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

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

“Lois Kaplan. What’s this all about? Has there been another burglary in the building?”

“No, Miss Kaplan. We want to ask you some questions about Mercy Howell? Did she live here with you?”

“Yes,” Lois said, and suddenly looked at them shrewdly. “What do you mean did? She still does. ”

They were standing in the small foyer of the apartment, and the foyer went so still that all the night sounds of the building were clearly audible all at once, as though they had not been there before but had only been summoned up now to fill the void of silence. A toilet flushed somewhere, a hot water pipe rattled, a baby whimpered, a dog barked, someone dropped a shoe. In the foyer now filled with noise, they stared at each other wordlessly, and finally Carella drew a deep breath and said, “Your roommate is dead. She was stabbed tonight as she was leaving the theater.”

“No,” Lois said, simply and flatly and unequivocally. “No, she isn’t.”

“Miss Kaplan...”

“I don’t give a damn what you say, Mercy isn’t dead.”

“Miss Kaplan, she’s dead.”

“Oh Jesus,” Lois said, and burst into tears, “oh Jesus, oh damn damn, oh Jesus.”

The two men stood by feeling stupid and big and awkward and helpless. Lois Kaplan covered her face with her hands and sobbed into them, her shoulders heaving, saying over and over again, “I’m sorry, oh Jesus, please, I’m sorry, please, oh poor Mercy, oh my God,” while the detectives tried not to watch. At last the crying stopped and she looked up at them with eyes that had been knifed and said softly, “Come in. Please,” and led them into the living room. She kept staring at the floor as she talked. It was as if she could not look them in the face, not these men who had brought her the news.

“Do you know who did it?” she asked.

“No. Not yet.”

“We wouldn’t have waked you in the middle of the night—”

“That’s all right.”

“But very often, if we get moving on a case fast enough, before the trail gets cold—”

“Yes, I understand.”

“We can often—”

“Yes, before the trail gets cold,” Lois said.

“Yes.”

The apartment went silent again.

“Would you know if Miss Howell had any enemies?” Carella asked.

“She was the sweetest girl in the world,” Lois said.

“Did she argue with anyone recently, were there—”

“No.”

“Any threatening telephone calls or letters?” Lois Kaplan looked up at them.

“Yes,” she said. “A letter.”

“A threatening letter?”

“We couldn’t tell. It frightened Mercy, though. That’s why she bought the gun.”

“What kind of gun?”

“I don’t know. A small one.”

“Would it have been a.25-caliber Browning?”

“I don’t know guns.”

“Was this letter mailed to her or delivered personally?”

“It was mailed to her. At the theater.”

“When?”

“A week ago.”

“Did she report it to the police?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Haven’t you seen Rattlesnake ?” Lois said.

“What do you mean?” Carella said.

“ Rattlesnake. The musical. Mercy’s show. The show she was in.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“But you’ve heard of it.”

“No.”

“Where do you live, for God’s sake? On the moon?”

“I’m sorry, I just haven’t—”

“Forgive me,” Lois said immediately. “I’m not usually... I’m trying very hard to... I’m sorry. Forgive me.”

“That’s all right,” Carella said.

“Anyway, it’s... it’s a big hit now but... There was trouble in the beginning, you see... Are you sure you don’t know about this? It was in all the newspapers.”

“Well, I guess I missed it,” Carella said. “What was the trouble about?”

“Don’t you know about this, either?” she asked Hawes.

“No, I’m sorry.”

“About Mercy’s dance?”

“No.”

“Well, in one scene, Mercy danced the title song without any clothes on. Because the idea was to express... the hell with what the idea was. The point is that the dance wasn’t at all prurient, it wasn’t even sexy! But the police missed the point and closed the show down two days after it opened. The producers had to go to court for a writ to get the show opened again.”

“Yes, I remember it now,” Carella said.

“What I’m trying to say is that nobody involved with Rattlesnake would report anything to the police. Not even a threatening letter.”

“If she bought a pistol,” Hawes said, “she would have had to go to the police. For a permit.”

“She didn’t have a permit.”

“Then how’d she get the pistol? You can’t buy a handgun without first—”

“A friend of hers sold it to her.”

“What’s the friend’s name?”

“Harry Donatello.”

“An importer,” Carella said drily.

“Of souvenir ashtrays,” Hawes said.

“I don’t know what he does for a living,” Lois said. “But he got the gun for her.”

“When was this?”

“A few days after she received the letter.”

“What did the letter say?” Carella asked.

“I’ll get it for you,” Lois said, and went into the bedroom. They heard a dresser drawer opening, the rustle of clothes, what might have been a tin candy box being opened. Lois came back into the room. “Here it is,” she said.

There didn’t seem much point in trying to preserve latent prints on a letter that had already been handled by Mercy Howell, Lois Kaplan, and God knew how many others. But Carella nonetheless accepted the letter on a handkerchief spread over the palm of his hand and then looked at the face of the envelope. “She should have brought this to us immediately,” he said. “It’s written on hotel stationery, we’ve got an address without lifting a finger.”

The letter had indeed been written on stationery from The Addison Hotel, one of the city’s lesser-known fleabags, some two blocks north of the Eleventh Street Theater, where Mercy Howell had worked. There was a single sheet of paper in the envelope. Carella unfolded it. Lettered in pencil were the words:

The lamp went out, the room was black.

At first there was no sound but the sharp intake of Adele Gorman’s breath. And then, indistinctly, as faintly as though carried on a swirling mist that blew in wetly from some desolated shore, there came the sound of garbled voices, and the room grew suddenly cold. The voices were those of a crowd in endless debate, rising and falling in cacophonous cadence, a mixture of tongues that rattled and rasped. There was the sound, too, of a rising wind, as though a door to some forbidden landscape had been sharply and suddenly blown open (how cold the room was!) to reveal a host of corpses incessantly pacing, involved in formless dialogue. The voices rose in volume now, carried on that same chill-penetrating wind, louder, closer, until they seemed to overwhelm the room, clamoring to be released from whatever unearthly vault contained them. And then, as if two and only two of those disembodied voices had succeeded in breaking away from the mass of unseen dead, bringing with them a rush of bone-chilling air from some world unknown, there came a whisper at first, the whisper of a man’s voice, saying the single word “Ralph!” sharp-edged and with a distinctive foreign inflection, “Ralph!” and then a woman’s voice joining it, “Adele!” pronounced strangely and in the same cutting whisper, “Adele!” and then “Ralph!” again, the voices overlapping, unmistakably foreign, urgent, rising in volume until the whispers commingled to become an agonizing groan and the names were lost in the shrilling echo of the wind.