Case Pending

by Dell Shannon

  “Why, where else would I be?” She was a tall, slim, straightbacked woman, and had once perhaps been beautiful: the bones of beauty were still there, in her smooth high forehead, delicate regular features, small mouth. Her skin was the color of well-creamed coffee. She was neat, even almost smart, in tailored navy-blue dress and coat, small gold earrings. She might be seventy, she might be older, but age had touched her lightly; her voice was firm, her eyes intelligent. “It’s Mr. Mendoza,” she said. “Or I should say ‘Lieutenant.’ You know, if I was a superstitious woman, Lieutenant, I’d say there’s more in it than meets the eye, you turning up. Did you want to see me about something?”

  “I don’t know. There’s been another,” he said abruptly. “I think the same one.”

  “Another colored girl?” she asked calmly.

  “No. And miles away, over on Commerce Street.”

  “That one,” she said, nodding. “I think you’d best come in, and I’ll tell you. It’s nothing much, though it’s queer—but it’s something you didn’t hear about before, you see. At first I thought I might write you a letter about it, and then I said to myself”—they were halfway up the walk to the house, and he’d taken the brown-paper bag of groceries from her—“I thought, it’s not important, I’d best not trouble you. But as you’re here, you might as well hear about it.” She had been away from Bermuda half her life, but her tongue still carried the flavor, the broad A’s, the interchange of V’s and W’s, the clipped British vowels. She unlocked the front door and they went into the living-room he remembered, furniture old but originally good and well cared for. “If you’ll just fetch that right back to the kitchen, Lieutenant—you’ll have a cup of coffee with me, we might as well be comfortable and it’s always hot on the back of the stove. Sit down, I’ll just tend to the Duke here and then be with you.”

  The cat surveying him with cold curiosity from the hallway door was a large black neutered tom; he established himself on the kitchen chair opposite Mendoza and continued to stare. “I didn’t remember he was the Duke,” said Mendoza.

  “The Duke of Wellington really, because he always thought so almighty high of himself, you know. We got him Carol’s second year in high, and she was doing history about it then. Cats, they’re like olives, seem like—either you’re crazy about them or you just can’t abide them. I remembered you like them. It’s why I was out, after his evaporated milk. Fresh he won’t look at, and the evaporated he lets set just so long till it’s thick the way he fancies it. You see now, he knows I’ve just poured it, he won’t go near. You take milk or sugar?—well, I always take it black too, you get the flavor.”

  She set the filled cups on the table and sat in the chair across from him. “You’ll have missed your granddaughter,” he said. It was another absurd superstitious feeling, that if he asked, brought her to the point, it would indeed be nothing at all.

  “Well, I do, of course. Sometimes it doesn’t seem right that there the Duke should be sitting alive, and her gone. It’d be something to believe in some kind of religion, think there was a God Who’d some reason, some plan. I never came to it somehow, but maybe there is. I’ve had two husbands and raised six children, and luckier than most in all of them—and you could say I’ve worked hard. It was a grief to lose my youngest son, that was Carol’s dad, but I had to figure I’d five left, and the other grandchildren too. Take it all in all, there’s been more good than bad—and what you can’t change, you’d best learn to live with content. I enjoy life still, and I don’t want to die while I’ve still my health and my mind, but you know, Lieutenant, I won’t be too sorry in a way when the time comes, because I must say I am that curious about the afterward part.”

  “It’s a point of view,” he agreed amusedly. “So am I now and then, but I’d rather be curious than dead.”

  She laughed, with a fine gleam of even white teeth. “Ah, you’re lucky, you’re half my age! But I said I’d something to tell you. It’s just a queer sort of thing, maybe doesn’t mean much.” She sipped and put down her cup. “Maybe you’ll remember that that night when Carol was killed, I told you I hadn’t been too worried about her being late home, because she’d said something about shopping along Hawke Street, that’d be when she got off the bus. It was a Monday night, and all the stores along there, they stay open till nine Mondays and Fridays. There’s a few nice little stores, and it’s handy—not so crowded as downtown, and most everything you’d want, drugstore and Woolworth’s, besides a Hartners’, and a shoe store and a couple of nice independent dress shops, and Mr. Grant at the stationery-and-card place even keeps a little circulating library—and then there’s Mrs. Breen’s.”

