The Knave of Hearts (21 page)

"A vacation,” she said. "And then this
has to come up." And there was in her tone, besides
exasperation, pride in his sense of responsibility, his strength as a
man of honor.

"I got to try," he said soberly. "Just
in case. You go and have a good time on your own, Mother, wherever
you fancy .... Thing is, man’s made a certain way, he’s got to do
certain things. Funny way to figure, too, I can’t help thinking—we
put off this vacation twice, and so I land here just this time, to
see the stories in the papers. Not to make out I’m all that
important, but it makes you wonder if it was meant. Maybe all for
something, make something happen or stop it happening. You don’t
know. Coincidence—maybe so. And maybe meant."

"You go along again in the morning, if you feel
you’ve got to," she said gently. "I’ll make out all
right."
 

FIFTEEN

"Oh, damn," said Alison to herself. She
hung up the receiver, resisting the impulse to bang it back in place.
Lame ducks! she thought. Why do I have this fatal attraction for
them?

Funny—or, of course, if you looked at it deeper,
maybe only natural—all these
substitutes
foisted on her, lame ducks. Natural, perhaps, because a man who
hadn’t acquired a wife before he was thirty or so was apt to be
either a little, well, backward in some way—irresponsible,
something like that—or the habitual wolf, nothing permanent. Unless
he was just unlucky—some people were, both sexes. Hard to figure a
reason, maybe. And about nine of the first kind to one wolf, out of
my random ten.

"Damn," she said again. She wasn’t
interested, by any remote stretch of the imagination, in this one—or
any of them these well-meaning people had urged (so subtly) on her.
But there was that thing called empathy, making her uneasily aware of
other people’s feelings. She supposed it was odd, when she set
herself up as an authority (in a way) on social behavior, that she
should be so inept at that kind of thing, the easy excuses of prior
obligations and so on. But, inevitably, the empathy told her of the
other person’s feeling, and almost without thought she softened the
phrase, flavored it with the friendliness, the warm apology, that
invited insistence . . . and so there she was, stuck.

And if she had to go out with the man, if she had to
saddle herself with him for an evening on that account, why hadn’t
she said, all right, tonight, get it over! Now, four days to have it
hanging over her. Saturday night.

Damn. He’d been so very persistent.

She wandered back into the living room. Ought to do
her nails tonight. Sheba had had a catnip orgy in the middle of a
sheet of newspaper spread on the floor; she was asleep on her back,
four black-gloved paws in the air, still wearing an ecstatic
expression.

Probably not an awful lot of money, thought Alison
vaguely; no need to dress up. The amber silk: it was old, but good.

Luis had always liked it.

Funny. This particular lame duck—funny about
people. Not bad-looking, enough intelligence and, oh, manner, to hold
that kind of job, but—nothing there, somehow. A window dummy
animated, very correct, very courteous, and very empty. She didn’t
want to go out with him, Saturday night or any other: why on earth
hadn’t she said so? All very well to be polite, but you got
yourself into things, unavoidably, if you cou1dn’t be just a little
rude sometimes.

Of course, some people, you had to make it more than
a little to get through to them.

Empathy.

She reached down for the paper, folding it over, and
Mendoza looked up at her from the top of the second page there. It
wasn’t a good picture, a candid shot snatched last year—she
remembered when they’d hrst run it—taken when there was all that
fuss during the Ackerson trial. He was coming out of some building,
hat in hand, glancing up sharp and annoyed at the photographer.
Reprinted here to illustrate this multiple-murder business there was
such a clamor about .... She hadn’t been following, it, she wasn’t
much interested; but it seemed—now she thought—quite a while
they’d been featuring it. A tough one, maybe. He must be worrying
at it—that terrific single-mindedness, that drive she knew so
well—if he’d lost his temper far enough to have a fight with this
reporter, so the headline said ....

She folded the paper and took it out to the kitchen.
She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat at the table drinking it
slowly, warming her hands on the cup. A hot, humid night, but her
hands cold. Cold hands, warm heart. Didn’t they say too—lucky at
cards, unlucky in love. Unlucky! Well, it depended which way you
looked at it.

