Widows

by Ed McBain

  Hawes guessed the doorman considered Friday night a weeknight. Hawes himself considered it the start of the weekend. He would be spending this weekend with Annie Rawles. Lately, he had been spending most of his weekends

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  with Annie Rawles. He wondered if this could be considered serious. To tell the truth, it was a little frightening.

  "What happened then?" Willis asked.

  "He started walking up the street," the doorman said. "With the dog."

  "Where were you?"

  "I went back inside."

  "Did you see anyone before you went back in?"

  "Nobody."

  "Across the street? Or up the block?"

  "Nobody."

  "When did you hear the shots?"

  "Almost the minute I went back in the building. Well, maybe a few seconds later, no more than that."

  "You knew they were shots, huh?"

  "I know shots when I hear them. I was in Nam."

  "How many shots?"

  "Sounded like a full clip to me. The dog got shot, too, you know. Nice gentle dog. Why would anyone want to kill a dog?"

  Why would anyone want to kill a human"? Willis wondered.

  "You'll want these," one of the technicians said, walking over. He was wearing jeans, white sneakers, and a white T-shirt. He handed Willis a small manila envelope printed with the word evidence. "Four bullets," he said. "Must've went on through."

  Overhead, there was a sudden flash of lightning.

  "Gonna rain," the doorman observed.

  "Thanks," Willis said to the technician, and took the envelope, and sealed it, and put it in the right-hand pocket of his jacket. Hawes looked at his watch. It was a quarter past eleven. He wondered how they could reach Mrs Schumacher. He didn't want to hang around here all night.

  "You have a number for them out on the Iodines?" he asked.

  "No, I'm sorry, I don't. Maybe the super has. But he won't be in till tomorrow morning."

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  "What time tomorrow?"

  "He's usually here by eight."

  "Would you know which island?"

  "I'm sorry, I don't know that, either."

  "Was the dog barking or anything?" Willis asked.

  "I didn't hear the dog barking."

  "Did you hear Mr Schumacher say anything?"

  "Nothing. All I heard was the shots."

  "What then?"

  "I came running outside."

  "And?"

  "I looked up and down the street to see where the shots had come from ..."

  "Uh-huh."

  "... and saw Mr Schumacher laying on the sidewalk there." He glanced toward where the technicians had chalked the outline of Schumacher's body on the pavement. "With the dog laying beside him," he said. The technicians had not chalked the dog's outline on the sidewalk. "Both of them laying there. So I ran over, and I knew right away they were both dead. Mr Schumacher and the dog."

  "What was the dog's name?" Willis asked.

  Hawes looked at him.

  "Amos," the doorman said.

  Willis nodded. Hawes was wondering why he'd wanted to know the dog's name. He was also wondering where they'd taken the dog. They didn't take murdered dogs to the morgue for autopsy, did they?

  "Did you see anyone at that time?" Willis asked.

  "No one. The street was empty."

  "Uh-huh."

  The technicians were still working the scene. Hawes wondered how long they'd be here. Another lightning flash crazed the sky. There was a crash of thunder. When it rained, the blood would be washed away.

  "Was she carrying a suitcase when she left?" he asked. "Mrs Schumacher?"

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  "Yes, sir, a small suitcase."

  "So you're pretty sure she went out to the Iodines, huh?"

  "Well, I can't swear to it, but that's my guess, yes, sir."

  Hawes sighed.

  "What do you want to do?" he asked Willis.

  "Finish up here, then start the canvass. If we can't get a phone listing for her, we'll just have to talk to the super in the morning."

  "Tomorrow's my day off," Hawes said.

  "Mine, too," Willis said.

  Something in his voice made it sound as if he was wondering what he would do on his day off.

  Hawes looked at him again.

  "Well," Willis said to the doorman, "thanks a lot, we'll get in touch with you if we have any more questions."

  "Okay, fine," the doorman said, and looked again at the chalked outline on the pavement.

  Suddenly, it was raining.

