"It was murder."
"Justified then."
"Perhaps."
There was the soft sound of rain pattering the sidewalk outside. They both looked up. "Rain," he said. "Yes," she said.
"Heading uptown," the cab driver said.
"Stay with them," Carella said.
Windshield wipers snicked at the lightly falling rain. Tires hissed against the pavement. Up ahead, the red Honda Accord moved steadily through the gray curtain of drizzle and dusk. Carella leaned over the back of the front seat, peering through the windshield.
"Pulling in," the driver said.
"Go past them to the corner."
He turned his head away as they passed the other car and then he looked back through the rear window to keep the car in sight. The woman was maneuvering it into the curb now, across the street from a playground where children stood under the trees looking out at the rain.
Carella paid and tipped the driver, got out of the cab, and ducked into a doorway just as Tommy climbed out of the Accord on the passenger side. A moment later, the woman joined him on the sidewalk. Together, they ran through the rain to a brownstone some twenty feet up from where she'd parked the car. Carella watched them entering the building. He walked up the street.
He was copying down the address on the brownstone when his beeper went off.
Brown was waiting for him in the rain.
The woman lay on the sidewalk under the trees. Blood seeping from her, mingling with the rain, diluted by the rain, running in rivulets into the gutter. Long blonde hair fanned out around her head. Raindrops striking her wide-open blue eyes. When Carella's father was taken to the hospital with his heart attack three years ago, it was raining. One of the nurses walking alongside the stretcher as he came out of the ambulance said, "He doesn't like it." The other nurse said, "It's raining on his face," and tented a newspaper over it. His father had always recounted that story with amusement. The idea that he was suffering a massive heart attack and the nurses were discussing rain in his face. Big Chief Rain in the Face, he'd called himself.
Lying on her back with her blonde hair spread on the slick gray pavement and her blood-drenched face shattered by the impact of the bullets that had entered it, Margaret Schumacher wasn't concerned about the rain in her face.
"When?" Carella asked.
"Boy One called it in an hour ago."
"Who found her?"
"Kid over there under the awning."
Carella looked up the street to where a white sixteen-year-old boy was standing with the doorman.
"He saw the whole thing," Brown said, "yelled at the perp, got shot at himself. He ran inside the building, got the doorman to call nine-one-one. Boy One responded."
"Homicide here yet?"
"No, thank God," Brown said, and rolled his eyes.
"Let's talk to him some more," Carella said.
They walked through the rain to where the doorman was counseling the kid on how to handle interviews with cops. This was the same doorman who'd been on duty the night Arthur Schumacher and his dog were killed. Now Schumacher's wife was lying dead on the sidewalk in almost the identical spot; it was getting to be a regular epidemic. Carella introduced himself and then said, "We'd like to ask a few more questions, if that's all right with you."
He wasn't talking to the doorman, but the doorman immediately said, "I called nine-eleven the minute he ran in here."
"Thanks, we appreciate it," Carella said, and then to the kid, "What's your name, son?"
"Penn Halligan," the kid said.
"Can you tell us what happened?"
The kid was handsome enough to appear delicate, almost feminine, large brown eyes fringed with long black lashes, a high-cheekboned porcelain face with a cupid's bow mouth, long black hair hanging lank with rain on his forehead. Tall and slender, he stood under the awning with the doorman and the detectives, hands in the pockets of a blue nylon wind-breaker. He was visibly trembling; he'd had a close call.
"I was coming home from class," he said. "I take acting lessons."
Carella nodded. He was thinking Halligan was handsome enough to be a movie star. Though nowadays that certainly wasn't a prerequisite.
"On The Stem," he said, gesturing with his head. "Upstairs from the RKO Orpheum. I go every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons. Five o'clock to seven o'clock. I was on my way home when …" He shook his head. The memory caused him to shiver again.
"Where do you live?" Brown asked.
"Just up the block. 1149 Selby."
"Okay, what happened?"
"I was coming around the corner when I saw this guy running across the street from under the trees there," he said, turning to point. "There was this blonde lady walking toward me on this side of the street, and the guy just crossed sort of diagonally, running from under the trees to where the blonde was walking, like on a collision course with her. I was just coming around the corner, I saw it all."
"Tell us everything you saw," Carella said. "Don't leave anything out."
"I was walking fast because of the rain …"
