Preach No More Read online

  “Make your decision for Christ,” the man in black said, in a voice Tony Cook thought he probably would never forget. “Accept the mercy, the infinite compassion, of the Lord. Only through—”

  There are very few Negroes here, Tony thought, looking around at the audience. He could see chiefly the backs of heads because he had chosen seats strategically near an exit ramp. Very few of them were the backs of Negro heads. Few of them were the backs of young heads. They have heard all this before, Tony thought. They have come because of the voice. Because it’s one hell of a good show and no admission charged. But it must cost a hell of a lot of money.

  Tony was conscious that the voice had stopped and that people in the audience had begun to cough. He stopped looking at the back of heads and looked again at the stage. The organ had begun again, and the choir, still lined on either side of the platform, had begun again to sing. “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” They sang very softly.

  The tall man had disappeared. His place had been taken by a much smaller man, also in clericals. He held a hand mike and spoke into it, and his voice was harsh.

  “The voice will be heard again,” the small man said. “Now an opportunity will be given you, you of the faithful gathered in your thousands to hear the word of God, to help make possible the carrying on of our work. Disciples will pass among you. Give with the generosity of your hearts. Salvation is at stake.”

  The choir continued to sing. Men and women, white-robed, moved in aisles, came up ramps. The lights in the auditorium were up.

  The collectors carried cans, with slots in the tops. On the cans, which were passed down the rows from hand to hand, were the words: “Give for Salvation.” Tony folded a dollar bill and slipped it through the slot and reached the can across Rachel to the woman beyond her—the woman who had shhed. So far as Tony could see, the woman did not put anything into the can. Which was none of his business.

  “When he comes back again,” Rachel said, “it’s the big moment. Anyway, my friend says it is. The one who’s in the choir.”

  He said, “Yes?”

  “It’s the come-to-Jesus part,” Rachel said. “Janet says it’s very impressive. They go up the aisles to be saved. Sometimes more than a hundred, she says. But there’s one man—she knows because he limps, and when they’re being saved the choir doesn’t usually really sing, and she can watch—comes up every night to be saved. Has been doing it every night for the last six weeks. Not every night, of course, because the Rangers have home games. And there’s another with a white beard, and he wears sandals and—”

  The woman next her said, “Shhh!” But all around people were getting their coughing done, and the choir was singing very softly from very far away. It was singing, “Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom.”

  Tony Cook said, “Hmmm.” He said, “Do you want to stay and be impressed?”

  “I don’t think so,” Rachel said. “I thought—oh, I guess, that it would be livelier. It’s—sedate, isn’t it?”

  The woman said, “Shhh!” and turned and looked at Rachel. Her look was baleful. “His is the voice of God, young woman.”

  “I’m sure,” Tony said, and stood up and reached his hand down to Rachel, who took it and stood with him. “He’s in very good voice tonight,” Tony said, and, still hand in hand, they went down the ramp. After a few steps, Rachel said, “Probably this is sacrilege,” and they parted hands.

  They got a cab in Seventh Avenue and, since there is little point in giving a hacker an address in Gay Street, Tony said, “Sixth Avenue and Waverly Place.” The driver said, “That’s down near Washington Square, mister?” Tony promised to guide him.

  “A return to fundamentals,” Rachel said. “I read some place that Billy Graham has entertainers. People like Ethel Waters. This—this was just like church. But he has a beautiful voice. Do you believe in God, Tony?”

  “I don’t know,” Tony said. “Sometimes, I guess. But not very much, I guess. Not since I went to Sunday School. This will do, driver.”

  They walked from Sixth Avenue through Waverly Place and into Gay Street, and around the crook in Gay Street and up a flight of stairs.

  In the apartment she sat on the sofa and nudged her shoes off. She said, to the tall man standing and looking down at her, “You can take your gun off, mister.”

  He took his jacket off and unstrapped his shoulder holster. When he turned back from putting it on top of the book case, she had taken off her suit jacket. He reached both hands down to her, and she took his hand and came up into his arms.

  “So this is what you had in mind,” she said, when her lips were hers to use. “Carnal sin. That’s what you had in mind all the time, mister. The blouse has a zipper. Sometimes it sticks.”