(
Toma esa llavita de oro, mi
bien
.... Open my breast and see how much I
love you ....
Y el mal pago que me das
. . . and how badly you repay me .... )

Live and learn, she thought a little numbly. Trying
to make it the cynical, the sardonic reflection. At least, live and
learn. Long ago, that anonymous woman who’d insisted on talking to
her on a train somewhere—funny, couldn’t remember where—"It
just don’t matter, how he is or what he is, or how he is to me, if
he’s just there, that’s all. They keep saying better leave
him—they don’t know, that’s all. It just don’t matter—"

A lot of women like that. Silly women, muddle-headed
women. Men drunkards, thieves, bullies, leading them unspeakable
lives. She’d always wondered at it, felt a little scornful. How
could they, how did they? No pride, no self-respect as a human
person. No—no human entity of their own, was that it? Not Alison,
the high-headed, the self-sufficient, with standards and ambitions!
Never proud Alison, to let a man degrade her so.

(
Tama es cajita de oro, mi
bien ....
Take this gold box, my love, look
to see what it holds . . .
lleva amores, lleva
celos
—love and jealousy .... )

She knew now what women like that were talking about.
Shameful, shameless, but it was so: it didn’t matter. Nothing else
mattered at all, if he was just there.

Not that you could ever imagine Luis being unkind,
cruel, any way. All that sleek cynical surface, veneer; he worked so
hard to cover up that awful softness in him, that he was a little
ashamed of, somehow. Empathy again . . . Luis, smiling one-sided and
cynical on some sardonic little remark—and his hand so gentle on
the kitten in his lap.

But this way or that way, it just didn’t matter.
And she wasn’t—that was how far she’d come—even ashamed at
any loss of pride; she was just trying to get through this painful
time as best she could, because surely to God after a while it would
stop being so bad—it had to. And intellectually she knew it was as
well she couldn’t shut herself up brooding here, had a living to
get-must let people crowd in on her, day by day—but that didn’t
make it easier to take.

She finished the coffee. Ought to do her nails
tonight. It didn’t seem very important, worthwhile: fussing over
herself, for—other people. For this—this ridiculous and suddenly
persistent store-window dummy. It wasn’t funny any more, it was
almost tragic. What you asked of life, what you got.

And that was perilously
near to maudlin self-pity, which was a dangerous thing. She forced
herself up, emulating briskness; she went into the bathroom, got out
the nail-polish remover. That coppery color, if she was going to wear
the amber silk on Saturday . . .

* * *

"Oh, well, after all he was in a rather awkward
position, the Chief," said Mendoza with a one-sided mirthless
grin. "Officially—even to me—he can’t approve that kind of
thing, but at the same time he’s a cop too, and he sympathized with
my feelings. He said so—off' the record."

"Justifiable, but don’t do it again?"
said Hackett.

"That’s about it."

"It wasn’t just an awful smart thing to do,
Luis. Makes it look, in a sort of way, as if there was something
behind Fitzpatrick’s charges."

"Al1 right, so it wasn’t. These things
happen."

“
They do say," remarked Hackett, "that
the fellows like you, couple of drinks set them spoiling for a fight,
are overcompensating for an inferiority complex."

"I’m," said Mendoza, "being
subjected to sufficient irritation by this case and the press, and I
can do without the reported maunderings of the head doctors."

"It was a joke," said Hackett hastily,
"—the idea of you feeling inferior to anybody, from the
Archangel Gabriel down." He eyed Mendoza covertly, wondering.
About a couple of things. Because, while this thing was enough to get
anybody down, he’d known Mendoza a long time and he didn’t
remember ever seeing him quite like this. He just wondered.

