“I’m not a prostitute, and I don’t care what you’re working on.”
“No, you’re just a Vassar graduate, right? Living here in Spade-land for the fun of it, right?”
“I can live where I like. There’s no law against living wherever I want to live.”
“Correct,” Ollie said. “Now tell us exactly where you were tonight.”
“Why?”
“Because all of a sudden this has become an investigation into illegal prostitution.”
Rosalie sighed.
“We’re listening,” Ollie said.
“Go ahead,” she said, “look through the place. I’ve got nothing to hide.”
Ollie and Hawes went into the bedroom. Rosalie poured herself another drink, and then said to Carella, “You want some of this?”
“No, thank you.”
She sipped at the cognac, watching him over the rim of the glass. In the bedroom, Carella heard drawers being opened and closed. The girl grimaced and jerked her head toward the sound, trying to share with Carella her sense of outrage at this invasion of privacy. Carella gave no sign that he understood what she was trying to convey. The setup, to say the least, stank to high heaven; he, too, believed that Rosalie was a call girl.
Hawes came back into the living room. He was holding an American passport in his hands. “This yours?” he asked.
“If you found it in my dresser, it’s mine.”
Hawes opened the passport and began leafing through it. “Travel a lot, Miss Waggener?” he asked.
“Every now and then.”
“Want to take a look at this, Steve?” he asked, and handed Carella the passport.
Carella studied the page to which it was opened. According to the stamped information on that page, Rosalie Waggener had entered West Germany through Bremen Flughafen on July 25, and had returned to the United States on July 27. Carella looked up from the passport. “I see you’ve been to Germany lately,” he said conversationally.
“Yes.”
“How come?”
Ollie, who had been listening in the bedroom, said in imitation of an SS officer, “I varn you not to lie, Fräulein. Ve know you haff relatives in Chermany.” Ollie, it appeared, was a man of many talents.
“I do have relatives in Germany,” Rosalie said, half to the bedroom and half to Carella and Hawes, who were watching her intently. “The family name used to be Wagner. It got bastardized.”
“Vatch your language, Fräulein!” Ollie called from the other room.
“Do you speak German?” Carella asked, again conversationally.
“Yes.”
“And you have relatives in Bremen, is that it?”
“In Zeven,” Rosalie said. “Just outside Bremen.” The hand holding the brandy snifter was trembling.
“Well, nothing wrong with visiting relatives,” Carella said, and handed the passport to her. “Short trip, though, wasn’t it?”
Rosalie took the passport. “I only had a few days,” she said.
“Vacation, was it?”
“Yes.”
“From your job?”
“Yes.”
“Where do you work?”
“Diamondback Development,” she said. “Part time.”
“What sort of work do you do for them?”
“Secretarial work,” she said.
Carella looked at the trembling hand holding the brandy snifter. The fingernails on that hand were long and pointed, and painted an emerald green that matched Rosalie’s gown and slippers. “Oscar Hemmings is a partner in that company, isn’t he?”
“Yes, he is.”
“Did he get the job for you?”
“He recommended me for it. As I told you, he’s a good friend.”
“Do you work directly under him?” Ollie shouted from the other room, and laughed obscenely.
“I work for all three partners,” Rosalie said.
“But only part time.”
“Only when they need me to take dictation or do filing. Like that,” she said.
“Sounds okay to me,” Carella said. “How we doing in there, Ollie?”
Ollie came back into the living room, perspiring. “I thought you lived here alone,” he said to Rosalie.
“I do,” she said.
“Then what’re all those men’s clothes doing in the closet and the dresser drawers?”
“Well,” she said, and shrugged.
“Shirts monogrammed O. H.,” Ollie said. “That’d be for Oscar Hemmings, wouldn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” Rosalie said.
“Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
“What’s your real relationship with Hemmings?” Ollie asked.
“We’re engaged.”
“In what?” Ollie said, and laughed.
“He’s my fiancé.”
“Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”
“I didn’t want to get him in trouble.”
“What kind of trouble were you thinking about?”
“You said something about arson.”
“Well, as you can see,” Ollie said, “we ain’t trying to get him in any trouble at all. Nor you, either.”
“Mmm,” Rosalie said.
“We’re sorry to have bothered you,” Carella said. “We’d like to keep in touch, though, so don’t leave the city or anything, okay?”
“I don’t plan on leaving the city.”
“What he means is don’t go visiting no relatives in Germany,” Ollie said.
“I know what he means. Who’s going to pay for having my lock fixed?”
“What lock is that?” Ollie said.
“On the door” Rosalie said. “What the hell lock do you think?”
“Gee,” Ollie said innocently, “that was busted when we got here.”
It was beginning to look like something — but they didn’t know what.
They only knew that the case was getting very hot, and the best way to solve a case that’s beginning to sizzle is to stick with it as advised in the Detective Division’s mimeographed flyer titled Investigation of Homicides and Suspicious Deaths: “This is your case... stick with the investigation and don’t do unimportant jobs.” Whether or not the Detective Division would have considered the examination of a World Atlas an “important” job was open to question. But a glance at that book revealed immediately that not only was Bremen close to Zeven (where Rosalie Waggener claimed she had relatives), it was also close to Bremerhaven — where a man named Erhard Bachmann ran a firm called Bachmann Speditionsfirma.
It may have been coincidental that Rosalie had arrived in Bremen on July 25, and that Bachmann had received payment for packing Grimm’s little wooden beasts the very next day, according to his letter of July 26, written to Grimm. It may also have been coincidental that Charlie Harrod’s gun had killed Frank Reardon, who had worked for Roger Grimm, who was in turn doing business with a firm in Bremerhaven, some fifty kilometers from Bremen. And the biggest coincidence of all may have been that yet another man associated with Diamondback Development had served time at Castleview State Penitentiary while Roger Grimm himself was incarcerated there. Alfred Allen Chase’s first year at Castleview had overlapped Roger Grimm’s last year there. In effect, the men had served concurrent terms for that period of time. All these seemingly related facts may only have been trains passing in the night. But it didn’t look that way to the detectives.
None of the three had had much sleep, but they had all eaten hearty breakfasts in the 83rd’s squadroom. They were now ready to head out into the city again, in an attempt to unravel some of the knots. They agreed that their telephone drop would be the 87th’s squadroom, and then they left the 83rd. Carella was carrying police photos of Charlie Harrod’s dead body. Ollie was carrying a Polaroid camera, and police photos of the members of The Ancient Skulls. Hawes wasn’t carrying anything.