The Knave of Hearts

by Dell Shannon

  "Why should you think that?"

  “Oh, well, I never thought he did, you know. He hadn’t—that kind of violence in him. If you know what I mean. I mean, well, you get feelings from people—ideas of what they’re like. You know? I don’t know, maybe it’s a funny thing to say—Mr. Haines, well, if Mary Ellen had been the kind of girl who didn’t care, the casual kind, you know, he’d ’ve—made love to her, and neither of them would have thought much about it. But he wasn’t the kind to use any force about it." She was still looking at her sandal, the visible scarlet-nailed toes. "I never said all this to Mother and Dad, they never thought but what— And the police were so sure, too, and after all they ought to know more about it than me. I just wondered if you’d found out anything more. Maybe I’m only imagining things, and I won’t ask any"—with a shy half—defiant grin—"awkward questions. But I don’t know why you’d be around again now, unless—Oh, well. Maybe we’ve just got to think, something like destiny .... I—Lieutenant, I guess I wouldn’t like to have Mother and Dad have to hear this—you know, sometimes older people think a little different about these things—"

  "Off the record," he said. "I promise." He put out his half-smoked cigarette in sudden distaste.

  A sidelong smile. "Well, I—you know, it was almost a year and a half ago, I was only seventeen .... You said you wanted to know about boys she— Naturally, you sort of forget all the things you— didn’t really like in somebody, when they’re dead—"

  "Sisters," he said, reading between the lines, making it easy for her, "don’t always get along. Sure. Off the record." That was one of the little difficulties he’d often faced: anybody recently dead—hard to get at the truth about them from conventional relatives and friends.

  "Mary Ellen and I always got along O.K.," she said absently. "Nothing like that. No, I never said so, nobody’d have listened anyway, but I never could see Mr. Haines doing it. I did wonder if it might have been the new one, the one she’d just met."

  Mendoza ripped open a fresh pack of cigarettes with less than his usual care, offered her one, lit both. Talk about stacked decks! The kind of thing that turned detectives gray. With all the scientific gadgets they had to help, what the job came down to was coping with people. You could ask all the indicated questions, look in all the indicated places, file it all in black and white for careful study, and still you could never be sure you had it all. Some quirk of human nature, some irrelevancy, innocently, by chance, screening the one important piece in the jigsaw puzzle. And coming out—if it ever did—by chance too ....Thompson had been a good man. But because a shy seventeen-year-old had hesitated to speak up, a little something never coming out. "The new one," he said noncommittally. "Who was that, and what about him made you think—?"

  "I never said anything to anybody about it, there wasn’t anything to say—just a crazy idea, maybe. I never met him,” said Edith. "Mary Ellen didn’t talk much to me about that kind of thing, not as much as she would have to friends her own age. Like Judy Gold or Wanda Adams. The reason I just sort of wondered, you know—well, it must have been someone she knew, mustn’t it? That was one of the reasons the police thought of Mr. Haines. It was afternoon, broad daylight. Ordinarily, Mary Ellen’d have come right home after her last class, or if she had a little shopping to do, she’d have been home by five or half past. So it must have been right then, and—just as they said about Mr. Haines—whoever it was offered her a ride home, something like that. Because she’d never have let herself be picked up, and nobody could be kidnaped off a city street in broad daylight .... That Sergeant Thompson was very nice and sympathetic, but"—she cocked her head, wrinkled her small nose charmingly—"it’s not quite the same, getting a—a background in questions and answers, as knowing at first hand. Is it?"

  "No. This new boy?"

