It was too bad Bert had to go out tonight. Whatever he’d planned for them to do on the telephone, Eileen was positive it would have put her in a good mood for sleeping afterward. If tomorrow night really came down the way Annie expected it would, then Eileen would need a good night’s sleep tonight. The trouble was, thinking about tomorrow night made it very difficult to fall asleep tonight. Eileen kept wondering if Annie had got those dates right. Or if any of that four-week, three-week, and so-on jazz made any sense at all. What I should do, she thought, is get up and look at the calendar again. Instead of lying here worrying about whether tomorrow night’s really going to be the night at all.
She snapped on the light beside the bed, threw the covers back, and swung her legs down to the floor. It was very cold in the apartment — that was October for you. Nice one day, freeze your ass off the next. She put on her robe and then worked her way around the piles of dirty laundry on the floor (I’ll wash all these on Saturday morning, she thought), went to the bedroom door and reached beyond it for the living room light switch.
At the desk, she turned on the small lamp, and opened the top drawer, hoping to find a calendar that was larger and easier to read than the one at the front of Mary’s checkbook — the big one, as Mary had called it. She found nothing but a little plastic calendar with a dry cleaner’s name and phone number on it, the kind you tuck into a wallet. Besides, it was last year’s calendar. She opened the bottom drawer on the right-hand side of the desk, fished out the checkbook again, and turned to the front of it.
The notes she had made while talking to Annie were still on the desk. She began ticking off the dates on the calendar, counting off the weeks. Well, Annie seemed to be right. Even allowing for the summer hiatus (how come no rapes in July and August, she wondered?) the pattern seemed clear. Tomorrow was Friday the twenty-first, and if their man acted as they expected he would, Mary Hollings was due for another visit. Out of curiosity, Eileen began leafing through the checkbook, locating the stubs for the checks Mary had written on the days she’d been raped.
June 10. Heavy activity, lots of bills to pay, all those shopping excursions Mary makes every day. Department stores all over the city, telephone company, electric company — Eileen counted ten checks written on that day alone. She flipped forward to September 16.
Equally heavy there, this lady sure ran up bills, those alimony checks had to be pretty hefty. A check made out to Reynolds Realty, Inc. (little late last month, huh, Mary? Your rent’s due on the fifteenth), another to a play subscription series at a theater down in the Quarter, another to an organization called A.I.M. (marked contribution), a stub for a check written to Albert Cleaners (the people who’d provided her with last year’s pocketsize calendar), another stub for a check made out to Citizens Savings Bank (marked renewal — SAFETY DEPOSIT BOX), a check to American Express, another to Visa, and that was it.
What the hell is A.I.M.? Eileen wondered. Sounds like an organization supporting a citizen’s right to bear arms. Ready, aim, fire. Was Mary a gun nut? Terrific. Support your local gun group and make life easier for all the cheap thieves in the world. A.I.M. Association of International Murderers? Allied Independent Maniacs? Am I Macho?
Eileen shrugged.
On October 7, Mary had written only six checks, two of them to department stores in the city (naturally), one to the Bowler Art Museum (again marked contribution), another to Raucher TV-Radio Repair, one for $5.75 made payable to Lombino’s Best Pizza (had she sent out for a pizza that night? And paid the delivery boy with a check?), and the last for a whopping $1,650 made payable to someone named Howard Moscowitz. The stub was marked legal fees.
So what’s A.I.M.? Eileen thought.
She hated mysteries.
She flipped back to the beginning of the checkbook. Maybe Mary had made a previous donation to A.I.M. And maybe she had written on the stub its full and doubtlessly honorable name. Amalgamated Indolent Masochists perhaps? Or Academy of Islamic Mosques? Or how about Avoid Intolerant Males? Or Are Iguanas Mammals?
Mary had made three contributions to A.I.M. during the past year. A hundred dollars in January. Fifty dollars in March. And a final fifty dollars on September 16, the second time she’d been raped. Undoubtedly in response to quarterly solicitations. There was no clue on the stubs as to what the acronym (if indeed it was one) stood for. Each was marked simply A.I.M. — CONTRIBUTION.
Eileen yawned.
This was better than counting sheep.
The Isola telephone directory was resting on the desk alongside the phone. She pulled it to her, flipped it open to the A listings, and began running her finger down the page:
A-I Bookshops, Inc...
A-I Systems...
AIC Investigations...
AID Photo...
AIG, Ltd....
AIHL Dental Labs...
A.I.M...
There it is, she thought, and copied the information on a sheet of paper:
A.I.M.
832 Hall Avenue
388-7400
Right here in the city, she thought. Maybe I ought to ask Annie to check on it. Three contributions to the same outfit. Might be important.
She yawned again.
She turned off the desk lamp, turned off the living room light, and went back into the bedroom. She put her robe at the foot of the bed, got under the covers, and lay thinking for a moment. A.I.M. Sleep, she thought. Go to sleep. Come on, Morpheus, where are you? A.I.M. Anyone Inviting Morpheus? The ayes have it. She reached up to turn off the bedside lamp.
The clock read ten minutes past eleven.
The owner of the Chevy Citation with the license plate number 38L4721 lived in Majesta. It took Meyer and Kling forty minutes to get there from the squadroom. Kling looked at his watch as they were parking the car outside the housing development in which Frederick Sagel lived. Twelve minutes past eleven. It was seventeen minutes past eleven by the time they knocked on his third-floor apartment. A woman’s voice yelled, “Who’s there?” She sounded alarmed. In this city, a knock on the door at anytime past ten — when you were supposed to know where your children were — could be considered ominous.
“Police,” Meyer said. He was weary; it had been a long day. He did not want to be out here knocking on anybody’s door, especially if a murderer happened to be behind it.
“Who?” the woman asked incredulously.
“Police,” Meyer repeated.
“Well... just a minute, okay?” she said. Kling put his ear to the door. He heard the woman say, in a sort of stage whisper, “Freddie, it’s the cops,” and then a man — presumably Freddie, who was also presumably Frederick Sagel — said, “What?”
“The cops, the cops,” the woman said impatiently.
“Well, Jesus, let me put something on,” Sagel said.
“He’s getting dressed,” Kling said to Meyer.
“Um,” Meyer said.
Sagel — if this was Sagel — was wearing a robe over pajamas when he opened the door. He was about twenty-five years old, Meyer guessed, a plump little man standing some five-feet-seven or eight inches tall, with a bald head and dark brown eyes. Meyer pitied him the bald head; he himself was wearing his toupee. But one look at him — Sagel or not — told both detectives that he was not the man who’d been described by the waiter at Marino’s. The man who’d been with Darcy Welles on the night of her murder was — according to the waiter — in his forties, about five-feet-ten-inches tall, with brown hair and brown eyes. Nonetheless, on the off chance that the waiter had been mistaken, they went through the routine.