Yes, white.

  The news came as something of a surprise to the cops because the girl lying on the rug had certainly looked like a Negress. After all, her skin was black. Not tan, not coffee-colored, not brown, but black—that intensely black coloration found on primitive tribes who spend a good deal of their time in the sun. The conclusion seemed to be a logical one, but death is a great equalizer not without a whimsical humor all its own, and the funniest kind of joke is a sight gag. Death changes white to black, and when that grisly old man comes marching in there’s no question of who’s going to school with whom. There’s no longer any question of pigmentation, friend. That girl on the floor looked black, but she was white, and whatever else she was she was also stone cold dead, and that’s the worst you can do to anybody.

  The report explained that the girl’s body was in a state of advanced putrefaction, and it went into such esoteric terms as “general distention of the body cavities, tissues, and blood vessels with gas,” and “black discoloration of the skin, mucous membranes, and irides caused by hemolysis and action of hydrogen sulfide on the blood pigment,” all of which broke down to the simple fact that it was a damn hot week in August and the girl had been lying on a rug which retained heat and speeded the postmortem putrefaction. From what they could tell, and in weather like this, it was mostly a guess, the girl had been dead and decomposing for at least forty-eight hours, which set the time of her demise as August 1 or thereabouts.

  One of the reports went on to say that the clothes she’d been wearing had been purchased in one of the city’s larger department stores. All of her clothes—those she wore and those found in her apartment—were rather expensive, but someone at the lab thought it necessary to note that all her panties were trimmed with Belgian lace and retailed for $25 a pair. Someone else at the lab mentioned that a thorough examination of her garments and her body had revealed no traces of blood, semen, or oil stains.

  The coroner fixed the cause of death as strangulation.

  It is amazing how much an apartment can sometimes yield to science. It is equally amazing, and more than a little disappointing, to get nothing from the scene of a murder when you are desperately seeking a clue. The furnished room in which Claudia Davis had been strangled to death was full of juicy surfaces conceivably carrying hundreds of latent fingerprints. The closets and drawers contained piles of clothing that might have carried traces of anything from gunpowder to face powder.

  But the lab boys went around lifting their prints and sifting their dust and vacuuming with a Söderman-Heuberger filter, and they went down to the morgue and studied the girl’s skin and came up with a total of nothing. Zero. Oh, not quite zero. They got a lot of prints belonging to Claudia Davis, and a lot of dust collected from all over the city and clinging to her shoes and her furniture. They also found some documents belonging to the dead girl—a birth certificate, a diploma of graduation from a high school in Santa Monica, and an expired library card. And, oh, yes, a key. The key didn’t seem to fit any of the locks in the room. They sent all the junk over to the 87th, and Sam Grossman called Carella personally later that day to apologize for the lack of results.

  The squadroom was hot and noisy when Carella took the call from the lab. The conversation was a curiously one-sided affair. Carella, who had dumped the contents of the laboratory envelope onto his desk, merely grunted or nodded every now and then. He thanked Grossman at last, hung up, and stared at the window facing the street and Grover Park.

  “Get anything?” Meyer asked.

  “Yeah. Grossman thinks the killer was wearing gloves.”

  “That’s nice,” Meyer said.

  “Also, I think I know what this key is for.” He lifted it from the desk.

  “Yeah? What?”

  “Well, did you see these canceled checks?”

  “No.”

  “Take a look,” Carella said.

  He opened the brown bank envelope addressed to Claudia Davis, spread the canceled checks on his desktop, and then unfolded the yellow bank statement. Meyer studied the display silently.

  “Cotton found the envelope in her room,” Carella said. “The statement covers the month of July. Those are all the checks she wrote, or at least everything that cleared the bank by the thirty-first.”

  “Lots of checks here,” Meyer said.

  “Twenty-five, to be exact. What do you think?”

