Case Pending - Dell Shannon (15 page)

"And such elegant amenities for it!" said
Mendoza sarcastically. "A wooden bench a foot wide, or a pair of
folding chairs! I may be overfastidious, but I ask you!"

"There’s a classic tag line you oughta
remember: It’s wonderful anywhere."

"So maybe it doesn’t mean anything.
Nevertheless, we’ll hang onto it, and I want a sketch of this
place, showing that door and the exact spot this was found."

"O.K., will do." There was always a lot of
labor expended on such jobs, in a thing like this, that turned out to
have been unnecessary; but it couldn’t be helped. And in case
something turned out to be relevant, they had to keep the D.A.’s
office in mind, document the evidence.

"And what happened to you‘?" added
Mendoza, turning on Dwyer, who was sporting a patch bandage taped
across one eye.

Dwyer said aggrievedly he ought to’ve run the guy
in for obstructing an officer. All he’d been doing was try to find
out more about that Browne girl who’d found the body—as per
orders. First he’d got the rough side of her landlady’s
tongue—the girl wasn’t home—for asking a few ordinary little
questions, like did the girl ever bring men home, or get behind in
the rent, and so on—you’d have thought she was the girl’s ma,
the way she jumped on him—if the police didn’t have anything
better to do than come round insulting decent women—! She’s still
yakking at him about that when this guy shows up, who turns out to be
some friend of the girl’s, and before Dwyer can show his badge, the
guy damns him up and down for a snooper and hauls off and—"Me,
Lieutenant! It was a fluke punch, he caught me off balance—"

"That’s your story," said Hackett.

"I swear to—Me, walking into one off a guy I
could give four inches and thirty pounds—and his name turns out to
be Joe Carpaccio at that!"

"So now you’ve provided the comic relief, what
did you get?"

"Not a damn thing but the shiner. Except she’s
only lived there three months or so. But how could she be anything to
do with it, Lieutenant?"

"I don’t think she is, but no harm getting her
last address."

"Well, that was why—"

"Let me give him all the news," said
Hackett. "You take the car and go on back, send Clawson over to
do a sketch. And then go home and nurse that eye, you’ve had enough
excitement for one day." Dwyer said gratefully he’d do that,
he had the hell of a headache and he must be getting old, let
anything like that happen. Hackett said, "Let’s sit down. I’ve
got a couple of little things for you. First, Browne. I was bright
enough to ask for her last address when we took her formal
statement—let her think it was a regulation of some kind—thought
it might be useful. And you might say it was. She gave one, but it
turned out to be nonexistent. Which is why I sent Bert to sniff
around some more."

"That’s a queer one," said Mendoza. "You
think it’s anything for us?"

Hackett considered. "It doesn’t smell that way
to me, no. She struck me as an honest girl, and sensible too, which
means it’s not likely she’s mixed into anything illegal. But they
say everybody’s got something to hide. We might trace her back,
sure, but I think all we’d find would be the kind of thing innocent
people get all hot and bothered about hiding—an illegitimate baby
or a relative in the nut house, or maybe she’s run away from an
alcoholic husband. I think it’d be a waste of time myself, but
you’re the boss."

"It might be just as well to find out,"
said Mendoza slowly. "In a thing like this, any loose end
sticking out of the tangle, take hold and pull—maybe it isn’t
connected to the main knot, or maybe it is—you can’t know until
you follow it in."

"O.K., I got more for you." The brief flare
of the match as he lit a new cigarette brought some looks his way
again. The kids on the floor were more interested in them than
skating, now—gathering in little groups, slow-moving, to whisper
excitedly about it; some of them
would have
known Elena.

Mendoza stared out at them absently, listening to
Hackett. It was now just about thirty-three hours since the body had
been found; a lot of routine spadework had kept a lot of men busy in
that time. A dozen formal statements had been taken, from the Ramirez
family, from three or four of the kids present here on Friday night,
from Ehrlich and the two attendants, from the Wades and their
visiting neighbor. A great many other people had been questioned, and
of course written reports had been turned in on most of this and a
new case-file started by the office staff. Again, as six months
before, routine inquiry was being made into all recently released or
escaped mental patients, and the present whereabouts of persons with
records of similar violent assaults. The official machinery had
ground elsewhere, arranging for the coroner’s inquest .... As
inevitably happened, crime had touched the lives of many innocent
people, had grouped together an incongruous assortment of individuals
whose private lives had in some part been invaded, you could say—if
incidentally and with benevolent motive.

