The Knave of Hearts

by Dell Shannon

  The only difference about those three, Teitel, Piper, and McCandless, was that they’d never got anyone for them. Those cases were still marked Pending.

  "Well?" said Hackett. "Do we work them all over again?"

  "On a civilian’s random hunch?" said Mendoza sharply. Absently he lined things up on the desk in more precise order, calendar, desk box, blotter, ashtray; brushed ash off the polished wood. He looked tired and all of his forty years for once, if as natty and dapper as always: a slender dark man with a black hairline of moustache and widow’s peak of thick black hair, the sharp arch of heavy brows accenting unremarkable regular features. He sat back, twisting the heavy gold seal-ring round his finger in aimless gesture. "The Haines business we’ll work over again, but hard. These others—we’ll see. Who’s still on McCandless?—Galeano. You’ve been on that Braxton thing—turn it over to Galeano, and get what he’s got on McCandless. I want you in this with me .... And, de paso, you’d better tell your loving bride to expect you when she sees you while we’re busy on this—we’ll all be working overtime."

  "That you needn’t tell me," said Hackett equably.

  “Look at McCandless. I’m going back over Wood. And in the meantime, let’s both look for any common denominator. Before we—mmh—jump to the unflattering conclusion that Mrs. Haines is brighter than I we are, I want something a lot more definite to say there’s a hookup in these cases. I’m going to brood over them tonight—I’ll see Mrs. Haines tomorrow. I want any inspiration that comes to you on McCandless by tomorrow afternoon."

  "O.K., I’ll get on it." Without further wasted words, Hackett heaved his bulk up and went out in search of Sergeant Galeano.

  Mendoza sat staring at the Foster statement for a minute, vaguely; roused himself, summoned Sergeant Lake, and sent him to rummage in the back files for all those records.

  While he waited for them, he did some thinking about common denominators.

  * * *

  Hackett got home finally about eight o’clock. The indefinable new warmth flooded him—there inside the door with Angel in his arms, the smell and look of this their own place not yet quite familiar, but home. She nuzzled his collar and said she’d kept something hot for him.

  "I see you’re going to make a fine wife for a cop. No complaints about irregular hours, bein’ neglected for some nasty corpse-"

  "A casserole," said Angel. "Very French and exotic. I did think maybe strawberry mousse afterward, but when you called— So I made a trifle instead. A very good one, first time I’d tried the recipe. I never i came across oregano in a sweet sauce before, but there’s something about it—odd but rather nice—"

  "I might’ve known," said Hackett. "You never missed me at all, with a new recipe to try."

  "I did too." She raised her mountain-pool eyes to his. "Art."

  "Mmh?"

  "Did you see much of your boss today? . . . I just wondered. Alison’s had a fight with him, I think. We were going downtown together this afternoon, I went to pick her up, and she begged off. She I looked—oh, I don’t know, all washed out, way down .... No, she wouldn’t exactly say, but you know, she didn’t need to—I—"

  "You don’t tell me," said Hackett slowly. A little something different about Mendoza, he’d thought: Mendoza a bit more nervous, irritable, than usual. So maybe this was it. He kissed the top of Angel’s brown head absently; he said, "Damn Luis. You think they’ve split up? No, she wouldn’t go looking for a shoulder to cry on—not that kind—but she’d take it hard .... Sooner or later he always walks out, sure."

  "Just like that, goodbye and good luck! Doesn’t he have any feelings at all?" she asked bitterly. "As if she was a— Oh, I was so damned sorry for her, darling! Of course she didn’t need to tell me, I know her well enough to—"

  "You weren’t by any chance, my Angel, thinkin’ of getting me to play go-between, maybe try to persuade him back to her? Because I’m not exactly a coward, but I got better sense than to fool around with high explosive, and when it comes to interfering with Luis’ private life—"

  "Heaven help us, you big lummox," said Angel crossly, "that’s the last thing I’d wish her! The sooner she gets over that man the better—I can’t imagine what women see in him—or you either, for that matter! Oh, he may be a wonderful detective and so on, but—" She pounded a chair cushion into shape as angrily as if it had been Mendoza himself.

