Case Pending - Dell Shannon (11 page)

He had formed some very nebulous ideas-mere ghosts of
hypotheses-overnight, out of the evidence a second murder inevitably
added to the evidence from a first one; and he thought that a
restricted locale was natural, if you looked at it a certain way. At
least, it was a fifty-fifty chance, depending on just what kind of
lunatic they were hunting. If he was the kind (disregarding the
psychiatrists' hairsplitting solemn terms) whose impulse to kill was
triggered suddenly and at random, the odds were that his victim would
be someone in the area where he lived or worked: and considering the
hour, probably the former. If he was the kind capable of planning
ahead, then the place of the crime meant nothing, or very little, for
he might have cunning enough to choose a place unconnected with him.
But to balance that there was the fact that madmen capable of
sustained cunning generally chose victims by some private logic: they
were the ones appointed by God to rid the world of prostitutes, or
Russian spies, or masquerading Martians. Like that. And to do so,
they had to be aware of the victims as individuals.

So there was a chance that this one, whatever kind he
was, lived somewhere fairly near the place he bad killed. And that
might be of enormous help, for it suggested that he had lived (or
worked) somewhere near the place Carol Brooks had been killed last
September. If he was the man who had killed her, and Mendoza thought
he was.

Sunday was only another day to Mendoza; he lay in bed
awhile thinking about all this, and also about Alison Weir, until the
sleek brown Abyssinian personage who condescended to share the
apartment with him, the green-eyed Bast, leapt onto his stomach and
began to knead the blanket, fixing him with an accusing stare. He
apologized to her for inattention; he got up and laid before her the
morning tribute of fresh liver; he made coffee. Eight o’clock found
him, shaven and spruce, poring over a small-scale map of the city in
his office. When Hackett came in at nine o’clock, he listened in
silence to Alison Weir’s contribution of the
muchacho
extrario
who stared, and grunted over the
neat penciled circles on the map. In the center of one was the
twenty-two-hundred block of Tappan Street, and in the center of the
other the junction of Commerce and Humboldt. Each covered
approximately a mile in diameter, to the map scale: call it a hundred
and fifty square blocks.

"Now isn’t that pretty!" said Hackett.
"And where would you get the army to check all that
territory—and for what? The idea, that I go along with, and if your
pretty circles happened to have prettier centers, say like Los Feliz
and Western, I’d say we might come up with something, just on a
check to see who’d moved where recently. But you know what you got
here!" He stabbed a blunt forefinger at the first circle. "About
half of this area is colored, and none of it, white or black, is very
fancy. Which also goes with bells on for the other area. Out on the
Strip, or along Wilshire, a lot of places, you’ve got people in
settled lives, and they leave records behind. City directory, phone
book, gas company, rent receipts, forwarding addresses. Here—"
he shrugged.

"You needn’t tell me," said Mendoza
ruefully. "This is just a little exercise in academic theory."
In these networks of streets, some of the most thickly populated in
the city, drifted the anonymous ones: people who wandered from one
casual job to another, who for various reasons (not always venal)
were sometimes known by different names to different people, and who
owned no property. Landlords were not always concerned with keeping
records, and most rent was paid in cash. There were also, of course,
settled, householders, responsible people. For economic reasons or
racial reasons, or both, they lived cheek-by-jowl, crowded thick;
they came and went, and because they were of little concern to anyone
as individuals, their comings and goings went largely unnoticed.

"If we had a name—but we’d get nothing for
half a year’s hunt, not knowing what to look for.
¡Qué
se le ha de hacer!
—it can’t be helped!
But if the general theory’s right, there’s a link somewhere."

"I’ll go along with you," said Hackett,
"but I’ll tell you, I think we’ll get it as corroborative
evidence after we’ve caught up with him by another route.
Somebody’ll see a newspaper cut, and come in to tell us that our
John Smith is also Henry Brown who used to live on Tappan Street. We
can’t get at it from this end, there’s damn-all to go on."

"I agree with you—though there’s such a
thing as luck. However!" Mendoza shoved the map aside. "What
did you get out of the Wades?"

