Snow White and Rose Red

9

On Thursday morning, April 25, Bloom and Rawles finally located the house on stilts that Tiffany Carter (née Sylvia Kazenski) had described to them. It had not been as easy to find as Sylvia had supposed. She had said it was “the only one up on stilts, right on the bay,” and had led them to believe it was “out near Whisper Key, but on the mainland — that spit of land just before you cross the north bridge to Whisper, on the bay there, where there are a lot of mobile homes and shitty little dumps crowding the waterfront.” Admittedly, Sylvia had been there only twice, but her faulty geographical memory cost the detectives almost three working days. Bloom later told me that whereas time was usually of the essence during the investigation of a homicide, in this case — where the murder was some seven months old before the police even knew it had been committed — a three-day loss didn’t matter all that much... unless the killer hoped to lure another young girl into the bird sanctuary. As he told me this, however, he could not help commenting sourly on the unreliability of witnesses.

The house, as it turned out, was not on the bay. Instead, it was on a lagoon some two miles from the spot Sylvia had described. Neither was it on the mainland approach to the north bridge. It was across the bridge, a good way across the bridge, in fact, on Whisper Key itself. Sylvia’s only valid memories were of the mobile homes and shacks bordering the lagoon — but it took Rawles and Bloom three days to find those shacks and the stilted house nestled among them.

The apartment Tracy Kilbourne had apparently been living in until sometime in July of last year was now occupied by a twenty-seven-year-old woman named Joyce Epstein, who had been living in New York until February, when she came down here on vacation, fell in love with Calusa, and decided to make her home here. In New York she had worked as a receptionist at a publishing house; in Calusa she was selling real estate, not a particularly lucrative occupation at the moment, since mortgage interest rates were so high and nobody was buying. In New York she had lived on the second floor of a tenement on Eighty-Third Street, near First Avenue. In Calusa she was living in a ramshackle wood-frame house overlooking what was surely one of the most beautiful lagoons in the world. Herons elegantly stalked the shallow waters outside her windows as the detectives talked to her. A pelican perched on the railing of her deck. Her apartment in Manhattan, she told them, had been far more spacious than this, but when she looked out her window there, all she saw was alternate-side-of-the-street parking. Here — and she gestured grandly toward the lagoon — she had “the Garden of Eden” on her doorstep. I remembered thinking, as Bloom related this to me, that Joyce Epstein should have a long talk with my partner, Frank.

Joyce did not know anyone named Tracy Kilbourne.

The former tenant here had been a man named Charlie something-or-other. She’d met him only once — when he was moving in and she was moving out. He’d told her he was going back to Cincinnati because he couldn’t stand all the goddamn birds out there on the lagoon. “As the old maid said when she kissed the cow,” Joyce told the detectives, and shrugged. Rawles didn’t know what she meant. He asked Joyce what she meant. “It’s all a matter of taste,” Joyce said, and smiled. Rawles said, “Oh,” and figured it hadn’t been worth his time asking the question. In any case, Joyce didn’t know Tracy Kilbourne, and that was that. Her phone was ringing. “Maybe somebody wants to buy a house,” she said, and ran to answer it.

The man who lived next door was sitting outside his mobile home and sipping a can of beer. He was wearing a white tank top undershirt and blue shorts. He told the detectives his name was Harvey Wallenbach — “they call me Harvey Wallbanger” — and asked how he could be of assistance. Rawles asked him how long he’d been living here.

“Three years now,” Wallenbach said.

“Were you living here last July?” Bloom asked.

“If I been living here three years, then I was living here last July, ain’t that right?” Wallenbach asked Rawles. He was somewhere in his sixties, Rawles guessed, a scarecrow of a man with unkempt white hair and nicotine-stained teeth and fingers. The door to his mobile home was open, and a television set was going inside. Rawles couldn’t see anyone watching it. A soap opera was unfolding on the screen — one of Rawles’s mother’s favorites. Something about doctors and nurses. Big heads talking about an illegitimate child. On the soap operas, everything was big heads and illegitimacy. You never saw a long shot on any of the soap operas. You never saw anybody who wasn’t a bastard on any of the soap operas. Daytime serials, they called them. Like calling a garbage man a sanitation engineer.

