Free The Empty Hours by Ed McBain

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 B.B.D.
& 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 blond 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 U.C.L.A. 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.