by Dell Shannon
The Missing Persons files told them her name, Madge Parrott; she’d made a statement at the time, as had various other people including Tony. Nothing had indicated that Julie hadn’t just drifted oif voluntarily. Madge had admitted that Julie had recently got acquainted with a free spender, some kind of oil worker on vacation, who’d taken her around. Men like that were more or less transient workers—he’d moved on, too, and they couldn’t locate him; it looked probable that Julie had gone with him. Neither of the girls apparently was a very orderly housekeeper, and Madge was forced to say that she couldn’t be a hundred percent sure Julie hadn’t taken a few things, but if so she hadn’t taken much, and not her only suitcase. But oil workers made money, and maybe she expected him to get her everything new and better.
So, de veras, it was a democratic country and theoretically its agencies didn’t favor one class over another, but things didn’t always work out that way in practice. Here there hadn’t been an anxious family of respectable citizens to demand more extensive police action: the girl was a loner, not important to anybody, and the police thought they’d figured out pretty accurately what had happened, and why go on wasting time making sure, for a girl like Julie? So there it had been left, understandably from the professional view—not so easy to forgive for the ordinary civilian who saw things in black and white.
Especially, thought Mendoza bitterly, when a paper like the Telegraph finished doing a job on it, blowing it up.
Madge Parrott had drifted on, no one seemed to know or care where, about a year ago. It was on the cards that publicity, a radio appeal, wouldn’t turn her up: she might not care for the idea of being mixed up with cops again, whether or not she had a concrete reason for staying clear. She might be in New York, she might have forgotten all about Julie Anderson. But they’d try to find her.
Dr. Bainbridge, mildly surprised at the body’s state of preservation, said he thought she’d been raped. He couldn’t as an honest man swear to it on the witness stand, after all this time, but he rather thought so, from a couple of secondary indications. At any rate, she had probably died of head blows, possibly of choking; the throat was lacerated, and the skull cracked in two vulnerable spots.
The story broke in the papers before the final results of the autopsy were in, but those boys didn’t need definite facts. She’d been youngish, she’d been choked and beaten, and buried: that was enough to connect her with Mary Ellen, and by inference with the others. A couple of papers reported the find in fairly noncommittal language, but the Telegraph blew it up under a byline every man on the force was coming to hate, Brad Fitzpatrick.
The chances were Fitzpatrick hadn’t ever possessed much love for authority, but a couple of other circumstances entered in. His paper had a policy of taking the most bombastic stand on any newsworthy subject, which the editors fondly claimed as crusading. More important, all this had come along at the psychological moment for Fitzpatrick, who had a personal grudge against the police uniform. He’d been picked up four times for speeding and twice for drunken driving; when Traffic picked him up the third time on that, two months ago, the judge threw the book at him and revoked his license. Consequently Fitzpatrick (who like everybody in that category had been unjustly treated—according to them) took great pleasure in needling the force on this business; and though he wielded a very blunt pen, he knew to a hairline where to stop short of personal libel.
He had some very nasty things to say about Anderson ....
NINE
Along with seven or eight other press boys, Fitzpatrick was waiting on the steps to catch Mendoza that next Saturday when he came back after lunch. "You got anything new for us, Sherlock, like maybe you just found out she bleached her hair?" Fitzpatrick was a big fellow in the forties, running to paunch, and a sloppy dresser; he grinned insolently at Mendoza over the shoulders of scholarly-looking Edmunds of the Herald, little Rodriguez of the Daily News, Wolfe of the Citizen.
"Nothing to make a story of, boys. You know routine doesn’t get us there overnight."
"Anything welcome, Lieutenant," said Edmunds mildly. "Any little scrap of stuff—"
"Sorry, nothing you haven’t got. You know about the radio appeal for the Parrott girl." Mendoza edged past; the group re-formed and barred his way again.
"My God, two and a half years they take to find out there’s a mass killer—now they’ve got nothing to say about how they’re hunting him! You have any idea how to detect anything, Sherlock—or d’you just sit around up there playin’ Deuces Wild with your sergeants?"
