The Knave of Hearts (2 page)

They both looked at the couple of stapled sheets on
the desk with resentment.

The Haines case had been officially closed on the
police books, for over a year. Haines had appealed the verdict, of
course; there had been delays, the desperate little seeking of legal
loopholes, but in the end he’d gone to the gas chamber for the
murder of Mary Ellen Wood. And all that time, during and after the
trial, no police officer who’d worked on the case had had any
smallest doubt of his guilt. That wasn’t prejudice, or
carelessness, or stupidity: it was the way all the facts pointed.
There was a lot of nonsense talked about circumstantial evidence;
people very seldom committed serious crimes before witnesses, so
circumstantial evidence was usually the only evidence there was, and
quite valid evidence too. In fact, as Mendoza remembered hearing a
judge remark once, witnesses being as prone to error as they were,
circumstantial evidence was frequently worth more than eyewitness
testimony.

This was an efficient, modern police force, noted for
its integrity and competence, its high standards for recruits.
Detective-Sergeant Thompson had happened to get the Haines case, but
it might have fallen to Mendoza or any of his sergeants, and if it
had, none of them would have come up with a different answer—not on
all the evidence that showed.

Mary Ellen Wood, nineteen months ago, had just turned
twenty. She was a pretty girl, brown-haired and brown-eyed, and she
was popular on the L.A.C.C. campus; but by all accounts she was a
shy, serious girl who didn’t spend much time fooling around with
the boys in study hour or afterward. She was majoring in English
literature and history, and she was a good student. She lived with
her parents and two younger sisters in a nice middle-class house in a
nice middle-class neighborhood in Hollywood. She had worked at
temporary office jobs a couple of summers, to earn her tuition and
buy clothes, but during the school year she held no regular job, did
occasional baby-sitting for a little extra money. The Haineses—Allan
Haines and his wife Sally—had hired her for that a number of times.
They lived only a few blocks away from the Woods, and they’d met
Mary Ellen through Sally Haines’ twenty-year-old brother Jim
Fairless, who went to L.A.C.C. too. The Haineses had two small
children, a boy six and a girl four, and were expecting another.

Most people seemed to have liked Mary Ellen, and
those who knew her best (outside her family: you couldn’t always go
by what the family said) said she was "a nice girl"—not
the kind of girl to, well, do anything she shouldn’t—and a steady
girl too: usually dated only on week-ends, and helped her mother
around the house. So the family had been somewhat alarmed almost
right away when she didn’t come home at her regular time that
Wednesday afternoon. By six o’clock her father was calling the
hospitals, and by seven the police.

So eventually there were quite a few trained men
looking for Mary Ellen and asking questions about her. For nearly a
week they looked and asked. They learned, among other things, that
Mary Ellen had confided to one of her girl friends that she’d had a
little trouble with the husband at a place she’d been baby-sitting:
no names mentioned. When it appeared that she hadn’t vanished
voluntarily, they began to look at the people she’d worked for. But
before they got round to the Haineses, Sally Haines happened to go
into a little garden shed in the Haineses’ back yard looking for a
rake, and she found Mary Ellen’s brown handbag on the shelf there.
The girl’s belongings were all in it, including identification.
Mrs. Haines realized at once what it was, and like an honest citizen
she called the police.

Probably Sally Haines had done some bitter thinking
about her behavior as an honest citizen. Because then, of course, the
police had taken a good look at the Haineses and their property; and
without much difficulty they had found Mary Ellen, hastily buried in
the earth floor of the garden shed. Sergeant Thompson had taken over
then, and within thirty-six hours he had arrested Allan Haines on a
charge of murder.

The autopsy showed that the girl had been raped and
shortly afterward beaten and strangled: two of many blows or the
strangulation could have been the actual cause of death—the surgeon
thought it had been the blows.

She had last been seen, by anyone who knew her, at a
little past three o’clock on the campus that Wednesday. She’d
been offered a ride home, but declined, saying she already had
one—she was meeting someone. However, no one of her acquaintances
on campus had been her date, as far as could be ascertained—and
Thompson had looked very thoroughly. Especially, of course, he had
looked at young Jim Fairless, who would have had knowledge of and
access to the Haineses’ garden shed. But Fairless had never gone
around with Mary Ellen, he had a girl of his own; and he also had an
excellent alibi—you couldn’t ask for a better. The surgeon had
pinned down the time of death to between that Wednesday afternoon and
the following afternoon or evening. It was midterm, and Jim Fairless
had cut the last two days of classes that week for a vacation. He’d
left Wednesday noon with his girl, a young married couple as
chaperones, and an engaged couple, both of whom were classmates of
his at college, for Lake Arrowhead and a few days of winter sports.
All five of them said he’d been with them continuously over that
weekend.

