“We’d appreciate your help,” Bloom said.
Barish sighed and picked up the dress again. He studied it carefully. He turned it inside out. He turned it right side out again. “This here is where there was a spot here. It wouldn’t come out, you see it? Impossible to get a spot like this out.”
“What kind of spot?” Bloom said at once.
“An ink spot, it looks like. It’s just a tiny dot, but it don’t make no difference how small it is, you can’t get a spot like that out. What I do, when I get a spot like that, I put a little notice on the garment, it tells the customer we tried to get the spot out, but a spot like this—”
“Do you remember anybody coming in with a dress like this?” Rawles said. “With an ink spot on it?”
“Ink spots are very common,” Barish said. “Because people are writing all the time, they drop the ballpoint pen, it hits the garment, it leaves the spot. Or they keep the ballpoint pen in their jacket pocket, the cap comes off, there’s an ink spot. Very common. And impossible to get out. You get an ink spot on a white garment, forget it, you can throw it away.”
“How about a red garment?” Rawles asked.
“The same thing. You get an ink spot on a red garment, unless it’s red ink, you can—”
“How about this red garment?” Rawles persisted. “The ink spot on this red garment? Can you remember anyone coming in with a red dress and telling you there was an ink spot on it?”
“A hundred times a year this could happen.”
“How about the dry-cleaning mark?” Bloom asked. “If you look at the mark, can you tell when it was put in there?”
“The marks ain’t dated,” Barish said. “You know how this works? Dry-cleaning marks?”
“No,” Rawles said.
“No,” Bloom said.
“You come here asking about a dry-cleaning mark, you don’t even know how it works,” Barish said, and sighed. “What this is, it’s a form of identification for a garment. Not for the cops, we couldn’t care less about what problems you got. The mark is for us, ’cause, you see, there aren’t many dry-cleaning places nowadays that do their own cleaning on the premises. What we do, we send the garments out to what’s called a ‘hot plant,’ there are maybe six or seven of them in Calusa. Now these hot plants, they get thousands of garments every day from dry-cleaning places all over the city. So how are they supposed to know which store sent them the garment? These garments have to go back to the store that sent them, understand? So every dry cleaner in the city, he has his own mark. Mine is ‘AC’ for Albert Cleaners. You run a store called Ready-Quik, whatever, your mark might be ‘RQ’ or maybe even ‘QK,’ you pick your own mark.”
“And what’s the ‘KLBN’?” Bloom asked.
“For me, it’s the customer’s name, a shorthand for the customer’s name. Other shops work it different, they use number systems, but that’s too complicated. Some of them use marks you can only see under ultraviolet light, very fancy-shmancy. Me, I just use indelible ink. So first there’s the ‘AC’ for Albert Cleaners, it tells the hot plant where the dress came from, and then next there’s the letters for the customer’s name. What’d you say your name was?” he asked Bloom.
“Bloom,” Bloom said.
“Okay, so you bring me a garment, I’ll put in it ‘AC’ and then something like ‘BLM,’ which is a shorthand for Bloom. Then I can check my tickets where I wrote the customer’s name, and I can figure out what belongs to who.”
“So what does the ‘KLBN’ stand for?” Bloom asked.
“Who knows? I told you. Once a garment is claimed, I throw away the ticket.”
“Try to remember about the ink spot,” Rawles said doggedly.
“A dress like this,” Barish said, “a cheap garment like this one, somebody came in with an ink spot on it, what I’d tell them is forget even having it dry-cleaned. Tear it up, use it for wiping up shmutz on the floor.”
“Did somebody come in who you told that to?” Bloom said.
“I would tell that to anybody who came in with a dress like this with an ink spot on it. This dress here — wait a minute,” Barish said.
The detectives waited.
“Yeah,” Barish said.
“Yeah, what?” Rawles said.
“She gave me a big argument, the girl who brought this dress in. I told her I couldn’t get a spot like this out, she should throw the dress away. She told me it was her favorite dress, why should she throw it away because I was a crummy dry cleaner who couldn’t get a spot out?”
“Then you remember her,” Rawles said.
“I remember the spot on the dress and she gave me a hard time, is what I remember. I finally took the dress, but I told her I wasn’t making any promises.”
“How about the girl herself? Who was she?”
“Who knows?” Barish said. “One of the hippies used to live around here with a hundred other kids in the same apartment. You ever notice there are no more hippies left anywhere in the world but Florida? Only down here do you still see the long hair and the—”
“What was her name?” Rawles asked. “Do you remember her name?”
“You expect me to remember a name from maybe a year ago?”
“Well, you wrote ‘KLBN’ in the dress, so what does that mean to you?”
“Now? A year later? It means ‘KLBN,’ is what it means.”
“Is that when she brought the dress in?”
“Maybe not a whole year. It was in the summertime, you could die down here in the summertime, the humidity. June or July, around then. August is even worse. September ain’t no picnic, neither.”
“But this was in June or July, is that right?” Bloom asked.
“Around then. May, it coulda been, we had a hot May last year. I can’t say for sure. Sometime around then. All I know for sure is this dress had the ink spot right where it still is, and the girl gave me such an argument, I coulda shot her. Did somebody shoot her?”
“Yes,” Rawles said.
“Where? I don’t see no hole on the dress. A bullet would leave a hole, no?”
“In the throat,” Bloom said.
“Hoo-boy,” Barish said.
“And cut out her tongue afterward,” Rawles said.
“Please, I got a weak stomach,” Barish said.
“How old was she, this girl who brought the dress in?” Bloom asked.
“Nineteen, twenty? Who can tell? By me, anybody under thirty, they all look the same age.”
“How tall was she?”
“Five-eight? Five-nine?”
“White?” Rawles asked.
“Sure, white.”
“What color hair?”
“Blonde. Long blonde hair, it came halfway down her back.”
“Sounds right,” Rawles said to Bloom. “What color were her eyes?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Would you remember her address?” Bloom asked.
“I don’t take addresses. Only the telephone number in case they leave the garment here forever.”
“Her telephone number, then? Do you remember it?”
“I got to be Einstein to remember a telephone number from last May.”
“Was she driving?”
“No. I can see whoever parks here, I watch the parking lot like a hawk so the hardware or the cowboys don’t use it for their customers. She walked in. No car.”
“Alone?” Rawles asked.
Barish said nothing.
“Mr. Barish? Was she—”
“I’m trying to think, hold your horses a minute, willya?”
The detectives waited.
“She had somebody with her,” Barish said at last. “Another hippie like her.”