Running eastward from the Straits of Napoli and Chinatown, Visser Street swerved to the north into what used to be an area of warehouses bordering the River Harb. Too far uptown to be considered Lower Platform, not far enough downtown to be a part of trendy Hopscotch, the newly erected projects here were officially called The Mapes Houses, after James Joseph Mapes, a revered former Governor of the state.
All of the city’s projects were rated by the police department on a one-to-five scale ranging from “uncertain” to “chancy” to “risky” to “unsafe” to downright “hazardous.” The Mapes Houses were classified a middling three on the Safety Factor scale, although foot patrolmen assigned to the area considered this a conservative ranking. The cops of the ThreeTwo dubbed the project “Rockfort,” after a seventeenth-century moated fortress on the easternmost limits of Kingston, but perhaps that was only because eighty percent of the residents here were Jamaican.
On Fat Ollie Weeks’s scale of personal safety, Rockfort ranked a dismal eight, which in his lexicon meant shitty, mon. He went in there alone early that Thursday afternoon, but only because it was broad daylight a few weeks before Christmas. Otherwise, he’d have requested backup and a SWAT team. Abandoning his usual swagger, which he felt might be a liability here among the Jamaican brethren, ah yes, his manner became almost obsequious as he went from door to door asking after a man some six foot, two or three inches tall, with a fawn-colored complexion, deep brown eyes, wide shoulders, a narrow waist, a lovely grin, and a melodic Jamaican lilt to his voice. He did not mention the blue star tattooed on the suspect’s penis because many of the people he spoke to were women, and many of the men considered themselves Christians.
He did not strike pay dirt until three that afternoon, by which time it was beginning to snow and the skies above were dark enough to cause him to consider going back uptown.
Cynthia Keating did not seem surprised to find Carella and Brown on her doorstep yet another time. She didn’t even threaten calling her lawyer. She asked them to come in, told them they had ten minutes, and then sat opposite them, crossing her legs and folding her arms across her chest. It had begun snowing, and the window behind her was alive with wind-driven flakes.
Carella got directly to the point.
“A woman named Martha Coleridge,” he said, “mailed some letters to Norman Zimmer’s office, asking that they be forwarded. One of them was addressed to you, as owner of the underlying rights to Jenny’s Room. With it was a photocopy of a play Miss Coleridge herself had written. Did you ever receive that play and the accompanying letter?”
“Yes, I did.”
Progress, Carella thought.
“How’d you feel about it?”
“Concerned.”
“Why?”
“Because it seemed to me there were similarities between her play and Jenny’s Room.”
“What kind of similarities?”
“Well, the premise, to begin with. An immigrant girl comes to America and falls in love with someone of another faith while at the same time she’s falling in love with the city itself-which she finally chooses over the man. That’s identical in both plays. And the conceit. We see her love affair with the city through the window of her room, which is really a window to her heart. That’s the same, too. Reading it was… well… alarming.”
“So what’d you do?”
“I called Todd. He…”
“Todd Alexander?”
“Yes. My lawyer. He advised me to forget about it.”
“And is that what you did?”
She hesitated for the briefest tick of time. Carella caught the hesitation, and so did Brown. Their eyes revealed nothing, but they had caught it. Her fleeting inner debate apparently led to a decision to tell the truth.
“No, I did not forget about it,” she said.
But the truth inevitably led to another question.
“What did you do instead?” Brown asked.
Again, the slight hesitation.
“I went to see her,” Cynthia said.
The detectives did not know why she was telling the truth-if indeed this was the truth. The woman they were here to inquire about was dead, and anything that had transpired between her and Cynthia Keating could neither be confirmed nor contradicted. But the path of evident truth was the one Cynthia seemed to have chosen, and they thanked God for small favors and plunged ahead regardless.
“When was this?” Carella asked.
“The day after I received the play. I called her, and we arranged to meet.”
“And when was that?”
“The Thursday before Connie’s party.”
“Where’d this meeting take place?” Brown asked.
“Her apartment. Downtown on Sinclair.”
“What’d you talk about?”
“Her letter. The play. I wanted to find out exactly what she had in mind.”
“How do you mean?”
“Her letter said she was looking for ‘appropriate compensation.’ I wanted to know what she considered appropriate.”
“You went there expecting to deal, is that it?”
