“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 7:00 A.M. and grow progressively worse by 9:30 that same morning. Monday is Monday and legislation will never change its personality. Monday is Monday, and it stinks.
By 9:30 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 trench coat, a wristwatch, 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 Fedelson.
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.”
“And Miss Davis applied for payment on the policy after her cousin died, huh?”
“Yes. Here it is, right here. Josephine Thompson drowned at Lake Triangle on June fourth. That’s right. Claudia Davis sent in the policy and the certificate of death and also a coroner’s jury verdict.”
“She didn’t miss a trick, did she?”
“Sir? I’m sorry, I...”
“Did you pay her?”
“Yes. It was a perfectly legitimate claim. We began processing it at once.”
“Did you send anyone up to Lake Triangle to investigate the circumstances of Miss Thompson’s death?”
“Yes, but it was merely a routine investigation. A coroner’s inquest is good enough for us, Detective Carella.”
“When did you pay Miss Davis?”
“On July first.”
“You sent her a check for twelve thousand five hundred dollars, is that right?”
“No, sir.”
“Didn’t you say...?”
“The policy insured her for twelve-five, that’s correct. But there was a double-indemnity clause, you see, and Josephine Thompson’s death was accidental. No, we had to pay the policy’s limit, Detective Carella. On July first we sent Claudia Davis a check for twenty-five thousand dollars.”
9
There are no mysteries in police work.
Nothing fits into a carefully preconceived scheme. The high point of any given case is very often the corpse that opens the case. There is no climactic progression; suspense is for the movies. There are only people and curiously twisted motives, and small unexplained details, and coincidence, and the unexpected, and they combine to form a sequence of events, but there is no real mystery, there never is. There is only life, and sometimes death, and neither follows a rule book. Policemen hate mystery stories because they recognize in them a control that is lacking in their own very real, sometimes routine, sometimes spectacular, sometimes tedious investigation of a case. It is very nice and very clever and very convenient to have all the pieces fit together neatly. It is very kind to think of detectives as master mathematicians working on an algebraic problem whose constants are death and a victim, whose unknown is a murderer. But many of these mastermind detectives have trouble adding up the deductions on their twice-monthly paychecks. The world is full of wizards, for sure, but hardly any of them work for the city police.