“Did you know a girl named Tracy Kilbourne?” Bloom was saying. “Used to live next door here?” He gestured to the house on stilts. Joyce Epstein was running out toward her car. She waved at the detectives. A lead, Rawles thought. “Blonde girl,” Bloom said. “Supposed to be very beautiful. Lived here last year from around May to July.” Joyce’s car started with a roar. Smiling, she waved again at the detectives and pulled out of the gravel driveway.

“That her name?” Wallenbach asked. “Tracy Kilbourne?”

“That’s what we have,” Bloom said.

“Never knew her name... if she’s the one you’re looking for. Big blonde job, maybe five-nine, five-ten. Blue eyes. Tits out to here. Wheels like Betty Grable. You remember Betty Grable?” he asked Rawles. Rawles nodded. “That the girl you’re looking for?” Wallenbach said.

“Sounds like the one,” Bloom said. “Do you remember telling a girl who came here asking about her — this was in July sometime — that Miss Kilbourne was gone?”

“I mighta done that,” Wallenbach said, looking suddenly crafty and suspicious. “Why? What’s the matter?”

“Told her Miss Kilbourne drove off in a big, expensive car?” Bloom said.

“Mighta,” Wallenbach said.

“Black chauffeur picked her up, helped her take her clothes out?”

“Yeah, maybe,” Wallenbach said.

“Yes or no?” Rawles said. “Did you see her leaving here?”

“Got to know what this is all about first,” Wallenbach said.

“Don’t tell them nothin’,” a woman’s voice said from inside the trailer.

“Shut up, Lizzie,” Wallenbach said.

“It’s all about Miss Kilbourne being dead,” Rawles said.

“I told you not to tell them nothin’,” the woman inside the trailer yelled.

“I didn’t even know her name,” Wallenbach said.

The woman came out of the trailer, her hands on her hips. She was wearing a pink slip and scuffed house slippers. She was perhaps fifty years old, a stout woman with bleached blonde hair and a face that must have been pretty thirty years earlier. She squinted against the sun, and then shaded her eyes to look the detectives over.

“You even ask to see a badge?” she said to Wallenbach.

“Shut the hell up, Lizzie,” Wallenbach said. “I’m handling this my ownself.”

“On’y thing you know how to handle is your twinkie,” Lizzie said. “Let me see your badges.”

The detectives showed her their identification.

“I ain’t surprised she’s dead,” Lizzie said. “What was she? A hooker or something? Came in all hours of the night, she musta been a hooker.”

“Ma’am,” Bloom said, “what we’re trying to do here is identify the car that picked her up. Your husband told a woman named Sylvia—”

“He ain’t my husband. And whatever he is, he’s got a big mouth.”

“I’m the one with the big mouth, huh?” Wallenbach said.

“We don’t wanna get involved in no hooker got herself murdered,” Lizzie said.

“Did you tell anyone that an expensive car picked up—”

“Harvey, keep your mouth shut,” Lizzie said.

“How’s it gonna harm us I tell ’em what I seen?” Wallenbach asked.

“‘Cause this’s a murder here, is what it is,” Lizzie said. “You wanna get involved in a hooker got murdered, you asshole?”

“She wasn’t dead when I seen her get in that car!” Wallenbach said.

“Now you done it,” Lizzie said, and went back into the trailer.

“Then you did see her get in a car,” Bloom said.

“I seen her.”

“What kind of car?”

“A Cadillac.”

“What color?”

“Black.”

“Did you see the license plate?”

“I seen it.”

“Would you remember the number?”

“Nope.”

“Was it a Florida plate?”

“Yep.”

“But you don’t remember the number.”

“I didn’t know when she got in that car she was gonna get murdered,” Wallenbach said. “Otherwise I’da looked harder.”

“It was chauffeur-driven, is that right?” Rawles asked.

“That’s right.”

“Was the chauffeur white or black?”

“Black,” Wallenbach said. “Like you.”

“Did you hear her mention his name or anything?”

“Nope.”

“What’d he look like?”

“I told you he was black,” Wallenbach said.

Rawles sighed.

“How tall was he?” he asked.

“ ’Bout five-ten, something like that.”

“Any idea what he weighed?”

“He was sort of husky, ’way he was throwing around them trunks and valises. I got no idea what he weighed, though. I ain’t so good at judgin’ weight.”

