by Dell Shannon
“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 assaults—sex 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.”32
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—”33
“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 decor 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. Leaves me a fair amount of time for my own work, and at the same time I really enjoy it, you know. Not to bore you—”
“But how could you indeed?”
“And this isn’t getting to what you want to know, anyway. It’s a fairly small group, I never take more than twenty-five in a class and it’s usually around twenty girls. I try to keep it on a more or less personal basis, you see. The course is six weeks, five days a week, but some of that time is spent on group reading and some on—private counseling, to give it a fancy name. Generally, I’ll see each girl privately, oh, say a total of two hours or so a week. So you see, while I knew the girl, you can’t say I knew her intimately.”
“But you’re no fool at sizing up people,” he said placidly, leaning back, arms folded behind his head. “And the girl poured out her problems into your sympathetic ear?”
“That she did. You probably know about that—the superior boy friend and his family’s objections. She was rather a pathetic little thing, really—awfully earnest, but—” She paused for a word.
“The first one comes to your mind about her,” he prompted softly.
“Stupid,” said Alison unhesitatingly. “She was stupid. She had no imagination, subtleties of any sort just didn’t penetrate—you know the type. Oddly enough, her older sister is quite intelligent—I met them in town one day—”
“Yes, that girl has brains.”
“Elena was honest, and—though she didn’t look it—quite a respectable girl, in the old-fashioned sense. Immature for her age. But stupid.”
“Immature and honest,” he murmured. A little something there. The man Tomás, if there was anything in that, this girl would probably have been too stupid to discover it. If anyone in that household had seen something suspicious about the visiting uncle, it would not have been Elena, but the sharp-eyed Teresa. “That’s no surprise,” he said, half to himself. “Even dead, she was—unsubtle. I haven’t met the boy yet—judging by Mrs. Wade, I’d say that his persistence was less attraction to Elena than rebellion against his mother.”
“Like that?” She looked amused, and then sobered. “But that’s another thing that happens, Lieutenant—the old, old story. I’ve never laid eyes on him either, don’t know what kind of a boy he is, but—”
“Oh, yes, that’s the first thing one thinks of here—if it was a private killing, so to speak. If she was pregnant, if she could make trouble for him, if he lost his head—It’s happened. It’ll happen again. We’ll find out if it happened here.”
“And how easy,” she said, “to talk about it like a—crossword puzzle. After all, she’s dead. Nineteen… She had a private session with me yesterday. She said she’d decided to stop bleaching her hair—” Alison stopped abruptly and looked up at him. “I have thought of something, but it doesn’t sound like much—”
“I’ll tell you whether it does when I’ve heard it, Miss Weir—or is it Mrs.?”
“I got my own name back after the divorce,” she said absently. “It was only a year. And aren’t you the autocratic male. Well, for what it’s worth, Elena asked me yesterday what to do about ‘a guy who annoys you’—that’s how she put it—she said he ‘sort of’ followed her and stared at her.”
“¡No me diga!” He sat up. “Don’t tell me! That might be it, you know. Tell me every last little word she said about it!”
“But there wasn’t anything, really! I’m afraid I didn’t take it as very important. You mean it might have been—?”
“It might have been. There
aren’t any rules for lunatics—or part-time lunatics—but even lunatics don’t often kill utter strangers without some reason. Nor what you or I’d call a logical reason, but a reason. I’m not even at the point of guessing about that here, but it’s probable that at least he’d seen the girl before—consequently she may have noticed him. Let’s have it—all of it!”
Alison looked stricken. “You’ll want to murder me, Lieutenant—I didn’t give her a chance to say much about it. In fact, I used it as an excuse to give her a neat little lecture on Making Oneself Conspicuous. She said—let me think!—‘Miss Weir, what should you do about a guy who annoys you?’ and I asked, Annoys you how? That was when she said he ‘sort of followed’ her and stared at her. And as I say, I seized the opportunity to point out that sometimes a girl seems to invite such attentions by making herself look cheap—and so on and so on—” Her voice died; she shut her eyes and pressed both hands to her cheeks, trying to remember. “There wasn’t anything else—she said she understood about that, and that was when she told me she’d decided to stop bleaching—we talked about different things, you know, one thing leading to another—”
“That you needn’t tell me! Women, they never keep to the subject!”
