"The relationship continued even after you moved back here? I understand you live here now."
"Yes, although I go to New York every few weeks, to talk with dealers. I represent both myself and several other potters to the New York galleries. I'd usually stay at Alie'e's apartment."
"Not always?"
"Not always. We both continued to have other relationshipswith men as well as women." She was looking at Lucas again. "Neither one of us thought of ourselves as primarily lesbian; we were just very good friends and our friendship had a physical component to it. If she had a man over, then I would stay someplace else. Usually up on Central Park South, so I could walk to the galleries on Fifty-seventh Street and over on Madison Avenue."
"Did you have a sexual encounter with Miz Maison last night at the party?" Sloan asked.
Another quick glance at the lawyer. "Yes."
"You were alone with her?"
"No. There were three of us. The other woman is Catherine Kinsley, who I believe is up north at her cabin with her husband. I haven't been able to reach her." She flushed for the first time. "This is not heavy duty masculine-style sexuality. This is more like cuddling, kissing, talking with each other."
"But there was a physical component."
"Yes."
"What happened afterwards? How was she when you left?"
"Sleepy. We were all sleepy, but she'd gotten up very early for her photo shoot, and had to get up the next day, and SillySilly Hansonsaid she could sleep there, and so we left her. She was okay."
"And neither you nor Miz Kinsley saw her again."
"No. Well, I don't know if Catherine saw her, because, like I said, I haven't been able to reach her this morning. I couldn't find her number, and I don't know exactly where the cabin is. Anyway, I don't think she saw her. We walked out to our cars together, said good-bye, and I went home. Your police people woke me up."
"Miz Maison injected heroin around the time of your encounter. Were you present for that?"
"No." Quick and definite, Lucas thought. She'd known the question was coming.
Sloan continued. "You didn't know that she was using heroin?"
A slight hesitation, another glance at the attorney, and, "I thought she might be tripping when we met in the bedroom. She was languid. She was the way you get when you're using. But I wasn't there when she injected, and I don't think she had much, because she didn't fall asleep or anything, not while we were there. It was more like a a party favor."
"A party favor," Lucas said.
"Yeah. That's what people call them. Some people call them short popsyou know, if you want the effect but don't want to get addicted."
"You get addicted anyway," Sloan said.
Corbeau flipped her head. "You know that's not true. That's just a political position."
Sloan looked at Lucas, who raised his eyebrows, and Sloan said, "I'm not here to argue with you, but just for the record, Miz Corbeau: Short pops will addict you as fast as anything. Believe me or don't believe me. But that's the way it is."
She shook her head, and Sloan said, "I don't want to embarrass you, but I've got to ask this question. The medical examiner tells us that Miz Maison has small light scratches around her vulva, and light bruising, as if she'd been involved in a fairly active. sexual encounter involving manual stimulation and perhaps oral stimulation Would that have characterized your encounter?"
She flushed again, looked at them quickly, one at a time, taking them in. Lucas, still feeling the effect she had on his breathing, squirmed; he felt like a pervert. She didn't help; she asked, "Do you guys get off on this sort of thing?"
Sloan, his face a monk's stolid mask, shook his head. "Sitting in a room like this, full of metal tables and tile floors, this is not very sexual, Miz Corbeau. We need to know, because we need to know if she had another sexual contact after yours, or if yours was most likely the cause of the scratching and bruising. Miz Maison was strangled, which frequently is associated with sexual activity."
"Okay," she said. "Yes, it's possible that she was scratched. Especially by Catherine. Catherine can be a little rough, and she had long nails. I keep mine very short because of my job."
"You're a potter."
"Yes."
"And you had nothing to do with the death of Alie'e Maison?"
"No, I did not." She bit her lip as the words came out, and her chin trembled. To Lucas, she seemed shaken.
"Do you think your brother might have?" Lucas interjected.
She looked at him, a frown flickering across her face, and then said, "No. If Amnon was going to go after somebody, it'd be me."
"Why you?"
"We have a personal problem."
"He told us about your relationship," Lucas said. "You think that could turn to violence? The breakup?"
She turned away, looking at the floor, twisting her fingers together. "Amnon has violence in him. He wouldn't have killed Alie'e, because he had no regard for her. He didn't care about her. You'd have to have some feeling for a person before you killed her, wouldn't you?"
"No," Lucas said. "Not if you're psychologically disturbed. People who are disturbed may kill to change the way they feel about something. The person killed may be a complete stranger, if the killing somehow medicates the disturbed person."
"God, that's awful."
"Yes. Your brother?"
"No. He's not disturbed that way. I know him well enough to say that."
"How did you get your names?" Swanson asked.
"Our parents were hippies, they went from one thing to another, and they eventually tried out Judaism. Amnon and I were born during that period. They're Bible names."
"I'm a Catholic," Lucas said. "We weren't big on Bibles when I was a kid. Do the names mean something?"
"Jael was maybe a sorceress. Deborah fought Sisera, the Canaanite, and defeated him, and Sisera fled the battlefield and hid in Jael's tent. When he was asleep, she killed him by driving a tent peg through his head."
"Ouch," Lucas said. A tiny flicker of a smile on her sad face? "How about Amnon?"
"Amnon was one of Solomon's sons," Corbeau said.
"What, he was wise?"
"No, no," she said. "He slept with his sister." She scanned the four men, Lucas, Sloan, Swanson, and her own attorney, showed a flicker of a sad smile again, and said, "Were my parents prophets, or what?"
When they were done, they milled in the hallway outside the interview room, and Lucas asked Jael, "Why'd you quit modeling?"
"You think I shouldn't have?"
"I think you could have continued," he said. She made him feel like a provincial clown, and he kind of liked it.
"It's boring," she said. "It's like making movies, except they don't pay you enough."
"Movies are boring?"
"Movies are fuckin' nightmares," she said. She laughed, and grasped his arm, just for a second; she was the kind of woman who liked to touch people, Lucas thought. "Shooting a movie is like watching grass grow."
When Jael and her lawyer left, Lucas and Sloan walked back to homicide. Frank Lester was talking to Rose Marie, and waved Lucas over.
"How'd you guys do?" he asked.
Lucas shrugged. "There's a lot of motive floating around, but not that points at Alie'e or Lansing."
"Who, then?" Rose Marie asked.
"Everybody," Lucas said. "We've got incest, jealousy, drugs, love triangles. You name it, we got it. But nothing that points at anyone."
"That's what I was telling Rose Marie," Lester said. "We've got so many suspects that it's turning into a technical problem. We've got fifty-four people for the party now, and there'll be more. How in the hell do you really interview more than fifty people, and do a good job of it? Who do you push, and how hard? The thing is, if the killer was at the party, and he's our forty-fifth interview there's no feel to it anymore."
"You're asking everybody to point at somebody else?" Lucas asked.
"Yeah, but they're all lying through their teeth. Nobody knew that everybody was using drugs Anyway, we've only been able toprobably eliminate a half-dozen people who left the party when Alie'e was still circulating. With that open window, we can't eliminate anyone who left after Alie'e went back to the bedroom. Somebody might have unlocked the window for the purpose of leaving, and coming back later."