“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.