by Dell Shannon
The Ace of Spades
Dell Shannon
1960
ONE
"Oh, damn," said Alison Weir. "Was it the next block? I could have sworn— "
"You left the car right here," said Patricia Moore firmly. "I remember noticing that particular bed of begonias. Especially line ones."
Pat's British raising, as it affected gardens and the King's English at least, was incorrigibly untranslated to citizenship.
"I'm not sure. All these little streets look so much alike. Damn. I don't know why I wore these shoes, my feet are killing me. ¡Qué incomodidad!— ¡es el colmo! I thought it was along here— "
"I notice you revert to Spanish a bit oftener these days," remarked Pat, sitting down placidly on the low brick wall flanking the sidewalk and fanning herself with the program of the exhibit they'd been looking at. "The car's been stolen, obviously."
"Don't be ridiculous," said Alison crossly. "Who on earth would want it?" She sat down beside Pat and lit a cigarette. "It's Luis' fault," she added. "After Dad died and I came back north, I didn't have much reason to use Spanish, you know, except for an occasional girl coming in to school. But there is one thing about it, it does give vent to one's feelings better than English sometimes .... It must have been the next b1ock."
"You and your policeman. It was here. I remember distinctly. It's been stolen. Did you leave the keys in it?"
"If you think," said Alison, "that I have attained the age of thirty without acquiring a little sense— of course I didn't. And really I must say I should think I could visit a respectable place like the County Museum in broad daylight without having my car stolen. If we'd been in a bar down on Skid Row it'd be different."
"Wickedness flourishes everywhere," said Miss Moore philosophically.
"And I can't say the exhibition was worth it. Personally I think Renoir was overrated."
"That's your photographic eye. You're inclined to be over-realistic yourself. Too much detail. And such strong color— of course I suppose it's only to be expected from a red-haired Scots-Irishwoman."
"I refuse," said Alison, "to discuss painting techniques sitting on bricks with the thermometer at a hundred. It's ridiculous. I want to go home and take off my clothes and have a large cold drink. Can it have been stolen?"
"It happens every day," said Miss Moore. "You'd better call the police. You've got an in with them, they'll probably produce it for you in no time."
"Luis isn't Traffic, he's Homicide. I suppose I had. Oh, damn!" said Alison. "And I don't suppose there's a public phone nearer than the central building. No rest for the wicked. And I cannot imagine why anybody should take the thing— of course they might not have got far, that's one comfort, if you don't know just how to manipulate that handchoke, it dies on you every fifty feet . . . I wonder if I'd look very odd if I took off my shoes? You see teen-agers going barefoot— "
"Really, Alison! " Miss Moore, who was dumpy, dowdy, and without an iota of personal vanity, but with strong notions of respectability, regarded her severely. "I'1l walk back with you, and you shouldn't delay reporting it."
"I suppose not." Alison got up with a grimace, and they started back to the building they'd just left. The one public phone, of course, was at the very end of a long marble hall, and when they got there neither of them had a dime. Under Pat's disapproving eye, Alison accosted a passer-by and got change, and eventually was put through to Traffic.
"Yes, ma'am," said an efficient, reassuring voice there. "The exact location, please .... If you'll just remain on the spot, there'll be an officer there directly to take particulars."
Alison thanked the voice gloomily. "And now we have to walk all the way back there again, and after they've taken down all the details they'll drive away in their nice new patrol car, and we'll have to come back here to call a cab."
"A cab?" said Miss Moore. "Sheer extravagance! There's a bus goes right down Exposition Boulevard— "
"Yes, I know, you can take it if you like," said Alison. They went back and sat on the wall. In about five minutes a black and white patrol car came along and a uniformed officer got out of it and projected courteous efficiency at them. Description of car, please— when was it parked here, when was the loss discovered?
"It was about two-thirty, wasn't it, when we got here? And if you can tell me why anybody should deliberately— I remember there was a brand-new Buick right ahead. It's a Ford, almost thirteen years old, light gray, a two-door sedan. I've got the license number on a thing on my key chain."
