Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 56, No. 2. Whole No. 321, August 1970

Nightshade by Ed McBain {© 1970 by Ed McBain.}

Another short novel about the 87th Precinct… one night in the lives and deaths of the men of the 87th — detectives Steve Carella, Cotton Hawes, Bert Kling, Meyer Meyer, and the rest of the squad… one night that is a microcosm of a metropolis — a mosaic of murder, vandalism, ghosts (!), bombing, theft, of missing persons, junkies, pushers, drunk-and-disorderlies, burglars, muggers — you name it, it swims into the orbit of a Precinct Station in a big city when “paradoxically, the night people take over in the morning.”

This short novel is the newest of Ed McBain s strictly American police procedurals — with the hard smack of realism and the interweaving, intertwining, interacting, interlinking of all-in-the-night’s-work at the 87th Precinct…

The morning hours of the night come imperceptibly here.

It is a minute before midnight on the peeling face of the hanging wall clock, and then it is midnight, and then the minute hand moves visibly and with a lurch into the new day. The morning hours have begun, but scarcely anyone has noticed. The stale coffee in soggy cardboard containers tastes the same as it did thirty seconds ago, the spastic rhythm of the clacking typewriters continues unabated, a drunk across the room shouts that the world is full of brutality, and cigarette smoke drifts up toward the face of the clock where, unnoticed and unmourned, the old day has already been dead for two minutes.

Then the telephone rings.

The men in this room are part of a tired routine, somewhat shabby about the edges, as faded and as gloomy as the room itself, with its cigarette-scarred desks and its smudged green walls. This could be the office of a failing insurance company were it not for the evidence of the holstered pistols hanging from belts on the backs of wooden chairs painted a darker green than the walls. The furniture is ancient, the typewriters are ancient, the building itself is ancient — which is perhaps only fitting since these men are involved in what is an ancient pursuit, a pursuit once considered honorable. They are law enforcers. They are, in the mildest words of the drunk still hurling epithets from the grilled detention cage across the room, dirty rotten pigs.

The telephone continues to ring.

The little girl lying in the alley behind the theater was wearing a belted white trench coat wet with blood. There was blood on the floor of the alley, and blood on the metal fire door behind her, and blood on her face and matted in her blonde hair, blood on her miniskirt and on the lavender tights she wore. A neon sign across the street stained the girl’s ebbing life juices green and then orange, while from the open knife wound in her chest the blood sprouted like some ghastly night flower, dark and rich, red, orange, green, pulsing in time to the neon flicker — a grotesque psychedelic light show, and then losing the rhythm, welling up with less force and power.

She opened her mouth, she tried to speak, and the scream of an ambulance approaching the theater seemed to come from her mouth on a fresh bubble of blood. The blood stopped, her life ended, the girl’s eyes rolled back into her head.

Detective Steve Carella turned away as the ambulance attendants rushed a stretcher into the alley. He told them the girl was dead.

“We got here in seven minutes,” one of the attendants said.

“Nobody’s blaming you,” Carella answered.

“This is Saturday night,” the attendant complained. “Streets are full of traffic. Even with the damn siren.”

Carella walked to the unmarked sedan parked at the curb. Detective Cotton Hawes, sitting behind the wheel, rolled down his frost-rimed window and said, “How is she?”

“We’ve got a homicide,” Carella answered.

The boy was 18 years old, and he had been picked up not ten minutes ago for breaking off car aerials. He had broken off twelve on the same street, strewing them behind him like a Johnny Appleseed planting radios; a cruising squad car had spotted him as he tried to twist off the aerial of a 1966 Cadillac. He was drunk or stoned or both, and when Sergeant Murchison at the muster desk asked him to read the Miranda-Escobedo warning signs on the wall, printed in both English and Spanish, he could read neither.

The arresting patrolman took the boy to the squadroom upstairs, where Detective Bert Kling was talking to Hawes on the telephone. Kling signaled for the patrolman to wait with his prisoner on the bench outside the slatted wooden rail divider, and then buzzed Murchison at the desk downstairs.

“Dave,” he said, “we’ve got a homicide in the alley of the Eleventh Street Theater. You want to get it rolling?”

“Right,” Murchison said, and hung up.

Homicides are a common occurrence in this city, and each one is treated identically, the grisly horror of violent death reduced to routine by a police force that would otherwise be overwhelmed by statistics. At the muster desk upstairs Kling waved the patrolman and his prisoner into the squadroom, Sergeant Murchison first reported the murder to Captain Frick, who commanded the 87th Precinct, and then to Lieutenant Byrnes, who commanded the 87th Detective Squad. He then phoned Homicide, who in turn set into motion an escalating process of notification that included the Police Laboratory, the Telegraph, Telephone and Teletype Bureau at Headquarters, the Medical Examiner, the District Attorney, the District Commander of the Detective Division, the Chief of Detectives, and finally the Police Commissioner himself. Someone had thoughtlessly robbed a young woman of her life, and now a lot of sleepy-eyed men were being shaken out of their beds on a cold October night.

Upstairs, the clock on the squadroom wall read 12:30 A.M. The boy who had broken off twelve car aerials sat in a chair alongside Bert Kling’s desk. Kling took one look at him and yelled to Miscolo in the Clerical Office to bring in a pot of strong coffee. Across the room the drunk in the detention cage wanted to know where he was. In a little while they would release him with a warning to try to stay sober till morning.

But the night was young.

They arrived alone or in pairs, blowing on their hands, shoulders hunched against the bitter cold, breaths pluming whitely from their lips. They marked the dead girl’s position in the alleyway, they took her picture, they made drawings of the scene, they searched for the murder weapon and found none, and then they stood around speculating on sudden death. In this alleyway alongside a theater the policemen were the stars and the celebrities, and a curious crowd thronged the sidewalk where a barricade had already been set up, anxious for a glimpse of these men with their shields pinned to their overcoats — the identifying Playbills of law enforcement, without which you could not tell the civilians from the plainclothes cops.

Monoghan and Monroe had arrived from Homicide, and they watched dispassionately now as the Assistant Medical Examiner fluttered around the dead girl. They were both wearing black overcoats, black mufflers, and black fedoras; both were heavier men than Carella who stood between them with the lean look of an overtrained athlete, a pained expression on his face.

“He done some job on her,” Monroe said.

Monoghan made a rude sound.

“You identified her yet?” Monroe asked.

“I’m waiting for the M.E. to get through,” Carella answered.

“Might help to know what she was doing here in the alley. What’s that door there?” Monoghan asked.

“Stage entrance.”

“Think she was in the show?”

“I don’t know,” Carella said.

“Well, what the hell,” Monroe said, “they’re finished with her pocketbook there, ain’t they? Why don’t you look through it? You finished with that pocketbook there?” he yelled to one of the lab technicians.

“Yeah, anytime you want it,” the technician shouted back.

“Go on, Carella, take a look.”

The technician wiped the blood off the dead girl’s bag, then handed it to Carella. Monoghan and Monroe crowded in on him as he twisted open the clasp.

“Bring it over to the light,” Monroe said.

The light, with a metal shade, hung over the stage door. So violently had the girl been stabbed that flecks of blood had even dotted the enameled white underside of the shade. In her bag they found a driver’s license identifying her as Mercy Howell of 1113 Rutherford Avenue, Age 24, Height 5' 3", Eyes Blue. They found an Actors Equity card in her name, as well as credit cards for two of the city’s largest department stores. They found an unopened package of Virginia Slims, and a book of matches advertising an art course. They found a rat-tailed comb. They found $17.43. They found a package of Kleenex, and an appointment book. They found a ballpoint pen with shreds o f tobacco clinging to its tip, an eyelash curler, two subway tokens, and an advertisement for a see through blouse, clipped from one of the local newspapers.

In the pocket of her trench coat, when the M.E. had finished with her and pronounced her dead from multiple stab wounds in the chest and throat, they found an unfired Browning .25 caliber automatic. They tagged the gun and the handbag, and they moved the girl out of the alleyway and into the waiting ambulance for removal to the morgue. There was now nothing left of Mercy Howell but a chalked outline of her body and a pool of her blood on the alley floor.

“You sober enough to understand me?” Kling asked the boy.

“I was never drunk to begin with,” the boy answered.

“Okay then, here we go,” Kling said. “In keeping with the Supreme Court decision in Miranda versus Arizona we are not permitted to ask you any questions until you are warned of your right to counsel and your privilege against self-incrimination.”

“What does that mean?” the boy asked. “Self-incrimination?”

“I’m about to explain that to you now,” Kling said.

“This coffee stinks.”

“First, you have the right to remain silent if you so choose,” Kling said. “Do you understand that?”

“I understand it.”

“Second, you do not have to answer any police questions if you don’t want to. Do you understand that?”

“What the hell are you asking me if I understand for? Do I look like a moron or something?”

“The law requires that I ask whether or not you understand these specific warnings. Did you understand what I just said about not having to answer?”

“Yeah, yeah, I understood.”

“All right. Third, if you do decide to answer any questions, the answers may be used as evidence against you, do you—?”

“What the hell did I do, break off a couple of lousy car aerials?”

“Did you understand that?”

“I understood it.”

“You also have the right to consult with an attorney before or during police questioning. If you do not have the money to hire a lawyer, a lawyer will be appointed to consult with you.”