Mendoza gave Fitzpatrick a tight, polite smile. "Once in a while we get a little exercise cruising around handing out tickets to honest upright citizens."
"What the hell!" said Fitzpatrick, scowling. "Don’t you try to hide out any more facts on us, amigo, to cover up your bungling! I got a hunch that’s just what you—"
"¡Hombrate!” said little Rodriguez softly.
Mendoza’s grin tightened; Fitzpatrick was indeed a clumsy fellow, but it didn’t make him less annoying. "Out of the way, boys, you bother me, I’ve got work to do." They let him by reluctantly; and his expression was still grim when he came into his office. Sergeant Lake eyed him and said he supposed he’d had to run the gauntlet again.
"You are," said Mendoza, "too young and innocent to hear my unexpurgated opinion of Mr. Bradley Fitzpatrick."
"Oh, I don’t know, might broaden my experience like they say," said Lake. "Art’s got a little something for you."
Mendoza went on into the inner office and demanded Hackett’s news.
"I don’t know that it means much," said Hackett, gloomily. "We’ve turned up a couple more of our suspects-in-embryo, that’s all. Just creating more work—now we’ll have to look at them hard instead of for them." He flipped over a little stack of file cards on the desk.
"John Tewke, sex record, indecent exposure—two years back. He’d moved, and we’ve spotted him working at a gas station in Sunland. George Canfield, nothing to say he’s anything but an honest citizen, he’s one of those worked in Haines’ office at the time—you remember he was fired, so he never asked for a reference and we didn’t know where he’d gone. Now we do, he’s working for some outfit in Compton as a clerk. And here’s that one the sheriff’s boy was mentioning the other day, Brooke Edwards. I didn’t remember it myself, but it seems there was quite a little publicity on that case—he got off, the girl’s word wasn’t good enough—and he changed his name all legal by deed poll afterward, so people wouldn’t connect him. He’s now Richard Brooke, working as a bond salesman for a respectable brokerage down on Spring. And Adam Pfeiffer, who lived two blocks down from the Haineses house then and moved about a month later—nothing on him except that he fits the description and we couldn’t find him. Now we have. He got married, which is why he moved, and he’s living in Glendale and driving a milk route. He doesn’t sound very dangerous."
"I am forced to agree," said Mendoza. He sat down at his desk and flicked the cards away contemptuously. "I am the biggest damned fool walking the face of the earth, Art. Will you explain to me why, why in the name of heaven I went on driving eight-hour tours in that squad car?"
"What? When?"
"Sixteen years and four months ago," said Mendoza bitterly. "Out of a precinct house in east Hollywood. When the old man finally died and we found all those bankbooks and the safe-deposit boxes stuffed with land deeds and gilt-edged stock. Will you tell me? The hell of an inheritance tax they slapped on it, but there was still quite a lot left. In the neighborhood of three million apiece for the old one and me. I could have bought a yacht. I could have gone round the world. I could have opened an exclusive night club. I could have retired to study Yoga or sleight of hand—"
Hackett grinned. "Coals to Newcastle, that last idea—just judging from the couple of times I’ve sat in a card game with you."
"But no, me, I’m a nice idealistic earnest young fellow, I’d got interested in being a cop and a cop I stayed. Everybody ought to have s
ome regular occupation in life, I said. And so what do I end up with? Mr. Bradley Fitzpatrick and our elusive Romeo. And I have the premonition I’ll have them for the next ten years, if I last that long."
"¡Animo!" said Hackett with forced cheerfulness. "You never know when something’s going to break."
"If you’re going to play Pollyanna, you can go and do so somewhere else." Mendoza passed a hand over his face tiredly. He made jokes about it, but he wasn’t feeling humorous in this situation. Like all the men working the case, he was tired; he’d been putting in sixteen hours a day since it broke—more than any of them, because he was the man in charge and he couldn’t give himself time off. He was the one who had to keep all the threads separated, untangle the knots, and decide which ends to follow into the skein.
