The Empty Hours (2 page)

“That’ll
be a tough name to track down, Steve. Must be a thousand of them in the phone
book.”

“Why is
your hair white?” the landlady asked.

“Huh?”

“That
streak.”

“Oh.”
Hawes unconsciously touched his left temple. “I got knifed once,” he said,
dismissing the question abruptly. “Mrs. Mauder, was the girl living alone?”

“I don’t
know. I mind my own business.”

“Well,
surely you would have seen…
“

“I
think she was living alone. I don’t pry, and I don’t spy. She gave me a month’s
rent in advance.”

Hawes
sighed. He could feel the woman’s hostility. He decided to leave the
questioning to Carella. “I’ll take a look through the drawers and closets,” he
said, and moved off without waiting for Carella’s answer.

“It’s
awfully hot in here,” Carella said.

“The
patrolman said we shouldn’t touch anything until you got here,” Mrs. Mauder
said. “That’s why I didn’t open the windows or nothing.”

“That
was very thoughtful of you,” Carella said, smiling. “But I think we can open
the window now, don’t you?”

“If you
like. It does smell in here. Is . . . is that her? Smelling?”

“Yes,”
Carella answered. He pulled open the window. “There. That’s a little better.”

“Doesn’t
help much,” the landlady said. “The weather’s been terrible
— just
terrible. Body can’t sleep at all.” She looked down at the dead girl. “She
looks just awful, don’t she?”

“Yes. Mrs.
Mauder, would you know where she worked, or if she had a job?”

“No, I’m
sorry.”

“Anyone
ever come by asking for her? Friends? Relatives?”

“No, I’m
sorry. I never saw any.”

“Can
you tell me anything about her habits? When she left the house in the morning?
When she returned at night?”

“I’m
sorry; I never noticed.”

“Well,
what made you think something was wrong in here?”

“The
milk. Outside the door. I was out with some friends tonight, you see, and when
I came back a man on the third floor called down to say his neighbor was
playing the radio very loud and would I tell him to shut up, please. So I went
upstairs and asked him to turn down the radio, and then I passed Miss Davis’
apartment and saw the milk standing outside the door, and I thought this was
kind of funny in such hot weather, but I figured it was
her
milk, you
know, and I don’t like to pry. So I came down and went to bed, but I couldn’t
stop thinking about that milk standing outside in the hallway. So I put on a
robe and came upstairs and knocked on the door, and she didn’t answer. So I
called out to her, and she still didn’t answer. So I figured something must be
wrong. I don’t know why. I just figured . . . I don’t know. If she was in here,
why didn’t she answer?”

“How’d
you know she was here?”

“I didn’t.”

“Was
the door locked?”

“Yes.”

“You
tried it?”

“Yes.
It was locked.”

“I see,”
Carella said.

“Couple
of cars just pulled up downstairs,” Hawes said, walking over. “Probably the
lab. And Homicide South.”

“They
know the squeal is ours,” Carella said. “Why do they bother?”

“Make
it look good,” Hawes said. “Homicide’s got the title on the door, so they
figure they ought to go out and earn their salaries.”

“Did
you find anything?”

“A
brand-new set of luggage in the closet, six pieces. The drawers and closets are
full of clothes. Most of them look new. Lots of resort stuff, Steve. Found some
brand-new books, too.”

“What
else?”

“Some
mail on the dresser top.”

“Anything
we can use?”

Hawes
shrugged. “A statement from the girl’s bank. Bunch of canceled checks. Might
help us.”

“Maybe,”
Carella said. “Let’s see what the lab comes up with.”

The
laboratory report came the next day, together with a necropsy report from the
assistant medical examiner. In combination, the reports were fairly valuable.
The first thing the detectives learned was that the girl was a white Caucasian
of approximately thirty years of age.

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 first 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 twenty-five dollars 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.

* * * *

3

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 desk top, 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?”