Kling gave this warning straight-faced even though he knew that under the Criminal Procedure Code of the city for which he worked, a public defender could not be appointed by the courts until the preliminary hearing. There was no legal provision for the courts or the police to appoint counsel during questioning, and there were certainly no police funds set aside for the appointment of attorneys. In theory, a call to the Legal Aid Society should have brought a lawyer up there to the old squadroom within minutes, ready and eager to offer counsel to any indigent person desiring it. But in practice, if this boy sitting beside Kling told him in the next three seconds that he was unable to pay for his own attorney and would like one provided, Kling would not have known just what the hell to do — other than call off the questioning.

“I understand,” the boy said.

“You’ve signified that you understand all the warnings,” Kling said, “and now I ask you whether you are willing to answer my questions without an attorney here to counsel you.”

“Go fly a kite,” the boy said. “I don’t want to answer nothing.”

So that was that.

They booked him for Criminal Mischief, a Class-A Misdemeanor defined as intentional or reckless damage to the property of another person, and they took him downstairs to a holding cell, to await transportation to the Criminal Courts Building for arraignment.

The phone was ringing again, and a woman was waiting on the bench just outside the squadroom.

The watchman’s booth was just inside the metal stage door. An electric clock on the wall behind the watchman’s stool read 1:10 A.M. The watchman was a man in his late seventies who did not at all mind being questioned by the police. He came on duty, he told them, at 7:30 each night. The company call was for 8:00, and he was there at the stage door waiting to greet everybody as they arrived to get made up and in costume. Curtain went down at 11:20, and usually most of the kids was out of the theater by 11:45 or, at the latest, midnight. He stayed on till 9:00 the next morning, when the theater box office opened.

“Ain’t much to do during the night except hang around and make sure nobody runs off with the scenery.” he said, chuckling.

“Did you happen to notice what time Mercy Howell left the theater?” Carella asked.

“She the one got killed?” the old man asked.

“Yes,” Hawes said. “Mercy Howell. About this high, blonde hair, blue eyes.”

“They’re all about that high, with blonde hair and blue eyes,” the old man said, and chuckled again. “I don’t know hardly none of them by name. Shows come and go, you know. Be a hell of a chore to have to remember all the kids who go in and out that door.”

“Do you sit here by the door all night?” Carella asked.

“Well, no, not all night. What I do, I lock the door after everybody’s out and then I check the lights, make sure just the work light’s on. I won’t touch the switchboard, not allowed to, but I can turn out lights in the lobby, for example, if somebody left them on, or down in the toilets — sometimes they leave lights on down in the toilets. Then I come back here to the booth, and read or listen to the radio. Along about two o’clock I check the theater again, make sure we ain’t got no fires or nothing, and then I come back here and make the rounds again at four o’clock, and six o’clock, and again about eight. That’s what I do.”

“You say you lock this door?”

“That’s right.”

“Would you remember what time you locked it tonight?”

“Oh, must’ve been about ten minutes to twelve. Soon as I knew everybody was out.”

“How do you know when they’re out?”

“I give a yell up the stairs there. You see those stairs there? They go up to the dressing rooms. Dressing rooms are all upstairs in this house. So I go to the steps, and I yell ‘Locking up! Anybody here?’ And if somebody yells back, I know somebody’s here, and I say, ‘Let’s shake it, honey,’ if it’s a girl, and if it’s a boy, I say, ‘Let’s hurry it up, sonny.’ ” The old man chuckled again. “With this show it’s sometimes hard to tell which’s the girls and which’s the boys. I manage, though,” he said, and again chuckled.

“So you locked the door at ten minutes to twelve?”

“Right.”

“And everybody had left the theater by that time?”

“ ’Cept me, of course.”

“Did you look out into the alley before you locked the door?”

“Nope. Why should I do that?”

“Did you hear anything outside while you were locking the door?”

“Nope.”

“Or at any time before you locked it?”

“Well, there’s always noise outside when they’re leaving, you know. They got friends waiting for them, or else they go home together, you know — there’s always a lot of chatter when they go out.”

“But it was quiet when you locked the door?”

“Dead quiet,” the old man said.

The woman who took the chair beside Detective Meyer Meyer’s desk was perhaps 32 years old, with long straight black hair trailing down her back, and wide brown eyes that were terrified. It was still October, and the color of her tailored coat seemed suited to the season, a subtle tangerine with a small brown fur collar that echoed an outdoors trembling with the colors of autumn.

“I feel sort of silly about this,” she said, “but my husband insisted that I come.”

“I see,” Meyer said.

“There are ghosts,” the woman said.

Across the room Kling unlocked the door to the detention cage and said, “Okay, pal, on your way. Try to stay sober till morning, huh?”

“It ain’t one thirty yet,” the man said, “the night is young.” He stepped out of the cage, tipped his hat to Kling, and hurriedly left the squadroom.

Meyer looked at the woman sitting beside him, studying her with new interest because, to tell the truth, she had not seemed like a nut when she first walked into the squadroom. He had been a detective for more years than he chose to count, and in his time had met far too many nuts of every stripe and persuasion. But he had never met one as pretty as Adele Gorman with her well-tailored, fur-collared coat, and her Vassar voice and her skillfully applied eye makeup, lips bare of color in her pale white face, pert and reasonably young and seemingly intelligent — but apparently a nut besides.

“In the house,” she said. “Ghosts.”

“Where do you live, ma’am?” he asked. He had written her name on the pad in front of him, and now he watched her with his pencil poised and recalled the lady who had come into the squadroom only last month to report a gorilla peering into her bedroom from the fire escape outside. They had sent a patrolman over to make a routine check, and had even called the zoo and the circus (which coincidentally was in town, and which lent at least some measure of credibility to her claim), but there had been no gorilla on the fire escape, nor had any gorilla recently escaped from a cage. The lady came back the next day to report that her visiting gorilla had put in another appearance the night before, this time wearing a top hat and carrying a black cane with an ivory head. Meyer had assured her that he would have a platoon of cops watching her building that night, which seemed to calm her at least somewhat. He had then led her personally out of the squadroom and down the iron-runged steps, and through the high-ceilinged muster room, and past the hanging green globes on the front stoop, and onto the sidewalk outside the station house. Sergeant Murchison, at the muster desk, shook his head after the lady was gone, and muttered, “More of them outside than in.”

Meyer watched Adele Gorman now, remembered what Murchison had said, and thought: Gorillas in September, ghosts in October.

“We live in Smoke Rise,” she said. “Actually, it’s my father’s house, but my husband and I are living there with him.”

“The address?”

“MacArthur Lane — number three hundred seventy-four. You take the first access road into Smoke Rise, about a mile and a half east of Silvermine Oval. The name on the mailbox is Van Houten. That’s my father’s name. Willem Van Houten.” She paused and studied him, as though expecting some reaction.

“Okay,” Meyer said, and ran a hand over his bald pate. He looked up and said, “Now, you were saying, Mrs. Gorman—”

“That we have ghosts.”

“Uh-huh. What kind of ghosts?”

“Ghosts. Poltergeists. Shades. I don’t know,” she said, and shrugged. “What kinds of ghosts are there?”

“Well, they’re your ghosts, so suppose you tell me,” Meyer said.

The telephone on Kling’s desk rang. He lifted the receiver and said, “Eighty-seventh, Detective Kling.”

“There are two of them,” Adele said.

“Male or female?”

“One of each.”

“Yeah,” Kling said into the telephone, “go ahead.”

“How old would you say they were?”

“Centuries, I would guess.”

“No, I mean—”

“Oh, how old do they look? Well, the man—”

“You’ve seen them?”

“Oh, yes, many times.”

“Uh-huh,” Meyer said.

“I’ll be right over,” Kling said into the telephone. “You stay there.” He slammed down the receiver, opened his desk drawer, pulled out a holstered revolver, and hurriedly clipped it to his belt. “Somebody threw a bomb into a store-front church. One-seven-three-three Culver Avenue. I’m heading over.”

“Right,” Meyer said. “Get back to me.”

“We’ll need a couple of meat wagons. The minister and two others were killed, and it sounds as if there’re a lot of injured.”

“Will you tell Dave?”

“On the way out,” Kling said, and was gone.

“Mrs. Gorman,” Meyer said, “as you can see, we’re pretty busy here just now. I wonder if your ghosts can wait till morning.”

“No, they can’t,” Adele said. “Why not?”

“Because they appear precisely at two forty-five A.M. and I want someone to see them.”

“Why don’t you and your husband look at them?” Meyer said.

“You think I’m a nut, don’t you?” Adele said.

“No, no, Mrs. Gorman, not at all.”

“Oh, yes you do,” Adele said. “I didn’t believe in ghosts either — until I saw these two.”

“Well, this is all very interesting, I assure you, Mrs. Gorman, but really we do have our hands full right now, and I don’t know what we can do about these ghosts of yours, even if we did come over to take a look at them.”

“They’ve been stealing things from us,” Adele said, and Meyer thought: Oh, we have got ourselves a prime lunatic this time.

“What sort of things?”

“A diamond brooch that used to belong to my mother when she was alive. They stole that from my father’s safe.”

“What else?”

“A pair of emerald earrings. They were in the safe, too.”

“When did these thefts occur?”

“Last month.”

“Isn’t it possible the jewelry’s been mislaid?”

“You don’t mislay a diamond brooch and a pair of emerald earrings that are locked inside a wall safe.”

“Did you report these thefts?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I knew you’d think I was crazy. Which is just what you’re thinking right this minute.”

“No, Mrs. Gorman, but I’m sure you can appreciate the fact that we — uh — can’t go around arresting ghosts,” Meyer said, and tried a smile.

