waitress asked, pouring.
"I like it better wherever you are, m'little chickadee."
"Sweet talker," she said, and smiled and walked off,
shaking her considerable booty.
"People ask me that all the time," Ollie said. "Don't
you work in the Eight-Three? As if I don't know where
the fuck I work. As if I'm making a fuckin mistake about where I work. The world's full of people playin Gotchal They got nothin to do with their time but look for mistakes. Ain't your middle name Lloyd? Hell, no, it's Wendell. Oliver Wendell Weeks, I don't know my own fuckin middle name? If I told you once it was Lloyd or Frank or Ralph, I was lying, it was all part of my fuckin cover."
A faint effluvial odor seemed to rise from Ollie whenever he became agitated, as he was now. Ignoring his own bodily emanations, he picked up the bagel and bit into it, his gnashing teeth unleashing a gush of cream cheese that spilled onto the right lapel of his jacket.
"Has this guy got a name?" he asked. "The fag was
in the card game with your hitter?"
"Harpo," Carella said.
"Works at the First Bap?" Ollie said.
Both detectives looked at him.
"Only Harpo I know up here," Ollie said. "I'm surprised he was in a card game, though. If it's the same guy."
"Harpo what?" Meyer asked.
"His square handle is Walter Hopwell, don't ask me
how it got to be Harpo. I never knew he was queer till
you guys mentioned it just now. Goes to show, don't it?
Ain't you hungry?" he asked, and signaled to the waitress
again. "Bring my friends here some more coffee," he said,
"they're famous sleuths from a neighboring precinct. And I'll have one of them croissants there." He pronounced the
word as if he were fluent in French, but it was only his stomach talking. "Thing I'm askin myself," he said, "is
how come a white stoolie is pals with a Negro fag?"
Ollie liked using the word "Negro" every now and then because he believed it showed how tolerant he was, even though he realized it pissed off persons of color who preferred being called either blacks or African-Americans. But it had taken him long enough to learn how to say "Negro," so if they wanted to keep changing it on him all the time, they could go fuck themselves.
"Would he be at the church now?" Carella asked.
"Should be. They got a regular office setup on the top floor."
"Let's go," Meyer said.
"You wanna start a race riot?" Ollie asked, and grinned as if he relished the prospect. "The First Bap's listed as a sensitive location. I was you, I'd look up Mr Hopwell in the phone book, go see him when he gets home from work."
"Our man's leaving town tomorrow," Carella said.
"In that case, darlings, let me finish my breakfast," Ollie said. "Then we can all go to church."
Brown's mother used to call her "The Barber's Wife." This was another name for the neighborhood gossip. The theory was that a guy went to get a haircut or a shave, he was captive in the barber's chair for an hour or so, he told the barber everything on his mind. The barber went home that night, and over supper told his wife everything he'd heard from all his customers all day long. The Barber's Wife knew more about what was happening in any neighborhood than any cop on the beat. What Brown and Kling wanted to do now was find The Barber's Wife in Andrew Bale's building.
There were six stories in the building, three tenants to each floor. When they got there that morning at a little past ten, most of the tenants were off to work. They knocked on six doors before they got an answer,
and then another two before they found the woman they
were looking for. Her apartment was on the same floor
as Andrew Hale's. She lived at the far end of the hall, in
apartment C. When she asked them to come in, please,
they hesitated on the door sill because she was cooking
something that smelled unspeakably vile.
The stench was coming from a big aluminum pot on the kitchen stove. When she lifted the lid to stir whatever
was inside the pot, noxious clouds filled the air, and Kling
caught sight of a bubbling liquid that appeared viscous
and black. He wondered whether there was eye of newt
in the pot. He wanted to go outside in the hall again, to
throw up. But the woman invited them into a small living
room where, mercifully, there was an open window that
rendered the stink less offensive. They sat on a sofa with
lace doilies on the arms and back. The woman had false teeth, but she smiled a lot nonetheless. Smiling, she told
them her name was Katherine Kipp, and that she had been a neighbor of Mr Hale's for the past seven years. They guessed she was in her sixties, but they didn't ask because they were both gentlemen, sure. She told them her husband had worked in the railroad yards up in Riverhead till he had an accident one day that killed him. She did not elaborate on what the accident might have been, and they did not ask. Kling wondered if the late Mr Kipp had possibly sampled some of the black brew boiling on the kitchen stove.
They asked her first about the night of October twenty-eighth, because this was the night someone had been in Hale's apartment boozing it up and smoking dope and everything, and incidentally hanging Hale from a hook on the bathroom door. Had Mrs Kipp seen anything? Heard anything?
"No," she said.
"How about anytime before that night?" Brown asked.
"See anybody going in or out of his apartment?"
"How do you mean?" Mrs Kipp asked.
"Anyone who might've visited Mr Hale. A friend, an acquaintance
...
a relative?"
"Well, his daughter used to stop by every now and then. Cynthia. She visited him every so often."
"You didn't see her on the night of the twenty-eighth,
did you?" Kling asked.
"No, I did not."
"How about anyone else?"
"That night, do you mean?"
"That night, or any other time. Someone he might have felt comfortable enough to sit with, talk to, have a drink or two, like that."
"He didn't have many visitors," Mrs Kipp said.
"Never saw anyone going in or out, hm?" Brown said.
"Well, yes. But not on a regular basis."
"I'm not sure I understand you, Mrs Kipp."
"Well, you said a friend or an acquaintance . . ."
"That's right, but . . ."
"I'm assuming you meant someone who came to see
Mr Hale on a regular basis. A friend. You know. An acquaintance."
"We meant anyone" Kling said. "Anyone who came
here to see Mr Hale. However many times."
"Well, yes," Mrs Kipp said. "There was someone who
came to see him."
"How often?" Brown asked.
"Three times."
"When?"
"In September."
It began raining again just as Carella swung the sedan into the curb in front of the First Baptist Church. They waited for five or six minutes, hoping the rain might lei
up. When it appeared hopeless, they piled out of the car,
and ran for the front doors of the church. Ollie pushed a
doorbell button to the right of the jamb.
The church was housed in a white clapboard structure
wedged between a pair of six-story tenements whose red-brick facades had been recently sandblasted. There were sections of Diamondback that long ago had been sucked into the quagmire of hopeless poverty, where any thoughts of gentrification were mere pipe dreams. But St Sebastian Avenue, here in the Double-Eight between Seventeenth and Twenty-first, was the hub of a thriving mini-community not unlike a self-contained small town. Along this stretch of avenue, you could find good restaurants, markets brimming with prime cuts of meat and fresh produce, clothing stores selling designer labels, repair shops for shoes, bicycles, or umbrellas, a new movie complex with six screens, even a fitness center.