  On Saturday morning, the twenty-first day of July, Steve Carella went back to work. The first thing he found on his desk was a copy of a Detective Division report signed by Detective/Third Grade Harold O. Willis and written by him before he'd left the squadroom at one o'clock this morning. At that time, he had not yet been able to contact Arthur Schumacher's widow. There was a phone listed to an Arthur Schumacher in Elsinore County, but the number was an unpublished one and the late-night telephone-company supervisor refused to let Willis have it until someone from Police Assistance okayed it in the morning.

  Lieutenant Byrnes's memo, paper-clipped to Willis's report, suggested that someone - he did not recommend who - should contact the telephone company again in the morning and get to Mrs Schumacher as soon as possible. Neither Willis nor Hawes, who'd caught the squeal, would be back in the squadroom till Monday morning, and someone - again, Byrnes did not say who - should set the 24-24 in motion.

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  Because the report had been left on his desk, Carella shrewdly detected that the someone the lieutenant had in mind was he himself.

  Elsinore County consisted of some eight communities on the Eastern Seaboard, all of them buffered from erosion and occasional hurricane force winds by Sands Spit, which - and with all due understanding of the city's chauvinist attitudes -did possess some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. Sands Spit ran pristinely north and south. The Iodines were the smaller islands that clustered around it like pilot fish around a shark.

  There were six Iodine islands in all, two of them privately owned, a third set aside as a state park open to the public, the remaining three rather larger than their sisters and scattered with small private houses and, more recently, high-rise condominiums and hotels, their fearless occupants apparently willing to brave the hurricanes that infrequently - but often enough - ravaged Sands Spit, the clustering Iodines, and sometimes the city itself.

  The Schumachers had shared a house on Salt Spray, the Iodine closest to the mainland. It was there that Carella reached the dead man's widow at nine-fifteen that morning, after having finally pried the phone number loose from a telephone-company liaison officer in the Police Assistance section. It was his sorry task to tell her that her husband had been murdered.

  They arrived at the Schumacher apartment on Selby Place at two o'clock that Saturday afternoon. Margaret Schumacher (and not Marjorie, as last night's doorman had surmised) had started into the city from Sands Spit shortly after talking to Carella, and was waiting to greet them now. She was in her late thirties, Carella guessed, an attractive woman with blue eyes and blonde hair rather too long for her narrow face. She was wearing a brown skirt cut some two inches above her knees, a tangerine-colored blouse, and low-heeled pumps. She told them that she'd just got home an hour or so ago. Her

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  eyes, puffy and red, indicated that she'd been crying all morning. Carella knew exactly how she felt.

  "This is a second marriage for both of us," Margaret said. "I was hoping it would last forever. Now this."

  She told them she'd been divorced for almost three years when she met Arthur. He was married at the time . . .

  "He's a good deal older than I am," she said, without seeming to realize she was still using the present tense. Her husband had been shot dead the night before, four gunshot wounds in his head according to the autopsy report, but she was still talking about him as if he were alive. Th
ey did this. It caught up with them all at once sometimes, or sometimes it never did. "I'm thirty-nine, he's sixty-two, that's a big age difference. He was married when I met him, with two daughters as old as I was - one of them, anyway. It was a difficult time for both of us, but it worked out eventually. We've been married for almost two years now. It'll be two years this September." Still the present tense.

  "Could you tell us his former wife's name, please?" Carella asked.

  He was thinking that divorced people sometimes did more terrible things to each other than any strangers could. He was thinking there were four bullet holes in the man's head. One would have done the job.

  "Gloria Sanders," Margaret said. "She went back to using her maiden name."

  Which perhaps indicated a bitter divorce.

  "And his daughters?"

  "One of them is still single, her name is Betsy Schumacher. The other one is married, her name is Lois Stein. Mrs Marc Stein. That's with a c, the Marc."

  "Do you have addresses and phone numbers for them? It would save us time if . . ."

  "I'm sure Arthur has them someplace."

  Something there, Brown thought. The way she'd said those words.

  "Did you get along with his daughters?" he asked.

