The Last Dance (5 page)

Her father is lying crosswise on it, just the way she dropped him, on his back, his legs bent at the knees and trailing to the floor. She goes to him and lifts the legs, turning the body so that he is lying properly now, his head on the pillow, his feet almost touching the footboard. She frees the blanket from beneath him, draws it down to the foot of the bed. She knows it will appear odd that he is in bed with his clothes on, knows a safer pretense would be to disrobe him before pulling the blanket up over his chest. But she has never seen her father naked in her lifetime, and the prospect of undressing him, the horrible thought of seeing his naked body cold and blue and shriveled and dead is so chilling that she takes an involuntary step backward, shaking her head, as if refusing even to consider such an act. The horror, she thinks. The horror. And pulls the blanket up over him, to just beneath his chin, hiding all but his face from view.

She goes to the phone then, and dials 911, and calmly tells the operator that she's just found her father dead in bed and asks her to please send someone.

“The girl was in shock,” Alexander said. “She didn't know what she was doing.”

“She just told us she was planning insurance fraud,” Carella said.

“No, she didn't say that at all. She doesn't even know what the policy says. Is there really a suicide exclusion clause in that policy? Who knows? All she knows is that there's a policy in her father's safe deposit box. What kind of policy, in what amount, she doesn't know. So how can you say she was planning insurance fraud?”

“Well, gee, Counselor,” Carella said, “when someone tries to make a suicide look like a natural death …”

“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.”

“
Row
-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 7-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 homicide 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 they either made an arrest or retired it in the so-called Open File.

Carella started the car.

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? R2? 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 the retail market in Germany. But it's still available here. That's another name for it, by the way. La Roche. Or even just Roach. How much did Blaney say the old man had dropped?”

“At least two mills.”

“Would've knocked him out in half an hour. It's supposed to be ten times stronger than Valium, no taste, no odor. You really never heard of it?”

“Never,” Carella said.

“It's also called the Date-Rape drug,” Meyer said. “When it first got popular in Texas, kids were using it to boost a heroin high or cushion a cocaine crash. Then some cowboy discovered if he dropped a two-mill tab in a girl's beer, it had the same effect as if she drank a six-pack. In ten, twenty minutes, she's feeling no pain. She loses all inhibitions, blacks out, and wakes up the next morning with no memory of what happened.”

“Sounds like science fiction,” Carella said.

“Small white tablet,” Meyer said, “you can either dissolve it in a drink or snort it. Ruffies is another name. The Forget Pill, too. Or Roofenol. Or Rib. Costs three, four bucks a tab.”

“Thanks for the input,” Carella said.

The men were on their way to Andrew Hale's bank.

They were now in possession of a court order authorizing them to open his safe deposit box. Inside that box, by Cynthia Keating's own admission, there was an insurance policy on her father's life. Her husband had also told them that his law firm was in possession of her father's will, which left to husband and wife all of the old man's earthly possessions—which did not amount to a hell of a lot. A passbook they'd found in the apartment showed a bank balance of $2,476.12. The old man had also owned a collection of 78 rpm's dating back to the thirties and forties, none of them rare, all of them swing hits of the day—Benny Goodman, Harry James, Glenn Miller—played and replayed over and over again until the shellac was scratched and the grooves worn. There were a few books in the apartment as well, most of them dog-eared paperbacks. There was an eight-piece setting of inexpensive silver plate.

True enough, in a city where a five-dollar bill in a tattered billfold was often cause enough for murder, these belongings alone might have provided motive. But not for two people as well off as the Keatings. Besides, this had not been a case of someone choosing a random victim on the street and then popping him, something that happened all the time. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble here, first drugging the old man and next hanging him. The prize had to be worth the trouble.

Carella pulled the car into a No Parking zone in front of the bank. He flipped down his visor to show the pink police paper that normally warned off any cop on the beat, and then stepped out of the car and dashed through the rain toward the front of the bank, Meyer pounding along behind him.

Their court order opened the dead man's safe deposit box, and
sure enough, they found an insurance policy for $25,000, with Andrew Hale's daughter and son-in-law listed as sole beneficiaries. The policy did, in fact, contain a suicide exclusion clause:

Section 1.5 Suicide If the insured dies by suicide within one year from the Date of Issue, the amount payable by the Company will be limited to the premiums paid.

But the policy had been issued almost ten years ago.

Thursday night was the night in question.

According to what Cynthia Keating had told them, she'd spoken to her father at nine that night, and had found him hanging dead at nine-thirty or so the next morning. A check with the telephone company confirmed that she had indeed called his number at 9:07 the night before, and had spent two minutes on the phone with him. This did not preclude her later taking the subway across the river and into the trees, going up to his apartment, dropping a few pills in his wine or his beer or his bottled water, and then hanging him over a hook.

But
—

Cynthia maintained that after having telephoned her father, she had gone to meet her girlfriend Josie at the movie theater a block from her apartment and together they had seen a movie that started around 9:15 and ended around 11:45, after which she and her friend Josie had gone for tea and scones at a little snack bar called Westmore's. She had returned home at around twelve-thirty, and had not left the apartment again until the next morning at around twenty to nine, at which time she had taken the subway across the river, and walked to her father's apartment, only to find Dad, poor Dad, hanging in the closet, and I'm feeling so bad. The
movie she'd seen was part of a Kurosawa retrospective. It was titled
High and Low,
and it was based on a novel by an American who wrote cheap mysteries. A call to the theater confirmed the title of the film and the start and finish times. A call to her girlfriend Josie Gallitano confirmed that she had accompanied Cynthia to the movie and had later enjoyed a cup of tea and a chocolate-covered scone with her. Cynthia's husband, as was to be expected, confirmed that he had found her asleep in bed when he got home from a poker game at around one o'clock. She had not left the apartment again that night.