“But there was something else, I know it. Yes—” She straightened. “Just as she got up to leave, she said, ‘But it’s not exactly like that, Miss Weir, like he was trying pick me up or nothing like that. It’s just—funny. Awful funny.’ And I said something like, Well, just be sure you’re not encouraging him, and that was that—she left, her consultation time was up.”
“God favor me with patience!” said Mendoza violently. “And they say women are curious and fond of gossip! This girl tells you some strange man is annoying her, and you talk about hair dye and never ask one question? She says there’s something ‘funny’ about him, and you—”
“How should I know it was anything important? If I’d—no, but listen, Lieutenant—she didn’t say it as if she thought it was important, anything to be worried about! You see? If there’d really been anything very queer about him, to frighten her—” Her voice dropped.
“Yes, you’ve remembered that she was a stupid girl,” he said sardonically. “And how did she mean that ‘funny’?”
“Extraño,34 like that—she said, ‘It’s just funny’ or ‘He’s just funny,’ and then she said it in Spanish, as if the English word didn’t quite express what she meant. Es un muchacho extraño.”
“I will be damned,” said Mendoza. “Something at last, maybe. ‘A queer boy.’” He looked at her in cold exasperation. “And you didn’t ask so much as where and when she saw him, what he looked like?”
“There’s a saying about hindsight,” retorted Alison, but meekly. “Would you have?”
“No, but then I’m not a woman. My God, I’d have thought you’d be a little curious! Well, it can’t be helped.” He got up. “I’ll ask you to make a formal statement about this, if you will.”
“Yes, of course.” She went to the door with him. “Where do I go and when?”
“Tomorrow will do.” Abruptly in better humor again, he smiled down at her. “I’ll take you down to headquarters myself, not to expose any of my sergeants to temptation. I make it a rule not to mix business with pleasure, but if you turn out to be irrelevant to business, I’ll be back—con su permiso.”
“Permission be damned, you mean! I do like your nerve,” said Alison pleasantly, leaning on the open door. “When you’re quite satisfied that I didn’t murder the girl—maybe because she was so stupid—or egg your lunatic onto her, you’ll condescend to find me good enough to be seen with. Un hombre muy arbitrario, in fact! And doesn’t it occur to you that I might have a possessive six-foot admirer hanging about to raise objections?”
“What, to compete with me? I don’t let those worry me any day.”
“As if I needed telling. What time tomorrow?”
“In a hurry to be rid of me? One o’clock?”
“But naturally,” she said, widening her eyes at him. “I’m panting for you to get to work and absolve me of guilt, what else, with such a reward offered? One o’clock—I’ll be ready.” The small amusement faded from her eyes then and she added, “I hope I have helped. Good luck with it.”
“That I’ve had my share of for today. Until then.” Scarcely a wasted afternoon, no—however you looked at it. He reflected pleasurably and with anticipation on Alison Weir—a sophisticated, shrewd, sensible woman (deliver him from romanticizing and possessive young girls!) and a very lovely one—until he slid behind the wheel and started the engine. He then removed his mind from her firmly and thought about what she had told him.
* * *
Hackett was waiting for him in his office; Hackett had been busy, and there was quite a list of miscellaneous bits and pieces to think about. Of greatest importance was the Ricky Wade business. That had to be looked into: it was so obvious. Hackett agreed with that: he would call there this evening, to catch both the boy and the father at home: a phone call assured that they would be, Mrs. Wade sounding surprised and uneasy (but what have we to do with this sordid matter, her tone implied).
The proprietor of the rink had been out, but some useful information had been obtained from his two employees, and Hackett was to see him at four. Two of Hackett’s men were now out chasing down the patrons definitely stated to have been in the place last night. That was a place to be very thorough, the rink and everybody connected with it, for the girl had almost certainly been on her way home from there.
