The Last Dance (9 page)

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 let 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.

Ollie rang the doorbell again. Lightning flashed behind the low buildings across the avenue. Thunder boomed. The middle of the three doors opened. The man standing there, peering out at the detectives and the rain, was some six feet, two or three inches tall, Carella guessed, with the wide shoulders and broad chest of a heavyweight boxer, which in fact the Reverend Gabriel Foster once had been. His eyebrows were still ridged with scars, the result of too much stubborn resistance against superior opponents when he was club-fighting all over the country. At forty-eight, he still looked mean and dangerous. Wearing a moss-green corduroy suit over a black turtleneck sweater, black loafers and black socks, a massive gold ring on the pinky of his left hand, he stood just inside the arched middle door to his church while the detectives stood in the rain outside.

“You brought the rain,” he said.

According to police files, Foster's birth name was Gabriel Foster Jones, but he'd changed it to Rhino Jones when he started boxing, and then to Gabriel Foster when he began preaching. Foster considered himself a civil rights activist. The police considered him a rabble-rouser, an opportunistic self-promoter, and a race racketeer. Which was why his church was listed in the files as a sensitive location. “Sensitive location” was departmental code for anyplace where the uninvited presence of the police might cause a race riot. In Carella's experience, most of these locations were churches.

The detectives kept standing in the teeming rain on the wide front steps of the church, waiting for the preacher to invite them in. He showed no sign of offering any such hospitality.

“Detective Carella,” Carella said, “Eighty-seventh Squad. We're looking for a man named Walter Hopwell, we understand he works here.”

“He does indeed,” Foster said.

The rain kept battering them.

“Apparently he knew a man named Daniel Nelson, who was killed yesterday morning,” Meyer said.

“Yes, I saw the news.”

“Is Mr. Hopwell here now?” Carella asked.

“Why do you want to see him?”

“We think he may have information pertaining to a case we're investigating.”

“You're the man who shot and killed Sonny Cole, aren't you?” Foster said.

Carella looked at him.

“What's that got to do with the price of fish?” Ollie asked.

“Everything,” Foster said. “The officer here shot and killed a brother in cold blood.”

A brother, Ollie thought.

“The officer here shot the individual who killed his father,” Ollie said. “Which has nothing to do with Walter Hopwell.”

Rain was running down his cheekbones and over his jaw. He
stood sopping wet in the rain, looking in at the dry comfort of the preacher inside, hating the son of a bitch for being dry and being black and looking so fucking smug.

“You're not welcome here,” Foster said.

“Well, gee, then here's what we'll have to do,” Ollie said.

“Let it go, Ollie,” Carella said.

“Oh no way,” Ollie said, and turned back to Foster again. “We'll ask the D.A. to subpoena Hopwell as a witness in a murder investigation. We'll come back with a grand-jury subpoena for Walter Hopwell, alias Harpo Hopwell, and we'll stand in the rain here outside your pretty little church here and ask anyone who comes out, ‘Are you Walter Hopwell, sir?' If the answer is yes, or if the answer is
no
answer at all, we'll hand him the subpoena to appear before the grand jury at nine-thirty tomorrow morning. Now if he goes before a grand jury, it might take them all day to ask him the same questions
we
could ask in half an hour if you let us in out of the rain. What do you say, Rhino? It's your call.”

Foster looked at Ollie as if deciding whether to punch him in the gut or drop him instead with an uppercut to the jaw. Ollie didn't give blacks too much credit for profound thinking, but
if
he was Foster, he'd be figuring Carella here had indeed slain a no-good murderer who merely happened to be of the same color as the reverend himself—but was this a good enough reason to take a substantial position at this juncture in time? This past August was already ancient history. Was the slain brother, who'd incidentally been
stalking
Carella with a nine-millimeter pistol, reason enough to precipitate a major confrontation at this late date? Ollie was no mind reader, but he guessed maybe Rhino here was thinking along those lines.

“Come in,” Foster said at last.

She had heard them arguing.

“The walls are paper thin in this building,” she said. “You can hear everything. Well, just listen,” she said. “Let's not talk for a
minute or so, you'll understand what I mean. Let's just be still, shall we?”