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  "No," Margaret said.

  Flat out.

  No.

  "How about your husband? How was his relationship with them?"

  "He loved Lois to death. He didn't get along with the other one."

  "Betsy, is that it?" Carella asked, glancing at his notes.

  "Betsy, yes. He called her an aging hippie. Which is what she is."

  "How old would that be?"

  "My age exactly. Thirty-nine."

  And the other daughter. Lois?"

  "Thirty-seven."

  "How'd he get along with his former wife?" Brown asked.

  Circling around again to what he'd heard in her voice when she'd said her husband probably had the phone numbers someplace, whatever it was she'd said exactly. The peculiarly bitter note in her voice.

  "I have no idea," she said.

  "Ever see her, talk to her, anything like . . .?"

  "Him or me?"

  "Well, either one."

  "There's no reason to talk to her. The daughters are grown. They were grown when we met, in fact."

  The daughters.

  Generic.

  "Any alimony going out to his former wife?" Brown asked.

  "Yes."

  The same bitter note.

  "How much?"

  "Three thousand a month."

  "Mrs Schumacher," Carella said, "can you think of anyone who might have done this thing?"

  You asked this question of a surviving spouse not because you expected any brilliant insights. Actually, it was a trick

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  question. Most murders, even in this day and age of anonymous violence, were incestuous affairs. Husband killing wife or vice versa. Wife killing lover. Boyfriend killing girlfriend. Boyfriend killing boyfriend. And so on down the line. A surviving husband or wife was always a prime suspect until you learned otherwise, and a good way of fishing for a motive was to ask if anyone else might have wanted him or her dead. But you had to be careful.

  Margaret Schumacher didn't give the question a moment's thought.

  "Everyone loved him," she said.

  And began crying.

  The detectives stood there feeling awkward.

  She dried her tears with a Kleenex. Blew her nose, kept crying. They waited. It seemed she would never stop crying. She stood there in the center of the living room of the sixth-floor apartment, sealed and silent except for the humming of the air conditioner and the wrenching sound of her sobs, a tall, good-looking woman with golden hair and a golden summer tan, seemingly or genuinely racked by grief. Everyone loved him, she had said. But in their experience, when everyone loved someone, then no one truly loved him. Nor had she said that she loved him. Which may have been an oversight.

  "This is a terrible thing that's happened," Brown said at last, "we know how you must..."

  "Yes," she said. "I loved him very much."

  Perhaps correcting the oversight. And using the past tense now.

  "And you can't think of any reason anyone might have ..."

  "No."

  Still crying into the disintegrating Kleenex.

  "No threatening letters or phone ..."

  "No."

  "... calls, no one who owed him money ..."

  "No."

  ". . . or who he may have borrowed from?"

  "No."

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  "Any problems with his employer . . .?"

  "It's his own business."

  Present tense again. Swinging back and forth between past and present, adjusting to the reality of sudden death.

  "What sort of business would that be?" Carella asked.

  "He's a lawyer."

  "Could we have the name of his firm, please?"

  "Schumacher, Benson, and Loeb. He's a senior partner."

  "Where is that located, ma'am?"

  "Downtown on Jasper Street. Near the Old Seawall."

  "Was he having trouble with any of his partners?"

  "Not that I know of."

  "Or with anyone working for the firm?"

  "I don't know."

  "Had he fired anyone recently?"

  "I don't know."

  "Mrs Schumacher," Brown said, "we have to ask this. Was your husband involved with another woman?"

  "No."

  Flat out.

  "We have to ask this," Carella said. "You're not involved with anyone, are you?"

  "No."

  Chin up, eyes defiant behind the tears.

  "Then this was a happy marriage."

  "Yes."

  "We have to ask," Brown said.

  "I understand."

  But she didn't. Or maybe she did. Either way, the questions had rankled. Carella suddenly imagined the cops of the Four-Five asking his mother if her marriage had been a happy one. But this was different. Or was it? Were they so locked into police routine that they'd forgotten a person had been killed here? Forgotten, too, that this was the person's wife, a person in her own right? Had catching the bad guy become so important that you trampled over all the good guys in the process? Or, worse, did you no longer believe there were any good guys?

