The Empty Hours (3 page)

“I don’t
know. It just doesn’t make sense. She wears underpants trimmed with Belgian
lace, but she lives in a crumby room-and-a-half with bath. How the hell do you
figure that? Two bank accounts, twenty-five bucks to cover her ass, and all she
pays is sixty bucks a month for a flophouse.”

“Maybe
she’s hot, Steve.”

“No.”
Carella shook his head. “I ran a make with C.B.I. She hasn’t got a record, and
she’s not wanted for anything. I haven’t heard from the feds yet, but I imagine
it’ll be the same story.”

“What
about that key? You said . . .”

“Oh,
yeah. That’s pretty simple, thank God. Look at this.”

He
reached into the pile of checks and sorted out a yellow slip, larger than the
checks. He handed it to Meyer. The slip read:

“She
rented a safe-deposit box the same day she opened the new checking account,
huh?” Meyer said.

“Right.”

“What’s
in it?”

“That’s
a good question.”

“Look,
do you want to save some time, Steve?”

“Sure.”

“Let’s
get the court order
before
we go to the bank.”

* * * *

4

The manager of the Seaboard
Bank of America was a bald-headed man in his early fifties. Working on the
theory that similar physical types are
simpático,
Carella allowed Meyer to
do most of the questioning. It was not easy to elicit answers from Mr.
Anderson., the manager of the bank, because he was by nature a reticent man.
But Detective Meyer Meyer was the most patient man in the city, if not the entire
world. His patience was an acquired trait, rather than an inherited one. Oh, he
had inherited a few things from his father, a jovial man named Max Meyer, but
patience was not one of them. If anything, Max Meyer had been a very impatient
if not downright short-tempered sort of fellow. When his wife, for example,
came to him with the news that she was expecting a baby, Max nearly hit the
ceiling. He enjoyed little jokes immensely, was perhaps the biggest practical
joker in all Riverhead, but this particular prank of nature failed to amuse
him. He had thought his wife was long past the age when bearing children was
even a remote possibility. He never thought of himself as approaching dotage,
but he was after all getting on in years, and a change-of-life baby was hardly
what the doctor had ordered. He allowed the impending birth to simmer inside
him, planning his revenge all the while, plotting the practical joke to end
all practical jokes.

When
the baby was born, he named it Meyer, a delightful handle which when coupled
with the family name provided the infant with a double-barreled monicker: Meyer
Meyer.

Now
that’s pretty funny. Admit it. You can split your sides laughing over that one,
unless you happen to be a pretty sensitive kid who also happens to be an
Orthodox Jew, and who happens to live in a predominately Gentile neighborhood.
The kids in the neighborhood thought Meyer Meyer had been invented solely for
their own pleasure. If they needed further provocation for beating up the Jew
boy, and they didn’t need any, his name provided excellent motivational fuel. “Meyer
Meyer, Jew on fire!” they would shout, and then they would chase him down the
street and beat hell out of him.

Meyer
learned patience. It is not very often that one kid, or even one grown man, can
successfully defend himself against a gang. But sometimes you can talk yourself
out of a beating. Sometimes, if you’re patient, if you just wait long enough,
you can catch one of them alone and stand up to him face to face, man to man,
and know the exultation of a fair fight without the frustration of overwhelming
odds.

Listen,
Max Meyer’s joke was a harmless one. You can’t deny an old man his pleasure.
But Mr. Anderson, the manager of the bank, was fifty-four years old and totally
bald. Meyer Meyer, the detective second grade who sat opposite him and asked
questions, was also totally bald. Maybe a lifetime of sublimation, a lifetime
of devoted patience, doesn’t leave any scars. Maybe not. But Meyer Meyer was
only thirty-seven years old.

Patiently
he said, “Didn’t you find these large deposits rather odd, Mr. Anderson?”

“No,”
Anderson said. “A thousand dollars is not a lot of money.”

“Mr.
Anderson,” Meyer said patiently, “you are aware, of course, that banks in this
city are required to report to the police any unusually large sums of money
deposited at one time. You are aware of that, are you not?”

“Yes, I
am.”

“Miss
Davis deposited four thousand dollars in three weeks’ time. Didn’t that seem
unusual to you?”

“No.
The deposits were spaced. A thousand dollars is not a lot of money, and not an
unusually large deposit.”

“To me,”
Meyer said, “a thousand dollars is a lot of money. You can buy a lot of beer
with a thousand dollars.”

