The Last Dance

by Ed McBain

  “Oh, I think so.”

  “Someone wanting him dead was make-believe?”

  “John had an active imagination.”

  “Someone willing to pay five thousand dollars to kill this old man and make it look like an accident …”

  “I didn’t believe a word of it.”

  “But it’s what he told you, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, to impress me.”

  “I see. To impress you. Did he give you a strip of roofers when you left the hotel?”

  “As a matter of fact, he did. But roofers aren’t a controlled substance.”

  “Mr. Hopwell, if I told you that an old man was drugged with Rohypnol and later hanged to make it look like a suicide, would you still believe John Bridges was trying to impress you when he told you he’d been paid five thousand …”

  “He didn’t say exactly that. You’re putting words in my mouth.”

  What’d he put in your mouth? Ollie wondered.

  “What did he say, exactly?” Meyer asked.

  “He was telling a story. He was saying suppose a person had been offered a certain amount of money …”

  “Five thousand dollars.”

  “Yes, he mentioned that sum. But it was all supposition. He was making up a story.”

  “A story about someone who was offered five grand to kill someone …”

  “He never used that word. He never said the word ‘kill.’ I’d have been out of there in a minute. He was just bragging. To impress me.”

  “What word did he use?”

  “I don’t know, but it wasn’t the word ‘kill,’ he never said anything about killing anyone. Listen, who remembers what he said? We were drinking a lot.”

  “And smoking a lot of pot, too, is that right?”

  “Well, a little.”

  “Which is a controlled substance.”

  “Haven’t you ever smoked pot, Detective?”

  “Did he mention any names?” Meyer asked.

  “No.”

  “Didn’t say which old man he’d been hired to …”

  “It was just a story.”

  “Didn’t say who had hired him to kill this old man?”

  “A good story, that was all.”

  “Didn’t say who had given him the five grand he later used as his stake in the poker game …”

  “He was just a terrific storyteller,” Hopwell said.

  “You didn’t think you should call the police after you heard this terrific story, huh?” Carella said.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Don’t you read the papers, Mr. Hopwell?”

  “Only for items about the reverend.”

  “How about television? Don’t you watch television?”

  “Again, only to …”

  “So when John Bridges told you he’d been paid five thousand dollars to kill an old man and make it look like …”

  “He never used the word ‘kill.’ I told you that.”

  “Whatever word or words he used, you never made a connection between what he was saying and a man named Andrew Hale, who’d been all over television that week?”

  “Never. I still don’t make any connection. I don’t know anything about this old man you say was killed. Look, I told you John’s name, I told you where he was staying. If he did something wrong, you’ll have to take that up with him.”

  “What else can you tell us about him?”

  “He had a scar down the left-hand side of his face.”

  “What kind of scar?”

  “It looked like a knife scar.”

  “You’re just remembering a knife scar?” Ollie said. “Guy has a fuckin knife scar on his face, and it’s the last thing you mention about him?”

  “I try not to notice deformities or infirmities,” Hopwell said.

  “Do you remember any other deformities or infirmities?”

  “No.”

  “How about identifying marks or tattoos? Like a mole, for example, or a birth …”

  “Well, yes, a tattoo,” Hopwell said, and hesitated. “A blue star on the head of his penis.”

  There was no one named John Bridges registered at the President Hotel. Nor had there been anyone registered under that name on the night of November sixth. When they gave the manager the description Hopwell had given them, he said he couldn’t recall anyone who’d looked or sounded Jamaican, but this was a big hotel with thousands of guests weekly, and it was possible there’d been any number of Jamaicans registered on the night in question.

  They checked the register for anyone from Houston, Texas. There’d been a guest from Fort Worth who’d checked in on the fourth and out the next night, and another from Austin, who was here with his wife and two kids; they did not bother him. Their computer showed no outstanding warrants for anyone named John Bridges. Neither was anyone listed under that name in the Houston telephone directory.

