by Dell Shannon
and then automatically bent and ground it into the dirt—native westerner, fire precaution on his mind six months a year. "Christ! Julie—that’s Julie?—we dug up—"
"I will be damned," said the county sergeant interestedly. "So she was dead after all. Well, there’s a date for you, anyway, and she’s kept damn well, I will say—wouldn’t have said the stiff was that old myself."
"Tell, tell! " begged Mendoza. "What, when, and how?"
The sergeant cupped both hands, half turned, expertly snatching a light from the breeze, took a long drag on the cigarette. "It got transferred downtown to Missing Persons-your boys can give you the details. Let’s see, it was June two years ago, call it twenty-seven months. Not a big thing, you know—this chippy walks off somewhere, and the girl friend she lived with keeps saying something’s happened to Julie. We looked around, asked questions, but what the hell? It looked a little funny that she hadn’t taken most of her belongings with her, but a girl like that, they come and go, and she might’ve taken off with some guy who’d just hit the jackpot at Vegas, or for some other reason expected to start out fresh somewhere. She didn’t have much to leave, that’s for sure. We figured it like that. It happens. Don’t know what headquarters figured, what else they got. "
"It happens. A girl like what?"
"Waitress at a joint up the road, along Zuma Beach. Part-time," said the sergeant, and spat aside. "Lived with another girl in a rented shack up in Topanga. Had quite a lot of company. Funny thing, though, never any other girls."
"Either of them ever been tagged officially on it?"
"Uh-uh. No complaints, no loud parties, and outside city limits. We’re all for morality down here, Lieutenant, but we’d need about twenty times the number of men we’ve got to keep the citizenry in order on that count, and what the hell?—live and let live—they didn’t run a pro house, they both held regular jobs. Like Prohibition. You can’t enforce laws against human nature. You got a whole roomful of files listing every easy dame, amateur and pro, up in the big city?"
Mendoza laughed. "¡A ver, atro chiste—tell another joke! Sure, I know, impossible. And so nobody was really much concerned. As you say, these women drift. But also, they’re apt to come in for this sort of thing,"—he nodded at the corpse. "What made you think of our Mr. X?"
"I’ve seen a lot of stiffs, Lieutenant, and a few this long gone. And like we can see, she’s kept damn well. I took a good long look, and I didn’t need a doctor to tell me what happened to her. She was raped and beaten, and I think choked too—"
"You can still see some of the marks," agreed Hackett. "Far as the rape goes, maybe it’s just inference, but her clothes are torn—that’s what it looks like. Surgeon’ll say for sure, let’s hope he can. But the main thing is, along with that, she was buried. Like Mary Ellen."
"Y-e-s," said Mendoza. He got up, brushed down his trousers mechanically, looked at the little book balanced on his handkerchief-shielded palm. "And it rather looked as if our Romeo meant to bury Jane Piper too, didn’t it? I see what you mean, Art, but it’s a little thin. Natural thing to do with a corpse. A lot of murderers do it. Of course, it isn’t very usual with rape cases, that I grant you. Our Romeo’s only done it once that we know of, and maybe meant to once more. Of course—" He was staring down the hillside, to the glittering stream of traffic sailing by, beyond to the smooth white beach and the summer-tranquil blue-green glass of the Pacific coming in in low lazy breakers—"of course there’s something else. A part-time whore, sure, she meets all sorts, she’s more apt to meet violence maybe, but on the other hand, who needs to rape her? . . . Yes. Maybe he didn’t know she was a whore? And when a rapist assaults a respectable woman, and ends by killing her, sometimes it’s in the course of stopping her noise but sometimes too it’s deliberate, with the idea that she might be able to identify him. Why would it matter here? Even if she knew him, she wouldn’t be likely to bring a charge, if her reputation was commonly known—to invite trouble on herself—"
"Yeah," said the sergeant. "Don’t want to butt in, Lieutenant—I just ride herd on speed demons and like that—but I read the papers, and I’ve had a couple ideas about your Mr. X. You got a real job on your hands with this one, any cop knows—the citizenry, damndest thing, they seem to figure a guy like Mr. X goes around wild-eyed and acting queer all the time, ought to be a cinch to spot him. We know better, hah?"
