Эд Макбейн: Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here

In the pocket of her trench coat, when the M.E. had finished with her and pronounced her dead from multiple stab wounds in the chest and throat, they found an unfired Browning.25-caliber automatic. They tagged the gun and the handbag, and they moved the girl out of the alleyway and into the waiting ambulance for removal to the morgue. There was now nothing left of Mercy Howell but a chalked outline of her body and a pool of her blood on the alley floor.

“You sober enough to understand me?” Kling asked the boy.

“I was never drunk to begin with,” the boy answered.

“Okay then, here we go,” Kling said. “In keeping with the Supreme Court decision in Miranda v. Arizona, we are not permitted to ask you any questions until you are warned of your right to counsel and your privilege against self-incrimination.”

“What does that mean?” the boy asked. “Self-incrimination?”

“I’m about to explain that to you now,” Kling said.

“This coffee stinks.”

“First, you have the right to remain silent if you so choose,” Kling said. “Do you understand that?”

“I understand it.”

“Second, you do not have to answer any police questions if you don’t want to. Do you understand that?”

“What the hell are you asking me if I understand for? Do I look like a moron or something?”

“The law requires that I ask whether or not you understand these specific warnings. Did you understand what I just said about not having to answer...?”

“Yeah, yeah, I understood.”

“All right. Third, if you do decide to answer any questions, the answers may be used as evidence against you, do you...?”

“What the hell did I do, break off a couple of car aerials? Jesus!”

“Did you understand that?”

“I understood it.”

“You also have the right to consult with an attorney before or during police questioning. If you do not have the money to hire a lawyer, a lawyer will be appointed to consult with you.”

Kling gave this warning straight-faced even though he knew that under the Criminal Procedure Code of the city for which he worked, a public defender could not be appointed by the courts until the preliminary hearing. There was no legal provision for the courts or the police to appoint counsel during questioning, and there were certainly no police funds set aside for the appointment of attorneys. In theory, a call to the Legal Aid Society should have brought a lawyer up there to the old squadroom within minutes, ready and eager to offer counsel to any indigent person desiring it. But, in practice, if this boy sitting beside Kling told him in the next three seconds that he was unable to pay for his own attorney and would like one provided, Kling would not have known just what the hell to do — other than call off the questioning.

“I understand,” the boy said.

“You’ve signified that you understand all the warnings,” Kling said, “and now I ask you whether you are willing to answer my questions without an attorney here to counsel you.”

“Go shit in your hat,” the boy said. “I don’t want to answer nothing.”

So that was that.

They booked him for criminal mischief, a class-A misdemeanor defined as intentional or reckless damage to the property of another person, and they took him downstairs to a holding cell, to await transportation to the Criminal Courts Building for arraignment.

The phone was ringing again, and a woman was waiting on the bench just outside the squadroom.

The watchman’s booth was just inside the metal stage door. An electric clock on the wall behind the watchman’s stool read 1:10 A.M. The watchman was a man in his late seventies who did not at all mind being questioned by the police. He came on duty, he told them, at seven-thirty each night. The company call was for eight, and he was there at the stage door waiting to greet everybody as they arrived to get made up and in costume. Curtain went down at eleven-twenty, and usually most of the kids were out of the theater by quarter to twelve or, latest, midnight. He stayed on till nine the next morning, when the theater box office opened.

“Ain’t much to do during the night except hang around and make sure nobody runs off with the scenery,” he said, and chuckled.

“Did you happen to notice what time Mercy Howell left the theater?” Carella asked.

“She the one got killed?” the old man asked.

“Yes,” Hawes said. “Mercy Howell. About this high, blonde hair, blue eyes.”

“They’re all about that high, with blonde hair and blue eyes,” the old man said, and chuckled again. “I don’t know hardly none of them by name. Shows come and go, you know. Be a hell of a chore to have to remember all the kids who go in and out that door.”

“Do you sit here by the door all night?” Carella asked.

“Well, no, not all night. What I do, is I lock the door after everybody’s out and then I check the lights, make sure just the work light’s on. I won’t touch the switchboard, not allowed to, but I can turn out lights in the lobby, for example, if somebody left them on, or down in the toilets, sometimes they leave lights on down in the toilets. Then I come back here to the booth and read or listen to the radio. Along about two o’clock, I check the theater again, make sure we ain’t got no fires or nothing, and then I come back here and make the rounds again at four o’clock, and six o’clock, and again about eight. That’s what I do.”

“You say you lock this door...”

“That’s right.”

“Would you remember what time you locked it tonight?”

“Oh, must’ve been about ten minutes to twelve. Soon as I knew everybody was out.”

“How do you know when they’re out?”

“I give a yell up the stairs there. You see those stairs there? They go up to the dressing rooms. Dressing rooms are all upstairs in this house. So I go to the steps, and I yell, ‘Locking up! Anybody here?’ And if somebody yells back, I know somebody’s here, and I say, ‘Let’s shake it, honey,’ if it’s a girl, and if it’s a boy, I say, ‘Let’s hurry it up, sonny.’” The old man chuckled again. “With this show, it’s sometimes hard to tell which’s the girls and which’s the boys. I manage, though,” he said, and again chuckled.

“So you locked that door at ten minutes to twelve?”

“Right.”

“And everybody had left the theater by that time.”

“’Cept me, of course.”

“Did you look out into the alley before you locked the door?”

“Nope. Why should I do that?”

“Did you hear anything outside while you were locking the door?”

“Nope.”

“Or at anytime before you locked it?”

“Well, there’s always noise outside when they’re leaving, you know. They got friends waiting for them, or else they go home together, you know, there’s always a lot of chatter when they go out.”

“But it was quiet when you locked the door.”

“Dead quiet,” the old man said.

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?”