When the baby was born, he named it Meyer, a delightful handle which when coupled with the family name provided the infant with a double-barreled monicker: Meyer Meyer.
Now that’s pretty funny. Admit it. You can split your sides laughing over that one, unless you happen to be a pretty sensitive kid who also happens to be an Orthodox Jew, and who happens to live in a predominately Gentile neighborhood. The kids in the neighborhood thought Meyer Meyer had been invented solely for their own pleasure. If they needed further provocation for beating up the Jew boy, and they didn’t need any, his name provided excellent motivational fuel. “Meyer Meyer, Jew on fire!” they would shout, and then they would chase him down the street and beat hell out of him.
Meyer learned patience. It is not very often that one kid, or even one grown man, can successfully defend himself against a gang. But sometimes you can talk yourself out of a beating. Sometimes, if you’re patient, if you just wait long enough, you can catch one of them alone and stand up to him face to face, man to man, and know the exultation of a fair fight without the frustration of overwhelming odds.
Listen, Max Meyer’s joke was a harmless one. You can’t deny an old man his pleasure. But Mr. Anderson, the manager of the bank, was fifty-four years old and totally bald. Meyer Meyer, the detective second grade who sat opposite him and asked questions, was also totally bald. Maybe a lifetime of sublimation, a lifetime of devoted patience, doesn’t leave any scars. Maybe not. But Meyer Meyer was only thirty-seven years old.
Patiently he said, “Didn’t you find these large deposits rather odd, Mr. Anderson?”
“No,” Anderson said. “A thousand dollars is not a lot of money.”
“Mr. Anderson,” Meyer said patiently, “you are aware, of course, that banks in this city are required to report to the police any unusually large sums of money deposited at one time. You are aware of that, are you not?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Miss Davis deposited four thousand dollars in three weeks’ time. Didn’t that seem unusual to you?”
“No. The deposits were spaced. A thousand dollars is not a lot of money, and not an unusually large deposit.”
“To me,” Meyer said, “a thousand dollars is a lot of money. You can buy a lot of beer with a thousand dollars.”
“I don’t drink beer,” Anderson said flatly.
“Neither do I,” Meyer answered.
“Besides, we do call the police whenever we get a very large deposit, unless the depositor is one of our regular customers. I did not feel that these deposits warranted such a call.”
“Thank you, Mr. Anderson,” Meyer said. “We have a court order here. We’d like to open the box Miss Davis rented.”
“May I see the order, please?” Anderson said. Meyer showed it to him. Anderson sighed and said, “Very well. Do you have Miss Davis’ key?”
Carella reached into his pocket. “Would this be it?” he said. He put a key on the desk. It was the key that had come to him from the lab together with the documents they’d found in the apartment.
“Yes, that’s it,” Mr. Anderson said. “There are two different keys to every box, you see. The bank keeps one, and the renter keeps the other. The box cannot be opened without both keys. Will you come with me, please?”
He collected the bank key to safety-deposit box number 375 and led the detectives to the rear of the bank. The room seemed to be lined with shining metal. The boxes, row upon row, reminded Carella of the morgue and the refrigerated shelves that slid in and out of the wall on squeaking rollers. Anderson pushed the bank key into a slot and turned it, and then he put Claudia Davis’ key into a second slot and turned that. He pulled the long, thin box out of the wall and handed it to Meyer. Meyer carried it to the counter on the opposite wall and lifted the catch.
“Okay?” he said to Carella.
“Go ahead.”
Meyer raised the lid of the box.
There was $16,000 in the box. There was also a slip of note paper. The $16,000 was neatly divided into four stacks of bills. Three of the stacks held $5,000 each. The fourth stack held only $1,000. Carella picked up the slip of paper. Someone, presumably Claudia Davis., had made some annotations on it in pencil.
“Make any sense to you, Mr. Anderson?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“She came into this bank on July fifth with twenty thousand dollars in cash, Mr. Anderson. She put a thousand of that into a checking account and the remainder into this box. The dates on this slip of paper show exactly when she took cash from the box and transferred it to the checking account. She knew the rules, Mr. Anderson. She knew that twenty grand deposited in one lump would bring a call to the police. This way was a lot safer.”
“We’d better get a list of these serial numbers,’ Meyer said.
“Would you have one of your people do that for us, Mr. Anderson?”
Anderson seemed ready to protest. Instead, he looked at Carella, sighed, and said, “Of course.”
The serial numbers didn’t help them at all. They compared them against their own lists, and the out-of-town lists, and the FBI lists, but none of those bills was hot.
Only August was.
5
Stewart City hangs in the hair of Isola like a jeweled tiara. Not really a city, not even a town, merely a collection of swank apartment buildings overlooking the River Dix, the community had been named after British royalty and remained one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in town. If you could boast of a Stewart City address, you could also boast of a high income, a country place on Sands Spit, and a Mercedes Benz in the garage under the apartment building. You could give your address with a measure of snobbery and pride — you were, after all, one of the elite.
The dead girl named Claudia Davis had made out a check to Management Enterprise, Inc., at 13 Stewart Place South, to the tune of $750. The check had been dated July nine, four days after she’d opened the Seaboard account.
A cool breeze was blowing in off the river as Carella and Hawes pulled up. Late-afternoon sunlight dappled the polluted water of the Dix. The bridges connecting Calm’s Point with Isola hung against a sky awaiting the assault of dusk.
“Want to pull down the sun visor?” Carella said.
Hawes reached up and turned down the visor. Clipped to the visor so that it showed through the windshield of the car was a hand-lettered card that read POLICEMAN ON DUTY CALL — 87TH PRECINCT. The car, a 1956 Chevrolet, was Carella’s own.
“I’ve got to make a sign for my car,” Hawes said. “Some bastard tagged it last week.”
“What did you do?”
“I went to court and pleaded not guilty. On my day off.”
“Did you get out of it?”
“Sure. I was answering a squeal. It’s bad enough I had to use my own car, but for Pete’s sake, to get a ticket!”
“I prefer my own car,” Carella said. “Those three cars belonging to the squad are ready for the junk heap.”