  The zipper did not stick.

  “Carnal sin, undoubtedly,” Rachel said when later they lay relaxed. “And very nice, too.”

  2

  A bell jangled Cook out of sleep. It still was dark in his small apartment in West Twelfth Street—an apartment which was costing him a lot more than he could afford; an apartment in which he still bumped into things in the dark. He looked at his watch, and the illuminated dial blurred to sleepy eyes. It seemed to be six o’clock. The alarm was set for seven, and something had gone wrong with—

  The bell kept on jangling and jangled in spurts. Tony reached toward the telephone by his bed and banged his hand against the table it stood on. Things still weren’t in the right places. He found the telephone and said, “Homicide, Detective Cook,” because the sleep fuzz was still in his mind. A voice said, “Shapiro, Tony,” and Tony Cook came awake. He said, “Morning, Lieutenant.”

  “Down in your part of town,” Lieutenant Nathan Shapiro told Detective (1st gr.) Anthony Cook. “Place called the Village Brawl. Something like that. Know it?”

  “Where it is,” Tony said. “Eighth Street. Over east a ways. I’ve never been there.”

  “Well,” Shapiro said, “you’re going to be, Tony. As soon as you can make it. I’ll be along. And damn near everybody else, probably. The commissioner, possibly. No, it’ll be too early for the commissioner.”

  “A big one?”

  “If they’ve got it right,” Shapiro said. “This evangelist. Or revivalist or whatever they call him. Jonathan Prentis. Been saving cities all over the world. Just finished saving New York.”

  Tony Cook said he’d be damned and swung his legs out of bed. He still held onto the telephone. “From the outside, this Brawl place looks like what it sounds like. He—hell, it looks like the sort of place he preached against. Last night. Dens of iniquity. Or maybe it was sinks of.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve—” Shapiro said, and left it hanging. “Anyway,” he said, “it’s where he died. If they’ve got the identity right, and I guess they have. With an ice pick in his back.”

  “An ice pick, for God’s sake!”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “We don’t get ice picks much any more. But that’s what the precinct says. Ice pick. Anyway, I’ll be along. If the subways aren’t flooded.”

  Tony repeated the last word.

  “It’s raining cats and dogs,” Shapiro said. “Here in Brooklyn, anyway.”

  Tony took the receiver from his ear and listened to other sounds. They were loud sounds, now that he was awake enough to hear them.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s sure as hell raining.”

  He closed the window most of the rain was getting into. Cold wet air came in through it too, before he closed it. He put coffee on and clothes on; strapped his gun on. The big one, this time. The little one was for off-duty hours. He drank coffee and ate toast and put a raincoat on and went out into cold teeming rain. It had been all right when he walked home from Gay Street a little before midnight. Last night it had been almost spring. The wind and rain were coming from the east. The rain blurred the street lights. He walked against the beating rain. It was one hell of a morning. It was the hell of an hour of a hell of a morning. And
what, for Christ’s sake, had the Reverend Jonathan Prentis been doing in a dive like the Village Brawl? Aside, of course, from getting himself killed in it?

  Police cars jammed East Eighth Street. There were four cruise cars and a long sedan. Assistant Chief Inspector Patrick O’Brien, at a guess. Early hours for an assistant chief inspector. But if they were right about who had got himself killed, it was a big one.

  Cook said, “Homicide,” to a uniformed man in a black slicker who stood at the top of a short flight of steps leading down under a sign which read: “The Village Brawl. Cocktails. Dancing.” The patrolman gestured, and Cook went down the steps. At the foot of the steps there was a glass door with small pictures of naked girls stuck to the glass. A hell of a place for a reverend to die in. Inside the door there was a uniformed police captain. He said, “Oh. The brain boys.” Anthony Cook said, “Sir.”

  The room was large. There was a bandstand at one end with a piano and music racks. Small combo, Tony thought. Piano, a guitar, maybe a trumpet. And the drums, of course. A girl singer? Probably a girl singer; probably an innuendo, a lyric.

