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."
"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 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.
