Eureka

CHAPTER 2

He had taken off his jacket, his tie was pulled down, and he had pulled his suspenders off his shoulders. He had been sweating and his handkerchief was stuffed in the back of his shirt collar. The lid of one of those large fireproof steel boxes was open, and there were stacks of documents, wrapped with rubber bands, spread out in piles on the desktop.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I thought I might find something to lead us back to where she came from,” he said without looking up. “Maybe find some relatives or something.”

“And?”

“This, which I think you’ll find most interesting.”

He dropped a large bundle of what looked like letters in a separate pile. They were bankbooks. Lots of bankbooks.

“Check this out,” he said. He opened one of them and leafed through the pages, stopping now and then to make a comment.

“I figure her salary was forty bucks a week, that figure appears every Friday so I assume she got paid weekly. Nothing else stands out

… except the papers on the house-paid in full at the time, in March of 1924, four thou. There are four car registrations, all paid in full at the time of purchase, the last was the DeSoto, bought in September 1939-looks like she got a new car every three years or so. Always cash. There are the usual bills for water, electricity, taxes. But lookee here. On the third of every month, like clockwork, five hundred smackers automatically go into her savings account. She paid the house loan, the cars, the furniture out of it, and very little else. Five C’s a month, Zeke, the deposit slips are here but no mention of where the money came from. I went back ten years so far. Every month, like clockwork, on the third. And here’s the kicker-her savings book.”

He laid it down in front of me. Verna Hicks had $98,400 in her savings account.

“Jesus,” I said.

“Yeah. All these financial records were in this box. It wasn’t even locked. Her house and car papers, everything; even her husband’s birth and death certificates and life insurance policy. Paid her five grand. And a bill of sale for Wilensky’s business. She sold it two years ago. Seven thou and nickels. But not a mention of the five hundred. It isn’t some kind of investment, the backup papers would be here. What do you think of that?”

“Maybe she had a married friend.”

He was digging through other bankbooks and flipping through them. He whistled through his teeth.

“These books go back, let’s see, here’s one from twenty-six, twenty-five… and that five hundred keeps popping up. Damn, Zee, her savings book shows she had these deposits going back to 1924. She opened it with four grand cash. She’s been banking that five a month for, what, seventeen years! Right through the Depression and all.”

He took out the car papers and checked them out.

“She paid twelve hundred cash for the DeSoto.”

He looked at me. “Hell, she could’ve been living uptown with that kind of dough.”

“Well, she must’ve been saving it for something.”

Agassi shrugged. “What?” He dug around in the box and came up with a small green envelope and dumped a small key into his palm.

“Safe deposit key,” I said. “Maybe there’s something there. What’s the bank?”

“West Los Angeles National. There’s two things missing,” he said.

“What?”

“No birth certificate. And no will.”

“Ninety-eight G’s and no will?”

“Yeah, and she was totally organized. I mean, every scrap of paper she ever got’s in here. But no will or B.C.”

“How about her purse?”

“I emptied it. The usual woman things, her wallet, and car keys. The wallet has eighteen bucks in it. According to her license, she was born April 14, 1894. She just turned forty-seven. That’s it.”

I took out the makings, rolled one, fired it up, and took a long pull, then said, “You know who gets all this and the savings account if there’s no beneficiary?”

“The state.”

“Yeah.”

“That don’t seem right somehow.”

“Yeah, whoever said life’s fair?”

He handed me a newspaper clipping from the Times. A two-column shot buried on the business page, it showed a group of women and one guy standing in a cluster around a small, plump brunette who was smiling sheepishly. The short story that accompanied it told us that Mrs. Verna Wilensky had celebrated her sixteenth anniversary with the Los Angeles tax assessor’s office. It was dated seven weeks ago.

“This everything?”

Agassi nodded. “Not another personal thing in the whole damn house. I went through the closets and drawers while you were next door. Nada.”

“A paid-for house and car, ninety-plus grand in the bank, and no will.”

I smoked for a few moments in silence, leaning back and blowing the smoke toward the ceiling. I stared down at the collection of checks and deposit slips, picked up the clipping. Then it hit me. I walked into the bedroom and then back into the living room.

“Do you notice anything peculiar?” I asked Ski.

“Other than the small fortune in the bank?”

“Pictures,” I said. “There aren’t any pictures of any body, except that clipping from the paper. No pictures of her, her husband, no family shots. Nothing.”

