Widows

by Ed McBain

  "All right, men, do what Inspector Brady says."

  Di Santis.

  Behind her, one of the ES cops muttered something Eileen couldn't understand, a word in Spanish that made the old man's smile widen. She heard the heavy weapons being placed on the floor . . .

  "The other guns, too," the old man said.

  "He wants the sidearms, too!" she yelled down the hall.

  "All your weapons, men!" Di Santis shouted.

  More muttering behind her, in English this time, soft grumbles of protest. They had been dealt a completely new hand, but the old man was still holding all the cards.

  "Now you," Eileen told him.

  "No," he said. "Come inside here."

  "You promised me," she said.

  "No," he said, smiling. "You're the one who made all the promises."

  Which was true.

  / promise they won't shoot you.

  No one will hurt you . . .

  "If you put down the gun," she reminded him.

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  "No."

  Shaking his head.

  "I promised that no one would hurt you if you put down the gun," she said.

  "No one can hurt me, anyway," he said, smiling. "No one has a gun now but me."

  Which was also true.

  "Well, I thought I could trust you," she said, "but I see I can't."

  "You can trust me," he said. "Open your blouse."

  "No," she said.

  "Open your goddamn blouse," one of the ES cops whispered urgently.

  She ignored him. "I'm going to leave now," she told the old man. "You broke your word, so I'm leaving. I can't promise what these men will do when I'm gone."

  "They'll do nothing," he said. "I have the gun."

  "There are others down the hall," she said. "I can't promise you anything anymore. I'm going now."

  "No!" he said. - She hesitated.

  "Please," he said.

  Their eyes met.

  "You promised," he said.

  She knew what she'd promised. She'd promised that no one would be hurt. She'd promised she would go in to him if he put down the gun. She had given him her word. She was a woman of her word.

  "Put down the gun," she said.

  "I'll kill you if you don't come in here," he said.

  "Put down the gun."

  "I'll kill you."

  "Then how will I be able to come in?" she asked, and the old man burst out laughing because the logic of the situation had suddenly become absurdly clear to him. If he killed her, she could not go in to him; it was as simple as that. She burst out laughing, too. Surprised, some of the ES cops behind her

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  began laughing, tentatively at first, and then a bit more boldly. Down the hall, Eileen heard someone whisper, "They're laughing." Someone else whispered, "What?" This seemed funny, too. The cops in their ceramic vests began laughing harder, like armored knights who'd been told their powerful king was in fact impotent. Defenseless, their weapons and holsters and cartridge belts on the floor at their feet, contained here in this stifling hot hallway, they quaked with laughter, thinking how silly it would be if the old man actually did kill the redhead, thereby making it impossible for her to go in to him. The old man was thinking the same thing, how silly all of this had suddenly become, thinking too that maybe he should just put down the gun and get it over with, all the trouble he'd caused here, his blue eyes squinched up, tears of laughter running down his wrinkled face into his grizzled gray beard. Down the hall there were puzzled whispers again.

  "Oh, dear," Eileen said, laughing.

  "Dios miol" the old man said, laughing.

  Any one of the ES cops could have shot him in that moment. He had lowered the shotgun, it sat across his lap like a walking stick. No one was in danger from that gun. Eileen took a tentative step into the room, reaching for it.

  "No!" the old man snapped, and the gun came up again, pointing at her head.

  "Aw, come on," she said, and grimaced in disappointment like a little girl.

  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."

  "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."

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  "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.

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  "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."

  "Y
ou'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.

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  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.