Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here!

by Ed McBain

  “Shut up, Frank,” Kling said. “Put your hands behind your back! Move!”

  He had already taken his handcuffs from his belt. He snapped them onto Pasquale’s wrists now, and only then became aware that Jimi Hendrix was still singing, the sailors were watching with pale white faces, the Puerto Rican girl was screaming, the fat faded blonde had her mouth open, the bartender was frozen in mid-motion, the tip of his bar towel inside a glass.

  “All right,” Kling said. He was breathing harshly. “All right,” he said again, and wiped his forehead.

  Timothy Allen Ames was a potbellied man of forty, with a thick black mustache, a mane of long black hair, and brown eyes sharply alert at five minutes past 5:00 in the morning. He answered the door as though he’d been already awake, asked for identification, and then asked the detectives to wait a moment, and closed the door, and came back shortly afterward, wearing a robe over his striped pajamas.

  “Is your name Timothy Ames?” Carella asked.

  “That’s me,” Ames said. “Little late to be paying a visit, ain’t it?”

  “Or early, depending how you look at it,” Hawes said.

  “One thing I can do without at five A.M. is humorous cops,” Ames said. “How’d you get up here, anyway? Is that little jerk asleep at the desk again?”

  “Who do you mean?” Carella asked.

  “Lonnie Sanford, whatever the hell his name is.”

  “Ronnie Sanford.”

  “Yeah, him. Little bastard’s always giving me trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “About broads,” Ames said. “Acts like he’s running a nunnery here, can’t stand to see a guy come in with a girl. I notice he ain’t got no compunctions about letting cops upstairs, though, no matter what time it is.”

  “Never mind Sanford, let’s talk about you,” Carella said.

  “Sure, what would you like to know?”

  “Where were you between eleven-twenty and twelve o’clock tonight?”

  “Right here.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “Sure. I got back here about eleven o’clock, and I been here since. Ask Sanford downstairs…No, never mind, he wasn’t on yet. He don’t come on till midnight.”

  “Who else can we ask, Ames?”

  “Listen, you going to make trouble for me?”

  “Only if you’re in trouble.”

  “I got a broad here. She’s over eighteen, don’t worry. But, like, she’s a junkie, you know? She ain’t holding or nothing, but I know you guys, and if you want to make trouble—”

  “Where is she?”

  “In the john.”

  “Get her out here.”

  “Look, do me a favor, will you? Don’t bust the kid. She’s trying to kick the habit, she really is. I been helping her along.”

  “How?”

  “By keeping her busy,” Ames said, and winked.

  “Call her.”

  “Bea, come out here!” Ames shouted.

  There was a moment’s hesitation, and then the bathroom door opened. The girl was a tall, plain brunette wearing a short terry cloth robe. She sidled into the room cautiously, as though expecting to be struck in the face at any moment. Her brown eyes were wide with expectancy. She knew fuzz, and she knew what it was like to be busted on a narcotics charge, and she had listened to the conversation from behind the closed bathroom door, and now she waited for whatever was coming, expecting the worst.

  “What’s your name, miss?” Hawes asked.

  “Beatrice Norden.”

  “What time did you get here tonight, Beatrice?”

  “About eleven.”

  “Was this man with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he leave here at any time tonight?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m positive. He picked me up about nine o’clock—”

  “Where do you live, Beatrice?”

  “Well, that’s the thing, you see,” the girl said. “I been put out of my room.”

  “So where’d he pick you up?”

  “At my girlfriend’s house. You can ask her, she was there when he came. Her name is Rosalie Dewes. Anyway, Timmy picked me up at nine, and we went to eat at Chink’s, and we came up here around eleven.”

  “I hope you’re telling us the truth, Miss Norden,” Carella said.

  “I swear to God, we been here all night,” Beatrice answered.

  “All right, Ames,” Hawes said, “we’d like a sample of your handwriting.”

  “My what?”

  “Your handwriting.”

  “What for?”

  “We collect autographs,” Carella said.

  “Gee, these guys really break me up,” Ames said to the girl. “Regular nightclub comics we get in the middle of the night.”

  Carella handed him a pen and then tore a sheet from his pad. “You want to write this for me?” he said. “The first part’s in block lettering.”

  “What the hell is block lettering?” Ames asked.

  “He means print it,” Hawes said.

  “Then why didn’t he say so?”

  “Put on your clothes, miss,” Carella said.

  “What for?” Beatrice said. “I mean, the thing is, I was in bed when you guys—”

  “That’s what I want him to write,” Carella explained.

  “Oh.”

  “Put on your clothes, miss,” Ames repeated, and lettered it onto the sheet of paper. “What else?” he asked, looking up.

  “Now sign it in your own handwriting with the following words: ‘The Avenging Angel.’”

  “What the hell is this supposed to be?” Ames asked.

  “You want to write it, please?”

  Ames wrote the words, and then handed the slip of paper to Carella. He and Hawes compared it with the note that had been mailed to Mercy Howell:

  “So?” Ames asked.