  "Not a boy. Mary Ellen—that’s what I was getting to—she was awfully particular, too much so. Old for her age, people said—you know, serious—I guess she was, you know, mature. She’d never go out with a lot of boys who asked her, because of some silly little thing about them, the way they dressed or used slang or drove a car. She thought most boys her age were uninteresting, didn’t know how to act to a girl. That was why, I guess, she’d never gone steady with anyone. There were some nice boys she could have gone with, but—it always seemed to me—she thought she was too good for them. She expected too much, it you know what I mean. And that was why she was all excited about this one. She’d only met him a couple of days before, I think, the way it she talked. She hadn’t been out on a date with him yet, or we’d have met him and I could tell you more about him. But she thought he was going to ask her, she said. I don’t think I ever saw her so—you know—set up over a b—a man. She was really a little silly about it. She said he was smooth, had awfully nice manners, and he wasn’t smart-aleck or kiddish like the boys at college—she thought he was twenty-nine or thirty. His name was Edward Anthony. I remember, I said he sounded like a gigolo—somehow I got the impression of those, you know, courtly manners, a little too smooth—and she got mad and wouldn’t say any more about him."

  Yes; human nature. See those other girls .... "Where did she meet him, do you know?"

  "She got mad before she told me that. This was the day before she was—was killed, Lieutenant, I ought to have said. She was really sold on him .... Well, I don’t know that anybody would have mentioned him to the police—I don’t think Mother and Dad ever heard about him. Mary Ellen kept things to herself a lot, that sort of thing anyway—she never said much to me. And it all went—sort of fast, after they—found her, you know, and everything seemed to point to Mr. Haines, and—with Mother and Dad carrying on so, and of course I was—I don’t suppose anyone’d have listened to me if I’d had anything definite to tell. But since then—thinking about it without feeling so much—I’ve just wondered. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all, of course. She knew a lot of people she’d have taken a ride from if they offered it. But—most of those, she’d known quite a while and ridden alone with before, and why just then should one of them—?"

  “Edward Anthony," said Mendoza. "Yes. Maybe it means something, maybe not." He looked at her, getting up: at her direct eyes and the something in the cock of her brown head that reminded him of Alison. "I’m sorry, it’s going to be hashed over again, Miss Wood. Not nice for any of you. Just one of those things."

  "He wasn’t the one, you’ve found out. How awful," she said. "How awful—for everybody. Poor Mrs. Haines—and you too."

  "That’s probably the first and last sympathy we’ll be offered in this mess," he said bitterly. "Thanks very much for the kind thought."

  And he was already, that early in the case, beginning to have a nightmare vision .... They cracked jokes, in Homicide, about Mendoza’s hunches: Luis and his crystal ball. Hunches didn’t come out of nowhere; he knew himself well enough to acknowledge that it was an almost feminine sensitivity for people, so that the nuances got through to him by something like radar, which produced most of his hunches. And they would be very damned helpful sometimes, pointing a direction to make a cast. But right now he didn’t welcome the hunch he had, and he hoped to God he was wrong.

  FOUR

  He got addresses from Edith Wood; he looked up those two girls she’d mentioned, friends of Mary Ellen’s. Neither was home, this summer Sunday. He made appointments to see them later, with a curious Mr. Gold and an alarmed Mrs. Adams. He sat in the car and looked at some other names and addresses he’d taken down. The law offices would be closed, of course. Finally he turned back east and drove down to Hawthorne, to the apartment house where, sixteen months ago, Celestine Teitel and Evelyn Reeder had shared quarters.

  Miss Reeder had moved, the manageress told him crossly (he’d disturbed her afternoon nap, by her déshabillé). No, not then: about two months ago. She’d got transferred to another school, and wanted to be closer. Well, she’d left the new address, on account of letters and so on .... Yes, the manageress could look it up, she sup
posed, if it was urgent. Mendoza exerted himself to put out a little charm; she thawed, I and retreated to rummage through her desk.

  Three o’clock found him back in Hollywood, out west this time. He ran his quarry down in the upper apartment of an old duplex: a dreary, neatly sterile place of drab color and content. Miss Reeder resembled her apartment. She sat bolt upright on a sagging sofa and regarded Mendoza uneasily; he deduced with no difficulty that in Miss Reeder’s philosophy all males were slightly suspect to start with, and one with a moustache, smooth address, and elegant tailoring was admitted to a téte-a-téte at obvious peril to any virtuous female. She was about forty, sandy-haired and spectacled.

  "Celestine—" she said with a little gasp when he’d explained, asked his question. "Such a terrible thing—an awful warning of what can happen. I’d been nervous about it, I begged her to use more caution, you know—going off to such lonely places to do her sketching—one never knows what dangerous characters—"

  He listened to her, murmured agreement, asked his question again.

