The empty hours 87th pre.., p.4
The Empty Hours (87th Precinct), page 4
“Like hell it can. This job is away over in…”
“Mr. Courtenoy, we don’t want to have to go all the way downtown and come back with a warrant for your arrest.”
“My arrest! For what? Listen, what did I…?”
“Sidney? Sidney, shall I call the police?” the woman shouted from inside the house.
“Oh, shut the hell up!” Courtenoy answered. “Call the police,” he mumbled. “I’m up to my ears in cops, and she wants to call the police. What do you want from me? I’m an honest bricklayer. I saw a girl drown. I told it just the way I saw it. Is that a crime? Why are you bothering me?”
“Just tell it again, Mr. Courtenoy. Just the way you saw it.”
“She was out in the boat,” Courtenoy said, sighing. “I was fishing. Her cousin was on the shore. She fell over the side.”
“Josie Thompson.”
“Yes, Josie Thompson, whatever the hell her name was.”
“She was alone in the boat?”
“Yes. She was alone in the boat.”
“Go on.”
“The other one—Miss Davis—screamed and ran into the water, and began swimming toward her.” He shook his head. “She didn’t make it in time. That boat was a long way out. When she got there, the lake was still. She dove under and came up, and then dove under again, but it was too late, it was just too late. Then, as she was swimming back, I thought she was going to drown, too. She faltered and sank below the surface, and I waited and I thought sure she was gone. Then there was a patch of yellow that broke through the water, and I saw she was all right.”
“Why didn’t you jump in to help her, Mr. Courtenoy?”
“I don’t know how to swim.”
“All right. What happened next?”
“She came out of the water—Miss Davis. She was exhausted and hysterical. I tried to calm her down, but she kept yelling and crying, not making any sense at all. I dragged her over to the car, and I asked her for the car keys. She didn’t seem to know what I was talking about at first. ‘The keys!’ I said, and she just stared at me. ‘Your car keys!’ I yelled. ‘The keys to the car.’ Finally she reached in her purse and handed me the keys.”
“Go on.”
“I drove her into town. It was me who told the story to the police. She couldn’t talk, all she could do was babble and scream and cry. It was a terrible thing to watch. I’d never before seen a woman so completely off her nut. We couldn’t get two straight words out of her until the next day. Then she was all right. Told the police who she was, explained what I’d already told them the day before, and told them the dead girl was her cousin, Josie Thompson. They dragged the lake and got her out of the water. A shame. A real shame. Nice young girl like that.”
“What was the dead girl wearing?”
“Cotton dress. Loafers, I think. Or sandals. Little thin sweater over the dress. A cardigan.”
“Any jewelry?”
“I don’t think so. No.”
“Was she carrying a purse?”
“No. Her purse was in the car with Miss Davis’s.”
“What was Miss Davis wearing?”
“When? The day of the drowning? Or when they pulled her cousin out of the lake?”
“Was she there then?”
“Sure. Identified the body.”
“No, I wanted to know what she was wearing on the day of the accident, Mr. Courtenoy.”
“Oh, skirt and a blouse, I think. Ribbon in her hair. Loafers. I’m not sure.”
“What color blouse? Yellow?”
“No. Blue.”
“You said yellow.”
“No, blue, I didn’t say yellow.”
Carella frowned. “I thought you said yellow earlier.” He shrugged. “All right, what happened after the inquest?”
“Nothing much. Miss Davis thanked me for being so kind and said she would send me a check for the time I’d missed. I refused at first and then I thought, What the hell, I’m a hard-working man, and money doesn’t grow on trees. So I gave her my address. I figured she could afford it. Driving a Caddy, and hiring a fellow to take it back to the city.”
“Why didn’t she drive it back herself?”
“I don’t know. I guess she was still a little shaken. Listen, that was a terrible experience. Did you ever see anyone die up close?”
“Yes,” Carella said.
From inside the house Courtenoy’s wife yelled, “Sidney, tell those men to get out of our driveway!”
“You heard her,” Courtenoy said, and finished rolling up his garage door.
Nobody likes Monday morning.
It was invented for hangovers. It is really not the beginning of a new week, but only the tail end of the week before. Nobody likes it, and it doesn’t have to be rainy or gloomy or blue in order to provoke disaffection. It can be bright and sunny and the beginning of August. It can start with a driveway interview at 7:00 A.M. and grow progressively worse by 9:30 that same morning. Monday is Monday and legislation will never change its personality. Monday is Monday, and it stinks.
