Ed McBain: The Last Dance

"She didn't want the world to believe her father killed himself," Alexander said.

"Bullshit," Lieutenant Byrnes said.

One of the female officers had taken Cynthia Keating

down the hall to the ladies' room. The three detectives were still sitting at the long table in the interrogation room. Alexander was standing now, facing them, pleading his case as if he were facing a jury. The detectives looked as if they might be playing poker, which perhaps they were. Carella had taken the lead here, questioning the Keating woman, eliciting from her what amounted to a confession to at least two crimes, and perhaps a third: Attempted Insurance Fraud. He looked a bit weary after almost twelve hours on the job. Meyer sat beside him like a man holding a royal flush in spades, wearing on his face a look of supreme confidence. The lady had told them all they needed to know. Alexander could do his little dance from here to Honduras, but he couldn't tap his way out of this one. Sitting with cards like these, Meyer knew the lieutenant would tell them to book her on all three counts.

"You really want to send that girl to jail?" Alexander asked.

Which was a good question.

Did they?

She may have been contemplating insurance fraud while committing certain criminal acts in order to establish a later claim, but until she actually submitted the claim, she hadn't actually committed the fraud, had she? So was what she'd done really too terribly harmful to society? Did they really want to send her to prison with ladies who had cut up their babies and dropped them

down the sewer? Did they really want to send a nice Calm's Point housewife to a place where she'd be forced to perform sexual acts upon hardened female criminals who'd murdered liquor store owners or garage attendants? Was that what they really wanted?

It was a good question.

Until Carl Blaney called at eight-thirty that night to

say he was just heading home after having completed the

full autopsy on Andrew Henry Hale. He thought Carella

might like to hear the results.

"I was running a routine toxicological analysis on his

hair," Blaney said. "Washed, desiccated, and extracted

hair samples with organic solvents. Injected the extracts

into the spectrometer, and compared the results against

known library samples."

"What'd you find?"

"Tetrahydrocannabinol."

"English, Doc."

"Marijuana. Did you find any in the apartment?"

"No."

"But that's not all the hair revealed."

"What else?"

"Rohypnol."

"?ow-fin-all?" Carella asked.

"R-O-H-Y-P-N-O-L," Blaney said. "The brand name

for a drug called flunitrazepam."

"I never heard of it."

"We don't see much of it in this city. No emergency-

room episodes, no deaths resulting from its use. It's a benzodiazepine, pretty popular in the South and Southwest. Young people use it in combination with alcohol and other drugs."

"I thought you said this was asphyxia."

"It was. Bear with me. The hair results sent me back

for another look at his blood. This time I was focusing

on flunitrazepam and its -amino metabolites. I found

only moderate levels of the parent drug—concentrations not significant enough to have contributed to the fatality.

But enough to conclude that he'd definitely ingested at

least two milligrams."

"Indicating?"

"Indicating he couldn't possibly have hanged himself.

He'd have been unconscious. You're looking at a homi

cide here."

And so it began.

It was raining relentlessly on the morning of October thirtieth, a Saturday, the day after the body of Andrew Henry Hale was found dead in his bed in an apartment on Currey and Twelfth. Carella and Meyer came running out of the precinct and into the parking lot behind it, drenched to the bone before they'd taken half a dozen steps. Rain banged on the roof of the car. Rain drilled Carella's head as he fumbled the key into the lock on the driver's side, rain smashed his eyes, rain soaked the shoulders of his coat and plastered his hair onto his forehead. Meyer stood patiently hunched and hulking on the passenger side of the car, eyes squinched, drowning in the merciless rain.

"Just take all the time in the world," he suggested.

Carella finally got the key into the lock, twisted it

open, hurried inside, and reached across the seat to unlock

the other door for Meyer.

"Whoosh!" Meyer said, and pulled the door shut behind him.

Both men sat breathless for a moment, enclosed now

in a rattling cocoon, the windshield and windows melting

with rain. Behind them, the precinct lights glowed yellow,

offering comfort and warmth, odd solace for a place they

rarely associated with either. Meyer shifted his weight,

reached into his back pants pockets for a handkerchief,

and dried his face and the top of his bald head. Carella

took several Dunkin' Donuts paper napkins from the side

pocket on the door and tried to blot water from his soaked

hair. "Boy," he said, and grabbed more napkins from the door.

Together, the two men in their bulky overcoats crowded the front seat of the "company car," as they mockingly called it. They were partnered as often as not, the twin peculiarities of exigency and coincidence frequently determining more effectively than any duty chart exactly who might be in the squadroom when the phone rang. They had caught the Hale squeal together yesterday morning. The case was now theirs until either they made an arrest or retired it in the so-called Open File.

Carella started the car.

I Meyer turned on the radio.

The insistent chatter of police calls scratched at the

beating rain. It took a while for the ancient heater to throw any real warmth into the car, adding its clanking clatter to the steady drumming of the rain, the drone of the dispatcher's voice, the hissing swish of tires on black asphalt. Cops on the job listened with one ear all the time, waiting to hear the dispatcher specifically calling their car, particularly waiting for the urgent signal that would tell them an officer was down, in which case every car in the vicinity would respond. Meanwhile, as the rain fell and the heater hurled uncertain hot air onto their faces and their feet, they talked idly about Carella's birthday party earlier this month—a subject he'd rather have forgotten since he'd just turned forty— and the trouble Meyer was having with his brother-in-law, who never had liked Meyer and who kept trying to sell him additional life insurance because he was in such a dangerous occupation.

"You think our occupation is dangerous?" he asked.

"Dangerous, no," Carella said. "Hazardous."

"Enough to warrant what he calls combat insurance?"

"No, I don't think so."

"I rented a video last week," Meyer said, "Robin Williams is dead in it, he goes to heaven. One of the worst movies I ever saw in my entire life."

"I never go to movies where somebody dies and goes

to heaven," Carella said.

"What you should never do is go to a movie with the word 'Dream' in the title," Meyer said. "Sarah likes these

pictures where movie stars die and go walking around so

mere mortals can't see them. So you never heard of it,

huh?" Meyer said.

"Never," Carella said, and smiled. He was thinking if you worked with a man long enough, you began reading

his mind.

"Your kids aren't teenagers yet," Meyer said. "Rophies?

Roofies? Rope? R? Those are all names the kids use for

it."

"New one on me," Carella said.

"It used to come in one- and two-milligram tablets,"

Meyer said. "Hoffman-La Roche—that's the company

that manufactures it—recently pulled the two-mill off