Case Pending - Dell Shannon (6 page)

If he was right, they'd need to spread a wider net.
For someone quite outside, someone without logical motive. Someone,
somewhere among the five million people in this teeming metropolitan
place sprawling in all directions—someone who was dangerous a
hundred times over because the danger from him was secret,
unsuspected.

This time Mendoza would like to get that one. Because
he had missed him six months ago, another girl was in a cold-storage
tray at the city morgue now.
 

FOUR

They met for a not-too leisured lunch at Federico's,
out on North Broadway. Hackett left him to mull over what meager
information they had; his own next stop was obviously the skating
rink. The waiter whisked away the relics of the meal, apologetically;
they never hurried you at Federico's, you could sit as long as you
pleased. "More coffee, sir?"

"Please." Mendoza brooded over his refilled
cup; he should go back to his office and occupy himself at being a
lieutenant; there were other cases on hand than this.

The girl who had found the body, nothing there
immediately: nothing known against her, but little emerged of her
background either. It was a very long chance that she had anything to
do with it, but of course she had to be investigated. As did every
aspect of the Ramirez girl's life. And after that, where to look?

He drank black coffee and dwelt for a moment on Mrs.
Elvira Wade. In her appalingly cluttered, tasteless,
middle-class-and-proud-of-it living room: a God-fearing upright
citizen, Mrs. Wade, who had spread a little too much in the waist and
hips, not at all in the mind.

"Of course we didn't like it, to say the least—a
Mexican girl—and such a girl, all that cheap-looking bleached hair
and perfectly dreadful clothes, but of course they're always so fond
of garish colors, you know. And then of course there was the
religious question. Really, boys have no sense, but it's beyond me
how a son of mine could be so taken in, after all you'd think he'd
have some finer instincts, the way I've tried to bring him up. Not
that I'm not sorry for the poor thing, the girl I mean, and one
shouldn't speak ill of the dead. I try to take a Christian view I'm
sure and after all people can't help being born what they are, but
when it comes to accepting them into one's family' It was something,
however, to have embarrassed such a woman even momentedly: her
belated furtive glance at his card, her ugly pink flush, almost
ludicrous. "And of course," she had added hurriedly,
"there's all the difference in the world between people like
that and the real high-class old Spanish families, everyone knows
that, I understand the peasant class is actually mostly Indian and
the real Spaniards wouldn't have anything to do with them. But I'm
sure you can see how we, my husband and I, felt'

Mendoza sighed into the dregs of his coffee. It did
not, apparently, cross Mrs. Wade's mind that she had perhaps, in a
sense, contributed to the girl's death. The boy had been strictly
forbidden to see Elena again ("really such strong measures were
necessary, though he is nineteen and ordinarily I don't believe in
iron discipline"), and when it was discovered, through a
garrulous acquaintance of Ricky's, that he had not borrowed the
family car to go to the movies last night but to take Elena to that
awful skating place—Well, I said to Mr. Wade, when it comes to
lying to his own parents, something drastic must be done! You can see
how she corrupted him, he'd never done such a thing before—I said
to Mr. Wade, you'll go right down there and, So Mr. Wade (could one
conjecture, breathing fire, or were the men married to such women
capable of it?—at least he seemed to have acted effectively) had,
by bus, sought out the Palace rink, publicly reprimanded the erring
Ricky, and fetched him ignominiously away. After this soul-scaring
experience, nineteen-year-old Ricky had probably been in no state to
consider how Elena would get home, and if it had occurred to the
Wades, presumably they had thought a girl like that would be used to
going about alone at night.

As, Mendoza conceded, she had been: she had probably
got home alone before. He pushed his coffee cup round in a little
circle, aimlessly; and of course the girl would also have been angry,
humiliated—quite possibly she might have let a stranger pick her
up, a thing she wouldn't ordinarily do. Someone at the rink?

He wondered what Hackett would find out there. He
paid the bill, redeemed the Ferrari from the lot attendant, and
instead of turning back downtown for headquarters, negotiated his way
through the bottleneck round the Union Station and turned up Sunset
Boulevard. It had begun to rain steadily, after long threat.

