At last, she took a step into the room, walked gingerly around the taped outline on the floor, and directly to a drop-leaf desk that must have cost her yearly salary. As a detective/third, Eileen currently earned $55,936 a year; her own one-bedroom flat was furnished with stuff she'd bought at IKEA, across the River Harb.
She lowered the drop-leaf front and sat in a chair upholstered with a satin seat and back.
In one of the desk's warren of cubbyholes, she found a box of checkbook inserts. Blank checks for FirstBank's Salisbury Street branch right here in the city. Top sheaf of checks numbered from 151 through 180. Sheaves
below it numbered to follow. Lettering across the top of each check was:
Gloria Stanford
1113 Silvermine Oval
Isola, 30576
In another of the cubbies, she found FirstBank's most recent statement. Gloria's checking account balance at the end of March had been $1,674.18. On the third of April, she'd made a cash deposit of $9,800. Another cash deposit on April 12, this time for $7,200. Yet another on April 23, for $8,100. Total cash deposits for the month: $25,100. Total amount of checks written: $24,202.17; her closing balance on April 30 was $2,573.01.
By law, all banks were required to report to the Internal Revenue Service any cash deposits in excess of $10,000. Was it mere coincidence that Gloria's cash deposits had been for amounts somewhat less than the ten grand? She looked for a savings account passbook and could find none.
So where had those cash deposits come from?
Eileen went through Gloria's appointment calendar and her address book.
She went through her closets and her dresser drawers.
She went through her medicine cabinet and her refrigerator.
Her 'woman's eye' caught nothing a man's eye might have missed.
In the living room, on a counter to the right of the entrance door, she found a tote bag with a small-caliber pistol in it. She wondered if Carella and Meyer had simply missed the gun. Or had they turned it over to Ballistics for testing, and then brought it back to the
apartment on their second go-round? A place for everything and everything in its place. She would have to ask them. Meanwhile, the apartment had been cleared, so she felt free to take the gun out of the bag (although using a pencil passed through the trigger guard) and sniff the barrel. It did not seem to have been fired recently.
Sliding the gun off the pencil, she dropped it back into the bag. Digging around the way only a woman could — the lieutenant was right in that respect, at least — she also found a tube of lipstick, a mascara pencil, a packet of Kleenex tissues, a small vial of Hermes' Caliche, and a red leather Coach wallet. Oddly, there was no identification in the wallet. No driver's license (but that was possible in a big city), no credit cards (which was unusual), no social security card (but you weren't supposed to carry that with you), not anything with Gloria Stanford's name or her signature on it.
She went back to the drop-leaf desk in the bedroom, opened the FirstBank statement again.
The statement showed checks written in April to American Express, Visa, and MasterCard. So where were the credit cards? Was that what he'd been after? The lady's credit cards? The Deaf Man? Planning to charge a camcorder or a stereo to the
lady's credit cards? Come on now.
That hardly seemed his style. And yet . . .
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May...
Maybe the poor man had fallen upon hard times. And summer's lease hath all too short a date ...
Maybe he needed a new wardrobe for the coming summer season.
Still and all. . .
Credit cards?
Such small-time shit for such a big-time schemer.
She decided to pay a visit to the FirstBank branch on Salisbury Street.
MELISSA HAD PRACTICED signing the name a hundred or more times. Copying it from Gloria Stanford's driver's license and credit cards. Gloria Stanford, Gloria Stanford, again and again. She now knew it almost the way she knew her own name. Melissa Summers, Gloria Stanford. Interchangeable.
There was a photo of a good-looking blonde on both the license and in the corner of one of rhe credit cards. But except for the blond hair, Gloria Stanford — whoever the hell she might be — bore no resemblance to Melissa Summers, none at all.
Melissa had pointed this out to Adam.
'We don't look at all alike,' she'd said.
'No problem,' he'd assured her. 'One thing certain about a so-called personal banker is that he wouldn't know you if he tripped over you in his own bathroom.'
She hoped so.
She did not know what crime it might be to try getting into someone else's safe-deposit box, but she had a feeling she could spend a lot of time upstate if she got caught doing it. Be ironic, wouldn't it? Get sent up for
signing someone else's name on a bank's signature card, after she'd been hooking all these years with never so much as a blemish on her spotless career — well, that one prostitution bust in L.A., but she was still Carmela Sammarone then.
Her high-heeled shoes clicked noisily on the bank's polished marble floor as she approached the desk at the rear. A bespectacled woman looked up at her, smiled. Handing her the little red envelope with the key in it, Melissa returned the smile. The woman shook the key out of the envelope, opened a file drawer with numbered index cards in it, fingered swiftly through them, yanked one out, silently read the name on it, looked up, asked 'Miss Stanford?,' and without waiting for an answer, handed the card to Melissa for signature. Gloria Stanford's true signature marched down the length of the card like so many identical siblings:
Gloria Stanford Gloria Stanford Gloria Stanford Gloria Stanford Gloria Stanford Gloria Stanford Gloria Stanford
Melissa added her forgery just below the last true signature:
Gloria Stanford
Close, but no cigar.
On the other hand, who was watching the store?
The lady in the eyeglasses glanced cursorily at the sig-
nature, and then opened the gate in the railing and led Melissa back to rhe rows upon rows of stainless steel boxes. She used first Gloria's key and next the bank's own key to open the door to one of the boxes, and then yanked the box out of the row and handed it, deep and sleek, to Melissa.
'Will you need a room, Miss Stanford?' she asked.
'Yes, please,' Melissa said.
Her heart was pounding.
In the small room, with the door locked, Melissa lifted the lid of the box and peered into it.
There seemed to be a whole big shitpot full of hundred-dollar bills in that box.
She wondered if Adam would find her and shoot her if she ran off with all that money.
She decided he would.
WHEN EILEEN BURKE got to the bank, the woman in the eyeglasses told her that Miss Stanford had been there not ten minutes earlier. She showed Eileen the signature card Miss Stanford had signed. Eileen knew she'd now have to go all the way downtown for a court order to open that safe-deposit box. She also knew that when she opened it, she would find it empty.
Just as she was going down into the subway kiosk to catch a train to High Street, the second message that day was being delivered to the stationhouse.
Shake off slumber, and beware: Awake, awake!
'There he goes again!' Meyer said. 'Taunting us with Shakespeare.'
'If it is Shakespeare,' Kling said. 'What else could it be but Shakespeare?' 'Calling us dummies,' Meyer said. 'Maybe we are dummies,' Genero said. No one disagreed with him.
'Let's try to figure out what he's saying,' Carella said. 'That shouldn't be too difficult.'