Adele Gorman did not smile back. “Forget the ghosts,” she said, “I was foolish to mention them. I should have known better.” She took a deep breath, looked him squarely in the eye, and said, “I’m here to report the theft of a diamond brooch valued at six thousand dollars, and a pair of earrings worth thirty-five hundred dollars. Will you send a man to investigate tonight, or should I ask my father to get in touch with your superior officer?”

“Your father? What’s he got to—”

“My father is a retired Surrogate’s Court judge,” Adele said.

“I see.”

“Yes, I hope you do.”

“What time did you say these ghosts arrive?” Meyer asked, and sighed heavily.

Between midnight and 2:00 the city does not change very much. The theaters have all let out, and the average Saturday night revelers, good citizens from Bethtown or Calm’s Point, Riverhead or Majesta, have come into the Isola streets again in search of a snack or a giggle before heading home. The city is an ant’s nest of after-theater eateries ranging from chic French cafés to pizzerias to luncheonettes to coffee shops to hot-dog stands to delicatessens, all of them packed to the ceilings because Saturday night is not only the loneliest night of the week, it is also the night to howl. And howl they do, these good burghers who have put in five long hard days of labor and who are anxious now to relax and enjoy themselves before Sunday arrives, bringing with it the attendant boredom of too much leisure time, anathema for the American male.

The crowds shove and jostle their way along The Stem, moving in and out of bowling alleys, shooting galleries, penny arcades, strip joints, night clubs, jazz emporiums, souvenir shops, lining the sidewalks outside plate-glass windows in which go-go girls gyrate, or watching with fascination as a roast beef slowly turns on a spit. Saturday night is a time for pleasure for the good people of Isola and environs, with nothing more on their minds than a little enjoyment of the short respite between Friday night at 5:00 and Monday morning at 9:00.

But along around 2:00 A.M. the city begins to change.

The good citizens have waited to get their cars out of parking garages (more garages than there are barber shops) or have staggered their way sleepily into subways to make the long trip back to the outlying sections, the furry toy dog won in the Pokerino palace clutched limply, the laughter a bit thin, the voice a bit croaked, a college song being sung on a rattling subway car, but without much force or spirit. Saturday night has ended, it is really Sunday morning already, and the morning hours are truly upon the city — and now the denizens appear.

The predators approach, with the attendant danger of the good citizens getting mugged and rolled. The junkies are out in force, looking for cars foolishly left unlocked and parked on the streets, or — lacking such fortuitous circumstance — experienced enough to force the side vent with a screwdriver, hook the lock button with a wire hanger, and open the door that way. There are pushers peddling their dream stuff, from pot to speed to hoss, a nickel bag or a twenty-dollar deck; fences hawking their stolen goodies, anything from a transistor radio to a refrigerator, the biggest bargain basement in town; burglars jimmying windows or forcing doors with a celluloid strip, this being an excellent hour to break into apartments, when the occupants are asleep and the street sounds are hushed.

But worse than any of these are the predators who roam the night in search of trouble. In cruising wedges of three or four, sometimes high but more often not, they look for victims — a taxicab driver coming out of a cafeteria, an old woman poking around garbage cans for hidden treasures, a teenage couple necking in a parked automobile — it doesn’t matter. You can get killed in this city at any time of the day or night, but your chances for extinction are best after 2:00 A.M. because, paradoxically the night people take over in the morning. There are neighborhoods that terrify even cops in this lunar landscape, and there are certain places the cops will not enter unless they have first checked to see that there are two doors, one to get in by, and the other to get out through, fast, should someone decide to block the exit from behind.

The Painted Parasol was just such an establishment.

They had found in Mercy Howell’s appointment book a notation that read: Harry, 2:00 A.M. The Painted Parasol; and since they knew this particular joint for exactly the kind of hole it was, and since they wondered what connection the slain girl might have had with the various unappetizing types who frequented the place from dusk till dawn, they decided to hit it and find out. The front entrance opened on a long flight of stairs that led down to the main room of what was not a restaurant, and not a club, though it combined features of both. It did not possess a liquor license, and so it served only coffee and sandwiches; but occasionally a rock singer would plug in his amplifier and guitar and whack out a few numbers for the patrons. The back door of the — hangout? — opened onto a sidestreet alley. Hawes checked it out, reported back to Carella, and they both made a mental floor plan just in case they needed it later.

Carella went down the long flight of steps first, Hawes immediately behind him. At the bottom of the stairway they moved through a beaded curtain and found themselves in a large room overhung with an old Air Force parachute painted in a wild psychedelic pattern. A counter on which rested a coffee urn and trays of sandwiches in Saran Wrap was just opposite the hanging beaded curtain. To the left and right of the counter were perhaps two dozen tables, all of them occupied. A waitress in a black leotard and black high-heeled patent-leather pumps was swiveling between and around the tables, taking orders.

There was a buzz of conversation in the room, hovering, captured in the folds of the brightly painted parachute. Behind the counter a man in a white apron was drawing a cup of coffee from the huge silver urn. Carella and Hawes walked over to him. Carella was almost six feet tall, and he weighed 180 pounds, with wide shoulders and a narrow waist and the hands of a street brawler. Hawes was six feet two inches tall, and he weighed 195 pounds bone-dry, and his hair was a fiery red with a white streak over the left temple where he had once been knifed while investigating a burglary. Both men looked like exactly what they were — fuzz.

“What’s the trouble?” the man behind the counter asked immediately.

“No trouble,” Carella said. “This your place?”

“Yeah. My name is Georgie Bright, and I already been visited, thanks. Twice.”

“Oh? Who visited you?”

“First time a cop named O’Brien, second time a cop named Parker. I already cleared up that whole thing that was going on downstairs.”

“What whole thing going on downstairs?”

“In the Men’s Room. Some kids were selling pot down there, it got to be a regular neighborhood supermarket. So I done what O’Brien suggested, I put a man down there outside the toilet door, and the rule now is only one person goes in there at a time. Parker came around to make sure I was keeping my part of the bargain. I don’t want no narcotics trouble here. Go down and take a look if you like. You’ll see I got a man watching the toilet.”

“Who’s watching the man watching the toilet?” Carella asked.

“That ain’t funny,” Georgie Bright said, looking offended.

“Know anybody named Harry?” Hawes asked.

“Harry who? I know a lot of Harrys.”

“Any of them here tonight?”

“Maybe.”

“Where?”

“There’s one over there near the bandstand. The big guy with the light hair.”

“Harry what?”

“Donatello.”

“Make the name?” Carella asked Hawes.

“No,” Hawes said.

“Neither do I.”

“Let’s talk to him.”

“You want a cup of coffee or something?” Georgie Bright asked.

“Yeah, why don’t you send some over to the table?” Hawes said, and followed Carella across the room to where Harry Donatello was sitting with another man. Donatello was wearing gray slacks, black shoes and socks, a white shirt open at the throat, and a double-breasted blue blazer. His long blondish hair was combed straight back from the forehead, revealing a sharply defined widow’s peak. He was easily as big as Hawes, and he sat with his hands folded on the table in front of him, talking to the man who sat opposite him. He did not look up as the detectives approached.

“Is your name Harry Donatello?” Carella asked.

“Who wants to know?”

“Police officers,” Carella said, and flashed his shield.

“I’m Harry Donatello. What’s the matter?”

“Mind if we sit down?” Hawes asked, and before Donatello could answer, both men sat, their backs to the empty bandstand and the exit door.

“Do you know a girl named Mercy Howell?” Carella asked.

“What about her?”

“Do you know her?”

“I know her. What’s the beef? She underage or something?”

“When did you see her last?”

The man with Donatello, who up to now had been silent, suddenly piped, “You don’t have to answer no questions without a lawyer, Harry. Tell them you want a lawyer.”

The detectives looked him over. He was small and thin, with black hair combed sideways to conceal a receding hairline. He was badly in need of a shave. He was wearing blue trousers and a striped shirt.

“This is a field investigation,” Hawes said drily, “and we can ask anything we damn please.”

“Town’s getting full of lawyers,” Carella said. “What’s your name, counselor?”

“Jerry Riggs. You going to drag me in this, whatever it is?”

“It’s a few friendly questions in the middle of the night,” Hawes said. “Anybody got any objections to that?”

“Getting so two guys can’t even sit and talk together without getting shook down,” Riggs said.

“You’ve got a rough life, all right,” Hawes said, and the girl in the black leotard brought their coffee to the table, and then hurried off to take another order. Donatello watched her jiggling as she swiveled across the room.

“So when’s the last time you saw the Howell girl?” Carella asked again.

“Wednesday night,” Donatello said.

“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 a field investigation?” Riggs asked sarcastically.

“Nobody’s in custody yet,” Hawes said, “so let’s cut the legal jazz, 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 plate-glass 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 blonde 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 Blacks 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 around 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 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. Two women who had been sitting on folding chairs closest to the altar lay on the floor, 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 second ambulance arriving. 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.” Kling 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 stuff in your book?”

“You said you saw what—”

“I saw it, all right. I was walking by, heading for the pool room 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 Volkswagen.”

“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 number?”

“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 white.”

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.”

MacArthur Lane was at the end of the road that curved past the Hamilton Bridge. Number 374 was a huge gray-stone house 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, and 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 oak 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 70 years old, with piercing blue eyes; he was 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, and red velvet slippers.

“What do you want?” he asked immediately.

“I’m Detective Meyer of the Eighty-seventh—”

“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 he slammed the door in Meyer’s face.

The detective stood on the doorstep feeling somewhat like a horse’s neck. 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 oak 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 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 looked 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 know that Willem Van Houten, former Surrogate’s Court judge, had not wanted the police to be notified, Meyer would not have been here either. He debated leaving now, but Adele Gorman had begun to talk again.

