The woman who took the chair beside Detective Meyer Meyer’s desk was perhaps thirty-two years old, with long straight black hair trailing down her back, and wide brown eyes that were terrified. It was still October, and the color of her tailored coat seemed suited to the season, a subtle tangerine with a small brown fur collar that echoed an outdoors trembling with the colors of autumn.
“I feel sort of silly about this,” she said, “but my husband insisted that I come.”
“I see,” Meyer said.
“There are ghosts,” the woman said.
Across the room, Kling unlocked the door to the detention cage and said, “Okay, pal, on your way. Try to stay sober till morning, huh?”
“It ain’t one-thirty yet,” the man said, “the night is young.” He stepped out of the cage, tipped his hat to Kling, and hurriedly left the squadroom.
Meyer looked at the woman sitting beside him, studying her with new interest because, to tell the truth, she had not seemed like a nut when she first walked into the squadroom. He had been a detective for more years than he chose to count, and in his time had met far too many nuts of every stripe and persuasion. But he had never met one as pretty as Adele Gorman with her welltailored, fur-collared coat, and her Vassar voice, and her skillfully applied eye makeup, lips bare of color in her pale white face, pert and reasonably young and seemingly intelligent — but apparently a nut besides.
“In the house,” she said. “Ghosts.”
“Where do you live, Mrs. Gorman?” he asked. He had written her name on the pad in front of him, and now he watched her with his pencil poised and recalled the lady who had come into the squadroom only last month to report a gorilla peering into her bedroom from the fire escape outside. They had sent a patrolman over to make a routine check, and had even called the zoo and the circus (which was coincidentally in town, and which lent at least some measure of possibility to her claim), but there had been no ape on the fire escape, nor had any simians recently escaped from their cages. The lady came back the next day to report that her visiting gorilla had put in another appearance the night before, this time wearing a top hat and carrying a black cane with an ivory head. Meyer had assured her that he would have a platoon of cops watching her building that night, which seemed to calm her at least somewhat. He had then led her personally out of the squadroom, and down the iron-runged steps, and through the high-ceilinged muster room, and past the hanging green globes on the front stoop, and onto the sidewalk outside the station house. Sergeant Murchison, at the muster desk, shook his head after the lady was gone, and muttered, “More of them outside than in.”
Meyer watched Adele Gorman now, remembered what Murchison had said, and thought, Gorillas in September, ghosts in October.
“We live in Smoke Rise,” she said. “Actually, it’s my father’s house, but my husband and I are living there with him.”
“And the address?”
“374 MacArthur Lane. You take the first access road into Smoke Rise, about a mile and a half east of Silvermine Oval. The name on the mailbox is Van Houten. That’s my father’s name. Willem Van Houten.” She paused and studied him, as though expecting some reaction.
“Okay,” Meyer said, and ran a hand over his bald pate, and looked up, and said, “Now, you were saying, Mrs. Gorman...”
“That we have ghosts.”
“Um-huh. What kind of ghosts?”
“Ghosts. Poltergeists. Shades. I don’t know,” she said, and shrugged. “What kinds of ghosts are there?”
“Well, they’re your ghosts, so suppose you tell me,” Meyer said.
The telephone on Kling’s desk rang. He lifted the receiver and said, “Eighty-seventh Squad, Detective Kling.”
“There are two of them,” Adele said.
“Male or female?”
“One of each.”
“Yeah,” Kling said into the telephone, “go ahead.”
“How old would you say they were?”
“Centuries, I would guess.”
“No, I mean...”
“Oh, how old do they look? Well, the man...”
“You’ve seen them?”
“Oh, yes, many times.”
“Um-huh,” Meyer said.
“I’ll be right over,” Kling said into the telephone. “You stay there.” He slammed down the receiver, opened his desk drawer, pulled out a holstered revolver, and hurriedly clipped it to his belt. “Somebody threw a bomb into a storefront church. 1733 Culver Avenue. I’m heading over.”