And—he finally stopped lingering the cigarette he’d
got out five minutes ago, and lit it—he would offer odds that if,
as, and when they caught up with this one, it would turn out to be
one of the many homicides any police officer had seen, which need
never have happened if someone had used a little common sense, or
more self-control, or hadn’t been a little too greedy or vain or
possessive or impatient.

Like Mrs. Demarest, he sometimes felt it would be
nice to believe there was a master plan, that some reason for all
this existed. He disapproved on principle of anything so disorderly
as blind fate.

"After telling you you’re chasin’ rainbows,"
Hackett was saying, "I’ll give you a little more confirmation.
I saw the Wade boy again, and he says maybe there was such a guy,
Elena mentioned it to him. Twice. He thinks the first time was about
a week ago, but they were out together two nights running and he
won’t swear which it was—they came here both nights. Anyway, she
asked him did he see the guy sitting there at the side staring at her
all the time—"

"Here," said Mendoza, sitting up. "Right
here? So—"

"Don’t run to get a warrant. The boy says he
looked, and there was somebody sitting where she said, but he
couldn’t see what he looked like in the dark, just that there was
somebody there. He didn’t pay much attention, because he thought it
was just one of the other kids, and Elena was imagining things—‘1ike
girls do,’ he said—when she said it was the same guy she’d seen
in here before, and that he never took his eyes off her. You’ll be
happy to know that Ricky also came to this conclusion because he
didn’t see how she could recognize a face that far off, in this
light—he couldn’t. He wears glasses for driving and movies, and
he didn’t have them on, never wears them in here on account of the
danger of breakage."

"
¡Fuegos del infierno!
"
exclaimed Mendoza violently. "Of course, of course!"

"Go on listening, it gets better. He says Elena
told him she’d seen the guy here five or six times, always in about
the same spot, but Ricky thought then she’d maybe seen a couple of
different kids, different times, and imagined the rest. O.K. On
Friday night, when they first got here, she looked, and he wasn’t
there. But later on, all of a sudden she spotted him, and made Ricky
look, and there he was—or there somebody was. Now, mind you, just
like her sister, Ricky didn’t think she was afraid of this fellow,
that there was anything like that to it. If he had, if she’d acted
that way, all the people she mentioned it to would’ve thought of it
right off, and I read it myself that she started out being kind of
flattered and annoyed at once, which would be natural, and then just
annoyed. Because there was something ‘funny’ about him. So, when
she spotted him again Friday night, she acted so worried about it
that Ricky decided to get a closer look, to watch for the guy again,
if you follow me. Elena said he’d showed up so sudden it was like
magic, one time she looked and no guy, and about three seconds later
she happened to look again and there he was—"

"Yes, of course. So?"

"So then, finish. Before Ricky gets over to take
a close look, Papa comes in breathing righteous wrath and yanks him
out."

This time Mendoza didn’t swear, merely shut his
eyes.

"And if you’re still interested, Smith has
tagged the Ramirez uncle visiting what is probably a cat-house on
Third—at least the address rang a bell, and I checked with Prince
in Vice—he pricked up his ears and said we’d closed it twice, and
he was glad to know somebody had opened up again, they’ll look into
it. After that Ramirez took a bus way across town to treat himself to
a couple of drinks at a place called the Maison du Chat, on Wilshire.
Which Smith thought was sort of funny because it’s a very fancy
layout where you get nicked a dollar and a half for a Scotch
highball, and six dollars for a steak because it’s in French on the
menu."

"I don’t give one damn about Ramirez’ taste
in women, let Prince look into that. The other, yes, we’ll follow
it up—find out what you can about it, it may be a drop for a
wholesaler. If anything definite shows up, throw it at Narcotics then
and let them take over."

