Hark! (7 page)

T
HERE WAS SOMETHING
eerily frightening about the murder scene. Maybe it was the yellow tape on the bedroom carpet, the outline of where Gloria Stanford's body had lain. Maybe it was the silence. Eileen guessed it was the silence.

A stillness so complete that it seemed to exclude the sounds one normally associated with big-city living, the ambulances and police sirens outside, the occasional toilet being flushed somewhere in the building, the low whine of an elevator, the rumble of television voices. All seemed subordinate to the utter silence.

She stood in the entrance door to the dead woman's bedroom, looking in at the yellow tape on the floor. The stillness was oppressive. It seemed to be challenging her to enter the bedroom. She hesitated on the door sill. At last, she took a step into the room, walked gingerly around the taped outline on the floor, and directly to a drop-leaf desk that must have cost her yearly salary. As a detective/third, Eileen currently earned $55,936 a year; her own one-bedroom flat was furnished with stuff she'd bought at IKEA, across the River Harb.

She lowered the drop-leaf front and sat in a chair upholstered with a satin seat and back.

In one of the desk's warren of cubbyholes, she found a box of checkbook inserts. Blank checks for FirstBank's Salisbury Street branch right here in the city. Top sheaf of checks numbered from 151 through 180. Sheaves below it numbered to follow. Lettering across the top of each check was:

G
LORIA
S
TANFORD
1113 S
ILVERMINE
O
VAL
I
SOLA
, 30576

In another of the cubbies, she found FirstBank's most recent statement. Gloria's checking account balance at the end of March had been $1,674.18. On the third of April, she'd made a cash deposit of $9,800. Another cash deposit on April 12, this time for $7,200. Yet another on April 23, for $8,100. Total cash deposits for the month: $25,100. Total amount of checks written: $24,202.17; her closing balance on April 30 was $2,573.01.

By law, all banks were required to report to the Internal Revenue Service any cash deposits in excess of $10,000. Was it mere coincidence that Gloria's cash deposits had been for amounts somewhat less than the ten grand? She looked for a savings account passbook and could find none.

So where had those cash deposits come from?

Eileen went through Gloria's appointment calendar and her address book.

She went through her closets and her dresser drawers.

She went through her medicine cabinet and her refrigerator.

Her “woman's eye” caught nothing a man's eye might have missed.

In the living room, on a counter to the right of the entrance door, she found a tote bag with a small-caliber pistol in it. She wondered if Carella and Meyer had simply missed the gun. Or had they turned it over to Ballistics for testing, and then brought it back to the apartment on their second go-round? A place for everything and everything in its place. She would have to ask them. Meanwhile, the apartment had been cleared, so she felt free to take the gun out of the bag (although using a pencil passed through the trigger guard) and sniff the barrel. It did not seem to have been fired recently.

Sliding the gun off the pencil, she dropped it back into the bag. Digging around the way only a woman could—the lieutenant was right in that respect, at least—she also found a tube of lipstick, a mascara pencil, a packet of Kleenex tissues, a small vial of Hermès'
Calèche
, and a red leather Coach wallet. Oddly, there was no identification in the wallet. No driver's license (but that was possible in a big city), no credit cards (which was unusual), no social security card (but you weren't supposed to carry that with you), not anything with Gloria Stanford's name or her signature on it.

She went back to the drop-leaf desk in the bedroom, opened the FirstBank statement again.

The statement showed checks written in April to American Express, Visa, and MasterCard.

So where were the credit cards?

Was
that
what he'd been after?

The lady's credit cards?

The Deaf Man?

Planning to charge a camcorder or a stereo to the lady's credit cards?

Come on now.

That hardly seemed his style.

And yet…

Maybe the poor man had fallen upon hard times.

Maybe he needed a new wardrobe for the coming summer season.

Still and all…

Credit
cards?

Such small-time shit for such a big-time schemer.

She decided to pay a visit to the FirstBank branch on Salisbury Street.

 

M
ELISSA HAD PRACTICED
signing the name a hundred or more times. Copying it from Gloria Stanford's driver's license and credit cards. Gloria Stanford, Gloria Stanford, again and again. She now knew it almost the way she knew her own name. Melissa Summers, Gloria Stanford. Interchangeable.

There was a photo of a good-looking blonde on both the license and in the corner of one of the credit cards. But except for the blond hair, Gloria Stanford—whoever the hell
she
might be—bore no resemblance to Melissa Summers, none at all.

Melissa had pointed this out to Adam.

“We don't look at all alike,” she'd said.

“No problem,” he'd assured her. “One thing certain about a so-called personal banker is that he wouldn't know you if he tripped over you in his own bathroom.”

She hoped so.

She did not know what crime it might be to try getting into someone else's safe-deposit box, but she had a feeling she could spend a lot of time upstate if she got caught doing it. Be ironic, wouldn't it? Get sent up for signing someone else's name on a bank's signature card, after she'd been hooking all these years with never so much as a blemish on her spotless career—well, that one prostitution bust in L.A., but she was still Carmela Sammarone then.

