87th Precinct - The Last Dance Part 22

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 175.

Ed McBain more accurate-got fired from the hospital because they thought he was too old to be nursing, even though there were/ema/e nurses his age on the ward. Fifty-three, is that old?-talk about s.e.xism. 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, i 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 whatl His friend up there on the third floor is a celebrity! Not only did she write the play she says 176.

she wrote, but it was also turned into a musical five years later, whatty a 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 t.i.tle 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. .h.i.t, 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 cra.s.s, 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!

177.

Ed McBain "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 F 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."

"Until your partner rediscovered the musical."

178.

"Yes. We did a copyright search, found that all renewals had been made, located the current owners, and proceeded to license the rights. You can imagine how thrilled these people were! The bookwriter' s grandson works in the mail room of a publis.h.i.+ng house in London. The lyricist's granddaughter sells real estate in L. A. And the composer's great-grandson drives a taxi in Tel Aviv! This revival is a G.o.dsend to them, an opportunity to make some very big bucks indeed. If the show is a hit, of course. Which I'm sure it will be," he said, and rapped his knuckles on his desk.

"When did you discover Hale had inherited the underlying rights?"

"When our lawyers did the search. We weren't expecting a problem, why would there have been a problem? In fact, we were already proceeding, a.s.suming that rights to the play would follow as a matter of course. A new bookwriter was already working, we'd commissioned new songs and hired a director and a ch.o.r.eographer, everything was in motion. But finding Hale was another matter. As it turned out, he was right under our noses here in the city, but he'd moved around a lot in the past several years. Apparently he got fired from a nursing job in a hospital somewhere in Riverhead, molested a young girl in her room, or so she later said, who the h.e.l.l knew? Or cared, for that matter? What we wanted were the rights to the mawkish little play Jessica Miles had written and inconsiderately willed to him."

"Are you saying it's not a good play?"

"It's dreadful. The only thing that put it over was Jenny Corbin in the starring role. She was the mayor's mistress at the time, you know, and quite a notorious personality. A stunning woman, from what I've been told." He hung both huge hands on the air and outlined the ripeness of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, nodding in appreciation. "But we needed the d.a.m.n thing," he said. "Without that play, we simply couldn't proceed any further." He sighed heavily, opened a cigar 179.

Ed McBain box on his desk, and fished a cigar from it. "Smoke?" he asked. "They're Havanas."

"Thanks, no," Carella said.

Brown shook his head.

Zimmer unwrapped the cigar, bit off one end, and struck a match. Puffing great clouds of asphyxiating smoke on the air, he waved them away with one big hand, and then settled back in his chair to puff contentedly. Without asking, Carella got up to open the window. Traffic noises flooded the room.

"Well, I went to see the old man," Zimmer said. "Never expecting a problem, mind you. Why should there be a problem? Who doesn't want to make a fortune? I told him we were reviving the musical based on Jessica Miles's play and wanted to license the rights from him. He flatly refused."

"Why?" Brown asked.

"Because he was an idiot," Zimmer said. "I tried to explain that he could make a lot of money if the show was a hit. No. I tried to tell him a hit show would play all over the United States, all over the world No. At first, I thought he was holding out for a bigger advance, higher royalties. But that wasn't it."

"What was it?" Carella asked.

"He was protecting Jessica's s.h.i.+tty little play! Can you believe it? He said she'd been unhappy with the musical . . .well, yes, I said, so are we'.That's why we're having the book rewritten, that's why we're adding new songs. No, he said. I'm sorry. She would not want the musical revived. I would be dishonoring her wishes if I let you have her play. Three times, I went to see him. He simply would not listen to reason." Zimmer shook his head, and blew a huge cloud of smoke at the ceiling. "So I went to see his daughter. Cynthia Keating. Mousy little housewife dominated by a legal-eagle husband who immediately appreciated how much money they could make if this show turned out to be 180.

a hit. I asked Cynthia to intercede on my behalf, go to the old man, talk some sense into him. No luck. He wouldn't budge from his position." Zimmer shook his head again, and looked across his desk at the detectives. "So I killed him," he said, and laughed suddenly, like a choirboy who' d farted during a Christmas chorale.

Neither Carella nor Brown even smiled.

"That's what you're thinking, isn't it?" Zimmer said. "That I had good reason to want him dead? Why not kill the stubborn son of a b.i.t.c.h? Be much easier to deal with the daughter, wouldn't it?"

The detectives said nothing.

