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.”