The Empty Hours (7 page)

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.”

* * * *

9

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 five? 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 stablekeeper. 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 moneychangers?
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 readings 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 keester. 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 Feldelson.

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 line-up.

On
Wednesday morning Bert Kling’s name appeared on the line-up duty chart.

* * * *

10

The line-up 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
line-up was a pretty valuable in-group custom. This didn’t mean that
detectives enjoyed the trip downtown. They drew line-up perhaps once every two
weeks and, often as not, line-up duty fell on their day off, and nobody
appreciated rubbing elbows with criminals on his day off.

The
line-up that Wednesday morning followed the classic pattern of all line-ups.
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 plain-clothes, 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 line-up, 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 line-up 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.

The
line-up bored the hell out of Kling. It always did. It was like seeing a stage
show for the hundredth time. Every now and then somebody stopped the show with
a really good routine. But usually it was the same old song and dance. It wasn’t
any different that Wednesday. By the time the eighth offender had been paraded
and subjected to the chief’s bludgeoning interrogation, Kling was beginning
to doze. The detective sitting next to him nudged him gently in the ribs.