The address Teresa had given him was close into town,
along the less glamorous stretches of that street. It proved to be
the upper half of a small office building, not new. A narrow door and
a steep stair brought him to a landing and a sign: THE SUNSET SCHOOL
OF CHARM. A mousy girl with a flat figure and harlequin glasses was
scrabbling among papers at the receptionist's desk.

"Miss Weir?"

"Oh, dear me, no." She moved the glasses up
to focus on him better. "No classes on Saturday, sir, and we
don't enroll gentlemen anyway."

"Which is not what I am here for," said
Mendoza, annoyed at the implication. "I want to see Miss Weir on
private business."

"Not here on Saturdays. . . . .Of course I have
her home address, but I don't know—oh, well, I suppose it's all
right."

New directions took him, tediously, several miles
into Hollywood, to a street of solidly middle-aged apartment
buildings, a little shabby, thirty years away from being fashionable
addresses, but neatly kept up. The row of locked mailboxes in the
foyer of the Blanchard Arms informed him that Miss Alison Weir lived
on the fourth floor. A hand-lettered placard further informed him
that the elevator was out of order.

Mendoza said mildly, "Damn," toiled up
three flights of dark, dusty-carpeted stairs, pressed the bell of 406
and, regaining his breath, hoped his quarry was in.

When the door opened to him, he was gratified for
more reasons than one. Miss Alison Weir was worth the drive through
traffic, worth a wasted afternoon. A middling tall young woman, with
an admirably rounded yet slender figure, less conventionally pretty
than charmingly provocative—rather square chin, a nose too small, a
mouth too large, alert gray-green-hazel eyes under feathery brows, a
magnificent mattewhite complexion, and crisply cut and curled hair
somewhere between copper and auburn, which was moreover nature's own
choice for her. Her tailored dress was exactly the color of her hair,
there were discreet gleams of topaz costume jewelry, her lipstick and
nail polish were of the same burnt-orange shade. Twenty-nine, thirty,
he said to himself: recovered, thank God, from the arch uncertainty
of girlhood, and miraculously not bent on maintaining it: one might
even suspect that great rarity in a woman, a sense of humor.

"Yes?" And her voice matched the rest of
her, a warm contralto. As he produced his credentials, explained, he
swore mentally at the destiny which involved the woman in a case. 
It was not a good idea to mix personal matters with the job, and he
was scrupulous about it. Until this woman was proved definitely to be
clear of any connection with the case—he would be extremely
surprised if she had, but it had to be checked, of course—strictly
business, Luis, he said to himself regretfully.

"Good lord!" she exclaimed. "Well,
come in, Lieutenant—you're lucky to catch me, I've just got in
myself."

"Then you're excellent advertisement for your
business. Any woman who can come in out of a rainstorm looking so
charming—" It was the usual apartment of this vintage, but the
personal touches were firmly individual: a good many books in cheap
low cases against the wall, a row of framed pen sketches above them,
a coffee table with Chinese teak underpinning topped with a large
Benares brass tray, in serene indifference to incongruity with the
rest of the furniture, and an enormous aerial photograph of a
suspension bridge over the simulated hearth. He sat down facing that,
at her gesture, on the sofa, and disposed his hat and coat beside
him.

"I shouldn't give myself away," she smiled,
"but I came in looking like a drowned rat, I'm afraid. I'd be in
a hot bath now if Marge hadn't called to warn me that a mysterious
sinister-looking strange—"

"That one's not such a good advertisement,"
he grinned.

"But I can't keep books.  what's all this
about the Ramirez girl? Cigarettes in that box, by the way—and
don't you usually hunt in couples?"

