Эд Макбейн - Snow White and Rose Red

“Don’t you keep records?”

“I give a customer a receipt, it’s a pink piece of paper — here, you see this pad here? On the top part there’s a number and on the bottom part there’s the same number — you see this perforated line? That’s where I tear off the bottom part to give to the customer. On the top part I write the customer’s name and telephone number and what kind of garment it is. You see here where all the different kinds of garments are listed? I just check the box alongside the garment — slacks, jacket, skirt, blouse, dress, whatever the garment is. Then I tear off the bottom part that has the number on it the same as the top part, and I give that to the customer for when he comes back to get the garment.”

“What do you do with the top part?” Bloom asked.

“I pin it to the garment. You put the top part and the bottom part together, you know which garment belongs to which customer. Also, because I got the telephone number on the top part, if somebody doesn’t come back for a long time, I give him a call and say, ‘Hey, you want these slacks or should I give them to the Salvation Army?’ That’s how it works.”

“After a person claims an article of clothing,” Bloom said, “what do you do with the receipt?”

“The top part and the bottom part both, I throw them in the garbage. What do I need them for if a person already came back to get his garment?”

“Then there aren’t any records, right?” Rawles said.

“Right. Not after somebody comes back to get a garment. If I saved all these pink pieces of paper, I’d have no room for clothes here anymore. The whole place would be full of pink pieces of paper. The parking lot outside would be full of pink pieces of paper, nobody from the hardware or the cowboys would be able to park in it, those bastards.”

“Take another look at the dress,” Rawles said.

“What for?”

“See if there’s anything you might recognize about it. Any places where it was fixed, anything like that.”

“Fixed? What do you mean, fixed?”

“Patched. Repaired.”

“I don’t do repair work here. I’m not a tailor, I’m a dry cleaner.”

“Maybe somebody else patched it,” Bloom said, “and maybe you’ll recognize that you saw the patch before.”

“What patch?” Barish said. “You see a patch anyplace on this dress? There’s no patches on this dress. This dress is the same as when this girl bought it for fifteen dollars on sale. You know what you can do with a shmatte like this? You can wipe up the floor with it.”

“The girl didn’t think so,” Rawles said. “The girl was wearing it when she died.”

“That’s all this dress is good for,” Barish said. “To wear when you maybe expect to be dying.”

“Take your time,” Rawles said. “Look it over again.”

“I looked at it already,” Barish said. “How many times can I look at it when I got my girl out sick and I’m all alone here?”

“Just take your time with it,” Rawles said.

“He keeps telling me to take my time with it,” Barish said to Bloom, “when the one thing I ain’t got today is time.”

“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?”