“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.”