"Oh, that's very helpful, ma'am. You didn't leave the keys in it, then?"
"Certainly not, I don't know why you always automatically assume women drivers are all fools— "
“Now don't take it out on the officer," said Pat. "Don't they have ways of starting it going somehow without a key?— I've read— "
"That's so," said the patrolman, who'd taken another look at Alison and doubled his gallantry. "And some of these kids, you know, the hot-rodders, they want old stuff like that, to strip down and rebuild."
"That makes me believe the stories about the younger generation having no sense," said Alison.
He laughed, handing back her key ring. "Chances are we'll pick it up within a few days, Miss Weir. You'll be notified, of course. Damn inconvenient, but there it is— it happens every day to a lot of people. Don't worry, it'll go on the hot list right away."
"Thanks very much .... And now back to the phone to call a cab, what did I tell you? I've heard there are some people in L.A. who don't own cars. How do you suppose they exist?"
"The lesser breeds without the law. We manage to get about on the two feet Providence provided," said Miss Moore. "Much healthier. Also better for the figure, although— " She compared her dumpiness to Alison's excellent distribution of poundage, and laughed.
* * *
The Los Angeles Police Department is a large one, and not all the men in it are acquainted with one another. In the ordinary way, Sergeant Edward Rhodes of Traffic would not have had any contact with the Homicide division, but as it happened one of his personal friends was Sergeant Landers of that office. Through Landers, Rhodes had heard this and that about Landers' superior, Lieutenant Luis Rodolfo Vicente Mendoza, and over a period of time he had caught some of Landers' hero worship for this personage. Both of them were young unmarried men, and over their coffee breaks and shared dinners in cheap restaurants, they talked shop.
Rhodes, in fact, cherished a secret ambition toward some day getting into Homicide himself, and Mendoza had not only a professional reputation any man might envy, but other kinds. Mendoza was, by all accounts, quite the hell of a fellow in three ways— at his job, at a poker table, and with the girls— and thereby hung a number of tales, which Landers had passed on at length.
So Rhodes, from a distance as it were, had set Mendoza up as a model. Not that he could ever hope to attain some of Mendoza's attributes: for one thing, there was all the money. Mendoza had come into a sizable fortune from a miserly grandfather and didn't stint himself enjoying it. Landers guessed that he didn't pay a dime less than two hundred bucks for any of his suits; he dressed to the nines, dapper and elegant, never a hair out of place, the precise line of black moustache always trimmed even and neat, the long narrow hands manicured— but nothing flashy, everything quiet, good taste. And he'd just taken delivery of a new car, which both of them had admired in the lot— it had cost the equivalent of Rhodes' salary for three years. It was a long, low, custom-built gunmental-colored Facel-Vega, a two-door hardtop sports coupé, and Landers reported with awe that it was said to be capable of acceleration from a stand to a hundred m.p.h. in eighteen seconds, only Lieutenant Mendoza never drove that
way, he was real careful with a car and had never got a moving-violation ticket at all, ever.
It wasn't to be supposed either that Sergeant Rhodes could ever attain the talent— as per Mendoza's reputation— for uncanny hunches and brilliant deductions. But he could admire— from a distance— and that he did.
As it further happened, Landers had casually heard from Sergeant Lake, who was desk man in Mendoza's office and now and then had to track him down out of hours, the name of Mendoza's current girlfriend, or at least one of them. Landers had even met her once, when he was relaying some urgent information to Mendoza, and reported her to be evidence of Mendoza's excellent taste— a real redhead, and quite something, he said. Funny sort of name for a girl, Alison: but for that reason it had stayed in Rhodes' mind.
Which was why he noticed it on the list of hot cars, and read the meager information with interest. A thirteen-year-old Ford: he thought instantly, respectfully, a nice girl, not a gold-digger, taking Mendoza for his money. Of course, that kind Mendoza wouldn't be such a fool to take up with in the first place. Landers said she ran one of these charm schools, and painted pictures on the side— kind of an artist. Couldn't have much money, driving a car like this .... His chivalrous instincts were aroused, and also he had a vague vision of Mendoza dropping into Traffic— say some time when Captain Edgely was around to hear— and thanking him for such an efficient, excellent performance of his job in the matter.
