Anthony Boucher - Ed McBain’s Mystery Book, No. 1, 1960

“A brunette,” Carella insisted, and he kept watching Mr. Sam.

“When she left. But when she came, a blonde.”

“What?” Hawes said.

“She was a blonde, a very pretty, natural blonde. It is rare. Natural blondness, I mean. I couldn’t understand why she wanted to change the color.”

“You dyed her hair?” Hawes asked.

“That is correct.”

“Did she say why she wanted to be a brunette?”

“No, sir. I argued with her. I said, ‘You have beautiful hair, I can do mar -velous things with this hair of yours. You are a blonde , my dear, there are drab women who come in here every day of the week and beg to be turned into blondes.’ No. She would not listen. I dyed it for her.” Mr. Sam seemed to be offended by the idea all over again. He looked at the detectives as if they had been responsible for the stubbornness of Claudia Davis.

“What else did you do for her, Mr. Sam?” Carella asked.

“The dye, a cut, and a set. And I believe one of the girls gave her a facial and a manicure.”

“What do you mean by a cut? Was her hair long when she came here?”

“Yes, beautiful long blonde hair. She wanted it cut. I cut it.” Mr. Sam shook his head. “A pity. She looked terrible. I don’t usually say this about someone I work on, but she walked out of here looking terrible. You would hardly recognize her as the same pretty blonde who came in not three hours before.”

“Maybe that was the idea,” Carella said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Forget it. Thank you, Mr. Sam. We know you’re busy.”

In the street outside Hawes said, “You knew before we went in there, didn’t you, Mr. Steve?”

“I suspected, Mr. Cotton, I suspected. Come on, let’s get back to the squad.”

They kicked it around like a bunch of advertising executives. They sat in Lieutenant Byrnes’s office and tried to find out how the cookie crumbled and which way the Tootsie rolled. They were just throwing out a life preserver to see if anyone grabbed at it, that’s all. What they were doing, you see, was running up the flag to see if anyone saluted, that’s all. The lieutenant’s office was a four-window office because he was top man in this particular combine. It was a very elegant office. It had an electric fan all its own, and a big wide desk. It got cross ventilation from the street. It was really very pleasant. Well, to tell the truth, it was a pretty ratty office in which to be holding a top-level meeting, but it was the best the precinct had to offer. And after a while you got used to the chipping paint and the soiled walls and the bad lighting and the stench of urine from the men’s room down the hall. Peter Byrnes didn’t work for BBD & O. He worked for the city. Somehow, there was a difference.

“I just put in a call to Irene Miller,” Carella said. “I asked her to describe Claudia Davis to me, and she went through it all over again. Short dark hair, shy, plain. Then I asked her to describe the cousin, Josie Thompson.” Carella nodded glumly. “Guess what?”

“A pretty girl,” Hawes said. “A pretty girl with long blonde hair.”

“Sure. Why, Mrs. Miller practically spelled it out the first time we talked to her. It’s all there in the report. She said they were like black and white in looks and personality. Black and white, sure. A brunette and a goddamn blonde!”

“That explains the yellow,” Hawes said.

“What yellow?”

“Courtenoy. He said he saw a patch of yellow breaking the surface. He wasn’t talking about her clothes, Steve. He was talking about her hair .”

“It explains a lot of things,” Carella said. “It explains why shy Claudia Davis was preparing for her European trip by purchasing baby doll nightgowns and bikini bathing suits. And it explains why the undertaker up there referred to Claudia as a pretty girl. And it explains why our necropsy report said she was thirty when everybody talked about her as if she were much younger.”

“The girl who drowned wasn’t Josie, huh?” Meyer said. “You figure she was Claudia.”

“Damn right I figure she was Claudia.”

“And you figure she cut her hair afterward, and dyed it, and took her cousin’s name, and tried to pass as her cousin until she could get out of the country, huh?” Meyer said.

“Why?” Byrnes said. He was a compact man with a compact bullet head and a chunky economical body. He did not like to waste time or words.

“Because the trust income was in Claudia’s name. Because Josie didn’t have a dime of her own.”

“She could have collected on her cousin’s insurance policy,” Meyer said.

“Sure, but that would have been the end of it. The trust called for those stocks to be turned over to UCLA if Claudia died. A college, for God’s sake! How do you suppose Josie felt about that? Look, I’m not trying to hand a homicide on her. I just think she took advantage of a damn good situation. Claudia was in that boat alone. When she fell over the side, Josie really tried to rescue her, no question about it. But she missed, and Claudia drowned. Okay. Josie went all to pieces, couldn’t talk straight, crying, sobbing, real hysterical woman, we’ve seen them before. But came the dawn. And with the dawn, Josie began thinking. They were away from the city, strangers in a strange town. Claudia had drowned but no one knew that she was Claudia. No one but Josie. She had no identification on her, remember? Her purse was in the car. Okay. If Josie identified her cousin correctly, she’d collect twenty-five grand on the insurance policy, and then all that stock would be turned over to the college, and that would be the end of the gravy train. But suppose, just suppose Josie told the police the girl in the lake was Josie Thompson? Suppose she said, ‘I, Claudia Davis, tell you that girl who drowned is my cousin, Josie Thompson’?”

Hawes nodded. “Then she’d still collect on an insurance policy, and also fall heir to those fat security dividends coming in.”

“Right. What does it take to cash a dividend check? A bank account, that’s all. A bank account with an established signature. So all she had to do was open one, sign her name as Claudia Davis, and then endorse every dividend check that came in exactly the same way.”

“Which explains the new account,” Meyer said. “She couldn’t use Claudia’s old account because the bank undoubtedly knew both Claudia and her signature. So Josie had to forfeit the sixty grand at Highland Trust and start from scratch.”

“And while she was building a new identity and a new fortune,” Hawes said, “just to make sure Claudia’s few friends forgot all about her, Josie was running off to Europe. She may have planned to stay there for years.”

“It all ties in,” Carella said. “Claudia had a driver’s license. She was the one who drove the car away from Stewart City. But Josie had to hire a chauffeur to take her back?”

“And would Claudia, who was so meticulous about money matters, have kept so many people waiting for payment?” Hawes said. “No, sir. That was Josie. And Josie was broke, Josie was waiting for that insurance policy to pay off so she could settle those debts and get the hell out of the country.”

“Well, I admit it adds up,” Meyer said.

Peter Byrnes never wasted words. “Who cashed that twenty-five-thousand-dollar check for Josie?” he said.

There was silence in the room.

“Who’s got that missing five grand?” he said.

There was another silence.

“Who killed Josie?” he said.

Jeremiah Dodd of the Security Insurance Corporation, Inc., did not call until two days later. He asked to speak to Detective Carella, and when he got him on the phone, he said, “Mr. Carella, I’ve just heard from San Francisco on that check.”