"I've got no business hunting at all," said
Mendoza, lighting her cigarette, then his. "I ought to be in my
office doing this and that about a dozen other cases. As it is, I'm
tying up loose ends—"—he gestured—"you might say, on
the perimeter of this business. I don't think it was a personal
business, you see—I think it was more or less chance that the
Ramirez girl was the one killed—but we have to be sure. I don't
know what I expect from you, but you've been seeing the girl five
days a week for the last couple of weeks, and anything she said to
you—any little problem she mentioned, maybe—?"

"I see." Alison studied her cigarette.
"You're always reading about these things in the papers—never
think of its happening to anyone you know. The poor kid . . . . I
don't know that I can tell you anything."

"I'm hoping you can't," he said frankly.
"We've already run across a couple of things in her personal
life that might—just might—have led to murder. They have to be
looked into. If you tell me something else, that's got to be
investigated too. And I don't believe anything personal is behind it,
I don't want to waste time on that."

"I see," she said again. "One of these
psychos, blowing off steam every so often, on anyone convenient at
the moment."

"They exist. Something like that, anyway. And I
don't think this is his first, either. I'd like to find him before
he, shall we say, has the impulse again."

"Amen to that," she said seriously. "But
how on earth do you even start to look for a man like that? It might
be anybody."

"I could give you a superior smile and say, We
have our methods." He shrugged. "There are places to start
looking. The records of any recently discharged mental patients—our
own records of similar assault ex offenders who might have graduated
to something more serious. We went through all that on the first
case."

"And didn't come up with anything? So then what
do you do?"

"Then," said Mendoza rather savagely, "you
file all the records neatly away marked Case Pending, and you wait
for it to happen again. Of course ideas occur to you about other
places to look—but to put them into effect, I'd need about three
times the number of men I've got." He sighed and put out his
cigarette. "Of course, if one like that kills a dozen people a
week, and obligingly leaves evidence to show it's all his own unaided
work, the upper echelons get excited—and I get the men. But nobody,
not even a lunatic killer, reaches the top of his career all at
once—there's a build-up."

"Everyone has to start small?" She smiled
briefly. "I see what you mean. Well, I don't think I can add
anything to what you've probably got from her family and so on, but
fire away—what do you want to know?"

"Did you have much to do with the girl
personally? You teach classes, or whatever they're called, yourself?"

"Oh, lord, yes, I'm all there is. It may sound
like a racket, Lieutenant, and maybe it is in some cases, but I think
I offer them something, you know." She leaned to the table to
put out her cigarette; her smile was wryly humorous. "The ones
like this girl—and some others who might surprise you. Natural good
taste and so on isn't standard equipment with the so-called upper
classes. I've known girls from the same sort of background as Elena
Ramirez who knew how to dress and had better instincts, as we say,
than girls from wealthy homes. Mostly I get girls who are serious
about improving themselves, but what they want to know, all I try to
get over to them, is pretty simple. The very basic things about
clothes and make-up and manners. You wouldn't believe what some of
them look like when they come—"

"But I would," said Mendoza sadly. "I've
seen them in the street, for my sins. Generally in those things
mistakenly called toreador pants."

She threw back her head and laughed, and he admired
the clean white line of her throat. "Oh, my lord, I know!"

"I have no moral objection whatever, you
understand—in fact it's enough to turn a man celibate for life—it's
the aesthetic view I object to."

"And how right you are, with most of them. Well,
as you might say yourself,
¿A qué viene eso?
What—"

"You speak Spanish, Miss Weir?"

"By accident. I was born in Durango—my father
was a structural engineer and worked in Mexico a good deal. That"—she
nodded at the big photograph—"is his last piece of work. 
Funny sort of
décor
for a living room, I suppose I'm sentimental about it—he was very
proud of it." She lit another cigarette. "In a sort of
roundabout way, that's how I got into this business. You see, I'm a
painter—or shall we say I hope I am—and that doesn't bring in
much of a living unless you're really good—or at least known. Dad
didn't leave me much, and I have to earn a living some way. What with
moving around the way we did for his work, I got a rather sketchy
education, and then like a fool I quit high school to get
married—which turned out a mistake in more ways than one—and,
well, I thought I'd try this, and it's worked out surprisingly well.