  “I know what I think,” Carella said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I look at those checks. I can see a life. It’s like reading somebody’s diary. Everything she did last month is right here, Meyer. All the department stores she went to, look, a florist, her hairdresser, a candy shop, even her shoemaker, and look at this. A check made out to a funeral home. Now who died, Meyer, huh? And look here. She was living at Mrs. Mauder’s place, but here’s a check made out to a swank apartment building on the South Side, in Stewart City. And some of these checks are just made out to names, people. This case is crying for some people.”

  “You want me to get the phone book?”

  “No, wait a minute. Look at this bank statement. She opened the account on July fifth with a thousand bucks. All of a sudden, bam, she deposits a thousand bucks in the Seaboard Bank of America.”

  “What’s so odd about that?”

  “Nothing, maybe. But Cotton called the other banks in the city, and Claudia Davis has a very healthy account at the Highland Trust on Cromwell Avenue. And I mean very healthy.”

  “How healthy?”

  “Close to sixty grand.”

  “What!”

  “You heard me. And the Highland Trust lists no withdrawals for the month of July. So where’d she get the money to put into Seaboard?”

  “Was that the only deposit?”

  “Take a look.”

  Meyer picked up the statement.

  “The initial deposit was on July fifth,” Carella said. “A thousand bucks. She made another thousand-dollar deposit on July twelfth. And another on the nineteenth. And another on the twenty-seventh.”

  Meyer raised his eyebrows. “Four grand. That’s a lot of loot.”

  “And all deposited in less than a month’s time. I’ve got to work almost a full year to make that kind of money.”

  “Not to mention the sixty grand in the other bank. Where do you suppose she got it, Steve?”

  “I don’t know. It just doesn’t make sense. She wears underpants trimmed with Belgian lace, but she lives in a crummy room-and-a-half with bath. How the hell do you figure that? Two bank accounts, twenty-five bucks to cover her ass, and all she pays is sixty bucks a month for a flophouse.”

  “Maybe she’s hot, Steve.”

  “No.” Carella shook his head. “I ran a make with CBI. She hasn’t got a record, and she’s not wanted for anything. I haven’t heard from the feds yet, but I imagine it’ll be the same story.”

  “What about that key? You said…”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s pretty simple, thank God. Look at this.”

  He reached into the pile of checks and sorted out a yellow slip, larger than the checks. He handed it to Meyer. The slip read:

  “She rented a safe-deposit box the same day she opened the new checking account, huh?” Meyer said.

  “Right.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  “Look, do you want to save some time, Steve?”

  “Sure.”

  “Let’s get the court order before we go to the bank.”

  The manager of the Seaboard Bank of America was a bald-headed man in his early fifties. Working on the theory that similar physical types are simpático, Carella allowed Meyer to do most of the questioning. It was not easy to elicit answers from Mr. Anderson, the manager of the bank, because he was by nature a reticent man. But Detective Meyer Meyer was the most patient man in the city, if not the entire world. His patience was an acquired trait, rather than an inherited one. Oh, he had inherited a few things from his father, a jovial man named Max Meyer, but patience was not one of them. If anything, Max Meyer had been a very impatient if not downright short-tempered sort of fellow. When his wife, for example, came to him with the news that she was expecting a baby, Max nearly hit the ceiling. He enjoyed little jokes immensely, was perhaps the biggest practical joker in all Riverhead, but this particular prank of nature failed to amuse him. He had thought his wife was long past the age when bearing children was even a remote possibility. He never thought of himself as approaching dotage, but he was after all getting on in years, and a change-of-life baby was hardly what the doctor had ordered. He allowed the impending birth to simmer inside him, planning his revenge all the while, plotting the practical joke to end all practical jokes.

  When the baby was born, he named it Meyer, a delightful handle that when coupled with the family name provided the infant with a double-barreled moniker: Meyer Meyer.

