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?”