"
Something to please you."
Circumstantially, the Wades were counted out. Ehrlich and his two
attendants at the rink had seen father and son leave, and agreed on
the time as "around ten to ten." The girl had been a good
ten or twelve minutes after them. By the narrowest reckoning it was a
twenty-minute drive to the Wades’ home, probably nearer thirty, and
a neighbor had happened to be present in the house on their arrival,
an outside witness who was positive of the time as ten twenty-live.
There hadn’t been time, even if you granted they’d done it
together, which was absurd .... The Wades,
pater
and mater familias
, might be snobs, with the
usual false and confused values of snobs (though much of their social
objection to the Ramirez girl was understandable: Mendoza, supposing
he were ever sufficiently rash or unwary to acquire a wife and
family, would probably feel much the same himself). But it could not
be seriously conjectured that a respectable middle-aged bookkeeper
had done murder (and such a murder) to avoid acquiring a
daughter-in-law addicted to double negatives and peroxide. And if he
had, it would hardly be in collusion with the boy.

"The boy," said Hackett, "hasn’t got
the blood in him to kill a mouse in a trap anyway—all you got to do
is look at him."

"I’ll take your word for it," said
Mendoza absently. He wasn’t interested in the boy, never had been
much; the Wades were irrelevant, but he was just as pleased that by
chance there was evidence to show that. And the Wades ought to be
very damned thankful for it too: they’d probably never realize it,
but without that evidence the boy could have found himself in bad
trouble. From Mendoza’s viewpoint that would have been regrettable
chiefly because it would have diverted the investigation into a blind
alley. They had wasted enough official time as it was.

He looked again at his map, and sighed. The
lunatic—of this or that sort—was his own postulation, and he
could be wrong: that had sometimes happened. Ideally an investigator
should be above personal bias, which—admitted or
unconscious—inevitably slanted the interpretation of evidence. And
yet evidence almost always had to be interpreted—full circle back
to personal opinion. There was always the human element, and also
what Dr. Rhine might call the X factor, which Mendoza, essentially a
fatalist as well as a gambler, thought of as a kind of cosmic
card-stacking. Much of the time plodding routine and teamwork led you
somewhere eventually; but it was surprising how often the sudden
hunch, the inspired guess, the random coincidence, took you round by
a shorter way. And sometimes the extra aces in the deck fell to the
opponent’s hand, and there was nothing you could do about that. The
law of averages had nothing to do with it.

"I dropped in to see if the autopsy report’s
come through . . . . oh, well, suppose we couldn’t expect it over
Sunday. Nothing much in it anyway. Back to the treadmill—"
Hackett got up. "I’ve still got some of the kids to see, ones
at the rink that night."

"The rink," said Mendoza, still staring at
his map. "Yes. We’ll probably get the autopsy report by
tonight—the inquest’s been set for Tuesday. Yes—
Vaya
. . . . todo es posible
. Yes, you get on with
the routine, as becomes your rank—me, I’m taking the day off from
everything else, to shuffle through this deck again,
por
decirlo asi
—maybe there’s a
marked card to spot."

He brooded over the map another minute when Hackett
had gone, and penciled in a line connecting the two circles. He
shrugged and said to himself, Maybe, maybe—folded the map away, got
his hat and coat and went out.

Downstairs, as he paused to adjust the gray Homburg,
a couple of reporters cornered him; they asked a few desultory
questions about the Ramirez girl, but their real interest was in
Sergeant Galeano’s husband-killer, who was of a socially prominent
clan. The more sensational of the evening papers had put Elena
Ramirez on the front page, but it wasn’t a good carry-over
story—they couldn’t make much out of a Hartners’ stock-room
girl, and the boy friend wasn’t very colorful either. The
conservative papers had played it down, an ordinary back-street
mugging, and by tomorrow the others would relegate it to the middle
pages. They had the socialite, and the freight yard corpse, besides a
couple of visiting dignitaries and the Russians; and a two-bit
mugging in the Commerce Street area, that just happened to turn into
a murder, was nothing very new or remarkable.