It took people a little different, but in most ways
the same. Kept his private life very damn private, Luis, but
circumstance had put Hackett in the way of knowing Alison Weir; and
Hackett looked, maybe, like the big dumb cop of notion, but he saw
more than he showed or talked about. It wasn’t hard to figure
Alison; Mendoza was a different story. The camouflage, the front to
the world. Didn’t matter why .... Sharp enough to cut himself,
Luis, except just here and there. They said the wolves, woman after
woman, were proving themselves: that figured. Other ways too, with
most of them. Not that you could generalize. Go back to
beginnings—maybe because his name was Luis Rodolfo Vicente Mendoza,
this place and this time, and he’d got the dirty stupid Mex routine
so often. Reason he’d make himself a little reputation as one of
the bright boys. Had to show better than anybody else. Not that the
head doctors had all the answers, but—

Same time, reflected Hackett (looking at the page of
Tom Landers’ notes in his hand without seeing it very clearly),
same time, there was something else—individual, and yet in a way
another generalization. The wolves. Part that natural charm: part
too, damn what the head doctors said about inferiority complexes,
part the extra-strong sex drive. They contradicted themselves there:
admitted that was the engine power, that old devil sex—direct
drive, or rechanneled in other directions——that was the power
plant for the whole works. The ones who lived the longest, lived the
hardest, lived the highest—the producers, the creators, the
leaders, always the ones with the stronger-than-average sex drive.
And also the bad ones, the violent ones, too: naturally.

Equal to aggression: just depended which direction
the aggression took, right or left. Dexter or sinister . . .

So, sure, say the Freudians had a little something:
that was what it went back to, essentially. Trouble with the wolves,
a lot of them never found out there might be, there could be
something more important to a woman than just the one thing. That
there was always one woman more important than all the rest put
together.

The head doctors, Freudian or Adlerian or whatever,
had a little something too when they said Areas—The water-tight
mental compartments for different subjects. The ultimate civilized
man, Luis Mendoza, a lot of ways; just, maybe, one way still the
ultimate Neanderthal (as God knows aren’t we all, this way or
that).

Hackett just wondered, looking at him. Such the hell
of a smart boy, any other way.

And himself. Passing the love of women . . . Oh, sure
to God there was something to it—sex loyalty, give it the fancy
name .... Angel asking, wondering too, his darling Angel, sharing
that certain empathy, that essential thing between: putting it in
words, "Could he, Art, I mean the way you say he’s so
irritable lately, so—really—unlike him self, I mean, I just
wondered . . ." And himself being noncommittal, jocular,
changing the subject—easy and affectionate. A different thing. Not
to give Luis away, if . . .

He just wondered if maybe, in that one area, Luis
Mendoza was growing up a little bit, finding out the truth.

And he had a very odd thought just then, staring down
unseeingly at Landers’ report. He thought that, looked at one way,
Luis Mendoza and this bloody-handed killer of women they were hunting
had something in common. Woman—to them it meant the one same thing.
Only Luis Mendoza—and that was a very damned peculiar thought
too—he was a man on the right side, across the table from the
Opponent, and a sane man; and so when all the chips were down he
might see that he’d been drawing to the wrong hand—there were
higher cards to find in the deck.

Hackett was annoyed with himself for unaccustomed
sentimentality. It was just—he wondered. And maybe hoped. Because,
come down to it, passing the love of women . . .

"You’d started to tell me about a bright
idea," he said, "before the summons came to appear before
authority. What was it?" Mendoza was swiveled around, brooding
out the window. "The beach," he said, "the beach.
Could we do something there? I just—"

Sergeant Lake said from the door, "Excuse me,
Lieutenant, but that fellow’s back again, that Lockhart that came
in yesterday. He asked me to give you this." He advanced and
laid a card on the desk.

"Persistent," said Mendoza. He swiveled
round and picked up the card; and then he sat motionless, head
cocked, studying it. After a moment he said softly "
¿Y
qué es esto
, what’s this? Mr. John
Lockhart—and in a vile scrawl, Chief of Police, Mount Selah,
Illinois—in re the Wood case, etc.
¡No me
diga
, don’t tell me! Something definite,
something helpful, a little break at last? I’ve got a feeling—cross
your fingers, Arturo! By God, I wonder. I’ll see him, Jimmy, bring
him in
pronto
!"