The Last Dance

by Ed McBain

  That Wednesday night, all five networks featured stories about Danny Gimp, the black and white shooters, and the similarly hued pair of detectives—Brown and Kling—who had responded to the call. The talking heads on the cable channels, babbling away on shows joining in their titles the words “pizza,” “shootout,” “terror,” “confrontation,” and “ambush” in various unimaginative combinations, endlessly debated whether a police informer was truly a “rat” as the term was commonly understood, why illegal guns seemed to proliferate at such an alarming rate in American cities, and whether it was politic or merely politics to have a black-and-white detective team investigating a case involving a black and a white shooter.

  Thursday came and Thursday went.

  So did Friday and Saturday.

  And Sunday.

  And all at once it was a new week.

  In days of yore, the police department used to run a lineup every Monday to Thursday morning. Detectives from squads all over the city would gather in the gymnasium at headquarters downtown, where the Chief of Detectives paraded any felony offender arrested the night before. This was done solely to acquaint the people in law enforcement with the people doing mischief in their town, the premise being that the bad guys would continue being bad all their lives and it was a good thing to be able to recognize them on the street.

  Nowadays, lineups were held only for purposes of identification, the suspected perp standing on a lighted stage with five innocent people, two of whom were usually squadroom detectives, the victim sitting behind a one-way mirror hoping to pick out a winner. But there was also another type of lineup, and it took place on television news programs whenever the tapes from hidden surveillance cameras were shown. On the five o’clock news that Monday night, the surveillance tapes from the pizzeria cameras were run for the first time, revealing in all their glory the two bold gunmen who had sprinted into the place and sprayed it with bullets. Danny Nelson’s assailants were identifiable chiefly by race, but otherwise blurry to anyone who didn’t really know them. In any event, no one came forward.

  In a brilliant public-relations move, however, Restaurant Affiliates, Inc.—the company that owned the Guido’s Pizzeria chain—now posted a $50,000 reward for any information leading to the capture and conviction of the two gunmen who’d shot up their fine establishment on Culver Avenue. That RA, Inc. seemed more interested in the damage done to their place of business than to the untimely demise of Danny Nelson went unnoticed by television viewers and newspaper readers alike. Informers were admittedly the scum of the earth, the campaign suggested, but public places should not be submitted to wanton violence. Linking pizza to after-school sports and public prayer, the TV commercials and newspaper ads called for swift apprehension of the culprits and stricter gun control everywhere in this wild and woolly nation. In conjunction with the police, an 800 line was set up and strict confidence was guaranteed any caller. A newspaper columnist wryly commented that Charlton Heston had stopped eating pizza in favor of a Japanese dish called Shogun Sushi, a weak pun on “shotgun,” but this was the afternoon paper. The column caused no end of amusement among the executive types up at RA, Inc.

  Still no one came forward.

  In a bit more than three weeks’ time, the Danny Gimp case passed from intense media scrutiny to total oblivion.

  Thanksgiving Day seemed almost an afterthought.

  5

  HE HAD drunk too much, and had argued with his uncle Dominick too loudly about whichever war was current wherever in the world. His uncle’s attitude was always and ever “Let’s bomb the shit out of them!” Carella had heard these words from him ever since he was old enough to understand, and his mother had always warned, “Dom, the children,” but that hadn’t stopped Uncle Dominick, who looked like an enforcer for the mob, and who—for all Carella knew, but never asked—might very well have been one in his younger days.

  They had got back home to Riverhead at about nine that night and the twins had reminded them, as if they needed reminding, that there was no school tomorrow, so they’d allowed them to stay up for a Thanksgiving special on NBC. Carella was still grumbling about his thick-headed uncle and Teddy was signing that maybe he should take a nice hot shower before he went to bed because tomorrow was another day, and he wasn’t off from school, and there would always be another war to fight in this sorry world of ours and more people out of whom to bomb the S-H-I-T, which word she spelled out letter by letter with her fingers lest Carella miss the point that he was beginning to annoy her. He came out of the shower looking wet and contrite and in need of a haircut, which she hadn’t noticed before.