  He remembered the name vaguely; after a moment he said, “The woman who had a stroke.”

  “That’s right. She’s had that little shop a long while, and sometimes you find things there that’re, you know, unusual, different from the big stores. You mightn’t remember, no reason you should, but on the one side she’s got giftware as they call it—china figures and fancy ash trays and vases and such—and on the other she’s got babies’ and children’s things. Real nice things, with handwork on them, the clothes, and reasonable too. You’ll remember that your men asked around in all the shops if Carol had been in that night, to get some idea of the time and all. And that was the very night Mrs. Breen had a stroke, so you couldn’t ask her if Carol’d been in there, and it didn’t seem important because you found out that she’d been in the drugstore and a couple of other places.”

  “Yes—nothing unusual anywhere, no one speaking to her, and she didn’t mention anything out of the way to the clerks who waited on her.”

  “That’s so. It didn’t seem as if Mrs. Breen could’ve told any more. She was alone in her place, you know, and all right as could be when her daughter come at nine or a bit before, to help her close up and drive her home. It was while they were locking up she had her stroke, poor thing, and they took her off to hospital and she’s been a long while getting back on her feet. Well, Lieutenant—let me hot up your coffee—what I’m getting to is this. It went out of my mind at the time, and when I thought of it, I hadn’t the heart to bother about it, didn’t seem important somehow—and Mrs. Breen was still in the hospital and her daughter’d closed up the shop. It’d have meant asking her, Mrs. Robbins I mean, to go all through the accounts and so on, and with her so worried and living clear the other side of town too, I just let it go.”

  “You thought Carol had been in and bought something there?”

  “It was for Linda Sue,” she said, and the troubled look in her eyes faded momentarily. “My first great-grandchild, see, my granddaughter May—that’s Carol’s cousin, May White—Linda Sue’s her little girl. May and Carol were much of an age, and chummed together, and Carol was just crazy about Linda Sue. It was along in June, I remember, Carol saw this in Mrs. Breen’s, and she wanted to get it for Linda Sue’s birthday in October. She told me about it then, and if I thought it was foolish, that much money, I kept still on it—she wanted to get it, and it was her money. Twenty dollars it was, and she asked Mrs. Breen if she could pay a bit on it every week or so. Mrs. Breen’s obliging like that, and she said it was all right, but she left it in the window for people to see, case anybody wanted one like it she could order another.”

  The Duke, who had been drowsing between them, suddenly woke up and began to wash himself vigorously. Mrs. Demarest finished her coffee and sighed. “It was a doll, Lieutenant—and while that seems like an awful price for a doll, I must say it was a special one. It’d be nearly as big as Linda Sue herself, and it was made of some stuff, you know, that looked like real flesh—and it had real hair, gold hair it was, that you could curl different ways, and it had on a pink silk dress with hand smocking, and silk underwear with lace, and there was a little velvet cape and velvet slippers, rose color. Well, Carol was buying it like that. I wasn’t sure to a penny how much she still owed on it, up to that night. And of
course Monday wasn’t a payday for her, I didn’t think it was likely she’d stopped in at Mrs. Breen’s that night, because she’d do that the day she got paid, you see. It was just that she had paid on it, but as I say, way things were, I didn’t bother about going ahead with it. There was time to sort it out, Mrs. Breen and Mrs. Robbins are both honest. I got other things for Linda Sue’s birthday, and once in a while I just said to myself, some day I’d best ask about it, straighten it out with Mrs. Breen.

  “Well, just last week Mrs. Breen came into her shop again. She was sick quite awhile, and then up-and-down like at her daughter’s, and now she’s better, but not to be alone any more, and she’s selling off what stock she has and going out of business. So I went round, last Thursday it was, to ask about Carol’s doll.