"Don’t we, indeed. Me, I’m a very democratic fellow, I listen to anybody’s ideas."
"Well, you take women," said the sergeant. "Sure to God they can drive a man nuts without half trying—but whatever the head shrinkers say, a man don’t have to be legally nuts to turn into a rapist. What occurred to me about Mr. X., I just got to thinking about two guys I picked up. Different times, I mean. One of ’em, his wife yelled for help and we kept him overnight—she wouldn’t lay a charge and we had to let him go. Seems he couldn’t get a kick out of it unless he hurt her. I don’t know why, about that one—if there was any reason except that it takes all sorts. The other one was kind of interesting. We picked him up—it was nearly five years back, around there—on the complaint of a girl who’d dated him. Said he assaulted her, in his car. There was quite a legal hassle over it, because she didn’t have too good a reputation—point is, what came out about him, in his defense. Don’t ask me if the head shrinkers are right, saying the way Mama housebroke us accounts for whether we turn out ballet dancers or hoods. But this guy, his mother had been a lush, and he had the hell of a grudge on her for, you know, neglecting him, embarrassing him in front of kids he knew, and bringing men home for a roll in the hay with the door open, that kind of thing, so he got what he called a ‘distorted view of sex’—you know. Seemed he had a kind of puritanical complex about it, he had all the normal instincts but he couldn’t get worked up to really laying a female unless he made it like rape. I don’t know, it just struck me your boy might be made that way. So he can’t get there at all unless he gets it by force."
"You find them," said Mendoza. "So you do. And that’s for the lawyers, afterward—what the hell good does it do us looking for him?" He dropped his cigarette, ground it under his heel. "What was that one’s name?"
"Brooke Edwards."
"It rings a bell. We’ve been back through the files on every sex case the last fifteen years—"
"Brother," said the sergeant respectfully. "And following ’em all up? When’ve you and all the rest of the L.A.P.D. been eating and sleeping‘?"
Hackett groaned. "Well may you ask! You ask me too sudden, I’d have to stop and think if my wife’s blonde or brunette."
"And they turn down the last proposal for a pay raise," said the sergeant philosophically. "Ridin’ around in nice late-model cars all day, in natty uniforms, not a thing to do but hand out traffic tickets to V.I.P.’s who hadn’t ought to be expected to obey the ordinary laws. And have the gall to ask more money for such a soft job! I read the letters-to-the-editor, don’t I know."
"Where did Anderson work?" asked Mendoza abruptly.
"Joint called Tony’s, about four-five miles up the road .... Yeah, same owner far as I know. Couldn’t tell you about the girl friend, that’s quite a while for a dame like that to stay one place."
"Missing Persons may have something to offer," said Hackett.
"Yes—I’d like to talk to the girl friend. Well, this may be a mare’s nest—maybe one of her customers thought she’d overcharged him and got mad—but we’ll follow her up as far as we can to be sure. The press will be a lot surer right away than I am—"
"They always know," agreed the sergeant.
"Have you had dinner, Art? Suppose we take a ride up to this Tony’s and see what we can get. The ambulance can take her away now, downtown—I’ll send a note along to rout out Bainbridge immediatamente, I want all he can give me right away. Statements and so on, tomorrow will do. Thanks very much, Sergeant—come on, Arturo."
EIGHT
That, of course, had been one place to start a cast—o
ne of many places, so big and vague an area that a lot of men had spent a lot of time looking, not sure just what they were looking for. They’d weeded out about fifty of the known rapists, men involved in other kinds of sex offenses, from the past twelve or fifteen years—men who in age, physical description, educational background, might possibly be their boy, by what had been learned from the girl friends. And damned little that was.
It added up to confirmation, the same man; but beyond that, all too vague in detail.
They knew now from Pauline McCandless’s bosom confidante (a girl who’d shared her room in college) that Pauline had met this Christopher Hawke at the beach—not that she was the kind who picked up boys like that—but he’d been really nice, you could tell, Pauline had said (a little defensively, it could be deduced). Awfully polite, not forward or anything like that—and good-looking, tallish and thin with brown hair, about thirty. He was a bookkeeper or something, some office job, worked for Western Oil, and he had a new car, sort of racy and bright blue, a hardtop roadster.