By 9:30 that Monday morning, Detective Steve Carella was on the edge of total bewilderment and, like any normal person, he blamed it on Monday. He had come back to the squadroom and painstakingly gone over the pile of checks Claudia Davis had written during the month of July, a total of twenty-five, searching them for some clue to her strangulation, studying them with the scrutiny of a typographer in a print shop. Several things seemed evident from the checks, but nothing seemed pertinent. He could recall having said: “I look at those checks, I can see a life. It’s like reading somebody’s diary,” and he was beginning to believe he had uttered some famous last words in those two succinct sentences. For if this was the diary of Claudia Davis, it was a singularly unprovocative account that would never make the nation’s best-seller lists.
Most of the checks had been made out to clothing or department stores. Claudia, true to the species, seemed to have a penchant for shopping and a checkbook that yielded to her spending urge. Calls to the various stores represented revealed that her taste ranged through a wide variety of items. A check of sales slips showed that she had purchased during the month of July alone three baby doll nightgowns, two half-slips, a trench coat, a wristwatch, four pairs of tapered slacks in various colors, two pairs of walking shoes, a pair of sunglasses, four bikini swimsuits, eight wash-and-wear frocks, two skirts, two cashmere sweaters, half-a-dozen best-selling novels, a large bottle of aspirin, two bottles of Dramamine, six pieces of luggage, and four boxes of cleansing tissue. The most expensive thing she had purchased was an evening gown costing $500. These purchases accounted for most of the checks she had drawn in July. There were also checks to a hairdresser, a florist, a shoemaker, a candy shop, and three unexplained checks that were drawn to individuals, two men and a woman.
The first was made out to George Badueck.
The second was made out to David Oblinsky.
The third was made out to Martha Fedelson.
Someone on the squad had attacked the telephone directory and come up with addresses for two of the three. The third, Oblinsky, had an unlisted number, but a half-hour’s argument with a supervisor had finally netted an address for him. The completed list was now on Carella’s desk together with all the canceled checks. He should have begun tracking down those names, he knew, but something still was bugging him.
“Why did Courtenoy lie to me and Meyer?” he asked Cotton Hawes. “Why did he lie about something as simple as what Claudia Davis was wearing on the day of the drowning?”
“How did he lie?”
“First he said she was wearing yellow, said he saw a patch of yellow break the surface of the lake. Then he changed it to blue. Why did he do that, Cotton?”
“I don’t know.”
“And if he lied about that, why couldn’t he have been lying about everything? Why couldn’t he and Claudia have done in little Josie together?”
“I don’t know,” Hawes said.
“Where’d that twenty thousand bucks come from, Cotton?”
“Maybe it was a stock dividend.”
“Maybe. Then why didn’t she simply deposit the check? This was cash, Cotton, cash. Now where did it come from? That’s a nice piece of change. You don’t pick twenty grand out of the gutter.”
“I suppose not.”
“I know where you can get twenty grand, Cotton.”
“Where?”
“From an insurance company. When someone dies.” Carella nodded once, sharply. “I’m going to make some calls. Damnit, that money had to come from someplace.”
He hit pay dirt on his sixth call. The man he spoke to was named Jeremiah Dodd and was a representative of the Security Insurance Corporation, Inc. He recognized Josie Thompson’s name at once.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “We settled that claim in July.”
“Who made the claim, Mr. Dodd?”
“The beneficiary, of course. Just a moment. Let me get the folder on this. Will you hold on, please?”
Carella waited impatiently. Over at the insurance company on the other end of the line he could hear muted voices. A girl giggled suddenly, and he wondered who was kissing whom over by the water cooler. At last Dodd came back on the line.
“Here it is,” he said. “Josephine Thompson. Beneficiary was her cousin, Miss Claudia Davis. Oh, yes, now it’s all coming back. Yes, this is the one.”
“What one?”
“Where the girls were mutual beneficiaries.”
“What do you mean?”
“The cousins,” Dodd said. “There were two life policies. One for Miss Davis and one for Miss Thompson. And they were mutual beneficiaries.”
“You mean Miss Davis was the beneficiary of Miss Thompson’s policy and vice versa?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“That’s very interesting. How large were the policies?”
