Case Pending - Dell Shannon

by Dell Shannon

  He had formed some very nebulous ideas-mere ghosts of hypotheses-overnight, out of the evidence a second murder inevitably added to the evidence from a first one; and he thought that a restricted locale was natural, if you looked at it a certain way. At least, it was a fifty-fifty chance, depending on just what kind of lunatic they were hunting. If he was the kind (disregarding the psychiatrists' hairsplitting solemn terms) whose impulse to kill was triggered suddenly and at random, the odds were that his victim would be someone in the area where he lived or worked: and considering the hour, probably the former. If he was the kind capable of planning ahead, then the place of the crime meant nothing, or very little, for he might have cunning enough to choose a place unconnected with him. But to balance that there was the fact that madmen capable of sustained cunning generally chose victims by some private logic: they were the ones appointed by God to rid the world of prostitutes, or Russian spies, or masquerading Martians. Like that. And to do so, they had to be aware of the victims as individuals.

  So there was a chance that this one, whatever kind he was, lived somewhere fairly near the place he bad killed. And that might be of enormous help, for it suggested that he had lived (or worked) somewhere near the place Carol Brooks had been killed last September. If he was the man who had killed her, and Mendoza thought he was.

  Sunday was only another day to Mendoza; he lay in bed awhile thinking about all this, and also about Alison Weir, until the sleek brown Abyssinian personage who condescended to share the apartment with him, the green-eyed Bast, leapt onto his stomach and began to knead the blanket, fixing him with an accusing stare. He apologized to her for inattention; he got up and laid before her the morning tribute of fresh liver; he made coffee. Eight o’clock found him, shaven and spruce, poring over a small-scale map of the city in his office. When Hackett came in at nine o’clock, he listened in silence to Alison Weir’s contribution of the muchacho extrario who stared, and grunted over the neat penciled circles on the map. In the center of one was the twenty-two-hundred block of Tappan Street, and in the center of the other the junction of Commerce and Humboldt. Each covered approximately a mile in diameter, to the map scale: call it a hundred and fifty square blocks.

  "Now isn’t that pretty!" said Hackett. "And where would you get the army to check all that territory—and for what? The idea, that I go along with, and if your pretty circles happened to have prettier centers, say like Los Feliz and Western, I’d say we might come up with something, just on a check to see who’d moved where recently. But you know what you got here!" He stabbed a blunt forefinger at the first circle. "About half of this area is colored, and none of it, white or black, is very fancy. Which also goes with bells on for the other area. Out on the Strip, or along Wilshire, a lot of places, you’ve got people in settled lives, and they leave records behind. City directory, phone book, gas company, rent receipts, forwarding addresses. Here—" he shrugged.

  "You needn’t tell me," said Mendoza ruefully. "This is just a little exercise in academic theory." In these networks of streets, some of the most thickly populated in the city, drifted the anonymous ones: people who wandered from one casual job to another, who for various reasons (not always venal) were sometimes known by different names to different people, and who owned no property. Landlords were not always concerned with keeping records, and most rent was paid in cash. There were also, of course, settled, householders, responsible people. For economic reasons or racial reasons, or both, they lived cheek-by-jowl, crowded thick; they came and went, and because they were of little concern to anyone as individuals, their comings and goings went largely unnoticed.

  "If we had a name—but we’d get nothing for half a year’s hunt, not knowing what to look for. ¡Qué se le ha de hacer!—it can’t be helped! But if the general theory’s right, there’s a link somewhere."

  "I’ll go along with you," said Hackett, "but I’ll tell you, I think we’ll get it as corroborative evidence after we’ve caught up with him by another route. Somebody’ll see a newspaper cut, and come in to tell us that our John Smith is also Henry Brown who used to live on Tappan Street. We can’t get at it from this end, there’s damn-all to go on."

  "I agree with you—though there’s such a thing as luck. However!" Mendoza shoved the map aside. "What did you get out of the Wades?"