  He didn’t say anything to her until she herself was in her nightgown—a long flannel granny because even with the temperature set at seventy-two, the old house was drafty and cold on this dank November night—her dark hair loose about her face, wearing a moisturizing cream she claimed was non-greasy but which he swore was made from goose grease, pulling back the covers, and jumping in quickly, and then reaching over to turn out the light—but his flying fingers caught her attention.

  “I’m sorry,” he said aloud, signing simultaneously.

  She was half-turned away from him, she missed what he was saying. He said it again.

  “I’m sorry.”

  And signed it.

  Only baby boomers in their late forties believed that love meant never having to say you’re sorry. Everyone else knew that if you truly loved someone and had hurt her, you had to say you were sorry—but you only had to say it once. You didn’t have to get down on your hands and knees and beg forgiveness over and over again for the rest of your life, not if the person believed you. You just said it once. “I’m sorry.” Unless you had a wife who could not hear your voice because she’d been born without hearing, and could not see your hands because her back was partially turned, in which case you said it again. “I’m sorry.” And she heard you this time, and nodded, and took one of your hands between both hers, and nodded again.

  They left the light on.

  She moved into his arms, on his pillow, and he kissed the top of her head and held her close and told her it hadn’t been his jackass uncle Dom who’d caused him to drink too much at his mother’s house this cold Thanksgiving Day, but instead it was the dead old guy hanging from a bathroom hook and Danny Gimp getting shot in that pizzeria and the girl stabbed uptown in Fat Ollie’s precinct that made him feel so goddamn worthless. It was suddenly as if all the cases he’d ever closed out had burst open again, exploding into a triple fireworks display trailing white-hot sparks on the night, a single brutal case where everything seemed linked but perhaps nothing was. And on top of that, his jackass uncle Dom probably had been a muscle man for a neighborhood smalltime hood named Vinnie Pineapples, a fat slob with bigger tits than most women had.

  Teddy listened to everything he had to say, her eyes performing their magic trick of watching his moving fingers and his moving lips at one and the same time, and then she told him how she herself always felt so worthless at the beginning of the holidays because there were so many gifts to buy, but especially this year when they were short of cash because of the payments on the new car. She didn’t want to take a job stuffing grocery bags at the supermarket, but at the same time not very many prospective employers wanted someone around the office who was handicapped, even though she could take steno and type eighty words a minute and was proficient in Word and Quicken and was very well-organized, go ask the twins. So he had to forgive her if sometimes she moped around the house, it was just that she often felt she wasn’t doing enough for him or the children, wasn’t doing enough for herself. And Vinnie Pineapples probably did have bigger tits than hers.

  In the dead of night, in the dark, with the children sleeping soundly in their separate bedrooms down the hall, and the house as still as her own silent world, they comforted each other.

  In a little while, Teddy fell asleep.

  Carella lay awake for most of the night.

  A lapsed Cath
olic—the last time he’d been to church was when he’d investigated the murder of a priest slain during vespers—Carella should have felt some vestiges of religious fervor during the Yuletide season, but instead he felt only guilt. Thanksgiving Day marked a full month since Andrew Hale was murdered. The beginning of the Christmas shopping season on the following day should have signaled the beginning of a month-long celebration that would not end until the last carol was sung and the last nog drunk on Boxing Day. Instead, it served as a reminder that the case was still unresolved. Carella wondered if Fat Ollie Weeks, a mile or so uptown, was experiencing the same feelings of helplessness and remorse. He almost called him. Instead, he slogged through a caseload that seemed to grow more mountainous day by day, taking small solace from the fact that the children seemed to be finding more joy in the holiday season than he did.

  Meyer was similarly depressed.