Ski stared at me blankly.

“Even the picture of her in the paper is kind of goofy. She isn’t looking at the camera. She’s staring down at the floor.”

I went back to the bathroom, stared at the broken shelf near the tub, pictured the corpse in my mind.

A very shy lady. A lady without a history for almost twenty years. No family pictures, not even a picture of her late husband. Not a wedding picture, or vacation shot with the Grand Canyon in the background.

So who was she saving the money for?

I got a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.

“How about the Clarks?” I said.

“The who?”

“People next door.”

“What about them?”

“You’d think if she didn’t have any family she would’ve left something to her best friends.”

He thought about that for a minute and nodded.

“Or at least left it to her dog,” I said.

“There’s a dog?”

“Out back, gnawing on a bone.”

“What happens to it?”

“The pound.”

“Well, that’s pretty shitty.”

“Want a dog?”

“I got three kids, a goldfish, two canaries, and a dachshund who hates strangers. How about you?”

“I live alone, no pets allowed.”

“Too bad, so the dog goes to the pound. What do we do now?”

“Look, we don’t know a damn thing about this woman before she moved here in 1924,” I said. “The Clarks say she came from Texas somewhere. Her license says she’s forty-seven. She didn’t just hatch seventeen years ago. Where the hell was she for the first thirty years of her life?”

“Well there ain’t anything in this house that’ll tell us the answer to that question.”

“I want the house sealed. Nobody else in or out.”

“Aw, c’mon, Zeke.”

“Tomorrow I take the bank, find out where the checks came from, and get into her safe deposit box; maybe there’s a will in there. You take the job, see if somebody down there knows anything about her that might fill in her background. Maybe we can find a survivor. Then check Motor Vehicles, see if they have any further background on her.”

Ski shook his head and rolled his eyes.

“What’re you building, Zee?”

“Precaution.”

“Precaution,” he said dejectedly. “Precaution of what?”

“Just precaution. That’s our job, Ski. Got to be cautious.”

He growled under his breath and got up.

“I’ll post a man at the door.”

“Until after the autopsy.”

“Right.”

“This lady didn’t want anyone to know her before she was thirty-or apparently since. Let’s find out why. I’ll take everything we’ve got, go over the records when I get home, put together everything we know about her.”

“How about the people next door? Maybe we should take another crack at them.”

“They’re not going anywhere. Let’s see what we come up with. Maybe it’ll jog their memories. I’ll lock the place down. Take the box out to the car. I know how the smell gets to you.”

“You’re a jewel, Zee.”

“Fourteen carat.”

“Then can we stop and get something to eat? I’m starving.”

“You’re always starving, Ski.”

“I eat for three.”

I closed and locked the windows, then went to the back door and looked outside. When I opened it, Rosebud stared at me. A nub of the bone lay at his feet.

“He’s probably hungry,” Mrs. Clark said. She was on her back porch with another drink. Jimmy sat beside her on the porch swing, sucking on a beer. “His bowl’s under the stairs. She leaves it there during the day in case he wants a snack.”

“What are you, his guardian angel?”

“Somebody has to care.”

“You’re doing more than your share,” I said. “This dog eats better than I do. By the way, do you have any photos of Verna?”

“She was funny about that. Hated to have her picture taken.”

I got the bowl, went into the kitchen, opened a can of Ken-L-Ration, and gave it to him. It vanished. He sat down and licked his chops. Then he looked over at the door. On a hook beside it was his leash.

“Ah hell.” I sighed.

I leashed him up, got the rest of the bones from the refrigerator, stuck a couple of cans of dog food in my pockets, got the front door key from under the mat, locked the front door, and we went out to the car. I opened the door and the dog jumped in the backseat without being invited.

I got behind the wheel and laid the bones on the seat beside me. Agassi didn’t say anything until we were a block or two away.

“What’s that?” he asked, nodding toward the butcher-paper bundle.

“Dog bones.”

“I’m not that hungry.”

“I thought you’d eat anything, Agassi.”

“ ‘I save the bones for Henry Jones ’cause Henry don’t eat no meat,’ ” he sang the line. It was an old blues song.

“I know, he’s an egg man,” I said, finishing the line.

We drove another block. Agassi looked at the dog.

“I thought he was headed for the pound.”

“I’ll take him tomorrow.”

“Uh-huh.”

Another block.

“What’s the hound’s name?”

“… Slugger,” I said.