The Last Dance

by Ed McBain

  “That was it, am I right? She spotted me on the tape, that fuckin bitch.”

  Kling was staring at the lieutenant.

  They had asked Betty Young to trust them.

  But the lieutenant had given her up.

  “You want whose name went in with me?” Blaine asked. “Is that it?”

  It was contagious.

  The black man who’d been Blaine’s partner on the pizzeria shivaree was a dark-skinned Colombian named Hector Milagros. They arrested him in a diner at nine that morning, having breakfast alone in a corner booth. Milagros knew there was no sense trying to force his way out of a situation where his back was to a plate glass window and he was looking at three nines as compared to his singleton thirty-eight. He asked them could he finish his eggs before they got cold. They told him they’d order more eggs for him up at the station house. Casually, he asked, “Wass thees all abou, anyways, muchachos?”

  “We’ve been talking to an old friend of yours,” Brown said.

  “Old shooting buddy of yours,” Kling said.

  “Maxie Blaine,” Carella said. “Remember him?”

  “Mierda!” Milagros said, and stabbed his fork into one of the egg yolks. Yellow ran all over his plate.

  By the time the network news broke the following day, both Milagros and Blaine had been indicted by a grand jury for the murder of Daniel Nelson. Expecting they would both be held without bail, Betty Young showed little temerity about revealing herself as the person responsible for their arrest. Ever on the prowl for promotional opportunities, Restaurant Affiliates arranged for the presentation of the $50,000 reward check (blown up to gigantic viewing size) on that evening’s six-thirty network news. It did not hurt that Betty Young was an attractive woman with a dazzling smile and a blameless bust. Winsomely grinning into the camera, she thanked RA, Inc. for the check she would use to buy nursing care for her bedridden mother in Florida and a new Chevy Geo for herself. She then expressed the fervent wish that those two ruthless killers would receive the maximum penalty—otherwise she’d be looking over her shoulder the rest of her life, she did not say to the television audience. Literary agents all over the city wondered if there was a book and subsequent movie in this. School children all over the United States wept sympathetic tears into their beers and went out to buy a nicer pizza, hopeful they’d accidentally stumble into a Guido’s killing of their own and glean a fifty-K reward as a result. Watching the show in bed, eating Chinese food with Sharyn Cooke, Kling wondered aloud if Lieutenant Byrnes had done the right thing.

  “Because you know, Shar,” he said, “Pete had no idea Blaine would suddenly open up. No idea at all. He just threw her to the lions, was what he did. After she gave us her trust.”

  “She didn’t look so shy accepting that check,” Sharyn said.

  He watched her manipulating the chopsticks. She worked them like a pro, clamping them onto morsels of food as if she’d been born in Beijing. He was almost hypnotized.

  “What?” she said.

  “I like the way you do that.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You do it pretty good yourself, Big Boy,” she said.

  “I keep dropping rice.”

  “Just don’t get it all over the bed.”

  “She really does have a bedridden mother in Florida, you know?”

  “Reason she needs the Geo,” Sharyn said. “Drive on down there to visit the old lady.”

  “Stop for a pizza on the way,” Kling said.

  “Fifty thousand bucks is gonna buy a whole lot of pizza,” Sharyn said, and pincered a mushroom and popped it into her mouth. “I never won anything in my life, did you?” she said. “I grew up with my mother playing the numbers every day of the week, most she ever won was five, ten dollars. I never won a nickel.”

  “I won a bicycle once.”

  “When?”

  “When I was twelve. At a street carnival.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Yeah. One of these roulette-wheel kind of things. I still remember the number.”

  “What was the number?”

  “Seventeen. It was black with white trim.”

  “The number?”

  “The bike.”

  “Just like us,” Sharyn said.

  “But you know,” he said, “she didn’t win anything. This was a reward.”

  “Right, for ratting on him,” Sharyn said.

  “We try to discourage that sort of thinking,” Kling said.

  “What sort?” Sharyn said. “And who’s ‘we’?”

  “The police. The sort of thinking that equates performing a public duty with ratting on somebody.”

  “Gee, is that whut you po-licemens try to do?” she said, and put her plate and chopsticks on the night table on her side of the bed, and finished her cup of tea and then slid over to him and kissed him on the mouth.

  She tasted of every black woman he had ever known.

  Matter of fact, she was the only black woman he had ever known, the only woman of whatever color he ever hoped to know in the near or distant future. He considered it fortunate that she felt the same way about him, that somehow in this troubled tribal universe, two people from very definitely different tribes had met and decided to give it an honest shot. He thought it miraculous, and so did she, that in the face of overwhelming odds, they were actually making a go of it. Just think of it. A little colored girl from Diamondback grows up to be a deputy police chief, and a white boy on a bicycle he won grows up to be a police detective, and in this hurried hating city, they find each other. And fall in love with each other. Go tell that to your Hutus and Tutsis, your Albanians and Serbs, your Arabs and Jews.