When Hackett left, Mendoza shoved aside everything to do with this case, conscientiously went over all the other pending matters under his authority. The still-unidentified corpse found in the freight yards; Sergeant Clock hadn’t come up with anything new. The liquor-store holdup, a clerk shot; Sergeant Brice was on a faint track there, from the usual anonymous Information Received. The woman who’d shot her husband before witnesses: nothing to investigate but much tiresome routine, collecting statements for the District Attorney’s office, in that sort of thing. Sergeant Galeano thought he had it about tied up now. A new memo from the captain’s office, more routine: particulars of a man New York wanted for parole violation, one Ray Dalton, five-ten, one-eighty, age 42, Caucasian—
Mendoza swore to himself and reached for Hackett’s notes again.
The two men at the rink, Hayes and Murphy, described themselves as attendants. They kept the place cleaned up (Hackett’s comment: “This is news to anyone who’s seen it”), one of them was on the floor at all times during open hours, to hand out skates and generally keep an eye on the patrons, and on occasion they spelled Ehrlich, the owner-proprietor, at the ticket desk. Not often, because Ehrlich didn’t trust nobody much but himself with money. Ehrlich’s wasn’t getting rich, but business was so-so: most nights and Saturday afternoons they had maybe thirty, forty people in. All kids, sure: teenagers; some of those were crazy about it, maybe the ones had been too poor ever to have skates. They were good enough kids, not punks: the kind of kids carried switch knives, roamed round in gangs, all that, got in trouble with the cops—to them kind roller skating was for the birds. Sure, the kids got noisy and rambunctious sometimes like kids do, but there wasn’t never anything real bad, knives pulled or an honest-to-God fight. No, neither of them ever remembered an adult coming in—not to skate. There’d been a kind of fad for it once, like that miniature golf and ping-pong, that was when Ehrlich had opened this place, but nowadays anybody grown-up, they’d feel like a damn fool roller skating. Well, the chairs round the sides were for people to sit and watch, sure, but this wasn’t like an Ice Palace where there was a show to see, for God’s sake—just a bunch of kids skating—nobody came just for that, the chairs were mostly used by the kids themselves, resting and talking.
As for the club thing, it wasn’t really a club but a kind of season-ticket deal, see. You got a cut rate if you joined as a “regular patron
”: there weren’t no meetings or nothing, all a card meant was they’d paid three or six months in advance. All the kids with cards didn’t necessarily know each other: sometimes yes, sometimes no. A card was an automatic pass good for three nights a week up to the date on it. What with kids sixteen and seventeen getting maybe forty a week at some job, a lot of them had more money than was good for them, to throw away.
Both men knew the Ramirez girl and confirmed that she had been in last night. What with the row, they could hardly miss her. Ehrlich had been damned mad about it too, the guy saying the rink was a low dive and all: Ehrlich was death on liquor in the place. This fellow barged right in, about twenty minutes to ten it was, and pulled the kid off the floor—one that was with this girl. Gave him hell, way the kids both looked: but not shouting, private-like at the side of the rink, see, where it was kind of dark, account the overhead lights were just in the middle, to light the skating floor. The fellow took the boy out finally, maybe five minutes later—practically dragged him, hardly give him time to take his skates off and turn them in. Yes, off the premises—Ehrlich probably saw them go out to the street or wherever, he was arguing at the guy and followed them. The girl was mad too, naturally. And she didn’t stay long after; a couple other kids come up and talked to her, but she probably didn’t feel much like staying to skate alone, thought it made her look silly, have her boy friend dragged away from her like that. She took off her skates when the other kids left her, and turned them in to Hayes who was on duty then, and left the floor. Murphy, who was having a cigarette in the little foyer, had noticed her come out; she’d gone into the rest room—those were opposite sides of the foyer, with the ticket desk in the center. Ehrlich was sitting there again by then, he would have seen her too. She was in the rest room maybe five minutes, and come out, and left. That was maybe ten or five after.