“… 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 did just that.”

“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. “The ghosts are here.”

Mercy Howell’s roommate had been asleep for nearly 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 I.D. 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 lowered noisily to the floor, 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 25, 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 dead. She was stabbed tonight as she was leaving the theater.”

“No,” Lois said, simply and flatly and unequivocably. “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, God,” Lois said, and burst into tears.

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, God, 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 dreadful news.

“Do you know who did it?” she asked.

“No. Not yet.”

“We wouldn’t have wakened you in the middle of the night if—”

“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 bad any enemies?” Carella asked.

“She was the sweetest girl in the world,” Lois said.

“Did she argue with anyone recently? Were there any—”

“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?”

“It was mailed to her. At the theater.”

“When?”

“A week ago.”

“Did she report it to the police?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Haven’t you seen Rattlesnake?” Lois said.

“What do you mean?” Carella said.

“Rattlesnake. The musical. The show Mercy was in.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“But you’ve heard of it.”

“No.”

“Where do you live, for God’s sake? On the moon?”

“I’m sorry, I just haven’t—”

“Forgive me,” Lois said immediately. I’m not usually — I’m trying very hard to — I’m sorry. Forgive me.”

“That’s all right,” Carella said.

“Anyway, it’s a big hit now but — well there was trouble in the beginning, you see. Are you sure you don’t know about this? It was in all the newspapers.”

“Well, I guess I missed it,” Carella said. “What was the trouble about?”

“Don’t you know about this either?” she asked Hawes.

“No, I’m sorry.”

“About Mercy’s dance?”

“No.”

“Well, in one scene Mercy danced the title song without any clothes on. Because the idea was to express — the hell with what the idea was. The point is that the dance wasn’t at all obscene, it wasn’t even sexy! But the police missed the point, and closed the show down two days after it opened. The producers had to go to court for a writ or something to get the show opened again.”

“Yes, I remember it now,” Carella said.

“What I’m trying to say is that nobody involved with Rattlesnake would report anything to the police. Not even a threatening letter.”

“If she bought a pistol,” Hawes said, “she would have had to go to the police. For a permit.”

“She didn’t have a permit.”

“Then how’d she get the pistol? You can’t buy a handgun without first—”

“A friend of hers sold it to her.”

“What’s the friend’s name?”

“Harry Donatello.”

“An importer,” Carella said.

“Of souvenir ashtrays,” Hawes said.

“I don’t know what he does for a living,” Lois said, “but he got the gun for her.”

“When was this?”

“A few days after she received the letter.”

“What did the letter say?” Carella asked.

“I’ll get it for you,” Lois said, and went into the bedroom. They heard a dresser drawer opening, the rustle of clothes, what might have been a tin candy box being opened. Lois came back into the room. “Here it is,” she said.

There didn’t seem much point in trying to preserve latent prints on a letter that had already been handled by Mercy Howell, Lois Kaplan, and the Lord knew how many others. But nonetheless Carella accepted the letter on a handkerchief spread over the palm of his hand, and then looked at the face of the envelope. “She should have brought this to us immediately,” he said. “It’s written on hotel stationery, we’ve got an address without lifting a finger.”

The letter had indeed been written on stationery from The Addison Hotel, one of the city’s lesser-known fleabags, some two blocks north of the Eleventh Street Theater, where Mercy Howell had worked. There was a single sheet of paper in the envelope. Carella unfolded it. Lettered on the paper in pencil were the words:

The lamp went out, the room was black.

At first there was no sound but the sharp intake of Adele Gorman’s breath. And then, indistinctly, as faintly as though carried on a swirling mist that blew in wetly from some desolated shore, there came the sound of garbled voices, and the room grew suddenly cold. The voices were those of a crowd in endless debate, rising and falling in cacaphonous cadence, a mixture of tongues that rattled and rasped. There was the sound, too, of a rising wind, as though a door to some forbidden landscape had been sharply and suddenly blown open to reveal a host of corpses incessantly pacing, involved in formless dialogue.

The voices rose in volume now, carried on that same chill penetrating wind, louder, closer, until they seemed to overwhelm the room, clamoring to be released from whatever unearthly vault contained them. And then, as if two of those disembodied voices had succeeded in breaking away from the mass of unseen dead, bringing with them a rush of bone-chilling air from some world unknown, there came a whisper at first, the whisper of a man’s voice, saying the single word “Ralph!” — sharp-edged and with a distinctive foreign inflection.

“Ralph!” — and then a woman’s voice joining it saying, “Adele!” — pronounced strangely and in the same cutting whisper.

“Adele!” — and then “Ralph!” again, the voices overlapping, unmistakably foreign, urgent, rising in volume until the whispers commingled to become an agonizing groan — and then the names were lost in the shrilling echo of the wind.

Meyer’s eyes played tricks in the darkness. Apparitions that surely were not there seemed to float on the crescendo of sound that saturated the room. Barely perceived pieces of furniture assumed amorphous shapes as the male voice snarled and the female voice moaned above it.

And then the babel of other voices intruded again, as though calling these two back to whatever grim mossy crypt they had momentarily escaped. The sound of the wind became more fierce, and the voices of those numberless pacing dead receded, and echoed, and were gone.

The lamp sputtered back into dim illumination. The room seemed perceptibly warmer, but Meyer Meyer was covered with a cold clammy sweat.

“Now do you believe?” Adele Gorman asked.

Detective Bob O’Brien was coming out of the Men’s Room down the hall when he saw the woman sitting on the bench just outside the squadroom. He almost went back into the toilet, but he was an instant too late; she had seen him, so there was no escape.

“Hello, Mr. O’Brien,” she said, and performed an awkward little half-rising motion, as though uncertain whether she should stand to greet him or accept the deference due a lady. The clock on the squadroom wall read 3:02 A.M. but the lady was dressed as though for a brisk afternoon’s hike in the park — brown slacks, low-heeled walking shoes, beige car coat, a scarf around her head. She was perhaps 55, with a face that once must have been pretty, save for the overlong nose. Green-eyed, with prominent cheekbones and a generous mouth, she executed her abortive rise, and then fell into step beside O’Brien as he walked into the squadroom.

“Little late in the night to be out, isn’t it, Mrs. Blair?” O’Brien asked. He was not an insensitive cop, but his manner now was brusque and dismissive. Faced with Mrs. Blair for perhaps the seventeenth time in a month, he tried not to empathize with her loss because, truthfully, he was unable to assist her, and his inability to do so was frustrating.

“Have you seen her?” Mrs. Blair asked.

“No,” O’Brien said. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Blair, but I haven’t.”

“I have a new picture — perhaps that will help.”

“Yes, perhaps it will,” he said.

The telephone was ringing. He lifted the receiver and said, “Eighty-seventh, O’Brien here.”

“Bob, this’s Bert Kling over on Culver — the church bombing.”

“Yeah, Bert.”

“Seems I remember seeing a red Volkswagen on that hot-car bulletin we got yesterday. You want to dig it out and let me know where it was snatched?”

“Yeah, just a second,” O’Brien said, and began scanning the sheet on his desk.

“Here’s the new picture,” Mrs. Blair said. “I know you’re very good with runaways, Mr. O’Brien — the kids all like you and give you information. If you see Penelope, all I want you to do is tell her I love her and am sorry for the misunderstanding.”

“Yeah, I will,” O’Brien said. Into the phone he said, “I’ve got two red VWs, Bert, a sixty-four and a sixty-six. You want them both?”

“Shoot,” Kling said.

“The sixty-four was stolen from a guy named Art Hauser. It was parked outside eight-six-one West Meridian.”

“And the sixty-six?”

“Owner is a woman named Alice Cleary. Car was stolen from a parking lot on Fourteenth.”

“North or South?”

“South. Three-o-three South.”

“Right. Thanks, Bob,” Kling said, and hung up.

“And ask her to come home to me,” Mrs. Blair said.

“Yes, I will,” O’Brien said. “If I see her, I certainly will.”

“That’s a nice picture of Penny, don’t you think?” Mrs. Blair asked. “It was taken last Easter. It’s the most recent picture I have. I thought it would be helpful to you.”

O’Brien looked at the girl in the picture, and then looked up into Mrs. Blair’s green eyes, misted now with tears, and suddenly wanted to reach across the desk and pat her hand reassuringly, the one thing he could not do with any honesty. Because whereas it was true that he was the squad’s runaway expert, with perhaps 50 snapshots of teenagers crammed into his bulging notebook, and whereas his record of finds was more impressive than any other cop’s in the city, uniformed or plainclothes, there wasn’t a damn thing he could do for the mother of Penelope Blair, who had run away from home last June.

“You understand—” he started to say.

“Let’s not go into that again, Mr. O’Brien,” she said, and rose.

“Mrs. Blair—”

“I don’t want to hear it,” Mrs. Blair said, walking quickly out of the squadroom. “Tell her to come home. Tell her I love her,” she said, and was gone down the iron-runged steps.

O’Brien sighed and stuffed the new picture of Penelope into his notebook. What Mrs. Blair did not choose to hear again was the fact that her runaway daughter Penny was 24 years old, and there was not a single agency on God’s green earth, police or otherwise, that could force her to go home again if she did not choose to.

Fats Donner was a stool pigeon with a penchant for Turkish baths. A mountainous white Buddha of a man, he could usually be found at one of the city’s steam emporiums at any given hour of the day, draped in a towel and reveling in the heat that saturated his flabby body. Bert Kling found him in an all-night place called Steam-Fit.