Tired . . . But he’d worked such hours before, cases as tough as this one, and never felt this deadly mental exhaustion—perilously near to losing interest in the whole damn thing, let somebody else worry about it . . .
He put his elbows on the desk, rested his head in his hands a minute. He had a little reputation at headquarters, Luis Mendoza, as one of the stars. Not because Luis Mendoza was any brainier than the next man—egotist though he might be, he knew that—but because he had come equipped with that tidy mind. Maybe from some crafty old Castilian military expert four hundred years back, or maybe from one of those Aztec engineers who’d so precisely designed those sacrihcial pyramids the archaeologists kept Ending. He liked things orderly, squared off. Give him something all in a tangle, he had to keep working at it until it was all straightened out. You might say it was just single-minded stubbornness, and it was helped along a little by that sensitivity for people giving him the nuances.
And usually he hit every new problem thrown his way hard and fast, feeling enthusiastic, feeling just naturally capable of solving it—because he was Mendoza, this bright fellow with a deserved reputation. He hadn’t hit this one like that, even the first day. He hadn’t felt all that usual enthusiasm for proving himself all over again. He’d fumbled at it a bit, too, worrying about decisions, unsure right away where to look, how to tackle it. And right now he wasn’t that headquarters star at all: he was a tired, irritated, even uncertain man—remembering again, vague and irrelevant, that he’d turned forty-years old last February.
And remembering (in the sympathetic silence there, Hackett letting him take a moment to himself) that aberration of last night . . . A little sluggishly his mind rose to tell him in defense, Not used yet to the old lady’s being gone, missing that sense of family. Eso era todo, that was all, that was all.
Sergeant Lake came in and laid a slip on the desk before him. "Tele-type, Lieutenant."
Mendoza raised his head slowly. "All right, thanks, Jimmy."
* * *
He had come in late and gone through all the usual motions: made a little fuss over the cats, cut up fresh liver for them, undressed, and had a bath. He sat up in the big bed smoking, for a while, and they came up around him, his only family now, his dear creatures so graceful and amusing to watch. The two small ones washing, settling down for the night, and the miniature lion El Senor trying to catch the smoke wisps in his big blond paws. And quite suddenly the grave silence of the big, solid-built apartment late at night had struck him to the heart with loneliness—Mendoza, always as self-sufficient as one of his cats! He was a man content in the life he had: so it was a strange and even frightening thought, sliding into his mind unbidden: what did he have? He had upwards of six million dollars, and three cats to welcome him home.
But, a momentary mood: to the outside world Mendoza looked pretty much the same all the time, equable of temperament-but inside, he was up or down from mood to mood between two seconds. The way he was made: keep up the mask, the camouflage.
So he got up, and went and poured himself a drink. He brought it back to the bedroom with him, and as he sat down on the bed he knew what he wanted more than the rye. He wanted most violently to be with Alison. There was oddly, no desire in him to make love to her, he was too tired: only to be with her, for the desultory talk they’d so often shared, or no talk at all, just the sense of her presence in the room. Alison of the quick unsentimental mind, the humor that matched his own, the personality tuned to the same wave length.
And he looked at himself in the mirror and told himself he was the kind of fool he’d never thought to be. The trap, the trap—however pretty it was hidden. This sentimental Anglo-Saxon notion, true love everlasting. A fable for the children. It was the tangible plane only that mattered: in al wider sense, hadn’t he found it out long ago?—all the other pretty fables too, the ones the priests told.
And he laughed, and told himself wryly he was an egotist: he wanted somebody to talk to, somebody sympathetic. Come down to it, it was probably one reason Luis Mendoza liked women, who by all convention learned to be such sympathetic listeners to men. And he drank the rye and put out the light, and after a long while he slept ....
* * *
The teletype was from a place called Murrietta. Madge Parrott had come into the police station there in response to the radio appeal. She was employed in a local restaurant; and Murrietta wanted to know whether they should take a statement and if so what about, or if L.A. would underwrite the cost of importing her.