They knew from the apartment manager’s wife and a girl in Jane Piper’s office a little of how it had gone there; Jane hadn’t said quite as much as Pauline, and also that was longer ago, people forgot. Jane had met a Stephen Lord or maybe it was Laird, some name like that, casually in the bank; they’d got to talking, and he’d seemed nice and polite, nothing brash, so probably if he’d asked for a date she’d have said yes, though they couldn’t say if he had. He had, they seemed to remember, been very generally described as tall and thin and brown-haired and about thirty.
Which was more or less what they had from the proprietor of the shop where Celestine Teitel had met him, and from Miss Evelyn Reeder. One of Mary Ellen Wood’s closest girl friends had been out of town that relevant week, hadn’t heard anything from Mary Ellen, but the other one, Wanda Adams, gave them a little confirmation. Mary Ellen had confided the story of her casual meeting with him—in the college cafeteria—and her hopes that he’d follow it up; she was, said Wanda, but really smitten with this Edward Anthony. Who was described as tallish and brown-haired and about thirty.
It added; but that was just defining the problem. They started to work on it the best way they could, by routine. They looked at the sex offenders; they looked at other files. They drew an arbitrary circle on the map, its center the Haineses’ former house (because you couldn’t take the whole damned town—it was a nightmare of a job even for twenty square blocks) and looked to see who had lived there at the time and moved since. No guarantee that their circle took in the right block—or if he’d lived within ten miles, then—or that he had moved, of course. No guarantee that, if he hadn’t lived around there long, a landlady would remember him, give any kind of description. And he might, even if he’d been there, have been then and now a family man, or living with relatives, in a private house. But just to give the boys another little job, out there tramping the streets in this heat, Mendoza was having them conduct as detailed a canvas as possible on all single men renting apartments or rooms in the district.
That was odds or evens: pure luck if anything turned up there. They drew a blank, expectably, at the L.A.C.C. registrar’s office. Mary Ellen had said he’d told her he was thinking of registering for an adult evening class in woodworking. But the registrar didn’t have his name, that one at least: so they took a long hard look at every male then and presently registered in any of those courses. None of them who answered the physical description even vaguely corresponded otherwise; they all looked like upright citizens.
There was a lot of routine that had to be done even though it was thin hope; you just never knew where you’d hit pay dirt. They looked at all the men listed in the phone books and city directories who were surnamed Anthony, Hamilton, Hawke, Lord, Laird. They annoyed the local offices of Western Oil and got a list of all their male office help to look at. They looked at all the male employees of that bank building where Piper had met him, and at all the shops and offices around that music shop where Teitel had met him.
Inevitably they’d got repercussions from the press stories. Sometimes publicity helped; it jogged the public memory; and they couldn’t pass up any bet, however absurd it looked. So they wasted time investigating about a dozen men suggested by nervous and imaginative people phoning in to say excitedly they were sure he was the one, he acted so queer. Among those, they did pick up an escaped mental patient from Camarillo, a gentle, bewildered middle-aged man who assured them that his only motive in talking to strangers in public was to spread the news that any day a superior race of Venusians was due to invade the earth and destroy all life, and he wanted to urge as many souls as possible to seek out salvation in time. "It matters not the church, you know, if they are received into some faith—so many scoffers and sinners, all doomed to perdition unless they take immediate steps—"
And Hackett said, "Welcome the Venusians! At least we wouldn’t have to worry about Romeo any more."
The rest of those were all innocent as day—at least of any connection with this case: two amateur poets, three amateur inventors, a medical student in the throes of studying for finals, and assorted ordinary citizens.
They hammered at Sally Haines grimly, and at Fairless, ignoring the jibes and insults: they got a list of the Haineses’ acquaintances, of men who might have had some kind of imagined grievance against Haines—or her. They looked at everybody who’d worked in Haines office. Maybe ten or fifteen years back that vague description of Romeo’s car as racy would have helped a little: but you could use the word for a lot of standard models this year, and bright blue wasn’t so unusual a color.
That was something to check against any suspect when they isolated a few with something definite on them.
