He had not been happy when he’d seen the size of the safety deposit box, and he had been even less happy when he and Kling discovered just how many papers were inside the damn thing. Those papers were scattered before him on the desk in the spare room now, together with Edelman’s bank statements and canceled checks and a can of beer. From the other room — his daughter Connie’s playroom during the day, his and Caroline’s television room at night — he could hear the identifying theme song of the Johnny Carson Show. He kept listening. He heard Ed McMahon announcing the list of guests (Lola Falana was one of them, sure as hell) and then he heard the familiar “Heeeeeere’s Johnnnnnnnnny!” and he sighed and took a long swallow of his beer, and then started separating the various documents they’d taken from the safety deposit box.
It was going to be a long night.
When the telephone rang, it startled Kling.
The phone was on an end table beside the bed, and the first ring slammed into the silence of the room like a pistol shot, causing him to sit bolt upright, his heart pounding. He grabbed for the receiver.
“Hello?” he said.
“Hi, this is Eileen,” she said.
“Oh, hi,” he said.
“You sound out of breath.”
“No, I... it was very quiet in here. When the phone rang, it surprised me.” His heart was still pounding.
“You weren’t asleep, were you? I didn’t—”
“No, no, I was just lying here.”
“In bed?”
“Yes.”
“I’m in bed, too,” she said.
He said nothing.
“I wanted to apologize,” she said.
“What for?”
“I didn’t know about the divorce,” she said.
“Well, that’s okay.”
“I wouldn’t have said what I said if I’d known.”
What she meant, he realized, was that she hadn’t known about the circumstances of the divorce. She had found out since yesterday, it was common currency in the department, and now she was apologizing for having described what she’d called an “uh-oh!” scene, the wife in bed with her lover, the husband coming up the steps, the very damn thing that had happened to Kling.
“That’s okay,” he said.
It was not okay.
“I’ve just made it worse, haven’t I?” she said.
He was about to say, “No, don’t be silly, thanks for calling,” when he thought, unexpectedly, Yes, you have made it worse, and he said, “As a matter of fact, you have.”
“I’m sorry. I only wanted—”
“What’d they tell you?” he asked.
“Who?”
“Come on,” he said. “Whoever told you about it.”
“Only that there’d been some kind of problem.”
“Uh-huh. What kind of problem?”
“Just a problem.”
“My wife was playing around, right?”
“Well, yes, that’s what I was told.”
“Fine,” he said.
There was a long silence on the line.
“Well,” she said, and sighed. “I just wanted to tell you I’m sorry if I upset you yesterday.”
“You didn’t upset me,” he said.
“You sound upset.”
“I am upset,” he said.
“Bert...,” she said, and hesitated. “Please don’t be mad at me, okay? Please don’t!” and he could swear that suddenly she was crying. The next thing he heard was a click on the line.
He looked at the phone receiver.
“What?” he said to the empty room.
The trouble with Edelman’s records was that they didn’t seem to add up. Or maybe Brown was just adding them up wrong. Either way, the arithmetic didn’t come out right. There seemed to be large sums of money unaccounted for. The constant factor in Brown’s calculations was the $300,000 they’d found in Edelman’s safe. To Brown, this indicated at least one cash transaction. Possibly a series of cash transactions, fifty thou a throw, say, allowed to accumulate in his safe before—
Before what?
According to his bank statements and canceled checks, Edelman had not made any truly large deposits or withdrawals during the past year. His various outlays for business expenses were for trips to Amsterdam, Zurich, and other European cities — the air fares, the hotel rooms, the checks written to gem merchants in the Dutch city. But the purchases he’d made (and he was, after all, in the business of buying and selling precious gems) were relatively small ones: $5,000 here, $10,000 here, a comparatively big check for $20,000 written to one Dutch firm. The subsequent bank deposits here in America seemed to indicate that Edelman turned a good, if not spectacular, profit on each of his purchases abroad.
From what Brown could figure, Edelman did a business somewhere in the vicinity of $200,000 to $300,000 a year. His current tax return had not yet been prepared — this was still only February, and it was not due till April 15 — but on the last return he’d filed, he’d indicated a gross income of $265,523.12 for the year, with a taxable income of $226,523.12 after allowable deductions and business expenses. A little calculation told Brown that Edelman had deducted about 15 percent from his gross. With Uncle Sam, he was playing it entirely safe: the tax due had been $100,710.56; a check written on April 14 last year indicated that Edelman had completely satisfied his obligation to the government — at least on the income he’d reported.
It was the $300,000 in cash that kept bothering Brown.
Doggedly, he turned to the documents they had taken from Edelman’s safety deposit box.
Kling looked at the telephone for a long time.
Had she been crying?
He hadn’t wanted to make her cry, he hardly knew the girl. He went to the window and stared out at the cars moving steadily across the bridge, their headlights piercing the night. It was snowing again. Would it ever stop snowing? He had not wanted to make her cry. What the hell was wrong with him? Augusta is wrong with me, he thought, and went back to bed.
It might have been easier to forget her if only he didn’t have to see her face everywhere he turned. Your average divorced couple, especially if there were no kids involved, you hardly ever ran into each other after the final decree. You started to forget. Sometimes you forgot even the good things you’d shared, which was bad but which was the nature of the beast called divorce. With Augusta, it was different. Augusta was a model. You couldn’t pass a magazine rack without seeing her face on the cover of at least one magazine each and every month, sometimes two. You couldn’t turn on television without seeing her in a hair commercial (she had such beautiful hair) or a toothpaste commercial, or just last week in a nail-polish commercial, Augusta’s hands fanned out in front of her gorgeous face, the nails long and bright red, as if they’d been dipped in fresh blood, the smile on her face — ahh, Jesus, that wonderful smile. It got so he didn’t want to turn on the TV set anymore, for fear Augusta would leap out of the tube at him, and he’d start remembering again, and begin crying again.