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.