"Incidentally," Zimmer said, and puffed on the cigar and then looked thoughtfully at the glowing end of it. "Cynthia knew her father was leaving her the rights to that play."

"How do you know that?" Carella asked.

"He told her. Said when he died she'd be getting twenty-five grand in insurance plus the rights to this miserable little play. Forgive the editorializing, but this entire matter p.i.s.ses me off a great deal."

Gee, imagine what it does to us, Carella thought.

"Tell you what," Zimmer said. "We're having a Meet 'N' Greet tomorrow ni. . ."

"A what?" Brown said.

"Little gathering for the usual suspects," he said, and grinned. "Why don't you stop by?"

Carella wondered what had happened to those simple cases where you walked in and found a guy with a smoking gun in his fist and a b.l.o.o.d.y corpse at his feet. Zimmer had suggested that he himself was a good suspect. Carella agreed. But so was Cynthia Keating, or her greedy little attorney husband, or any one of the copyright inheritors in London, Tel Aviv, or Los Angeles. Not to mention all the people now involved with the current show-the new bookwriter and composer, the director, the ch.o.r.eographer, 181.

Ed McBain Zimmer' s partner. Anyone who wanted this show to happen could have hired the Jamaican who'd hanged Hale on the bathroom door like a wet towel.

"What time tomorrow night?" he asked.

"You want a mystery?" Parker asked them. "Here's a mystery for you."

"We don't want a mystery," Carella said.

"We already have a mystery," Meyer said.

"Two mysteries," Kling said.

"Too many mysteries," Brown said.

"Here's a mystery for you," Parker said. "I stop this guy the other day, he just went through a red light, I'm standing right there on the corner. I flag him down cause I'm a conscientious cop . . ."

Brown blew his nose.

". . . and I ask to see his driver's license and registration. So he pulls all this s.h.i.+t out of his wallet and his glove compartment, and guess what's there with it?"

"What?" Kling asked.

"His marriage certificate."

"His what?"

"Yeah," Parker said.

"Why's he carrying a marriage certificate?"

"That's the mystery," Parker said.

"Was he recently married?"

"No, the certificate was ten years old."

"So why's he carrying it around with him?"

"I don'tknow. That's why it's a mystery."

"I hate mysteries," Carella said.

The Meet 'N' Greet was supposed to start at six P.M. in Connie Lindstrom's penthouse apartment on Grover Avenue, overlooking Grover Park, a world away from the 182.

Eighty-seventh Precinct station house, but only a mile and a half farther downtown. If Brown and Carella had gone to work that Sat.u.r.day, they'd have been to the party in ten minutes. But they were coming down from their homes in Riverhead, and so they allowed themselves forty minutes, Brown picking up Carella at twenty past five. By that time, a fierce snow storm had started in the city and they hit its full force just as they were crossing the bridge over the Devil's Byte. They did not get to her building until six-thirty. As it was, they were not overly late. Most of the guests, similarly held up by the storm, were just arriving. The detectives had dressed up for the occasion, both of them wearing unaccustomed suits, Brown's blue, Carella's gray. They needn' t have bothered. Half the guests were wearing blue jeans. One of them, an actor, asked them what they did. When they told him they were police detectives, he said he had once played a cop in a summer stock production of Detective Story.

The show's new songwriter, a man who introduced himself as Randy Flynn, told Carella that the term "Meet 'N' Greet" was usually reserved for the start of rehearsals, when the full cast met the producers and the creative team for the first time. "Connie's new in the business, though," he whispered. "She sometimes gets the lingo wrong." Flynn, a man in his sixties with several hit shows to his credit, wore a look of extreme smugness that attested to his worldwide fame. Puffing incessantly on a cigarette, he told Carella that he'd been contacted by Zimmer early in July, when they'd first acquired the rights to the original show's music from the composer's great-grandson in Tel Aviv. "He's not here tonight," he said, "but the others are."

The original lyricist's granddaughter had been flown in from Los Angeles, where she worked at Coldwell Banker selling real estate. Her name was Felicia Carr, and she was possibly thirty-three years old, a reddish-blonde wearing the only long gown in the room, a silky green number that 183.

Ed McBain clung to her like moss. She was listening intently to Naomi Ja.n.u.s, the ch.o.r.eographer, who had on her head the same black rustler's hat she'd been wearing this past Tuesday. Naomi was telling a man named Arthur Bragg that she planned some startlingly s.e.xy dance sequences for the speakeasy number, whatever that was. Brown surmised that Bragg was the show's musical director, whatever that was. He decided there were too many people here. Felicia said she couldn't wait to see the dances, she just loved musicals that had a lot of s.e.xy dancing in them.