  She stared at him a little fuzzily, her pale eyes enlarged by thick lenses, seen full on.

  "Oh, Celestine was a very quiet person, never one for-for much social life. I—neither of us went out a great deal—only her sketching that took her out to such places .... Gentlemen? Well, I don’t think—no, I don’t recall that she ever— But surely, Lieutenant, I’m afraid I don’t quite understand, it wouldn’t have been anyone she knew! Some criminal—some mental defective—lurking—"

  He asked the question again, patiently. Miss Reeder adjusted her pink plastic glasses and looked thoughtful, looked startled. She said slowly, "Well, it is a peculiar coincidence—now you ask about it specifically—naturally it never entered my head to mention at the time, because, my goodness, the kind of person people like ourselves would know—it just didn’t seem at all relevant—but now you recall it to my mind . . ."

  * * *

  He dropped in at his office downtown an hour later. Hackett had been and gone; he had left a page of notes on McCandless centered on Mendoza’s desk. Mendoza glanced over them without sitting down. Hackett didn’t know about this little idea, but Hackett wasn’t lacking in brains or imagination; if something had suggested it to him too, it would be just more confirmation.

  Not a great deal to say about Pauline McCandless. You got the impression, a colorless nonentity of a girl, not many friends, not many interests outside her home and her work at the library. She was on duty there, that particular week, from nine to six; she’d just finished a tour of night duty. And she didn’t come home after six o’clock, that day. So—

  September the fifth. Daylight saving still on, but even without it not dark then. "¡Caramba y todos los diablos del inflerno!" he muttered. "Chance—chance! But we’ve been stupid here, damn it."

  Hackett hadn’t been able to contact the mother yet; he’d talked with a couple of the girls who had worked with Pauline. They said among other things they’d felt sorry for her, because the mother was a tiresome hypochondriac who’d never let the girl call her soul her own—awfully old-fashioned and puritanical.

  This isn’t much to go on, sorry. Not much to get, I’d say. But see times on Piper and Wood. Can’t count in Teitel on that angle, or can we?—daylight, but not town, lonely spot. ¿Y pues qué, what of it? I don’t buy the idea yet but, Galeano wonders too, somebody she knew? Maybe?

  Mendoza exclaimed violently, "God damn it to hell and back!" Sergeant Thoms, who at Sergeant Lake’s desk on Lake’s days off, put his head in the door and asked if Mendoza had called. "I did not—there’s nothing, nada absolutamente, you or me or the Chief or the newest rookie in uniform can do about this! Only one indicated move occurs to me—the city should instantly requisition enough money to give every member of the force a course in elementary logic. I’m going home, Bill. I may take myself straight up to Camarillo as a voluntary mental patient. Better yet, I may take several precinct lieutenants and a few of the sheriff’s boys along with me."

  "You sound like you need a drink," said Sergeant Thoms.

  "And that is also one excellent idea," said Mendoza. He tucked Hackett’s notes into his pocket and left and, unusually, he did stop for a drink on the way home.

  After the drive across town in traffic, in hundred-degree temperature, the air-conditioned apartment was haven. Two of the cats came to greet him pleasedly, the ruddy brown Abyssinian Bast and her adolescent daughter Nefertite, who was convalescent from surgery to insure that the number of cats in the household remained static. She talked to him loudly all the way across the room, in the piercing voice she had inherited from her Siamese father; and Mendoza had a good idea what she was talking about. "What has he been up to today, this witch’s familiar? And where is he? No se preocupe, I don’t blame you two well-mannered 1adies!"

  The record-cabinet door was open; the electric clock lay on its face on the mantel; several books had been pulled out of the bookcase, and the leather case for cuff links, from the dresser in the bedroom, lay open on the kitchen floor, quite empty. "¡Qué exasperación!" said Mendoza, not amused. “¡Señor ladrén malicioso e ingrato, ven acá!"

