by Ed McBain
“Did you see her tonight?”
“No.”
“Were you supposed to see her tonight?”
“Where’d you get that idea?”
“We’re full of ideas,” Hawes said.
“Yeah, I was supposed to meet her here ten minutes ago. Dumb broad is late, as usual.”
“What do you do for a living, Donatello?”
“I’m an importer. You want to see my business card?”
“What do you import?”
“Souvenir ashtrays.”
“How’d you get to know Mercy Howell?”
“I met her at a party in The Quarter. She got a little high, and she done her thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing she does in that show she’s in.”
“Which is what?”
“She done this dance where she takes off all her clothes.”
“How long have you been seeing her?”
“I met her a couple of months ago. I see her on and off, maybe once a week, something like that. This town is full of broads, you know, a guy don’t have to get himself involved in no relationship with no specific broad.”
“What was your relationship with this specific broad?”
“We have a few laughs together, that’s all. She’s a swinger, little Mercy,” Donatello said, and grinned at Riggs.
“Want to tell us where you were tonight between eleven and twelve?”
“Is this still afield investigation?” Riggs asked sarcastically.
“Nobody’s in custody yet,” Hawes said, “so let’s cut the legal crap, okay? Tell us where you were, Donatello.”
“Right here,” Donatello said. “From ten o’clock till now.”
“I suppose somebody saw you here during that time.”
“A hundred people saw me.”
A crowd of angry black men and women were standing outside the shattered window of the storefront church. Two fire engines and an ambulance were parked at the curb. Kling pulled in behind the second engine, some ten feet away from the hydrant. It was almost 2:30 A.M. on a bitterly cold October night, but the crowd looked and sounded like a mob at an afternoon street-corner rally in the middle of August. Restless, noisy, abrasive, anticipative, they ignored the penetrating cold and concentrated instead on the burning issue of the hour, the fact that a person or persons unknown had thrown a bomb through the plateglass window of the church. The beat patrolman, a newly appointed cop who felt vaguely uneasy in this neighborhood even during his daytime shift, greeted Kling effusively, his pale-white face bracketed by earmuffs, his gloved hands clinging desperately to his nightstick. The crowd parted to let Kling through. It did not help that he was the youngest man on the squad, with the callow look of a country bumpkin on his unlined face, it did not help that he was blond and hatless, it did not help that he walked into the church with the confident youthful stride of a champion come to set things right. The crowd knew he was fuzz, and they knew he was whitey, and they knew, too, that if this bombing had taken place on Hall Avenue crosstown and downtown, the police commissioner himself would have arrived behind a herald of official trumpets. This, however, was Culver Avenue, where a boiling mixture of Puerto Ricans and Negroes shared a disintegrating ghetto, and so the car that pulled to the curb was not marked with the commissioner’s distinctive blue-and-gold seal, but was instead a green Chevy convertible that belonged to Kling himself, and the man who stepped out of it looked young and inexperienced and inept despite the confident stride he affected as he walked into the church, his shield pinned to his overcoat.
The bomb had caused little fire damage, and the firemen already had the flames under control, their hoses snaking through and around the overturned folding chairs scattered about the small room. Ambulance attendants picked their way over the hoses and around the debris, carrying out the injured—the dead could wait.
“Have you called the Bomb Squad?” Kling asked the patrolman.
“No,” the patrolman answered, shaken by the sudden possibility that he had been derelict in his duty.
“Why don’t you do that now?” Kling suggested.
“Yes, sir,” the patrolman answered, and rushed out. The ambulance attendants went by with a moaning woman on a stretcher. She was still wearing her eyeglasses, but one lens had been shattered and blood was running in a steady rivulet down the side of her nose. The place stank of gunpowder and smoke and charred wood. The most serious damage had been done at the rear of the small store, farthest away from the entrance door. Whoever had thrown the bomb must have possessed a damn good pitching arm to have hurled it so accurately through the window and across the fifteen feet to the makeshift altar. The minister lay across his own altar, dead, one arm blown off in the explosion. Two women who had been sitting on folding chairs closest to the altar lay upon each other on the floor now, tangled in death, their clothes still smoldering. The sounds of the injured filled the room and then were suffocated by the overriding siren-shriek of the arriving second ambulance. Kling went outside to the crowd.