  Now that’s pretty funny. Admit it. You can split your sides laughing over that one, unless you happen to be a pretty sensitive kid who also happens to be an Orthodox Jew, and who happens to live in a predominately Gentile neighborhood. The kids in the neighborhood thought Meyer Meyer had been invented solely for their own pleasure. If they needed further provocation for beating up the Jew boy, and they didn’t need any, his name provided excellent motivational fuel. “Meyer Meyer, Jew on fire!” they would shout, and then they would chase him down the street and beat hell out of him.

  Meyer learned patience. It is not very often that one kid, or even one grown man, can successfully defend himself against a gang. But sometimes you can talk yourself out of a beating. Sometimes, if you’re patient, if you just wait long enough, you can catch one of them alone and stand up to him face-to-face, man-to-man, and know the exultation of a fair fight without the frustration of overwhelming odds.

  Listen, Max Meyer’s joke was a harmless one. You can’t deny an old man his pleasure. But Mr. Anderson, the manager of the bank, was fifty-four years old and totally bald. Meyer Meyer, the detective second grade who sat opposite him and asked questions, was also totally bald. Maybe a lifetime of sublimation, a lifetime of devoted patience, doesn’t leave any scars. Maybe not. But Meyer Meyer was only thirty-seven years old.

  Patiently he said, “Didn’t you find these large deposits rather odd, Mr. Anderson?”

  “No,” Anderson said. “A thousand dollars is not a lot of money.”

  “Mr. Anderson,” Meyer said patiently, “you are aware, of course, that banks in this city are required to report to the police any unusually large sums of money deposited at one time. You are aware of that, are you not?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Miss Davis deposited four thousand dollars in three weeks’ time. Didn’t that seem unusual to you?”

  “No. The deposits were spaced. A thousand dollars is not a lot of money, and not an unusually large deposit.”

  “To me,” Meyer said, “a thousand dollars is a lot of money. You can buy a lot of beer with a thousand dollars.”

  “I don’t drink beer,” Anderson said flatly.

  “Neither do I,” Meyer answered.

  “Besides, we do call the police whenever we get a very large deposit, unless the depositor is one of our regular customers. I did not feel that these deposits warranted such a call.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Anderson,” Meyer said. “We have a court order here. We’d like to open the box Miss Davis rented.”

  “May I see the order, please?” Anderson said. Meyer showed it to him. Anderson sighed and said, “Very well. Do you have Miss Davis’s key?”

  Carella reached into his pocket. “Would this be it?” he said. He put a key on the desk. It was the key that had come to him from the lab together with the documents they’d found in the apartment.

  “Yes, that’s it,” Mr. Anderson said. “There are two different keys to every box, you see. The bank keeps one, and the renter keeps the other. The box cannot be opened without both keys. Will you come with me, please?”

  He collected the bank key to safety-deposit box number 375 and led the detectives to the rear of the bank. The room seemed to be lined with shining metal. The boxes, row upon row, reminded Carella of the morgue and the refrigerated shelves that slid in and out of the wall on squeaking rollers. Anderson pushed the bank key into a slot and turned it, and then he put Claudia Davis’s key into a second slot and turned that. He pulled the long, thin box out of the wall and handed it to Meyer. Meyer carried it to the counter on the opposite wall and lifted the catch.

  “Okay?” he said to Carella.

  “Go ahead.”

  Meyer raised the lid of the box.

  There was $16,000 in the box. There was also a slip of notepaper. The $16,000 was neatly divided into four stacks of bills. Three of the stacks held $5,000 each. The fourth stack held only $1,000. Carella picked up the slip of paper. Someone, presumably Claudia Davis, had made some annotations on it in pencil.

  “Make any sense to you, Mr. Anderson?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “She came into this bank on July fifth with twenty thousand dollars in cash, Mr. Anderson. She put a thousand of that into a checking account and the remainder into this box. The dates on this slip of paper show exactly when she took cash from the box and transferred it to the checking account. She knew the rules, Mr. Anderson. She knew that twenty grand deposited in one lump would bring a call to the police. This way was a lot safer.”

