The Empty Hours (10 page)

“This
is Mr. Sam,” Miss Marie said, and
Hawes turned to see Carella
shaking hands with a rather elongated man. The man wasn’t particularly tall, he
was simply elongated. He gave the impression of being seen from the side seats
in a movie theater, stretched out of true proportion, curiously
two-dimensional. He wore a white smock, and there were three narrow combs in
the breast pocket. He carried a pair of scissors in one thin, sensitive-looking
hand.

“How do
you do?” he said to Carella, and he executed a half-bow, European in origin,
American in execution. He turned to Hawes, took his hand, shook it, and again
said, “How do you do?”

“They’re
from the police,” Miss Marie said briskly, releasing Mr. Sam from any
obligation to be polite, and then left the men alone.

“A
woman named Claudia Davis was here on July seventh,” Carella said. “Apparently
she had her hair done by you. Can you tell us what you remember about her?”

“Miss
Davis, Miss Davis,” Mr. Sam said, touching his high forehead in an attempt at
visual shorthand, trying to convey the concept of thought without having to do
the accompanying brainwork. “Let me see, Miss Davis, Miss Davis.”

“Yes.”

“Yes,
Miss Davis. A very pretty blonde.”

“No,”
Carella said. He shook his head. “A brunette. You’re thinking of the wrong
person.”

“No, I’m
thinking of the right person,” Mr. Sam said. He tapped his temple with one
extended forefinger, another piece of visual abbreviation. “I remember. Claudia
Davis. A blonde.”

“A
brunette,” Carella insisted, and he kept watching Mr. Sam.

“When
she left. But when she came, a blonde.”

“What?”
Hawes said.

“She
was a blonde, a very pretty, natural blonde. It is rare. Natural blondness, I
mean. I couldn’t understand why she wanted to change the color.”

“You
dyed her hair?” Hawes asked.

“That
is correct.”

“Did
she say
why
she wanted to be a brunette?”

“No,
sir. I argued with her. I said, ‘You have
beautiful
hair, I can do marvelous
things with this hair of yours. You are a
blonde,
my dear, there are
drab women who come in here every day of the week and
beg
to be turned
into blondes.’ No. She would not listen. I dyed it for her.” Mr. Sam seemed to
be offended by the idea all over again. He looked at the detectives as if they
had been responsible for the stubbornness of Claudia Davis.

“What
else did you do for her, Mr. Sam?” Carella asked.

“The
dye, a cut, and a set. And I believe one of the girls gave her a facial and a manicure.”

“What
do you mean by a cut? Was her hair long when she came here?”

“Yes,
beautiful long blond hair. She wanted it cut. I cut it.” Mr. Sam shook his
head. “A pity. She looked terrible. I don’t usually say this about someone I
work on, but she walked out of here looking terrible. You would hardly
recognize her as the same pretty blonde who came in not three hours before.”

“Maybe
that was the idea,” Carella said.

“I beg
your pardon?”

“Forget
it. Thank you, Mr. Sam. We know you’re busy.”

In the
street outside Hawes said, “You knew before we went in there, didn’t you, Mr.
Steve?”

“I
suspected, Mr. Cotton, I suspected. Come on, let’s get back to the squad.”

* * * *

14

They kicked it around like a
bunch of advertising executives. They sat in Lieutenant Byrnes’ office and
tried to find out how the cookie crumbled and which way the Tootsie rolled.
They were just throwing out a life preserver to see if anyone grabbed at it,
that’s all. What they were doing, you see, was running up the flag to see if
anyone saluted, that’s all. The lieutenant’s office was a four-window office
because he was top man in this particular combine. It was a very elegant
office. It had an electric fan all its own, and a big wide desk. It got cross
ventilation from the street. It was really very pleasant. Well, to tell the
truth, it was a pretty ratty office in which to be holding a top-level meeting,
but it was the best the precinct had to offer. And after a while you got used
to the chipping paint and the soiled walls and the bad lighting and the stench
of urine from the men’s room down the hall. Peter Byrnes didn’t work for B.B.D.
& O. He worked for the city. Somehow, there was a difference.

“I just
put in a call to Irene Miller,” Carella said. “I asked her to describe Claudia
Davis to me, and she went through it all over again. Short dark hair, shy,
plain. Then I asked her to describe the cousin, Josie Thompson.” Carella nodded
glumly. “Guess what?”

“A
pretty girl,” Hawes said. “A pretty girl with long blond hair.”

“Sure.
Why, Mrs. Miller practically spelled it out the first time we talked to her. It’s
all there in the report. She said they were like black and white in looks and
personality. Black and white, sure. A brunette and a goddamn blonde!”

“That
explains the yellow,” Hawes said.

“What
yellow?”

“Courtenoy.
He said he saw a patch of yellow breaking the surface. He wasn’t talking about
her clothes, Steve. He was talking about her
hair”

“It
explains a lot of things,” Carella said. “It explains why shy Claudia Davis was
preparing for her European trip by purchasing baby doll nightgowns and bikini
bathing suits. And it explains why the undertaker up there referred to Claudia
as a pretty girl. And it explains why our necropsy report said she was thirty
when everybody talked about her as if she were much younger.”

