Calypso Read Online Free PDF Page B

anyone money?"
        "No. But that's only because of the dancing. That's why I didn't want to quit the job. We wouldn't have been able to make ends meet otherwise."
        "But aside from any arguments you had about your job…"
        "We didn't argue about anything else," she said, and suddenly burst into tears again.
        "I'm sorry," Carella said at once. "If this is difficult for you right now, we'll come back in the morning. Would you prefer that?"
        "No, that's all right," she said.
        "Then… can you tell me if your husband argued with anyone else recently?"
        "Nobody I can think of."
        "Mrs. Chadderton, in the past several days have you noticed anyone who seemed particularly interested in your husband's comings and goings? Anyone lurking around outside the building or in the hallway, for example."
        "No," she said, shaking her head.
        "How about tonight? Notice anyone in the hallway when your husband left?"
        "I didn't go out in the hall with him."
        "Hear anything in the hall after he was gone? Anyone who might have been listening or watching, trying to find out if he was still home?"
        "I didn't hear anything."
        "Would anyone else have heard anything?"
        "How would I know?"
        "I meant, was there anyone here with you? A neighbor? A friend?"
        "I was alone."
        "Mrs. Chadderton," he said, "I have to ask this next question, I hope you'll forgive me for asking it."
        "George wasn't fooling around with any other women," she said at once. "Is that the question?"
        "That was the question, yes."
        "And I wasn't fooling around with any other men."
        "The reason he had to ask," Meyer said, "is-"
        "I know why he had to ask," Chloe said. "But I don't think he'd have asked a white woman that same question."
        "White or black, the questions are the same," Carella said flatly. "If you were having trouble in your marriage-"
        "There was no trouble in my marriage," she said, turning to him, her dark eyes blazing.
        "Fine then, the matter is closed."
        It was not closed, not so far as Carella was concerned. He would come back to it later if only because Chloe's reaction had been so violent. In the meantime, he picked up again on the line of questioning that was mandatory in any homicide.
        "Mrs. Chadderton," he said, "at any time during the past few weeks-"
        "Because I guess it's impossible for two black people to have a good marriage, right?" she said, again coming back to the matter-which apparently was not yet closed for her, either.
        Carella wondered what to say next. Should he go through the tired "Some of My Best Friends Are Blacks" routine? Should he explain that Arthur Brown, a detective on the 87th Squad, was in fact happily married and that he and his wife, Caroline, had spent hours in the Carellas' house discussing toilet training and school busing and, yes, even racial prejudice? Should he defend himself as a white man in a white man's world, when this woman's husband-a black man-had been robbed of his life in a section of the precinct that was at least fifty-percent black? Should he ignore the possibility that Chloe Chadderton, who had immediately flared upon mention of marital infidelity, was as suspect in this damn case as anyone else in the city? More suspect, in fact, despite the screaming and the hollering and the tears, despite the numbness as she'd listened to the details.
        White or black, they all seemed numb, even the ones who'd stuck an icepick in someone's skull an hour earlier; they all seemed numb. The tears were sometimes genuine and sometimes not; sometimes, they were only tears of guilt or relief. In this city where husbands killed wives and lovers killed rivals; in this city where children were starved or beaten to death by their parents, and grandmothers were slain by their junkie grandsons for the few