The Knave of Hearts

by Dell Shannon

  "Listen," she said defensively, "neither of us ever welcomed just anybody with open arms. It wasn’t that kind of thing. But I guess you see what I mean, it was account of him being that way made me think—when I been thinking it over just lately—he was a kind of loner. Didn’t know any fellows around there, let alone share a cabin with any, or mix much with any crowd. You see?"

  "Mmh. Logical. Tell on."

  "That’s about it. If he told Julie his name that night, she didn’t remember it or tell me. She wasn’t interested—neither was I, then. But when I read about what happened to these others, I thought about him. It could be. I don’t know what you think about it, and what I’ve said—all I knew about it, and her—doesn’t look as if she’d ever have gone out on a date with him, nothing like that. But if he offered her a ride home from Tony’s some night—we didn’t have a car—or from the store, why, she’d have said yes quick, anyone would, a little thing like that."

  "Yes," he agreed. And all this was—like most of everything else they had to go on in this business—a very small scrap of what was only might-be evidence; but there was another little list of just possibly suggestive facts which was leading him on to wonder if it did connect. He stared at his empty glass, and he thought, Not Mary Ellen. But that was in the middle of the week. Topanga Canyon—the beach up toward Ventura, the other side of Malibu (and that was on a Sunday)—the beach street where Julie had been buried. Yes—no? Coincidence? Meaning anything at all?

  He looked up at Madge without seeing her very clearly. "Yes," he said, "yes. Tal vez—just maybe . . ." Balance the credits and debits. Another one to add to the list. The press had already done that, but on the other hand, maybe on this one some much more useful pointers where to look? He said, "I want a statement from you on this."

  "Sure, anything I can do to help, Lieutenant."

  "Let’s see if the sheriff can supply us a steno at this time of night."

  And he wondered doubtfully if they closed up the police station at nine o’c1ock, maybe, and all went home; but when they came past there was a light in a rear window, so he parked and took Madge in. The front office was empty, but there was talk and laughter from the rear and he went down a little duty hall. There in a back room sat the sheriff, the deputy Mendoza had met, and three others round a table under an unshaded electric bulb, over what looked to be a lively hand of poker. There was a good deal of smoke, a half-empty bottle, and a general air of camaraderie.

  The sheriff laid down his hand, innocently turned his back on the table, and came up to ask what he wanted. Mendoza explained. "Oh, sure, I guess we can take care of that for you. Andy here’s a pretty fair steno if you give him time." He wasn’t too pleased at having the game interrupted, but he knew his duty. "Madge really had something for you, eh?"

  "Very gratifying, in a way," said Mendoza, absently. He and Madge and Andy foregathered in the front office and Madge made her statement. They watched Andy copy it, Madge signed it neatly, and Mendoza said, "I’ll take you home, Miss Parrott—or back to work?"

  "I guess not much point in that now, they’ll be through the rush, and Mr. Newbolt’s nice, he won’t grudge me the pay anyways."

  Mendoza took her home through a labyrinth of dark lanes, and on his way back wished he had blazed the trail to the main street. He found the police station again, went in, and thanked the sheriff cordially for his invaluable aid. "I see you’re—mmh—whiling away the evening with a little friendly game." He gave them all a vague general smile. "I’ve been so busy lately, no time to re1ax—but they do say a change of occupation’s sometimes more restful, don’t they?"

  At this broad hint the sheriff looked doubtful, looked resigned, and then slowly another idea (Mendoza saw it germinate) occurred to him; his eyes rested a little thoughtfully on Mendoza’s gold cuff links, custom-made shoes, and Sulka tie. He said genially, "Like to sit in a few hands, Lieutenant? Glad to have you, hah, boys?"