  They both knew that the God, Country, and Brotherhood bit they’d each and separately had drummed into their heads in school wasn’t quite where it was at today. They were a black woman and a white man living together in the real world. What they shared was not some idealistic democratic sentiment premised on alikeness. They knew that much of what they felt for each other had to do with identical likes and dislikes, yes, but that really wasn’t all of it. They had similar senses of humor, yes, and they were in the same line of work, more or less, and yes, they had the same tastes in movies and books and plays and they both liked basketball and they both voted identically and yearned for a house and three kids if that was in their future somewhere—but this was America, you know, and so they wondered and worried about that future, and were cautious about wishing too hard for it. In the darkness of the night, where there was no color or lack of color, if they ever thought about whether their samenesses had created the strong and unusual bond between them, they each and separately might have concluded that it had also been their differences.

  They were not color blind.

  Any white or black person in America who told you he or she was color blind was lying.

  In fact, Kling had been attracted to her because she was black and beautiful and he was curious, and Sharyn had been attracted to him because he was so goddamn blond and white and good-looking and forbidden. There were differences between them that spanned continents and oceans and spoke of jungle drums and sailing ships and slaves in chains and white men bartering in open markets and blood on the snow and blood on the stars and blood mixing with blood until blood became meaningless. These very differences brought them closer together. In each other’s arms, in each other’s lives, they shared an intimacy each had never known before, Kling not with any other woman, ever, Sharyn not with any other man, ever.

  “A black and white bicycle, huh?” she said.

  “Black with white trim.”

  “You sure it wasn’t white with black trim?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “You know what trim is?”

  “I know.”

  “You know what black trim is?”

  “I know.”

  “How come you know such dirty things?”

  “How come I love you so much?” he asked.

>   “Sweet talker,” she said.

  “You love me, too?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said.

  7

  WHEN THEY went to see Norman Zimmer again, they were prepared to threaten him with a grand-jury subpoena. Instead, he seemed ready to cooperate. This was now Friday morning, the third day of December. They had last seen him on Tuesday. They assumed he’d had time since then to talk to his lawyer, and fully realized the folly of impeding a homicide investigation.

  They sat in his corner office overlooking Stemmler Avenue and Stockwell Street. On The Stem, six stories below, thick traffic crawled by. Even with the windows closed, they could hear the incessant honking of horns, an annoyance specifically prohibited by law in this city. Here in the privacy of his own office, Zimmer nonetheless projected as if trying to reach the last row in the second balcony, his booming voice easily overriding the traffic noises floating up from below.

  “I’m sorry I was so short with you when you popped in the other day,” he said. “But we were just starting auditions, and I’m afraid I was a bit on edge. Things have calmed down a bit now. Ask me anything you’d like.”

  He was dressed the way he’d been on that last day of November, the suit brown this time, the shirt a sort of ivory color, the jacket again draped over his chair, the tie pulled down, the sleeves rolled up, the suspenders picking up the color of the tie again, which was a sort of rust-colored knit. A big man, Mrs. Kipp had said. Very big.

  “First of all,” Carella said, “these rights.”

  “The rights,” Zimmer repeated.

  “Describe them.”

  “Long story.”

  “We have time.”

  “I’m not sure I do,” Zimmer said, and looked at his watch the way he had on Tuesday. The detectives thought for a fleeting moment they might have to get that grand-jury subpoena after all. Zimmer took a deep breath.

  “Fade in,” he said. “1923. A twenty-two-year-old woman named Jessica Miles writes an autobiographical play called Jenny’s Room. It’s a big hit, it runs for three years here on The Stem. In 1928, it’s turned into a musical that opens and closes in a month. End of story, right? Not quite. My partner Connie—whom you met at the auditions Tuesday? She’s the one who smokes a lot?”

  “The one I’m old enough to be her father,” Brown said.

  “That’s the one. She dug up the original sheet music for the musical—this was before there were such things as cast albums, you know—and guess what? The score is terrific! The book was hopeless, of course, but that could be rewritten. So she convinced me we should do it together.”

  “This is the same show you’re doing now?” Brown asked.

  “Yes,” Zimmer said. “Well, I shouldn’t say that. It’s essentially the same show, yes. We’ve had the book rewritten, and there are several new tunes, but those are minor changes. For all intents and purposes, it’s the same show, yes.”

  Brown was wondering why he’d want to produce a flop all over again.

  “And it was based on this play called Jenny’s Room, is that right?” he asked.

  “Still is based on it,” Zimmer said. “That’s why we had to go to Cynthia Keating.”

  Brown looked at Carella. Carella looked back at him.

  “To obtain rights to the underlying material,” Zimmer said. “The source material. Cynthia Keating owns those rights.”

  Again the detectives looked stupid.

  “We’d already acquired the other essential rights from the three people who’d written the musical’s songs and book, but we still needed—well, wait a minute, let me correct that. The original creators had all passed away a long time ago. In most instances we were dealing with grandchildren, or even great-grandchildren, who’d succeeded to the rights by inheritance. But the underlying rights were another matter. When the musical closed in 1928, the rights to the play reverted back to the person who’d written the play—Jessica Miles. And without those underlying rights, we couldn’t proceed.”

