The Knave of Hearts

by Dell Shannon

  "Well, I don’t need to tell you there’s nothing there. Rhoda being the kind she was, maybe she got to hitting the bottle and forgot all about the aspirin, sure. But—" Lockhart spread his hands. "I didn’t think so then and I don’t think so now. I didn’t see Gideon again, no reason to ask any more—it was all in my mind, just a feeling. Nothing at all to build a charge on. I just knew, somehow, sure as death. I couldn’t tell you why. I can see him going to visit Rhoda, you know—or maybe just, you might put it, decidin’ to stay once he was there, with that bottle of aspirin. Not even old Abraham could outlaw human nature entirely, and for all Gideon was a backward sort I don’t guess there was anything wrong about him that way. Don’t suppose he’d ever been in ten feet of anything female, that way, and we know what they say about the pot with the lid on too tight. I can see, with the old man gone and nobody to keep tabs on him any more, Gideon might have found out he still had a little of the old Adam in him. And maybe when he got there that night, knowing what Rhoda was and all, he just all of a sudden let go. But I don’t know why he should have killed her—and if I wasn’t just woolgathering, it wasn’t anything very sane, because it was a pretty bloody business. Unless, maybe, he just felt so damn guilty afterward and took it out on her."

  "It could be, it could be. I like this very much—it could be a big piece of our jigsaw puzzle. The first one—setting the pattern . . . I don’t suppose you’d be here telling us all this if Gideon Wise was still behind the counter of his drugstore in Mount Selah."

  "That’s so. I don’t know where he is, gentlemen. This was three years back last month, like I say. Old Abraham two months dead. How he’d managed to save that much I don’t know, but it came out he’d had nearly five thousand in the bank. It came to Gideon, of course. We’d wondered if he might maybe kick over the traces some—you know—but he never showed a sign of it, that couple of months. Before Rhoda. Then,"—Lockhart leaned to deposit the stub of his cigar in the ashtray—"day after I’d talked to him about that, he shut the store and left town. They rented the building—matter o’ fact it belongs to my brother-in-law—there wasn’t a lease. Gideon just went over to Bill Green, it came out later, and offered him the stock at his own price. They’d rented the old place they lived in too, and he never took any of the furniture—nothing but his clothes, and the money out of the bank, and got a ride up to the county seat with Jim Hotchkiss, where he could get a train. To somewhere. And that’s all I know. What was in my mind, what brought me here today—I saw that woman, and she wasn’t killed by a sane man. Especially if I’m right and it was Gideon. I’m no doctor, but they say anything improves with practice. When I read about this joker you’re after here, and what you think he looks like, and the way he’s killed these women—I just wondered. It connected up in my mind. Because in a kind of way, I never felt very easy about Rhoda and Gideon. Nothing I could do about it. I don’t know how much this means to you, of course. Don’t know if you’ll think it worth even mentioning, that a couple of people—after Gideon’d left and people were talking about it, you know—remembered him saying once or twice he’d always wanted to see California.”

  "This story I like better and better," said Mendoza. "Are you offering odds against it, Art?"

  "I don’t think so," said Hackett slowly. "It sounds an awful lot like our boy, Luis. The pattern. Coincidence is a funny thing, but most coincidences, you look at them twice and it’s not so random as it looks—good solid reason behind it. But evidence, my God—"

  "The hell with that," said Mendoza, sitting up with a jerk. "Since when have we had any good legal evidence on this at all? Mr. Lockhart summed up the situation for us on that—the dismal truth is, if we picked him up in the next hour, tell me what we’d hold him on, even for a day! ¡Ay qué risa! Over two and a half months since Pauline McCandless, the latest one—up to twenty-eight months ago on Anderson. None of them so conveniently clutching a strand of the murderer’s hair or a button off his coat, to identify him—no nice footprints or fingerprints—nothing, nothing to say the man who killed them is this man or that man, nothing to match up to any man we bring in. Not a soul alive who ever met these charming newly acquired boy friends—just secondhand reports of what the women said he looked like. Don’t we know how many men conform to that vague description! The pattern in more ways than one—we’re stuck for evidence just the way you were, Mr. Lockhart. For once, I’m not thinking about the D.A.’s office—we can’t. We’ve got to spot him, and then look for the evidence to bring him in on."

