Case Pending - Dell Shannon (14 page)

Alison sent Mendoza a glance he missed and another at
Hackett which connected; he said he was going that way, be glad to
drive her home, and gave Alison a mock-reproachful backward look,
shepherding Teresa off.

"Your draft’s quite all right. Hey, wake up, I
said——"

"Yes," said Mendoza. "Is it? Good."
He summoned one of the stenos on duty, took Alison back to his office
to wait, gave her a chair and cigarette but no conversation. She sat
quietly, watching him with a slight smile, looking round the room;
when the typed pages were brought in she signed obediently where she
was told and announced meekly that she could get home by herself.

Mendoza said, "Don’t be foolish." But he
was mostly silent on the drive across town. When he drew into the
curb at the apartment building, he cut the motor, didn’t move
immediately. "Tell me something. Did you like dolls when you
were a little girl?"

"Against my better judgment you do intrigue me.
Most little girls do."

He grunted. "Ever know any little boys who did?"

"When they’re very young, otherwise not.
Though I believe there are some, but they can’t be very normal
little boys. The psychiatrists—"

"I beg you, not the doubletalk about Id and Ego
and Superego. Especially not about infantile sexuality and the
traumatic formation of the homosexual personality.
Esta
queda entre los dos
. Just between the two of
us, I find a most suggestive resemblance between the Freudians and
those puritanical old maids who put the worst interpretation on
everything—and with such damned smug-satisfaction into the
bargain."

 
She laughed. "Oh, I’m with you every
time! But what’s all this about dolls?"

He got out a cigarette, looked at it without flicking
his lighter. "Suppose you’re taking one of those
word-association tests, what do you say to that?—doll."

"Why, I guess—little girls. Why?"

"And me too," he said. "Which is what
makes it difficult. Well, never mind—inquisition over for today."
He lit the cigarette and turned to her with a smile. "You’ll
have dinner with me tomorrow night, tell me what you get out of your
girls, if anything?

Alison cocked her auburn head at him. "I seem to
remember you said you didn’t mix business and pleasure. Do I infer
I’m absolved already?"

"I’m always making these impossible
resolutions." He got out, went round and opened the door for
her. "Black," he said, gesturing, "something elegant,
and decolleté. Maybe pearls. Seven o’clock."

She got out of the car, leisurely and graceful, and
tucked her bag under her arm; she said, "Charm isn’t the word.
But I have heard—speaking of the Freudians—that there are some
women who really I enjoy being dominated. Seven o’clock it is, and
I’ll wear what I damned well please, Lieutenant Luis Mendoza!"

"
Mi gatita roja
,"
he said, smiling.

"And," said Alison, "I am not your
little red kitten, you—you—
tu macho
insolente!
"

"What language for a
lady. Until tomorrow." He grinned at her straight back; there
was—he was aware—a certain promise in being called an insolent
male animal, by a female like Alison.

* * *

It sat on the corner of Matson and San Rafael, a
block up and a block over from Commerce and Humboldt. Not really much
of a walk home for Elena, a quarter of an hour by daylight: down San
Rafael to Commerce, to Humboldt, across the empty lot and down a
block to Foster where Humboldt made a jog to bypass a gloomy little
cul-de-sac misleadingly called a court: another block to Main,
another to Liggitt and half a block more to home. Little more than
half a mile, but that could be a long way at night. Main was neon
lights and crowds up to midnight anyway, but these other streets were
dark and lonely.

It was a big barn of a building. Matson Street wasn’t
residential, but strung with small warehouses, small business that
must permanently balance on the edge of inso1vency—rug cleaning,
said the faded signs, tools sharpened, speedy shoe repair, cleaning &
dyeing—and in between, the secretive warehouses unlabeled or
reticent with WHOLESALE PARTS, INC.—MASTERSON BROS.—ASSOCIATED
INDUSTRIES. At Matson and San Rafael, there was a graveyard for old
cars on one corner, with a high iron fence around it (SECONDHAND
PARTS CHEAP), and warehouses on two other corners, and on the fourth
the Palace Roller Rink. The building wasn’t flush to the sidewalk
like the warehouses, but set back fifteen or twenty feet, to provide
off-street parking on two sides.

