"Sunglasses? She was wearing sunglasses?"
"Yes."
"What else was she wearing?"
"Pants. Shirt."
"What color?"
"Sand color."
"What'd she say?"
"Says Vittoria Seegah. Tell Miss Brauer."
"Tell her what?"
"Vittoria Seegah here."
"Did you tell her?"
"Tell her, yes."
"Then what?"
"She tell me send up."
"And did she go up?"
"Yes. Go elevator."
"How are you spelling that?" Brown asked again. "S-E-E-G?"
"Seegah," Ahmad said.
"What time was this?" Carella asked. "That she went upstairs?"
"Five. Little more."
"A little past five?"
"Yes. Little past."
"Did you see her when she came down?"
"Yes."
"When was that?"
"Six."
"Exactly six?"
"Little past."
"So she was up there a full hour, huh?"
Ahmad went blank.
"Did you look at your watch?"
"No."
"You're just estimating?"
The blank look.
"Any blood on her clothes?"
"No."
"What else do you remember about her?"
"Bag. Market bag."
"She was carrying a bag?"
"Yes."
"A what bag?" Brown asked.
"Market bag."
"You mean a shopping bag?"
"Yes. Shopping bag."
"Did you see what was in the bag?"
"No."
"Went upstairs with it?"
"Yes."
"Came back down with it?"
"Yes."
"Can you try spelling that name for us?" Carella said.
Ahmad went blank again.
Brown shook his head. "Seeger," he said.
Which was close, but - as they say - no see-gah.
There were thirty-eight Seegers, Seigers, and Siegers listed in the telephone directories for all five sections of the city, but none of them was a Victoria. There were eight Seagers and eleven Seagrams. Again, no Victorias. There were hundreds and hundreds of Seegals and Segals and Segels and Seigals and Seigels and Siegels and Siegles and Sigals and Sigalls. One of them was a Victoria and seven of them were listed as merely Vs. But the posssibility existed that a Victoria might be residing at any one of the addresses listed for a Mark or a Harry or an Isabel or a Whoever.
"It'll take forty cops working round the clock for six months to track down all those people," Byrnes said. "And we don't even know if the Arab was saying the name right."
As a matter of fact, the doorman was an Iranian of the Turkic and not the Arabian ethnic stock - but people in America rarely made such fine distinctions.
They went back to the apartment again that Monday afternoon. Stood there in the living room where Susan Brauer had lain with her wounds shrieking silently to the night, slash and stab marks on her breasts and her belly and the insides of her thighs, blood everywhere, torn white flesh and bright red blood. Shrieking.
The apartment was silent now.
Early-afternoon sunlight slanted through the living room windows.
They had checked her personal address book and had found no listing for any of the Seeger or Seigel variations, Victoria or otherwise. No Seagrams, either. No nothing. No help.
They were now looking for …
Anything.
It had come down to that.
They'd been told to go back to the beginning, and that's exactly where they were. Square one. Zero elevation. The lockbox had been found in her bedroom closet. Twelve thousand dollars in that box. In hundred-dollar bills. Now they went back to the closet again, and searched again through the fripperies and furs, the satins and silks, the feathers and frills, the designer dresses and monogrammed suitcases, the rows of high-heeled shoes in patent and lizard and crocodile. They found nothing that Kling and Brown hadn't found the first time around.
So they went through the desk again, and the trash basket under the desk, unwrapping balled pieces of paper, studying each scrap carefully for something they might have missed, yanking a piece of paper free from where it was stuck to a wad of chewing gum, reading the scribbling on it, discarding it as unimportant.
The kitchen was still ahead of them.
The garbage was waiting for them in the pail under the sink.
It didn't smell any better than it had thirteen days ago. They dumped it out onto the open newspapers again, and they began going through it bit by bit, the whole noisome lot of it, the moldy bread and rotten bananas, the empty oat-bran box, the coffee grinds and milk container, the soup cans, the crumpled paper towels, the soft smelly melon, the rancid slab of butter, the wilted vegetables and wrinkled summer fruit, the old …
"What's that?" Brown asked.
"Where?"
"In the container there."
A flash of white. A piece of crumpled white paper. Lying on the bottom of a round white container that once had held yogurt. The container stank to high heaven. By proximity, so did the crumpled ball of paper, perfectly camouflaged, white on white. It was easy to see how it could have been missed on the first pass. But they weren't missing it this time around.
Carella picked it up.
White as the driven snow.