  "That makes sense, Lieutenant, but you may never get any."

  "And if we don’t, maybe there’s another card up our sleeve. Whether our boy is your Gideon or not, he’s not a sane man—if he once was, not after four, five, six. Patterns—patterns, sure—you can go by them some. A lot of woman-killers, mass killers in general, have the notion they’re specially appointed executioners, under God’s protection. Sometimes when they’re caught up with, it sends them all the way over the edge. We might just get a confession. We might just get a suicide. But I’ll worry about that when we’ve spotted him, for ninety percent sure, anyway. And I’m hoping to God, friend, your boy is our boy too, because if he is, you’re the only witness this side of the Mississippi who can recognize him. In fact," said Mendoza, gazing at Mr. Lockhart fondly, "you are worth your weight in gold here and now, and I’m tempted to give you a bodyguard to see you don’t get killed in traffic or fall off any ten-storey buildings until you’ve had a good look at all our possibles—”

  Lockhart grinned. "I’ll take good care o’ myself, always have."

  "Because just in case you can tell us that one of our maybes is Gideon Wise, this background rings up a lot more preponderance of suspicion on him—evidence or no. Especially if he’s changed his name, which we seem to be taking it for granted he has. Why? Did you make him a little nervous, possibly? I wonder. Or maybe he just wanted to make a fresh start .... But I’d like to know if he’s here, I would indeed."

  "How many possibles you got and where are they?"

  Mendoza closed his eyes. "I haven’t counted lately. In round figures, about fifty. With special check marks on a dozen or so."

  "I pried three more names out of Mrs. Andrews yesterday afternoon," remarked Hackett. "Haven’t located two of them yet."

  "You boys must have been busy,” said Lockhart. "When and where I do I look at them?"

  "Art, you can act as a special escort. Take the Andrews list fiirst, I think. They’re all scattered, Mr. Lockhart, miles apart all over the damn town, and we’ve been dodging reporters and—mmh—1ooking at them from a distance, no direct questioning yet, because there’s just no solid reason whatever to connect any of them with any of the murders. So you’ll look at them one by one, please, in their daily habitats—it’ll make a nice guided tour of L.A. for you. It may take two days, it may take three. Because we haven’t been able to tie strings to all of them, of course—in any way. I’m banking heavily on the Andrews list, which Hackett’ll explain to you—we’ve got four possibles there who just it might be a little more possible than any of the rest, and so there are men keeping an eye on them, sniffing around a little closer. And of course, our Romeo may have no connection with your Gideon, and whether he has or not we may not have him anywhere on our lists of maybes. And just in the event that it is Gideon, and he isn’t in our lists, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to look in the phone book and so on—he might not have changed his name. We may find him living somewhere, innocent as day, as Gideon Wise. And even if he did come to California, there’s a lot of it outside L.A. But I have a feeling about this—just as I do about Mrs. Andrews’ clandestine roomers. That we’re coming a little closer."

  "And suppose I look at all of them and say no."

  "Way the cards fall. Like shooting craps blindfolded, damn it. Sure. We don’t know. If you don’t spot him among these, that doesn’t say one of them isn’t still our boy—no link with Gideon. Doesn’t say yes or no—we might not have him listed a
t all, as I say. All we can do is 1ook."

  "So we go and look," said Hackett with a sigh, for summer had absent-mindedly overstayed itself into this month, "and you’ll be sitting here in a nice air-conditioned seventy-seven-degree temperature, waiting for the green light. Some day, Mr. Lockhart, I’m going to get to be a lieutenant too."

