"How much money?"
"I don't know the exact amount. A lot. But I know that neither of my daughters killed him for his money. Or for any reason at all, for that matter."
Both detectives were thinking that the only two reasons for doing murder were love or money. And hate was the other side of the love coin.
"How about you?" Brown asked. "Are you in that will?"
"No."
"Would you know if the present Mrs Schumacher . . .?"
"I have no idea. Why don't you ask her? Or better yet, ask Arthur's beloved partner, Lou Loeb. I'm sure he'll know all there is to know about it."
"Getting back to your daughter," Brown said. "Betsy. Did you talk to her after the funeral on Sunday?"
"No."
"When did you talk to her last?"
"I guess the day after he got killed."
"That would've been Saturday," Carella said.
"I suppose. It was on television, it was in all the papers. Betsy called and asked me what I thought about it."
"What'd you tell her?"
"I told her good riddance to bad rubbish."
"How'd she feel about it?"
"Ambivalent. She wanted to know whether she should go to the funeral. I told her she should do what she felt like doing."
"Apparently she decided to go."
"Apparently. But when we talked, she wasn't certain."
133
"Did she mention where she'd been the night before?" Carella asked.
"No games," Gloria reminded him.
He smiled.
"How about Lois?" he asked. "Did she call you, too?"
"Yes. Well, this was a shocking thing, a man gunned down right outside his apartment. Although in this city, it's starting to be the norm, isn't it?"
"Any city," Brown said, suddenly defensive.
"Not like here," Gloria said.
"Yes, like here," he said.
"When did Lois call you?" Carella asked.
"Saturday morning."
"To talk about her father?"
"Of course."
"How'd you feel about her continuing relationship with him?"
"I didn't like it. That doesn't mean I killed him."
"How'd she seem? When she called?"
"Seem?"
"Was she in tears, did she seem in . . ."
"No, she ..."
"... control of herself?"
"Yes."
"What'd she say?"
"She said she'd just read about it in the paper. She was surprised that her stepmother" - giving the word an angry spin - "hadn't called her about it, she was sure she must have known before then."
"You don't like Mrs Schumacher very much, do you?"
"I loathe her. She stole my husband from me. She ruined my marriage and my life."
Carella nodded.
"But I didn't kill him," she said.
"Then you won't mind telling us where you were Friday night," he said, and smiled.
134
"Games again," she said, and did not return the smile. "I was home. Watching television."
"Anyone with you?"
"No, I was alone," she said. "I'm a sixty-year-old grass widow, a bitter, unpleasant woman who doesn't get invited out very often. Arthur did that to me. I never forgave him for it, and I'm glad he's dead. But I didn't kill him."
"What were you watching?" Brown asked.
"A baseball game."
"Who was playing?"
"The Yankees and the Minnesota Twins."
"Where?"
"In Minnesota."
"Who won?"
"The Twins. Two to one. I watched the news afterward. And then I went to bed."
"You still have no idea where we can find Betsy, huh?" Carella said.
"None."
"You'd tell us if you knew, right?"
"Absolutely."
"Then I guess that's it," he said. "Thank you very much, Ms Sanders, we appreciate your time."
"I'll walk you out," she said, and rose ponderously and wearily. "Catch a cigarette in the alley," she added in a lower voice. And winked.
The trouble with a name like Sonny was that too many criminals seemed to favor it. This was a phenomenon neither Bent nor Wade quite understood. As kids growing up in the inner city, they had known their share of blacks named Sonny, but they hadn't realized till now just how popular the nickname was. Nor had they realized that its popularity crossed ethnic and racial barriers to create among criminals a widespread preference that was akin to an epidemic.
Bent and Wade were looking for a black Sonny.
This made their job a bit more difficult.
135
For whereas the computer spewed out a great many Sonnys who'd originally been Seymours or Stanislaws or Sandors, it appeared that blacks and people of Italian heritage led the pack in preferring the nickname Sonny to given names like Seward or Simmons or Salvatore or Silvano.
The detectives were further looking for a black Sonny who may or may not have had an armed-robbery arrest record. This made their job even more difficult in that the computer printed out a list of thirty-seven black Sonnys who within the past three years had done holdups in this city alone. As a sidelight, only six of those Sonnys were listed as wearing tattoos, a percentage much lower than that for the general armed-robber population, white, black, or indifferent. They did not bother with a nationwide search, which might have kept them sitting at the computer all day long.
Eight of the thirty-seven black armed robbers named Sonny were men who'd been born during the two years that Sonny Liston was the world's heavyweight boxing champion and considered a worthy role model. They were now all in their late twenties, and Wade and Bent were looking for a black Sonny who'd been described as being in his twenties. They knew that to most white men all black men looked alike. That was the difficulty in getting a white man to identify a black man from a photograph - especially a police photograph, which did not exactly qualify as a studio portrait. Dominick Assanti was no different from any other white man they'd ever known. To Dominick, only two black men were instantly recognizable: Eddie Murphy and Bill Cosby. All other black men, including Morgan Freeman and Danny Glover, looked alike. To Assanti, Bent and Wade probably looked alike, too.
First they showed him each of the eight mug shots one by one.
"Recognize any of them?" they asked.
Assanti did not recognize any of the men in the mug shots.
He commented once that he would not like to meet this guy in a dark alley.
Wade and Bent agreed.
136
Then they placed the mug shots on the table side by side, all eight of them, and asked him to pick out the three Sonnys who most resembled the Sonny who'd run past him with a gun in his fist on the night of the Carella murder.
Assanti said none of them looked like the man he'd seen.
"Are you sure?" Bent asked.
"I'm positive," Assanti said. "The one I seen had a scar on his face."
"Ah," Bent said.
So it was back to the computer again, this time with new information. Recognizing the difficulty of judging a man's age when he's rushing by you at night with a gun in his hand, the gun taking on more immediacy than the year of his birth, they dropped the age qualification. Recognizing, too, that the bakery shop holdup did not necessarily indicate a history of armed robbery, they dropped this qualification as well and ran a citywide search for any black man convicted of a felony within the past five years, provided he was named Sonny and had a scar on his face. They turned up sixty-four of them. This was not surprising.
It was almost impossible to grow up black in the inner city without one day acquiring a scar of one sort or another. And because keloids - scars that extend and spread beyond the original wound - were more prevalent in black skin than in white, these scars were usually highly visible. The knife scar over Wade's left eye was a keloid. He'd been told it could be treated with radiation therapy combined with surgery and injection of steroids into the lesion. He'd opted to wear the scar for the rest of his life. Actually, it didn't hurt in his line of work.