  "That’s very hospitable of you," said Mendoza; he coughed gently. "I don’t often get the chance of playing, I’m afraid—they keep me busy, you know." He beamed around at introductions, advancing to the table. "Very nice of you indeed, I’ll enjoy a few friendly hands. Oh, nothing to drink, thanks, I never drink when I’m handling cards .... "

  ELEVEN

  Hackett sat looking at those file cards for a few minutes after Mendoza had gone, and then got up and stood staring out the window. There wasn’t really a great deal for him to do right now. A lot of hard work on this business, but it wasn’t as if there were a dozen witnesses to be questioned and requestioned by the top officers: most of the work at his stage was collecting facts—the men on the street did most of that—and thinking hard about them, arranging them in different patterns. And he didn’t know that any amount of thinking was going to get them anywhere.

  Maybe a hundred men (he hadn’t counted) who could be Romeo, just because of a very arbitrary connection somewhere. A connection to the Haineses’ former neighborhood in general. To Haines’ office. To sex-offense records. To the neighborhoods around where Piper and Teitel had met him. Things like that. And all of these possibles had to be looked at closely to be sure; the L.A.P.D. simply didn’t have the manpower to do that all at once, and would have to take them in batches, hoping to climinate as they went along. You had to start looking somewhere, but on an offbeat one like this that sort of routine wasn’t always very useful. Chance played such a large part, sometimes: the random coincidence.

  He might never have lived within ten miles of the Haineses; he might have known about that big back yard and the garden shed from having visited someone around there once, on business or socially. He might never have been in trouble with the police: millions of citizens never had. He might have been in those other districts, where he’d picked up Piper and Teitel, just on one occasion.

  Hackett sighed. Routine. Sure, it put together a lot of cases. There had to be routine. But from experience he knew Mendoza was right in saying that routine, hard work, wasn’t always the whole reason you got somewhere or didn’t. Mendoza the gambler seemed to feel it was as if Providence—or Something—sat up there dealing hands around, and this deal you got a couple of nice fat aces, next deal nothing but low cards. And on discard-and-draw, sometimes you got just what you were after to till out your hand, and sometimes the fellow across the table, the one you had to beat, got all the court cards instead.

  Mendoza, of course, didn’t think there was anything to it but blind chance, the way the deck got shuffled. Hackett, who wouldn’t call himself a religious man, persisted in feeling vaguely that always, when it came to the last deal—when all the chips were down—the deck was stacked against the Opponent.

  And of course—he’d seen that kind of thing work out more than once—the random chance could favor you as well as the fellow across the table.

  He came back to the desk and without sitting down he looked at the city map he’d been studying when Mendoza came in. There was a little thought, he couldn’t call it an idea, in his mind about that. Something he couldn’t very well explain to Dwyer or Higgins or Landers, any man out on the street collecting facts: something he couldn’t formulate except vaguely to himself.

  Take a map, any map, but maybe especially one of this place, the whole city. It told you directions and distances and the names of streets; it couldn’t show you all the little things, or the intangible things. What kinds of neighborhoods; where one kind turned into another kind. Relationships of buildings and houses and empty lots. What a given place really looked like. Or, of course, what kind of people lived there.

  And it was people who were important. Inevitably.

  This place. The biggest city in the world in area, four hundred and fifty-seven square miles of it. There were jokes about that; there was an L.A. City Limits sign at Boulder Dam over in Nevada, another somewhere up in Alaska. Well, it had just grown—one reason and another—and in all directions. And as far as people went, they were from all over: take any crowd at random,
only about one in eighteen would be California-born. And all kinds of people.

  Very convenient indeed if you could generalize with confidence, if people fitted nice and neat into the general-type slots—figuring it economically or any other way. Sure. And you couldn’t throw in your hand and demand a new deal, but you could always draw, hoping you’d get something useful. Hackett got his hat and went out, to chase a will-o’-the-wisp he wasn’t at all sure was there.

  The Haineses had lived a little way up from Franklin Avenue in Hollywood. Franklin was a minor dividing line of neighborhoods, right along there, running more or less across the top of Hollywood east to west. Not very far above it was the line of foothills, with the San Fernando Valley on the other side, no natural passes here; there wasn’t much level ground above Franklin. Twenty or thirty years ago Franklin had been an exclusive street to live on, as had the few little winding streets north of it then developed and built on. Down below, there had been and were side streets crossing Western, Van Ness, Gower, Vine, Cahuenga—the main drags—which were residential, but not as exclusive: respectable middle-class, some better than others, some rental-zoned. But business had grown inexorably all around and between Western and Van Ness, here, and while there were still quiet residential side streets—the Woods’ house was on one of them—a lot of it to this and that side was beginning to look a little down-at-heel. As for Franklin—who had the money to keep up city estates like those now?

