The Empty Hours Read Free

that’s the worst you can do to anybody.
     
    The
report explained that the girl’s body was in a state of advanced putrefaction,
and it went into such esoteric terms as “general distention of the body
cavities, tissues, and blood vessels with gas,” and “black discoloration of the
skin, mucous membranes, and irides caused by hemolysis and action of hydrogen
sulfide on the blood pigment,” all of which broke down to the simple fact that
it was a damn hot week in August and the girl had been lying on a rug which
retained heat and speeded the postmortem putrefaction. From what they could
tell, and in weather like this, it was mostly a guess, the girl had been dead
and decomposing for at least forty-eight hours, which set the time of her
demise as August first or thereabouts.
     
    One of
the reports went on to say that the clothes she’d been wearing had been purchased
in one of the city’s larger department stores. All of her clothes — those
she wore and those found in her apartment — were rather expensive, but someone
at the lab thought it necessary to note that all her panties were trimmed with
Belgian lace and retailed for twenty-five dollars a pair. Someone else at the
lab mentioned that a thorough examination of her garments and her body had
revealed no traces of blood, semen, or oil stains.
     
    The
coroner fixed the cause of death as strangulation.
     
    * * * *

 
     
    3
     
     
    It is amazing how much an
apartment can sometimes yield to science. It is equally amazing, and more than
a little disappointing, to get nothing from the scene of a murder when you are
desperately seeking a clue. The furnished room in which Claudia Davis had been
strangled to death was full of juicy surfaces conceivably carrying hundreds of
latent fingerprints. The closets and drawers contained piles of clothing that
might have carried traces of anything from gunpowder to face powder.
     
    But the
lab boys went around lifting their prints and sifting their dust and vacuuming
with a Söderman-Heuberger filter, and they went down to the morgue and studied
the girl’s skin and came up with a total of nothing. Zero. Oh, not quite zero.
They got a lot of prints belonging to Claudia Davis, and a lot of dust
collected from all over the city and clinging to her shoes and her furniture.
They also found some documents belonging to the dead girl — a
birth certificate, a diploma of graduation from a high school in Santa Monica,
and an expired library card. And, oh, yes, a key. The key didn’t seem to fit
any of the locks in the room. They sent all the junk over to the 87th, and Sam
Grossman called Carella personally later that day to apologize for the lack of
results.
     
    The
squadroom was hot and noisy when Carella took the call from the lab. The
conversation was a curiously one-sided affair. Carella, who had dumped the contents
of the laboratory envelope onto his desk, merely grunted or nodded every now
and then. He thanked Grossman at last, hung up, and stared at the window facing
the street and Grover Park.
     
    “Get
anything?” Meyer asked.
     
    “Yeah.
Grossman thinks the killer was wearing gloves.”
     
    “That’s
nice,” Meyer said.
     
    “Also,
I think I know what this key is for.” He lifted it from the desk.
     
    “Yeah?
What?”
     
    “Well,
did you see these canceled checks?”
     
    “No.”
     
    “Take a
look,” Carella said.
     
    He
opened the brown bank envelope addressed to Claudia Davis, spread the canceled
checks on his desk top, and then unfolded the yellow bank statement. Meyer
studied the display silently.
     
    “Cotton
found the envelope in her room,” Carella said. “The statement covers the month
of July. Those are all the checks she wrote, or at least everything that
cleared the bank by the thirty-first.”
     
    “Lots
of checks here,” Meyer said.
     
    “Twenty-five,
to be exact. What do you think?”
     
    “I know
what I think,” Carella said.
     
    “What’s
that?”
     
    “I look
at