  "Oh, well," said Hackett, "‘passing the love of women'—" Which was all too true: even his Angel took funny ideas sometimes, or didn’t quite understand. You had to expect it. And he guessed a lot of women would feel that way about a man like Mendoza. The one that always got away: the one you couldn’t trust (the way it looked to them)—whether or not they felt the charm. A lot of guff talked about equality and friendship between the sexes: people weren’t made that way; men still knew men better, and women women—for any real emotional understanding.

  Mendoza—the only way you stayed a close friend to Luis was not trying to go too deep with him, intrude on privacies. And of course, men weren’t given to that in friendship anyway, which was maybe the reason they could always stay better friends longer than women: they left each others’ emotions alone. It wasn’t any of Art Hackett’s business, and it didn’t make any difference to the friendship, what Mendoza did or didn’t do in his private life.

  At the same time, in this instance there was Alison Weir, whom he liked, and owed something, and felt sorry for .... She’d been a good friend to Angel. Maybe if it hadn’t been for Alison his Angel wouldn’t be the sane and pretty girl she was, nor his either.

  "It’s senseless." she said. "Tearing herself to pieces over a man like that—"

  But Luis, and it was a damn funny way to put it (even in thought)— it wasn’t really selfishness or irresponsibility in him, that he was like that. It was more something like shyness. As if he was ashamed to show any real emotion, to show himself uncamouflaged to anybody—so he was afraid to get in too deep.

  Well . . . people. "Darling love, there’s nothing anybody can do about it. People—just made the way they’re made." He was suddenly, immensely sorry for both of them—for anybody who didn’t have what he and his Angel had.

  "I know .... I wish she’d meet someone really nice, and—and solid, and good for her—"

  "A real satisfactory husband just like me," he said, trying for a smile.

  "Oh, you—I’ll make up my mind if you’re satisfactory or not in about thirty years. Nobody can be sure in less. But really, I do wish she’d find someone right for her. If—"

  "You can’t pick for somebody else. Best bargain in the world come along and want her, she’d probably have no use for him." He didn’t add, while Luis was still above ground: he didn’t have to.

  "No," she agreed morosely.

  "You say something about keeping something hot?"

  Angel’s eyes took on the absent dreaminess which meant she was thinking about recipes. "Mmh. Something new and nice. I’ll get it ....And the triffle. I thought maybe I’d do the strawberry mousse tomorrow—"

  "Is that one of those things won’t keep? Better not count on it. We're going to be havin’ some heavy homework, so to speak."

  "Oh. A new case?"

  "Yes and no," said Hackett. "A nasty one—I’ve got a feeling, a bad one."

  "I thought the great Mendoza was the one who had hunches," said Angel, making a face.

  THREE

  Mendoza sat opposite Sally Haines in her slightly-too-neat living room and looked at her, and at her brother Jim Fairless. He hadn’t troubled to do much listening to her yet: no use until she’d got it all said, just what she thought about the blundering cops.

  She had a reason to say it, and a right. It would be no use either to argue with her, to point out that policemen and the law in general had to go on factual evidence, that it was only about once in a thousand cases that factual evidence pointed the wrong way or, conversely, that careful police investigation didn’t turn up all the factual evidence th
ere was. No use to point out the fact that—you might say, looking for first causes—if her husband hadn’t had some reason to be cheating on her, to be with Rose Foster that day, he’d probably have been easily cleared by a straightforward alibi.

  There were excuses for the law’s mistake; that didn’t make it any easier to acknowledge—either for Mendoza or Sally Haines. He sighed and got out a new cigarette.

  "—won’t admit it even now!" she was saying fiercely. "Now that this woman—but you’ll have to, in the end! You—"

  Yes: there’d be some nasty publicity, the governor would issue a posthumous pardon, everybody would make excuses and apologies, passing the buck, a lot of the ordinary public would lose faith in their police force, and none of it would be any use to Allan Haines. Whose life had been a stiff price to pay for one illicit roll in the hay: and probably (considering Rose Foster) not a very good one at that.

