The Last Dance (23 page)

Palmer told Carella that for the past fifteen years he'd been working in the “post room,” as he called it, of a publishing 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.”

“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 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 cocktail 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 ass. 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 canapés 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 glass.

“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.”

He began playing.

Carella could not determine where any new songs had been added; to him, the music flooding the air in Connie Lindstrom's penthouse apartment sounded seamless. As Flynn sang in his raspy smoker's voice, Carella floated back to another time and place, this city in the year 1928, when everything seemed fresh and innocent to a young girl named Jenny, fantasizing in her room all the way downtown, in an immigrant area then called—as it still was—The Lower Platform.

But, oh, the differences between then and now.

Flynn sang of a young girl's yearnings and awakenings in a wondrous island bordered by confluent rivers and spanned by magical bridges. He sang of golden towers rising into the clouds, interlaced with immaculate streets, humming belowground with subways not yet sullied by time or wear. He sang of promise and hope for a population of immigrants that had brought with them customs to treasure and to nourish. As he sang, his voice became a choir of voices, the voices of a hundred tribes with as many different backgrounds, joining together in this shining new land, to become at last a single strong united tribe.

Here beyond the windows in Jenny's room …

Ah, what a wonderland there had been.

Flynn struck the last chord of the last dance.

It was still snowing.

Carella looked across the room to where his partner stood solid and big and black against the white flakes swirling outside. Randy
Flynn rose from the piano bench, placed the palms of his hands together like a guru, and bowed in transparently false modesty, accepting applause from the assembled guests. Brown's eyes scanned the room. So did Carella's.

Almost anyone in this room could have killed Andrew Hale.

There was no way the detectives who caught the murder down in Hopscotch could have connected it with the murders uptown. No way. The first victim uptown had been a sixty-eight-year-old white man who'd been hanged from a door hook and then transported to a bed. The second one had been a nineteen-year-old black girl stabbed in the chest with a knife grabbed from her own kitchen counter. The prior ingestion of a drug called Rohypnol was the only connecting link between them—if, in fact, it
was
a link and not the sort of coincidence that plagued police work.

Except when they were reading novels, the cops in this city rarely came across serial killers. Serial killers in novels were enormously popular these days, but that did not mean they were running rampant all over the United States. Current estimates maintained that only some thirty-five to fifty of them were out there loose. In order for a murderer to qualify as a bona fide serial killer, he had to have killed three or more people within a relatively short period of time. On the other hand, a serial killer was not someone who killed Uncle George and two days later killed Cousins Mandy and Maude because they'd seen him commit the first murder. That was merely a careful murderer.

The cops in this city investigated some 2,000 homicides annually. Even if the detectives catching the downtown squeal had remotely suspected a connection between the Hale murder, the Cleary murder, and this new murder, they would not have jumped to the conclusion that a raving lunatic serial killer was loose in the city. The detectives catching the squeal early that Monday morning
might
have heard about the Hale murder from television, but they most certainly had not heard about the murder of an obscure little
black girl in Diamondback. So it never once entered their minds that this new murder was somehow related to the previous two, serially or otherwise.

According to a birth certificate they found in a candy tin in the top drawer of her bedroom dresser, the victim's name was Martha Coleridge and she was ninety-eight years old. A thin, birdlike creature, she lay in her nightgown at the foot of the bed, her neck apparently broken. The detectives—an experienced First named Bryan Shanahan, and a newly appointed Third named Jefferson Long—went through the lady's belongings, sifting through browned letters and diaries, knowing they wouldn't find any clues in all this stuff, but going through the drill anyway. What they figured was that some junkie burglar had come in here, stolen the old lady's grocery money, and then snapped her neck for good measure. They kept looking through her old papers, tossing them onto the bed while the
ME
examined the body. One of the things they found was a blue binder with a typed label on it. The label read:

My Room

by Martha Coleridge

What was inside the binder looked like some kind of play or something. They tossed it on the bed with all the other crap.

The first thing that attracted the Reverend Gabriel Foster to the case was the fact that the white suspect had been released on bail whereas his black counterpart had been denied bail and remanded to the Men's House of Detention. Same crime, same judge, two shooters, one white, one black, different disposition.

That was the first thing, but it wasn't enough to send him running through the streets, because what he was sensing here was a change in the public mood. Whereas Maxwell Corey Blaine and Hector Milagros had at first been treated like national heroes for disposing of that vilest of human beings, the informer, they were now being pilloried as monsters or worse because a
second
informer—who
was now a media darling and something of an instant heroine—had for a substantial reward turned in the white man, who had at once copped a plea and given up his partner, the black man who'd been denied bail. The world was full of no-good dirty rats these days, but Foster wasn't about to take up the banner for a pair of universally reviled murderers.

Until a pair of ambitious detectives made life easier for him.

