by Dell Shannon
He came to the far corner and with mild gratification found another closet and another door. “At a guess, the fuse boxes,” he murmured, and eased the door open. A quick look with the flash interested him so much that he stepped inside, pulled the door shut after him, and swept the flash around for a good look.
Fuse boxes, yes: also, of course, the meter: and a narrow outside door. For the meter reader, obviously: very convenient. He tried it and found himself looking out to a narrow unpaved alley between this building and the warehouse next to it.
And does it mean anything at all? he wondered to himself. He retreated, and now he did not care if he was seen or not; he kept the flash on, the beam pointed downward… How very right Hackett had been: this place had not been so much as swept for years. But full of eddying drafts as it was, you couldn’t expect footprints to stay in the dust, however thick. He worked back and forth between the rail and the wall, dodging the chairs. He had no idea at all what he was looking for, and also was aware that anything he might find would either be completely irrelevant or impossible to prove relevant to the case.
Now, of course, he had been noticed; he heard the attendant’s chair scrape back, and a few of the skaters had drifted over to the rail this side, curious. He didn’t look up from the little spotlight of the flash: he followed it absorbedly back and forth.
“Hey, what the hell you up to, anyway?” The attendant came heavy-footed, shoving chairs out of his path. “Who—”
“Stop where you are, for God’s sake!” exclaimed Mendoza suddenly. “I’m police—you’ll have my credentials in a minute, but don’t come any closer.”
“Police—oh, well—”
And Mendoza said aloud to himself, “So here it is. But I don’t believe it, it’s impossible.” And to that he added a rueful, “And what in the name of all the devils in hell does it mean?”
In the steady beam of the flash, it lay there mute and perhaps meaningless: a scrap of a thing, three inches long, a quarter-inch wide: a little strip of dainty pink lace, so fine that it might once have been the trimming on the lingerie of a very special doll.
* * *
Ehrlich went on saying doggedly, “My place didn’t have nothing to do with it.” That door, well, sure, the inside one oughta be kept locked, it usually was—but neither he nor the attendants would swear to having checked it for months, all three maintaining it was the other fellow’s responsibility. Mendoza found them tiresome. Hackett and Dwyer, summoned by phone, if they didn’t altogether agree with Ehrlich were less than enthusiastic over Mendoza’s find; Hackett said frankly it didn’t mean a damned thing. He listened to the story of Carol Brooks’ doll and said it still didn’t mean a damned thing.
“I don’t want to disillusion you, but I’ve heard rumors that real live dolls sometimes wear underwear with pink lace on—and just like you say, it is nice and dark along here. Not havin’ such a pure mind as you, I can think of a couple of dandy reasons—”
“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.”46
“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 enquiry 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 stopp
ed fingering 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—‘like 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!”47 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-house48 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’s 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 mí!—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,49 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—”
“All 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.”
42 “My red kitten.”
43 King Cophetua was a legendary African king who spied a beggar woman out his window, fell in love at first sight, and married her. The tale was preserved in poetry and art and merged into the Pygmalion myth of the transformation of a statue into a woman, ultimately emerging as Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw (and, of course, the musical My Fair Lady).
44 Literally, “Go for God!” meaning something like, “For God’s sake!”
45 “A vain expectation,” meaning “a lost cause.”
46 There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, about Captain “Pete” Olmsted of the USS Arizona. Sometime in the late 1930s, Olmsted granted ten days�
� leave to a sailor to get married and enjoy a honeymoon. When the sailor cabled the ship to ask for an extension of the leave, he wrote: “Request five days extension of leave. It’s wonderful here.” Olmsted reportedly replied, “It’s wonderful anywhere. Request refused. Rejoin the ship.” Ken Jones and Hubert Kelly Jr., Admiral Arleigh (31-Knot) Burke: The Story of a Fighting Sailor (Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1965), 69.
47 An unusual expression—“fires of hell!”—idiosyncratic to Mendoza (or Linington)!
48 A brothel. The term “cat,” meaning a prostitute, can be traced to the fifteenth century.
49 “On the way,” meaning “in passing.”
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.
She appeared now from the kitchen, jamming an ancient felt hat over her tight sausage curls. “I was just leavin’. There you go, switchin’ on lights allovera place—your bill must be somethin’ sinful! You found out yet who that dead man in the yards was?”