  "Mrs. Haines," he said at last, his eyes on his cigarette, "we all appreciate how you feel about this. You may not believe me, but we’re not exactly feeling indifferent about it either. But I haven’t come here to listen to recriminations for what’s past help now. I’d like to ask you a question. Those letters you wrote to us—"

  "Don’t tell me someone read them!" She laughed sharply. He had seen Thompson’s private notes, and he thought Thompson had sized her up pretty well. Quite a pretty woman, blonde, slender, tall; probably an excellent wife and mother: but Thompson’s scribbled terse notes summed her up—bossy, in a nice way—likes family under her thumb. He had added, Reason? H. fed up—but not enough guts break real clear? Maybe, thought Mendoza; it didn’t matter much now. Yes, she’d be smooth about it, but she’d been the man in that family. Haines hadn’t been his pigeon and he’d never met him, but it wasn’t hard to figure him, the easy-going salesman type, agreeable, friendly—the type who often went for a woman he could lean on a little. (And at the same time often picked one, for the extracurricular exercise, who’d lean on him, flatter him.) All of which was quite irrelevant now.

  "You made some accusations, Mrs. Haines, concerning three other homicides. I’d like to know just what led you to link them up."

  "Better late than never!" exclaimed Fairless with a sarcastic smile.

  He shared this apartment with his sister; and that was another item on the account. Someone had to help support a widow with three kids, and he’d come in for part of that responsibility, Mendoza deduced. "Red-letter day, Sally—the cops are asking for help from somebody with at least an average I.Q.! My God, having to ask that, an obvious thing like that! But I suppose when they make ranking cops of your kind—"

  Mendoza returned the smile. "It’s quite as obvious to the police as it is to you, Mr. Fairless, that there are certain points in common among these cases. But they’re only three out of a dozen very similar cases, you know. Why did you single them out, Mrs. Haines?"

  "I should have thought that would be obvious too," she said in a hard tone. "I knew it would happen again—that kind of man—watched the papers, I followed everything printed about any murder

  like that, that was how—Do you really need an outsider to point out such a simple fact?"

  Mendoza’s smile tightened a little. Generally he had himself well in control, and he had come here expecting nothing else than this; he had intended merely to verify his deductions, say as little as possible. But he disliked this bad business almost as emotionally as these people did, and the tone of Fairless’ voice, making your kind a thin euphemism for a dirty stupid Mex, raised unaccustomed anger in him, suddenly.

  He said softly, "To save time—and perhaps our tempers—was all you had to go on the fact that these three were women of similarly respectable backgrounds?"

  She did not condescend to show him disappointment. to miss the satisfaction of stating the obvious. "All? I should think it was enough! That kind of thing doesn’t often happen to such women—the opportunity—men like that—"

  Mendoza stood up. "It happens. You picked them for that reason—I thought so. I’ve only one other question, Mrs. Haines—one you were asked before, but you may have thought of an answer by now. In those letters and others, you put forward the theory—I might deduce, suggested by wide reading of detective novels—" and he let his smile turn sardonic, "that Mary Ellen Wood’s body was buried on your property in a deliberate attempt to make your husband the scapegoat. Have you any—mmh—candidate to name who might have had reason for that? Anyone with a grievance? Who might also have been the kind of man to commit that murder?"

  "No, of course I—but it could have been! Oh, I don’t know, about that! But the other—it’s so obvious!" He had put her a little on the defensive now. "Girls, women like that—not the kind to let themselves be picked up by any stranger—just as Mary Ellen wasn’t. Not as if they’d been alone down on Skid Row at midnight, anywhere like— It can’t have been just the usual thing with them, the way it usually happens, just as it wasn’t with Mary Ellen—whoever—"

  "I assure you, the implications are plain—even to a policeman," said Mendoza. These people had suffered a wrong, but there was no law that said he had to like them for it. As he walked down from the door to the street and the long elegance of the Facel-Vega there, he was aware of their hot eyes on his back. Aware that Fairless was wondering how a cop could afford to run a car like that—and making the obvious deduction.