  “So you’re clean,” Hawes said.

  “Imagine if I was dirty,” Ames answered.

  At the desk downstairs, Ronnie Sanford was still immersed in his accounting textbook. He got to his feet again as the detectives came out of the elevator, adjusted his glasses on his nose, and then said, “Any luck?”

  “Afraid not,” Carella answered. “We’re going to need this register for a while, if that’s okay.”

  “Well…”

  “Give him a receipt for it, Cotton,” Carella said. It was late, and he didn’t want a debate in the lobby of a run-down hotel. Hawes quickly made out a receipt in duplicate, signed both copies, and handed one to Sanford.

  “What about this torn cover?” Hawes asked belatedly.

  “Yeah,” Carella said. There was a small rip on the leather binding of the book, and he fingered it briefly now and then said, “Better note that on the receipt, Cotton.” Hawes took back the receipt and, on both copies, jotted the words “Small rip on front cover.” He handed the receipts back to Sanford.

  “Want to just sign these, Mr. Sanford?” he said.

  “What for?” Sanford asked.

  “To indicate we received the register in this condition.”

  “Oh, sure,” Sanford said. He picked up a ballpoint pen from its desk holder and asked, “What do you want me to write?”

  “Your name and your title, that’s all.”

  “My title?”

  “Night Clerk, The Addison Hotel.”

  “Oh, sure,” Sanford said, and signed both receipts. “This okay?” he asked. The detectives looked at what he had written.

  “You like girls?” Carella asked suddenly.

  “What?” Sanford asked.

  “Girls,” Hawes said.

  “Sure. Sure, I like girls.”

  “Dressed or naked?”

  “What?”

  “With clothes or without?”

  “I…I don’t know what you mean, sir.”

  “Where were you tonight between eleven-twenty and midnight?” Hawes asked.

&
nbsp; “Getting…getting ready to come to…to work,” Sanford said.

  “You sure you weren’t in the alley of the Eleventh Street Theater stabbing a girl named Mercy Howell?”

  “What? No…no, of course…of course not. I was…I was…I was home…getting…getting dressed…to…to…” Sanford took a deep breath and decided to get indignant. “Listen, what’s this all about?” he said. “Would you mind telling me?”

  “It’s all about this,” Carella said, and turned one of the receipts so that Sanford could read the signature:

  “Get your hat,” Hawes said. “Study hall’s over.”

  It was twenty-five minutes past 5:00 when Adele Gorman came into the room with Meyer’s cup of tea. He was crouched near the air-conditioning unit recessed into the wall to the left of the drapes, and he glanced over his shoulder when he heard her, and then rose.

  “I didn’t know what you took,” she said, “so I brought everything.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “Just a little milk and sugar is fine.”

  “Have you measured the room?” she asked, and put the tray down on the table in front of the sofa.

  “Yes, I think I have everything I need now,” Meyer said. He put a spoonful of sugar into the tea, stirred it, added a drop of milk, stirred it again, and then lifted the cup to his mouth. “Hot,” he said.

  Adele Gorman was watching him silently. She said nothing. He kept sipping his tea. The ornate clock on the mantelpiece ticked in a swift whispering tempo.

  “Do you always keep this room so dim?” Meyer asked.

  “Well, my husband is blind, you know,” Adele said. “There’s really no need for brighter light.”

  “Mmm. But your father reads in this room, doesn’t he?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The night you came home from that party. He was sitting in the chair over there near the floor lamp. Reading. Remember?”

  “Oh. Yes, he was.”

  “Bad light to read by.”

  “Yes, I suppose it is.”

  “I think maybe those bulbs are defective,” Meyer said.

  “Do you think so?”

  “Mmm. I happened to look at the lamp, and there are three hundred-watt bulbs in it, all of them burning. You should be getting a lot more illumination with that kind of wattage.”

  “Well, I really don’t know too much about—”

  “Unless the lamp is on a rheostat, of course.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what a rheostat is.”

  “It’s an adjustable resistor. You can dim your lights or make them brighter with it. I thought maybe the lamp was on a rheostat, but I couldn’t find a control knob anywhere in the room.” Meyer paused. “You wouldn’t know if there’s a rheostat control someplace in the house, would you?”

  “I’m sure there isn’t,” Adele said.

  “Must be defective bulbs, then,” Meyer said, and smiled. “Also, I think your air conditioner is broken.”

  “No, I’m sure it isn’t.”

  “Well, I was just looking at it, and all the switches are turned to the ‘on’ position, but it isn’t working. So I guess it’s broken. That’s a shame, too, because it’s such a nice unit. Sixteen thousand BTUs. That’s a lot of cooling power for a room this size. We’ve got one of those big old price-fixed apartments on Concord, my wife and I, with a large bedroom, and we get adequate cooling from a half-ton unit. It’s a shame this one is broken.”

  “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 someplace, 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 at 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, and 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. 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. 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 f
ell 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 6:00 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.