  “And Mrs. Breen says that Carol came in that night and paid all the rest she owed, and took the doll away with her. She remembers it clear—the stroke didn’t affect her mind, she’s a bit slower but all there. She didn’t hear about Carol for quite awhile, naturally, being sick and all, and of course when she did, she naturally thought everyone knew about the doll. Because, you remember—”

  “Yes,” he said. He remembered: in the glare of the spotlights, the stiffening disfigured corpse and the several small parcels scattered on the sidewalk. A card of bobby pins, two spools of thread from the dime store: a magazine, a bottle of aspirin, a candy bar from the drugstore: an anniversary card from the stationery store. He looked at Mrs. Demarest blankly. “That’s very odd,” he said. “She had it—the woman’s sure?”

  She nodded vigorously. “She showed me the accounts book, Lieutenant. There’s the date, and while there’s no time put down, it’s the next-to-last entry that night, and she says the last customer came in was a woman she knows, a Mrs. Ratchett, and it was just before nine. She thinks Carol came in about eight-thirty, a few minutes before maybe. Probably it was the last place Carol stopped, you see—nobody else remembers her with a big parcel. She paid Mrs. Breen seven dollars and forty-six cents, all she still owed, and she didn’t have the doll gift-wrapped because she wanted to show it to May and me first. And she took it with her.” Mrs. Demarest held out her hands, measuring. “Like that it’d have been—a big stout cardboard box, white, a good yard or more long, and maybe eighteen inches wide and a foot deep. Heavy, too. And inside, along with the doll, three yards of pink silk ribbon and the tissue paper for wrapping it, and a birthday card. The whole thing was wrapped up in white paper and string, and Mrs. Breen made a little loop on top for her to carry it by.”

  They looked at each other. “But that’s very damned odd indeed,” he said softly. “Not much time there, you know. She was dead by nine, at the latest. It’s possible that someone else came by and found her first, didn’t want to get involved, but picked up the biggest parcel, maybe the only one he noticed in the dark, on the chance that it was worth something. But you’d think, in that case, he—or she, of course—might have taken time to snatch up the handbag too, after cash… and that hadn’t been touched, the strap was still on her arm.”

  “I guess you’d better hear how she came to get the money, not that it matters. One of the girls worked at the hotel with her came to see me, two-three days afterward—a nice girl she was, Nella Foss—to say how sorry they all were, and give me a little collection the hotel people’d taken up. They thought maybe I’d rather have the money, you know, instead of flowers for the funeral—it was real thoughtful of them. Well, Nella said that very afternoon there’d been a lady just checked out of the hotel came back after a valuable ring she’d left, and Carol’d already found it, doing out the room you know, and turned it in. And the lady gave her five dollars as a present. I expect Carol decided right off she’d finish paying for the doll with it. At the time, I thought of course what was in her purse, three-eighty-four it was, was what she’d had left out of the five.”

  “Yes… but so little time! Do we say it was the murderer took it away? Just that?—not a finger on her handbag after cash? And why?”

  “Now, that I couldn’t say,” said Mrs. Demarest, placidly. “It’s queer, certainly. I’d say the same as you—well, I guess detecting things is just a matter of using common sense and reasoning things out. I suppose somebody might think there was something valuable in a big parcel like that, and steal it just on the chance—but a thief who’d do that, it’s just not logical he wouldn’t take the handbag too, at least rummage through it.” She cocked her head at him, and her brown eyes were bright as a sparrow’s. “Lieutenant, would you think I’m a woolgathering silly old woman—you’re too polite ever say it, if you did—if I said, Maybe whoever took it knew right well what was in that parcel?”

  “You’d say whoever killed her? For a doll—”

  “I don’t know that. Maybe somebody else, first—or afterward. But I can tell you something else. I’ve studied about it, and I went back to ask Mrs. Breen a couple other things. I said she’d left the doll in the window, didn’t I? Well, I go past there three-four times a week, up to the market, and I do think I’d’ve noticed if that doll had been gone out of the window right after Carol was killed, and put two and two together, and asked then. But Mrs. Breen took it out of the window about a week before, so I didn’t expect it there, if you see what I mean. And she says now, reason she did is that she had notice from the factory or whatever that made them, that they weren’t making this particular doll anymore—so she didn’t want to show it, and have to disappoint anybody wanted one. And, this is what I’m getting at, the morning of that day Carol was killed, there was a woman came into the store and wanted to buy that doll. She wanted it real bad, Mrs. Breen said she was almost crying that she couldn’t have that one or get Mrs. Breen to order another, and she stayed a long while trying to argue Mrs. Breen into selling her the one Carol was buying.”

