“George wasn’t earning all that much with his calypso.”
“How much would you say he normally—”
“Two, three hundred a week, some weeks. Other weeks, nothing.”
“Did he owe anyone money?”
“No. But that’s only because of the dancing. That’s why I didn’t want to quit the job. We wouldn’t have been able to make ends meet otherwise.”
“But aside from any arguments you had about your job...”
“We didn’t argue about anything else,” she said, and suddenly burst into tears again.
“I’m sorry,” Carella said at once. “If this is difficult for you right now, we’ll come back in the morning. Would you prefer that?”
“No, that’s all right,” she said.
“Then... can you tell me if your husband argued with anyone else recently?”
“Nobody I can think of.”
“Mrs. Chadderton, in the past several days have you noticed anyone who seemed particularly interested in your husband’s comings and goings? Anyone lurking around outside the building or in the hallway, for example.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head.
“How about tonight? Notice anyone in the hallway when your husband left?”
“I didn’t go out in the hall with him.”
“Hear anything in the hall after he was gone? Anyone who might have been listening or watching, trying to find out if he was still home?”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“Would anyone else have heard anything?”
“How would I know?”
“I meant, was there anyone here with you? A neighbor? A friend?”
“I was alone.”
“Mrs. Chadderton,” he said, “I have to ask this next question, I hope you’ll forgive me for asking it.”
“George wasn’t fooling around with any other women,” she said at once. “Is that the question?”
“That was the question, yes.”
“And I wasn’t fooling around with any other men.”
“The reason he had to ask,” Meyer said, “is—”
“I know why he had to ask,” Chloe said. “But I don’t think he’d have asked a white woman that same question.”
“White or black, the questions are the same,” Carella said flatly. “If you were having trouble in your marriage—”
“There was no trouble in my marriage,” she said, turning to him, her dark eyes blazing.
“Fine then, the matter is closed.”
It was not closed, not so far as Carella was concerned. He would come back to it later if only because Chloe’s reaction had been so violent. In the meantime, he picked up again on the line of questioning that was mandatory in any homicide.
“Mrs. Chadderton,” he said, “at any time during the past few weeks—”
“Because I guess it’s impossible for two black people to have a good marriage, right?” she said, again coming back to the matter — which apparently was not yet closed for her, either.
Carella wondered what to say next. Should he go through the tired “Some of My Best Friends Are Blacks” routine? Should he explain that Arthur Brown, a detective on the 87th Squad, was in fact happily married and that he and his wife, Caroline, had spent hours in the Carellas’ house discussing toilet training and school busing and, yes, even racial prejudice? Should he defend himself as a white man in a white man’s world, when this woman’s husband — a black man — had been robbed of his life in a section of the precinct that was at least 50 percent black? Should he ignore the possibility that Chloe Chadderton, who had immediately flared upon mention of marital infidelity, was as suspect in this damn case as anyone else in the city? More suspect, in fact, despite the screaming and the hollering and the tears, despite the numbness as she’d listened to the details.
White or black, they all seemed numb, even the ones who’d stuck an ice pick in someone’s skull an hour earlier; they all seemed numb. The tears were sometimes genuine and sometimes not; sometimes, they were only tears of guilt or relief. In this city where husbands killed wives and lovers killed rivals; in this city where children were starved or beaten to death by their parents, and grandmothers were slain by their junkie grandsons for the few dollars in their purses; in this city any immediate member of the family was not only a possible murderer but a probable one. The crime statistics here changed as often as did the weather, but the latest ones indicated a swing back to so-called family homicides, as opposed to those involving total strangers, where the victim and the murderer alike were unknown to each other before that final moment of obscene intimacy.
A witness had described George Chadderton’s killer as a tall skinny man, almost a boy. A man who looked like a teenager. Chloe Chadderton was perhaps five feet nine inches tall, with the lithe, supple body of a dancer. Given the poor visibility of the rain-drenched night, mightn’t she have passed for a teenage boy? In Shakespeare’s time, it was the teenage boys who’d acted the women’s roles in his plays. Chloe had taken offense at a question routinely asked and now chose to cloud the issue with black indignation, perhaps genuine, perhaps intended only to bewilder and confuse. So Carella looked at her, and wondered what he should say next. Get tough? Get apologetic? Ignore the challenge? What? In the silence, rain lashed the single window in the kitchen. Carella had the feeling it would never stop raining.
“Ma’am,” he said, “we want to find your husband’s murderer. If you’d feel more comfortable with a black cop, we’ve got plenty of black cops, and we’ll send some around. They’ll ask the same questions.”
She looked at him.
“The same questions,” he repeated.
“Ask your questions,” she said, and folded her arms across her breasts.
“All right,” he said, and nodded. “At any time during the past few weeks did you notice anything strange about your husband’s behavior?”
“Strange how?” Chloe said. Her voice was still edged with anger, her arms were still folded defensively across her breasts.
“Anything out of the ordinary, any breaks in his usual routine — I take it you knew most of his friends and business acquaintances.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Were there any such breaks in his usual routine?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Did your husband keep an appointment calendar?”
“Yes.”
“Is it here in the apartment?”
“In the bedroom. On the dresser.”
“Could I see it, Mrs. Chadderton?”
“Yes,” she said, and rose and left the room. Carella and Meyer waited. Somewhere outside, far below, a drainpipe dripped steadily and noisily. When Chloe came back into the room, she was carrying a black appointment book in her hand. She gave it to Carella, and he immediately opened it to the two facing pages for the month of September.
“Today’s the fifteenth,” Meyer said.
Carella nodded, and then began scanning the entries for the week beginning September eleventh. On Monday at 3:00 P.M., according to the entry scrawled in black ink in the square for that date, George Chadderton had gone for a haircut. On Tuesday at 12:30 P.M., he’d had lunch with someone identified only as Charlie. Carella looked up.
“Who’s Charlie?” he said.
“Charlie?”
“‘Lunch 12:30 P.M., Charlie,’” Carella read.
“Oh. That’s not a person, it’s a place. Restaurant called Charlie down on Granada Street.”
“Have any idea who your husband had lunch with that day?”
“No. He was always meeting with people, discussing gigs and contracts and like that.”