In this city, you can get anything done for a price. If you want someone’s eyeglasses smashed, it’ll cost you a subway token. You want his fingernails pulled out? His legs broken? You want him hurt so bad he’s an invalid his whole life? You want him …killed? Let me talk to someone. It can be done.

The hanging death of a nondescript old man in a shabby little apartment in a meager section of the 87th Precinct is nothing much in this city, especially to detectives Carella and Meyer. But everyone has a story, and this old man’s story stood to make some people a lot of money. His story takes Carella, Meyer, Brown, and Weeks on a search through the city’s seedy strip clubs and to the bright lights of the theater district. There they discover an upcoming musical with ties to a mysterious drug and a killer who stays until the last dance.

STEP RIGHT IN >>

Chapter 1

“He had heart trouble,” the woman was telling Carella.

Which perhaps accounted for the tiny pinpricks of blood on the dead man’s eyeballs. In cases of acute right-heart failure, you often found such hemorrhaging. The grayish-blue feet sticking out from under the edge of the blanket were another matter.

“Told me he hadn’t been feeling good these past few days,” the woman was saying. “I kept telling him to go see the doctor. Yeah, I’ll go, I’ll go, don’t worry, like that, you know? So I stopped by this morning to see how he was, found him just this way. In bed. Dead.”

“So you called the police,” Meyer said, nodding.

Because he’d expected to go out on a narcotics plant this morning, he was wearing blue jeans, a sweat shirt, and Reeboks. Instead, he’d caught this one with Carella and here he was. On a fishing expedition with a woman he felt was lying. Burly and bald, he posed his question with wide, blue-eyed innocence, just as if it did not conceal a hand grenade.

“Yes,” she said, “I called the police. That was the first thing I did.”

“Knew straight off he was dead, is that right?”

“Well…yes. I could see he was dead.”

“You didn’t take his pulse or anything like that, did you?” Carella asked.

Looking trimmer and fitter than he had in a long while–he had deliberately lost six pounds since his fortieth birthday–he was dressed casually this morning in dark blue trousers, a gray corduroy jacket, a plaid sports shirt, and a dark blue knit tie. He had not anticipated this particular squeal at a little past ten in the morning. In fact, he had scheduled a ten-fifteen squadroom interview with a burglary victim. Instead, here he was, talking to a woman he, too, felt was lying.

“No,” she said. “Well, yes. Well, not his pulse. But I leaned over him. To see if he was still breathing. But I could see he was dead. I mean…well, look at him.”

The dead man was lying on his back, covered with a blanket, his eyes and his mouth open, his tongue protruding. Carella glanced at him again, a faint look of sorrow and pain momentarily knifing his eyes. In these moments, he felt particularly vulnerable, wondering as he often did if he was perhaps unsuited to a job that brought him into frequent contact with death.

“So you called the police,” Meyer said again.

“Yes. Told whoever answered the phone…”

“Was this 911 you called? Or the precinct number direct?”

“911. I don’t know the precinct number. I don’t live around here.”

“Told the operator you’d come into your father’s apartment and found him dead, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“What time was this, Miss?”

“A little after ten this morning. It’s Mrs., by the way,” she said almost apologetically.

Carella looked at his watch. It was now twenty minutes to eleven. He wondered where the medical examiner was. Couldn’t touch anything in here till the ME pronounced the victim dead. He wanted to see the rest of the body. Wanted to see if the legs matched the feet.

“Mrs. Robert Keating,” the woman said. “Well, Cynthia Keating, actually.”

“And your father’s name?” Meyer asked.

“Andrew. Andrew Hale.”

Better to let Meyer stay with it for now, Carella thought. He had noticed the same things Carella had, was equally familiar with the telltale signs of a hanging, which this one resembled a great deal, but you couldn’t hang yourself lying flat on your back in bed with no noose around your neck.