“So you took the train up there and then drove Miss Davis and the Cadillac back to the city, is that right?”
“Yeah.”
“I suppose she was pretty distraught on the trip home.”
“Huh?”
“You, know. Not too coherent.”
“Huh?”
“Broken up. Crying. Hysterical,” Carella said.
“No. No, she was okay.”
“Well, what I mean is...” Carella hesitated. “I assumed she wasn’t capable of driving the car back herself.”
“Yeah, that’s right. That’s why she hired me.”
“Well, then...”
“But not because she was broken up or anything.”
“Then why?” Carella frowned. “Was there a lot of luggage? Did she need your help with that?”
“Yeah, sure. Both hers and her cousin’s. Her cousin drowned, you know.”
“Yes. I know that.”
“But anybody coulda helped her with her luggage,” Oblinsky said. “No, that wasn’t why she hired me. She really needed me, mister.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because she don’t know how to drive, that’s why.”
Carella stared at him. “You’re wrong,” he said.
“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.
13
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?”