  "Something to please you." Circumstantially, the Wades were counted out. Ehrlich and his two attendants at the rink had seen father and son leave, and agreed on the time as "around ten to ten." The girl had been a good ten or twelve minutes after them. By the narrowest reckoning it was a twenty-minute drive to the Wades’ home, probably nearer thirty, and a neighbor had happened to be present in the house on their arrival, an outside witness who was positive of the time as ten twenty-live. There hadn’t been time, even if you granted they’d done it together, which was absurd .... The Wades, pater and mater familias, might be snobs, with the usual false and confused values of snobs (though much of their social objection to the Ramirez girl was understandable: Mendoza, supposing he were ever sufficiently rash or unwary to acquire a wife and family, would probably feel much the same himself). But it could not be seriously conjectured that a respectable middle-aged bookkeeper had done murder (and such a murder) to avoid acquiring a daughter-in-law addicted to double negatives and peroxide. And if he had, it would hardly be in collusion with the boy.

  "The boy," said Hackett, "hasn’t got the blood in him to kill a mouse in a trap anyway—all you got to do is look at him."

  "I’ll take your word for it," said Mendoza absently. He wasn’t interested in the boy, never had been much; the Wades were irrelevant, but he was just as pleased that by chance there was evidence to show that. And the Wades ought to be very damned thankful for it too: they’d probably never realize it, but without that evidence the boy could have found himself in bad trouble. From Mendoza’s viewpoint that would have been regrettable chiefly because it would have diverted the investigation into a blind alley. They had wasted enough official time as it was.

  He looked again at his map, and sighed. The lunatic—of this or that sort—was his own postulation, and he could be wrong: that had sometimes happened. Ideally an investigator should be above personal bias, which—admitted or unconscious—inevitably slanted the interpretation of evidence. And yet evidence almost always had to be interpreted—full circle back to personal opinion. There was always the human element, and also what Dr. Rhine might call the X factor, which Mendoza, essentially a fatalist as well as a gambler, thought of as a kind of cosmic card-stacking. Much of the time plodding routine and teamwork led you somewhere eventually; but it was surprising how often the sudden hunch, the inspired guess, the random coincidence, took you round by a shorter way. And sometimes the extra aces in the deck fell to the opponent’s hand, and there was nothing you could do about that. The law of averages had nothing to do with it.

  "I dropped in to see if the autopsy report’s come through . . . . oh, well, suppose we couldn’t expect it over Sunday. Nothing much in it anyway. Back to the treadmill—" Hackett got up. "I’ve still got some of the kids to see, ones at the rink that night."

  "The rink," said Mendoza, still staring at his map. "Yes. We’ll probably get the autopsy report by tonight—the inquest’s been set for Tuesday. Yes—Vaya . . . . todo es posible. Yes, you get on with the routine, as becomes your rank—me, I’m taking the day off from everything else, to shuffle through this deck again, por decirlo asi—maybe there’s a

  marked card to spot."

  He brooded over the map another minute when Hackett had gone, and penciled in a line connecting the two circles. He shrugged and said to himself, Maybe, maybe—folded the map away, got his hat and coat and went out.

  Downstairs, as he paused to adjust the gray Homburg, a couple of reporters cornered him; they asked a few desultory questions about the Ramirez girl, but their real interest was in Sergeant Galeano’s husband-killer, who was of a socially prominent clan. The more sensational of the evening papers ha
d put Elena Ramirez on the front page, but it wasn’t a good carry-over story—they couldn’t make much out of a Hartners’ stock-room girl, and the boy friend wasn’t very colorful either. The conservative papers had played it down, an ordinary back-street mugging, and by tomorrow the others would relegate it to the middle pages. They had the socialite, and the freight yard corpse, besides a couple of visiting dignitaries and the Russians; and a two-bit mugging in the Commerce Street area, that just happened to turn into a murder, was nothing very new or remarkable.

  Maneuvering the Ferrari out into Main Street, Mendoza thought that was a point of view, all right: almost any way you looked at it, it was an unimportant, uninteresting kill. No glamor, no complexity, nothing to attract either the sensationalists or the detective-fiction fans. In fact, the kind of murder that happened most frequently....The press had made no connection between Elena Ramirez and Carol Brooks. No, they weren’t interested; but if the cosmic powers had stacked the deck this time, and that one stayed free to kill again, and again, eventually some day he would achieve the scare headlines, and then—de veras, es lo de siempre, Mendoza reflected sardonically, the mixture as before: our stupid, blundering police!

