by Ed McBain
"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."
Poor Amos, Brown thought.
"So who else is left?" she asked, and grinned in what Carella could only interpret as a wise-ass hippie challenge of the sort she'd extended all too often when the world was young and nobody wore a bra and everybody had long blond hair and all cops were pigs.
"Nobody, I guess," he said, and turned to Brown. "Can you think of anybody else, Artie?"
"Gee, no," Brown said. "Unless
maybe her father."
"Oh, right, right," Carella said. "He was killed, too, wasn't he? Your father."
Betsy scowled at him.
"But let's start with the first one," Carella said. "The bimbo. Susan Brauer. That would've been Tuesday night, the seventeenth. Can you tell us . . .?"
"Am I going to need a lawyer here?" she asked.
"Not unless you want one," Carella said. "But that's entirely up to you."
"Because if you're going to ask me where I was and all that shit. . ."
"Yes, we're going to ask you where you were," Brown said.
And all that shit, he thought.
"Then maybe I need one," she said.
"Why? Were you someplace you shouldn't have been?"
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"I don't remember where I was. I don't even know when that was."
"Today's Saturday, the twenty-eighth," Carella said. "This would've been eleven days ago."
"A Tuesday night," Brown said.
"The seventeenth," Carella said.
"Then I was in Vermont."
"I thought you went up to Vermont after your father's funeral."
"I went back up. I've been there since the beginning of July."
"Did your mother know this?"
"I don't tell my mother everything I do."
"Where do you go up there?" Brown asked.
"I have a little place my father gave me after the divorce. I think he was trying to win me over. He gave me this little house up there."
"Where?"
"Vermont. I told you."
"Where in Vermont?"
"Green River. It's a little house in the woods, I think one of his clients gave it to him years ago, instead of a fee. This was even before he married Mom. So it was just sitting there in the woods, practically falling apart, and he asked me if I wanted it. I said sure. Never look a gift horse, right?"
Carella was thinking she wouldn't even give her father the time of day, but she accepted a little house from him.
"Anyway, I go up there a lot," she said. "Get away from the rat race."
"And your mother doesn't know this, huh?" Brown said. "That you go up to Vermont a lot to get away from the rat race."
"I'm sure my mother knows I go up to Vermont."
"But she didn't know you went up there on the first of July ..."
"The beginning of July. The fifth, actually. And I don't remember whether I told her or not."
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"But you were up there when Susan Brauer was killed, is that right?"
"If she was killed on the seventeenth, then I was up there, yes."
"Anybody with you?"
"No, I go up there alone."
"How do you get there?" Carella asked.
"By car."
"Your own car? Or do you rent one?"
"I have my own car."
"So you drive up there to Vermont in your own car."
"Yes."
"All alone?"
"Yes."
"How long does it take you to get there?"
"Three, three-and-a-half hours, depending on traffic."
"And it takes the same amount of time to get back, I suppose."
"Yes."
"When did you come back down again?"
"What do you mean?"
"You said you went up on the fifth ..."
"Oh. Yes. I came down again right after my sister called me."
"When was that?"
"The day after my father got killed. She called to give me the news."
"That he'd been murdered."
"Yes."
"Then your sister also knew you were in Vermont."
"Yes."
"Both your mother and your sister have the number up there."
"Yes, they both have the number."
"So the day after your father got killed ..."
"Yes."
"Your sister called you."
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"Yes."
"That would've been Saturday, the twenty-first."
"Whenever."
"What time would that have been?"
"She called early in the morning."
"And you say you came back to the city right after she called?"
"Well, I called my mother first. After I spoke to my sister."
Which checked with what Gloria Sanders had told them.
"What'd you talk about?"
"About whether or not I should go to the funeral."
Which also checked.
"And what'd you decide?"
"That I'd go."
"So what time would you say you left Vermont?"
"I had breakfast, and I dressed and packed some things . . . it must've been eleven o'clock or so before I got out of there."
"Drove straight back to the city, did you?"
"Yes."
"Took you three, three-and-a-half hours, right?" Brown said.
"About that, yes."
They were both thinking that Vermont wasn't the end of the world. You could get up there in three hours. You could be here in the city killing somebody the night before and you could be back in Vermont taking a telephone call the next morning. People could see you coming and going in Vermont, into a grocery store, into a bakery, into a bookshop, into a bar, and no one would know whether you were in residence in your little house in the woods or commuting back and forth to the city to do murder.