  “We’d better get a list of these serial numbers,” Meyer said.

  “Would you have one of your people do that for us, Mr. Anderson?”

  Anderson seemed ready to protest. Instead, he looked at Carella, sighed, and said, “Of course.”

  The serial numbers didn’t help them at all. They compared them against their own lists, and the out-of-town lists, and the FBI lists, but none of those bills was hot.

  Only August was.

  Stewart City hangs in the hair of Isola like a jeweled tiara. Not really a city, not even a town, merely a collection of swank apartment buildings overlooking the River Dix, the community had been named after British royalty and remained one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in town. If you could boast of a Stewart City address, you could also boast of a high income, a country place on Sands Spit, and a Mercedes Benz in the garage under the apartment building. You could give your address with a measure of snobbery and pride—you were, after all, one of the elite.

  The dead girl named Claudia Davis had made out a check to Management Enterprise, Inc., at 13 Stewart Place South, to the tune of $750. The check had been dated July 9, four days after she’d opened the Seaboard account.

  A cool breeze was blowing in off the river as Carella and Hawes pulled up. Late-afternoon sunlight dappled the polluted water of the Dix. The bridges connecting Calm’s Point with Isola hung against a sky awaiting the assault of dusk.

  “Want to pull down the sun visor?” Carella said.

  Hawes reached up and turned down the visor. Clipped to the visor so that it showed through the windshield of the car was a hand-lettered card that read POLICEMAN ON DUTY CALL—87TH PRECINCT. The car, a 1956 Chevrolet, was Carella’s own.

  “I’ve got to make a sign for my car,” Hawes said. “Some bastard tagged it last week.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I went to court and pleaded not guilty. On my day off.”

  “Did you get out of it?”

  “Sure. I was answering a squeal. It’s bad enough I had to use my own car, but for Pete’s sake, to get a ticket!”

  “I prefer my own car,” Carella said. “Those three cars belonging to the squad are ready for the junk heap.”

  “Two,” Hawes corrected. “One of them’s been in the police garage for a month now.”

  “Meyer went down to see about it the other day.”

  “What’d they say? Was it ready?”

  “No, the mechanic told him there were four patrol cars ahead of the sedan, and they took precedence. Now how about that?”

  “Sure, it figures. I’ve still got a chit in for the gas I used, you know that?”

  “Forget it. I’ve never got back a cent I laid out for gas.”

  “What’d Meyer do about the car?”

  “He slipped the mechanic five bucks. Maybe that’ll speed him up.”

  “You know what the city ought to do?” Hawes said. “They ought to buy some of those used taxicabs. Pick them up for two or three hundred bucks, paint them over, and give them out to the squads. Some of them are still in pretty good condition.”

  “Well, it’s an idea,” Carella said dubiously, and they entered the building. They found Mrs. Miller, the manager, in an office at the rear of the ornate entrance lobby. She was a woman in her early forties with a well-preserved figure and a very husky voice. She wore her hair piled on the top of her head, a pencil stuck rakishly into the reddish-brown heap. She looked at the photostated check and said, “Oh, yes, of course.”

  “You knew Miss Davis?”

  “Yes, she lived here for a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “Five years.”

  “When did she move out?”

  “At the end of June.” Mrs. Miller crossed her splendid legs and smiled graciously. The legs were remarkable for a woman of her age, and the smile was almost radiant. She moved with an expert femininity, a calculated, conscious fluidity of flesh that suggested availability and yet was totally respectable. She seemed to have devoted a lifetime to learning the ways and wiles of the female and now practiced them with facility and charm. She was pleasant to be with, this woman, pleasant to watch and to hear, and to think of touching. Carella and Hawes, charmed to their shoes, found themselves relaxing in her presence.

  “This check,” Carella said, tapping the photostat. “What was it for?”

  “June’s rent. I received it on the tenth of July. Claudia always paid her rent by the tenth of the month. She was a very good tenant.”

 

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