Ed McBain - The Last Dance

"That's not my problem."

"It might not get produced," Kling said reasonably.

"So what?"

"Come on, Miss Carr," Meyer said sharply. "There's lots of money involved here."

"I've got a good job in L.A.," Felicia said. "It'll be nice if Jenny's Room happens. But if not, not. Life goes on."

Not if you're Martha Coleridge, Meyer thought.

"So can you tell us where you were Sunday night?" he asked.

"I went to a movie with my girlfriend," Felicia said, sighing. "The woman whose apartment this is. Shirley Lasser."

"What'd you see?" Kling asked casually.

"The new Travolta film."

"Any good?"

"The movie was lousy," Felicia said. "But I like him."

"He's usually very good," Kling said.

"Yes."

"Do you find him handsome?"

"Extremely so."

"What time did the show go on?" Meyer asked, getting back in character.

"Eight o'clock."

"What time did you get home?"

"Around eleven."

"Girlfriend with you all that time?"

"Yes."

"Where can we reach her?"

"She's at work right now."

"Where's that?"

"You guys kill me," Felicia said.

The sky was beginning to cloud over as they headed uptown. Decked out for Christmas as she was, the city petulantly demanded snow. Store windows were decorated with fake snow, and there were fake Salvation Army Santas shaking beUs in front of fake chimneys on every other street corner. But this was already the ninth of December and Christmas Day was fast approaching. What the city needed now was a real Santa soaring over

the rooftops, real snow falling gently from the sky above. What the city needed was a sign.

"I think she was telling the truth," Kling said.

"I don't," Meyer said.

"Where was she lying?"

"She gets a letter threatening legal action, and she forgets the woman's name?"

"Well . . ."

"Says she never heard of her, quote, unquote. Then all at once, comes the dawn! Oh yes, now recall," he said, doing a pretty fair imitation. "Martha Coleridge! She's the one who wrote a letter that can only deprive me of early retirement." He snapped the niobile phone from its cradle, held it out to Kling. "Call this Shirley Lasser," he said, "tell her we're on the way. Six to five her pal's already been on the pipe, telling her they saw a Travolta movie together last Sunday night."

Kling began dialing.

"I wonder which one it was," he said.

Knowing that Jamaicans slept ten, twelve to a room, Fat Ollie Weeks did not consider it beyond the realm of possibility that a Jamaican visitor from Houston, Texas, might have crashed with friends or relatives now residing in this fair city, ah yes. Further knowing that the Jamaican in question had picked up Althea Cleary in a diner in the Eight-Eight, he took a run at the precinct's own Jamaican enclave, The Forbes Houses on Noonan and Crowe—and came up empty. Undaunted, but unwilling to do a door-to-door canvass of the city's six other Jamaican neighborhoods, he headed for the largest of them, downtown in the Three-Two Precinct.

Here in the old city, narrow, twisting little streets with Florida-sounding names like Lime, Hibiscus, Pelican, Manatee, and Heron ran into similarly cramped little

lanes and alleys called Goedkoop, Keulen, Sprenkels, and Visser, named by the Dutch when the city was new and masted sailing ships lay in the harbor. Them days was gone forever, Gertie. Running eastward from the Straits of Napoli and Chinatown, Visser Street swerved to the north into what used to be an area of warehouses bordering the River Harb. Too far uptown to be considered Lower Platform, not far enough downtown to be a part of trendy Hopscotch, the newly erected projects here were officially called The Mapes Houses, after James Joseph Mapes, a revered former Governor of the state.

All of the city's projects were rated by the police department on a one-to-five scale ranging from "uncertain" to "chancy" to "risky" to "unsafe" to downright "hazardous." The Mapes Houses were classified a middling three on the Safety Factor scale, although foot patrolmen assigned to the area considered this a conservative ranking. The cops of the Three-Two dubbed the project "Rockfort," after a seventeenth-century moated fortress on the easternmost limits of Kingston, but perhaps that was only because eighty percent of the residents here were Jamaican.

On Fat Ollie Weeks's scale of personal safety, Rockfort ranked a dismal eight, which in his lexicon meant shitty, mon. He went in there alone early that Thursday afternoon, but only because it was broad daylight a few weeks before Christmas. Otherwise, he'd have requested backup and a SWAT team. Abandoning his usual swagger, which he felt might be a liability here among the Jamaican brethren, ah yes, his manner became almost obsequious as he went from door to door asking after a man some six foot, two or three inches tall, with a fawn-colored complexion, deep brown eyes, wide shoulders, a narrow waist, a lovely grin, and a melodic Jamaican lilt to his voice. He did not mention the blue star tattooed on the suspect's penis because many of the people he spoke to

were women, and many of the men considered themselves Christians.

He did not strike pay dirt until three that afternoon, by which time it was beginning to snow and the skies above were dark enough to cause him to consider going back uptown.

Cynthia Keating did not seem surprised to find Carella and Brown on her doorstep yet another time. She didn't even threaten calling her lawyer. She asked them to come in, told them they had ten minutes, and then sat opposite them, crossing her legs and folding her arms across her chest. It had begun snowing, and the window behind her was alive with wind-driven flakes.

Carella got directly to the point.

"A woman named Martha Coleridge," he said, "mailed some letters to Norman Zimmer's office, asking that they be forwarded. One of them was addressed to you, as owner of the underlying rights to Jenny's Room. With it was a photocopy of a play Miss Coleridge herself had written. Did you ever receive that play and the accompanying letter?"

"Yes, I did."

Progress, Carella thought.

"How'd you feel about it?"

"Concerned."

"Why?"

"Because it seemed to me there were similarities between her play and Jenny's Room."

"What kind of similarities?"

"Well, the premise, to begin with. An immigrant girl comes to America and falls in love with someone of another faith while at the same time she's falling in love with the city itself—which she finally chooses over the man. That's identical in both plays. And the conceit. We

see her love affair with the city through the window of her room, which is really a window to her heart. That's the same, too. Reading it was . . . well . . . alarming."

"So what'd you do?"

"I called Todd. He . . ."

"Todd Alexander?"

"Yes. My lawyer. He advised me to forget about it."

"And is that what you did?"

She hesitated for the briefest tick of time. Carella caught the hesitation, and so did Brown. Their eyes revealed nothing, but they had caught it. Her fleeting inner debate apparently led to a decision to tell the truth.

"No, I did not forget about it," she said.

But the truth inevitably led to another question.

"What did you do instead?" Brown asked.

Again, the slight hesitation.

"I went to see her," Cynthia said.

The detectives did not know why she was telling the truth—if indeed this was the truth. The woman they were here to inquire about was dead, and anything that had transpired between her and Cynthia Keating could neither be confirmed nor contradicted. But the path of evident truth was the one Cynthia seemed to have chosen, and they thanked God for small favors and plunged ahead regardless.

"When was this?" Carella asked.