  El Senor regarded him interestedly from the top of the refrigerator, but made no move to obey this peremptory command. Twice the size of his mother and sister, he looked rather like a small lion in color transposition—his black coat, blond paws, eyebrows, stomach, and tail tip shining clean, his sea-green eyes cold for this lack of respect due any member of his race. "What have I ever done to deserve you?"

  Mendoza asked him. He plucked El Senor off the refrigerator, put all the cats out, and spent half an hour crawling about the floor searching under the furniture, before recovering all three pairs of his extra links.

  That cat was getting just too damned smart at opening things; for once he was disinclined to be indulgent.

  He poured himself a large drink straight from the bottle of rye in the kitchen and took it into the living room. It wasn’t once in six months he had more than one drink a day, but what with this and that he needed more now. The hell of a state this force was in, to slip up on one like this, right under their noses! To have a muddle-minded female civilian spot it first for what it was. All right, for the wrong reason—or not all the right ones, just on a wild guess really, but—! And, clara que si, good excuses why it hadn’t been spotted before. Sure. This was a big town, the biggest city in the world in area if not quite in population; its police force was perennially shorthanded, and also—more to the point—different police forces held tenure within its borders. The county boys, outside city limits: suburban forces. All cooperating together, but it added to the difficulty of keeping things straight.

  Teitel: she’d been found just within the county border, along the beach, so the sheriff’s boys had looked at her first, and then when she was identified the Hawthorne police came in because she’d lived there. Piper: also found in the county, and later handed over to the Wilcox Street precinct on account of her Hollywood residence: later turned over to Headquarters.

  McCandless: headquarters got her right away, because Walnut Park wasn’t an incorporated suburb, was within the regular L.A.P.D. jurisdiction.

  Not as if one investigating officer had been in on all those cases from the start. Not as if they were offbeat homicides, to get a lot of publicity, so that all the details were common property. Hawthorne had one, the L.A.P.D. had two, and those two nearly nine months apart.

  Teitel, a year ago last July: nearly fifteen months ago, two and a half months after Mary Ellen Wood. Piper, last January, six months after Teitel. McCandless, two weeks and a day ago—September fifth—nine months after Piper.

  And what in between, in this sprawling metropolitan place with its fifty or sixty suburbs, its six and a half million people? Other assaults, rape and attempted rape, and a few ending in murder.

  He finished the rye, all but a mouthful. All right, for God’s sake! he said to himself. Wasting time tabulating the excuses. Too much
time wasted already. Get busy doing some constructive thinking about it.

  He swallowed the last mouthful, sat there laxly, empty glass in hand. After a while he noticed that there were a couple of notes propped on the desk: notes from Mrs. Bryson or Mrs. Carter, his neighbors who ran in and out waiting on the Cats, or from the maid-of-all-work, Bertha. Presently he’d read them; right now he was too tired, suddenly.

  No more little black-scrawled notes from his grandmother. Never any more, since six weeks ago. No more of her fondly automatic orders about regular meals, late nights, this pernicious habit of gambling: the transparently cunning little traps to get her Luis safely married to some decent, modest wife who could coax him back to the priests.

  He got up, went to the kitchen to pour another drink. He could hear her saying disapprovingly, Better you get yourself a good solid meal, you are tired and irritable because your stomach is empty, boy—men, they never know how to take care of themselves, like children they are.

  "Damn," he said to his drink softly. Things tied up. True enough, he hadn’t eaten since morning—in a while he’d get something, or go out but that wasn’t altogether the reason he was so violently out of sorts with himself. And his new bad business wasn’t, either. He’d been this way before that, and sooner or later he’d have to look at it square, straighten it out with himself. As that small voice kept telling him.

  Alison . . . Because you got into trouble lying to yourself, rationalizing. Let yourself get by with it once, after a while you couldn’t tell lie from truth, about anything.

  All right. He swallowed half the new drink. He was beginning to feel it now; he eyed the rest of it dubiously. In vino veritas?—maybe. If so, not very flattering to think the real Luis Rodolfo Vicente Mendoza was the one that showed in liquor. Spoiling for a fight with anybody who crossed his path: which was the reason he didn’t drink much.