  Carella called Houston Central and talked to a man who identified himself as Detective Jack Walman. He told Carella he’d been a cop for almost twelve years now and knew most of the people doing mischief in this town, but he’d never run acrosst one had a knife scar down the left-hand side of his face and a blue star tattooed on his pecker.

  “That does beat all,” he said. “What’s the star stand for? The lone star state?”

  “Could be,” Carella said.

  “What I’ll do,” he said, “I’ll run it through the computer. But that’s a unusual combination, ain’t it, and I’d sure remember something peculiar like that if I’d ever seen it. Unless, what coulda happened, he mighta got the knife scar before he got the tattoo. Lots of these guys get jailhouse tattoos, you know. In which case, there wouldn’t be both of them on the computer, you follow? We get plenty knife scars down here. Is your man Chicano?”

  “No. A Jamaican named John Bridges.”

  “Well, we got something like two thousand Jamaicans here, too, so who knows? What’d he do, this dude?”

  “Maybe killed two people.”

  “Bad, huh?”

  “Bad, yes.”

  “Musta hurt, don’t you think?” Walman said. “Gettin tattooed that way?”

  He called back an hour later to say he’d searched the system—city and state—for any felon named John Bridges and had come up blank. As he’d mentioned earlier, there were plenty facial scars in the state of Texas, and if Carella wanted him to fax printouts on each and every felon who had one, he’d be happy to oblige. But none of the facial scars came joined to tattooed dongs. One of the old-timers here at the station, though, remembered a guy one time had a little American flag tattooed on his wiener, if that was any help, it waved in the breeze whenever he got an erection. But he thought the guy was doing time at Angola, over Louisiana way. Aside from that, Walman was sorry he couldn’t be of greater assistance. Carella asked him to please fax the facial-scar printouts, and thanked him for his time.

  They were right back where they’d been on the morning of October twenty-ninth, when they’d first caught the squeal.

  4

  THERE WERE three airports servicing the metropolitan area. The largest of them, out on Sands Spit, flew three direct flights and six connecting flights to Houston on most weekdays. The airport closest to the city flew nine direct flights and eleven connecting flights. Across the river, in the adjoining state, direct flights went out virtually every hour, starting at 6:20 A.M. Twenty-one non-stop and connecting flights left from that airport alone. Altogether, a total of fifty flights flew to Houston almost every day of the week. It was a big busy city, that Houston, Texas.

  Starting early Wednesday morning, the tenth day of November, twelve detectives began surveillance of the check-in counters at Continental, Delta, US Airways, American, Northwest, and United Airlines, looking for a Jamaican with a knife scar who might be headed for either Houston-Intercontinental or Houston-Hobby on a direct flight, or on any one of the flights connecting through Charlotte, Dallas/Fort Worth, New Orleans, Detroit, Chicago, Memphis, Atlanta, Cle
veland, Pittsburgh, or Philadelphia. None of the men boarding any of the flights even remotely fit the description Harpo Hopwell had given them.

  There were still a lot more flights going out that day.

  “Who’s in charge here?” the assistant medical examiner wanted to know.

  Ollie merely gave him a look: he was the only person here with a gold and blue-enameled detective’s shield pinned to his jacket lapel, so who the hell did the man think was in charge? The only other cops at the scene were a pair of blues, both of them standing around looking bewildered, their thumbs up their asses. Did the man think uniforms were now handling homicide investigations?

  Or maybe the man had forgotten that he and Ollie had worked together before. Ollie could not imagine this; he did not consider himself an eminently forgettable human being. Did the man work with detectives as fat as Ollie every day of the week? The man had to know that the fat detective in the loud sports jacket was the one in charge here. Or was he pretending not to know Ollie because he didn’t want Ollie to think the only reason he remembered him was because he was fat? If so, that was stupid. Ollie knew he was fat. He also knew that behind his back people called him Fat Ollie. He considered it a measure of respect that nobody ever called him this to his face.

  “Oh, hello, Weeks,” the ME said, as if noticing him for the first time, which was tantamount to suddenly noticing a hippopotamus at the dinner table. “What’ve we got?”

