In July, he and his wife went away for the Fourth . . . well, actually, they'd left the city on the thirtieth of June, which was a Saturday, and spent the whole next week in Baltimore with her sister, didn't get back until the following Sunday. Susan came into the shop the very next day. Monday. The ninth. Came in around lunchtime, wanted to know if he hadn't forgotten a little something? He didn't know what she meant at first. Oh? she said. You don't know? You really don't know? Maybe you think a girl like me just comes along every day of the week, huh? Maybe next time you want me to …
"Well, she made a reference to … to what we … to what we … well, what she . . . uh. She said I might. . . she said I ought to think about that the next time I asked her to … you know. Because if I was going to forget all about the rent coming due, then maybe she should start looking for someone who might enjoy being with her and taking advantage of her that way. She was furious. I'd never seen her like that. I hadn't really thought I was taking advantage of her, I thought she enjoyed it. I tried to explain …"
He'd tried to explain. It had been the holiday, you see, the Fourth of July, the bank would be closed on Wednesday, anyway, and he'd had to go away with his wife, she knew he was married, she knew he had a wife. She said did he know how humiliating it was for her to receive a call from the woman who was renting her the apartment, asking her where the rent was, did he realize? He'd gone to the bank while she waited in the shop . . .
"This was around twelve-thirty, the bank's record is correct," he said.
. . . and he'd brought the money back, and all of a sudden she was a different person, the same Susan he'd always known. In fact, right there in the shop, she'd . . .
"Well," he said.
They did not ask him what she'd done right there in the shop.
Instead, Carella said, "Where were you on the night she was killed?"
"Home with my wife," Mott said.
Isabelle Mott was a woman in her mid-to-late forties, some five feet seven or eight inches tall, with long straight black hair and dark brown eyes, which combined with the silver-and-turquoise jewelry she was wearing to give her the strikingly attractive look of a native American Indian, which she was not. She was, in fact, of Scotch-Irish ancestry, go figure.
They did not tell her that her husband, Thomas, had been enjoying of late an affair with a beautiful twenty-two-year-old blonde who'd been murdered only eight days after he'd last seen her. They figured there was no sense causing more trouble than already existed. They simply asked if she knew where he'd been on the night of July seventeenth, that would've been a Tuesday night, ma'am. When she asked why they wanted to know, they said what they said to any civilian who wanted to know why certain questions were being asked: Routine investigation, ma'am.
"He was here," she said.
"How do you happen to remember that?" Carella asked.
She had not looked at a calendar, she had not consulted an appointment -
"I was sick in bed that night," she said.
"Uh-huh," Carella said.
"Sick with what, ma'am?" Brown asked.
"Actually, I was recovering from surgery," she said.
"Uh-huh," Carella said.
"What kind of surgery, ma'am?" Brown asked.
"Minor surgery," she said.
"Had you been hospitalized?" Carella asked.
"No. The surgery was done that morning, Tommy came to pick me up that afternoon."
"Where was this surgery done, ma'am?" Brown asked.
Both cops were thinking abortion. It sounded like abortion.
"At Hollingworth," she said.
A hospital not far from here, in the Three-Two Precinct.
"And what was the nature of the surgery?" Carella asked.
"If you must know," Isabelle said, "I had a D and C, okay?"
"I see," Carella said, and nodded.
Brown was thinking that's what they used to call abortions before Roe v. Wade.
"What time did you get home from the hospital?" Carella asked.
"Around four, four-thirty."
"And you say your husband was with you?"
"Yes."
"Did he leave the house at any time after that?"
"That night, do you mean?"
"Yes. The night of the seventeenth. After you got home from the hospital, did he leave the house at any time?"
"No."
Firm and emphatic.
"He was home all night long?"
"Yes," she said, positively nailing it to the wall.
"Well, thank you," Carella said.
Brown nodded glumly.
The signs on the corner lamppost read respectively Meriden St and Cooper St, white lettering on green, one sign running horizontally in an east-west direction, the other running north-south. Below these, white on blue, was a larger sign that read:
QUIET
HOSPITAL
ZONE
Across the street, Farley General's huge illuminated windows glared a harsh yellow-white against a black moonless sky. It was fifteen minutes to midnight, and the street was silent and deserted. An occasional automobile passed, but for the most part the traffic was light; motorists tended to avoid this street because the speed limit here was only twenty miles an hour, and they preferred Averill as an approach to the bridge.