“Anybody here witness this?” he asked.
A young man, black, wearing a beard and a natural hair style, turned away from a group of other youths and walked directly to Kling.
“Is the minister dead?” he asked.
“Yes, he is,” Kling answered.
“Who else?”
“Two women.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know yet. We’ll identify them as soon as the men are through in there.” He turned again to the crowd. “Did anybody see what happened?” he asked.
“I saw it,” the young man said.
“What’s your name, son?”
“Andrew Jordan.”
Kling took out his pad. “All right, let’s have it.”
“What good’s this going to do?” Jordan asked. “Writing all this shit in your book?”
“You said you saw what…”
“I saw it, all right. I was walking by, heading for the poolroom up the street, and the ladies were inside singing, and this car pulled up, and a guy got out, threw the bomb, and ran back to the car.”
“What kind of a car was it?”
“A red VW.”
“What year?”
“Who can tell with those VWs?”
“How many people in it?”
“Two. The driver and the guy who threw the bomb.”
“Notice the license plate?”
“No. They drove off too fast.”
“Can you describe the man who threw the bomb?”
“Yeah. He was white.”
“What else?” Kling asked.
“That’s all,” Jordan replied. “He was whiter.”
There were perhaps three dozen estates in all of Smoke Rise, a hundred or so people living in luxurious near seclusion on acres of valuable land through which ran four winding, interconnected, private roadways. Meyer Meyer drove between the wide stone pillars marking Smoke Rise’s western access road, entering a city within a city, bounded on the north by the River Harb, shielded from the River Highway by stands of poplars and evergreens on the south—exclusive Smoke Rise, known familiarly and derisively to the rest of the city’s inhabitants as “The Club.”
374 MacArthur Lane was at the end of the road that curved past the Hamilton Bridge. The house was a huge gray stone structure with a slate roof and scores of gables and chimneys jostling the sky, perched high in gloomy shadow above the Harb. As he stepped from the car, Meyer could hear the sounds of river traffic, the hooting of tugs, the blowing of whistles, the eruption of a squawk box on a destroyer midstream. He looked out over the water. Reflected lights glistened in shimmering liquid beauty, the hanging globes on the bridge’s suspension cables, the dazzling reds and greens of signal lights on the opposite shore, single illuminated window slashes in apartment buildings throwing their mirror images onto the black surface of the river, the blinking wing lights of an airplane overhead moving in watery reflection like a submarine. The air was
cold, a fine piercing drizzle had begun several minutes ago. Meyer shuddered, pulled the collar of his coat higher on his neck, and walked toward the old gray house, his shoes crunching on the driveway gravel, the sound echoing away into the high surrounding bushes.
The stones of the old house oozed wetness. Thick vines covered the walls, climbing to the gabled, turreted roof. He found a doorbell set over a brass escutcheon in the thick oaken doorjamb and pressed it. Chimes sounded somewhere deep inside the house. He waited.
The door opened suddenly.
The man looking out at him was perhaps seventy years old, with piercing blue eyes, bald except for white thatches of hair that sprang wildly from behind each ear. He wore a red smoking jacket and black trousers, a black ascot around his neck, red velvet slippers.
“What do you want?” he asked immediately.
“I’m Detective Meyer of the 87th—”
“Who sent for you?”
“A woman named Adele Gorman came to the—”
“My daughter’s a fool,” the man said. “We don’t need the police here,” and slammed the door in his face.
