According to Carella’s notes, Muriel Stark had worked as a bookkeeper at the Mercantile Trust on Nestor and Sixth. Carella looked at his watch now. It was indeed a little past 2:30. He’d have to hurry if he wanted to get to the bank before closing.
7
He was not looking for trouble.
Patricia Lowery had identified her brother as the killer; the grand jury would undoubtedly indict; there was an excellent chance for conviction even without further evidence. So Carella was not looking for trouble when he went to the bank. But the man in charge of the bookkeeping department was named Jack Armstrong, and he had brown hair and blue eyes. And Carella could not forget that Patricia Lowery — when she’d been lying to protect her brother — had first said the killer was a man as tall as Carella, with blue eyes and hair that was “either brown or black, but very dark.” As he stood opposite Armstrong now and shook hands with him, he was looking directly into the man’s blue eyes, and the top of the man’s brown-haired head was level with his own. He knew there were possibly 2,365,221 dark-haired, blue-eyed men in this city (Patricia had in fact picked one of them out of a lineup when she was still pursuing her initial lie), but it now seemed extraordinarily coincidental that the man who’d been Muriel Stark’s boss also happened to have dark hair and blue eyes. So whereas Carella was not looking for trouble, he nonetheless wondered whether Patricia had ever met Jack Armstrong, and whether this might have triggered an unconscious association. Why, for example, while she was inventing a killer, hadn’t she said his hair was blond and his eyes green; or his hair brown and his eyes brown; or his hair red and his eyes blue? Why dark hair and blue eyes — which Jack Armstrong, Muriel’s boss, most definitely had? He also had the name Jack Armstrong, and he immediately explained to Carella that this had caused him no end of embarrassment over the years.
“We’re both too young to remember this,” he said, “but there used to be a radio show called ‘Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy.’ I take a lot of ribbing about it. I’ll meet a man in his forties, he’ll remember the show and begin singing the theme song the minute I introduce myself. Well, not literally, but I’ll always get some comment on it. I’m thirty-four, I grew up mostly on television. But you get some of these older fellows, they can name every radio show that was ever on the air. And Jack Armstrong was one of them, believe me.”
They were sitting in Armstrong’s office at the rear of the bank. A panel of glass some five feet square was on the wall beside Armstrong’s desk, affording him a view of the girls working outside. He was smoking a cigar, which he constantly flicked at an ashtray, even when the ash was short.
“I suppose you’re here about the Stark girl,” he said.
“Yes.”
“A terrible thing. Terrible.”
“How well did you know her?” Carella asked.
“Not well at all, I’m afraid. I was only transferred from our Calm’s Point branch in August, the beginning of August.
We hardly had time to get acquainted. But she seemed like a lovely person.”
“Mr. Armstrong, as you may know, a young man named Andrew Lowery has been arrested and charged with the murder. He’s her cousin, you may have read that in the newspapers.”
“Yes, a terrible shame,” Armstrong said.
“His sister’s name is Patricia Lowery,” Carella said. “She’s the one who’s identified him as the killer.”
“Yes.”
“Had you ever met her?”
“Who?”
“Patricia Lowery.”
“No. How would I have met her?”
“Well, Muriel worked here, I thought perhaps her cousin might have come to the bank one day—”
“No, I never met her,” Armstrong said, and shook his head and flicked his cigar at the ashtray. “I hardly even knew Muriel, it’s not likely I’d have met her cousin. I don’t understand. Is that why you came here? To find out whether or not I knew—?”
“No, no,” Carella said. “Actually, I was interested in talking to some of Muriel’s friends here at the bank, people she might have—”
“You’d want to talk to Heidi then,” Armstrong said. “The Stark girl worked at the desk alongside hers, I’m sure they were friends. That’s Heidi Beck, shall I ask her to come in?”
“Please,” Carella said.
Armstrong buzzed his secretary and asked her to have Miss Beck come to his office. Some three minutes later a tentative knock sounded on the door, and Armstrong said, “Come in.” Heidi Beck was a good-looking blonde in her early twenties. She was wearing form-fitting slacks, and very high platform shoes, and a short-sleeved sweater over a long-sleeved blouse. When Armstrong introduced her to Carella, she seemed relieved that she hadn’t been called to the office for a reprimand. Armstrong came from behind the desk, told Carella to take all the time he needed, and then left the office. Through the glass panel on Carella’s left, he could see Armstrong working his way through the bookkeeping department, stopping to chat with one or another of the girls at their desks.
“Mr. Armstrong tells me you and Muriel Stark were friends,” Carella said.
“Yes,” Heidi answered. “Well, I guess so. I mean, we weren’t close friends or anything, but we’d go out to lunch together every now and then. And we’d talk during the day. I guess we were friends as far as the bank goes, do you know what I mean? We never saw each other away from the bank, except like I said to have lunch every now and then.”
“Did you and Muriel ever discuss personal matters?”
“Well, there was quite a bit of age difference between us,” Heidi said.
“How old are you, Miss Beck?” Carella said.
“I’m twenty-four. Muriel was only seventeen, you know. So we really didn’t talk about too many personal matters.”
“Ever talk about boyfriends?”
“No. We’d say this or that fellow in the bank was cute, something like that, but we never talked about boys we were going out with, no.”
“Did Muriel think any of the boys in the bank were cute?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Who in particular?”
“Well, nobody in particular that I can remember. But she had an eye for the boys, she liked boys. In the beginning, anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“When she first started working here.”
“When was that?”
“She began in February. And, like I said, she used to, you know, give the boys more of a once-over when she first started. Then, I don’t know, she didn’t seem too interested any more. I had the feeling she’d found herself a boyfriend.”
“Did she ever mention a boyfriend?”
“No.”
“Then what gave you the idea she had one?”