Kling sent the masseur into the steam room to tell Donner he was there, and Donner sent word out that he would be through in five minutes, unless Kling wished to join him. Kling did not wish to join him. He waited in the locker room, and in seven minutes’ time, Donner came out, draped in his customary towel, a ludicrous sight at any time, but particularly at 3:30 A.M.

“Hey!” Donner said. “How you doing?”

“Fine,” Kling said. “How about yourself?”

“Comme-ci, comme-ca,” Donner said, and made a seesawing motion with one fleshy hand.

“I’m looking for some stolen heaps,” Kling said, getting directly to the point.

“What kind?” Donner said.

“Volkswagens. A sixty-four and a sixty-six.”

“What color?”

“Red.”

“Both of them?”

“Yes.”

“Where were they heisted?”

“One from in front of eight-six-one West Meridian. The other from a parking lot on South Fourteenth.”

“When was this?”

“Both last week sometime. I don’t have the exact dates.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Who stole them.”

“You think it’s the same guy on both?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s so important about these heaps?”

“One of them may have been used in a bombing tonight.”

“You mean the church over on Culver?”

“That’s right.”

“Count me out,” Donner said.

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a lot of guys in this town who’re in sympathy with what happened over there tonight. I don’t want to get involved.”

“Who’s going to know whether you’re involved or not?” Kling asked.

“The same way you get information, they get information.”

“I need your help, Donner.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sorry on this one,” Donner said, and shook his head.

“In that case I’d better hurry downtown to High Street.”

“Why? You got another source down there?”

“No, that’s where the D.A.’s office is.”

Both men stared at each other — Donner in a white towel draped around his belly, sweat still pouring from his face and his chest even though he was no longer in the steam room, and Kling looking like a slightly tired advertising executive rather than a cop threatening a man with revelation of past deeds not entirely legal. They stared at each other with total understanding, caught in the curious symbiosis of law breaker and law enforcer, an empathy created by neither man, but essential to the existence of both. It was Donner who broke the silence.

“I don’t like being coerced,” he said.

“I don’t like being refused,” Kling answered.

“When do you need this?”

“I want to get going on it before morning.”

“You expect miracles, don’t you?”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

“Miracles cost.”

“How much?”

“Twenty-five if I turn up one heap, fifty if I turn up both.”

“Turn them up first. We’ll talk later.”

“And if somebody breaks my head later?”

“You should have thought of that before you entered the profession,” Kling said. “Come on, Donner, cut it out. This is a routine bombing by a couple of punks. You’ve got nothing to be afraid of.”

“No?” Donner asked. And then, in a very professorial voice, he uttered perhaps the biggest understatement of the decade. “Racial tensions are running high in this city right now.”

“Have you got my number at the squadroom?”

“Yeah, I’ve got it,” Donner said glumly.

“I’m going back there now. Let me hear from you soon.”

“You mind if I get dressed first?” Donner asked.

The night clerk at The Addison Hotel was alone in the lobby when Carella and Hawes walked in. Immersed in an open book on the desk in front of him, he did not look up as they approached. The lobby was furnished in faded Victorian: a threadbare Oriental rug, heavy curlicued mahogany tables, ponderous stuffed chairs with sagging bottoms and soiled antimacassars, two spittoons resting alongside each of two mahogany paneled supporting columns. A genuine Tiffany lampshade hung over the registration desk, one leaded glass panel gone, another badly cracked. In the old days The Addison had been a luxury hotel. It now wore its past splendor with all the style of a dance-hall girl in a moth-eaten mink she’d picked up in a thrift shop.

The clerk, in contrast to his antique surroundings, was a young man in his mid-twenties, wearing a neatly pressed brown tweed suit, a tan shirt, a gold and brown rep tie, and eyeglasses with tortoise-shell rims. He glanced up at the detectives belatedly, squinting after the intense concentration of peering at print, and then he got to his feet.

“Yes, gentlemen,” he said. “May I help you?”

“Police officers,” Carella said. He took his wallet from his pocket, and opened it to where his defective’s shield was pinned to a leather flap.

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m Detective Carella, this is my partner, Detective Hawes.”

“How do you do? I’m the night clerk — my name is Ronald Sanford.”

“We’re looking for someone who may have been registered here two weeks ago,” Hawes said.

“Well, if he was registered here two weeks ago,” Sanford said, “chances are he’s still registered. Most of our guests are residents.”

“Do you keep stationery in the lobby here?” Carella asked.

“Sir?”

“Stationery. Is there any place here in the lobby where someone could walk in off the street and pick up a piece of stationery?”

“No, sir. There’s a writing desk there in the corner, near the staircase, but we don’t stock it with stationery, no, sir.”

“Is there stationery in the rooms?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How about here at the desk?”

“Yes, of course, sir.”

“Is there someone at this desk twenty-four hours a day?”

“Twenty-four hours a day, yes, sir. We have three shifts. Eight to four in the afternoon. Four to midnight. And midnight to eight A.M.”

“You came on at midnight, did you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any guests come in after you started your shift?”

“A few, yes, sir.”

“Notice anybody with blood on his clothes?”

“Blood? Oh, no, sir.”

“Would you have noticed?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you generally pretty aware of what’s going on around here?”

“I try to be, sir. At least, for most of the night. I catch a little nap when I’m not studying, but usually—”

“What do you study?”

“Accounting.”

“Where?”

“At Ramsey U.”

“Mind if we take a look at your register?”

“Not at all, sir.”

He walked to the mail rack and took the hotel register from the counter there. Returning to the desk he opened it and said, “All of our present guests are residents, with the exception of Mr. Lambert in two hundred and four, and Mrs. Grant in seven hundred and one.”

“When did they check in?”

“Mr. Lambert checked in — last night, I think it was. And Mrs. Grant has been here four days. She’s leaving on Tuesday.”

“Are these the actual signatures of your guests?”

“Yes, sir. All guests are asked to sign the register, as required by state law.”

“Have you got that note, Cotton?” Carella asked, and then turned again to Sanford. “Would you mind if we took this over to the couch there?”

“Well, we’re not supposed—”

“We can give you a receipt for it, if you like.”

“No, I guess it’ll be all right.”

They carried the register to a couch upholstered in faded red velvet. With the book supported on Carella’s lap they unfolded the note that Mercy Howell had received, and began to compare the signatures of the guests with the only part of the note that was not written in block letters — the words, The Avenging Angel.

There were 52 guests in the hotel. Carella and Hawes went through the register once, and then started through it a second time.

“Hey,” Hawes said suddenly.

“What?”

“Look at this one.”

He took the note and placed it on the page so that it was directly above one of the signatures:

“What do you think?” he asked.

“Different handwriting,” Carella said.

“Same initials,” Hawes said.

Detective Meyer Meyer was still shaken. He did not like ghosts. He did not like this house. He wanted to go home to his wife Sarah. He wanted her to stroke his hand and tell him that such things did not exist, there was nothing to be afraid of, a grown man? How could he believe in poltergeists, shades, Dutch spirits? Ridiculous!

But he had heard them, and he had felt their chilling presence, and had almost thought he’d seen them, if only for an instant. He turned with fresh shock now toward the hall staircase and the sound of descending footsteps. Eyes wide, he waited for whatever new manifestation might present itself. He was tempted to draw his revolver, but he was afraid such an act would appear foolish to the Gormans. He had come here a skeptic, and he was now at least willing to believe, and he waited in dread for whatever was coming down those steps with such ponderous footfalls — some ghoul trailing winding sheets and rattling chains? Some specter with a bleached skull for a head and long bony clutching fingers dripping the blood of babies?

Willem Van Houten, wearing his red velvet slippers and his red smoking jacket, his hair still jutting wildly from behind each ear, his blue eyes fierce and snapping, came into the living room and walked directly to where his daughter and son-in-law were sitting.

“Well?” he asked. “Did they come again?”

“Yes, Daddy,” Adele said.

“What did they want this time?”

“I don’t know. They spoke Dutch again.”

Van Houten turned to Meyer. “Did you see them?” he asked.

“No, sir, I did not,” Meyer said.

“But they were here,” Gorman protested, and turned his blank face to his wife. “I heard them.”

“Yes, darling,” Adele assured him. “We all heard them. But it was like that other time, don’t you remember? When we could hear them even though they couldn’t quite break through.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Gorman said, and nodded. “This happened once before, Detective Meyer.” He was facing Meyer now, his head tilted quizzically, the sightless eyes covered with their black glasses. When he spoke his voice was like that of a child seeking reassurance. “But you did hear them, didn’t you, Detective Meyer?”

“Yes,” Meyer said. “I heard them, Mr. Gorman.”

“And the wind?”

“Yes, the wind, too.”

“And felt them. It — it gets so cold when they appear. You did feel their presence, didn’t you?”

“I felt something,” Meyer said.

Van Houten suddenly asked, “Are you satisfied?”

“About what?” Meyer said.

“That there are ghosts in this house? That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To ascertain—”

“He’s here because I asked Adele to notify the police,” Gorman said.

“Why did you do that?”

“Because of the stolen jewelry,” Gorman said. “And because—” He paused. “Because I’ve lost my sight, yes, but I wanted to — to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind as well.”

“You’re perfectly sane, Ralph,” Van Houten said.

“About the jewelry—” Meyer said.

“They took it,” Van Houten said.

“Who?”

“Johann and Elisabeth. Our friendly neighborhood ghosts.”

“That’s impossible, Mr. Van Houten.”

“Why is it impossible?”

“Because ghosts—” Meyer started, and hesitated.