  He wanted to tum and go back, say to Fairless, Oddly enough, friend, it’s honest money: if maybe the old miser rang in a cold deck now and then to win his capital, by the time it came to me it was on the level and it’s stayed that way.

  He was surprised at himself for the sudden temper, over such a small thing. This damned business . . . And he wasn’t so juvenile as to harbor any honor-of-the-regiment chauvinism for the Los Angeles Police Department as sacrosanct; but for some nineteen years a large part of his life had been bound up with it. It wasn’t very often that the L.A.P.D.—or any other efficient police force—got itself into a position like this, and it wasn’t a happy position for any representative. The hell of it was, he was beginning to think it might be a bigger, cruder blunder than anybody had suspected . . . not just on the Wood case. And that he didn’t like: very much he didn’t like that.

  It was a quarter to one of this hot, still September Sunday. Mrs. Haines’ apartment was in Bellflower; he drove up to Hollywood, to where the Woods still lived. The house was a sprawling frame bungalow, neatly maintained, on a quiet street. The girl who answered the door was relief and promise after Fairless and Mrs. Haines: about nineteen, luscious young rounded figure innocently displayed in shorts and halter top, and a boyishly friendly grin. Edith Wood, the sister.

  "Oh," she said to his explanations. "Well, I’m the only one home, but I guess you can come in, Lieutenant. Off the record, I’m always getting warned about strange men, but after all if you’re not safe with a policeman, when are you? The rest of the family’s gone to the beach, but I had an essay to do for English Lit .... About Mary Ellen?"

  —and she sobered. "Unless it’s something awfully important, maybe it’s just as well you ask me—Mother and Dad, well, they’ve never really gotten over it, you know—"

  "Understandable," said Mendoza, sitting down.

  "Can I get you a drink or something?—I was just going to have some lemonade, it’s all chilled in the refrigerator—no trouble .... But what’s this all about, after all this time?" She had nice topaz-colored eyes, intelligent, and she cocked her cropped brown head at him shrewdly.

  “Unfortunately," he said, "I’m afraid you’ll be getting the answer to that in the papers soon. If I told you all about it now, you might be a little prejudiced against me as a representative detective. All I—"

  "Oh, I don’t know," she murmured.

  "All I want to ask you, it’s something you may not be able to tell me." Maybe it was the contrast of his reception here, but he felt oddly at home in this big, cool living room with its comfortable shabby furniture. The girl looked s
ideways at him (frankly interested, curious, a little gauche as yet and yet knowing that: her awareness of herself and him somehow endearing); and suddenly he knew it wasn’t the room, or the friendly welcome, made him feel that way. Something more personal. She reminded him of Alison . . . not in any physical way: in herself. The kind of girl Alison would have been, eleven or twelve years back. This direct look, this promise of something more subtle than beauty. Alison. . .

  "¡Caray, soy on loca completo—going senile!” he thought to himself irritably. Let it go, for God’s sake, forget it, no post-mortems! (And a whisper at the back of his mind saying, but you know why, don’t you? Just think a minute: you will have to face it, admit it, sooner or later, you know.)

  "What I want to ask you, Miss Wood,"—he flicked his lighter quickly—"is about your sister’s friends. If you’ll indulge me a moment without knowing why. She wasn’t going steady with anyone? Were there many young men she dated?—how many?—who were they?" Thompson had covered all that, but you had to start somewhere.

  She studied one scuffed toe of her old flat sandals. "It’s funny, isn’t it," she said irrelevantly, "after a while you get to a place where you can be—objective—about it. You know? Where you can look back it without feeling an awful 1ot." She shot him a quick glance. "If you know what I mean, you can see that somebody dead—somebody you really loved—that there were good and bad things about them ....Have you found out Mr. Haines didn’t do it after all?"