Blue Lonesome Read Free Page B

behaving in a way that was socially if not criminally suspect.
    “You say you hardly knew the woman, Mr. Messenger. Then why are you so interested in who she was and why she took her own life?”
    “I keep asking myself the same question. I suppose it’s because she was a … solitary person and so am I. I looked at her and I saw myself.”
    “Did you have a relationship with her?”
    “Relationship?”
    “Date her. Sleep with her.”
    “No. I told you, I hardly knew her.”
    “But you did talk to each other.”
    “Only once, for about a minute.”
    “Did she tell you anything at all about herself?”
    “No. Nothing.”
    “You try to find out on your own?”
    “No.”
    “So you don’t know anybody else who knew her.”
    “No.”
    “Where she came from, why she was in San Francisco.”
    “No.”
    “What led her to commit suicide.”
    “She was lonely,” Messenger said.
    One of Del Carlo’s eyebrows rose. “There’re a lot of lonely people in this city, Mr. Messenger. It’s not much motivation for suicide.”
    “It is if you’re cut off from the rest of society, if you exist in a kind of vacuum of despair.”
    “Vacuum of despair. Nice phrase. And that’s the way this woman lived?”
    “I think so, yes.”
    “By choice, or did something drive her to it?”
    “I don’t know. But I can’t imagine anyone living that way by simple choice.”
    “Running from something or somebody?”
    “Either that, or running from herself.”
    Del Carlo said, “Uh-huh,” and leaned back in his chair. “Well, there’s not much I can tell you, Mr. Messenger. She didn’t leave a note and there was nothing among her effects to tell us why she did the Dutch. We did find a photograph in the bathtub with her body; must’ve been looking at it before or after she slit her wrists. Too badly water- and blood-damaged to be identifiable, but our lab people say it was of a child.”
    “Boy or girl?”
    “Couldn’t be sure. Sex or age.”
    “What about her effects? What happened to them?”
    “Building manager still has them, with instructions to keep everything until further notice. No place left in the property room here for a Jane Doe suicide’s stuff. But like I said, there’s nothing there to help us. No driver’s license, no Social Security card, no credit cards—no ID of any kind.”
    “Fingerprints?”
    “We filed them with the Department of Justice’s CID computer, along with X rays and as much other physical data as her body could give us. No record of her anywhere. No match with any missing persons report. We also ran the name Janet Mitchell through various local agencies; that got us another zero. Doesn’t seem to be much doubt that it was an assumed name.”
    “What about money? Didn’t she have a bank account?”
    “No,” Del Carlo said. “What she did have was a safe deposit box at the Wells Fargo branch on Taraval. Stuffed full of cash—better than fourteen thousand in hundred-dollar bills.”
    “My God, that much?”
    “That much. Bank keeps those little slips they make box holders sign when they come in. She dipped into her box once a week, on Friday afternoons, regular as clockwork.”
    “Which means she paid all her expenses in cash.”
    “Looks that way.”
    “You need to provide a Social Security number to rent a safe deposit box,” Messenger said. “I suppose she put a phony one on her application.”
    “Right. And nobody at the bank bothered to check it. Ditto all the other information she supplied.”
    “She sounds like a criminal of some kind. But I can’t believe she was. Not her.”
    “Well, you could be right,” Del Carlo said. “People adopt aliases for a lot of reasons, legal as well as illegal. Same goes for hiding out, squirreling away a large amount of cash and living off of it.”
    “I don’t suppose there’s any question that her death really was a suicide.”
    “Not as far as I’m concerned. Wasn’t a shred of evidence to suggest foul