“What was the dead girl wearing?”
“Cotton dress. Loafers, I think. Or sandals. Little thin sweater over the dress. A cardigan.”
“Any jewelry?”
“I don’t think so. No.”
“Was she carrying a purse?”
“No. Her purse was in the car with Miss Davis’.”
“What was Miss Davis wearing?”
“When? The day of the drowning? Or when they pulled her cousin out of the lake?”
“Was she there then?”
“Sure. Identified the body.”
“No, I wanted to know what she was wearing on the day of the accident, Mr. Courtenoy.”
“Oh, skirt and a blouse, I think. Ribbon in her hair. Loafers. I’m not sure.”
“What color blouse? Yellow?”
“No. Blue.”
“You said yellow.”
“No, blue, I didn’t say yellow.”
Carella frowned. “I thought you said yellow earlier.” He shrugged. “All right, what happened after the inquest?”
“Nothing much. Miss Davis thanked me for being so kind and said she would send me a check for the time I’d missed. I refused at first and then I thought, What the hell, I’m a hard-working man, and money doesn’t grow on trees. So I gave her my address. I figured she could afford it. Driving a Caddy, and hiring a fellow to take it back to the city.”
“Why didn’t she drive it back herself?”
“I don’t know. I guess she was still a little shaken. Listen, that was a terrible experience. Did you ever see anyone die up close?”
“Yes,” Carella said.
From inside the house Courtenoy’s wife yelled, “Sidney, tell those men to get out of our driveway!”
“You heard her,” Courtenoy said, and finished rolling up his garage door.
8
Nobody likes Monday morning.
It was invented for hangovers. It is really not the beginning of a new week, but only the tail end of the week before. Nobody likes it, and it doesn’t have to be rainy or gloomy or blue in order to provoke disaffection. It can be bright and sunny and the beginning of August. It can start with a driveway interview at seven a.m. and grow progressively worse by nine-thirty that same morning. Monday is Monday and legislation will never change its personality. Monday is Monday, and it stinks.
By nine-thirty that Monday morning, Detective Steve Carella was on the edge of total bewilderment and, like any normal person, he blamed it on Monday. He had come back to the squadroom and painstakingly gone over the pile of checks Claudia Davis had written during the month of July, a total of twenty-five, searching them for some clue to her strangulation, studying them with the scrutiny of a typographer in a print shop. Several things seemed evident from the checks, but nothing seemed pertinent. He could recall having said: “I look at those checks, I can see a life. It’s like reading somebody’s diary,” and he was beginning to believe he had uttered some famous last words in those two succinct sentences. For if this was the diary of Claudia Davis, it was a singularly unprovocative account that would never make the nation’s best-seller lists.
Most of the checks had been made out to clothing or department stores. Claudia, true to the species, seemed to have a penchant for shopping and a checkbook that yielded to her spending urge. Calls to the various stores represented revealed that her taste ranged through a wide variety of items. A check of sales slips showed that she had purchased during the month of July alone three baby doll nightgowns, two half slips, a trenchcoat, a wrist watch, four pairs of tapered slacks in various colors, two pairs of walking shoes, a pair of sunglasses, four bikini swimsuits, eight wash-and-wear frocks, two skirts, two cashmere sweaters, half-a-dozen best-selling novels, a large bottle of aspirin, two bottles of Dramamine, six pieces of luggage, and four boxes of cleansing tissue. The most expensive thing she had purchased was an evening gown costing $500. These purchases accounted for most of the checks she had drawn in July. There were also checks to a hairdresser, a florist, a shoemaker, a candy shop, and three unexplained checks that were drawn to individuals, two men and a woman.
The first was made out to George Badueck.
The second was made out to David Oblinsky.
The third was made out to Martha Feldelson.
Someone on the squad had attacked the telephone directory and come up with addresses for two of the three. The third, Oblinsky, had an unlisted number, but a half-hour’s argument with a supervisor had finally netted an address for him. The completed list was now on Carella’s desk together with all the canceled checks. He should have begun tracking down those names, he knew, but something still was bugging him.
“Why did Courtenoy lie to me and Meyer?” he asked Cotton Hawes. “Why did he lie about something as simple as what Claudia Davis was wearing on the day of the drowning?”
“How did he lie?”
“First he said she was wearing yellow, said he saw a patch of yellow break the surface of the lake. Then he changed it to blue. Why did he do that, Cotton?”
“I don’t know.”
“And if he lied about that, why couldn’t he have been lying about everything? Why couldn’t he and Claudia have done in little Josie together?”
“I don’t know,” Hawes said.
“Where’d that twenty thousand bucks come from, Cotton?”
“Maybe it was a stock dividend.”
“Maybe. Then why didn’t she simply deposit the check? This was cash, Cotton, cash. Now where did it come from? That’s a nice piece of change. You don’t pick twenty grand out of the gutter.”
“I suppose not.”
“I know where you can get twenty grand, Cotton.”
“Where?”
“From an insurance company. When someone dies.” Carella nodded once, sharply. “I’m going to make some calls. Damnit, that money had to come from someplace.”
He hit pay dirt on his sixth call. The man he spoke to was named Jeremiah Dodd and was a representative of the Security Insurance Corporation, Inc. He recognized Josie Thompson’s name at once.
“Oh, yes,’ he said. “We settled that claim in July.”
“Who made the claim, Mr. Dodd?”
“The beneficiary, of course. Just a moment. Let me get the folder on this. Will you hold on, please?”
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.”