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 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?"
"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."
"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."
"Yes."
"That would've been Saturday, the twenty-first."
"Whenever."
"What time would that have been?"
