bagels and coffee on the lieutenant’s desk, a treat—or more accurately a bribe to encourage punctuality—paid for by the squadroom slush fund every Tuesday.

  This was eight o’clock in the morning. A harsh, bright sunlight streamed through Byrnes’s corner windows. All told, and including the lieutenant, there were eight detectives in the office. Artie Brown and Bert Kling had responded to the pizzeria shoot-out and were looking for anything they could get on the two shooters. Carella and Meyer wanted to explore the Hale case. The two detectives sulking against the wall didn’t care to offer their thoughts on anything. They’d been shut out, and they were miffed, although Byrnes seemed blithely unaware of their annoyance. Cotton Hawes was neutral. His plate was clean at the moment. In fact, he’d been in court testifying all last week. Sitting in a leather easy chair opposite the lieutenant’s desk, feeling curiously uninvolved, like a cop visiting from another city, he listened as the lieutenant summarized the two homicide cases, and then asked, “You think they’re linked?”

  “Maybe,” Carella said.

  “Meyer?” Byrnes asked.

  “Only if they were trying to shut Danny up.”

  “You sure they weren’t after Steve?”

  “No, it was Danny,” Kling said.

  “Neither of them even fired a shot at me.”

  “Ten, twelve people s
aw them go straight for Danny,” Brown said.

  “They’d seen a lot of movies.”

  “Kept describing it as a gangland execution.”

  “In broad daylight?” Hawes asked, and shook his head skeptically. He was sitting in sunlight. It caught his red hair, setting it on fire. The single white streak over his left temple looked like a patch of melting snow.

  “Nobody says your goons are brain surgeons.”

  “Black and white, huh?”

  “And red all over.”

  “Could’ve been an old beef,” Hawes suggested. “Finally caught up with him.”

  “Be a coincidence, the day he’s meeting with Steve. But I buy coincidence,” Byrnes said. “I’ve been a cop long enough.”

  “Coulda been they wanted him before he told Steve whatever it was he had to tell him,” Brown said. He was straddling a wooden chair near the bookcases, a huge man with skin the color of a giant grizzly’s coat. His shirt collar was open, and he was wearing over it a green sweater. His arms were resting on the chair’s top rail.

  “Did he tell you anything?” Kling asked. “Before they got him?”

  “Not really. He wanted to get paid first.”

  “Gee, there’s a surprise.”

  “How much was he looking for?” Hawes asked.

  “Five grand.”

  Hawes whistled.

  “What’d he promise?” Willis asked, giving in at last to his curiosity. He was the shortest man on the squad, wiry and intense, dark eyes reflecting the day’s cold light. Parker turned to him with a sharp look, as if his best friend in the entire world had suddenly moved to Anniston, Alabama, to wallow in pig shit.

  “He said he knew the name and address of the guy who did Hale,” Carella said.

  “Where’d he get that?” Willis asked, totally involved now. Parker stepped a little bit away from him.

  “Pal of his was in a poker game with the hitter.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Hawes said. “Danny was in a poker game with the hitter?”