The Last Dance

by Ed McBain

  “No, no,” Meyer said. “A friend of Danny’s was in the game.”

  “With the guy who hung Hale from the bathroom door?”

  “Hanged him, yeah.”

  “Yeah, him?”

  “The very.”

  “What is this, a movie?” Willis asked.

  “I wish,” Carella said.

  “I’da paid him on the spot,” Parker said suddenly, and then realized with a start that he’d broken his own sullen silence. Everyone turned to him, surprised by the vehemence in his voice, surprised, too, that he’d bothered to shave this morning. “That kind of information,” he said, plunging ahead, “I’da asked him to wait while I went to rob a bank.”

  “I should’ve,” Carella said.

  “Who’s this pal of his?” Kling asked. He was wearing this morning a brown leather jacket that looked like it had come from Oklahoma or Wyoming, but which he’d bought off a pushcart at a street fair this summer. Blond and hazel-eyed, with a complexion and lashes most women would kill for, he projected a country bumpkin air that worked well in Good Cop/Bad Cop scenarios. He was particularly well-paired with Brown, whose perpetual scowl could sometimes be intimidating. “Did Danny give you a clue?”

  “Somebody named Harpo.”

  “It is a movie,” Willis said.

  “Harpo what?”

  “Didn’t say.”

  “He’s gay,” Meyer offered.

  “White, black?”

  “Didn’t say.”

  “Where’d the card game take place?”

  “Lewiston Av.”

  “The Eight-Eight.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Probably black,” Parker said. “The Eight-Eight.”

  Brown looked at him.

  “What?” Parker said. “Did I say something bothered you?”

  “I don’t know what you said.”

  “I said a card game in the Eight-Eight, you automatically figure black players,” Parker said, and shrugged. “Anyway, fuck you, you’re so sensitive.”

  “What’d I do, look at you?” Brown asked.

  “You looked at me cockeyed.”

  “Break it up, okay?” Byrnes said.

  “Just don’t be so fuckin sensitive,” Parker said. “Everybody in the world ain’t out to shoot you a hundred and twelve times.”

  “Hey!” Byrnes said. “Did you hear me, or what?”

  “I heard you. He’s too fuckin sensitive.”

  “One more time, Andy,” Brown said.

  “Hey!” Byrnes shouted.

  “All I’m sayin,” Parker said, “is if this was a black card game, then Danny’s friend Harpo, and the guy who hanged Hale, could both be black, is all I’m sayin.”

  “Point taken,” Brown said.

  “Boy,” Parker said, and rolled his eyes.

  “We finished here?” Byrnes asked.

  “If we’re finished,” Parker said, “I’d like to talk about settin up a bust on a …”

  “I meant are you two finished with this bullshit here?”

  “What bullshit?” Parker asked.

  “Let it go, Pete,” Brown said.

  Byrnes glared at both of them. The room was silent for several moments. Hawes cleared his throat.

  “It’s possible, you know,” he said, “that one of the two shooters in the pizzeria was the guy who also did Hale.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “He finds out Harpo told Danny about him, figures he’ll take Danny off the board before he spreads the word. That’s possible, too, you know.”

  “A hangman suddenly becomes a shooter?” Parker said.

  “It’s possible.”

  “There’s a twenty-five-grand policy, huh?” Willis said.

  “Daughter and son-in-law the sole beneficiaries,” Carella said.

  “They know about it?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “They’re alibied to the hilt,” Meyer said.

  “So you’re figuring a contract job.”

  “Is what Danny said it was. He said the killer got five grand to do the old man.”

  “Were those his exact words?” Byrnes asked.

  “No, he said the old man had something somebody else wanted real bad and he wouldn’t part with it. Something worth a lot of money.”

  “What’d he say about having him killed?”

  “He said somebody was willing to pay five grand to kill the old man and make it look like an accident.”

  “But why?” Willis asked.

  “What do you mean why?”

  “You said the old man had something somebody else wanted …”

  “Right.”