  There was a small dance floor in front of the bandstand. There were tables through the big room and booths along two of the walls. Chairs were upside down on the tables. One of the booths was getting the treatment. Flash bulbs were going off in it. Two men with fingerprint equipment were waiting until the photographers had finished. At a table near the booth, a man from the precinct was talking to a man in a dinner jacket but no black tie.

  Tony went over toward the booth and looked into it. No body. He hadn’t supposed there would be. The body would be up at Bellevue, in the morgue. Or on a table being opened.

  Tony knew the detective talking to the tieless man in the dinner jacket. He started toward the table, and a gray-haired man in a dark suit—and an adhesive bandage on his right jaw—looked at him. Tony said, “Detective Cook, Inspector. Homicide South, sir.”

  Assistant Chief Inspector Patrick O’Brien said, “Uh,” in the tone of a man who is up earlier than he wants to be and has cut himself shaving. Then he added, “About time,” and went off toward the uniformed captain at the foot of the entrance stairs.

  Tony Cook went to the table where the man from the precinct squad was talking to the man in the dinner jacket. He said, “Morning, Charley.” Detective Charles Pieronelli said, “Hi.” He said, “All by yourself?”

  “Lieutenant Shapiro’ll be along,” Tony Cook said. “And Captain Weigand, probably.”

  Tony took a chair off one of the tables and put it down next to Pieronelli. Pieronelli said, “Detective Cook, Mr. Granzo.” He said, “Mr. Granzo owns the place, Tony. He’s just giving us a rundown, far’s he can.”

  Granzo was a small, neat man. His dinner jacket fitted with precision even when, as now, he leaned forward. He had a light voice when he spoke—a somewhat high-pitched voice.

  “Not much I can tell you,” Granzo said. “I’d called it a night. Gone upstairs.”

  He jerked a thumb to show where upstairs was.

  “Mr. Granzo has an apartment on the top floor,” Pieronelli said, doing his own filling in. “Go ahead, Mr. Granzo.”

  “This boy came up,” Granzo said. “I’d just started to go to bed. It was—oh, maybe two-thirty. Maybe close to three. He banged on the door and I said something. Probably said, ‘What the hell?’ And he started to jabber through the door. He’s Puerto Rican, you see. Knows some English but he was jabbering in Spanish. Very fast. Very excited. Name’s Manuel something. He’s a bus.”

  “Manuel Perez,” Pieronelli said. “Lives to-hell-and-gone downtown. They’re bringing him along. He’d been cleaning up, I take it, Mr. Granzo?”

  “With a couple of other boys, yeah. Combo knocks off at two and people begin to drink up and move along. Takes them a while, usually. But about two-thirty the boys begin to stack the chairs on the tables. Sort of a hint. And the waiters who get stuck begin to stand around and look at people. You know how it is.”

  “Sure,” Pieronelli said. “The band’s gone and the bar’s closed and you—I gather you call it a night, Mr. Granzo. Was it a busy night?”

  “Average,” Granzo said. “Which is pretty busy. Lot of uptowners come down most nights. Think there’ll be hippies, I guess. People from out of town, too. Yeah, we keep pretty busy.” He paused. “For now,” he said. “Pretty soon they’ll start going somewhere else. Way it is in this business.”

  “This bus boy,” Cook said. “Manuel Perez. He knocked at your door. Began, as you say, to jabber at you. You don’t understand Spanish, Mr. Granzo?”

  “A few words,” Granzo said. “A few words of French. For the waiters. Most of them are Italian. Call themselves Henri and André and things like that, but they’re Italian. About Spanish. The kid was all excited. Talking very fast, and I didn’t make it out. I let him in and said, ‘Speak English, boy,’ and he said, ‘Dead man. In booth.’ Naturally, I thought he was nuts. Thought somebody had had more than he could handle and was sleeping it off.”

  “But you did go down. Come down here?”

  “Yeah. It’s my place, after all. Took it over a couple of years ago, when it was a run-down joint. Changed it around some. Man who used to run it had girl waitresses. Believe it or not.”

  “You serve food here?” Cook asked him.

  “Sure. That’s the law, isn’t it? Suppers, anyway. Mostly people come to drink and dance and listen to Adele. But they can eat if they want to.”

  “Adele?”

  “Girl who sings with the combo. Damn good, too.”

