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.