  Mostly they were two-storey stucco, bastard Spanish or Mediterranean, at the top of immense sweeps of terraced lawn: looking down their noses, like a row of elderly dowagers at a modem miss in a bikini. And not so well kept up these days as they had been. Hackett reflected, driving past, that falling heir to one of them when old Aunt Mary died—as a lot of poor devils had—would be acquiring a white elephant....And here was the street the Haineses had lived on, Birch Avenue. He

  turned up it.

  After the trial and the denial of the appeal—probably when all the money was gone to the lawyers—Sally Haines had sold the house. Hackett didn’t know who owned it now, but he wasn’t interested in the house. He drove past it; like some of its neighbors it was vaguely colonial-style, white stucco and frame, with a low wall; like most of them, pretty well kept up. This wasn’t a brashly fashionable area by any means; these houses were just a little newer than the big places along Franklin, built when it was beginning to be prohibitive to maintain a twelve-room house. It was conservative upper-middle-class here; the houses were all twenty or thirty years old, but the taxes would run higher than Hackett would care to pay.

  He turned left at the next narrow street and two city frontages up saw the mouth of the little alley to the left. It didn’t continue across; probably its existence was due to some divergence in the original subdividing of this area. He remembered that it wasn’t very long—a block or so—and seeing the place in three dimensions, rather than on a map, he could see why it attracted traffic. These streets ran diagonally up here, and anyone on foot who was going or coming from nearby on Birch Avenue, or Archer a block up, or View Terrace, which he was on now, would find the alley a little short cut, closer to Franklin.

  They had drawn a circle on the map, twenty square blocks or thereabouts, and men had canvassed the whole area collecting statistics. And maybe none of it meant a damned thing. Also, of course, they had looked at this particular small center of the circle a little closer (and so they had before, at the time of the Wood case). If there was anything out of the ordinary, anything here, somebody should have spotted it by now.

  Hackett told himself he was a damn fool clutching at straws, wasting time like this. He parked, walked across the little street, and started slowly down the alley.

  It was wide enough for a car, and up ahead he could see that some people had put rear double doors on their garages so they could come in and out by the alley. The first three houses from the corner, to his left, had achieved privacy by a high brick wall, a reed fence, and a wire fence overgrown with ivy. The next house apparently didn’t care who looked into its back yard; there was just a low stucco wall about two feet high, and he could see the rear and side of the frame garage, lawn, flower beds, rattan and aluminum patio furniture, the whole of the house, and a clothesline with a dozen diapers hung on it. The house next to that was the one the Haineses had owned.

  There wasn’t even a wall here, just a low picket fence a man could easily step over. Privacy had been arranged by the hedge—he didn’t know what kind—planted about twenty feet up the yard, right across except for a gap where there was a wooden gate. Midway between that and where he stood was the famous garden shed, a little corrugated-iron affair, utilitarian rather than beautiful, where tools would obviously be kept. Grass grew listlessly brown in patches this side of the hedge, but this part of the yard wasn’t landscaped: there was the big cement slab where an incinerator had stood before the city outlawed them, and off to the side a clothesline.

  Quite handy for disposing of Mary Ellen, especially after dark, as it had undoubtedly been. Provided you had a flashlight; because you couldn’t switch on the light in the shed even if you knew it was there. He walked on, to the boundary of the property that side, where the next garage cut off the view of that yard, and discovered that you could see into the shed: the door was half open and he could make out part of a shelf and the earth floor.

  He wondered who lived in that house now and whether they boasted about living there, showed visitors the shed, or kept quiet about it. He walked on up the alley, and there was nothing at all out of the way to see. Back yards, patio furniture, fences, wall. Four garages this side with alley entrances; most of the garages on the right side, toward the rising hill above, had alley entrances. On that upper side, you couldn’t see into the back yards as well because the hill rose quite steeply there, and probably only patches of those yards nearer the houses were leveled to make patios and drying areas.

