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

“This is a field investigation,” Hawes said drily, “and we can ask anything we damn please.”

“Town’s getting full of lawyers,” Carella said. “What’s your name, counselor?”

“Jerry Riggs. You going to drag me in this, whatever it is?”

“It’s a few friendly questions in the middle of the night,” Hawes said. “Anybody got any objections to that?”

“Getting so two guys can’t even sit and talk together without getting shook down,” Riggs said.

“You’ve got a rough life, all right,” Hawes said, and the girl in the black leotard brought their coffee to the table and then hurried off to take another order. Donatello watched her jiggling behind as she swiveled across the room.

“So when’s the last time you saw the Howell girl?” Carella asked again.

“Wednesday night,” Donatello said.

“Did you see her tonight?”

“No.”

“Were you supposed to see her tonight?”

“Where’d you get that idea?”

“We’re full of ideas,” Hawes said.

“Yeah, I was supposed to meet her here ten minutes ago. Dumb broad is late, as usual.”

“What do you do for a living, Donatello?”

“I’m an importer. You want to see my business card?”

“What do you import?”

“Souvenir ashtrays.”

“How’d you get to know Mercy Howell?”

“I met her at a party in The Quarter. She got a little high, and she done her thing.”

“What thing?”

“The thing she does in that show she’s in.”

“Which is what?”

“She done this dance where she takes off all her clothes.”

“How long have you been seeing her?”

“I met her a couple of months ago. I see her on and off, maybe once a week, something like that. This town is full of broads, you know, a guy don’t have to get himself involved in no relationship with no specific broad.”

“What was your relationship with this specific broad?”

“We have a few laughs together, that’s all. She’s a swinger, little Mercy,” Donatello said, and grinned at Riggs.

“Want to tell us where you were tonight between eleven and twelve?”

“Is this still a field investigation?” Riggs asked sarcastically.

“Nobody’s in custody yet,” Hawes said, “so let’s cut the legal crap, okay? Tell us where you were, Donatello.”

“Right here,” Donatello said. “From ten o’clock till now.”

“I suppose somebody saw you here during that time.”

“A hundred people saw me.”

A crowd of angry black men and women were standing outside the shattered window of the storefront church. Two fire engines and an ambulance were parked at the curb. Kling pulled in behind the second engine, some ten feet away from the hydrant. It was almost 2:30 A.M. on a bitterly cold October night, but the crowd looked and sounded like a mob at an afternoon street-corner rally in the middle of August. Restless, noisy, abrasive, anticipative, they ignored the penetrating cold and concentrated instead on the burning issue of the hour, the fact that a person or persons unknown had thrown a bomb through the plateglass window of the church. The beat patrolman, a newly appointed cop who felt vaguely uneasy in this neighborhood even during his daytime shift, greeted Kling effusively, his pale-white face bracketed by earmuffs, his gloved hands clinging desperately to his nightstick. The crowd parted to let Kling through. It did not help that he was the youngest man on the squad, with the callow look of a country bumpkin on his unlined face, it did not help that he was blond and hatless, it did not help that he walked into the church with the confident youthful stride of a champion come to set things right. The crowd knew he was fuzz, and they knew he was whitey, and they knew, too, that if this bombing had taken place on Hall Avenue crosstown and downtown, the police commissioner himself would have arrived behind a herald of official trumpets. This, however, was Culver Avenue, where a boiling mixture of Puerto Ricans and Negroes shared a disintegrating ghetto, and so the car that pulled to the curb was not marked with the commissioner’s distinctive blue-and-gold seal, but was instead a green Chevy convertible that belonged to Kling himself, and the man who stepped out of it looked young and inexperienced and inept despite the confident stride he affected as he walked into the church, his shield pinned to his overcoat.

The bomb had caused little fire damage, and the firemen already had the flames under control, their hoses snaking through and around the overturned folding chairs scattered about the small room. Ambulance attendants picked their way over the hoses and around the debris, carrying out the injured — the dead could wait.

“Have you called the Bomb Squad?” Kling asked the patrolman.

“No,” the patrolman answered, shaken by the sudden possibility that he had been derelict in his duty.

“Why don’t you do that now?” Kling suggested.

“Yes, sir, ” the patrolman answered, and rushed out. The ambulance attendants went by with a moaning woman on a stretcher. She was still wearing her eyeglasses, but one lens had been shattered and blood was running in a steady rivulet down the side of her nose. The place stank of gunpowder and smoke and charred wood. The most serious damage had been done at the rear of the small store, farthest away from the entrance door. Whoever had thrown the bomb must have possessed a damn good pitching arm to have hurled it so accurately through the window and across the fifteen feet to the makeshift altar. The minister lay across his own altar, dead, one arm blown off in the explosion. Two women who had been sitting on folding chairs closest to the altar lay upon each other on the floor now, tangled in death, their clothes still smoldering. The sounds of the injured filled the room and then were suffocated by the overriding siren-shriek of the arriving second ambulance. Kling went outside to the crowd.

“Anybody here witness this?” he asked.

A young man, black, wearing a beard and a natural hair style, turned away from a group of other youths and walked directly to Kling.

“Is the minister dead?” he asked.

“Yes, he is,” Kling answered.

“Who else?”

“Two women.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know yet. We’ll identify them as soon as the men are through in there.” He turned again to the crowd. “Did anybody see what happened?” he asked.

“I saw it,” the young man said.

“What’s your name, son?”

“Andrew Jordan.”

Kling took out his pad. “All right, let’s have it.”

“What good’s this going to do?” Jordan asked. “Writing all this shit in your book?”

“You said you saw what...”

“I saw it, all right. I was walking by, heading for the poolroom up the street, and the ladies were inside singing, and this car pulled up, and a guy got out, threw the bomb, and ran back to the car.”

“What kind of a car was it?”

“A red VW.”

“What year?”

“Who can tell with those VWs?”

“How many people in it?”

“Two. The driver and the guy who threw the bomb.”

“Notice the license plate?”

“No. They drove off too fast.”

“Can you describe the man who threw the bomb?”

“Yeah. He was white.”

“What else?” Kling asked.

“That’s all,” Jordan replied. “He was whiter. ”

There were perhaps three dozen estates in all of Smoke Rise, a hundred or so people living in luxurious near seclusion on acres of valuable land through which ran four winding, interconnected, private roadways. Meyer Meyer drove between the wide stone pillars marking Smoke Rise’s western access road, entering a city within a city, bounded on the north by the River Harb, shielded from the River Highway by stands of poplars and evergreens on the south — exclusive Smoke Rise, known familiarly and derisively to the rest of the city’s inhabitants as “The Club.”