So then Thompson looked at Haines, and it appeared
that Haines had left his office at around one-thirty that Wednesday
and couldn’t prove where he’d been and what he’d done
afterward. He was a salesman for a wholesale garden-supply firm and
didn’t keep regular office hours; nobody thought anything of his
being out that afternoon. Questioned, he’d told a lie about where
he’d been; and when that fell through—by then he understood that
he was the number-one suspect—he said all right, he’d tell the
truth, God forgive him but he’d gone to see this woman, this Rose
Pringle. He said he’d met the woman at one of the companies he sold
to: she wasn’t an employee, she’d been applying for a job there.
He didn’t know much about her except her name—he’d only met her
twice. Just one of those things—he must have been crazy, but there
it was. He gave an address, where he said he’d been with her that
afternoon; it was a shabby run-down apartment off Vermont Avenue and
the tenants had just moved, but the name had been Foster, not
Pringle. A couple of neighbors who’d known them casually said they
didn’t think it likely that Mrs. Foster’d be up to nothing like
that, she was a real quiet modest little thing and not very pretty
anyways. Press appeals were made, and radio appeals, for the Fosters
to come forward, but they never did. They might not have liked the
idea of publicity, or they might have gone out of the state and never
heard they were wanted.

And then Edith Wood, Mary Ellen’s
seventeen-year-old sister, admitted that Allan Haines had been the
husband who’d—well, call it made advances—to Mary Ellen once,
when she was baby-sitting for them. He usually brought her home
afterwards, of course, like the fathers always did, and it had been
one of those times, in his car. But Mary Ellen had told Edith he let
her go right away when she struggled, and seemed ashamed of himself,
apologized: he’d been a little tight, hadn’t known what he was
doing—Mr. Haines was really a nice man, he’d never do anything
like that in his right mind, so to speak. And she told Edith for
goodness sake not to tell their parents about it, or they’d never
let her take another job at the Haineses’, which was silly because
he’d been terribly ashamed and nothing like that would ever happen
again, she knew.

Haines admitted all that; he said he’d lost his
head, he’d had a few drinks too many that night, but he’d been
horrified at himself afterward—a nice girl like Mary Ellen.
Certainly he’d never thought of her that way before or since; he
hadn’t, before God he hadn’t, met her that afternoon and
assaulted her and then—scared of inevitable retribution when she
accused him—killed and buried her.

"My God," he said, "if I had, wouldn’t
I have had better sense than to bury her in my own back yard—leave
her bag right out in plain sight?”

But murderers did that kind of thing, time and again.
There was a school of thought which held it was the unconscious
seeking of punishment; in Mendoza’s opinion it was just vanity (the
earmark of all criminals, that was)—the conviction that they were
invincible.

Then a couple of L.A.C.C. students came in to say
that they thought they’d seen Haines that afternoon, sitting in a
car near the campus. It would have been about two-thirty. They’d
cut the last half of a study hour to go out for coffee at a place on
Vermont, and half a block or so this side they’d passed this fellow
sitting in a car. Why had they noticed him particularly? Well— That
wasn’t hard to figure if you looked at his photograph. Haines was a
good-looking man, and he ran a classy open Thunderbird; both the
students were female. They identified Haines positively as the man
they’d seen.

Yes, he was there, said Haines; it was the first time
he’d visited Rose Pringle, he’d been looking for the address. All
those narrow little side streets off Vermont there, he’d finally
had to look at a map, and that’s what he’d been doing when those
girls walked past—just pulled up to the curb a minute, locating the
street on a city map. He hadn’t noticed the girls, hadn’t given a
thought to the fact that he was near the L.A.C.C. campus—why should
he?

Both the Haineses said that anyone could have walked
into their back yard and disposed of the body there. It was a lot two
hundred feet deep; there was a hedge between the shed and the house,
and an unpaved alley at the end which was used freely for foot
traffic. After dark—

But it seemed peculiar that Haines hadn’t noticed
anything. There were a neighbor and his wife who’d seen him
entering the shed around eight that evening and again on Thursday; he
had to admit he’d been in the shed perhaps three or four times that
week. And hadn’t seen the strange handbag right in plain sight on
the shelf—there was an unshaded hanging bulb that lit up the whole
place bright as day. No, he hadn’t or maybe he had and just thought
it was his wife’s. Did Mrs. Haines usually keep her handbags in the
garden shed? Well, of course not; and he couldn’t say why, if he
had noticed it and thought she’d left it there, he hadn’t taken
it into the house to her. He hadn’t noticed the very obviously
disturbed earth in the shed? No. The photographs taken at the time
showed the grave open, but everyone present at the opening had
testified that there had been fresh-turned earth heaped there, earth
left on the spade hanging in its place on the wall rack—evidence of
the digging was plain to see, and the grave right in the center of
the floor. It was a small but significant point: if somebody from
outside had done it, how had he known, first, that the shed didn’t
have a wooden floor, and second, that he’d find a spade convenient
to hand?

