“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. My 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 upon 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... 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... 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 contact 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 lawyer 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... 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 still questions to be asked, reports to be typed, odds and ends to put in place before they could go home. And since the relieving detectives were busy getting their approaching workday organized, the squadroom at 6 A.M. was busier than it might have been on any given afternoon, with two teams of cops getting in each other’s 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 if they ever had traced the note, they would think some illiterate had written it, and 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 upon others, to intrude upon 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 niggers in America were getting too damn pushy, shoving their way in where they didn’t belong, 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 the goddamn boogies that you couldn’t get away with shit like that, not in America. He didn’t seem too 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.
At his desk, Meyer Meyer started to type up a report on the Gorman ghosts, and then decided the hell with it. If the lieutenant asked him where he’d been half the night, he would say he had been out cruising, looking for trouble in the streets. Christ knew there was enough of that around. He pulled the report forms and their separating sheets of carbon paper from the ancient typewriter, and noticed that Detective Hal Willis was pacing the room anxiously, waiting to get at the desk the moment he vacated it.
“Okay, Hal,” he said, “it’s all yours.”
“Finalmente!” Willis, who was not Italian, said.
The telephone rang.
The sun was up when they came out of the building and walked past the hanging green “87” globes and down the low flat steps to the sidewalk. The park across the street shimmered with early morning autumn brilliance, the sky above it clear and blue. It was going to be a beautiful day. They walked toward the diner on the next block, Meyer and O’Brien ahead of the others, Carella, Hawes, and Kling bringing up the rear. They were tired, and exhaustion showed in their eyes and in the set of their mouths, and in the pace they kept. They talked without animation, mostly about their work, their breaths feathery and white on the cold morning air. When they reached the diner, they took off their overcoats and ordered hot coffee and cheese danish and toasted English muffins. Meyer said he thought he was coming down with a cold. Carella told him about some cough medicine his wife had given one of the children. O’Brien, munching on a muffin, glanced across the diner and saw a young girl in one of the booths. She was wearing blue jeans and a brightly colored Mexican serape, and she was talking to a boy wearing a Navy pea jacket.
“I think I see somebody,” he said, and he moved out of the booth past Kling and Hawes, who were talking about the new goddamn regulation on search and seizure.