"I’m ahead of you. I got Higgins and
Farnsworth on it. All they got so far is the owner’s name, which is
Nicholas Dimitrios." Hackett dropped his cigarette and put a
careful heel on it. "Just what’s your idea about all this,
anyway?—dolls, yet! I don’t see you’ve got much to get hold
of."

"
¡Me lo cuenta a
mi!
—you’re telling me! But I’ll tell
you how I see it happening. Somewhere around here is our lunatic—and
don’t ask me what kind he is—nor I won’t even guess why he
finds a back way into this hellhole and gets a kick out of watching
these kids on skates. It makes a better story if you say he was
following Elena. Anyway, here he is, and nobody else seems to have
noticed him particularly. Neither of the attendants has much occasion
to come down to this end of the floor, and if any of the kids noticed
him, they took him for one of themselves. And about that,
de
paso
, I think we can deduce that he’s a
fairly young man. Elena called him a boy, and the odds are an older
man would have been noticed by others in here, would have stood
out—as it is, I think he was seen, casually, by some of the kids,
and accepted as one of them. On the other hand, he seems to have
taken some care not to be noticed much, sitting back against the
wall—" Mendoza shrugged. "It’s pretty even, maybe, but
I think the balance goes to show he’s fairly young. All right. She
had seen him at least once elsewhere, with another boy or several
others, one of whom is named Danny—"

"A1l of which is very secondhand evidence."

"Don’t push me. He was here on Friday night,
he saw her leave alone. Evidently he hadn’t made any attempt before
to approach her, speak to her, and I think he did then because he saw
her boy friend taken out and thought this was his chance. He followed
her, using his private door, so Ehrlich and the attendants didn’t
notice him leave. So he had to walk round the building, which put him
just far enough behind her that he didn’t catch up for a block or
so. Finish. And I don’t know why he killed her, if that was in his
mind from the start or a sudden impulse. I’m inclined to say
impulse, because you couldn’t find two girls more different than
Brooks and this one—so he doesn’t pick victims by any apparent
system, though there’s holes in that reasoning, I grant you—he
may have some peculiar logic of his own, of course."

"I’ll buy all that, but there’s no evidence
at all, a lot of hearsay and a lot of ifs. And how do you tie in
Brooks and the doll?"

"Oh, damn the doll," said Mendoza. "I
can’t figure the odds on that, if it ties in or not—it’s just
as possible that somebody stumbled on Brooks after the killer left
her, and stole the thing—or that she was robbed of it before she
ran into the killer. And I can say—
claro
está!
—it’s a lunatic, and the same
lunatic—and when we find him, we’ll find that last September he
had some reason to frequent Tappan Street. There’s even less
evidence on all that." He stood and took up his hat from the
bench, flicked dust off it automatically. "Here’s Clawson. I’m
going home."

"I might’ve expected that—walk off and leave
me enough work so I can’t try to beat your time with that redhead."

"That," said Mendoza, "to quote
another classic tag line, would be sending a boy to do a man’s
work. But you have my permission to try, Arturo—I never worry about
competition."
 

EIGHT

All the same, that doll intrigued him; it was such an
incongruous thing.

When he unlocked the door of his apartment,
automatically reaching to the light switch as he came in, the first
thing that met his eyes was the elegant length of the Abyssinian cat
draped along the top of the traverse-rod housing across the front
windows, a foot below the ceiling.

Which meant that Bertha was here. Bast intensely
resented Bertha and her vigorous maneuvers with mop, dustcloths, and
vacuum cleaner, and took steps to keep out of her way. He was
unsurprised to find her there on a late Sunday afternoon; the seven
or eight people who shared Bertha’s excellent services were used to
her ways. If she felt like doing a thorough job on the Carters’
Venetian blinds when she ought to be at the Elgins’, or got behind
because she’d decided to turn out all the Brysons’ kitchen
cupboards, she was apt to turn up almost anywhere at any time, and no
one ever complained because, miraculously, Bertha really did the work
she was paid for, and had even been known to dust the backs of
pictures and the tops of doors.