The Last Dance (21 page)

“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.

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 crass, 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!