“There’s no point in it. I knew her as Janet Mitchell.”
“I see.”
“How long will you keep her body here unclaimed?”
“Thirty to sixty days, depending on space available.”
“And then?”
“We’ll make arrangements with the Public Administrator’s Office for cremation or burial. But in this case, at least, the city won’t have to assume the cost.”
“Why is that?”
“She left more than enough money to pay for it.”
“How much money?”
“I’m afraid I can’t give you that information.”
“Can you at least tell me what’s being done to find out her real identity?”
“No, you’ll have to discuss that with the officer in charge of her case.”
“If you’ll give me his name...”
“Inspector Del Carlo,” the clerk said. “Second floor, main building.”
Inspector George Del Carlo was sixtyish, heavyset, with black-olive eyes that seldom blinked. He was neither friendly nor unfriendly, but still he made Messenger feel uncomfortable, as if he thought his visitor was behaving in a way that was socially if not criminally suspect.
“You say you hardly knew the woman, Mr. Messenger. Then why are you so interested in who she was and why she took her own life?”
“I keep asking myself the same question. I suppose it’s because she was a... solitary person and so am I. I looked at her and I saw myself.”
“Did you have a relationship with her?”
“Relationship?”
“Date her. Sleep with her.”
“No. I told you, I hardly knew her.”
“But you did talk to each other.”
“Only once, for about a minute.”
“Did she tell you anything at all about herself?”
“No. Nothing.”
“You try to find out on your own?”
“No.”
“So you don’t know anybody else who knew her.”
“No.”
“Where she came from, why she was in San Francisco.”
“No.”
“What led her to commit suicide.”
“She was lonely,” Messenger said.
One of Del Carlo’s eyebrows rose. “There’re a lot of lonely people in this city, Mr. Messenger. It’s not much motivation for suicide.”
“It is if you’re cut off from the rest of society, if you exist in a kind of vacuum of despair.”
“Vacuum of despair. Nice phrase. And that’s the way this woman lived?”
“I think so, yes.”
“By choice, or did something drive her to it?”
“I don’t know. But I can’t imagine anyone living that way by simple choice.”
“Running from something or somebody?”
“Either that, or running from herself.”
Del Carlo said, “Uh-huh,” and leaned back in his chair. “Well, there’s not much I can tell you, Mr. Messenger. She didn’t leave a note and there was nothing among her effects to tell us why she did the Dutch. We did find a photograph in the bathtub with her body; must’ve been looking at it before or after she slit her wrists. Too badly water- and blood-damaged to be identifiable, but our lab people say it was of a child.”
“Boy or girl?”
“Couldn’t be sure. Sex or age.”
“What about her effects? What happened to them?”
“Building manager still has them, with instructions to keep everything until further notice. No place left in the property room here for a Jane Doe suicide’s stuff. But like I said, there’s nothing there to help us. No driver’s license, no Social Security card, no credit cards — no ID of any kind.”
“Fingerprints?”
“We filed them with the Department of Justice’s CID computer, along with X rays and as much other physical data as her body could give us. No record of her anywhere. No match with any missing persons report. We also ran the name Janet Mitchell through various local agencies; that got us another zero. Doesn’t seem to be much doubt that it was an assumed name.”
“What about money? Didn’t she have a bank account?”
“No,” Del Carlo said. “What she did have was a safe deposit box at the Wells Fargo branch on Taraval. Stuffed full of cash — better than fourteen thousand in hundred-dollar bills.”
“My God, that much?”
“That much. Bank keeps those little slips they make box holders sign when they come in. She dipped into her box once a week, on Friday afternoons, regular as clockwork.”
“Which means she paid all her expenses in cash.”
“Looks that way.”
“You need to provide a Social Security number to rent a safe deposit box,” Messenger said. “I suppose she put a phony one on her application.”
“Right. And nobody at the bank bothered to check it. Ditto all the other information she supplied.”
“She sounds like a criminal of some kind. But I can’t believe she was. Not her.”
“Well, you could be right,” Del Carlo said. “People adopt aliases for a lot of reasons, legal as well as illegal. Same goes for hiding out, squirreling away a large amount of cash and living off of it.”
“I don’t suppose there’s any question that her death really was a suicide.”
“Not as far as I’m concerned. Wasn’t a shred of evidence to suggest foul play.”
“Then it’s a closed case.”
“Except as far as the money is concerned. That went into an escrow account in case a relative shows up and puts in a claim. Minus whatever it costs to bury or cremate her remains.”
Messenger said, “And if nobody claims the balance after seven years, it goes to the state.”
“How did you— Oh, right, you’re a CPA.”
“If it really was her money, it should go to her family.”
“Sure, assuming she had a family. But the way it looks now, we’ll never know.”
“I guess you’re right. The way it looks now we never will.”
3
He was an hour late getting back to work. Not that it mattered; no one said anything to him about it. After fourteen years with Sitwell & Cobb, he had a certain amount of leeway where his time was concerned. It didn’t make any difference to Harvey Sitwell where the work got done, office or home, or how much time it took to do it as long as an employee kept his billable hours up. In that respect, and in terms of base loyalty to his people, Sitwell was a good man to work for. The problem was that he was tightfisted and inflexible in his opinions. Prying an annual raise out of him was always a chore; and once he’d made up his mind where you fitted in the office pecking order, that was where you stayed. It had taken Messenger five struggling years to find out that his slot was somewhere in the middle, and that no matter how hard he worked, no matter what he did, he’d still be in that same slot in ten, twenty, thirty years.
More than once, early on, he’d thought about leaving the firm and hooking up with another that offered a better chance for advancement. But he’d never quite gotten around to doing it, and now he no longer even considered the idea. Apathy, sure, but it was apathy motivated by complacency. The job here was secure; he got along well with Sitwell and with his fellow wage slaves; his salary was more than adequate for his modest needs; and his annual vacation time was three weeks, plus odd days here and there whenever he finished an account ahead of schedule. It was only once in a great while — like today — that he chafed at the job, that his little slot seemed too tight, too confining, and he yearned for something more. Or at least for something different.
He found that he was having trouble concentrating. His mind kept shifting gears, replaying his conversations with the coroner’s clerk and Inspector Del Carlo. The fourteen thousand dollars bothered him the most. Whether it was legally Ms. Lonesome’s or not, and where she’d gotten it. If there was somebody somewhere who was entitled to it, who needed it far more than the state of California, and soon.