  * * *

  Once off the main streets here, away from the blinding gleam of the used-car lots, the screamer ads plastered along store-fronts, these were quiet residential streets, middle-class, unremarkable. Most of the houses neatly maintained, if shabby: most with carefully kept flower plots in front. Along the quiet Sunday sidewalks, dressed-up children on the way to Sunday school, others not so dressed up running and shouting at play—householders working in front gardens this clear morning after the rain. This was all Oriental along here, largely Japanese. When he stopped at an intersection a pair of high-school-age girls crossed in front of him—"But honestly it isn’t fair, ten whole pages of English Lit, even if it is on the week end! She’s a real fiend for homework—" One had a ponytail, one an Italian cut; their basic uniform of flat shell pumps, billowy cotton skirts and cardigans, differed only in color.

  At the next corner he turned into Tappan Street; this wasn’t the start of it, but the relevant length for him, this side of Washington Boulevard. He drove slow and idle, as if he’d all the time in the world to waste, wasn’t exactly sure where he was heading: and of course he wasn’t, essentially. It was a long street and it took him through a variety of backgrounds.

  Past rows of frame and stucco houses, lower—middle-class—respectable houses, where the people on the street were Oriental, and then brown and black; there, late-model cars sat in most driveways and the people were mostly dressed up for Sunday. Past bigger, older, shabbier houses with Board-and-Room signs, rank brown grass in patches, and broken sidewalks: dreary courts of semi-detached single-story rental units, stucco boxes scabrous for need of paint: black and brown kids in shabbier, even ragged clothes, more raucous in street play. A lot of all that, block after block. Past an intersection where a main street crossed and a Catholic church, a liquor store, a chiropractor’s office and a gas station shared the corners. Past the same kind of old, shoddy houses and courts, for many more blocks, but here the people on the street white. Then a corner which marked some long-ago termination of the street: where it continued, across, there were no longer tall old camphorwoods lining it; the parking was bare. The houses were a little newer, a little cleaner: they gave way to solid blocks of smallish apartment buildings, and all this again was settled middle-class, and again the faces in the street black and brown.

  At the next intersection, he caught the light and sat waiting for it, staring absently at the wooden bench beside the bus-stop sign on the near left corner. Its back bore a faded admonition to Rely on J. Atwood and Son, Morticians, for a Dignified Funeral. There, that night, Carol Brooks had got off the bus on her way home from work, and some time later started down Tappan Street. She had had only three blocks to walk, but she had met—something—on the way, and so she hadn’t got home. . . .The car behind honked at him angrily; the light had changed.

  Across the intersection, he idled along another block and a half, slid gently into the curb and took his time over lighting a cigarette. Three single-family houses from the corner, there sat two duplexes, frame bungalows just alike, one white and one yellow. They were, or had been, owned by the widowed Mrs. Shadwell who lived in one side of the yellow one. On that September night the left-hand side of the white one had been empty of tenants, the tenants in the other side had been out at a wedding reception, the tenants in the left side of the yellow duplex had been giving a barbecue supper in their back yard, and Mrs. Shadwell, who was deaf, had taken off her hearing aid. So just what had happened along here, as Carol Brooks came by, wasn’t very clear; if she’d been accosted, exchanged any talk or argument with her killer, had warning of attack and called for help, there’d been no one to hear. She’d been found just about halfway between the walks leading to the two front doors of the white duplex, at twenty minutes past nine, by a dog-walker from the next block: she had then been dead for between thirty minutes and an hour.

  It occurred to Mendoza that he was simply wasting time in the vague superstitious hope that the cosmic powers would tap his shoulder and drop that extra ace into his lap. He tossed his cigarette out the window, which was now by law a misdemeanor carrying a fifty-dollar fine, and drove on a block and a half: glanced at the neat white frame bungalow where Carol Brooks had lived, and turned left at the next corner. This was a secondary business street, and it marked one of the boundaries: that side Negro, this side white. The streets deteriorated sharply on the white side, he knew, lined with old apartment buildings only just not describable as tenements. He turned left again and wandered back parallel to Tappan, turned again and then again and came to the corner where the bus stopped, past the two duplexes, and drew into the curb in front of the bungalow numbered 2214.

  A woman came up the sidewalk from the opposite direction, turned in at the white house, hesitated and glanced at the car, and turned back toward it. Mendoza got out and took off his hat. "Mrs. Demarest. I wondered if you still lived here."

  "Why, where else would I be?" She was a tall, slim, straight-backed 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 esta
blished 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 Caro1’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 way when the time comes, because I must say I am that curious about the afterward part."