  He turned around and came back, stopping to look over at the little shed again. The inspired hunch did not visit him; nothing said anything to him. He walked on moodily, head down, and about a dozen steps on collided violently with something.

  "Oh, excuse me!"

  "My fault, not looking where I was going," said Hackett. The young man had emerged, apparently, from a fancy iron gate in a tall hedge on the upper side of the alley. He’d left it open behind him, and Hackett could see a flight of worn stone steps leading up toward the house level. The young man was about twenty-five, blonde and nice-looking, with a friendly grin.

  He looked at Hackett, and he said, "You must be the new roomer. Mrs. Andrews said you’d be coming in today. Looking at the garage?—it’s a damned narrow spot to turn in or out, but it can be done, unless you run something brand-new. I don’t have any trouble, but I’ve got an old Plymouth, which you probably noticed—I’m your stablemate."

  "Well," said Hackett cautiously, "as a matter of fact—"

  "Somebody did tell you which garage? Ma Andrews isn’t always very definite—nice woman, but she doesn’t have any more to do with us than she can help, which is a welcome change from most landladies, isn’t it? It’s the one next— Look here," said the young man suddenly, "let’s not shout. Come up here—there’s that Smithers woman out in her yard, and I don’t want to get Ma Andrews in trouble. Not that we know the Smithers would, but better safe than sorry." He drew Hackett inside the gate. "It’s the next garage down, belongs to Mrs. Markstein next door. She lets Mrs. Andrews—they’re old friends, you see."

  "I see," said Hackett. In a dim way, he thought he did.

  "I suppose she told you to be careful. Er—going and coming and so on. I mean, you never know—just takes one of these letter-of-the-law people, and Ma Andrews’d be out of luck."

  "I see," said Hackett again. A doubtful small excitement rose in him. Did he? The young fellow had evidently assumed he was turning in this gate. "Er—" he said, "suspicious neighbors?"

  "Oh, well, no, or she couldn’t have kept it
up this long, but you know how people are—I understand there’s a couple of new families around, who don’t know her, and let just one whisper get out about devaluing the property—"

  Hackett shoved his hat back a little and remarked conversationally, "That’s right, hit them in the pocketbook and they really feel it."

  "Too true. And while there are a few drawbacks—she doesn’t like you to keep a bottle around, but she’d never dream of poking her nose inside your room to see, you know—very welcome change from most landladies—and they’re all much more comfortable rooms than you’d find anywhere else, as you know or you wouldn’t be here. Well, I won’t keep you, I’m late for a date now—my name’s Robbins, by the way—let’s see, you’re Garner, aren’t you?—nice to have met you, I’ll see you around." And with another friendly grin he swung off down the alley. Hackett waited where he was, head cocked, and heard garage doors pulled back, the coughing protest of an old engine warming up; it died away down the alley.

  And here was something they had missed.

  Zoning, he thought. I’ll bet that’s it.

  He came out to the alley again, and counted houses down to its mouth. The sixth one in. He walked up the hill to Archer Street, turned left, and counted down. A big, dignified old Mediterranean stucco, ten to twelve rooms, probably: grass a little too long in the strip of front yard, a couple of loose tiles on the roof.

  He went up and rang the doorbell, and in a minute took off his hat to a p1easant—faced gray-haired woman in a printed cotton housedress.

  "Yes?"

  "I’m Sergeant Hackett from headquarters—police," and he showed her his I. D. card. "I’d like to talk to you for a minute if I may, Mrs. Andrews—isn’t it?"

  Her expression tightened a little. "There was another man—just the other day. I don’t—oh, well—"

  "Yes," said Hackett, and came in as she stepped back with a reluctant gesture. Old, good furniture, nothing fancy, but the living room looked lived—in, comfortable. Some sewing piled on one chair; she picked it up, the needle still stuck in it, held it on her lap as if to remind him he’d interrupted her.