“What color hair did he have?”

“Sort of salt-and-pepper. More white than black.”

“Eyes?”

“Brown.”

“What was he wearing?”

“Chauffeur’s uniform. Gray. Peaked cap. You know.”

“But you didn’t hear his name, huh?”

“Girl didn’t say his name.”

“Did she seem to know him?”

“Let him take all her stuff outta the house, I guess she hadda know him,” Wallenbach said.

“Carried the stuff down for her, did he?” Bloom asked.

“The heavy stuff. She carried some valises down herself.”

“And put them in the trunk of the car?”

“Some in the trunk, some in the front seat.”

“She say anything to you before they left?”

“Nope. Didn’t know the girl ’cept to see her.”

“Didn’t say where she was going or anything?”

“I just told you I didn’t know her. Why would she tell me where she was going? Didn’t know a thing about her, in fact, ’cept she lived next door and was always sittin’ on her deck without no top on. Was she a hooker?”

“She was a hooker, all right,” Lizzie said from inside the trailer.

“Did you see which way the car went? When it left?” Bloom asked.

“Made a left turn at the end of the driveway,” Wallenbach said.

“Heading farther out on the key then, is that right?” Rawles said.

“Looked that way to me.”

“you’re sure the car was a Cadillac?”

“Positive. Cars, I know.”

“Ain’t nothing you know but your twinkie,” Lizzie said from inside the trailer.

“This was a big black Cadillac limo,” Wallenbach yelled to the open trailer door.

“Anything else you may have noticed about it?” Bloom asked. “Any bumper stickers? Any—”

“Bumper stickers?” Wallenbach said, appalled. “On a stretch limo?”

“Anything on the windshield? Any monogrammed initials on the doors?”

“Didn’t see anything like that,” Wallenbach said.

“And this was in July sometime, is that right?” Bloom said.

“Around the Fourth,” Wallenbach said.

“What day?” Rawles asked, looking at the calendar in his notebook. “The Fourth last year fell on a Wednesday.”

“The day after, I think it was. I remember we was sittin’ lookin’ at the fireworks the night before. So this hadda be the next day.”

“The fifth of July.”

“Right.”

“What time?” Bloom asked.

“In the morning.”

“Early morning?”

“Around ten o’clock or so.”

“What was the girl wearing, do you remember?”

“Cut-off blue jeans and a white T-shirt. No bra.”

“She never wore a bra,” Lizzie said from inside the trailer.

“Anything else you can remember about that morning?” Rawles asked.

“She looked happy,” Wallenbach said.

The detectives weren’t too very happy.

They had learned from Wallenbach substantially what they had learned from Sylvia Kazenski: that an expensive automobile driven by a black chauffeur had picked up Tracy Kilbourne and her luggage one morning in July last year, presumably to take her somewhere on Whisper Key. Well, yes, they now had an exact date: July 5. And an approximate time: 10:00 a.m. And the car was a black Cadillac.

But that was all.

So they hit the telephone book for Whisper Key.

There were six Kilbournes listed for the key. None of the first names was Tracy. They phoned each of the Kilbournes nonetheless, and asked if any of the answering parties knew a girl named Tracy Kilbourne.

One of the ladies they called was a little hard of hearing. She said, “Yes, my granddaughter’s name is Casey Kilbourne.”

“No,” Rawles said. “Tracy Kilbourne.”

“That’s right,” the woman said.

“Your granddaughter’s name is Tracy Kilbourne?”

“Casey Kilbourne, right,” the woman said.

“Well, thank you very much,” Rawles said.

“Did you want to speak to her?” the woman asked.

“No, thank you,” Rawles said.

“Just a second, then, I’ll get her.”

Rawles hung up.

None of the Kilbournes knew a Tracy Kilbourne.