"When did you fly east?" Brown asked her.

"Yesterday," she said. "On the Red Eye."

"And you go back when?"

"Oh, not for a while. I'm planning to do some Christmas shopping."

"This must be very exciting for you."

"Oh yes, it is!" she said. "I can't wait for it to open!"

"When will that be?"

"Next fall sometime," Naomi said. "Provided there's a theater available."

"That seems a long way off."

"Well," Naomi said, "the show's been lying dormant since it closed in 1928, so I guess it can wait a few months more."

The bookwriter' s grandson was a Brit named Gerald Palmer. He was in his early forties, Carella guessed, a clean-shaven man in need of a haircut. Like the two detectives, he, too, was wearing a suit, though his seemed somewhat out of fas.h.i.+on, an impression possibly created by its British styling. The suit was blue, the shoes he wore with it brown. In his c.o.c.kney accent, he explained to Carella, unnecessarily, that the bookwriter wrote all the words spoken onstage, as opposed to anything sung or danced. "He's sometimes called the librettist," he said. "My grandfather wrote an absolutely wonderful libretto for the original musical. I don't know why they hired someone 184.

to rewrite it." Carella guessed he hadn't been told that the original book was "hopeless."

At just that moment, the man who'd revised the book joined them. He was tall and ungainly, in his late fifties, Carella supposed, wearing jeans, a blue s.h.i.+rt open at the throat, and a green shawl-collared cardigan sweater over it. "Clarence Hull," he said, and shook hands with both of them. He immediately told Palmer-almost by way of apology, it seemed to Carella-that his grandfather's libretto had been "quite artful for its day," his exact words, but that the new millennium required something more immediately engaging, which was why he'd chosen to place the show's opening not on a farm in the East Midlands, where the original had started, but instead in London, "so that the heroine isn't a simple farm girl coming to America but is instead someone rather more sophisticated moving from one big city to another, do you see?" Palmer told him that his grandfather had once written a straight play as well, "A comedy, actually," he said, "about soccer," which he thought might make a good musical, given the current American obsession with the sport. Hull told him flatly that the only sports musical that had ever made it was d.a.m.n Yankees, and then excused himself to go refill his champagne gla.s.s.

Palmer told Carella that for the past fifteen years he'd been working in the "post room," as he called it, of a publis.h.i.+ng house called Martins and Grenville, "the last publisher in Bedford Square, d'you know it? A highly prestigious firm." He said he was thrilled they were doing his granddad's show again. "I hope it'll come to London one day," he said.

"When did you get here?" Carella asked.

"Flew over on Wednesday."

"Where are you staying?"

"The Piccadilly. Sounded a lot like home," he said, and 185.

Ed McBain grinned. He'd shaved too close. There were razor nicks on his chin.

"When will you be going back?"

"Not till next Sunday. I'm taking a little time here, enjoying the city. Plenty of time for work later on, eh?" he said.

Cynthia Keating was wearing a simple black c.o.c.ktail dress. Her husband Robert was another of the men wearing a suit. Brown figured anyone not intimately connected with show business had dolled up for the occasion. He was beginning to feel somewhat like a horse's a.s.s. The suit Keating had on was a severe pinstripe. He looked as if he might be trying a case for IBM. Cynthia was telling Rowland Chapp, the show's director, that the original play Jessica Miles had written was "perfectly wonderful," something Chapp accepted with a distracted nod that indicated he knew precisely how dreadful the play was. Brown wanted to go home.

Champagne and canapes were coming around on trays, served by a pair of wannabe actors who were dressed in black and white tonight, earnestly playing witty waiter and flirtatious waitress. Snow swirled past the penthouse windows, the flakes illuminated by corner floodlights that made them appear as sharp and as swift as tiny daggers.

Connie Lindstrom tapped on her champagne gla.s.s.

"I have a treat," she said. "Randy?"

There was applause, and then a hush as Randy Flynn went to the grand piano in one corner of the room, sat, and lifted the lid over the keys. Behind him, snowflakes rushed the night.

"I'm going to play the show for you," he said. "Including the three new songs I wrote. We've kept the original conceit, the entire musical takes place in Jenny's room. The window in her room is a window on the city. We see the city, we see everything happening in the city through her eyes, from her point of view."