“Oh, no,” Oblinsky said. “She can’t drive, believe me. While I was putting the luggage in the trunk, I asked her to start the car, and she didn’t even know how to do that. Hey, you think I ought to raise a fuss with the phone company?”

  “I don’t know,” Carella said, rising suddenly. All at once the check made out to Claudia Davis’s hairdresser seemed terribly important to him. He had almost run out of checks, but all at once he had an idea.

  The hairdresser’s salon was on South Twenty-third, just off Jefferson Avenue. A green canopy covered the sidewalk outside the salon. The words ARTURO MANFREDI, INC., were lettered discreetly in white on the canopy. A glass plaque in the window repeated the name of the establishment and added, for the benefit of those who did not read either Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar, that there were two branches of the shop, one here in Isola and another in “Nassau, the Bahamas.” Beneath that, in smaller, more modest letters, were the words “Internationally Renowned.” Carella and Hawes went into the shop at 4:30 in the afternoon. Two meticulously coifed and manicured women were sitting in the small reception room, their expensively sleek legs crossed, apparently awaiting either their chauffeurs, their husbands, or their lovers. They both looked up expectantly when the detectives entered, expressed mild disappointment by only slightly raising newly plucked eyebrows, and went back to reading their fashion magazines. Carella and Hawes walked to the desk. The girl behind the desk was a blonde with a brilliant shellacked look and an English finishing school voice.

  “Yes?” she said. “May I help you?”

  She lost a tiny trace of her poise when Carella flashed his buzzer. She read the raised lettering on the shield, glanced at the photo on the plastic-encased ID card, quickly regained her polished calm, and said coolly and unemotionally, “Yes, what can I do for you?”

  “We wonder if you can tell us anything about the girl who wrote this check?” Carella said. He reached into his jacket pocket, took out a folded photostat of the check, unfolded it, and put it on the desk before the blonde. The blonde looked at it casually.

  “What is the name?” she asked. “I can’t make it out.”

  “Claudia Davis.”

  “D-A-V-I-S.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t recognize the name,” the blonde said. “She’s not one of our regular customers.”

  “But she did make out a check to your salon,” Carella said. “She wrote this on July seventh. Would you please check your records and find out why she was here and who took care of her?”

  “I’m sorry,” the blonde said.

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry, but we close at five o’clock, and this is the busiest time of the day for us. I’m sure you can understand that. If you’d care to come back a little later…”

  “No, we wouldn’t care to come back a little later,” Carella said. “Because if we came back a little later, it would be with a search warrant and possibly a warrant for the seizure of your books, and sometimes that can cause a little commotion among the gossip columnists, and that kind of commotion might add to your international renown a little bit. We’ve had a long day, miss, and this is important, so how about it?”

  “Of course. We’re always delighted to cooperate with the police,” the blonde said frigidly. “Especially when they’re so well-mannered.”

  “Yes, we’re all of that,” Carella answered.

  “Yes. July seventh, did you say?”

  “July seventh.”

  The blonde left the desk and went into the back of the salon. A brunette came out front and said, “Has Miss Marie left for the evening?”

  “Who’s Miss Marie?” Hawes asked.

  “The blonde girl.”

  “No. She’s getting something for us.”

  “That white streak is very attractive,” the brunette said. “I’m Miss Olga.”

  “How do you do.”

  “Fine, thank you,” Miss Olga said. “When she comes back, would you tell her there’s something wrong with one of the dryers on the third floor?”

  “Yes, I will,” Hawes said.

  Miss Olga smiled, waved, and vanished into the rear of the salon again. Miss Marie reappeared not a moment later. She looked at Carella and said, “A Miss Claudia Davis was here on July seventh. Mr. Sam worked on her. Would you like to talk to him?”

  “Yes, we would.”

  “Then follow me, please,” she said curtly.

  They followed her into the back of the salon past women who sat with crossed legs, wearing smocks, their heads in hair dryers.

  “Oh, by the way,” Hawes said, “Miss Olga said to tell you there’s something wrong with one of the third-floor dryers.”

  “Thank you,” Miss Marie said.

  Hawes felt particularly clumsy in this world of women’s machines. There was an air of delicate efficiency about the place, and Hawes—six feet two inches tall in his bare soles, weighing in at 190 pounds—was certain he would knock over a bottle of nail polish or a pail of hair rinse. As they entered the second-floor salon, as he looked down that long line of humming space helmets at women with crossed legs and what looked like barber’s aprons covering their nylon slips, he became aware of a new phenomenon. The women were slowly turning their heads inside the dryers to look at the white streak over his left temple. He suddenly felt like a horse’s ass. For whereas the streak was the legitimate result of a knifing—they had shaved his red hair to get at the wound, and it had grown back this way—he realized all at once that many of these women had shelled out hard-earned dollars to simulate identical white streaks in their own hair, and he no longer felt like a cop making a business call. Instead, he felt like a customer who had come to have his goddamned streak touched up a little.

  “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 mar-velous 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 blonde 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.”

  They kicked it around like a bunch of advertising executives. They sat in Lieutenant Byrnes’s 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 BBD & 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 blonde 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 UCLA 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.

  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?”

  “I’m a detective,” Carella said. He opened his wallet to where his shield was pinned to the leather. “You cashed a check for Miss Claudia Davis sometime in July. An insurance-company check for twenty-five thousand dollars. Would you happen to remember it?”

  “No, sir, I don’t think I handled it.”

  “Would you check around and see who did, please?”

  The girl held a brief consultation with the other girls, and then walked to a desk behind which sat a corpulent, balding man with a razor-thin mustache. They talked with each other for a full five minutes. The man kept waving his hands. The girl kept trying to explain about the insurance-company check. The bell over the front door sounded. Bert Kling came in, looked around, saw Carella, and joined him at the counter.

  “All done?” Carella asked.

  “Yeah, I bought her a charm for her bracelet. How about you?”

  “They’re holding a summit meeting,” Carella said.

  The fat man waddled over to the counter. “What is the trouble?” he asked Carella.

  “No trouble. Did you cash a check for twenty-five thousand dollars?”

  “Yes. Is the check no good?”

  “It’s a good check.”

  “It looked like a good check. It was an insurance-company check. The young lady waited while we called the company. They said it was bona fide and we should accept it. Was it a bad check?”

 

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