He looked at her. The tears were still streaming down his face, he could still remember how funny this had seemed a moment ago.
"Mr Valdez?" she said.
He kept looking at her.
"Please let me have the gun."
Still looking at her. Weeping now. For all the laughter that was gone. For all those days on the beach long ago.
"Please?" she said.
For all the pretty little girls, gone now.
He nodded.
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She held out her hands to him, palms up.
He put the gun into her hands.
Their eyes locked.
She went into the apartment, the gun hanging loose at her side, the barrels pointing toward the floor, and she leaned into the old man where he sat frail and weeping in the hardbacked chair, and she kissed him on his grizzled cheek and whispered, "Thank you," and wondered if she'd kept her promise to him after all.
Gloria Sanders was covered with blood.
This was ten o'clock on the morning of July twenty-fifth in the nurses' lounge at Farley General Hospital, downtown on Meriden Street. Her white uniform was covered with blood, and there were also flecks of blood in her blonde hair and on her face. They'd had a severe bleeder in the Emergency Room not ten minutes earlier, and Gloria had been part of the team of nurses who, working with the resident, had tried to stanch the flow of blood. There'd been blood all over the table, bed, blood on the walls, blood everywhere, she had never seen anyone spurting so much blood in her life.
"A stabbing victim," she told Carella and Brown. "He came in with a patch over the wound. The minute we peeled it off, he began gushing."
She was dying for a cigarette now, she told them, but smoking was against hospital rules, even though the people who'd made the rule had never worked in an emergency room or seen a gusher like the one they'd had this morning. Or the kid yesterday, who'd fallen under a subway car and had both his legs severed just above the knee. A miracle either of them was still alive. And they wouldn't let her smoke a goddamn cigarette.
Arthur Schumacher's taste for blue-eyed blondes seemed to go back a long way. His former wife's eyes were the color of cobalt, her hair an extravagant yellow that blatantly advertised
its origins in a bottle. Slender and some five feet six or seven inches tall, Gloria strongly resembled the one daughter they'd already met, but there was a harder edge to her. She'd been around a while, her face said, her body said, her entire stance said. Life had done worse things to her than being bled on by a stabbing victim, her eyes said.
"So what can I do for you?" she asked, and the words sounded confrontational and openly challenging. I've seen it all and done it all, so watch out, boys. I'd as soon kick you in the groin as look at you. Blue eyes studying them warily. Blonde hair bright as brass, clipped short and neat around her head, giving her a stern, forbidding look. This was not the honey-blonde hair her daughter Lois had; if this woman were approaching you at night, you'd see her a block away. She reminded Carella of burned-out prison matrons he had known. So what can I do for you?
"Mrs Sanders," he said, "we went..."
"Ms Sanders," she corrected.
"Sorry," Carella said.
"Mm," she said.
It sounded like a grunt of disapproval.
"We went to your daughter's apartment on Rodman this morning ..."
Eyes watching them.
"The address we have for her on Rodman," Brown said.
"... and the super told us he hadn't seen her for the past several days."
"Betsy," she said, and nodded curtly.
"Yes."
"I'm not surprised. Betsy comes and goes like the wind."
"We're eager to talk to her," Carella said.
"Why?"
Leaning forward in the leather chair. The walls of the lounge painted white. She hadn't had a chance to wash before coming to talk to them; there were tiny flecks of blood in her yellow hair. Blood on the front of the white uniform. Blood
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on the white shoes, too, Brown noticed. He tried to visualize the bleeder. Most bleeders he'd seen were already dead.
"We understand she didn't get along with your former husband," Carella said.
"So what?" Gloria said. "Neither did I."
The challenge again. Is that why you're here? Because I didn't get along with my husband who's now dead from four bullets in the head?
"That is true, isn't it?" Carella said. "That your daughter ..."
"She didn't kill him," Gloria said flatly.
"No one said she did," Carella said.
"Oh no?" she said, and pulled a face. "There are cops all over the ER every day of the week," she said, "uniformed cops, plainclothes cops, all kinds of cops. There isn't a cop in the world who doesn't first look to the family when there's any kind of trouble. I hear the questions they ask, they always want to know who got along with whom. Man's got a bullet in his belly, they're asking him did he get along with his wife. So don't lie to me about this, okay? Don't tell me we're not suspects. You know we are."
"Who do you mean, Ms Sanders?"
"I mean Betsy, and me, and maybe even Lois, for all I know."
"Why would you think that?"
"I don't think that. You're the ones who think it."
"Why would we think it?"
"Let's not play games here, Officer. You told me a minute ago that you understood Betsy didn't get along with her father. So what does that mean? What are you, a social worker looking for a reconciliation? You're a cop, am I right? A detective investigating a murder. Arthur was killed, and his daughter didn't get along with him. So let's find her and ask her where she was last Friday night, Saturday night, whenever the hell it was, I don't know and I don't care. No games. Please. I'm too tired for games."
"Okay, no games," Carella said. He was beginning to like
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her. "Where's your daughter? She was at her father's funeral on Sunday, and now she's gone. Where is she?"
"I don't know. I told you. She comes and goes."
"Where does she go to or come from?" Brown asked. He didn't like her at all. He'd had a teacher like her in the fourth grade. She used to hit him on the hands with a ruler.
"This is the summertime. In the summer, hippies migrate. They cover the earth like locusts. Betsy is a thirty-nine-year-old hippie, and this is July. She could be anywhere."
"Like where anywhere?" Brown insisted.
"How the hell should I know? You're the cop, you find her."
"Ms Sanders," Carella said, "no games, okay? Please. I'm too tired for games. Your daughter hated him, and she hated his dog, and both of them are . . ."
"Who says so?"
"What do you mean?"
"That she hated the dog."
"Lois. Your daughter Lois. Why? Didn't Betsy hate the dog?"
"Betsy seemed to hate the dog, yes."
"Then why'd you question it?"
"I simply wanted to know who'd told you. I thought it might have been her." Almost snarling the word.
"Who do you mean?" Brown asked.
"Haven't you talked to her yet? His precious peroxide blonde?"
Pot calling the kettle, Carella thought.
"Do you mean Mrs Schumacher?" he asked.
"Mrs Schumacher, yes," she said, the word curling her upper lip into a sneer. She flushed red for a moment, as if containing anger, and then she said, "I thought she might have been the one who told you Betsy hated that dumb dog."
"How'd you feel about that dumb dog?" Carella asked.
"Never had the pleasure," Gloria said. "And I thought we weren't going to play games."
"We won't."
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"Good. Look, let me make it easier for you, okay? I hated Arthur for what he did to me, but I didn't kill him. Betsy hated him for much the same reasons, but I'm sure she didn't kill him, either. I know you'll find out about the will, so I might as well tell you right now that I wouldn't grant a divorce until I made sure both my daughters were in his will for fifty percent of his estate. That's twenty-five percent each, which in Arthur's case comes to a hell of a lot of money."