“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 a hundred and ninety 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 marvelous 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 blond 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.”
14
They kicked it around like a bunch of advertising executives. They sat in Lieutenant Byrnes’ 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 B.B.D. & 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 blond 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.”