  “Dead black girl in the kitchen,” Ollie said.

  The ME’s name was Frederick Kurtz, a Nazi bastard if Ollie had ever met one. Even had a little Hitler mustache under his nose. Little black satchel like some mad doctor at Buchenwald. Wearing a rumpled suit looked as if he’d slept in it all this past week. Had a bad cold, too. Kept taking a soiled handkerchief from his back pocket and blowing fresh snot into it, the fuckin Nazi. Ollie followed him into the kitchen.

  The girl lay on her back in front of the sink counter, the knife still in her. This was going to be a real tough call. It would take a fuckin Nazi rocket scientist to diagnose this one as a fatal stabbing. Nobody had yet taken the knife out of her because rule number one was you didn’t touch anything till the ME officially pronounced the vic dead. Ollie waited while Kurtz circled the body like a vulture, trying to find a comfortable position from which to examine the dead girl. He put his satchel down on the floor beside her, and leaned over close to her mouth, as if hoping to catch a shimmer of breath from her lips. Ollie was thinking if the girl was still breathing, she’d be sanctified before nightfall. Be the first black saint from this city. Kurtz placed his forefinger and middle finger on the side of her neck, feeling for a pulse in the carotid artery. Fat Chance Department, Ollie thought.

  “Reckon she’s dead?” he asked, trying to sound like John Wayne, but succeeding only in sounding like W. C. Fields. Ollie sometimes tried to do Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, and Robert De Niro, but somehow all his imitations came out sounding like W. C. Fields. He didn’t realize this. He actually considered his imitations right on the money, and often thought of himself as the man with the golden ear. Kurtz knew sarcasm when he heard it, however, even when it came from a fat dick who neither looked nor sounded like a cowboy. He didn’t answer Ollie. Instead, he put his stethoscope to the girl’s chest, already knowing she was dead as a doornail, to coin a medical phrase, and went about his examination pretending Ollie wasn’t there, something difficult to do under any circumstances. A voice from the bedroom doorway startled Kurtz, echoing as it did his own earlier question,

  “Who’s in charge here?” Monoghan asked.

  Same stupid question from another jackass who should know better, Ollie thought. In this city, the detective catching the squeal was the cop officially investigating the case from that moment on. Detective Monoghan, his partner Detective Monroe, and various other detectives from the Homicide Division were sent to the scene of any murder in their bailiwick, to serve in a so-called advisory and supervisory capacity. The reason for their existence was that this city was a bureaucratic monolith that cost more to run than the entire nation of Zaire.

  In this city, ten people were necessary to do the job of one person. What this city did was hire high school dropouts, put them in suits, and then teach them how to greet the public with blank stares on their faces. In this city, if you needed a copy of, say, your birth certificate or your driver’s license, you stood on line for an hour and a half while some nitwit pretended to be operating a computer. When he or she finally located what you were there for, you had to go over to the post office and stand on line for another hour and a half to purchase a money order to pay for it. That was because in this city, municipal employees weren’t allowed to accept cash, personal checks, or credit cards. This was because the city fathers knew the caliber of the people who were featherbedding throughout the entire system, knew that cash would disappear in a wink, knew that credit cards would be cloned, knew that personal checks would somehow end up in private bank accounts hither and yon. That’s why all those people behind municipal counters gave you such hostile stares. They were angry at the system because they couldn’t steal from it. Or maybe they were pissed off because they couldn’t qualify for more lucrative jobs like security officers at any of the city’s jails, where an ambitious man could earn a goodly amount of unreportable cash by smuggling in dope to the inmates.

  Monoghan and Monroe were necessary to such a system.

  Without two jackasses here to tell an experienced detective like Ollie how to do his job, the system would fall apart in a minute and a half. The Homicide dicks knew damn well who was in charge here. Oliver Wendell Weeks was in charge here. It bothered them, too, that in days of yore, the Homicide Division in this city had merited the measure of respect it now enjoyed only on television. Nowadays, Homicide’s proud tradition was vestigial at best. All that remained of its elegant past were the black suits Homicide cops still wore, the color of death, the color of murder itself.