“Yes?”

“Ghosts… well, ghosts don’t go around stealing jewelry. I mean, what use would they have for it?” he said lamely, and looked at the Gorman for corroboration. Neither of the Gormans seemed to be in a substantiating mood. They sat on the sofa near the fireplace, both looking glum.

“They want us out of this house,” Van Houten said. “It’s as simple as that.”

“How do you know?”

“Because they said so.”

“When?”

“Before they stole the necklace and the earrings.”

“They told this to you?”

“To me and to my children. All three of us were here.”

“But I understand the ghosts speak only Dutch.”

“Yes, I translated for Ralph and Adele.”

“And then what happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“When did you discover the jewelry was missing?”

“The instant they were gone.”

“You mean you went to the safe?”

“Yes, and opened it, and the jewelry was gone.”

“We had put it in the safe not ten minutes before that,” Adele said. “We’d been to a party, Ralph and I, and we got home very late, and Daddy was still awake, reading, sitting in that chair you’re in this very minute. I asked him to open the safe, and he did, and he put the jewelry in and closed the safe and… and then they came and… and made their threats.”

“What time was this?”

“The usual time. The time they always come. Two forty-five in the morning.”

“And you say the jewelry was put into the safe at what time?”

“About two-thirty,” Gorman said.

“And when was the safe opened again?”

“Immediately after they left. They only stay a few moments. This time they told my father-in-law they were taking the necklace and the earrings with them. He rushed to the safe as soon as the lights came on again—”

“Do the lights always go off?”

“Always,” Adele said. “It’s always the same. The lights go off, and the room gets very cold, and we hear these strange voices arguing.” She paused. “And then Johann and Elisabeth come.”

“Except that this time they didn’t come,” Meyer said.

“And one other time,” Adele said quickly.

“They want us out of this house,” Van Houten said, “that’s all there is to it. Maybe we ought to leave. Before they take everything from us.”

“Everything? What do you mean?”

“The rest of my daughter’s jewelry. And some stock certificates. Everything that’s in the safe.”

“Where is the safe?” Meyer asked.

“Here. Behind this painting.” Van Houten walked to the wall opposite the fireplace. An oil painting of a pastoral landscape hung there in an ornate gilt frame. The frame was hinged to the wall. Van Houten swung the painting out as though opening a door, and revealed the small, round, black safe behind it. “Here.”

“How many people know the combination?” Meyer asked.

“Just me,” Van Houten said.

“Do you keep the number written down anywhere?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Hidden.”

“Where?”

“I hardly think that’s any of your business, Detective Meyer.”

“I’m only trying to find out whether some other person could have got hold of the combination somehow.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s possible,” Van Houten said. “But highly unlikely.”

“Well,” Meyer said, and shrugged. “I don’t really know what to say. I’d like to measure the room, if you don’t mind, get the dimensions, placement of doors and windows, things like that. For my report.” He shrugged again.

“It’s rather late, isn’t it?” Van Houten said.

“Well, I got here rather late,” Meyer said, and smiled.

“Come, Daddy, I’ll make us all some tea in the kitchen,” Adele said. “Will you be long, Detective Meyer?”

“It may take a while.”

“Shall I bring you some tea?”

“Thank you, that would be nice.”

She rose from the couch and then guided her husband’s hand to her arm. Walking slowly beside him, she led him past her father and out of the room. Van Houten looked at Meyer once again, nodded briefly, and followed them out. Meyer closed the door behind them and immediately walked to the standing floor lamp.

The woman was 60 years old, and she looked like anybody’s grandmother, except that she had just murdered her husband and three children. They had explained her rights to her, and she had told them she had nothing to hide and would answer any questions they asked her. She sat in a straight-backed squadroom chair, wearing a black cloth coat over blood-stained nightgown and robe, her handcuffed hands in her lap, her hands unmoving on her black leather pocketbook.

O’Brien and Kling looked at the police stenographer, who glanced up at the wall clock, noted the time of the interrogation’s start as 3:55 A.M., and then signaled that he was ready whenever they were.

“What is your name?” O’Brien asked.

“Isabel Martin.”

“How old are you, Mrs. Martin?”

“Sixty.”

“Where do you live?”

“On Ainsley Avenue.”

“Where on Ainsley?”

“Six hundred fifty-seven Ainsley.”

“With whom do you live there?”

“With my husband Roger, and my son Peter, and my daughters Anne and Abigail.”

“Would you like to tell us what happened tonight, Mrs. Martin?” Kling asked.

“I killed them all,” she said. She had white hair, a fine aquiline nose, brown eyes behind rimless spectacles. She stared straight ahead of her as she spoke, looking neither to her right nor to her left, seemingly alone with the memory of what she had done not a half hour before.

“Can you give us some of the details, Mrs. Martin?”

“I killed him first.”

“Who do you mean, Mrs. Martin?”

“My husband.”

“When was this?”

“When he came home.”

“What time was that, do you remember?”

“A little while ago.”

“It’s almost four o’clock now,” Kling said. “Would you say this was at, what, three thirty or thereabouts?”

“I didn’t look at the clock,” she said. “I heard his key in the door, and I went in the kitchen, and there he was.”

“Yes?”

“There’s a meat cleaver I keep on the sink. I hit him with it.”

“Why did you do that, Mrs. Martin?”

“Because I wanted to.”

“Were you arguing with him, is that it?”

“No. I just went over to the sink and picked up the cleaver, and then I hit him with it.”

“Where did you hit him, Mrs. Martin?”

“On his head and on his neck and I think on his shoulder.”

“You hit him three times with the cleaver?”

“I hit him a lot of times. I don’t know how many.”

“Were you aware that you were hitting him?”

“Yes, I was aware.”

“You knew you were striking him with a cleaver.”

“Yes, I knew.”

“Did you intend to kill him with the cleaver?”

“I intended to kill him with the cleaver.”

“And afterwards, did you know you had killed him?”

“I knew he was dead, yes.”

“What did you do then?”

“My oldest child came into the kitchen. Peter. My son. He yelled at me, he wanted to know what I’d done, he kept yelling at me and yelling at me. I hit him too — to get him to shut up. I hit him only once, across the throat.”

“Did you know what you were doing at the time?”

“I knew what I was doing. He was another one, that Peter.”

“What happened next, Mrs. Martin?”

“I went in the back, bedroom where the two girls sleep, and I hit Annie with the cleaver first, and then I hit Abigail.”

“Where did you hit them, Mrs. Martin?”

“On the face. Their faces.”

“How many times?”

“I think I hit Annie twice, and Abigail only once.”

“Why did you do that, Mrs. Martin?”

“Who would take care of them after I was gone?” Mrs. Martin asked of no one.

There was a long pause, then Kling asked, “Is there anything else you want to tell us?”

“There’s nothing more to tell. I done the right thing.”

The detectives walked away from the desk. They were both pale. “Man,” O’Brien whispered.

“Yeah,” Kling said. “We’d better call the night D.A. right away, get him to take a full confession from her.”

“Killed four of them without batting an eyelash,” O’Brien said, and shook his head, and went back to where the stenographer was typing up Mrs. Martin’s statement.

The telephone was ringing. Kling walked to the nearest desk and lifted the receiver. “Eighty seventh, Detective Kling,” he said.

“This is Donner.”

“Yeah, Fats.”

“I think I got a lead on one of those heaps.”

“Shoot.”

“This would be the one heisted on Fourteenth Street. According to the dope I’ve got it happened yesterday morning. Does that check out?”

“I’ll have to look at the bulletin again. Go ahead, Fats.”

“It’s already been ditched,” Donner said. “If you’re looking for it try outside the electric company on the River Road.”

“Thanks, I’ll make a note of that. Who stole it, Fats?”

“This is strictly entre nous,” Donner said. “I don’t want no tie-in with it never. The guy who done it is a mean little guy — rip out his mother’s heart for a dime. He hates blacks, killed one in a street rumble a few years ago, and managed to beat the rap. I think maybe some officer was on the take, huh, Kling?”

“You can’t square homicide in this city, and you know it, Fats.”

“Yeah? I’m surprised. You can square damn near anything else for a couple of bills.”

“What’s his name?”

“Danny Ryder. Three-five-four-one Grover Avenue. You won’t find him there now, though.”

“Where will I find him now?”

“Ten minutes ago he was in an all-night bar on Mason, place called Felicia’s. You going in after him?”

“I am.”

“Take your gun,” Donner said.

There were seven people in Felicia’s when Kling got there at 4:45. He cased the bar through the plate-glass window fronting the place, unbuttoned the third button of his overcoat, reached in to clutch the butt of his revolver, worked it out of the holster once and then back again, and went in through the front door.

There was the immediate smell of stale cigarette smoke and beer and sweat and cheap perfume. A Puerto Rican girl was in whispered consultation with a sailor in one of the leatherette-lined booths. Another sailor was hunched over the juke box thoughtfully considering his next selection, his face tinted orange and red and green from the colored tubing. A tired, fat, 50-year old blonde sat at the far end of the bar, watching the sailor as though the next button he pushed might destroy the entire world. The bartender was polishing glasses. He looked up when Kling walked in and immediately smelled the law.

Two men were seated at the opposite end of the bar.

One of them was wearing a blue turtleneck sweater, gray slacks, and desert boots. His brown hair was clipped close to his scalp in a military cut. The other man was wearing a bright orange team jacket, almost luminous, with the words Orioles, S.A.C. lettered across its back. The one with the crewcut said something softly, and the other one chuckled. Behind the bar a glass clinked as the bartender replaced it on the shelf. The juke box erupted in sound, Jimi Hendrix rendering All Along the Watchtower.