“I don’t
drink beer,” Anderson said flatly.

“Neither
do I,” Meyer answered.

“Besides,
we
do
call the police whenever we get a very large deposit, unless the
depositor is one of our regular customers. I did not feel that these deposits
warranted such a call.”

“Thank
you, Mr. Anderson,” Meyer said. “We have a court order here. We’d like to open
the box Miss Davis rented.”

“May I
see the order, please?” Anderson said. Meyer showed it to him. Anderson sighed
and said, “Very well. Do you have Miss Davis’ key?”

Carella
reached into his pocket. “Would this be it?” he said. He put a key on the desk.
It was the key that had come to him from the lab together with the documents
they’d found in the apartment.

“Yes,
that’s it,” Mr. Anderson said. “There are two different keys to every box, you
see. The bank keeps one, and the renter keeps the other. The box cannot be
opened without both keys. Will you come with me, please?”

He
collected the bank key to safety-deposit box number 375 and led the detectives
to the rear of the bank. The room seemed to be lined with shining metal. The
boxes, row upon row, reminded Carella of the morgue and the refrigerated
shelves that slid in and out of the wall on squeaking rollers. Anderson pushed
the bank key into a slot and turned it, and then he put Claudia Davis’ key into
a second slot and turned that. He pulled the long, thin box out of the wall and
handed it to Meyer. Meyer carried it to the counter on the opposite wall and
lifted the catch.

“Okay?”
he said to Carella.

“Go
ahead.”

Meyer
raised the lid of the box.

There
was $16,000 in the box. There was also a slip of note paper. The $16,000 was
neatly divided into four stacks of bills. Three of the stacks held $5,000 each.
The fourth stack held only $1,000. Carella picked up the slip of paper.
Someone, presumably Claudia Davis., had made some annotations on it in pencil.

“Make
any sense to you, Mr. Anderson?”

“No, I’m
afraid not.”

“She
came into this bank on July fifth with twenty thousand dollars in cash, Mr.
Anderson. She put a thousand of that into a checking account and the remainder
into this box. The dates on this slip of paper show exactly when she took cash
from the box and transferred it to the checking account. She knew the rules,
Mr. Anderson. She knew that twenty grand deposited in one lump would bring a
call to the police. This way was a lot safer.”

“We’d
better get a list of these serial numbers,’ Meyer said.

“Would
you have one of your people do that for us, Mr. Anderson?”

Anderson
seemed ready to protest. Instead, he looked at Carella, sighed, and said, “Of
course.”

The serial
numbers didn’t help them at all. They compared them against their own lists,
and the out-of-town lists, and the FBI lists, but none of those bills was hot.

Only
August was.

* * * *

5

Stewart City hangs in the hair
of Isola like a jeweled tiara. Not really a city, not even a town, merely a
collection of swank apartment buildings overlooking the River Dix, the
community had been named after British royalty and remained one of the most
exclusive neighborhoods in town. If you could boast of a Stewart City address,
you could also boast of a high income, a country place on Sands Spit, and a
Mercedes Benz in the garage under the apartment building. You could give your
address with a measure of snobbery and pride
— you were, after all,
one of the elite.

The
dead girl named Claudia Davis had made out a check to Management Enterprise,
Inc., at 13 Stewart Place South, to the tune of $750. The check had been dated
July nine, four days after she’d opened the Seaboard account.

A cool
breeze was blowing in off the river as Carella and Hawes pulled up.
Late-afternoon sunlight dappled the polluted water of the Dix. The bridges connecting
Calm’s Point with Isola hung against a sky awaiting the assault of dusk.

“Want
to pull down the sun visor?” Carella said.

Hawes
reached up and turned down the visor. Clipped to the visor so that it showed
through the windshield of the car was a hand-lettered card that read POLICEMAN
ON DUTY CALL
— 87TH PRECINCT. The car, a 1956 Chevrolet, was Carella’s own.

“I’ve
got to make a sign for my car,” Hawes said. “Some bastard tagged it last week.”

“What
did you do?”

“I went
to court and pleaded not guilty. On my day off.”

“Did
you get out of it?”

“Sure.
I was answering a squeal. It’s bad enough I had to use my own car, but for Pete’s
sake, to get a ticket!”

“I
prefer my own car,” Carella said. “Those three cars belonging to the squad are
ready for the junk heap.”