  “You came down,” Pieronelli said, and was patient about it. “This boy showed you the booth he meant. That booth.”

  He gestured toward the booth halfway down the long wall. The photographers had finished with it. The two fingerprint men were working in it.

  “Yeah. This guy was sort of slumped down. Part on the table, part on the seat. You know what I mean?”

  They knew what he meant.

  “I took hold of his shoulder,” Granzo said. “Shook him a little. Said something like—oh, ‘We’re closing up, sir. Better be getting along.’ Something like that.”

  “And?”

  “He sort of slid down on the seat. And then I saw this wooden thing sticking out of his back. Didn’t get it, at first. Then I thought, That looks like the handle of an ice pick, for Christ’s sake. And then I put my hand on his forehead and he—well, it didn’t feel right. Not cold but not warm either. Not the way it ought to have been warm. See what I mean?”

  “Yes,” Pieronelli said. “We see what you mean, Mr. Granzo. And then you called the police.”

  “I sure as hell did.”

  “The call came through at two-fifty-six,” Pieronelli told Tony Cook. “Got a patrol car here in maybe ten minutes. Ambulance maybe another ten minutes. D.O.A. You had seen this man before, Mr. Granzo? Regular customer? Anything like that?”

  “Must have seen him when he came in,” Granzo said. “People come in, I seat them. When there’s a table. But I don’t remember this guy. He wasn’t a regular. But most of our people aren’t. Somebody tells somebody the Brawl is a live spot and they come down to see.”

  “Reservations?” Tony asked him.

  “Mostly no,” Granzo said. “They just wander in. From nine o’clock on, mostly. Some come earlier. People who look like out-of-towners. Come for dinner. But mostly it’s an after-dinner crowd, like I said.”

  “Cover charge?”

  “Well,” Granzo said, “we don’t call it that. Say there’s a minimum, see? I mean, it’s no good having somebody come in for a beer, is there?”

  “I can see there wouldn’t be,” Cook said. “Somebody with him when he came in?”

  “Like I said,” Granzo said. “I don’t remember him at all. Sure, I must have seated him. But I don’t remember him. Mostly, people come in couples.”

  “You’d remember a man who came alone?”

  “You’d think so, sure. But thing is, I don’t. He w
as a preacher, right?”

  “An evangelist,” Pieronelli said. “Revivalist. He’s been going pretty much all over the world. Holding gospel meetings. Saving souls. That’s what he called it. Saving souls from perdition was the way he put it. Heard him on TV once. Wife held out for it. Week or so ago, that was.”

  “He had his last meeting at Madison Square Garden last night,” Tony said. “Had been going to go on to Chicago and save it. Saw him myself, actually.”

  Charles Pieronelli turned to look at Cook. He said, “Well, I’ll be damned, Tony.”

  “A girl I know held out for it,” Anthony Cook said. He looked over Granzo’s head. “Austere type, he looked like being,” Cook said. “Collar backside front. That sort of thing. Down on drinking. Smoke from cigarettes is smoke from hell fire. Strange place for him to end up.” He waved a hand to show what place he meant.

  “Listen,” Granzo said. “This is an all-right joint. Name of it throws you off, maybe. Called the Village Brawl when I took it over and I let it ride. Damn near all I got for my money, the name of the place. Oh, the lease and some chairs and tables and—”

  “Sure,” Tony Cook said. “Not throwing off on your place, Mr. Granzo. All I meant was—”

  “No pushers,” Granzo said. “Keep an eye out for them. No queers, when we can spot them. Few started to show up couple months ago and we had a lot of reserved tables. See what I mean?”

  Pieronelli said, “Yes, Mr. Granzo.”

  “Nice clean boys,” Granzo said, with the vigor of a man who wants everything made clear. “Thing is, out-of-towners don’t like them. And once they start—well, they sort of take over. Know what I mean?”

  This time it was Cook who said, “Yes, Mr. Granzo.” Then he said, “This girl singer you have. This Adele. She’s—say she’s fully dressed?”

  “She’s decent,” Granzo said. “A sweet, decent kid. And she can belt it out. I don’t say she’s all swaddled up like.”