He exerted himself, therefore, with dispatch, to find Alison Weir's car for her; he sent out a special bulletin about it, and each morning eagerly scanned the list of stolen cars located.
But it wasn't until Thursday— it had been stolen on Sunday afternoon— that it turned up, on a routine check of overparked cars. Out in a rather lonely section of Compton, left along a new residential street. It was brought in and Rhodes looked it over. Awful old piece of junk, he thought. These kids!— no discipline, no principles at all these days. Anything sitting around loose, if they wanted it for half an hour—
That was about half past four on Thursday afternoon, and he succumbed to temptation, called Miss Weir, reported the finding of the car, and said it wasn't any trouble at all, he'd deliver it himself, bring her the formal papers to sign acknowledging its recovery.
Not exactly according to Hoyle, but he went down to the garage and got one of the boys to start the Ford for him and trail him in a patrol car to bring him back, and drove up to Hollywood to Miss Weir's apartment.
"We'll have to ask you to look it over, Miss Weir— you know, say what damage's been done, if any." Landers had been quite right: nothing cheap, a plain sort of tan summer dress, not too much jewelry, but a looker, in a ladylike way: you didn't often see real red hair that wasn't carroty, and she had the complexion to go with it, milk-white, and hazel-green eyes.
"Oh, certainly," said Alison, "but I don't suppose there's much they could have done to it. It's seen quite a lot of life already." She came downstairs with him obligingly. "It's never really got used to the good roads up here— you see, it was the last car my father bought, he was a construction engineer and worked a good deal in Mexico, it passed its adolescence mostly down in Coahuila, negotiating burro trails, and I really think it's suspicious of anything else .... Well, I can't see that it looks any different." She opened the door and peered in. "The seat covers have had that rip for months, and that dent in the dashboard, that was Ferdinando Gomez the time he got the D.T.'s and Dad drove him down to the missionary hospital. No, it's all just the way it was. Nothing missing from the glove compartment as far as I can tell— heavens, what a lot of junk one does accumulate."
"You want to be sure, Miss Weir, before you sign the receipt— on account of the insurance, you know. If you put in a claim— "
"Oh, lord, I'm just thankful to have it back, and still running— I don't see any need to do that. There doesn't seem to be anything wrong mechanically?"
"Well— er— " said Rhodes.
"I mean, it is running?"
"Oh, it runs, sure, I just drove it up, of course."
"Well, then, that's all right. I still can't imagine why they took it. Where'd you find it?"
He told her, handing over the receipt and a pen. "Just kids, probably, out for a joy ride. It'd been sitting there quite a while, they didn't keep it 1ong."
"Well, thank you very much," said Alison with a nice smile, handing back the receipt and pen. "I am glad to have it back."
"No trouble at all," said Rhodes gallantly. Possibly, he thought, she'd say something to Mendoza: such a nice efficient officer who brought it back; but in any case he'd been interested in meeting her. Of course, he reflected further on the ride back to headquarters, she'd actually have been better off if they'd wrecked that piece of junk and she could put in the full insurance claim.
The car had come back on Thursday, and Alison drove it to her school next morning and back again that afternoon, and found it just the same as usual. On Saturday she drove it down to the beach, up past Malibu, where she spent most of the day working on what turned out to be a rather unsatisfactory seascape. Unloading her painting gear when she got home, she reflected that the poor thing was badly in need of a bath— a job she loathed— but it was later than she'd thought, and she had barely an hour to get dressed before Luis came to take her out to dinner. Tomorrow, she'd clean the car. The better the day the better the deed.
