“Mr Zimmer,” Carella said, “these rights you bought from Cynthia Keating. Did she inherit them from her father?”
“If you need information regarding the acquisition of rights, you’ll have to talk to my attorney. Meanwhile, you’ve wasted enough of my time.
Goodbye.”
“Does that answer your question?” Chapp said, and nodded. “Good, we have work to do here, so do curtsy and go home.” He sat abruptly on one of the folding chairs, took off the galoshes, removed from his tote bag a pair of soft leather loafers, and slipped into them. “Where’s Naomi?” he asked.
Rising abruptly-he was a man of swift, decisive movements, Brown noticed-he clapped his hands like a schoolmarm calling together an unruly class, said, “Ten after ten, kiddies, no more questions!”
Ignoring him, Brown asked, “Is that why you went to see Hale? To talk about the rights to Jenny’s Room?”
“Yes,” Zimmer said.
“Where the hell is Naomi!” Chapp shouted.
The door opened. A blond, blue-eyed woman wearing a black parka, a black cowboy hat, and black jeans came in and walked swiftly toward the tables.
“Right on cue,” Chapp said.
Naomi-if that was her name-smiled quizzically at the detectives, pulled a face that asked Who the hell are these people, unzipped the parka, and said, “Sorry I’m late.”
“Construction on Farrell,” Connie said.
“Got it,” Naomi said, aiming a finger at her and pulling an imaginary trigger. Under the parka, she was wearing a long black sweater pulled low over the jeans. She did not take off the black hat.
“Are you a cattle rustler?” Chapp asked her.
“Yes, Ro,” she said.
Connie was lighting another cigarette from the stub of the first one.
“You don’t plan to smoke while people are singing in here, do you?”
Naomi asked, appalled.
“Sorry,” Connie said, and stubbed it out at once.
The door to the waiting room burst open. The bespectacled young man who’d earlier asked Carella if he’d need sides popped his head in.
“The piano player’s here,” he said.
“Good,” Chapp said. “What’s that in the corner there, Charlie?”
“A piano?” Charlie said cautiously.
“Good. Introduce it to the piano player. Who’s our ten o’clock?”
“Girl named Stephanie Beers.”
“Send her right in.”
“You heard him,” Zimmer told the detectives.
“Just one more question,” Carella said.
“Just.”
“How’d Hale acquire those rights?”
“I have no time to go into that just now.”
“When will you have time?” Carella asked.
“You said just one more question,” Chapp reminded him.
The door opened again.
“Morning, morning!”
A man wearing a short overcoat, a long muffler, and bright red woolen gloves walked directly to the upright piano angled into the corner, took off his overcoat and gloves, hurled them on top of the piano, yanked out the bench, and sat. A tall, redheaded woman walked in almost immediately behind him.
“Good morning, everyone,” she said. “I’m Stephanie Beers.”
“Hi,” Chapp said. “I’m Rowland Chapp, director of Jenny’s…”
“I love your work, Mr Chapp.”
“Thank you. Naomi Janus, our choreographer. And our two producers, Connie Lindstrom and… Norm? Sorry, but we really must…”
“Coming.”
“We’ll be back,” Carella said.
“What are you going to sing for us?” Chapp asked, smiling.
A call to the Hack Bureau had revealed no pickups outside The Telephone Company at two A. M. or thereabouts on November 10. So you think, a black hooker, who gives a shit? Then you think some guy dropped roofers in her beer or ginger ale and stabbed her? That ain’t fair, is what you think. So you start wondering how the girl got home that night if she didn’t take a taxi. Did somebody drive her home in his own car, which was the worst of all possibilities? Or did she take the subway or a bus? Not many girls wanted to risk the subway at two in the morning, even though it was faster than surface transportation. After midnight, a bus driver had to let you out anywhere along the route, and not just at designated stops, a peculiarly civilized option in a city often cited for barbarism. So Ollie figured maybe the girl did take a bus home the night she was killed. In which case it was possible she’d met whoever later killed her either on the bus or after she got off the bus, both magnificent speculations but better than nothing when all you had was nothing. If you went this route, you were thinking the two crimes were unrelated. The roofers in each crime were then just a coincidence, which Ollie did not rule out. No working cop ever ruled out coincidence. Only in Sweden did learned scholars scoff at coincidence.