  A Jew in a Christian nation, he always felt oddly dispossessed at Christmas time. Never mind the euphemistic Chanukah bush he and Sarah had put up for the kids when they were small and still believed in Santa Claus. Never mind the gifts and the greetings exchanged. Try as he might to convince himself that the season had less to do with religion than with people being kind to each other, he could never shake the knowledge that this was not his holiday. He had once invited Carella and his family to a seder, and Carella had later confessed that he’d felt oddly out of place, even though Meyer had himself conducted the traditional ceremony, in English. Carella would hide Meyer in his basement in a minute and fight a thousand Nazis who tried to break down the door. Carella would break the head of anyone who made the slightest derogatory remark to Meyer. Carella would defend Meyer with his honor and his very life. But he had felt strange celebrating Passover with him. A measure of their friendship was that he’d been able to admit this.

  In much the same way, Meyer had once asked Carella if all his Christmas cards read “Seasons Greetings” or “Happy Holidays” or “Yuletide Joy” or the like, or were these just the cards he sent to Meyer and other Jewish friends each year? Did Carella send other cards that read “Merry Christmas”? And if so, was it to spare Meyer’s feelings that he sent the generic card? Carella told him all his cards were similarly antiseptic because what he was celebrating each December was not the birth of Christ, but instead the peace he hoped would prevail at Christmas time—a view he was sure would provoke a flood of letters from people he didn’t know. Meyer said, “In fact, I’ll write you a letter, you heathen!”

  Thus encouraged, Carella went on to wonder aloud why he sent Christmas cards at all since he knew in his heart of hearts that Christmas—in America, at least—was simply a commercial holiday designed by merchants eager to recoup losses they’d sustained during the rest of the year. Meyer asked him if he was using the word “merchants” in an anti-Semitic way, and Carella said, “Vot minns anti-Semitic?” and Meyer said, “In that case, I wish to remind you that ‘White Christmas’ was written by a Jew.” Carella said, “Giuseppe Verdi was a Jew?” Thus encouraged, Meyer said, “‘A Rose in Spanish Harlem,’ too.” All amazed, both men went out to drink fervent toasts to Mohammed and Buddha.

  That was too many Christmases ago.

  This year, they shared a guilt that had something to do with what each considered a solemn duty to protect and preserve. A lonely old man had been befriended by someone who’d later drugged him and hanged him. A nineteen-year-old black quasi-hooker had been drugged in the same manner and then stabbed to death, most possibly by the same person who’d slain the old man. That person was either still here in this city, or else in Houston, Texas, or else only God knew where. For all they knew, he himself might be dead by now, killed in a bar fight or a motorcycle crash, murdered by a stiffed hooker or a miffed lover. Until they knew for certain, both cases sat in the Open File, neither resolved nor any longer under investigation, exactly like the Danny Nelson assassination.

  But then, on the last day of November, Carella opened the morning paper.

  The article was headlined “Jenny Redux.”

  Norman Zimmer, whose “Tea Time” is still running after 730 performances, has announced the acquisition of all rights to “Jenny’s Room,” a musical he plans to revive here next fall. “Auditions will start this week,” he said, “with rehearsals planned for the spring. We’re looking for an L.A. tryout in late June, early July.” Mr. Zimmer added that negotiations were already under way with a top female star whose name he refused to divulge.

  For those with long memories, “Jenny’s Room” was first produced in 1927, as a vehicle for Jenny Corbin, a popular musical comedy performer of the day. It did not fare well with the critics and closed within a month. Mr. Zimmer is certain this will not be its fate this time around. “I’ve worked too hard acquiring the rights,” he said. “The original copyright holders have all passed on, and it was a matter of tracking down whoever had succeeded to their ownership. We found one of them in London, another in Tel Aviv, a third in Los Angeles.”

  The quest ended happily five days ago when the last of the successors, a woman named Cynthia Keating, signed on the dotted line, right here in the big bad …

  Carella spit out a mouthful of coffee.

  He found a listing for a Zimmer Theatrical downtown on The Stem and called the office shortly after nine A.M. A woman told him Mr. Zimmer would be at auditions all day today, and when Carella told her he was a detective investigating a homicide—the magic word—she gave him an address for Octagon Theater Spaces and told him the auditions were being held down there, she didn’t know in which studio. “They don’t like to be bothered, though,” she added gratuitously.