  "You malign me," said Mendoza. "I’m going to be out chasing a little hare of my own. No, wrong metaphor—hoping to find one to chase. We’ll see—we’ll see .... "

  SEVENTEEN

  Say it was or say it wasn’t, thought Mendoza, sitting behind the wheel of the Facel-Vega waiting for that three-way signal where Chautauqua ran into the coast highway. If Lockhart looked at this George Hopper, this John Tewke, this William Bell—at any one of the fifty, sixty men they had listed in this long, patient, dull hunt for the maybes—and said, that’s Gideon Wise, it was (call it) seventy-five percent sure that was their boy. No more, because there was nothing to say for sure Gideon Wise had killed Rhoda Vann: just that little tingle up Chief Lockhart’s spine (and how well Mendoza knew the feeling!) But something more, nice and definite, to point out Romeo: and then they could go to work on him, look for the kind of evidence the law demanded. But! The odds might not be quite astronomical that Gideon and Romeo were the same man; they were the hell of a lot longer that there’d be any tangible evidence to be got, even when they’d spotted him.

  The light changed at last and Mendoza slid down the hill behind an old Ford and turned into the slow lane of the Malibu road. Like roulette, he thought. Cover yourself with the side bets. Most of your stake on the one chosen number—por las malas or par las buenas, all or nothing—but the side bet on red or black.

  They could use all the little pointers of evidence there to be found. Maybe to be found.

  Himself, he was operating on all cylinders again, the thinking-machine Mendoza. With the little advertised tablets, he’d slept: he got up feeling dull, slow, but a couple of cups of coffee spiked with a finger or two of rye, he was O.K., he was himself. If he’d admit it, if he ever thought about it that specifically, this was always his chief stimulant, the one thing in life he got the big kick out of: the challenge. Running a trail, when it began to warm up a little.

  A feeling for people, sure, he had: what produced his hunches. But essentially, he told himself, he was the thinking machine. He didn’t give one damn, admit it honestly, for the corpses: what the hell, people lived and died, liked to think there was an ordered destiny to it, a benevolent God or a stern paternal one arranging it all: damn nonsense, wishful thinking; people lived and died, blind chance. Quite a lot of them not worth mourning. Never missed, important only to themselves. He was sworn to uphold the law of the land but, admit it, that wasn’t why Mendoza had built a little reputation as one of the bright boys: he didn’t give one damn for the law per se, or people in the abstract. Lo que not se puede remediar, se ha de aguantar—what can’t be cured must be endured. He was a realist and a cynic; he wasn’t a police officer because he had any earnest high ideals about people or the law. Oh, admit it, it was the hunt he’d enjoyed always—the purely intellectual brain stimulation of getting all the pieces tidily put together. He’d fumbled around at this thing for a while, got off to a bad start, and maybe all the press hullabaloo had thrown him off stride, maybe that was it. That had, praise heaven, settled down somewhat now: he had an idea there’d been a quiet word between the Chief and a couple of editors, but whatever reason, the Telegraph had eased off on its campaign against the uniform.

  And he felt all right in himself again; he was really getting to this now, the old Mendoza.

  Right now, with the fattest part of his stake riding with Chief Lockhart, he was about to place a side bet.

  They had a lot of scientific gadgets to help them these days, but to a great extent those were most useful after the hard work was all done, to produce legal proofs for the D.A., to confirm the little hunch. In the last analysis, any definition of detection came right back to the formula stated by the idiot boy who found the lost horse.

  Mendoza liked the Gideon Wise thing, and one reason was that it gave him a little more character to build on, for Romeo. If. But Gideon or not, Romeo was apt to be that general type.

  So now Mendoza idled down the right lane of the coast highway thinking and looking—for a place which might have struck that one’s fancy.