Kling walked over to the two men.

“Which one of you is Danny Ryder?” he asked.

The one with the short hair said, “Who wants to know?”

“Police officer,” Kling said, and the one in the orange jacket whirled with a pistol in his hand. Kling’s eyes opened wide in surprise, and the pistol went off.

There was no time to think, there was hardly time to breathe. The explosion of the pistol was shockingly close, the acrid stink of cordite was in Kling’s nostrils. The knowledge that he was still alive, the sweet rushing clean awareness that the bullet had somehow missed him was only a fleeting click of intelligence accompanying what was essentially a reflexive act.

Kling’s .38 came free of its holster, his finger was inside the trigger guard and around the trigger, he squeezed off his shot almost before the gun had cleared the flap of his overcoat, fired into the orange jacket and threw his shoulder simultaneously against the chest of the man with the short hair, knocking him backward off his stool. The man in the orange jacket, his face twisted in pain, was leveling the pistol for another shot.

Kling fired again, squeezing the trigger without thought of rancor, and then whirled on the man with the short hair, who was crouched on the floor against the bar.

“Get up!” he yelled.

“Don’t shoot!”

“Get up!”

He yanked the man to his feet, hurled him against the bar, thrust the muzzle of his pistol at the blue turtleneck sweater, ran his hands under the armpits and between the legs, while the man kept saying over and over again “Don’t shoot, please don’t shoot.”

He backed away from him and leaned over the one in the orange jacket.

“Is this Ryder?” he asked. “Yes.”

“Who’re you?”

“Frank Pasquale. Look, I—”

“Shut up, Frank,” Kling said. “Put your hands behind your back. Move!”

He had already taken his handcuffs from his belt. He snapped them onto Pasquale’s wrists, and only then became aware that Jimi Hendrix was still singing, the sailors were watching with pale white faces, the Puerto Rican girl was screaming, the fat faded blonde had her mouth open, the bartender was frozen in mid-motion, the tip of his bar towel inside a glass.

“All right,” Kling said. He was breathing harshly. “All right,” he said again, and wiped his forehead.

Timothy Allen Ames was a potbellied man of 40, with a thick black mustache, a mane of long black hair, and brown eyes sharply alert at 5:05 in the morning. He answered the door as though he’d been already awake, asked for identification, then asked the detectives to wait a moment, closed the door, and came back shortly afterward, wearing a robe over his striped pajamas.

“Is your name Timothy Ames?” Carella asked.

“That’s me,” Ames said. “Little late to be paying a visit, ain’t it?”

“Or early, depending how you look at it,” Hawes said.

“One thing I can do without at five A.M. is humorous cops,” Ames said. “How’d you get up here, anyway? Is that little jerk asleep at the desk again?”

“Who do you mean?” Carella asked.

“Lonnie Sanford, or whatever his name is.”

“Ronald — Ronnie Sanford.”

“Yeah, him. Always giving me trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“About broads,” Ames said. “Acts like he’s running a nunnery here, can’t stand to see a guy come in with a girl. I notice he ain’t got no compunctions about letting cops upstairs, though, no matter what time it is.”

“Never mind Sanford, let’s talk about you,” Carella said.

“Sure, what would you like to know?”

“Where were you between eleven twenty and twelve tonight?”

“Right here.”

“Can you prove it?”

“Sure. I got back here about eleven o’clock, and I been here ever since. Ask Sanford downstairs — no, he wasn’t on yet. He don’t come on till midnight.”

“Who else can we ask, Ames?”

“Listen, you going to make trouble for me?”

“Only if you’re in trouble.”

“I got a broad here. She’s over eighteen, don’t worry. But, like, she’s a junkie, you know? But I know you guys, and if you want to make trouble—”

“Where is she?”

“In the john.”

“Get her out here.”

“Look, do me a favor, will you? Don’t bust the kid. She’s trying to kick the habit, she really is. I been helping her along.”

“How?”

“By keeping her busy,” Ames said, and winked.

“Call her.”

“Bea, come out here!” Ames shouted.

There were a few moments of hesitation, then the bathroom door opened. The girl was a tall plain brunette wearing a short terrycloth robe. She sidled into the room cautiously, as though expecting to be struck in the face at any moment. Her brown eyes were wide with expectancy. She knew fuzz, she knew what it was like to be arrested on a narcotics charge, and she had listened to the conversation from behind the closed bathroom door; and now she waited for whatever was coming, expecting the worst.

“What’s your name, Miss?” Hawes asked.

“Beatrice Norden.”

“What time did you get here tonight, Beatrice?”

“About eleven.”

“Was this man with you?”

“Yes.”

“Did he leave here at any time tonight?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m positive. He picked me up about nine o’clock—”

“Where do you live, Beatrice?”

“Well, that’s the thing, you see,” the girl said. “I been put out of my room.”

“So where’d he pick you up?”

“At my girl friend’s house. You can ask her, she was there when he came. Her name is Rosalie Dawes. Anyway, Timmy picked me up at nine, and we went out to eat, and we came up here around eleven.”

“I hope you’re telling us the truth, Miss Norden,” Carella said.

“I swear to God, we been here all night,” Beatrice answered.

“All right, Ames,” Hawes said, “we’d like a sample of your handwriting.”

“My what?”

“Your handwriting.”

“What for?”

“We collect autographs,” Carella said.

“Gee, these guys really break me up,” Ames said to the girl. “Regular night-club comics we get in the middle of the night.”

Carella handed him a pencil and then tore a sheet from his pad. “You want to write this for me?” he said. “The first part’s in block lettering.”

“What the hell is block lettering?” Ames asked.

“He means print it,” Hawes said.

“Then why didn’t he say so?”

“Put on your clothes, Miss,” Carella said.

“What for?” Beatrice said.

“That’s what I want him to write,” Carella explained.

“Oh.”

“Put on your clothes, Miss,” Ames repeated, and lettered it onto the sheet of paper. “What else?” he asked, looking up.

“Now sign it in your own handwriting with the following words: The Avenging Angel.”

“What the hell is this supposed to be?” Ames asked.

“You want to write it, please?”

Ames wrote the words, then handed the slip of paper to Carella. He and Hawes compared it with the note that had been mailed to Mercy Howell:

“So?” Ames asked.

“So you’re clean,” Hawes said.

At the desk downstairs, Ronnie Sanford was still immersed in his accounting textbook. He got to his feet again as the detectives came out of the elevator, adjusted his glasses on his nose, and said, “Any luck?”

“Afraid not,” Carella answered. “We’re going to need this register for a while, if that’s okay.”

“Well—”

“Give him a receipt for it, Cotton,” Carella said. It was late, and he didn’t want a debate in the lobby of a rundown hotel. Hawes quickly made out a receipt in duplicate, signed both copies, and handed one to Sanford.

“What about this tom cover?” Hawes asked belatedly.

“Yeah,” Carella said. There was a small rip on the leather binding of the book. He fingered it briefly now, then said, “Better note that on the receipt, Cotton.” Hawes took back the receipt and, on both copies, jotted the words Small rip on front cover. He handed the receipts back to Sanford.

“Want to just sign these, Mr. Sanford?” he said.

“What for?” Sanford asked.

“To indicate we received the register in this condition.”

“Oh, sure,” Sanford said. He picked up a ballpoint pen from its desk holder, and asked, “What do you want me to write?”

“Your name and your title that’s all.”

“My title?”

“Night Clerk, The Addison Hotel.”

“Oh, sure,” Sanford said, and signed both receipts. “This okay?” he asked. The detectives looked at what he had written.

“You like girls?” Carella asked suddenly.

“What?” Sanford asked.

“Girls,” Hawes said.

“Sure. Sure, I like girls.”

“Dressed or naked?”

“What?”

“With clothes or without?”

“I… I don’t know what you mean, sir.”

“Where were you tonight between eleven twenty and midnight?” Hawes asked.

“Getting — getting ready to come to — to work,” Sanford said.

“You sure you weren’t in the alley of the Eleventh Street Theater stabbing a girl named Mercy Howell?”

“What? No… no, of course not. I was… I was home — getting dressed—” Sanford took a deep breath and decided to get indignant. “Listen, what’s this all about?” he said. “Would you mind telling me?”

“It’s all about this,” Carella said, and turned one of the receipts so that Sanford could read the signature:

“Get your hat,” Hawes said. “Study hall’s over.”

It was 5:25 when Adele Gorman came into the room with Meyer’s cup of tea. He was crouched near the air-conditioning unit recessed into the wall to the left of the drapes; he glanced up when he heard her, then rose.

“I didn’t know what you took,” she said, “so I brought everything.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Just a little sugar is fine.”

“Have you measured the room?” she asked, and put the tray down on the table in front of the sofa.

“Yes, I think I have everything I need now,” Meyer said. He put a spoonful of sugar into the tea, stirred it, then lifted the cup to his mouth. “Hot,” he said.

Adele Gorman was watching him silently. She said nothing. He kept sipping his tea. The ornate clock on the mantelpiece ticked in a swift whispering tempo.

“Do you always keep this room so dim?” Meyer asked.

“Well, my husband is blind, you know,” Adele said. “There’s really no need for brighter light.”

“Mmm. But your father reads in this room, doesn’t he?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The night you came home from that party. He was sitting in the chair over there near the floor lamp. Reading. Remember?”

“Oh. Yes, he was.”

“Bad light to read by.”

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

“I think maybe those bulbs are defective,” Meyer said.

“Do you think so?”

