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
