to a cubicle. We entered together, and Guzik closed and locked the door. The room struck me as rather cramped for sex, but I understand people do it in airplane lavatories, and this was spacious in comparison.
I asked Guzik what had happened to the girl.
'Oh, we told the bank not to press charges, or all it would do was give every streetwalker in the business the same idea. We told them to refund her box-rental fee and tell her they didn't want her business, so I guess that's what they did. She probably walked across the street and started doing business with another bank.'
'But you never got any more complaints.'
'No. Maybe she's got a friend at Chase Manhattan.' He laughed hard at his own line, then chopped it off abruptly. 'Let's see what's in the box, Scudder.'
I handed it to him. 'Open it yourself,' I said.
He did, and I watched his face while he looked through everything. He had some interesting comments on the pictures he saw, and he gave the written material a fairly careful reading. Then he looked up suddenly.
'This is all the stuff on the Ethridge dame.'
'Seems that way,' I said.
'What about the others?' '
'I guess these safe-deposit vaults aren't as foolproof as they're supposed to be. Somebody must have come in and taken everything else.'
'You son of a bitch.'
'You've got everything you need, Guzik. No more and no less.'
'You took a different box for each one. How many others are there?'
'What difference does it make?'
'You son of a bitch. So we'll walk back and ask the guard how many other boxes you have here, and we'll take a look at all of them.'
'If you want. I can save you a little time.'
'Oh?'
'Not just three different boxes, Guzik. Three different banks. And don't even think about shaking me for the other keys, or running a check on the banks, or anything else you might have in mind. In fact, it might be a good idea if you stopped calling me a son of a bitch, because I might get unhappy, and I might decide not to cooperate in your investigation. I don't have to cooperate, you know.
And if I don't, your case goes down the drain. You can possibly tie Ethridge to Lundgren without me, but you'll have a hell of a time finding anything a D.A. is going to want to take to court.'
We looked at each other for a while. A couple of times he started to say something, and a couple of times he figured out that it wasn't a particularly good idea. Finally something changed in his face, and I knew he'd decided to let it go.
He had enough, and he had all he was going to get, and his face said he knew it.
'The hell,' he said, 'it's the cop in me, I want to get to the bottom of things.
No offense, I hope.'
'None at all,' I said. I don't suppose I sounded very convincing.
'They probably hauled Ethridge out of bed by now. I'll get back and see what she's got to say. It should make good listening. Or maybe they didn't haul her out of bed. These pictures, you'd have more fun hauling her into bed than out. Ever get any of that, Scudder?'
'No.'
'I wouldn't mind a taste myself. Want to come back to the station house with me?'
I didn't want to go anywhere with him. I didn't want to see Beverly Ethridge.
'I'll pass,' I said. 'I've got an appointment.'
Chapter 17
I spent half an hour under the shower with the spray as hot as I could stand it. It had been a long night, and the only sleep I'd had had been when I dozed off briefly in Birnbaum's chair. I had come close to being killed, and I had killed the man who'd been trying for me. The Marlboro man, John Michael Lundgren. He'd have been thirty-one next month. I would have guessed him at younger than that, twenty-six or so. Of course, I'd never seen him in particularly good light.
It didn't bother me that he was dead. He had been trying to kill me and had seemed pleased at the prospect. He had killed Spinner, and it wasn't unlikely that he'd killed other people before. He might not have been a pro at killing, but it seemed to be something he enjoyed. He certainly liked working with the knife, and the boys who like to use knives usually get a sexual thrill out of their weaponry.
Edged weapons are even more phallic that guns.
I wondered if he'd used a knife on Spinner. It wasn't inconceivable. The Medical Examiner's office doesn't catch everything. There was a case a while ago, a then-unidentified floater they fished out of the Hudson, and she was processed and buried without anyone's noticing that there was a bullet in her skull.
They found out only because some yoyo severed her head before burial. He wanted the skull for a desk ornament, and ultimately they found the bullet and identified the skull from dental records and found out the woman