  Both Monoghan and Monroe were wearing black on this dismal November afternoon. They looked as if they were on their way to a funeral home to tell some Irish mick like themselves how sorry they were that Paddy O’Toole had kicked the bucket, poor drunken soul. The consistent thing about Ollie Weeks was that he hated everyone, regardless of race, creed, or color. Ollie was a consummate bigot. Without even knowing it.

  “These two Irishmen walk out of a bar?” he said.

  “Yeah?” Monoghan said.

  “It could happen,” Ollie said, and shrugged.

  Neither Monoghan nor Monroe laughed.

  Kurtz, the fuckin Nazi, laughed, but he tried to hide it by blowing his nose again, because to tell the truth these two big Irish cops scared hell out of him. He guessed Ollie was of English descent, or he wouldn’t have told such a joke to two Irishmen dressed like morticians and looking somewhat red in the face to begin with.

  “What is that, some kind of ethnic slur?” Monoghan asked.

  “Some kind of stereotypical innuendo?” Monroe asked.

  “Is she dead or not?” Ollie asked the ME, changing the subject because these two Irish jackasses seemed to be getting touchy about their drunken cronies.

  “Yes, she’s dead,” Kurtz said.

  “Would you wish to venture a guess as to the cause?” Ollie said, this time trying to sound like a sarcastic British barrister, but it still came out as W. C. Fields.

  “Coroner’s Office’ll send you a report,” Kurtz said, thinking he could ace the Big O, but Ollie merely smiled.

  “I can’t blame you for being so cautious,” he said, “knife stickin out of her chest and all.”

  Fuck you, Fat Boy, the ME thought, but he blew his nose instead and walked out.

  The Homicide dicks wandered around the apartment looking grouchy. Ollie guessed they were still smarting over his Irish joke, which he thought was a pretty good one, hey, if you can’t take a joke, go fuck yourself. There were enough personal items around the place—an engagement calendar, an address book, bra
s and panties in the dresser—to convince Ollie that the girl lived here and wasn’t just visiting whoever had juked her. The super of the building confirmed this a few minutes later when he came upstairs to see how the investigation was coming along. One thing Ollie hated—among other things he hated—was amateur detectives sticking their noses in police work. He asked the super what the girl’s name was, and the super told him she was Althea Cleary, and that she’d been living here since May sometime. He thought she was from Ohio or someplace like that. Idaho maybe. Iowa. Someplace like that. Ollie thanked him for the valuable information and his citizenly concern and ushered him out of the apartment. One of the responding blues told him the lady who’d phoned the police was in the hall outside waiting to talk to him, was it okay to let her in?

  “What makes you think it wouldn’t be okay?” Ollie asked.

  “Well, it being a crime scene and all.”

  “That’s very good thinking,” Ollie said, and smiled enigmatically. “Show her in.”

  The woman was in her late fifties, Ollie guessed, wearing a green cardigan sweater and a brown woolen skirt. She told Ollie that she and Althea were friends, and that she’d knocked on her door around two o’clock to see if she wanted to go down for a cappuccino.

  “I work at home,” the woman said. “And Althea was home a lot, too. So sometimes, we walked over to Starbucks for cappuccino.”

  “What is it you do?” Ollie asked. “At home, I mean.”

  “Well, I teach piano,” she said.

  “I always wanted to play piano,” Ollie said. “Could you teach me five songs?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I want to learn five songs. I want to play five songs like a pro. Then when I go to a party, I can sit down and play the five songs and everybody’ll think I know how to play piano.”

  “Well, if you can play five songs, then actually you are playing the piano, aren’t you?”

  Ollie hated smart-ass women, even if they knew how to play piano.

  “Sure,” he said, “but I mean they’ll think I know more than just the five songs.”

  “I suppose I could teach you five songs,” the woman said.