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  "I'm sorry," he said.

  "Mrs Schumacher," Brown said, "would it be all right if we looked through your husband's personal effects? His addrese book, his appointment calendar, his diary if he kept..." "He didn't keep a diary."

  "Anything he may have written on while he was making or receiving telephone calls, a notepad, a . . ."

  "I'll show you where his desk is."

  "We'd also like to look through his clothes, if you don't..."

  "Why?"

  "Sometimes we'll find a scrap of paper in a jacket pocket, or a matchbook from a restaurant, or . . ."

  "Arthur didn't smoke."

  Past tense exclusively now.

  "We'll be careful, we promise you," Carella said.

  Although he had not until now been too overly careful.

  "Yes, fine," she said.

  But he knew they'd been clumsy, he knew they had alienated her forever. He suddenly wanted to comfort her the way he'd comforted his mother, but the moment was too far gone, the cop had taken over from the man, and the man had lost.

  "If we may," he said.

  Margaret showed them where her husband's clothes were hanging in the master bedroom closet. They patted down jackets and trousers and found nothing. A smaller room across the hall was furnished as a study, with a desk and an easy chair and a lamp and rows of bookshelves bearing mostly legal volumes. They found the dead man's address book and appointment calendar at once, asked Margaret if they might take them for reference, and signed a receipt to make it all legal. In the desk drawer above the kneehole, in a narrow little box some three inches long
and seven inches wide, they found a stack of blank wallet-sized refill checks and a small red snap-envelope containing the key to a safe-deposit box.

  Which was how, on Monday morning, they located another bundle of erotic letters.

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  Wednesday, June 14 Hi!

  I'm putting on my new sexy lingerie, a red demi—bra (so—called because it pushes up my breasts and leaves my nipples uncovered) a garterbelt with red silk stockings, and the tiniest red panties you ever saw in smooth soft silk. On top of that I'll wear the new suit I got yesterday. It cost an arm and a leg but it was irrestible, a prim—looking blue thing with avshort, double-breasted jacket and — the piece de resistance — a skirt with an interesting arrangement in front: a big split artistically draped with intricate folds so that it looks very decent when I stand up but when I sit down and spread my legs a little I'm practically inviting the man sitting next to me to put his hand through that split and touch me between the legs.

  Is this the sort of letter you want me to write? I think I may enjoy this.

  In my fantasy, we'll check into a hotel and then go down to the restaurant together and find a booth in.an out-of-the-way corner somewhere and you would be that man sitting next to me and you would put your hand through that split in the skirt and you would touch my cunt, which would be very hot, very wet, and very very hungry for your attention. In no time at all, you would bring me to climax, and then it would be my turn. I would unzip your fly and find your cock, which I'm sure, would already be stone hard. It would spring out into my

  hand, and I would play with it under the table until it got harder and harder, and then when nobody was looking, I would pretend to pick up a napkin from the floor, and I would lower my mouth onto your cock, and suck you till you begged me to let you come but I wouldn't let you no matter how hard you begged, I'd just keep sucking your big cock until you were almost weeping, and then I'd say, "Come on, let's go up to the room."

  He would compose ourselves, leave the restaurant, and take the elevator back upstairs. And inside the room, I'd take off the blue suit, and you'd tear off that wisp of red panty, and you'd say something about me driving you crazy, and I'd unzip you once again, and sink to my knees, and put your big cock in my mouth again. You'd take off the rest of your clothes, and slowly slip out of my mouth, and then you'd lift me to you and start licking my breasts. I would come again, you always make me come so fast, even just sucking my nipples, but I would know you weren't finished with me yet, I would know you wanted more from me, you always want more and more from me. You would pick me up and carry me to the bed, and you would kneel over me with my legs wide open and your cock in your hand, and you would begin fucking me slow and steady, and then harder and harder and harder, give it to me, baby, fuck me now.