Extra Kill - Dell Shannon (16 page)

 
"We don't know he didn't," said
Hackett. "Maybe somebody just hasn't come forward to say. Maybe
this old flame of yours knew where he was those two days. Maybe, for
that matter, he never did leave the Temple on Friday and the Kingmans
just say he did. Maybe he was killed there and ferried out—"

"
Caray
,
let's not make it any more complicated than it is! You're forgetting
those suitcases-those carefully packed suitcases. What did we say
when we looked at them? He was getting ready to clear out, of his own
choice. Now maybe he was just moving to another apartment, maybe he
was going to get married, maybe he'd just heard he'd inherited a
million dollars and didn't have to stay in the racket any longer—but
one of the possibilities is that for some reason his whole private
racket was up, here, and he had to get out. Say he was going to
clear. Then tell me what he'd have done too, just before he left."

"That's an easy one, he'd have taken some of the
Kingmans' money along with him. But it depends on a lot of ifs."

"Well, I don't know that it does. There are a
lot of fishy things about the Kingmans' behavior, but two things are
a little fishier than the rest. In the first place, you'll never get
me to believe—no matter whether all this about Twelvetrees'
blackmailing them was so or not—that Mr. Martin Kingman is so
unworldly and unbusinesslike that he didn't have a home address and a
phone number for the treasurer of his Temple. Why didn't he give
Woods that information right away, if he was so anxious to catch up
with Twelvetrees? And second, he jumped the gun very damned quick,
didn't he, on laying a charge? If, as I think we can almost take for
granted, the Kingmans and Twelvetrees looked on this Mystic Truth
business as nothing but a business, there wouldn't be anything very
peculiar about dear Brooke missing their Sabbath ceremonies—it must
have happened before, his taking a weekend off. He couldn't have
gotten into the bank then before ten on Monday morning, either to
deposit the month's receipts or close out the accounts. And,
de
paso
, that in itself poses a funny little
question, you know. If he was planning to run with a big handful of
the profit—as much as he could persuade the bank to let him
have—why was he packing up and getting ready to leave as early as
Friday? It'd be Monday before he could—"

"So there you are, maybe it wasn't Friday."

"Reason it through," said Mendoza. "It
wouldn't have been very sensible, if he intended to take off on
Monday morning, to start packing on Saturday night. And we know it
wasn't Sunday night, because Mrs. Bragg found the note on Sunday
noon, he'd already gone by then. I wonder if that bank—yes, well,
file that for thinking about .... Kingman knew what time the bank
opened, after all, and closed. When he saw Twelvetrees on Friday
afternoon, the banks were still open—if he was afraid Twelvetrees
was planning larceny, why didn't he contact the bank then? And bright
and early Monday morning we find him ‘checking with the
bank'—evidently because he's leaped to this conclusion over the
Saturday when dear Brooke didn't show up—and at a quarter past ten
he's up in Theft laying the charge. Which looks—" Mendoza
stopped and interrupted himself reflectively, "Or, of course—"

"You've argued yourself into a corner there,"
said Hackett. "If he thought there was any danger Twelvetrees
was going to try to clean them out—or already had—then he didn't
know Twelvetrees was dead."

"Or it was a double play," said Mendoza.
"And also—"

"Oh, the hell with it," said Hackett.
"We've wasted half the morning talking about it—let's get busy
and collect some more facts to fit into the picture."

“
Those we can always use
more of," agreed Mendoza. But when Hackett left he was still
sitting there motionless, staring out the window .... Doubtless still
trying to fill in details on his idea about Joe Bartlett, thought
Hackett.

* * *

And Mendoza knew Hackett didn't go along on that,
thought it was a wild one. He also knew it might be, that he must
keep an open mind on it himself. His besetting sin was that dislike
for ragged edges, wanting everything neat, precisely dovetailed; and
criminal cases, like a lot of other things in life, didn't always
work out that way. Often there were ragged edges all round the
truth—human nature and real life being what it was.