“Right,” Meyer said. “Get back to me.”
“We’ll need a couple of meat wagons. The minister and two other people were killed, and it sounds as if there’re a lot of injured.”
“Will you tell Dave?”
“On the way out,” Kling said, and was gone.
“Mrs. Gorman,” Meyer said, “as you can see, we’re pretty busy here just now. I wonder if your ghosts can wait till morning.”
“No, they can’t,” Adele said.
“Why not?”
“Because they appear precisely at two forty-five A.M., and I want someone to see them.”
“Why don’t you and your husband look at them?” Meyer said.
“You think I’m a nut, don’t you?” Adele said.
“No, no, Mrs. Gorman, not at all.”
“Oh, yes you do,” Adele said. “I didn’t believe in ghosts, either, until I saw these two.”
“Well, this is all very interesting, I assure you, Mrs. Gorman, but really we do have our hands full right now, and I don’t know what we can do about these ghosts of yours, even if we did come over to take a look at them.”
“They’ve been stealing things from us,” Adele said, and Meyer thought, Oh, we have got ourselves a prime lunatic this time.
“What sort of things?”
“A diamond brooch that used to belong to my mother when she was alive. They stole that from my father’s safe.”
“What else?”
“A pair of emerald earrings. They were in the safe, too.”
“When did these thefts occur?”
“Last month.”
“Isn’t it possible the jewelry was mislaid someplace?”
“You don’t mislay a diamond brooch and a pair of emerald earrings that are locked inside a wall safe.”
“Did you report any of these thefts?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I knew you’d think I was crazy. Which is just what you’re thinking right this minute.”
“No, Mrs. Gorman, but I’m sure you can appreciate the fact that we, uh, can’t go around arresting ghosts,” Meyer said, and tried to smile.
Adele Gorman did not smile back. “Forget the ghosts,” she said. “I was foolish to mention them, I should have known better.” She took a deep breath, looked him squarely in the eye, and said, “I’m here to report the theft of a diamond brooch valued at six thousand dollars and a pair of earrings worth thirty-five hundred dollars. Will you send a man to investigate tonight, or should I ask my father to contact your superior officer?”
“Your father? What’s he got to...?”
“My father is a retired Surrogate’s Court judge,” Adele said.
“I see.”
“Yes, I hope you do.”
“What time did you say these ghosts arrive?” Meyer asked, and sighed heavily.
Between midnight and two o’clock, the city does not change very much. The theaters have all let out, and the average Saturday night revelers, good citizens from Bethtown or Calm’s Point, Riverhead or Majesta, have come into the Isola streets again in search of a snack or a giggle before heading home to their separate beds. The city is an ants’ nest of after-theater eateries ranging from chic French cafés to pizzerias to luncheonettes to coffee shops to hot dog stands to delicatessens, all of them packed to the ceilings because Saturday night is not only the loneliest night of the week, it is also the night to howl. And howl they do, these good burghers who have put in five long hard days of labor and who are anxious now to relax and enjoy themselves before Sunday arrives, bringing with it the attendant boredom of too damn much leisure time, anathema for the American male. The crowds shove and jostle their way along The Stem, moving in and out of bowling alleys, shooting galleries, penny arcades, strip joints, nightclubs, jazz emporiums, souvenir shops, lining the sidewalks outside plateglass windows in which go-go girls gyrate, or watching with fascination as a roast beef slowly turns on a spit. Saturday night is a time for pleasure, and even the singles can find satisfaction, briefly courted by the sidewalk whores standing outside the shabby hotels in the side streets off The Stem, searching out homosexuals in gay bars on the city’s notorious North Side or down in The Quarter, thumbing through dirty books in the myriad “back magazine” shops, or slipping into darkened screening rooms to watch 16mm films of girls taking off their clothes, good people all or most, with nothing more on their minds than a little fun, a little enjoyment of the short respite between Friday night at five and Monday morning at nine.