“The
girl who drowned wasn’t Josie, huh?” Meyer said. “You figure she was Claudia.”

“Damn
right I figure she was Claudia.”

“And
you figure she cut her hair afterward, and dyed it, and took her cousin’s
name, and tried to pass as her cousin until she could get out of the country,
huh?” Meyer said.

“Why?”
Byrnes said. He was a compact man with a compact bullet head and a chunky
economical body. He did not like to waste time or words.

“Because
the trust income was in Claudia’s name. Because Josie didn’t have a dime of her
own.”

“She
could have collected on her cousin’s insurance policy,” Meyer said.

“Sure,
but that would have been the end of it. The trust called for those stocks to be
turned over to U.C.L.A. if Claudia died. A college, for God’s sake! How do you
suppose Josie felt about that? Look, I’m not trying to hand a homicide on her.
I just think she took advantage of a damn good situation. Claudia was in that
boat alone. When she fell over the side, Josie really tried to rescue her, no
question about it. But she missed, and Claudia drowned. Okay. Josie went all to
pieces, couldn’t talk straight, crying, sobbing, real hysterical woman, we’ve
seen them before. But came the dawn. And with the dawn, Josie began thinking.
They were away from the city, strangers in a strange town. Claudia had drowned
but no one
knew
that she was Claudia. No one but Josie. She had no identification
on her, remember? Her purse was in the car. Okay. If Josie identified her
cousin correctly, she’d collect twenty-five grand on the insurance policy, and
then all that stock would be turned over to the college, and that would be the
end of the gravy train. But suppose, just suppose Josie told the police the
girl in the lake was Josie Thompson? Suppose she said, ‘I, Claudia Davis, tell
you that girl who drowned is my cousin, Josie Thompson’?”

Hawes
nodded. “Then she’d still collect on an insurance policy, and also fall heir to
those fat security dividends coming in.”

“Right.
What does it take to cash a dividend check? A bank account, that’s all. A bank
account with an established signature. So all she had to do was open one, sign
her name as Claudia Davis, and then endorse every dividend check that came in
exactly the same way.”

“Which
explains the new account,’ Meyer said. “She couldn’t use Claudia’s old account
because the bank undoubtedly knew both Claudia
and
her signature. So
Josie had to forfeit the sixty grand at Highland Trust and start from scratch.”

“And
while she was building a new identity and a new fortune,” Hawes said, “just to
make sure Claudia’s few friends forgot all about her, Josie was running off to
Europe. She may have planned to stay there for years.”

“It all
ties in,” Carella said. “Claudia had a driver’s license. She was the one who
drove the car away from Stewart City. But Josie had to hire a chauffeur to take
her back?”

“And
would Claudia, who was so meticulous about money matters, have kept so many
people waiting for payment?” Hawes said. “No, sir. That was Josie. And Josie
was broke, Josie was waiting for that insurance policy to pay off so she could
settle those debts and get the hell out of the country.”

“Well, I
admit it adds up,” Meyer said. Peter Byrnes never wasted words. “Who cashed
that twenty-five-thousand-dollar check for Josie?” he said.

There
was silence in the room.

“Who’s
got that missing five grand?” he said.

There
was another silence.

“Who
killed
Josie?” he said.

* * * *

15

Jeremiah Dodd of the Security
Insurance Corporation, Inc., did not call until two days later. He asked to
speak to Detective Carella, and when he got him on the phone, he said, “Mr.
Carella, I’ve just heard from San Francisco on that check.”

“What
check?” Carella asked. He had been interrogating a witness to a knifing in a
grocery store on Culver Avenue. The Claudia Davis or rather the Josie Thompson
case was not quite yet in the Open File, but it was ready to be dumped there,
and was truly the farthest thing from Carella’s mind at the moment.

“The
check was paid to Claudia Davis,” Dodd said.

“Oh,
yes. Who cashed it?”

“Well,
there are two endorsements on the back. One was made by Claudia Davis, of
course. The other was made by an outfit called Leslie Summers, Inc. It’s a
regular company stamp marked ‘For Deposit Only’ and signed by one of the
officers.”

“Have
any idea what sort of a company that is?” Carella asked.

“Yes,”
Dodd said. “They handle foreign exchange.”

“Thank
you,” Carella said.

He went
there with Bert Kling later that afternoon. He went with Kling completely by
chance and only because Kling was heading downtown to buy his mother a birthday
gift and offered Carella a ride. When they parked the car, Kling asked, “How long
will this take, Steve?”

“Few
minutes, I guess.”

“Want
to meet me back here?”

“Well,
I’ll be at 720 Hall, Leslie Summers, Inc. If you’re through before me, come on
over.”

“Okay,
I’ll see you,” Kling said.

They
parted on Hall Avenue without shaking hands. Carella found the street-level
office of Leslie Summers, Inc., and walked in. A counter ran the length of the
room, and there were several girls behind it. One of the girls was speaking to
a customer in French and another was talking Italian to a man who wanted lire
in exchange for dollars. A board behind the desk quoted the current exchange
rate for countries all over the world. Carella got in line and waited. When he
reached the counter, the girl who’d been speaking French said, “Yes, sir?”