“I don’t know. That’s why it’s a mystery.”
“I hate mysteries,” Carella said.
The Meet ‘N’ Greet was supposed to start at six P . M . in Connie Lindstrom’s penthouse apartment on Grover Avenue, overlooking Grover Park, a world away from the Eighty-seventh Precinct station house, but only a mile and a half farther downtown. If Brown and Carella had gone to work that Saturday, they’d have been to the party in ten minutes. But they were coming down from their homes in Riverhead, and so they allowed themselves forty minutes, Brown picking up Carella at twenty past five. By that time, a fierce snow storm had started in the city and they hit its full force just as they were crossing the bridge over the Devil’s Byte. They did not get to her building until six-thirty. As it was, they were not overly late. Most of the guests, similarly held up by the storm, were just arriving. The detectives had dressed up for the occasion, both of them wearing unaccustomed suits, Brown’s blue, Carella’s gray. They needn’t have bothered. Half the guests were wearing blue jeans. One of them, an actor, asked them what they did.
When they told him they were police detectives, he said he had once played a cop in a summer stock production of Detective Story.
The show’s new songwriter, a man who introduced himself as Randy Flynn, told Carella that the term “Meet ‘N’ Greet” was usually reserved for the start of rehearsals, when the full cast met the producers and the creative team for the first time. “Connie’s new in the business, though,” he whispered. “She sometimes gets the lingo wrong.” Flynn, a man in his sixties with several hit shows to his credit, wore a look of extreme smugness that attested to his worldwide fame. Puffing incessantly on a cigarette, he told Carella that he’d been contacted by Zimmer early in July, when they’d first acquired the rights to the original show’s music from the composer’s great-grandson in Tel Aviv. “He’s not here tonight,” he said, “but the others are.”
The original lyricist’s granddaughter had been flown in from Los Angeles, where she worked at Coldwell Banker selling real estate. Her name was Felicia Carr, and she was possibly thirty-three years old, a reddishblonde wearing the only long gown in the room, a silky green number that clung to her like moss. She was listening intently to Naomi Janus, the choreographer, who had on her head the same black rustler’s hat she’d been wearing this past Tuesday. Naomi was telling a man named Arthur Bragg that she planned some startlingly sexy dance sequences for the speakeasy number, whatever that was. Brown surmised that Bragg was the show’s musical director, whatever that was. He decided there were too many people here. Felicia said she couldn’t wait to see the dances, she just loved musicals that had a lot of sexy dancing in them.
“When did you fly east?” Brown asked her.
“Yesterday,” she said. “On the Red Eye.”
“And you go back when?”
“Oh, not for a while. I’m planning to do some Christmas shopping.”
“This must be very exciting for you.”
“Oh yes, it is!” she said. “I can’t wait for it to open!”
“When will that be?”
“Next fall sometime,” Naomi said. “Provided there’s a theater available.”
“That seems a long way off.”
“Well,” Naomi said, “the show’s been lying dormant since it closed in 1928, so I guess it can wait a few months more.”
The bookwriter’s grandson was a Brit named Gerald Palmer. He was in his early forties, Carella guessed, a clean-shaven man in need of a haircut.
Like the two detectives, he, too, was wearing a suit, though his seemed somewhat out of fashion, an impression possibly created by its British styling. The suit was blue, the shoes he wore with it brown. In his Cockney accent, he explained to Carella, unnecessarily, that the bookwriter wrote all the words spoken onstage, as opposed to anything sung or danced. “He’s sometimes called the librettist,” he said. “My grandfather wrote an absolutely wonderful libretto for the original musical. I don’t know why they hired someone to rewrite it.” Carella guessed he hadn’t been told that the original book was “hopeless.”
