“Miss Welles?” he said, and this seemed correct; she nodded briefly in response, still staring at her shoes. Against the wall the bottles of lotion shimmered with reflected light. “When did you see her last?”
“Before I started here.”
“When was that?”
“About six months ago. May. Is that six months?”
“You hadn’t seen her since?”
“No.”
“Were you particularly close?”
“I liked her a lot. I guess maybe I loved her.”
“But you hadn’t seen her since May.”
“No.”
“Had you talked to her?”
“You mean on the phone?”
“Yes.”
“I tried to call her at least once a week. She was blind, you know. How could anybody... why would anybody...?” Stephanie shook her head.
“When did you talk to her last?”
“Last week.”
“When last week?”
“Thursday night, I guess it was. I get Wednesdays and Thursdays off.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Well, the usual.”
“Which was?”
“Well, you see, I lied to her about the job here. I mean, that’s why I stopped going to see her. Because if, you know, I had to sit there face to face and lie... she could sense things, you know. Blind people can sense things. And if I lied to her sitting right there in the room with her, well, she’d just know it, and I... I couldn’t bear that. My mother’s dead, you know, Aunt Hess was all I had, I didn’t want to... to hurt her... or to... you know... by her finding out I’m working in a place like this.”
“Where did you say you worked?”
“I told her I was a flight attendant. A stewardess. And I said I was based in Chicago and only got to the city here every now and then. I used to say I was calling from the airport. I told her I was trying to get my flight schedules changed so I could come see her again. I told her I was working on it. Meanwhile, I wrote to her a lot, and I called her whenever I could.”
“How’d you manage writing to her?”
“What do you mean?”
“You told her you were living in Chicago.”
“Oh. I have a girl friend there, she used to work here at the Tahitian. She forwarded my aunt’s letters to me, and then I’d send my answers back, you know, for her to mail from Chicago.”
“Wouldn’t it have been easier to just quit the job here, find some work your aunt...”
“Well, the money’s good,” Stephanie said, and shrugged.
“How’d you get started here?”
“Well, I don’t want to talk about it. I needed a job, that’s all.”
“There are lots of jobs in this city.”
“They don’t pay as much as this one. The job here gave me plenty of money for myself, and enough to send Aunt Hess a little every now and then. Besides, I wanted a Benz.”
“A what?”
“A Mercedes-Benz. I wanted one for the longest time. So I answered an ad in one of the fuck-papers, and took the job. I’m paying off the car now, I bought it on time. I make a lot of money here. And I’m really good at it,” Stephanie said, and shrugged. “I give good blow-jobs.”
“How often did you send money to your aunt?”
“Every now and then.”
“How much?”
“Fifty dollars, a hundred. It depended.”
“Did anyone know she had this extra money coming in?”
“Why? Was she robbed? Did someone rob her?”
“No, it doesn’t look that way. But sometimes people get envious and...”
“It wasn’t that much money. I sent her whatever I could, but it wasn’t a fortune. Anyway, my aunt never told her business to anybody. I’m sure she wouldn’t have told anybody she was getting money from me.”
Again there was laughter down the hall. A girl’s laughter, high and genuine. Stephanie reached for a tissue in a box resting on the floor. She blew her nose, and tucked the tissue into the waistband of the skirted scarf covering the G-string. Then she looked at her watch.
“The last time you spoke to your aunt...” Carella said.
“Yeah,” Stephanie said, and nodded, “but could you please hurry it up, cause you paid for a half-hour, you know, and they like us to keep track of the time.”
“Did she mention anything that was frightening her?”
“No.”
“Any threatening letters or phone calls?”
“No.”
“Anything that was worrying her, or troubling her...”
“Nothing,” Stephanie said.
“Nothing,” Carella repeated.
Driving back home to Riverhead, the faulty car-heater clanking and rattling but doing little otherwise to defrost the windshield, he began adding up what he had. The tally came close to the nothing he had got from Stephanie Welles. He bunched his gloved fist, rubbed it against the rime forming on the glass, and cleared a spot about the size of a melon. He knew it would frost over again in no time at all, but meanwhile he enjoyed the luxury of being able to see the road ahead. It was not yet eleven-thirty, there wasn’t much traffic going out of the city this early on a Saturday night.
The case had begun on Thursday with the murder of Jimmy Harris, had lurched into Friday morning with the subsequent murder of Jimmy’s wife, and had zigged and zagged an essentially unrewarding path across the city and the state until it smashed into a dead-end brick wall with the murder of Hester Mathieson earlier tonight. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, three days, and the case was still as cold as a herring, red or otherwise.
Carella was tired and he was irritated and he was probably inconsolable, but he tried nonetheless to console himself with facts because he knew that in police work there were no mysteries; there were only crimes and the people who committed them. The people were sometimes professionals — as were armed robbers and burglars and some murderers. Or they were sometimes amateurs — as were most murderers. Or they were sometimes crazies — as were most pyros and some murderers and a mixed bag of other lawbreakers as unrelated as rapists or false-alarmists or muggers or parakeet-thieves or—
The facts, please.
Three blind people killed in as many days. Nothing stolen from any of them. Apartment of the first two victims turned inside out and upside down. Okay, the murderer was looking for something. What? Was it something Jimmy had buried? Dirt under his fingernails — soil, soil. So yes, he had possibly buried something. Then why did the killer tear up the furniture and overturn the lamps and dump forks and knives all over the floor and generally behave badly? Because he didn’t know beforehand that Jimmy had buried whatever it was he was looking for. All right then, did he find whatever Jimmy had buried? Yes, he found it. How do you know? Because he didn’t similarly ransack Hester Mathieson’s apartment. If he’d already found what Jimmy had buried, there was no need to search for it elsewhere. Good. In fact, brilliant. Then why did he bother to kill Hester Mathieson? If she had nothing he wanted, why did he kill her?