Mendoza parked there, among six or eight other cars:
mostly old family sedans, a couple of worked-over hot-rods. It was
ten past four, a good time for the experiment he had in mind. He
fished up a handful of change from his pocket, picked out a quarter,
a dime, and a nickel, and walked up to the entrance.

There were big double doors fastened back, but at
this time of year, the place facing north, not much light fell into
the foyer. That was perhaps ten feet wide, three times as long up to
the restroom doors at either end. There was a Coke-dispensing freezer
and a big trash basket under a wall dispenser for paper cups. In the
middle of the foyer was a three-sided plywood enclosure with a narrow
counter bearing an ancient cash register; and inside, on a high stool
with a back, sat Ehrlich the proprietor, a grossly fat man in the
late sixties, bald bullet-shaped head descending to several rolls of
fat front and rear, pudgy hands clasped over a remarkable paunch:
wrinkled khaki shirt and pants, no tie. Ehrlich, peacefully
drowsing—still, very likely, digesting a solid noon dinner which
had ended with several glasses of beer. Mendoza surveyed him with
satisfaction, walked quietly up and laid the silver on the counter.
The fat man roused with a little grunt, scooped it up and punched the
register, and produced from a box under the counter a sleazy paper
ticket, slid it across. Mendoza picked it up and passed by. At the
narrower door into the main part of the building, he glanced back:
Ehrlich’s head was again bowed over his clasped hands. So there we
are, thought Mendoza. The man had raised his eyes just far enough to
check the money: if the exact change was laid out, a gorilla in pink
tights could walk by him without notice.

The second door led Mendoza into more than
semi-darkness. It was a rectangle within a rectangle: a
fifteen-foot-wide strip of dark around all four sides of the skating
floor. That was a good hundred and fifty feet long, a little more
than half as wide, of well-laid hardwood like a dance floor. There
was an iron pipe railing enclosing it, with two or three gaps in each
side for access to the occasional hard wooden benches, scattered
groups of folding wooden chairs, along the four dark borders. A big
square skylight, several unshaded electric bulbs around it, poured
light directly down on the skating floor, but not enough to reach
beyond: anywhere off the edge of that floor it was dark. The effect
was that of a theater, about that quality of light, looking from the
borders to the big floor.

Straight ahead from the single entrance, at the gap
in the rail there, sat one of the attendants, sidewise in a chair to
catch the light on his magazine. Beside him was a card table, a
cardboard carton on it and another on the floor; those would hold the
skates. Not just the skates, Mendoza remembered from the statements
taken: flat shoes with skates already fastened on—something to do
with the insurance, because as Hayes (or was it Murphy) had put it,
otherwise some of these dumb girls would come in with four-inch heels
on. As Elena had, he remembered.

It was shoddy, it was dirty, a place of garish light
and dense shadow, of drafts and queer echoes from its very size. No
attempt was evident to make it attractive or comfortable: the sole
amenities, if you could so call them, appeared to be the Coke machine
and, at the opposite side of the floor, an old nickel jukebox which
was presently emitting a tired rendition of "The Beautiful Blue
Danube." And yet the fifteen or twenty teenagers on the floor
seemed to be enjoying themselves, mostly skating in couples round and
round—one pair in the center showing off, with complicated
breakaways and dance steps—half a dozen in single file daring the
hazards lined down the far side, a little artificial hill, a low
bar-jump. Those girls shrieked simulated terror, speeding down the
sharp drop; the boys jeered, affected nonchalance. It was all very
innocent and juvenile—depressingly so, Mendoza reflected sadly from
the vantage point of his nearly forty years.