“Oh, very small.”
“Well, how small then?”
“I believe they were both insured for twelve thousand five hundred. Just a moment; let me check. Yes, that’s right.”
“And Miss Davis applied for payment on the policy after her cousin died, huh?”
“Yes. Here it is, right here. Josephine Thompson drowned at Lake Triangle on June fourth. That’s right. Claudia Davis sent in the policy and the certificate of death and also a coroner’s jury verdict.”
“She didn’t miss a trick, did she?”
“Sir? I’m sorry, I…”
“Did you pay her?”
“Yes. It was a perfectly legitimate claim. We began processing it at once.”
“Did you send anyone up to Lake Triangle to investigate the circumstances of Miss Thompson’s death?”
“Yes, but it was merely a routine investigation. A coroner’s inquest is good enough for us, Detective Carella.”
“When did you pay Miss Davis?”
“On July first.”
“You sent her a check for twelve thousand five hundred dollars, is that right?”
“No, sir.”
“Didn’t you say…?”
“The policy insured her for twelve-five, that’s correct. But there was a double-indemnity clause, you see, and Josephine Thompson’s death was accidental. No, we had to pay the policy’s limit, Detective Carella. On July first we sent Claudia Davis a check for twenty-five thousand dollars.”
There are no mysteries in police work.
Nothing fits into a carefully preconceived scheme. The high point of any given case is very often the corpse that opens the case. There is no climactic progression; suspense is for the movies. There are only people and curiously twisted motives, and small unexplained details, and coincidence, and the unexpected, and they combine to form a sequence of events, but there is no real mystery, there never is. There is only life, and sometimes death, and neither follows a rule book. Policemen hate mystery stories because they recognize in them a control that is lacking in their own very real, sometimes routine, sometimes spectacular, sometimes tedious investigation of a case. It is very nice and very clever and very convenient to have all the pieces fit together neatly. It is very kind to think of detectives as master mathematicians working on an algebraic problem whose constants are death and a victim, whose unknown is a murderer. But many of these mastermind detectives have trouble adding up the deductions on their twice-monthly paychecks. The world is full of wizards, for sure, but hardly any of them work for the city police.
There was one big mathematical discrepancy in the Claudia Davis case.
There seemed to be $5,000 unaccounted for.
Twenty-five grand had been mailed to Claudia Davis on July 1, and she presumably received the check after the Fourth of July holiday, cashed it someplace, and then took her money to the Seaboard Bank of America, opened a new checking account, and rented a safety-deposit box. But her total deposit at Seaboard had been $20,000 whereas the check had been for $25,000, so where was the laggard $5,000? And who had cashed the check for her? Mr. Dodd of the Security Insurance Corporation, Inc., explained the company’s rather complicated accounting system to Carella. A check was kept in the local office for several days after it was cashed in order to close out the policy, after which it was sent to the main office in Chicago where it sometimes stayed for several weeks until the master files were closed out. It was then sent to the company’s accounting and auditing firm in San Francisco. It was Dodd’s guess that the canceled check had already been sent to the California accountants, and he promised to put a tracer on it at once. Carella asked him to please hurry. Someone had cashed that check for Claudia and, supposedly, someone also had one-fifth of the check’s face value.
The very fact that Claudia had not taken the check itself to Seaboard seemed to indicate that she had something to hide. Presumably, she did not want anyone asking questions about insurance company checks, or insurance policies, or double indemnities, or accidental drownings, or especially her cousin Josie. The check was a perfectly good one, and yet she had chosen to cash it before opening a new account. Why? And why, for that matter, had she bothered opening a new account when she had a rather well-stuffed and active account at another bank?
There are only whys in police work, but they do not add up to mystery. They add up to work, and nobody in the world likes work. The bulls of the 87th would have preferred to sit on their backsides and sip at gin and tonics, but the whys were there, so they put on their hats and their holsters and tried to find some becauses.
Cotton Hawes systematically interrogated each and every tenant in the rooming house where Claudia Davis had been killed. They all had alibis tighter than the closed fist of an Arabian stable keeper. In his report to the lieutenant, Hawes expressed the belief that none of the tenants were guilty of homicide. As far as he was concerned, they were all clean.
