"Marilyn Hollis had nothing to do with either of those murders!" Willis said heatedly.
"I'm not convinced of that. Neither is the lieutenant."
"You've got no reason to believe she…"
"I've got no reason to believe otherwise, either. What the hell's wrong with you, Hal? You know she's a suspect!"
"Who says? In my book, if someone has an airtight alibi for…"
"You know what you can do with airtight alibis, don't you? Some of the best killers I've known had airtight…"
"She's not a killer!" Willis shouted.
The room went silent.
"What do we do here?" Carella said at last. "You're living with the woman, do we have to keep our thoughts on the case…?"
"I don't care what you do," Willis said.
"If we've got a situation here where anything we say in the squadroom goes straight back to…"
"I haven't said or done anything to jeopardize this investigation!"
The room went silent again.
"I want to talk to her," Carella said. "Do I arrange an appointment through you?"
"No one's telling you how to run your case."
"I thought it was our case."
"It is," Willis said. "We just have different ideas on who's a suspect and who isn't."
"Is she home now?" Carella asked.
"She was when I left."
"Then if you don't mind, I'd like to go over there."
"I suggest you call first."
"Hal…" Carella started, and then merely shook his head.
He left Willis sitting at the long table in the Interrogation Room, the two-way mirror behind him.
"What is it you want to know?" she asked Carella.
She was wearing blue jeans and a man's shirt. Carella wondered if the shirt was Willis's. They were in the paneled living room. The house was silent at eleven o'clock in the morning, thick walls insulating the room from the sounds of traffic outside. It was difficult to remember she'd taken a fall for prostitution. She looked like a teenager. Flawless skin, alert blue eyes, no makeup on her face, not even lipstick. But you could apply the Multiple Mouse Rule here. If you saw one mouse in your barn, that meant you had a hundred. If a girl took one fall for hooking, you could bet she'd already turned a thousand tricks.
"About Basil Hollander," he said.
"What about him?"
"How'd you happen to know him?"
"Biblically," she said, and smiled.
Hooker's trick. Take the curse off intimacy by joking about it.
"So you told us," he said drily. "How'd you meet him?"
"Why do you want to know this, Mr. Carella?"
"He was a friend of yours," Carella said. "He's dead. Another friend of yours is also dead. I know you'll forgive our curiosity…"
"I don't appreciate sarcasm," she said. "Why don't you like me?"
"I neither like you nor dislike you, Miss Hollis, I'm a cop doing…"
"Oh, please, spare me the cop-doing-his-job routine, will you? I got enough of that from Hal."
Hal. Well, of course. What else would she call him? Detective Willis?
"Why don't you like me?" she said again. "Is it because we're living together?"
Straight to the point. Never mind the other point, the fact that he'd asked her how she'd met Hollander, and she still hadn't answered him.
"Hal's business is Hal's business," he said. Which wasn't what he'd told Willis less than an hour ago. "My business is…"
"I thought you and Hal were in the same business."
"I thought so, too," Carella said.
"But you don't think so anymore, huh? Because he's living with someone who may be a coldblooded killer, isn't that right?"
"You said it, not me."
"But that's what you think, isn't it? That I may have killed both Jerry and Baz?"
"I have no evidence to support…"
"We're not talking about evidence here," she said. "The evidence indicates that I was nowhere near either of them when they were killed. That's the evidence, Mr. Carella. We're talking about gut feeling, aren't we? What's your gut feeling? You think I may have killed them, don't you?"
"I think my job is to…"
"Yes, here we go with your job again."
"Which you're not making any easier," Carella said.
"Oh? How so? By living with your partner?"
"No, by not answering a question I asked you five minutes ago."
"Has it been five minutes already?" she said. "My, how the time flies when you're having a good time."
"Why don't you like me?" he asked.
"I've met you before, Mr. Carella. You're every cop I've ever met. With the exception of Hal. You think if a person's ever been in trouble with the law, he'll always be in trouble with the law. A leopard never changes its spots, right, Mr. Carella? Once a hooker, always a hooker."
"If that's what you want to believe about me, fine. Meanwhile, how'd you meet Basil Hollander?"
"At a concert," she said, and sighed.
"Where?"
"The Philharmonic."
"When?"
"Last June."
"Just met accidentally?"
"During intermission. We started talking about the program, and I discovered we shared the same tastes in music. We hit it off immediately."
"And began seeing each other when?"
"He called me the next week. He had tickets to the opera. I don't particularly care for opera, but I went with him, anyway, and we had a marvelous time." She smiled and said, "Though I still don't care for opera."
Very refined tastes, he thought. Hookers in Houston naturally went to the Philharmonic a lot, but not the opera. He squelched the thought. Maybe she was right about him. Maybe he'd been a cop too long and was jumping to conclusions based on knowledge he'd thought entirely empirical. But he'd never met either a reformed hooker or a reformed armed robber. He'd never met an armed robber who attended symphonies, either. Or operas.
Out of deference to Willis, he did not ask her when she'd started sleeping with Hollander. This bothered him. He was already compromising the investigation. Ordinarily, the intensity of a relationship between a man and a woman was of prime importance in a murder case, especially one of the Boy-Meets-Girl variety. Instead, he said, "He was an accountant, is that right?"
"You know he was," she said.
"When did you learn this?"
"That he was an accountant?" she asked, looking surprised. "Of what possible interest…?"
"Did he ever do any accounting work for you?"
"No. What? Basil?"
"You do have an accountant, don't you?"
"I do."
"Who is he?"
"A man named Marc Aronstein."
"How long has he been your accountant?"
"I hired him when I came here from Buenos Aires."
"Buenos Aires?"
"I thought Hal might have mentioned it."
"No."
"I was hooking in Buenos Aires."
"I see," he said. "How long were you doing that?"
"Five years."
"And in Houston."
"Only a year. I left shortly after I got busted."
Longer history than he'd thought. Willis had picked himself a real winner.
"Went directly to Argentina from Houston?" he asked.
"No. I went to Mexico first."
"Were you hooking there, too?"
"No," she said, and smiled. "Just sightseeing."
"For how long?"
"Six months or so."
"How old are you, Miss Hollis?"
"You're the detective, I'll let you figure it out. I left home three months before my sixteenth birthday, went to L.A. where I lived for a bit more than a year before heading for Houston."
"Why Houston?"
"I thought I might apply for admission to Rice."