But he hadn’t come here to philosophize on the
vagaries of adolescence .... If you went straight down to the
attendant, to give up your ticket and acquire your skates, you would
be noticed; otherwise, he could easily miss seeing you. Mendoza had
wandered a little way to the side from the door, and stood with his
back to the wall; he was in deep shadow and he’d made no noise. He
stood there until his eyes had adjusted to the darkness, to avoid
colliding with anything, and moved on slowly. He knew now that it was
possible to come in here without being noticed, but could anyone
count on it five times out of five?

There would be times Ehrlich was wider awake, for one
thing.

He sat down in a chair midway from the railing,
twenty feet from the attendant. In five minutes neither the man nor
any of the skaters took the slightest notice of him. He got up,
drifted back to the wall, and began a tour of the borders.

When he got round to the opposite side of the floor,
he made an interesting discovery. In the corner there a small square
closet was partitioned off, with a door fitted to it. He tried the
door and it gave to his hand with a little squeak. He risked a brief
beam from his pencil-flash: rude shelving, cleaning materials, an
ancient can of floor wax, mops and pails. Hackett was quite right;
nobody had disturbed the dust in here for a long time. He shut the
door gently and went on down the rear width of the building.

The jukebox was never silent long; it seemed to have
a repertoire only of waltzes, and now for the third time was
rendering, in all senses of the word, "Let Me Call You
Sweetheart."

He came to the far corner and with mild gratification
found another closet and another door. "At a guess, the fuse
boxes," he murmured, and eased the door open. A quick look with
the flash interested him so much that he stepped inside, pulled the
door shut after him, and swept the flash around for a good look.

Fuse boxes, yes: also, of course, the meter: and a
narrow outside door. For the meter reader, obviously: very
convenient. He tried it and found himself looking out to a narrow
unpaved alley between this building and the warehouse next to it.

And does it mean anything at all? he wondered to
himself. He retreated, and now he did not care if he was seen or not;
he kept the flash on, the beam pointed downward .... How very right
Hackett had been: this place had not been so much as swept for years.
But full of eddying drafts as it was, you couldn’t expect
footprints to stay in the dust, however thick. He worked back and
forth between the rail and the wall, dodging the chairs. He had no
idea at all what he was looking for, and also was aware that anything
he might find would either be completely irrelevant or impossible to
prove relevant to the case.

Now, of course, he had been noticed; he heard the
attendant’s chair scrape back, and a few of the skaters had drifted
over to the rail this side, curious. He didn’t look up from the
little spotlight of the flash: he followed it absorbedly back and
forth.

"Hey, what the hell you up to, anyway?" The
attendant came heavy-footed, shoving chairs out of his path. "Who—"

"Stop where you are, for God’s sake!"
exclaimed Mendoza suddenly. "I’m police—you’ll have my
credentials in a minute, but don’t come any closer."

"Police—oh, well—"

And Mendoza said aloud to himself, "So here it
is. But I don’t believe it, it’s impossible." And to that he
added a rueful, "And what in the name of all the devils in hell
does it mean?"

In the steady beam of the
flash, it lay there mute and perhaps meaningless: a scrap of a thing,
three inches long, a quarter-inch wide: a little strip of dainty pink
lace, so fine that it might once have been the trimming on the
lingerie of a very special doll.

* * *

Ehrlich went on saying doggedly, "My place
didn’t have nothing to do with it." That door, well, sure, the
inside one oughta be kept locked, it usually was—but neither he nor
the attendants would swear to having checked it for months, all three
maintaining it was the other fellow’s responsibility. Mendoza found
them tiresome. Hackett and Dwyer, summoned by phone, if they didn’t
altogether agree with Ehrlich were less than enthusiastic over
Mendoza’s find; Hackett said frankly it didn’t mean a damned
thing. He listened to the story of Carol Brooks’ doll and said it
still didn’t mean a damned thing.

"I don’t want to disillusion you, but I’ve
heard rumors that real live dolls sometimes wear underwear with pink
lace on—and just like you say, it is nice and dark along here. Not
havin’ such a pure mind as you, I can think of a couple of dandy
reasons—"