  “So how’s this somebody gonna get it if he has the old man killed?”

  The detectives fell silent, thinking this over.

  “Had to be the insurance money,” Hawes said at last.

  “Only thing anyone could get by having him killed.”

  “Which leads right back to the daughter and son-in-law.”

  “Unless there’s something else,” Carella said.

  “Like what?”

  “Was the guy tortured?” Hawes asked.

  “No.”

  “Cause maybe the killer was trying to get whatever it was, and when he couldn’t …”

  “No, he wasn’t tortured,” Meyer said. “The killer doped him and hanged him. Period.”

  “Smoked some pot with him, dropped roofers in his drink …”

  “Which is what the guy in the card game offered Harpo.”

  “Did these two guys know each other?” Parker asked.

  “They met in the card game.”

  “Not them two. I’m talking about the old man and the guy who killed him.”

  Again, the room went silent. They were all looking at Parker now. Sometimes a great notion.

  “I mean, were they buddies or something? Cause otherwise, how’d he get in the apartment? And how come they were smoking pot together and drinking together? They had to know each other, am I right?”

  “I don’t see how,” Carella said. “Danny told me the killer was a hit man from Houston. Going back there tomorrow.”

  “Told you everything but what you wanted to know, right?”

  “Did the old man ever go to Houston?” Byrnes asked.

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “Not much. Not yet.”

  “Find out. And soon.”

  “Did he leave a will?” Hawes asked.

  “Left everything he had to the kids.”

  “Which was what?”

  “Bupkes,” Meyer said.

  “What’s that?” Parker asked.

  “Rabbit shit.”

  “So then what’s this something somebody wanted bad enough to kill for?”

  “The MacGuffin,” Hawes said.

  “I told you,” Willis said. “It’s a fuckin movie.”

  “Movie, my ass,” Byrnes said. “Get some composites made from the witnesses in that pizza joint. Let’s at least find two guys who came in blazing in broad daylight, can we? And find out where that poker game took place. There has to be …”

  “On Lewiston,” Carella said. “Up in the …”

  “Where on Lewiston? Our man’s leaving town tomorrow.”

  The room went silent.

  “I want you to treat this like a single case with Danny as the connecting link,” Byrnes said. “One of the guys in that poker game knew Danny, and another one may have killed Hale. Let’s find out who was in the damn game. And find out who that old man really was. He didn’t exist in a vacuum. Nobody does. If he had something somebody wanted, find out what the hell it was. If it was just the insurance policy, then stay with the Keatings till you nail them. I want the four of you who caught the squeals to work this as a team. Split the legwork however you like. But bring me something.”

  Carella nodded.

  “Meyer?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Artie? Bert?”

>   “We hear you.”

  “Then do it,” Byrnes said.

  “What about my dope bust?” Parker asked.

  “Stay,” Byrnes said, as if he were talking to a pit bull.

  There were several training exercises at the academy, each designed to illustrate the unreliability of eye witnesses. Each of them involved a variation on the same theme. During a class lecture, someone would come into the room, interrupting the class, and then go out again. The cops-in-training would later be asked to describe the person who’d entered and departed. In one exercise, the intruder was merely someone who went to one of the windows, opened it, and walked out again. In another, it was a woman who came in with a mop and a pail, quickly mopped a small patch of floor, and went out again just as quickly. In a more vivid exercise, a man came in firing a pistol, and then rushed out at once. In none of these exercises was the intruder accurately described afterward.

  Brown, Kling, and the police artist interviewed fourteen people that Tuesday morning. Only one of them—Steve Carella—was a trained observer, but even he had difficulty describing the two shooters who’d marched into the pizzeria at ten minutes past nine the day before. Of all the witnesses who’d been there at the time, only two blacks and four whites remembered anything at all about the men. The white witnesses found it hard to say what the black shooter had looked like. If they’d been asked to tell the difference between Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Eddie Murphy, and Mike Tyson, there’d have been no problem. Maybe. But when the police artist asked them to choose from representative eyes, noses, mouths, cheeks, chins, and foreheads, all at once all black men looked alike. Then again, they might have had similar difficulty describing an Asian suspect.

