“It’s dreadful. The only thing that put it over was Jenny Corbin in the starring role. She was the mayor’s mistress at the time, you know, and quite a notorious personality. A stunning woman, from what I’ve been told.” He hung both huge hands on the air and outlined the ripeness of her breasts, nodding in appreciation. “But we needed the damn thing,” he said. “Without that play, we simply couldn’t proceed any further.” He sighed heavily, opened a cigar box on his desk, and fished a cigar from it. “Smoke?” he asked. “They’re Havanas.”
“Thanks, no,” Carella said.
Brown shook his head.
Zimmer unwrapped the cigar, bit off one end, and struck a match.
Puffing great clouds of asphyxiating smoke on the air, he waved them away with one big hand, and then settled back in his chair to puff contentedly.
Without asking, Carella got up to open the window. Traffic noises flooded the room.
“Well, I went to see the old man,” Zimmer said. “Never expecting a problem, mind you. Why should there be a problem? Who doesn’t want to make a fortune? I told him we were reviving the musical based on Jessica Miles’s play and wanted to license the rights from him. He flatly refused.”
“Why?” Brown asked.
“Because he was an idiot,” Zimmer said. “I tried to explain that he could make a lot of money if the show was a hit. No. I tried to tell him a hit show would play all over the United States, all over the world! No. At first, I thought he was holding out for a bigger advance, higher royalties. But that wasn’t it.”
“What was it?” Carella asked.
“He was protecting Jessica’s shitty little play! Can you believe it? He said she’d been unhappy with the musical…well, yes, I said, so are we.
That’s why we’re having the book rewritten, that’s why we’re adding new songs. No, he said. I’m sorry. She would not want the musical revived. I would be dishonoring her wishes if I let you have her play. Three times, I went to see him. He simply would not listen to reason.” Zimmer shook his head, and blew a huge cloud of smoke at the ceiling. “So I went to see his daughter. Cynthia Keating. Mousy little housewife dominated by a legaleagle husband who immediately appreciated how much money they could make if this show turned out to be a hit. I asked Cynthia to intercede on my behalf, go to the old man, talk some sense into him. No luck. He wouldn’t budge from his position.” Zimmer shook his head again, and looked across his desk at the detectives. “So I killed him,” he said, and laughed suddenly, like a choirboy who’d farted during a Christmas chorale.
Neither Carella nor Brown even smiled.
“That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?” Zimmer said. “That I had good reason to want him dead? Why not kill the stubborn son of a bitch? Be much easier to deal with the daughter, wouldn’t it?”
The detectives said nothing.
“Incidentally,” Zimmer said, and puffed on the cigar and then looked thoughtfully at the glowing end of it. “Cynthia knew her father was leaving her the rights to that play.”
“How do you know that?” Carella asked.
“He told her. Said when he died she’d be getting twenty-five grand in insurance plus the rights to this miserable little play. Forgive the editorializing, but this entire matter pisses me off a great deal.”
Gee, imagine what it does to us, Carella thought.
“Tell you what,” Zimmer said. “We’re having a Meet ‘N’ Greet tomorrow ni…”
“A what?” Brown said.
“Little gathering for the usual suspects,” he said, and grinned. “Why don’t you stop by?”
Carella wondered what had happened to those simple cases where you walked in and found a guy with a smoking gun in his fist and a bloody corpse at his feet. Zimmer had suggested that he himself was a good suspect.
Carella agreed. But so was Cynthia Keating, or her greedy little attorney husband, or any one of the copyright inheritors in London, Tel Aviv, or Los Angeles. Not to mention all the people now involved with the current show -the new bookwriter and composer, the director, the choreographer, Zimmer’s partner. Anyone who wanted this show to happen could have hired the Jamaican who’d hanged Hale on the bathroom door like a wet towel.
“What time tomorrow night?” he asked.
“You want a mystery?” Parker asked them. “Here’s a mystery for you.”
“We don’t want a mystery,” Carella said.
“We already have a mystery,” Meyer said.
“Two mysteries,” Kling said.
“Too many mysteries,” Brown said.
“Here’s a mystery for you,” Parker said. “I stop this guy the other day, he just went through a red light, I’m standing right there on the corner. I flag him down cause I’m a conscientious cop…”
Brown blew his nose.
“… and I ask to see his driver’s license and registration. So he pulls all this shit out of his wallet and his glove compartment, and guess what’s there with it?”
“What?” Kling asked.
“His marriage certificate.”
“His what?”
“Yeah,” Parker said.
“Why’s he carrying a marriage certificate?”
“That’s the mystery,” Parker said.
“Was he recently married?”
“No, the certificate was ten years old.”
“So why’s he carrying it around with him?”