"Did you know that under the provisions of your father's will, you would inherit twenty-five percent of his estate?" Carella asked.
"Yes, I knew that."
"How'd you happen to know?"
"Mom constantly told us."
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"What do you mean by constantly?"
"Well, all the time. Certainly while they were negotiating the settlement ... we weren't children, you know, this was only two years ago. Mom told us she wouldn't give him a divorce unless he agreed to put both of us in the will. Me and Lois. For half the estate. Together, that is. Sharing half the estate. So we knew about it at the time, and since then she's repeated the story again and again, with a great deal of pleasure and pride. Because she felt she'd done something very good for us. Which she had."
"Where were you on Friday night, Miss Schumacher?" Brown asked.
"Vermont. I told you."
The hippie grin again. Her mother's daughter for sure. No tricks, please. Just the facts, ma'am.
"You weren't down here in the city?"
"No. I was in Vermont."
"Anyone with you?"
"I told you. I go up there alone."
"I didn't ask if you went up there with anyone," Brown said pleasantly. "I asked if anyone was with you on the night Margaret Schumacher was killed."
"No. I was home alone. Reading."
"Reading what?" Carella asked.
"I don't remember. I read a lot."
"What kind of books?"
"Fiction mostly."
"Do you read murder mysteries?"
"No. I hate murder mysteries."
"You said you read about Margaret Schumacher's murder in the newspaper ..."
"Yes."
"Local Vermont paper?"
"No. I picked up one of our papers at the ..."
"Our papers?"
"Yes. From here in the city. We do get them up there, you know."
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"And that's when you saw the headline ..."
"It wasn't a headline. Not in the paper I bought. It was on page four of the metropolitan section."
"A story about Mrs Schumacher's murder."
"Yes. Mrs Schumacher's murder."
Repeating the title scornfully, so that it sounded dirty somehow.
"And you say you felt gleeful..."
"Well, perhaps that was too strong a word to use."
"What word would you use now?"
"Happy. The story made me happy."
"Reading about a woman's brutal murder ..."
"Yes."
"... made you happy."
; "Yes."
"She'd been shot repeatedly in the head and chest..."
"Right."
"And reading about this made you happy."
"Yes," Betsy said. "I'm glad someone killed her."
Both detectives looked at her.
"She was a rotten bitch who wrecked our lives. I used to pray she'd fall out a window or get run over by a bus, but it never happened. Well, now someone got her. Someone gave it to her good. And yes, that makes me happy. In fact, it makes me gleeful, yes, that is the right word, I'm overflowing with glee because she's dead. I only wish she'd been shot a dozen times instead of just four."
There was a satisfied smile on her face.
You couldn't argue with a smile like that.
You could only wonder whether the newspapers had mentioned that Margaret Schumacher had been shot four times.
It was getting late.
They'd been talking in the living room of the house Angela had shared with Tommy until just recently, three-year-old Tess asleep in the back room, Angela telling her brother she was dying for a cigarette but her doctor had forbidden her to
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smoke while she was pregnant. Carella thought suddenly of Gloria Sanders, who'd been dying for a smoke when they'd talked to her at the hospital. He could not shake the persistent feeling that Penn Halligan had been describing a woman running through the rain. Or had the image been created by the foreknowledge that three women had survived Arthur Schumacher: two daughters, and an ex-wife who hated him.
"But it won't be long now," Angela said.
"You should stay off them," Carella said.
"Tough habit to kick," she said, and shrugged.
His father hadn't known that Angela smoked. Or at least had pretended not to know. Carella could remember one Sunday afternoon when all the family was gathered together . . . this was when he himself still smoked. A long time ago. Shortly after Angela and Tommy got married. An Easter Sunday was it? A Christmas? The entire family gathered. They'd just finished the big afternoon meal - with Italian families, every meal was a feast - and he patted down his pockets, and realized he was out of cigarettes, and he went across the room to where Angela was sitting at the old upright piano, playing all the songs she'd learned as a little girl, a grown woman now with a husband, and he'd said, "Sis? Have you got a cigarette?" And Tony Carella, sitting in an easy chair listening to his daughter playing, suddenly shook his head and put his finger to his lips, shushing Carella, letting Carella know that his father wasn't supposed to know his darling daughter smoked, the sly old hypocrite.