  An extra ace to pad his hand, Mendoza had hoped: but could it be? Such a small thing—such a meaningless thing! “Did she know this woman?”

  “She’d seen her before. It was a white woman, Lieutenant, from over across Hunter Avenue. She couldn’t call the name to mind, but she thinks she’s got it written down somewhere because the woman made her copy down her name and address and promise to find out couldn’t she get a doll like that somewhere. You’d best see Mrs. Breen and ask, if you think it means anything at all… She thinks she remembers it was a middling-long sort of name, and started with an L.”

  36 “What is there to do!”

  37 Compare Mendoza’s view to that of Sherlock Holmes: “We approached the case, you remember, with an absolutely blank mind, which is always an advantage. We had formed no theories. We were simply there to observe and to draw inferences from our observations.” Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Cardboard Box,” Strand Magazine 5, no. 1 (January 1893): 61–73.

  38 Joseph Banks (J. B.) Rhine (1895–1980) was the father of parapsychology, establishing the Journal of Parapsychology and forming the Parapsychological Association and also the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man (FRNM), a precursor to the Rhine Research Center. His experiments “proving” the existence of extrasensory perception and psychokinesis have never been replicated and hence are largely discredited.

  39 “So to speak.”

  40 “It is really the same as always.”

  41 Washington Boulevard is a major arterial road in Los Angeles, running east-west for more than twenty-seven miles. Much of South-Central Los Angeles, historically home to the black community, is south of Washington Boulevard.

  Seven

  Mendoza felt rather irritated at the cosmic powers; if they intended to direct a little luck his way, they might have been more explicit. Still, one never knew: it might lead to something.

  The gift shop was closed, of course; he would come back tomorrow. And it was possible that this Breen woman had simply told a lie to avoid having to pay back twelve or thirteen dollars; but such a relatively small amount—and Mrs. Demarest was emph
atic on assurance of her honesty. Judge for himself…

  He drove tedious miles across the city, cursing the Sunday traffic, to Alison Weir’s apartment, and was late by some minutes. She opened the door promptly and told him so, taking up her bag, joining him in the hall. She was in green and tan today, plain dark-green wool dress, high-necked: coat, shoes, bag all warm beige, and copper earrings, a big copper brooch.

  He settled her in the car and sliding under the wheel said, “Unsubtle, that dress. Every woman with red hair automatically fills her wardrobe with green.”

  “It’s only fair to tell you,” said Alison amiably, “that like practically all women I detest men who know anything about women’s clothes.”

  “As intelligent people we should always try to overcome these illogical prejudices.” He had not moved to start the engine; he smiled at her. “You know, it would be regrettable if you were lying to me, Miss Weir.”

  The little amusement died from her green-hazel eyes meeting his. “Do you think I’ve lied to you? Why? I—”

  “No, I don’t think so. But Teresa Ramirez says her sister meant to tell you about this ‘queer boy,’ and yet you don’t know quite as much as she told Teresa.”

  “I told you about that. She probably did mean to tell me a lot more, but I took up her consultation time with lecturing her. You can’t regret it any more than I do, Lieutenant! If I’d listened to her—”

  “Yes,” said Mendoza. He’d turned sideways to look at her, his right arm along the seat-back; he laughed abruptly and slid his hand down to brush her shoulder gently, reaching to the ignition. “I’ll tell you why I’m not just a hundred percent sure—I mustn’t be. Because I’m working this on a preconceived idea, and that’s dangerous. I find something that doesn’t fit, I’m tempted to think, let it go, it’s not important—because I don’t want to prove my beautiful theory wrong. Just now and then I am wrong, and it’s not an experience I enjoy.”