“That’s what I thought,” Gregor said. “Relax, John. I’m not accusing you of negligence. That’s what I would have done myself, initially, and you didn’t have much chance after that, with your entire department committed to the suicide theory. But think about it. How do we know this woman’s name was Cheryl Cass?”
“Mrs. Monaghan told us,” Smith said promptly.
“True. And Mrs. Monaghan is someone who knew Cheryl Cass in high school and had not been in touch with her since. Cass was Cheryl Cass’s maiden name.”
“Oh, good grief,” Smith said. “And with that wedding ring—”
“It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that she was using her married name,” Gregor finished.
“At least I know she wasn’t using ‘Cheryl,’” Smith said, “and she wasn’t using the initial C. There weren’t any Cheryls and I checked out all the initial C’s.”
“From what I’ve learned about Cheryl Cass, I wouldn’t be surprised if she was being very traditional about the whole thing, calling herself Mrs. Earl Jones or Mrs. Harold Doe. With the hotels that were still open, did you ask the staff who’d been on duty at the time if they’d seen her? Did you show them a picture?”
“Of course.”
“I thought you probably had,” Gregor said. “What about the Maverick?”
“Yes, yes we did. And it wasn’t easy, either.”
“She probably didn’t register for herself. It didn’t make much sense that she would have, not if the hotel she was staying in right before she died was the Maverick or a place like it. Looking like that, they probably wouldn’t have taken her. And she herself might have been afraid to ask. What we need to do now is to check the addresses as well as the names on the registers. Then I think we’d better check with the staffs again, show them pictures of everybody involved in the Andy Walsh murder—”
“Everybody? Even the Cardinal?”
“Even the Cardinal.”
John Smith grinned. It was the grin of a man whose deepest, most secret, most impossible wish has finally been granted, in spades.
“Oh, I like this,” he said. “I like it a lot. I’m going to go from one end of this city to another, carrying the Cardinal’s picture and saying, ‘Excuse me, ma’am, but this is a murder investigation and we want to know if you saw this man in or around—’”
“John,” Gregor warned.
“Don’t spoil it,” John said. “I love working with you. This is wonderful. Is there anything else you want?”
“Yes, there is. I want the background file on Cheryl Cass.”
“I’ve got it right here,” Smith said. He opened the center drawer of his desk, took out a file so thin it might have been empty, and dumped it in Gregor’s lap. Then he said, “You read it. I’m going to go across the street and get us some Chinese.”
[2]
Gregor didn’t know if Chinese was what he wanted, but he had to admit it had at least one virtue. It was bound to be full of things that weren’t allowed on his Lenten fast. He watched Smith leave the squad room, connecting with half a dozen people on the way, and then bent over the background file and told himself to concentrate. It was hard to do. His breakfast had consisted of a cup of coffee. His dinner last night had been another mess of beans. His stomach felt as wide and deep and empty as a landlocked Marianas trench.
The Cass file was wide and deep and empty, too—not incomplete, but devoid of both happiness and surprise, like one of those depressing auteur movies they showed late at night on public television. Gregor didn’t believe in marked men, or women. He didn’t think childhood and environment were the unbreakable determinants of any person’s life. He did think Cheryl Cass would have had to be a very different person to escape the ordinary effects of hers. To put it bluntly, everything about her life, from the day she was born, had been a horrific mess.
She had been born to a pair of drunks and brought home from the hospital to a rented apartment just inside the boundaries of St. Agnes Parish. The apartment had been over a bar, and the bar’s owner seemed to have spent most of his time during the first six years of Cheryl’s life calling the police on Cheryl’s father. The list of officers’ reports and complaints filed was appallingly long. Cheryl’s father had been not only a drunk, but a mean one. He shouted, he stamped, he hit, and he broke things. Once he put a sofa through the apartment’s living room window. It fell the full story to the street and smashed up two of the cars parked at the curb. Twice he broke Cheryl’s mother’s jaw and three times her left arm, so that next to the notation to the officers’ reports there was a reference to the injury hospital file. Even in those days of relative nonchalance about battered wives, the Colchester police had had no use whatsoever for Richard Cass.