That was a satisfying, dramatic little picture he'd
seen, on Walsh's thing—a murderer panicking, killing Bartlett in
error. But it might not be the true picture: maybe those kids had
killed Bartlett after all, and that had nothing to do with the
Twelvetrees case. Maybe it had been Twelvetrees himself who opened
the door when the squad car was sitting there and didn't think twice
about it when he saw it was the alcoholic Johnstones again.

By the same token, he couldn't let himself get so
sold on the Kingmans that he ignored evidence pointing away from
them. But he fancied the Kingmans quite highly: if Pennsylvania could
offer any suggestions as to what Twelvetrees might have had on them,
their stock would go even higher.

He wanted to locate Marian Marner, find out what
she'd had to do with Twelvetrees, and he wanted to find out from
Twelvetrees' agents anything the man might have said about himself,
and possibly contact in that way any friends Twelvetrees might have
made among people in that circle, show business hopefuls. The paper
had had this since the late extras on Saturday, and probably everyone
who had known him had seen the news: if anyone had any information to
volunteer, it should turn up today or tomorrow. And just for the
record, they'd have a look at Whalen. But on the whole the Kingmans
looked like the obvious bet....

He'd see the Kingmans himself.

Before he left his office, however, one of those
things happened that a detective had to get used to—some new bit of
evidence turning up that made a favored theory more doubtful.

Sergeant Lake, who was going through the amended list
of model agencies looking for Marian Marner, came in and said there
was a cab driver outside in answer to the official enquiry sent out
to all the companies. "Oh?" said Mendoza, rather surprised.
“Well, all right, I'd better see him." Because if it had been
the Kingmans working together, there'd have been no need for whoever
had disposed of the Porsche taking a cab backs to the apartment: one
would have driven the Porsche, the other their own car.

The cab driver was tall, thin, elderly, a
clerkish-looking fellow with rimless glasses and a diffident manner.
He had a funny little story to tell, and Mendoza listened to it in
growing annoyance that it couldn't be fitted into any theory he had.

"It was just after midnight that Friday night,
the thirtieth," the driver said when his slight nervousness had
been soothed and he was sitting back more at ease with a cigarette.
"I'd just taken a couple to the Union Station, I guess to make
the Owl for San Francisco—only passenger I know of leaving about
then. Business is always slow that time of night, you know. I hung
around waiting for the Lark down from the north, she was late—due
in at ten-forty, but she didn't get in until eleven-fifty, some
trouble on the line up at Santa Maria, I heard. Well, I guess you
aren't interested in all that, it was just—not many came off her
and none of 'em wanted a cab—all been met, you see—so I thought
I'd go uptown where chances were better for strays. I went up Alameda
and through the old Plaza, you see, and it was just as I came by the
old Mission Church there, this woman hailed me. I guess maybe you'll
know it's dark as hell along there, that time of night—all the
shops in Olvera Street was shut then, and those old streets are so
narrow, and all the trees in the old Plaza square—we1l, she had to
step right off the curb almost into my headlights to hail me. And
that was the only real good look I got at her, rest of the time it
was all dark—"

"What did she look like‘?”

"She looked like the Witch of Endor," said
the driver frankly. "And she acted about as queer. I wasn't
surprised one bit to see your official query in our office last
night—of course it didn't give any description, but the places
nailed it for me, I says right off, that's my girl. This one look I
got at her, in the head-beam, you see, well, I couldn't give you a
real description, I mean how tall she was or what color eyes or hair
or even. what sort of age, naturally. But there she was with this
Mexican serape over her head like a shawl, see, and kind of wound
around her neck, and what made it look so funny was that she'd put it
on top of a hat—I guess maybe to protect her hat from the rain. And
the hat had a veil, and she'd pulled that right down over her face.
But what I could see of her face under the veil, well, she'd just
plastered the make-up on—looked like a clown, or something—God
knows what her natural face looked like under it."

"
Fuera, la drama
extravagante
," muttered Mendoza. "Can
it be? Yes, go on, what about the rest of her clothes?"

