The dress was not low-cut. It didn't have to be.
Nor was it particularly tight, and it didn't have to be that, either.
It was not expensive, but it fitted her figure well. He had no doubt that anything she wore would fit her figure well. He had no doubt that even a potato sack would look remarkably interesting on the woman who had been Hank's wife.
"What do I do now?" Alice asked. "Make up beds at the precinct? That's the usual routine for a cop's widow, isn't it?"
"Did Hank leave any insurance?" Carella asked.
"Nothing to speak of. Insurance doesn't come easily to cops, does it? Besides . . . Steve, he was a young man. Who thinks of things like this? Who thinks these things are going to happen?" She looked at him wide-eyed. Her eyes were very brown, her hair was very blond, her complexion was fair and unmarred. She was a beautiful woman, and he did not like considering her such. He wanted her to be dowdy and forlorn. He did not want her looking fresh and lovely. Goddamnit, what was there about this room that suffocated a man? He felt like the last male alive, surrounded by bare-breasted beauties on a tropical island surrounded by man-eating sharks. There was no place to run to. The island was called Amazonia or something, and the island was female to the core, and he was the last man alive.
The room and Alice Bush.
The femaleness reached out to envelop him in a cloying, clinging embrace.
"Change your mind, Steve," Alice said. "Have a drink."
"All right, I will," he answered.
She rose, displaying a long white segment of thigh as she got to her feet, displaying an almost indecent oblivion to the way she handled her body. She had lived with it for a long time, he supposed. She no longer marveled at its allure. She accepted it, and lived with it, and others could marvel. A thigh was a thigh, what the hell! What was so special about the thigh of Alice Bush?
"Scotch?"
"All right."
"How does it feel, something like this?" she asked. She was standing at the bar across from him. She stood with the loosehipped stance of a fashion model, incongruous because he always pictured fashion models as willowy and thin and flat-chested. Alice Bush was none of these.
"Something like what?"
"Investigating the death of a colleague and friend."
"Weird," Carella said.
"I'll bet."
"You're taking it very well," Carella said.
"I have to," Alice answered briefly.
"Why?"
"Because I'll fall all to pieces if I don't. He's in the ground, Steve. It's not going to help for me to wail and moan all over the place."
"I suppose not."
"We've got to go on living, don't we? We can't simply give up because someone we love is gone, can we?"
"No," Carella agreed.
She walked to him and handed him the drink. Their fingers touched for an instant. He looked up at her. Her face was completely guileless. The contact, he was sure, had been accidental.
She walked to the window and looked out toward the college. "It's lonely here without him," she said.
"It's lonely at the house without him, too," Carella said, surprised. He had not realized, before this, how really attached he had become to Hank.
"I was thinking of taking a trip," Alice said, "getting away from things that remind me of him."
"Things like what?" Carella asked.
"Oh, I don't know," Alice said. "Like . . . last night I saw his hair brush on the dresser, and there was some of that wild red hair of his caught in the bristles, and all at once it reminded me of him, of the wildness of him. He was a wild person, Steve." She paused. "Wild."
The word was female somehow. He was reminded again of the word portrait Hank had drawn, of the real portrait before him, standing by the window, of the femaleness everywhere around him on this island. He could not blame her, he knew that. She was only being herself, being Alice Bush, being Woman. She was only a pawn of fate, a girl who automatically embodied womanhood, a girl who . . . hell!
"How far have you come along on it?" she asked. She whirled from the window, went back to the love seat and collapsed into it. The movement was not a gracious one. It was feline, however. She sprawled in the love seat like a big jungle cat, and then she tucked her legs under her again, and he would not have been surprised if she'd begun purring in that moment.
He told her what they thought they knew about the suspected killer. Alice nodded.
"Quite a bit to go on," she said.
"Not really."
"I mean, if he should seek a doctor's aid."
"He hasn't yet. Chances are he won't. He probably dressed the wound himself."
"Badly shot?"
"Apparently. But clean."
"Hank should have killed him," she said. Surprisingly, there was no viciousness attached to the words. The words themselves bore all the lethal potential of a coiled rattler, but the delivery made them harmless.
"Yes," Carella agreed. "He should have."
"But he didn't."
"No."
"What's your next step?" she asked.
"Oh, I don't know. Homicide North is up a tree on these killings, and I guess we are, too. I've got a few ideas kicking around, though."
"A lead?" she asked.
"No. Just ideas."
"What kind of ideas?"
"They'd bore you."
"My husband's been killed," Alice said coldly. "I assure you I will not be bored by anything that may lead to finding his killer."
"Well, I'd prefer not to air any ideas until I know what I'm talking about."
Alice smiled. "That's different. You haven't touched your drink."
He raised the glass to his lips. The drink was very strong.
"Wow!" he said. "You don't spare the alcohol, do you?"
"Hank liked his strong," she said. "He liked everything strong."
And again, like an interwoven thread of personality, a personality dictated by the demands of a body that could look nothing but blatantly inviting, Alice Bush had inadvertently lighted another fuse. He had the feeling that she would suddenly explode into a thousand flying fragments of breast and hip and thigh, splashed over the landscape like a Dali painting.
"I'd better be getting along," he said. 'The City doesn't pay me for sipping drinks all morning."
"Stay a while," she said. "I have a few ideas myself."
He glanced up quickly, almost suspecting an edge of double entendre in her voice. He was mistaken. She had turned away from him and was looking out the window again, her face in profile, her body in profile.
"Let me hear them," he said.
"A cop hater," she replied.
"Maybe."
"It has to be. Who else would senselessly take three lives? It has to be a cop hater, Steve. Doesn't Homicide North think so?"
"I haven't talked to them in the past few days. That's what they thought in the beginning, I know."
"What do they think now?"
"That's hard to say."
"What do you think now?"
"Maybe a cop hater. Reardon and Foster, yes, a cop hater. But Hank... I don't know."
"I'm not sure I follow you."
"Well, Reardon and Foster were partners, so we could assume that possibly some jerk was carrying a grudge against them. They worked together . . . maybe they rubbed some idiot the wrong way."
"Yes?"
"But Hank never worked with them. Oh, well maybe not never. Maybe once or twice on a plant or something. He never made an important arrest with either of them along, though. Our records show that."
"Who says it has to be someone with a personal grudge, Steve? This may simply be some goddamned lunatic." She seemed to be getting angry. He didn't know why she was getting angry because she'd certainly been calm enough up to this point. But her breath was coming heavier now, and her breasts heaved disconcertingly. "Just some crazy, rotten, twisted fool who's taken it into his mind to knock off every cop in the 87th Precinct. Does that sound so far-fetched?"