So late Sunday afternoon found her in the cramped apartment garage, equipped with a stiff brush, several rags, and a pail of water. She started by brushing out the inside— seats and floor. The front seat had accumulated quite a surprising amount of sand from her jaunt to the beach, and she brushed vigorously, getting well down into the crack between the back and the seat, kneeling on the seat to press it down.
Sand, dust, anonymous fluff, and dirt— and of all things, a long dried twig with a couple of mummified leaves clinging to it, probably blew in the window and got crushed down— she ran two fingers down the crack to be sure of getting it all out, and suddenly felt something else there, and delved farther. Damn, when she pulled the opening wider the thing just slipped down— but eventually, at the expense of a torn nail and several muttered curses, she persuaded it out, and looked at it.
"¿Y qué es esto?" she said to herself absently, turning the thing over * in her palm. "What on earth is it and where did it come from? How very odd . . ."
TWO
The body turned up that Monday morning, halfway down a narrow alley opening on Carson Street not far from Main. Unlike a lot of alleys down there, this one wasn't used for anything much, and as the corpse was beyond the entrance, it hadn't been discovered at once; some kids had finally stumbled over it, running through.
Sergeant Arthur Hackett went down with a crew of men to look at it, and was not enlightened. Or, if the truth were told, much interested.
It wasn't that he expected the kind of corpses and mysteries found in the paperback novels at drugstores, every time he got a call to a new case; that sort of thing just didn't happen; at least in his nine years' experience of being a cop he'd never run across it. But some corpses were just naturally more interesting than others, and this one was, in a word, routine.
"Just another piece of flotsam," he said to Mendoza when he came back. "On the big H and finally took too much of a jolt and didn't come out of it. God knows who he was— probably nobody cares anymore."
"Really," said Mendoza. "Nothing on him to say?"
"Nada. Maybe he'll get identified by somebody while he's on file, but maybe not, too. You know how they drift. Not very important either way, I'd say." Hackett brought out a manila envelope. "Here's all he had on him. Damnedest thing how they set out to commit suicide— what it amounts to. He was a good-looker, and I'd say not over thirty."
"A lot of answers on that one," said Mendoza, "and maybe as many answers as there are users." Business had been a little slack lately, and he was unoccupied for the moment; idly he up-ended the envelope on his desk and looked at what it
disgorged.
A clean folded handkerchief, plain white, cheap cotton, dime store variety. A flat longish box bearing the name of a chain drugstore and containing a much=used and dirty hypodermic syringe and several needles. A cheap pocketknife. Forty-eight cents in change. A crumpled package of cigarettes with three left in it. A scrap of paper, irregularly torn across one edge, about four inches wide at the broadest part and narrowing down to a point. Torn off a corner of something.
"What's this?"
"Piece torn off a letter or something, I suppose. I wouldn't have seen it at all, but the staple bit my finger when I was going through his pockets. You can see the holes— there were a couple of pages, or more, stapled together. I just stuck it in, thought there might be something on it to say who he was, but— "
"Yes," said Mendoza, "and an odd sort of letter it seems to have been. Nymphs and dolphins. ¡Comó, oyé! I'd heard that heroin gives some people hallucinations, but what superior hallucinations!"
"What? Let's see, I didn't— "
Mendoza passed it over. Automatically he began to tidy the desk, setting the deceased's possessions in a neat little pile at one side, brushing off tobacco crumbs, lining up the ashtray with the blotter and desk-box.
That was Mendoza: the orderly mind, place-for-everything— everything-in-its-place. Probably one of the reasons he had acquired a little reputation as an investigative officer: ragged edges worried him, the thing left all untidy, patternless. He might be and often was irritable at the frustration of continually being presented with another box of jigsaw pieces to put together, but he was constitutionally unable to leave them alone until every last little piece had been fitted in where it belonged.
He glanced up at Hackett, and got out a cigarette: a slim dark man, the black hairline moustache, the sharp arch of heavy brows, the widow's peak, punctuation marks to a long nose and a long jaw: impassive, an unremarkable if regular-featured face, but it could flash into sudden charm when a smile touched the dark eyes.