"She had on a long coat, that's all I could see.
It was a lightish color and it had dark bands, like trimming of some
sort, down the front. And when she talked, she had a funny kind of
foreign accent. She said ‘ze' for ‘the,' you know, and ‘Please
to take me,' and all that, but I couldn't say what kind of accent it
was, French or German or what—and she didn't say much. She was just
in the light like that a second, and I stopped, and she hopped around
and got in the cab before I knew it, hardly, with her suitcase—”

"A suitcase. What kind?"

"I didn't get a look at that, couldn't say. I've
got the impression she was carrying it when she stepped out to hail
me, that is, she didn't go back to the curb to get it. And once she
was out of the lights I could just see she had some kind of bag. Like
she'd just come off a train, but I don't see how she could of. She
wasn't on the Lark—I'd have spotted her—and anyway if she had
been why didn't she take a cab down at the station, instead of
wandering up the hill to the Plaza? Anyway, in she gets, and she says
in this funny accent to take her to this address out on Polk Street.
Well, it was to-hell-and-gone down toward the beach, fifteen miles
easy, and I wanted to be sure she wasn't a nut or something without
any money on her, so I said that was quite a ways, it'd cost her
four-five bucks, as a kind of hint, if you get me. And right away she
says, ‘That will be all right, my good man,' in this crazy accent,
and she hands me a fivespot over the back of the seat. So I drove
her. It'd mean an empty run back because it wasn't likely I'd pick up
another stray way out there, but if she handed over the five so easy
I thought maybe there'd be a good tip .... It's a block of tract
houses, one of those new subdivisions.”

"Let's look at a map." They looked, and
Mendoza was more irritated. That block on Polk Street was a short
block up and a short block across from Twelvetrees' apartment on
267th.

"—And no streetlights in yet, so I didn't get
any better look at her there, and she hadn't done any talking at all
on the way. You know, some people want to talk to the driver and some
don't, I let them pick. I had a look in the mirror now and then, and
she was just sitting kind of huddled up in one corner, holding that
serape over her face like she was afraid of breathing germs or
something. When we got there, quick as anything she hands me over
another five, and before I can get out to open the door, give her her
change, she's already out, with her suitcase, and says, ‘That's all
right, my man, I don't want change,' and off she goes. I hadn't even
killed the engine yet."

"So, of course, you didn't," said Mendoza.
"You made a U-tum and headed back—and you didn't see her go
into any of those houses."

"Well, no, I didn't. She was a funny one, but we
see plenty of them hacking, you know. But that street's too narrow
for a U-turn, I had to go up to the next corner. And by the time I
got back where she'd got out, no sign of her. But I did notice that
the house where she said she wanted to go wasn't lighted at all, as
if they were expecting somebody. Only way I knew the right address
was, the house next to it had the porch light on and I saw that
number."

"Yes. A very funny little story. Thanks very
much for coming in. We'll want your name and so on, and a formal
statement .... " And just how did that little piece of melodrama
tit in? Why had Cara Kingman (if it had been) have to taxi back to
the apartment? And call such obvious notice to herself in the
process? Polk Street. Two blocks to 267th. Which in turn was only
about a mile from where Bartlett had been killed three hours earlier.
The only thing Mendoza liked at all about this was that it had
happened on the Friday night; and that was senseless too, just
because he was set on that theory.

"
Ca, vaya historial
I don't believe it, it's a damned ridiculous coincidence," he
said to himself. But it had to be followed up, of course. He put on
his hat and set out on the six-block walk down to the old Plaza and
Olvera Street.
 
 

TEN

Once, they'd been going to destroy the narrow alley
with its uneven old brick paving and the gutter down its middle, the
leaning ramshackle old buildings flanking it. Nothing to do, that
was, with a progressive and fast-growing city proud of its modernity.
Then a few civic-minded organizations got up indignant petitions and
committees, and in the end it stayed, to become a landmark, one of
the places tourists came to see: the first, the oldest street of that
little village whose name was nearly as long as the street—the town
of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels, of the little portion.