"I would love to read it sometime," Andrew says, and Jessica goes briefly into the other room and returns a moment later with the leather-bound copy her producer presented to her on opening night.
That night, Andrew cries when he reads the scene in the play where Jessie breaks up with the one true love of her life without realizing it, though the audience does. His wife tells him to please be quiet, she's trying to sleep.
Not long after that, Jessica Miles becomes desperately ill.
He cares for her at home until it becomes apparent she must be removed to a hospital. And then, he visits her every day, often lingering by her bedside from morning to night, and sometimes throughout the night. She dies within a matter of weeks.
In her will, she leaves to him the leather-bound copy of her precious play, and something even more precious: the copyright to the play itself.
"How do you know all this?" Carella asked.
"Hale told me. A hundred times over," Zimmer said. "Of course, no one at the time expected the musical would be revived. Jessica died fourteen, fifteen years ago. For all intents and purposes, the play she left him had only sentimental value."
"Until your partner rediscovered the musical."
"Yes. We did a copyright search, found that all renewals had been made, located the current owners, and proceeded to license the rights. You can imagine how thrilled these people were! The bookwriter' s grandson works in the mail room of a publishing house in London. The lyricist's granddaughter sells real estate in L. A. And the composer's great-grandson drives a taxi in Tel Aviv! This revival is a godsend to them, an opportunity to make some very big bucks indeed. If the show is a hit, of course. Which I'm sure it will be," he said, and rapped his knuckles on his desk.
"When did you discover Hale had inherited the underlying rights?"
"When our lawyers did the search. We weren't expecting a problem, why would there have been a problem? In fact, we were already proceeding, assuming that rights to the play would follow as a matter of course. A new bookwriter was already working, we'd commissioned new songs and hired a director and a choreographer, everything was in motion. But finding Hale was another matter. As it turned out, he was right under our noses here in the city, but he'd moved around a lot in the past several years. Apparently he got fired from a nursing job in a hospital somewhere in Riverhead, molested a young girl in her room, or so she later said, who the hell knew? Or cared, for that matter? What we wanted were the rights to the mawkish little play Jessica Miles had written and inconsiderately willed to him."
"Are you saying it's not a good play?"
"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 legal-eagle 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."