  In the long run—like many other decisions in America—the result was premised on race. The blacks had better luck describing the black suspect, and the whites had better luck with the white one. The detectives were less than satisfied with what the artist finally delivered. They felt the composite sketches were … well … sketchy at best.

  When Carella and Meyer walked in late that Tuesday morning, Fat Ollie Weeks was sitting alone in a booth at the rear of the diner, totally absorbed in his breakfast. Acknowledging their presence with a brief nod, Ollie stabbed a sausage with his fork and hoisted it immediately to his mouth. A ribbon of egg yolk dribbled from the sausage onto Ollie’s tie, where it joined a medley of other crusted and hardened remnants of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners devoured in haste. Ollie always ate as if expecting an imminent famine. He picked up his cup, swallowed a huge gulp of coffee, and then smiled in satisfaction and at last looked across the table at the two visiting cops. He did not offer his hand; cops rarely shook hands with each other, even during social encounters.

  “So what brings you up here?” he asked.

  “The murder yesterday,” Carella said.

  “What murder?” Ollie asked. Here in Zimbabwe West, as he often referred to his beloved Eighty-eighth Precinct, there were murders every day of the week, every minute of the day.

  “An informer named Danny Gimp,” Carella said.

  “I know him,” Ollie said.

  “Two shooters marched into Guido’s Pizzeria while we were having a conversation,” Carella said.

  “Maybe they were after you,” Ollie suggested.

  “No, I’m universally well-liked,” Carella said. “They were after Danny, and they got him.”

  “Where’s Guido’s?”

  “Culver and Sixth.”

  “That’s your turf, man.”

  “Lewiston isn’t.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite.”

  “A pal of Danny’s was in a poker game a week ago Saturday,” Meyer said. “On Lewiston Avenue.”

  “Met a hitter from Houston who later treated him to a little booze, a little pot, some casual sex, and a strip of roofers.”

  “Uh-huh,” Ollie said, and signaled to the waitress. “So what’s that got to do with me?”

  “Lewiston is up here in the Eight-Eight.”

  “So? I’m supposed to know every shitty little card game in the precinct?” Ollie said. “Give me another toasted onion bagel with cream cheese,” he told the waitress. “You guys want anything?”

  “Just coffee,” Meyer said.

  “The same,” Carella said.

  “You got that?” Ollie asked the waitress, who nodded and walked off toward the counter. “You think this card game’s gonna lead you to the shooters?”

  “No, we think it’s gonna lead us to the hitter from Houston.”

  “World’s just full of hitters these days, ain’t it?” Ollie said philosophically. “You think your Houston hitter and the two pizzeria shooters are connected?”

  “No.”

  “Then what are you …?”

  “Don’t you work in the Eight-Three?” the waitress asked, and put down Ollie’s bagel and the two coffees.

  “I used to work in the Eight-Three,” Ollie said. “I got transferred.”

  “You want more coffee?”

  “Ah, yes, m’dear,” Ollie said, doing his world-famous W. C. Fields imitation. “If it’s not too much trouble, ah, yes.”

  “You like it here better than the Eight-Three?” the waitress asked, pouring.

  “I like it better wherever you are, m’little chickadee.”

  “Sweet talker,” she said, and smiled and walked off, shaking her considerable booty.

  “People ask me that all the time,” Ollie said. “Don’t you work in the Eight-Three? As if I don’t know where the fuck I work. As if I’m making a fuckin mistake about where I work. The world’s full of people playin Gotcha! They got nothin to do with their time but look for mistakes. Ain’t your middle name Lloyd? Hell, no, it’s Wendell. Oliver Wendell Weeks, I don’t know my own fuckin middle name? If I told you once it was Lloyd or Frank or Ralph, I was lying, it was all part of my fuckin cover.”