Rawles immediately put in a call to General Telephone of Calusa, identified himself to one of the supervisors there, and told her what he was looking for: a telephone number and an address for a girl named Tracy Kilbourne, for whom service may have begun in July of last year. The supervisor checked her computerized records and reported that they had no listing whatever for a Tracy Kilbourne anywhere in the city of Calusa. Rawles asked her to check back through January of last year, when — according to Corrinne Haley at Pizza Pleasure — Tracy first came to Calusa. The supervisor reported that the records she was consulting went back three years, and she had nothing for a Tracy Kilbourne. Rawles looked at Corrinne Haley’s WIF form, zeroed in on the names of the girls Tracy had shared a room with, and asked the supervisor if she had anything for either Abigail Sweeney or Geraldine Lorner. The supervisor had an old listing for Abigail Sweeney at 3610 South Webster, which Corrinne Haley had given as Tracy’s old address. Service there had been discontinued in February of this year. There were no new listings for either Abigail Sweeney or Geraldine Lorner. Rawles gave the supervisor the address at Heron Lagoon, where Tracy had rented the house on stilts, and was told that telephone service there was listed to a Mr. Harold Weinberger and that billing for that number was made to him at his address in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Rawles thanked the woman and hung up, and immediately dialed Mr. Weinberger in Pittsburgh. Weinberger told him he kept the Heron Lagoon property as an investment and that a real-estate agent down there handled the rentals for him. He had no idea who came in or out of the apartment or where they went when they left the apartment. They passed through like trains in the night, and the only thing he insisted on was that they make any long-distance calls collect.

So, okay. The phone on South Webster had been listed in Abigail Sweeney’s name, not an unusual situation when girls were sharing an apartment. Nor was it unusual in a resort town like Calusa for people to pick up and go when they’d had enough of the sun. Hence no new listings for either of Tracy’s former roommates, who were now only God knew where. The Heron Lagoon phone was listed in the absentee owner’s name; again, not an unusual situation where rental property was concerned. But Tracy Kilbourne had left that house on the fifth of July, so why was there no further telephone listing for her? She had been found dead in Calusa. Presumably she had stayed in Calusa. But no telephone?

The next calls the detectives made were to all the real-estate agents on Whisper Key. What they wanted to know was whether a girl named Tracy Kilbourne had bought or rented a house or condominium on the key in July of last year. Virtually all of the real-estate agents said they would have to check their files and get back. While the detectives waited for the return calls, they started telephoning all the banks on Whisper Key. An assistant manager at the Whisper Key branch of First Calusa City reluctantly told Bloom that a woman named Tracy Kilbourne had a checking account there. The assistant manager’s name was Mrs. O’Hare, and she spoke with a faint Irish brogue. This was the first good lead they’d had since they learned the dead girl’s name, so Bloom naturally started asking questions about the account. Mrs. O’Hare told Bloom she could not reveal anything more about the account without a court order. Bloom told her he was investigating a homicide. Mrs. O’Hare told him the bank had rules and regulations. Bloom told her it would be an enormous inconvenience for him to have to go before a magistrate to apply for a court order. Mrs. O’Hare told him he should get another job if he didn’t like being a policeman. Bloom told her he would go get the court order, but that he would be in a foul temper when he finally came to see her at the bank. Mrs. O’Hare said, “Have a nice day,” and hung up.

It took Bloom three hours to get a court order that would allow him to open the records on Tracy Kilbourne’s checking account. By the time he got to the bank, he was ready to tell Mrs. O’Hare just what he thought of all this bureaucratic bullshit, but she turned out to be a little gray-haired old lady who reminded him of his Aunt Sarah in Mineola, Long Island, so instead he found himself apologizing for having been rude on the telephone. A little plastic sign on Mrs. O’Hare’s desk told him that her first name was Betsy. She was wearing the kind of dress Lizzie Borden must have been wearing when she chopped up first her stepmother and then her father. She was also wearing rimless eyeglasses. She smelled of mimosa. Bloom felt for a moment that he had stepped back into the nineteenth century. Mrs. O’Hare studied the court order as though she suspected it were counterfeit.

Satisfied at last, she asked, “What is it you wish to know, then, Detective Bloom?”

“When was this account opened?” Bloom said.

Mrs. O’Hare consulted her records. Like a third-grader trying to shield a test paper from a potentially cheating neighbor across the aisle, she kept her hand cupped over the top of the sheet, hiding it from Bloom’s view. Bloom — Aunt Sarah notwithstanding — was beginning to dislike her intensely.

“The sixth day of July,” Mrs. O’Hare said.

“A Friday,” Bloom said, consulting his pocket calendar.