Maneuvering the Ferrari
out into Main Street, Mendoza thought that was a point of view, all
right: almost any way you looked at it, it was an unimportant,
uninteresting kill. No glamor, no complexity, nothing to attract
either the sensationalists or the detective-fiction fans. In fact,
the kind of murder that happened most frequently....The press had
made no connection between Elena Ramirez and Carol Brooks. No, they
weren’t interested; but if the cosmic powers had stacked the deck
this time, and that one stayed free to kill again, and again,
eventually some day he would achieve the scare headlines, and then—
de
veras, es lo de siempre
, Mendoza reflected
sardonically, the mixture as before: our stupid, blundering police!

* * *

Once off the main streets here, away from the
blinding gleam of the used-car lots, the screamer ads plastered along
store-fronts, these were quiet residential streets, middle-class,
unremarkable. Most of the houses neatly maintained, if shabby: most
with carefully kept flower plots in front. Along the quiet Sunday
sidewalks, dressed-up children on the way to Sunday school, others
not so dressed up running and shouting at play—householders working
in front gardens this clear morning after the rain. This was all
Oriental along here, largely Japanese. When he stopped at an
intersection a pair of high-school-age girls crossed in front of
him—"But honestly it isn’t fair, ten whole pages of English
Lit, even if it is on the week end! She’s a real fiend for
homework—" One had a ponytail, one an Italian cut; their basic
uniform of flat shell pumps, billowy cotton skirts and cardigans,
differed only in color.

At the next corner he turned into Tappan Street; this
wasn’t the start of it, but the relevant length for him, this side
of Washington Boulevard. He drove slow and idle, as if he’d all the
time in the world to waste, wasn’t exactly sure where he was
heading: and of course he wasn’t, essentially. It was a long street
and it took him through a variety of backgrounds.

Past rows of frame and stucco houses,
lower—middle-class—respectable houses, where the people on the
street were Oriental, and then brown and black; there, late-model
cars sat in most driveways and the people were mostly dressed up for
Sunday. Past bigger, older, shabbier houses with Board-and-Room
signs, rank brown grass in patches, and broken sidewalks: dreary
courts of semi-detached single-story rental units, stucco boxes
scabrous for need of paint: black and brown kids in shabbier, even
ragged clothes, more raucous in street play. A lot of all that, block
after block. Past an intersection where a main street crossed and a
Catholic church, a liquor store, a chiropractor’s office and a gas
station shared the corners. Past the same kind of old, shoddy houses
and courts, for many more blocks, but here the people on the street
white. Then a corner which marked some long-ago termination of the
street: where it continued, across, there were no longer tall old
camphorwoods lining it; the parking was bare. The houses were a
little newer, a little cleaner: they gave way to solid blocks of
smallish apartment buildings, and all this again was settled
middle-class, and again the faces in the street black and brown.

At the next intersection, he caught the light and sat
waiting for it, staring absently at the wooden bench beside the
bus-stop sign on the near left corner. Its back bore a faded
admonition to Rely on J. Atwood and Son, Morticians, for a Dignified
Funeral. There, that night, Carol Brooks had got off the bus on her
way home from work, and some time later started down Tappan Street.
She had had only three blocks to walk, but she had met—something—on
the way, and so she hadn’t got home. . . .The car behind honked at
him angrily; the light had changed.

Across the intersection, he idled along another block
and a half, slid gently into the curb and took his time over lighting
a cigarette. Three single-family houses from the corner, there sat
two duplexes, frame bungalows just alike, one white and one yellow.
They were, or had been, owned by the widowed Mrs. Shadwell who lived
in one side of the yellow one. On that September night the left-hand
side of the white one had been empty of tenants, the tenants in the
other side had been out at a wedding reception, the tenants in the
left side of the yellow duplex had been giving a barbecue supper in
their back yard, and Mrs. Shadwell, who was deaf, had taken off her
hearing aid. So just what had happened along here, as Carol Brooks
came by, wasn’t very clear; if she’d been accosted, exchanged any
talk or argument with her killer, had warning of attack and called
for help, there’d been no one to hear. She’d been found just
about halfway between the walks leading to the two front doors of the
white duplex, at twenty minutes past nine, by a dog-walker from the
next block: she had then been dead for between thirty minutes and an
hour.