The detectives did not wish to be still, not when Mrs. Kipp had just told them that the normally reclusive Andrew Hale had been visited by someone three times during the month of September. But they fell silent nonetheless, listening intently. Someone flushed a toilet. A telephone rang. They could hear, faintly, what sounded like voices on a television soap opera.

“Do you see what I mean?” she asked.

Hear
what you mean, Kling thought, but did not say.

“Was this a man or a woman?” Brown asked. “This person who visited Mr. Hale.”

“A man.”

“Did you
see
him?”

“Oh yes. But only once. The first time he was here. I knocked on Mr. Hale's door to ask if he needed anything at the grocery store. I was going down to the grocery store, you see …”

The way Katherine Kipp remembers it, she first hears the visitor shouting as she comes out into the hallway and is locking her door. The voice is a trained voice, an actor's voice, an opera singer's voice, a radio announcer's voice, something of that sort, thundering through the closed door to Mr. Hale's apartment and roaring down the hallway.

She can make out words as she approaches the door to 3A. Mr. Hale's visitor is shouting something about the chance of a lifetime. He is telling Mr. Hale that only a fool would pass up this opportunity, this is something that is coming his way by sheer coincidence, he should thank his lucky stars. You can make
millions,
the man shouts. You're being a goddamn jackass!

She is standing just outside Mr. Hale's door now.

She is almost afraid of knocking, the man sounds so violent. At the same time, she is afraid
not
to knock. Suppose he does something to Mr. Hale? He sounds apoplectic. Suppose he
hurts
Mr. Hale?

The voice stops abruptly the moment she knocks on the door.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Hale? It's me. Katherine Kipp.”

“Just a second, Mrs. Kipp.”

The door opens. Mr. Hale is wearing a cardigan sweater over an open-throat shirt and corduroy trousers. The man sitting at the kitchen table is drinking a cup of coffee.

“Do you know Mr. Hale's son-in-law?” Kling asked.

“Yes, I do.”

“Was that who the man was?”

“Oh no.”

“Do you
know
who the man was?”

“No. Well, I'd recognize him if I saw him again. But no, I don't know him.”

“Mr. Hale didn't introduce him or anything?”

“No.”

“What'd he look like?” Kling asked.

Walter Hopwell worked with at least a dozen other people on the top floor of the church. These people had nothing to do with church hierarchy. Up here, there were no deacons, no trustees, no pastor's aides, no church secretaries or announcement clerks. Instead, these men and women were all employees hired by Foster to generate the personal publicity, promotion, and propaganda that had kept him in the public eye and the political arena for the past ten years. Except for three young white men and a white woman, all of them were black.

Here in Hopwell's small private office, a room hung with photographs of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela, its windows dripping rainsnakes, Carella and Meyer talked to Hopwell while Fat Ollie stood by with a somewhat supercilious smirk on his face, as if certain that the man they were questioning was an ax murderer at best or a serial killer at worst. Hopwell looked like neither. A slender man with finely sculpted features and
a head shaved as bald as Meyer's, he wore black jeans, a black turtleneck sweater, and a fringed suede vest. A small gold earring pierced his left ear lobe. Ollie figured this was some kind of signal to other faggots. Or was that the right ear?

“Danny Nelson was killed yesterday morning, did you know that?” Carella asked.

“Yes, I saw it on television,” Hopwell said.

“How'd you happen to know him?” Meyer asked.

“He did some work for me.”

“Oh?”

“What kind of work?” Carella asked.

“Research,” Hopwell said.

Ollie rolled his eyes.

“What sort of research?” Meyer asked.

“Information on people who've been critical of Reverend Foster.”

A fuckin snitch researcher, Ollie thought.

“How long was he doing this for you?”

“Six months or so.”

“You knew him for six months?”

“Yes.”

“Came here to the church, did he?”

“Yes. With his reports.”

“What'd you do with these reports?”

“I used them to combat false rumors and specious innuendoes.”

“How?”

“In our printed material. And in the reverend's radio addresses.”

“When I met with Danny yesterday morning,” Carella said, “he mentioned a card game you'd been in …”

“Yes.”

“… with a man from Houston.”

“Yes.”

“Who won a lot of money.”

“Yes, he did.”

“Did you have a conversation with this man afterward?”

“We had a drink together, yes. And shared some conversation.”

“Did he mention having killed someone?”

Gee, that's subtle, Ollie thought.

“No, he didn't say he'd killed anyone.”