"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."
"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.
"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.
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.