The partners were named Archie Bingman and Robert Tracey, familiarly called Bingo and Bop by the people who lived in Hightown, where Enrique Ramirez ran his pool hall and his drug operation. They had been dogging
El Jefe
's tracks for the past year and a half now. Under the federal Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute, murders committed in the furtherance of criminal enterprise were punishable by lifetime sentences. The Colombian cartel was most definitely a racketeer-influenced and corrupt organization. If they could tie the Guido's Pizzeria murder to
El Jefe
's drug operation, he'd be sitting on his ass in Kansas for the rest of his life, Toto.

Bingo and Bop felt certain that the two shooters hadn't revealed anything that might incriminate Ramirez. The indicted pair knew well enough that the long arm of the cartel could reach into the loneliest of prison cells, and they did not long for an icepick in the eye one dark and stormy night. Better to ride the road upstate alone, do the time, and breathe easy. Besides, if the pair
had
traded Ramirez for some kind of Chinese deal, the grand jury would have already indicted him. Bingo and Bop knew of no such paper handed down.

It galled them to know that one of Ramirez's hit men was sitting downtown in custody, where any police officer with a bit of ingenuity could gain access to him and perhaps learn something about who had sent whom to shoot the hapless little stoolie neither of the detectives had ever met or used. They already
knew
who had sent Milagros to that pizzeria because it was common knowledge up
here in the Eight-Nine that Milagros and his partner Blaine were two of
El Jefe
's cleanup men. In the American criminal justice system, however,
knowing
something wasn't enough. You also had to be able to
prove
it beyond a reasonable doubt, worse luck.

That Monday night, the sixth of December, while two detectives in Hopscotch filed their DD-5 on the little old lady who'd had her neck broken, and the reverend Foster pored over that day's newspapers trying to figure out a way to turn the arrest of Hector Milagros to his advantage, Bingo and Bop drove downtown to the Men's House of Detention in its new quarters on Blanchard Street, and told the jailer on duty they were there to see the Guido's Pizzeria shooter. The jailer wanted to know on whose authority.

“We're investigating a related drug matter,” Bingo said.

“You got to go through his lawyer,” the jailer said.

“We already talked to him,” Bop said. “He told us it's okay.”

“I need it in writing,” the jailer said.

“Come on, don't break 'em, willya?” Bingo said. “Where the fuck we gonna find his lawyer, this hour?”

“Find him tomorrow,” the jailer said. “Come back tomorrow.”

“We got something hot can't wait till tomorrow,” Bingo said.

“You ever hear of hot pursuit?” Bop said.

“I never heard of hot pursuit leadin to a jail cell.”

“Come on, we want to nail this cocksucker sellin dope to your kids.”

“My kids are grown up and livin in Seattle,” the jailer said.

“Ten minutes, okay?”

“The door was open, and you walked in,” the jailer said.

Milagros was in his cell reading his Bible. One other cell in the hall was occupied by an old man mumbling in his sleep. Milagros had never seen these guys in his life, and he wondered how they'd got in here. His lawyer hadn't mentioned anything about anybody coming to see him. Far as Milagros knew, he'd be sitting on his ass here in The Catacombs till his case came to trial. The way his lawyer had explained it, you couldn't convict somebody solely on
the uncorroborated testimony of an accomplice. Anyway, who was gonna believe a guy who tried to kill five cops and succeeded in hurting one of them pretty bad? Nobody, that's who. Just sit tight and you walk, his lawyer had said, which was fine with Milagros. So who were these two guys, and what did they want here, this hour of the night?

The door clicked open electrically. Bingo and Bop entered the cell, and closed the door behind them. From the far end of the corridor, the jailer threw the switch that locked it again.

Bingo smiled.

Milagros had learned a long time ago all about guys who came at you smiling.

The other one was smiling, too.

“So tell us who sent you to the pizzeria,” Bingo said.

“Who the fuck are you?” Milagros asked.

“Nice talk,” Bop said.

“We're two fellas gonna send your boss away,” Bingo said.

“What boss you talkin abou', man?”

“Enrique Ramirez.”

“Don't know him.”

“Oh dear,” Bingo said.

“Get the fuck outta here, I call d'key.”

“The key is down the hall takin a leak,” Bop said.

“I wake up dee whole fuckin jail you don' ged outta here,” Milagros said.

“Oh dear,” Bingo said again.

“Someone I'd like you to meet,” Bop said, and yanked a nine from a shoulder holster. “Mr. Glock,” he said, “meet Mr. Milagros.”

Milagros looked at the semi.

“Come on, whass dis?” he said.

“Dis,”
Bop said, mimicking him, “is a pistol.
Una pistola, maricón. Comprende?”

“Come on, whass dee matter wi' you?”

“Who sent you to kill that fuckin pussy-clot?”

“Nobody. He owe us money, we go on our own.”

“El Jefe
sent you, didn't he?”

“You know who
El Jefe
is?” Milagros said, and tried a smile. “My
mama
is
El Jefe
. Thass wha' me an' my brudders call her.
Jefita
.”

“Gee, is that what you call your mama?” Bingo said.

“Is that what you call your whore mama?” Bop said.

“'Ey, man, watch your mou', okay?”

“You watch
your
mouth,” Bop said, and rammed the barrel of the nine against Milagros's lips.