Her high-heeled shoes clicked noisily on the bank's polished marble floor as she approached the desk at the rear. A bespectacled woman looked up at her, smiled. Handing her the little red envelope with the key in it, Melissa returned the smile. The woman shook the key out of the envelope, opened a file drawer with numbered index cards in it, fingered swiftly through them, yanked one out, silently read the name on it, looked up, asked “Miss Stanford?,” and without waiting for an answer, handed the card to Melissa for signature. Gloria Stanford's true signature marched down the length of the card like so many identical siblings:

Gloria Stanford
Gloria Stanford
Gloria Stanford
Gloria Stanford
Gloria Stanford
Gloria Stanford
Gloria Stanford

Melissa added her forgery just below the last true signature:

Gloria Stanford

Close, but no cigar.

On the other hand, who was watching the store?

The lady in the eyeglasses glanced cursorily at the signature, and then opened the gate in the railing and led Melissa back to the rows upon rows of stainless steel boxes. She used first Gloria's key and next the bank's own key to open the door to one of the boxes, and then yanked the box out of the row and handed it, deep and sleek, to Melissa.

“Will you need a room, Miss Stanford?” she asked.

“Yes, please,” Melissa said.

Her heart was pounding.

In the small room, with the door locked, Melissa lifted the lid of the box and peered into it.

There seemed to be a whole big shitpot full of hundred-dollar bills in that box.

She wondered if Adam would find her and shoot her if she ran off with all that money.

She decided he would.

 

W
HEN
E
ILEEN
B
URKE
got to the bank, the woman in the eyeglasses told her that Miss Stanford had been there not ten minutes earlier. She showed Eileen the signature card Miss Stanford had signed. Eileen knew she'd now have to go all the way downtown for a court order to open that safe-deposit box. She also knew that when she opened it, she would find it empty.

Just as she was going down into the subway kiosk to catch a train to High Street, the second message that day was being delivered to the stationhouse.

“There he goes again!” Meyer said. “Taunting us with Shakespeare.”

“If it
is
Shakespeare,” Kling said.

“What else could it be but Shakespeare?”

“Calling us dummies,” Meyer said.

“Maybe we
are
dummies,” Genero said.

No one disagreed with him.

“Let's try to figure out what he's saying,” Carella said. “That shouldn't be too difficult.”

“I got better things to do,” Parker said, and went off to the men's room to pee.

“He's telling us to wake up.”

“Or else.”

“ ‘Shake off slumber and beware.' ”

“ ‘Awake, awake!' ”

“It doesn't even rhyme,” Genero said.

 

D
R
. J
AMES
M
ELVIN
H
UDSON
was head of the Oncology Department at Mount Pleasant Hospital, not too distant from where Sharyn Cooke maintained her private practice in Diamondback. As a member of the medical team in the Deputy Chief Surgeon's Office in Majesta, however, he reported only to Sharyn, his immediate superior.

At twelve noon that Thursday, while Detective Eileen Burke was on her way downtown for her court order, Hudson asked Sharyn if she'd like to go down for lunch, and they both went downstairs to a sandwich joint called the Burger and Bun, right there in the Rankin Plaza complex. The strip mall in which the Deputy Chief Surgeon's Office was located also housed a dry-cleaning establishment, a fitness center, a Mail Boxes, Etc., and a branch of the Lorelie Records chain of music shops. A cop who'd recently been shot or merely kicked in the ass could therefore have coffee or lunch before being examined by a doctor, get his uniform jacket pressed while he was having his chest X-rayed, develop his pecs or his abs after his exam, and then buy and mail a CD to his mother for her birthday, all in the same little mall. Location, location. All was location.

Timing was important, too.

At a quarter past noon, when Hudson and Sharyn entered the Burger and Bun, it was jammed with similarly minded lunchers. Heads turned nonetheless. Here was a strikingly good-looking black couple, both obvious professionals, both wearing white tunics, a stethoscope hanging around Sharyn's neck, another one dangling from Hudson's pocket. He was six-feet two-inches tall. She was five-nine. All conversation almost stopped when they came through the door. The proprietor showed them to a booth near the rear of the shop. They ordered soups and sandwiches, and then earnestly and seriously discussed a patient they'd both seen earlier that morning, Sharyn because the cop had been shot two months ago, Hudson because the cop had revealed to him that two non-malignant tumors had been removed from his bladder three weeks before the shooting. When their food came, they dropped shop talk for a while, Sharyn mentioning a movie she and Kling had seen over the weekend, Hudson telling her he was getting sick and tired of movies aimed at fifteen-year-old boys.

“There's nothing made for grownups anymore,” he said.

“Not
all
movies are that bad,” Sharyn said.

She was bone weary.

Her police workday was only three hours old, and she was ready to go home. Still had to bus back to the city for her own office hours this afternoon. Sometimes, she wondered.

“I'd rather stay home and listen to music,” Hudson said. And then, without preamble, “Are you familiar with the work of a rap group called Spit Shine?”

“No,” she said. “I don't much like rap.”

“Well, it's come a long way from ‘Let's All Kill the Police,' if that's what you're thinking.”

“I don't know what ‘Let's All Kill the Police' is.”

“I'm categorizing a form of gangsta rap,” Hudson said. “Spit Shine went beyond that. Spit Shine addressed the ills of black society itself. Didn't try to lay it all on Whitey. Asked us what we
ourselves
were doing to denigrate…”