The Empty Hours by Ed McBain Read Free Book Online

?”
     
    “The
policy insured her for twelve-five, that’s correct. But there was a
double-indemnity clause, you see, and Josephine Thompson’s death was
accidental. No, we had to pay the policy’s limit, Detective Carella. On July
first we sent Claudia Davis a check for twenty-five thousand dollars.”
     
    * * * *

 
     
    9
     
     
    There are no mysteries in
police work.
     
    Nothing
fits into a carefully preconceived scheme. The high point of any given case is
very often the corpse that opens the case. There is no climactic progression;
suspense is for the movies. There are only people and curiously twisted
motives, and small unexplained details, and coincidence, and the unexpected,
and they combine to form a sequence of events, but there is no real mystery,
there never is. There is only life, and sometimes death, and neither follows a
rule book. Policemen hate mystery stories because they recognize in them a
control that is lacking in their own very real, sometimes routine, sometimes
spectacular, sometimes tedious investigation of a case. It is very nice and
very clever and very convenient to have all the pieces fit together neatly. It
is very kind to think of detectives as master mathematicians working on an
algebraic problem whose constants are death and a victim, whose unknown is a
murderer. But many of these mastermind detectives have trouble adding up the
deductions on their twice-monthly paychecks. The world is full of wizards, for
sure, but hardly any of them work for the city police.
     
    There
was one big mathematical discrepancy in the Claudia Davis case.
     
    There
seemed to be $5,000 unaccounted for.
     
    Twenty-five
grand had been mailed to Claudia Davis on July 1, and she presumably received
the check after the Fourth of July holiday, cashed it someplace, and then took
her money to the Seaboard Bank of America, opened a new checking account, and
rented a safety-deposit box. But her total deposit at Seaboard had been $20,000
whereas the check had been for $25,000, so where was the laggard five? And who
had cashed the check for her? Mr. Dodd of the Security Insurance Corporation,
Inc., explained the company’s rather complicated accounting system to Carella.
A check was kept in the local office for several days after it was cashed in
order to close out the policy, after which it was sent to the main office in
Chicago where it sometimes stayed for several weeks until the master files were
closed out. It was then sent to the company’s accounting and auditing firm in
San Francisco. It was Dodd’s guess that the canceled check had already been
sent to the California accountants, and he promised to put a tracer on it at
once. Carella asked him to please hurry. Someone had cashed that check for
Claudia and, supposedly, someone also had one-fifth of the check’s face value.
     
    The
very fact that Claudia had not taken the check itself to Seaboard seemed to indicate
that she had something to hide. Presumably, she did not want anyone asking
questions about insurance company checks, or insurance policies, or double
indemnities, or accidental drownings, or especially her cousin Josie. The
check was a perfectly good one, and yet she had chosen to cash it before opening
a new account. Why? And why, for that matter, had she bothered opening a new
account when she had a rather well-stuffed and active account at another bank?
     
    There
are only whys in police work, but they do not add up to mystery. They add up to
work, and nobody in the world likes work. The bulls of the 87th would have preferred
to sit on their backsides and sip at gin-and-tonics, but the whys were there,
so they put on their hats and their holsters and tried to find some becauses.
     
    Cotton
Hawes systematically interrogated each and every tenant in the rooming house
where Claudia Davis had been killed. They all had alibis tighter than the
closed fist of an Arabian stablekeeper. In his report to the lieutenant, Hawes
expressed the belief that