Mrs. O’Hare said nothing.

“What was the opening deposit?” Bloom asked.

Mrs. O’Hare consulted her papers again.

“Ten thousand dollars,” she said.

“And the current balance?”

“Seven hundred seventy-nine dollars and fourteen cents.”

“When was the last check drawn?” Bloom asked.

“I’m afraid I do not have that information here,” Mrs. O’Hare said.

“Where would this information be?” Bloom asked.

“In our Statements Department. All I have here are the details regarding—”

“Well, I’ll need a list of all transactions in the account from the day of the opening deposit to the last check written,” Bloom said.

“I’m afraid the bank cannot supply such information on one of its depositors,” Mrs. O’Hare said. “Not without her permission.”

“Mrs. O’Hare,” Bloom said slowly and carefully, “we are not about to get any permission from Miss Kilbourne because she is dead. She was murdered, Mrs. O’Hare. That’s why I’m here, Mrs. O’Hare. I’m trying to find out who killed her, Mrs. O’Hare.”

“Yes, well, you have your job,” Mrs. O’Hare said, “and I have mine.”

“And what we both have is this court order here,” Bloom said, “which I suggest you take another look at.”

“I have already read your court order,” Mrs. O’Hare said.

“Then you know it calls for complete disclosure. Those are the words there, Mrs. O’Hare, ‘complete disclosure,’ that is what the magistrate signed, a court order calling for complete disclosure. Now, Mrs. O’Hare, there is somebody out there someplace who shot a young girl and cut out her tongue—”

“Oh!” Mrs. O’Hare said.

“—and we’re wasting time here while he’s maybe planning to do the same thing to some other young girl. So, if you’ll pardon me, Mrs. O’Hare, I would like to quit waltzing around the mulberry bush, and I would like the information I came for. Now you go get what I want, and you go get it fast.”

“This is not Nazi Germany,” Mrs. O’Hare said.

“No, this is Calusa, Florida,” Bloom said.

Mrs. O’Hare went at once to get the complete file on Tracy Kilbourne.

When Bloom got back to the Public Safety Building, Rawles was on the telephone with the sixteenth real-estate agent he’d talked to since Bloom left for his court order. He hung up at last, and said, “No luck yet. Three more to go, but so far none of them ever heard of Tracy Kilbourne.”

“So where was she taking all her stuff?” Bloom asked.

“Good question. How’d you make out?”

“I got the court order, and also got what we need from the bank,” Bloom said, and put a thick manila envelope on the desk. “We got our work cut out for us. She opened the account last July, must’ve written three hundred checks between then and September.”

“What’s the date on the last one?” Rawles asked.

“September twenty-fifth.”

“How long did the ME say she’d been in the water?”

“Six to nine months.”

“That would put it—”

“If it was nine months ago, July. If it was six, October.”

“That’s pretty close, Morrie. September twenty-fifth.”

“Did you call Motor Vehicles?” Bloom asked.

“Yep. She had a Florida driver’s license, last known address 3610 South Webster. No automobile registered to her.”

“Well, let’s take a look at this bank shit,” Bloom said, and sighed heavily.

The court order had called for complete disclosure, and before Bloom left the bank that afternoon he insisted that they photocopy for him the microfilm of all the checks Tracy Kilbourne had written since the account was opened. The photocopied checks were the same thing as having Tracy’s canceled checks in front of them. And canceled checks could often be more helpful than either an appointment calendar or a diary.

The first thing they looked for was a check written to General Telephone of Calusa. They found none. Was it possible that Tracy lived in an apartment or a house without a telephone? Everybody had a telephone! They began looking for monthly checks made out to a real-estate agent, a condominium association, a bank, or a private individual, hoping to discover where Tracy had either rented or bought an apartment or a house. There was nothing. How the hell could that be? Had the Cadillac dropped her and her luggage on a beach somewhere? Everybody got to be someplace, man, and Tracy Kilbourne seemed to have been noplace. Or at least noplace in Calusa. Bloom asked a detective named Pete Kenyon to start calling real-estate offices, banks, telephone companies — the same routine he and Rawles had just gone through locally — for any community within an arbitrary forty-mile radius of Calusa, and then he and Rawles went back to the checks.