  Octagon Theater Spaces was a six-story building in a section of the city called King’s Road after the one in London, but bearing scant resemblance to it. The actual name of the street was Kenney Road, a heavily trafficked thoroughfare lined with furniture warehouses, electrical supply stores, auto repair shops, a garage for the city’s Department of Sanitation trucks, and an occasional restored and renovated factory like the Octagon and its virtual twin down the street, Theater Five, an eight-story structure divided into large rehearsal spaces. A receptionist told them there were six studios on each floor. In some of them, rehearsals were in progress; in others, auditions were being held. The Jenny’s Room auditions were in studio four, on the second floor.

  A lumbering elevator dating back to the building’s factory days took them to the second floor, where they stepped out into a large entrance hall, one wall of which was hung with pay phones. The pleasant hum of busy chatter hung on the air. Good-looking men and women—this was their profession, after all—greeted each other familiarly, all of them seeming to know each other. Actors holding scripts, dancers in tights and leg warmers roamed from telephones to rehearsal halls, elevators to corridors, rest rooms to audition rooms. They glanced only cursorily at Carella and Brown, knowing at once that they weren’t actors, but unable to peg their occupations.

  Brown hadn’t expected to be in the field today. He was wearing blue jeans, a ski sweater with a reindeer pattern, a green ski parka over it, and a blue woolen watch cap pulled down over his ears. He looked as square as a tuba. Carella could have passed for some guy here to read the gas meter. He was wearing a heavy mackinaw over a maroon sweater and gray corduroy trousers. No hat, although his mother constantly told him if his head got cold, he’d be cold all over. Both men were wearing wool-lined pull-on Bean boots. As they came down the corridor looking for studio four, a young girl in jeans and a leotard top chirped, “Hi,” smiled, and flitted on by.

  A door with a frosted-glass upper panel was lettered with the words STUDIO FOUR. It opened onto a small waiting room lined with folding chairs upon which sat young men and women in street clothes, all of them intently studying pages Carella assumed had been photocopied from a master script. A feverish-looking young man wearing glasses and a V-necked vest sweater over an apple green shirt asked Carella if he was here for Jenny. Carella showed him his shield and sa
id he was here to see Mr. Norman Zimmer. The young man didn’t seem to get it at first.

  “Will you need sides?” he asked.

  Carella didn’t know what sides were.

  “I’m a police detective,” he said. “I’m here to see Mr. Zimmer. Is he here?”

  “Just a second, please, I’ll see,” the young man said, and opened a door beyond which Carella glimpsed a very large room lined with windows on one side. The door closed again. Brown shrugged. The man was back a moment later. He said auditions would be starting at ten, but Mr. Zimmer could spare them a few minutes before then. “Please go right in,” he said.

  Carella looked at his watch.

  It was a quarter to ten.

  At the far end of the room, Zimmer—or a man they assumed was Zimmer—stood alone behind a row of folding chairs behind a bank of long tables. The moment they stepped into the room, he said, “What’s this about, gentlemen?”

  Brown blinked.

  His voice. I recognized his voice. He had a very distinctive voice. Whenever he got agitated, the voice just boomed out of him.

  Mrs. Kipp’s words. Describing the voice of the man who’d visited Andrew Hale three times during the month of September, arguing with him each time, threatening him.

  The voice was a trained voice, an actor’s voice, an opera singer’s voice, a radio announcer’s voice, something of that sort.

  Carella—remembering the description from the report Kling and Brown had filed—was himself suddenly paying very close attention to the man who now came around the end of the row of tables, walking toward them.

  “Mr. Zimmer?” he asked.

  “Yes?” His voice sounded as if it were coming over a bullhorn.

  “Detective Carella. My partner, Detective Brown.”

  “How do you do?” Zimmer said, and extended his hand. His grip was like a moray eel’s. “I haven’t much time,” he said. “What is it?”