Meyer stood on the doorstep feeling somewhat like a horse’s ass. A tugboat hooted on the river. A light snapped on upstairs, casting an amber rectangle into the dark driveway. He looked at the luminous dial of his watch. It was 2:35 A.M. The drizzle was cold and penetrating. He took out his handkerchief, blew his nose, and wondered what he should do next. He did not like ghosts, and he did not like lunatics, and he did not like nasty old men who did not comb their hair and who slammed doors in a person’s face. He was about to head back for his car when the door opened again.
“Detective Meyer?” Adele Gorman said. “Do come in.”
“Thank you,” he said, and stepped into the entrance foyer.
“You’re right on time.”
“Well, a little early actually,” Meyer said. He still felt foolish. What the hell was he doing in Smoke Rise investigating ghosts in the middle of the night?
“This way,” Adele said, and he followed her through a somberly paneled foyer into a vast, dimly lighted living room. Heavy oaken beams ran overhead, velvet draperies hung at the window, the room was cluttered with ponderous old furniture. He could believe there were ghosts in this house, he could suddenly believe it. A young man wearing dark glasses rose like a specter from the sofa near the fireplace. His face, illuminated by the single standing floor lamp, looked wan and drawn. Wearing a black cardigan sweater over a white shirt and dark slacks, he approached Meyer unsmilingly with his hand extended—but he did not accept Meyer’s hand when it was offered in return.
Meyer suddenly realized that the man was blind.
“I’m Ralph Gorman,” he said, his hand still extended. “Adele’s husband.”
“How do you do, Mr. Gorman,” Meyer said, and took his hand. The palm was moist and cold.
“It was good of you to come,” Gorman said. “These apparitions have been driving us crazy.”
“What time is it?” Adele asked suddenly, and looked at her watch. “We’ve got five minutes,” she said. There was a tremor in her voice. She seemed suddenly very frightened.
“Won’t your father be here?” Meyer asked.
“No, he’s gone up to bed,” Adele said. “I’m afraid he’s bored with the whole affair and terribly angry that we notified the police.”
Meyer made no comment. Had he known that Willem Van Houten, former Surrogate’s Court judge, had not wanted the police to be notified, Meyer would not have been here in the first place. He debated leaving now, but Adele Gorman had begun talking again, and it was impolite to depart in the middle of another person’s sentence.
“…is in her early thirties, I would guess. The other ghost, the male, is about your age—forty or forty-five, something like that.”
“I’m thirty-seven,” Meyer said.
“Oh.”
“The bald head fools a lot of people.”
“Yes.”
“I was bald at a very early age.”
“Anyway,” Adele said, “their names are Elisabeth and Johann, and they’ve probably been—”
“Oh, they have names, do they?”
“Yes. They’re ancestors, you know. My father is Dutch, and there actually were an Elisabeth and Johann Van Houten in the family centuries ago, when Smoke Rise was still a Dutch settlement.”
“They’re Dutch, um-huh, I see,” Meyer said.
“Yes. They always appear wearing Dutch costumes. And they also speak Dutch.”
“Have you heard them, Mr. Gorman?”
“Yes,” Gorman said. “I’m blind, you know…” he added, and hesitated, as though expecting some comment from Meyer. When none came, he said, “But I have heard them.”
“Do you speak Dutch?”
“No. My father-in-law speaks it fluently, though, and he identified the language for us and told us what they were saying.”
“What did they say?”
“Well, for one thing, they said they were going to steal Adele’s jewelry, and they damn well did.”
“Your wife’s jewelry? But I thought—”
“It was willed to her by her mother. My father-in-law keeps it in his safe.”
“Kept, you mean.”
“No, keeps. There are several pieces in addition to the ones that were stolen. Two rings and also a necklace.”
“And the value?”
“Altogether? I would say about forty thousand dollars.”
“Your ghosts have expensive taste.”
The floor lamp in the room suddenly began to flicker. Meyer glanced at it and felt the hackles rising at the back of his neck.