"Hell!" said Mendoza. "I want to talk to her myself, I can’t tell anybody else what questions to ask—"
"Tell them to send her up, no expense spared."
"No. No. Ten to one she’s got nothing to give us at all, but if she has, I won’t have the press at her—just in case it’s something that shouldn’t come out. Bring her up, we’d have to let them interview her. And if Anderson turns out to be irrelevant to this case, I’ll be damned if I give the press any more reason to blow it up. They’d make headlines—New Witness Discovered. Let’s keep it all nice and quiet until we know. Where the hell is Murrietta, somewhere south of Elsinore, isn’t it?—give me a map .... Yes, there you are, call it ninety miles or a hundred. Pues bien, iré—I’ll go down myself, probably overnight. O.K.? What time is it?—twenty of two. I’d better get going then, you can carry on here, I’ll be back tomorrow morning."
"I don’t envy you the drive in this weather."
"Might as well be doing something as nothing."
“Nothing," said Hackett. "Are you kidding?"
Mendoza laughed and went out. All the reporters had gone, downstairs, except Fitzpatrick, who’d buttonholed Edmunds and was laying down the law about something to him, gesturing emphatically. Both of them stopped talking and got on Mendoza’s heels like a pair of well-trained hounds; they’d thought he was placed for the afternoon. "Something new come up, Lieutenant?"
"Where’re you off to, Sherlock?"
"It’s too hot to work, boys," said Mendoza, "I’m taking the afternoon off to visit a blonde."
"And I could believe that damn easy!" Fitzpatrick shot at him as he went past. Mendoza took the Facel-Vega out onto Main openly; he couldn’t very well do anything else. He grinned to himself, thinking of Fitzpatrick, licenseless, fuming at the driver they allotted him. No sign of them, though they’d be coming, but an old sedan with a "Press" sign and Edmunds at the wheel right behind him when he caught the signal at First. He’d have to go a little off his direction to lose them; he didn’t mind. He was ordinarily a scrupulously cautious driver, but what was the use of running something like a Facel-Vega if you didn’t let it out occasionally? He drove sedately up to the Hollywood freeway and took off like a scalded cat in the fast lane; this time of day it wasn’t crowded, and within five miles he’d lost the press.
They wouldn’t figure he was going home at this hour; he turned off at at Hyperion and went on up northeast, no further attempt at concealment. Home, he folded pajamas, put them with his razor into a briefcase, called on the one of his four helpfully cat-venerating neighbors at home, Mrs. Bryson, and asked her to see that his darlings were let in and out and fed for the next eighteen hours. Thoughtfully he put a
way the cuff-link case in a drawer (El Senor had yet to master drawers), set out fresh meals for them, and left.
It was just before seven when he got to Murrietta. He could have made it earlier; once he was out of the metropolitan traffic, somewhere the other side of Whittier, he made good time southeast. But from the look of Murrietta on the map, he wouldn’t find much effete accommodation there, and he stopped at Corona for an early dinner.
At the police station in Murrietta, which was about what he’d expected from the map, he announced himself to a big indolent-looking sheriff with remarkably shrewd eyes, who surveyed his tailoring, his moustache, his I. D. card, and the Facel-Vega parked outside the little building and obviously didn’t think much of any of them. "You must be real anxious to talk to Madge, Lieutenant, run down on purpose like this. Don’t strike me as very likely she’d know much about a nut like the one you’re after, but that’s your business."
"Well, you never know," said Mendoza amiably. A young fellow even bigger than the sheriff came in, was introduced as a deputy, and adopted a similar expression of politely veiled scorn for this city fop who called himself a police officer. "Where’ll I find her?"
The sheriff said kindly, "You go down this road ’bout a mile and a half and take the west cutoff toward Fallbrook, and half a mile or so on you’ll come to the Apache Inn. That’s where she works, see. Randolph Newbolt runs the place, you just ask somebody for Mr. Newbolt and he’ll likely let her take time off to talk to you."