“Mmm. I happened to look at the lamp, and there are three one-hundred-watt bulbs in it, all of them burning. You should be getting a lot more light with that much wattage.”

“Well, I really don’t know about such—”

“Unless the lamp is on a rheostat, of course.”

“I’m afraid I don’t even know what a rheostat is.”

“It’s an adjustable resistor. You can dim your lights or make them brighter with it. I thought maybe the lamp was on a rheostat, but I couldn’t find a control knob anywhere in the room.” Meyer paused. “You wouldn’t know if there’s a rheostat control in the house, would you?”

“I’m sure there isn’t,” Adele said.

“Must be defective bulbs then,” Meyer said, and smiled. “Also, I think your air conditioner is broken.”

“No, I’m sure it isn’t.”

“Well, I was just looking at it, and all the switches are turned to the ‘On’ position, but it isn’t working. So I guess it’s broken. That’s a shame, too, because it’s such a nice unit. Sixteen thousand BTUs. That’s a lot of cooling power for a room this size. We’ve got one of those big old price-fixed apartments on Concord, my wife and I, with a large bedroom, and we get adequate cooling from a half-ton unit. It’s a shame this one is broken.”

“Yes. Detective Meyer, I don’t wish to appear rude, but it is late—”

“Sure,” Meyer said. “Unless, of course, the air conditioner’s on a remote switch, too. So that all you have to do is turn a knob in another part of the house and it comes on.” He paused. “Is there such a switch somewhere, Mrs. Gorman?”

“I have no idea.”

“I’ll just finish my tea and run along,” Meyer said. He lifted the cup to his lips, sipped the tea, glanced at her over the rim, took the cup away from his mouth, and said, “But I’ll be back.”

“I hardly think there’s any need for that,” Adele said.

“Well, some jewelry’s been stolen—”

“The ghosts—”

“Come off it, Mrs. Gorman.”

The room went silent.

“Where are the loudspeakers, Mrs. Gorman?” Meyer asked. “In the false beams up there? They’re hollow — I checked them out.”

“I think perhaps you’d better leave,” Adele said slowly.

“Sure,” Meyer said. He put the teacup down, sighed, and got to his feet.

“I’ll show you out,” Adele said.

They walked to the front door and out into the driveway. The night was still. The drizzle had stopped, and a thin layer of frost covered the grass rolling away toward the river below. Their footsteps crunched on the gravel as they walked slowly toward the automobile.

“My husband was blinded four years ago,” Adele said abruptly. “He’s a chemical engineer, there was an explosion at the plant, he could have been killed. Instead, he was only blinded.” She hesitated an instant, then said again, “Only blinded,” and there was such a sudden cry of despair in those two words that Meyer wanted to put his arm around her, console her the way he might his daughter, tell her that everything would be all right come morning, the night was almost done, and morning was on the horizon.

But instead he leaned on the fender of his car, and she stood beside him looking down at the driveway gravel, her eyes not meeting his. They could have been conspirators exchanging secrets in the night, but they were only two people who had been thrown together on a premise as flimsy as the ghosts that inhabited this house.

“He gets a disability pension from the company,” Adele said, “they’ve really been quite kind to us. And, of course, I work. I teach school, Detective Meyer. Kindergarten. I love children.” She paused. She would not raise her eyes to meet his. “But — it’s sometimes very difficult. M y father, you see—”

Meyer waited. He longed suddenly for dawn, but he waited patiently, and heard her catch her breath as though committed to go ahead now however painful the revelation might be, compelled to throw herself on the mercy of the night before the morning sun broke through.

“My father’s been retired for fifteen years.” She took a deep breath, and then said, “He gambles, Detective Meyer. He’s a horse player. He loses large sums of money.”

“Is that why he stole your jewels?” Meyer asked.

“You know, don’t you?” Adele said simply, and raised her eyes to his. “Of course you know. It’s quite transparent, his ruse, a shoddy little show really, a performance that would fool no one but — no one but a blind man.” She brushed at her cheek; he could not tell whether the cold air had caused her sudden tears. “I really don’t care about the theft; the jewels were left to me by my mother, and after all it was my father who bought them for her, so it’s — it’s really like returning a legacy. I really don’t care about that part of it. I’d have given the jewelry to him if only he’d asked, but he’s so proud, such a proud man. A proud man who — who steals from me and pretends that ghosts are committing the crime.

“And my husband, in his dark universe, listens to the sounds my father puts on tape and visualizes things he cannot quite believe and so he asks me to notify the police because he needs an impartial observer to contradict the suspicion that someone is stealing pennies from his blind man’s cup. That’s why I came to you, Detective Meyer. So that you would arrive here tonight and perhaps be fooled as I was fooled at first, and perhaps say to my husband, ‘Yes, Mr. Gorman, there are ghosts in your house.’ ”

She suddenly placed her hand on his sleeve. The tears were streaming down her face, she had difficulty catching her breath. “Because you see, Detective Meyer, there are ghosts in this house, there really and truly are. The ghost of a proud man who was once a brilliant judge and who is now a gambler and a thief; and the ghost of a man who once could see, and who now trips and falls in the darkness.”

On the river a tugboat hooted. Adele Gorman fell silent. Meyer opened the door of his car and got in behind the wheel.

“I’ll call your husband tomorrow,” he said abruptly and gruffly. “Tell him I’m convinced something supernatural is happening here.”

“And will you be back, Detective Meyer?”

“No,” he said. “I won’t be back, Mrs. Gorman.”

In the squadroom they were wrapping up the night. Their day had begun at 7:45 P.M. yesterday, and they had been officially relieved at 5:45 A.M.; but they had not left the office yet because there were questions still to be asked, reports to be typed, odds and ends to be put in place before they could go home. And since the relieving detectives were busy getting their approaching workday organized, the squadroom at 6:00 A.M. was busier than it might have been on any given afternoon, with two teams of cops getting in each others’ way.

In the Interrogation Room, Carella and Hawes were questioning young Ronald Sanford in the presence of the Assistant District Attorney who had come over earlier to take Mrs. Martin’s confession, and who now found himself listening to another one when all he wanted to do was go home to sleep. Sanford seemed terribly shocked that they had been able to notice the identical handwriting in The Addison Hotel and The Avenging Angel — he couldn’t get over it. He thought he had been very clever in misspelling the word “clothes,” because then they would think some illiterate had written it, not someone who was studying to be an accountant.

He could not explain why he had killed Mercy Howell. He got all mixed up when he tried to explain that. It had something to do with the moral climate of America, and people exposing themselves in public, people like that shouldn’t be allowed to pollute others, to foist their filth on others, to intrude on the privacy of others who only wanted to make a place for themselves in the world, who were trying so very hard to make something of themselves, studying accounting by day and working in a hotel by night, what right had these other people to ruin it for everybody else?

Frank Pasquale’s tune, sung in the Clerical Office to Kling and O’Brien, was not quite so hysterical, but similar to Sanford’s nonetheless. He had got the idea together with Danny Ryder. They had decided between them that the blacks in America were taking jobs away from decent hardworking people who only wanted to be left alone, what right did they have to force themselves on everybody else? So they had decided to bomb the church, just to show them they couldn’t get away with it, not in America. He didn’t seem terribly concerned over the fact that his partner was lying stone-cold dead on a slab at the morgue, or that their little Culver Avenue expedition had cost three people their lives, and had severely injured a half dozen others. All he wanted to know, repeatedly, was whether his picture would be in the newspaper.

At his desk Meyer Meyer started to type up a report on the Gorman ghosts, then decided the hell with it. If the lieutenant asked him where he’d been half the night, he would say he had been out looking for trouble in the streets. The Lord knew there was enough of that around, any night. He pulled the report forms and their separating sheets of carbon paper from the ancient typewriter, and noticed that Detective Hal Willis was pacing the room anxiously, waiting to get at the desk the moment he vacated it.

“Okay, Hal,” he said, “it’s all yours.”

“Finalmente!” Willis, who was not Italian, said.

The telephone rang.

The sun was up when they came out of the building and walked past the hanging green “87” globes and down the low flat steps to the sidewalk. The park across the street shimmered with early-morning autumn brilliance, the sky above it was clear and blue. It was going to be a beautiful day.

They walked toward the diner on the next block, Meyer and O’Brien ahead of the others, Carella, Hawes, and Kling bringing up the rear. They were tired, and exhaustion showed in their eyes, in the set of their mouths, in the pace they kept. They talked without animation, mostly about their work, their breaths feathery and white on the cold morning air.

When they reached the diner, they took off their overcoats and ordered hot coffee and cheese Danish and toasted English muffins. Meyer said he thought he was coming down with a cold. Carella told him about some cough medicine his wife had given one of the children. O’Brien, munching on a muffin, glanced across the diner and saw a young girl in one of the booths. She was wearing blue jeans and a bright colored Mexican serape, and she was talking to a boy wearing a Navy pea jacket.

“I think I see somebody,” he said, and he moved out of the booth past Kling and Hawes, who were talking about the newest regulation on search and seizure.

The girl looked up when he approached the booth.

“Miss Blair?” he said. “Penelope Blair?”

“Yes,” the girl answered. “Who are you?”

“Detective O’Brien,” he said, “Eighty-seventh Precinct. Your mother was in last night, Penny. She asked me to tell you—”

“Flake off, cop,” Penelope Blair said. “Go stop a riot somewhere.”

O’Brien looked at her silently for a moment. Then he nodded, turned away, and went back to the table.

“Anything?” Kling asked.

“You can’t win ’em all,” O’Brien said.