“The lights are going out, Ralph,” Adele whispered.
“Is it two forty-five?”
“Yes.”
“They’re here,” Gorman whispered.
Mercy Howell’s roommate had been asleep for close to four hours when they knocked on her door. But she was a wily young lady, hip to the ways of the big city, and very much awake as she conducted her own little investigation without so much as opening the door a crack. First she asked them to spell their names slowly. Then she asked them their shield numbers. Then she asked them to hold their shields and their ID cards close to the door’s peephole, where she could see them. Still unconvinced, she said through the locked door, “You just wait there a minute.” They waited for closer to five minutes before they heard her approaching the door again. The heavy steel bar of a Fox lock was pushed noisily to the side, a safety chain rattled on its track, the tumblers of one lock clicked open, and then another, and finally the girl opened the door.
“Come in,” she said, “I’m sorry I kept you waiting. I called the station house and they said you were okay.”
“You’re a very careful girl,” Hawes said.
“At this hour of the morning? Are you kidding?” she said.
She was perhaps twenty-five, with her red hair up in curlers, her face cold-creamed clean of makeup. She was wearing a pink quilted robe over flannel pajamas, and although she was probably a very pretty girl at 9:00 A.M., she now looked about as attractive as a Buffalo nickel.
“What’s your name, miss?” Carella asked.
“Lois Kaplan. What’s this all about? Has there been another burglary in the building?”
“No, Miss Kaplan. We want to ask you some questions about Mercy Howell? Did she live here with you?”
“Yes,” Lois said, and suddenly looked at them shrewdly. “What do you mean did? She still does.”
They were standing in the small foyer of the apartment, and the foyer went so still that all the night sounds of the building were clearly audible all at once, as though they had not been there before but had only been summoned up now to fill the void of silence. A toilet flushed somewhere, a hot water pipe rattled, a baby whimpered, a dog barked, someone dropped a shoe. In the foyer now filled with noise, they stared at each other wordlessly, and finally Carella drew a deep breath and said, “Your roommate is de
ad. She was stabbed tonight as she was leaving the theater.”
“No,” Lois said, simply and flatly and unequivocally. “No, she isn’t.”
“Miss Kaplan…”
“I don’t give a damn what you say, Mercy isn’t dead.”
“Miss Kaplan, she’s dead.”
“Oh Jesus,” Lois said, and burst into tears, “oh Jesus, oh damn damn, oh Jesus.”
The two men stood by feeling stupid and big and awkward and helpless. Lois Kaplan covered her face with her hands and sobbed into them, her shoulders heaving, saying over and over again, “I’m sorry, oh Jesus, please, I’m sorry, please, oh poor Mercy, oh my God,” while the detectives tried not to watch. At last the crying stopped and she looked up at them with eyes that had been knifed and said softly, “Come in. Please,” and led them into the living room. She kept staring at the floor as she talked. It was as if she could not look them in the face, not these men who had brought her the news.
“Do you know who did it?” she asked.
“No. Not yet.”
“We wouldn’t have waked you in the middle of the night—”
“That’s all right.”
“But very often, if we get moving on a case fast enough, before the trail gets cold—”
“Yes, I understand.”
“We can often—”
“Yes, before the trail gets cold,” Lois said.
“Yes.”
The apartment went silent again.
“Would you know if Miss Howell had any enemies?” Carella asked.
“She was the sweetest girl in the world,” Lois said.
“Did she argue with anyone recently, were there—”
“No.”
“Any threatening telephone calls or letters?” Lois Kaplan looked up at them.
“Yes,” she said. “A letter.”
“A threatening letter?”
“We couldn’t tell. It frightened Mercy, though. That’s why she bought the gun.”
“What kind of gun?”
“I don’t know. A small one.”
“Would it have been a .25-caliber Browning?”
“I don’t know guns.”
“Was this letter mailed to her or delivered personally?”