  A loner (Gideon or not): one who tended to shy away from crowds and people in general—shy, lacking self-confidence, just not liking people, or preferring his own company. So he would like a place more or less isolated, not crowded cheek-by-jowl with a dozen and one other little cabins. People like that tended to get set in their ways, to dislike change of any kind, and so if he was financially able at all, ten to one he’d buy or rent a place—which would also be cheaper in the long run than staying at a different motel every weekend. (Gideon had five thousand dollars, or nearly: not much to buy much of a place, but he might have found one for that—especially a very isolated, maybe a dilapidated place.) A man, and one like this, probably wouldn’t care a great deal about what a place looked like: he’d just want something reasonably weatherproof, isolated, and within his financial reach. (Gideon had probably an ingrained distrust of time payments, from his miserly father; and there was the car—he must have bought a car when he landed here, to be going back and forth from beach to city. Yes, but he’d recently bought a new, or fairly new, car—so maybe the old one had been a piece of used tin he’d picked up cheap.) And, de paso, of course his financial state depended on other things: when he had bought or rented or leased a place down here, whether it was just after he’d got to California, whether he had a job then, what kind of job it was. He wouldn’t, probably, have much preference to the exact location: unless he’d fallen in love with a particular stretch of beach, and that you couldn’t reckon with. He had been seen, at any rate, along here somewhere, and beach dwellers tended to be curiously insular; they stuck mostly to their own little length of coast, the familiar stores and restaurants and bars. (Probably not bars, with Gideon.)

  Coming down off Chautauqua here, Mendoza was a little way out of Santa Monica proper and its beach; he didn’t think Romeo would have been attracted there, for a couple of reasons. Inside city limits, prices and rents would be higher, and also, that whole stretch of coast behind him, until you got a good way below Venice, was solidly built up—jerry-built cabins literally leaning on each other all the way along, except for the fishing piers and boat docks. Below Venice was Playa del Rey, a little too exclusive and expensive.

  And it was from here on up he’d been seen. A long while back: but Pauline McCandless had met him at the beach two and a half months ago, or thereabouts. She’d worked regular hours; so it had probably been on a weekend. So he still liked the beach; he might still own or rent a place here.

  Mendoza looked thoroughly as he idled along, scanning the right side of the road. Along here not a great deal to see. Except for occasional abrupt little cutbacks, the palisades went up steep and sheer, and there were houses at their tops, but dignified family houses, view houses that sold in the thirty-thousand bracket. Down here, an occasional restaurant built on several levels against the hillside; gas stations; entrances to little canyons. Here was Colibri Avenue, where they’d found Julie; he turned up it, but the half-dozen houses up there, on the winding little street, were all too big and expensive to be called beach cottages. He came back and went on up the highway.

  He was working hard, the purely intellectual exercise he had set himself so many times before—getting into the skin of the man he was hunting, trying to feel as he would feel, see as he would see . . .

  Here was the broad, curving entrance to Topanga Canyon. He wasn’t bothering about Topanga, though Romeo had been seen there once. It was too big, and there were too many people living in it, scattered thickly around, a lot of shacks, a few nice expensive houses. Within five or six miles of the coast, at this end of the canyon, he didn’t think ther
e’d be any cottage isolated enough to appeal to Romeo: that was a friendly, fairly crowded community. It might be that Romeo had a place there, but it was too big to cover this way.

  On up, it was all emptier: and the hill dropped away so that there were stretches of flattish, sometimes rolling land to his right, inland. Once in a while a house, a street. He stopped and marked his first possibility a mile up from Topanga—a small cottage standing alone about forty feet off the highway, nothing around it: he had to come up on the shoulder to read the house number, and it looked empty. (But this was a weekday.)

  In the next ten miles he collected fourteen possibles: cabins in isolated situations, eight of them on side streets off the highway—or rather dirt lanes which might some day be called streets—the rest on the highway. He put check marks beside those; he had an idea that Romeo might like to be as near the sea as possible.

  He drove five miles past Zuma Beach West and with some trouble made a U-tum and headed back, keeping an eye on the ocean side now. Less to be seen on that side: mostly public beach, some government-owned and sternly fenced off. Restaurants. He didn’t bother to turn off where the highway swerved inland around Malibu village: that was all movie-star class in there, nothing for him.

  Just where the highway began to swerve back toward the coast, he saw another possible. On a narrow dirt track leading toward the beach a few hundred yards off—the main road here curled round in a semicircle, and the track bisected it. He braked, turned in; stopped and looked