  “Is Cynthia Keating a grandchild?” Carella asked. “Is that it? Or a great …?”

  “No, Jessica Miles never married.”

  “Then how’d Cynthia get those rights?”

  “Another long story.”

  “We still have time.”

  At first, Andrew Hale knows the woman only to talk to.

  He sees her on his way in and out of the building, and they always exchange a friendly good morning or good evening, but that’s it. The woman is very old, far older than Andrew, who—when he first meets her—is in his early fifties. He is still married at the time. This is long before he suffers his first heart attack. In fact, this is shortly after he quit working at the hospital, or—to be more accurate—got fired from the hospital because they thought he was too old to be nursing, even though there were female nurses his age on the ward. Fifty-three, is that old?—talk about sexism. He guesses it’s because when a man reaches a certain age, they think of him as a dirty old man, and they don’t want him moving in and out of rooms where girls are wearing only surgical gowns tied up the back, their behinds all showing.

  He supposes the woman is in her mid-eighties, a frail little thing who looks arthritic and possibly lame in one leg, maybe she’s diabetic, who knows? One morning, he comes across her struggling to get a bag of groceries up to her third-floor apartment. He asks if he can help her with that, and she says Oh, thank you, I’d truly appreciate it. A British accent, he figures she’s originally from England. Well, one thing leads to another, and this and that, and the next thing you know they’re truly friends, he’s making tea for her in the afternoons, and running little errands for her, helping her hang photographs, put up screens, dust the apartment for her, little things like that. It makes him feel young again, taking care of her. It makes him feel wanted and needed again, nursing a frail old woman this way.

  One day she tells him she was once a famous playwright, did he know that? He goes Come on, what are you telling me? She says No, it’s true. When I was twenty-two years old, I wrote a play called Jenny’s Room, it was a big hit, may I drop dead this very minute if I’m not telling the truth. He goes Come on, you’re kidding me. She goes Oh yeah? So look it up in the library. Jessica Miles. I’m in Who’s Who In America.

  He is almost afraid to look in the book because suppose her name isn’t there? Suppose this is all some kind of fantasy? Then she’d be just a crazy old lady making up things, wouldn’t she? He doesn’t know if he can deal with that. But, hey, guess what? His friend up there on the third floor is a celebrity! Not only did she write the play she says she wrote, but it was also turned into a musical five years later, whattya know about that? The play starred somebody named Jenny Corbin, who was a big star back then. When he sees her the next time, he says Well, well, well, grinning at her, and she says Was I lying? and he says I’d sure love to read that play sometime, I’d be honored.

  She tells him it was originally called “Jessie’s Room,” not “Jenny’s Room,” because it was all autobiographical, about her coming to the city here from England and all, and her first years here working for Beneficial Loan, and the experiences she’d had with various beaux and all, and her disastrous love affair, which resulted in her vowing never to marry, all of which was in the play. But when Jenny Corbin, who was a tremendous star of the day, agreed to take the role, she also insisted they change the title to “Jenny’s Room,” to make it her play, you see …

  “That’s terrible,” Andrew says.

  “Well, no, not really,” Jessica says. “Because she made it a tremendous hit, you see. I mean, no one would have come to see something about me, but they thought the play was about her, you see, about Jenny Corbin the star, so they all flocked to the theater and I made a lot of money. And, oh, she was so very beautiful.”

  She does not have similar kind words for the producers of the musical five years later. She tells Andrew that they took a sensitive play—well, a play about Jessica herself—and turned it into something cheap and c
rass, with a libretto by some person born in Liverpool who’d previously written a comedy about soccer, can you imagine? And the words and music weren’t much better. Everything had an insistent ragtime beat to it, with obvious rhymes and the crudest sort of innuendo. As an example, they took one of the play’s most sensitive scenes—which Jenny performed like an angel, by the way—and turned it into a dance number!

  “The scene where she breaks up with the one true love of her life though she doesn’t realize it at the time? A truly wonderful, touching scene, the audience cried every night when Jenny did it. But in the musical, they had colored boys and girls dancing in the background in the most suggestive manner, it was just dreadful. If I’d known what was going to happen to my little play, I’d never have given them permission.”

  “I would love to read it sometime,” Andrew says, and Jessica goes briefly into the other room and returns a moment later with the leather-bound copy her producer presented to her on opening night.

  That night, Andrew cries when he reads the scene in the play where Jessie breaks up with the one true love of her life without realizing it, though the audience does. His wife tells him to please be quiet, she’s trying to sleep.

  Not long after that, Jessica Miles becomes desperately ill.

  He cares for her at home until it becomes apparent she must be removed to a hospital. And then, he visits her every day, often lingering by her bedside from morning to night, and sometimes throughout the night. She dies within a matter of weeks.

  In her will, she leaves to him the leather-bound copy of her precious play, and something even more precious: the copyright to the play itself.

  “How do you know all this?” Carella asked.

  “Hale told me. A hundred times over,” Zimmer said. “Of course, no one at the time expected the musical would be revived. Jessica died fourteen, fifteen years ago. For all intents and purposes, the play she left him had only sentimental value.”