"Hey!" he yells. "Hey!"
The guy keeps coming. The blonde looks up because she hears the yell, she thinks at first Halligan is the one to worry about, Halligan is the one yelling, Halligan is the crazy lunatic in this city full of crazy lunatics, Halligan is coming at her from the corner, yelling at her, Hey, hey, hey! She hasn't yet seen the guy in black, she doesn't yet know that a gun is pointed at her head, she doesn't yet realize that the threat is angling in on her from diagonally across the street, ten feet away from her now, eight feet . . .
"Hey!" he yells again. "Stop!"
... six feet away, four feet . . .
And the gun goes off. Bam, bam on the wet night air, bam again, and again, four shots shattering the steady patter of the rain. "Hey!" he yells, and the man turns to face him squarely, the blonde tumbling in slow motion to the sidewalk behind him, the man turning in slow motion, everything suddenly in slow motion, the blonde falling, crumbling in slow motion, the rain coming down in slow motion, each silvery streak sharp and clear against the blackness of the night, the gun swinging around in slow motion, a yellow flash at its muzzle as it goes off, the explosion following it in seeming slow motion, reverberating on the rain-laden air, he thinks Jesus Christl and the gun goes off again.
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He is already hurling himself to the sidewalk and rolling away, he has seen a lot of movies, not for nothing is he a drama student. He rolls away toward the opposite side of the gun hand, the gunman is right-handed, the pistol is in his right hand, he does not roll into the gun, he rolls away from it, you have to watch movies carefully. He expects another shot, he has not been counting, when you are about to wet your pants you don't count shots exploding on the night. He knows he will be dead in the next ten seconds, suspects that the blonde lying in a bleeding crumpled heap on the sidewalk is already dead, hears the man's footfalls in the rain, pattering through the pattering rain ...
A woman, Carella thinks.
... to where he is lying against the brick wall of the building now, waiting for the fatal shot, it's a miracle he hasn't been shot yet, it's a miracle he isn't already dead.
He hears a click and another click and the word Shitl whispered on the night, hissing on the night, and the man turns and runs, he does not see the man running, he only hears the footfalls on the night, in the rain, rushing away, fading, fading, and finally gone. He lies against the wall trembling, and then at last he gets to his feet and realizes that he has in fact either wet his pants or else he was lying in a puddle against the wall. He looks into the darkness, into the rain. The man is gone.
"Could it have been a woman?" Carella asked.
"No, it was very definitely a man," Halligan said.
"Are you sure he was right-handed?" Brown asked.
"Positive."
"The gun was in his right hand?"
"Yes."
"What'd you do then?" Brown asked. "After he was gone."
"I came over here and told the doorman what I'd just seen."
"I called nine-eleven right away," the doorman said.
"You're sure this wasn't a woman, huh?" Carella asked.
"Positive."
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"Okay," Carella said, and thought maybe it was only the reference to Tony Perkins in drag. "I called nine-eleven right away," the doorman said again.
They found Betsy Schumacher the very next day.
Or rather, she found them.
It was still raining.
Brown and Carella were just about to leave for the day. The shift had been relieved at a quarter to four, and it was a quarter past when she came into the squadroom, dripping wet in a yellow rain slicker and a yellow rain hat, straight blonde hair cascading down on either side of her face.
"I'm Betsy Schumacher," she said. "I understand you've been looking for me."
Betsy Schumacher. Arther Schumacher's alienated daughter. Whom they'd been trying to locate ever since her father's murder, because - for one reason - she'd been named in his will as the legatee of twenty-five percent of his estate.
So here she was.
As blue-eyed as the blue out of which she'd appeared.
"I read about Margaret in the newspaper," she said.
So had everyone else in this city. The newspapers were clearly having a ball with this one. First a beautiful blonde bimbo in a love nest, then her elderly lover, and then the elderly lover's equally beautiful and equally blonde wife. Such was the stuff of which American headlines were made. But when you're in love, the whole world's blonde, Carella figured, because here was yet another beauty wearing neither lipstick nor eye shadow, the slicker and hat a brighter yellow than her honey-colored hair, cornflower eyes wide in a face the shape of her sister's and - come to think of it - her mother's as well. Betsy Schumacher, how do you do?
"I figured I'd better come up here," she said, and shrugged elaborately. "Before you started getting ideas."
The shrug seemed all the more girlish in that she was thirty-nine years old. This was no teenager standing here, despite the dewy complexion and the freshness of her looks. Her own
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father had called her an aging hippie, and her mother had corroborated the description: Betsy is a thirty-nine-year-old hippie, and this is July. She could be anywhere.
"Where've you been, Miss Schumacher?" Carella asked.
"Vermont," she said.
"When did you go up there?"
"Last Sunday. Right after the funeral. I had some heavy thinking to do."
He wondered if she'd been thinking about how she would spend her money.
"How'd you learn we were looking for you?"
"Mom told me."
"Did she call you, or what?" Brown asked.
A trick question. Gloria Sanders had told them she didn't know where her daughter was.
"I called her," Betsy said. "When I read about Margaret."
"When was that?"
"Yesterday."
"How'd your mother feel about it?"
"Gleeful," Betsy said, and grinned mischievously. "So did I, in fact."
"And she told you we wanted to see you?"
"Yeah. So I figured I'd better come on down. Okay to take off my coat?"
"Sure," Carella said.
She undipped the fasteners on the front of the slicker and slipped it off her shoulders and arms. She was wearing a faded denim mini, somewhat tattered sandals, and a thin, white cotton T-shirt with the words save the whales printed across its front. She wasn't wearing a bra. Her nipples puckered the words save on her right breast and whale on her left breast, the word the falling someplace on her neutral sternum. She did not take off the hat. It sat floppily on her head, like a wilted wet sunflower, its petals framing her face. She looked around for a place to hang the slicker, spotted a coatrack near the water cooler in the corner, carried the slicker to it, hung it on one of the pegs, had herself a drink of water while she was
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at it - bending over the fountain, denim skirt tightening over her buttocks - and then came back to where the detectives were waiting for her. There was a faint secret smile on her face, as if she knew they'd been admiring her ass, which in fact they had been doing, married men though they both were.
"So what would you like to know?" she asked, sitting in the chair beside Carella's desk and crossing her legs, the skirt riding up recklessly. "I didn't kill the bimbo, and I didn't kill Mrs Schumacher, either ..."
Same malicious twist to the dead woman's true and courteous title . . .
"And I certainly didn't kill the fucking mutt."