  A faint effluvial odor seemed to rise from Ollie whenever he became agitated, as he was now. Ignoring his own bodily emanations, he picked up the bagel and bit into it, his gnashing teeth unleashing a gush of cream cheese that spilled onto the right lapel of his jacket.

  “Has this guy got a name?” he asked. “The fag was in the card game with your hitter?”

  “Harpo,” Carella said.

  “Works at the First Bap?” Ollie said.

  Both detectives looked at him.

  “Only Harpo I know up here,” Ollie said. “I’m surprised he was in a card game, though. If it’s the same guy.”

  “Harpo what?” Meyer asked.

  “His square handle is Walter Hopwell, don’t ask me how it got to be Harpo. I never knew he was queer till you guys mentioned it just now. Goes to show, don’t it? Ain’t you hungry?” he asked, and signaled to the waitress again. “Bring my friends here some more coffee,” he said, “they’re famous sleuths from a neighboring precinct. And I’ll have one of them croissants there.” He pronounced the word as if he were fluent in French, but it was only his stomach talking. “Thing I’m askin myself,” he said, “is how come a white stoolie is pals with a Negro fag?”

  Ollie liked using the word “Negro” every now and then because he believed it showed how tolerant he was, even though he realized it pissed off persons of color who preferred being called either blacks or African-Americans. But it had taken him long enough to learn how to say “Negro,” so if they wanted to keep changing it on him all the time, they could go fuck themselves.

  “Would he be at the church now?” Carella asked.

  “Should be. They got a regular office setup on the top floor.”

  “Let’s go,” Meyer said.

  “You wanna start a race riot?” Ollie asked, and grinned as if he relished the prospect. “The First Bap’s listed as a sensitive location. I was you, I’d look up Mr. Hopwell in the phone book, go see him when he gets home from work.”

  “Our man’s leaving town tomorrow,” Carella said.

  “In that case, darlings, let me finish my br
eakfast,” Ollie said. “Then we can all go to church.”

  Brown’s mother used to call her “The Barber’s Wife.” This was another name for the neighborhood gossip. The theory was that a guy went to get a haircut or a shave, he was captive in the barber’s chair for an hour or so, he told the barber everything on his mind. The barber went home that night, and over supper told his wife everything he’d heard from all his customers all day long. The Barber’s Wife knew more about what was happening in any neighborhood than any cop on the beat. What Brown and Kling wanted to do now was find The Barber’s Wife in Andrew Hale’s building.

  There were six stories in the building, three tenants to each floor. When they got there that morning at a little past ten, most of the tenants were off to work. They knocked on six doors before they got an answer, and then another two before they found the woman they were looking for. Her apartment was on the same floor as Andrew Hale’s. She lived at the far end of the hall, in apartment 3C. When she asked them to come in, please, they hesitated on the door sill because she was cooking something that smelled unspeakably vile.

  The stench was coming from a big aluminum pot on the kitchen stove. When she lifted the lid to stir whatever was inside the pot, noxious clouds filled the air, and Kling caught sight of a bubbling liquid that appeared viscous and black. He wondered whether there was eye of newt in the pot. He wanted to go outside in the hall again, to throw up. But the woman invited them into a small living room where, mercifully, there was an open window that rendered the stink less offensive. They sat on a sofa with lace doilies on the arms and back. The woman had false teeth, but she smiled a lot nonetheless. Smiling, she told them her name was Katherine Kipp, and that she had been a neighbor of Mr. Hale’s for the past seven years. They guessed she was in her sixties, but they didn’t ask because they were both gentlemen, sure. She told them her husband had worked in the railroad yards up in Riverhead till he had an accident one day that killed him. She did not elaborate on what the accident might have been, and they did not ask. Kling wondered if the late Mr. Kipp had possibly sampled some of the black brew boiling on the kitchen stove.

  They asked her first about the night of October twenty-eighth, because this was the night someone had been in Hale’s apartment boozing it up and smoking dope and everything, and incidentally hanging Hale from a hook on the bathroom door. Had Mrs. Kipp seen anything? Heard anything?