Haines said that it was obviously a shelter for
garden tools: anyone who’d ever passed down that alley might have
known. But there were no footprints in that fresh earth except his,
no prints on the spade—and there was a pair of cotton work gloves
handy there on the shelf.

What more did an investigating officer want? It was
open and shut. Haines had been attracted to the girl, had made
advances once at least: that was sure. She’d been buried in his
shed with his spade, and if he hadn’t done it, it didn’t look as
though he could have entered the place without noticing the evidence
of that. ("I was worried that week," said Haines
desperately, "I had a couple of business problems on my mind, I
was kind of absent-minded—I just didn’t notice—I only went in
there a minute, a couple of times, to get a trowel, the rake.")
He’d been seen near the campus at a significant time, as if he were
waiting for someone. Mary Ellen had expected to be met and given a
ride home, she’d said. And Haines couldn’t produce his witness to
say what he’d been doing instead.

It looked run-of-the-mill. Contrary to all the
detective stories—any experienced cop knew—murderers weren’t
often very clever. Most of them in fact were damn fools. Thompson
built it up this way.

Haines had been on his way to a business call in that
area, say about two or a bit past, and he’d run into Mary Ellen
(she’d gone to that coffee shop on Vermont before her last class).
There’d been a little casual talk; he’d seen another chance to
get her and offered to meet her and take her home, in an hour. Mary
Ellen—believing herself safe with him, seeing him as only a
friendly neighbor—had accepted. He waited, and met her there at
three o’clock. Drove somewhere, maybe up in the hills in Griffith
Park, where any screams wouldn’t be heard. She hadn’t fought her
assailant; her nails weren’t broken or her clothes torn. Maybe
she’d been taken so completely by surprise she hadn’t had time,
or maybe he’d knocked her unconscious right away. In his notes
Thompson had also outlined a tentative idea that the girl might have
been genuinely in love with Haines, been led on to a voluntary
assignation. That was just an idea, and it wasn’t the case stated
by the prosecution at the trial, because there was no proof. If it
had been like that, Haines would have had no reason to kill the girl,
unless he was a lunatic. More likely, after he’d raped her it came
to him what a spot he’d be in when she accused him, and he took the
easiest way out. There was no blood in his car, no evidence of the
assault—of course, he might have taken her out, into the bushes
somewhere—but they did find a little blood on the old blanket
folded on the floor of the trunk, and it was type O, Mary Ellen’s
type. (Also Haines’ type, and he said Yes, he’d skinned his hand
on a wrench one day when he was working on the car, that must have
been how the blood . . .) He’d probably stashed her in the trunk,
with her own coat bundled round her so no blood would get on the
floor, and either late that Wednesday night or the following night
made the grave. (It was surprising how often a killer who disposed of
the body liked to have the spot under his eye, close to home. Plenty
of j precedent there, and for the other mistakes he’d made.) The
garage was at the back of the lot, close to the shed. Mrs. Haines
wasn’t the gardener—Haines did most of that—and she seldom
entered the shed, so he hadn’t bothered to do a perfect job. Maybe
forgot about the purse or intended to dispose of it later. He hadn’t
(with that inevitable conviction of safety, that he was too clever to
be caught) expected to be linked to it; when he was, he was taken by
surprise. And in the same impulsive way the murder had been done, he
produced a spur-of-the-moment alibi. He made up this Rose Pringle out
of his head, gave an address at random (remembering a street name
he’d noticed as he waited for Mary Ellen). Yes, senseless, but
people did these things—he might even have been cocky enough to
figure that when he confessed cheating on his wife like that,
everybody would believe it was the truth because surely, otherwise
he’d never have admitted it. He might even have gambled that
whatever woman lived at that address could be bribed to back him up.
Bribed, of course, by Mrs. Haines (Haines was sitting in a cell
downtown then)—for Mrs. Haines, faced with the choice of keeping a
cheating husband or losing a murderous one to the gas chamber, had
stayed by him; protested her belief in him; bought TV time to appeal
to the Pringle woman to come forward.