The account had been opened on the sixth of July, the day after Tracy left the house on Heron Lagoon. The opening deposit had been $10,000. By the thirteenth of August, when the bank mailed its first statement to her, Tracy had written checks totaling $8,202.48, leaving a balance of $1,797.52 before another deposit was made — this time for $25,000, on August 6. Another statement was mailed on September 10. It showed that Tracy had written checks totaling $23,407.12, reducing the balance to $3,390.40 before another deposit of $15,000 was made on September 4. The last bank statement showing any activity in the account was mailed on October 15. It revealed that by that date, Tracy had reduced the balance to a mere $800.14. There were no further deposits after the one on September 4, which was the Tuesday following the Labor Day weekend holiday. In short, a total of $50,000 had been deposited in the account between July 6 and September 4 — and $49,199.86 of that had been spent by the twenty-fifth of September, when Tracy wrote her last check.

It seemed impossible that anyone living in Calusa — where mass transit was almost nonexistent — could have survived without an automobile. Motor Vehicles had reported that Tracy Kilbourne was a licensed driver in the state, but that they had no record of an automobile registered to her name. On the off chance that Motor Vehicles had been wrong, they searched through the checks to see if any large sum of money had been paid to an automobile dealer. They found nothing. Tracy’s biggest expenditures seemed to have been for clothing and jewelry, but in August she had written a check to American Express for $3,721.42. The memo line in the lower left-hand corner of the check was filled in with the words “L.A. trip” in the same handwriting as her signature in the lower right-hand corner. Had she gone out there looking for movie work? Wearing the new clothes she’d bought at Calusa’s fanciest boutiques? Sporting the jewelry she’d purchased in Calusa’s most expensive shops? They would have to call American Express for a detailed breakdown of her charges. In the meantime, they were extremely curious about those three deposits totaling $50,000. Nothing in the bank material indicated the nature of those deposits.

Bloom called the bank again, avoiding Mrs. O’Hare this time around. The manager he spoke to was a soft-spoken southern woman named Mary Jean Kenworthy. That was how she announced herself when she came onto the line.

“Mary Jean Kenworthy.”

“Morris Nathan Bloom,” Bloom said. “Calusa Police Department. we’re investigating a homicide here—”

“Oh my,” Mary Jean said.

“Yes, Ma’am, and we’ve been looking over the victim’s bank records — Tracy Kilbourne — and I was wondering if you could give me some further information. What I need to know, Ma’am—”

“It’s ‘miss,’ ” Mary Jean said.

“Sorry, Ma’am... miss,” Bloom said. “We have listings here for three substantial deposits on July sixth, August sixth, and September fourth. I was wondering if you can tell me how those deposits were made?”

“How?”

“Check, cash, money order, whatever. If they were made by check, I’d like to know the name of the person or firm writing the checks.”

“The depositor’s name again, please?”

“Tracy Kilbourne. That’s K-I–L-B-O-U-R-N-E.”

“Can you hold just a moment, sir?”

“Yes, surely.”

Mary Jean Kenworthy came back on the line some five minutes later.

“Mr. Bloom?” she said.

“Yes, Miss Kenworthy, I’m here.”

“We have a July sixth deposit for ten thousand dollars—”

“That’s right.”

“An August sixth deposit for twenty-five thousand dollars—”

“Yes.”

“And a September fourth deposit for fifteen thousand dollars.”

“That jibes with what I have. How—”

“All those deposits were made in cash, Mr. Bloom.”

“Cash?” Bloom said.

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s a lot of cash,” Bloom said.

“Oh my, yes,” Mary Jean Kenworthy said. “You know, do you, that there hasn’t been any activity in the account since the twenty-fifth of September last year?”

“Yes, we do,” Bloom said.

“It’s just that... the account requires a minimum balance of a thousand dollars. If it falls below that, we begin deducting maintenance charges of three dollars a month. we’ve been doing that, and... well... there was something a bit over eight hundred dollars in the account last September, and it’s now down to seven hundred seventy-nine dollars and fourteen cents. If Miss Kilbourne left any survivors, it might be wise for the estate to close out the account.”

“We haven’t been able to locate her mother yet,” Bloom said.

“Well, if you should...”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Bloom said, and hesitated. “Cash, you said, huh?”

“Cash, yes,” she said.