“Rosebud.”
“Rosebud!” I gasped. “ He’s a male, for God’s sake! That’s an awful name for a big mutt like that.”
“I know. She named him after a character in a movie she saw. She just loved the movies.”
“It wasn’t a character, it was a sled.”
“You mean like a kid’s snow sled?”
“Yeah, a snow sled.”
“She never told me that. Just like Verna. She had a screwy sense of humor.” She paused for a moment and said, “What’s going to happen to him now?”
“Couldn’t you take him?” I suggested.
“We have two cats. He hates them and they hate him.”
“Then I guess he’ll go to the pound.”
“They’ll put him to sleep!” she said with alarm.
“Maybe somebody will adopt him.”
“That’s where she got him,” Mrs. Clark said. I could hear a new sob coming. “They were about to put him to sleep and she just couldn’t bear the thought. Actually, she went to get a smaller dog.”
“He must weigh seventy, eighty pounds,” I said, watching the big dog tearing up the bone.
“He’s such a sweetheart. She lets him in at night. He’s trained.”
“Swell,” I said.
“How terribly sad,” she said. “First he loses Verna, now they’re going to give him the gas. He deserves better.”
I closed the door and went back to the living room.
“I hate a day like this,” I said. “It’s depressing. The great American love story.” I sat on the arm of one of the sofas and started rolling another cigarette. “Two lonely people meet, fall in love, work hard, weather the Depression, buy a little love nest in a nice neighborhood. What happens? He gets ironed out by a hit-and-run and she fries herself in the tub. Simple but sad.”
“Maybe not quite,” Ski said, still rifling through the papers in the strongbox.
“Maybe not quite what?” I asked.
“Maybe not quite so simple,” the big man answered.
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