From all the places they had made casts, they’d drawn fish; and that was one of the worst headaches they had to cope with now—keeping tabs on all the might-be’s. They knew now of approximately a hundred men, one of whom might be their boy. Men whose general physical descriptions tallied, out of the list of sex offenders; residents near the Haineses; employees in that building (and of Western Oil, and Haines’ old office, and places around that shop); even a few men from the phone list of those names, and—just groping in the dark—from their files of men with any sort of record. As time went on, they’d doubtless collect more. And an eye had to be kept on them; they had to be investigated in the hope of narrowing it down more, eliminating, and pinpointing.
Of the names thus singled out they hadn’t found all of them in person, not yet. Some had changed addresses, drifted away—who could say where?—and they had to be located, looked at, just to be sure. Some of them would be honest citizens—a press appeal would bring them in to report and clear themselves; some of them would have reasons for staying clear of the cops, and would have to be found the hard way if at all; and the one they wanted would be lying very low indeed.
They had just so many men to work the routine; in this ten days they had accomplished a quiet miracle in checking all the places they had, all the people. But that was the kind of thing that didn’t show—the press boys couldn’t make a good story out of patient clerks poring over file cards, tired street men plodding from house to house in the pitiless October heat, asking the same questions .... The radical papers jabbed fretfully at the police, accusing, challenging, deploring. The others ran cautious editorials pointing out the excuses for delay, the difficulties of the hunt. The public wrote letters to the editors agreeing or carping: people who disapproved of the press printing anything about such sordid affairs ("simply encouraging our youth to dwell on filth"); people who had theories; people who advocated a vigilante committee to aid the police. ("¡No faltaba más que eso—that’s all we need!" said Mendoza.)
The Chief was wisely avoiding all but noncommittal comment. He knew Mendoza, but no officer was much different there: the hourly demands for progress reports, the exhortations, merely irritating. And now, this one.
"Discard and draw," said Mendoza, edging the Face
l-Vega out into highway traffic. "Another one—just maybe in the series—another chance of more evidence, another trail to follow. But also the chance of another dead end. You’re looking thoughtful—has inspiration visited you?"
"Favour que me hace, you flatter me," said Hackett. "I was just thinkin’, Luis," and he sighed. "I can remember eating breakfast because it was eggs a new kind of exotic way—with cream and green pepper and melted cheese and little bits of ham mixed in—"
"Scrambled eggs Creole.”
"I guess. But I didn’t have time for lunch. And what we hear about this joint of Tony’s, I don’t suppose we can expect much of a meal."
"You think too much about your stomach," said Mendoza. "And if you’re not careful, that girl will have you grossly overweight. I swear you’ve gained five pounds just in the month or so she’s been feeding you. You’ll get high blood pressure and have a heart attack and have to retire at forty if it doesn’t kill you—"
"But it’s such a nice way to die," said Hackett wistfully.
* * *
Mendoza didn’t think much of Julie Anderson. The fellows in the detective novels, everything was so nice and neat for them: the interest in clues was their obscurity. In real life, the first problem usually was to decide whether it was a clue at all and, next, if it belonged to this particular problem. What had happened to Julie Anderson had happened to a lot of women in the last twenty-seven months, and their boy hadn’t accounted for them all, that they knew. Among the small list of things his known crimes had in common was the fact that the women had all come from a very different background than Julie Anderson’s.
But it had to be looked into, of course.
The proprietor of Tony’s just laughed when they asked him about her. If he tried to keep track of all the chippies he had in and out of here, he wouldn’t have time to run his business. Sure, he remembered Julie—and was interested to hear about the murder, that was something, and probably (he added thoughtfully to himself) would bring in some trade .... Yes, he remembered her going off, it had been a damn nuisance, but these girls, no responsibility, she wasn’t the first or the last had just walked out without warning. And what the hell were they getting at, asking if he knew anything about her private life?—he was a respectable married man. So what if she hadn’t had a very clean reputation?—he had some like that working for him sometimes, and sometimes the other kind, he didn’t ask for a letter from their ministers before he hired them, and it wasn’t any of his business what they did in their off time. And about the girl friend he didn’t remember anything if he’d ever known anything.