Meyer Meyer attacked the 87th’s stool pigeons. There were money changers galore in the precinct and the city, men who turned hot loot into cold cash—for a price. If someone had cashed a $25,000 check for Claudia and kept $5,000 of it during the process, couldn’t that person conceivably be one of the money changers? He put the precinct stoolies on the ear, asked them to sound around the word of a Security Insurance Corporation check. The stoolies came up with nothing.
Detective Lieutenant Sam Grossman took his laboratory boys to the murder room and went over it again. And again. And again. He reported that the lock on the door was a snap lock, the kind that clicks shut automatically when the door is slammed. Whoever killed Claudia Davis could have done so without performing any locked-room gymnastics. All he had to do was close the door behind him when he left. Grossman also reported that Claudia’s bed had apparently not been slept in on the night of the murder. A pair of shoes had been found at the foot of a large easy chair in the bedroom and a novel was wedged open on the arm of the chair. He suggested that Claudia had fallen asleep while reading, had awakened, and gone into the other room where she had met her murderer and her death. He had no suggestions as to just who that murderer might have been.
Steve Carella was hot and impatient and overloaded. There were other things happening in the precinct, things like burglaries and muggings and knifings and assaults and kids with summertime on their hands hitting other kids with ball bats because they didn’t like the way they pronounced the word “señor.” There were telephones jangling, and reports to be typed in triplicate, and people filing into the squadroom day and night with complaints against the citizenry of that fair city, and the Claudia Davis case was beginning to be a big fat pain in the keister. Carella wondered what it was like to be a shoemaker. And while he was wondering, he began to chase down the checks made out to George Badueck, David Oblinsky, and Martha Fedelson.
Happily, Bert Kling had nothing whatsoever to do with the Claudia Davis case. He hadn’t even discussed it with any of the men on the squad. He was a young detective and a new detective, and the things that happened in that precinct were enough to drive a guy nuts and keep him busy forty-eight hours every day, so he didn’t go around sticking his nose into other people’s cases. He had enough troubles of his own. One of those troubles was the lineup.
On Wednesday morning Bert Kling’s name appeared on the lineup duty chart.
The lineup was held in the gym downtown at Headquarters on High Street. It was held four days a week, Monday to Thursday, and the purpose of the parade was to acquaint the city’s detectives with the people who were committing crime, the premise being that crime is a repetitive profession and that a crook will always be a crook, and it’s good to know who your adversaries are should you happen to come face-to-face with them on the street. Timely recognition of a thief had helped crack many a case and had, on some occasions, even saved a detective’s life. So the lineup was a pretty valuable in-group custom. This didn’t mean that detectives enjoyed the trip downtown. They drew lineup perhaps once every two weeks and, often as not, lineup duty fell on their day off, and nobody appreciated rubbing elbows with criminals on his day off. The lineup that Wednesday morning followed the classic pattern of all lineups. The detectives sat in the gymnasium on folding chairs, and the chief of detectives sat behind a high podium at the back of the gym. The green shades were drawn, and the stage illuminated, and the offenders who’d been arrested the day before were marched before the assembled bulls while the chief read off the charges and handled the interrogation. The pattern was a simple one. The arresting officer, uniformed or plainclothes, would join the chief at the rear of the gym when his arrest came up. The chief would read off the felon’s name, and then the section of the city in which he’d been arrested, and then a number. He would say, for example, “Jones, John, Riverhead, three.” The “three” would simply indicate that this was the third arrest in Riverhead that day. Only felonies and special types of misdemeanors were handled at the lineup, so this narrowed the list of performers on any given day. Following the case number, the chief would read off the offense, and then say either “Statement” or “No statement,” telling the assembled cops that the thief either had or had not said anything when they’d put the collar on him. If there had been a statement, the chief would limit his questions to rather general topics since he didn’t want to lead the felon into saying anything that might contradict his usually incriminating initial statement, words that could be used against him in court. If there had been no statement, the chief would pull out all the stops. He was generally armed with whatever police records were available on the man who stood under the blinding lights, and it was the smart thief who understood the purpose of the lineup and who knew he was not bound to answer a goddamned thing they asked him. The chief of detectives was something like a deadly earnest Mike Wallace, but the stakes were slightly higher here because this involved something a little more important than a novelist plugging his new book or a senator explaining the stand he had taken on a farm bill. These were truly “interviews in depth,” and the booby prize was very often a long stretch up the river in a cozy one-windowed room.
