The Knave of Hearts (24 page)

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 there’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
at the place.

A frame cottage, old,
unpainted, weathered: about three rooms. Railed porch around four
sides, and a carport, empty. It wasn’t attractive, but it looked
solidly built for a beach cabin. There wasn’t another building
within half a mile or more: the nearest houses would be the big
places up in Malibu village. The track went on, about thirty yards,
to the highway, and across the highway there was a good public beach.
Mendoza thought Romeo might have fancied a place like this. There
didn’t seem to be a street name for the track, or a number on the
cabin, but he sketched out a little map of its location. That made
fifteen. He found four more on his way back to where he’d started.
He’d spent the entire afternoon on this, and it might all be a
mare’s nest; but you never knew. He turned around again and drove a
mile up the highway to a little, gaily painted real estate office.

* * *

The man who had been Edward Anthony was in his shabby
Hollywood apartment, making the hours pass. He was feeling very
excited and eager and impatient—also very confident—and it seemed
that time had stopped, that this day (and tomorrow, and the next day)
would go on forever.

That it would never get to be Saturday night.

He had not gone to work today and he wouldn’t
tomorrow, because he was afraid it would show somehow, that he
couldn’t seem his usual self. He had called up and said he wasn’t
feeling well, he was coming down with a bad cold, maybe the flu, and
thought he’d better stay home the next few days—and besides, he
didn’t want to infect anyone else. Mr. Rasmussen hadn’t liked it
too well, but he’d said all right. He just didn’t feel he could
go through the same sober routine of everyday; and it was, in a way,
a red-letter day (as they called it), when the truth was at last
revealed to him, and he felt it deserved to be marked as a holiday.
Red-letter day. Red for blood, red for—

He walked up and down the little sitting room
excitedly, thinking about it. Yes, yes, of course many foolish
people, mad—deluding themselves—and he’d been slow to accept it
for that reason. But now he was quite sure.

He had not recognized it at the time, but there had
been some of that evil taint in all of them, not only Julie and
Rhoda; and so that was the reason, and the little worried guilt he
had felt had not been necessary. It was quite all right. Everything
was quite all right: he would never be punished by God or man. And so
Saturday night would be all right too. It was odd to think how
nervous he had been a while ago, when there was that headline about a
new witness. Who, how could there be, and did they really— And then
it all came out, only a desperate kind of lie, the newspaper or the
police, it didn’t matter which—nothing in it—and that police
officer having a fight with a reporter . . . It just showed all the
more clearly that they hadn’t anything really—losing his temper
because it was true, what the paper said— If they had anything,
they’d be only too pleased to tell about it, with all that was
being said. All true Very stupid. Although of course he had been
clever . . .

But that was irrelevant. They didn’t matter, his
cleverness didn’t matter, because it was intended, all arranged—no
danger, no danger. Quite safe.

Things you thought coincidence, just random
chance—afterward you saw how they were meant. His safe, secret
place, the little house standing alone: he’d only just realized
what a very ideal place it was. Partly on account of Julie. He’d
felt it was a kind of violation, then, but that was while he’d
still been feeling the guilt—afterward—and now he knew there was
no reason for that. Of course, of course.

An ideal place-for the future. A lot of excited,
rather incoherent plans were drifting round his mind, but mainly he
was thinking about Saturday night.

Take care, of course. Reasonable care. Only sensible.
But nothing would interfere, it would all go as he planned it out.

He was only sorry it was Saturday—a whole day
wasted, for he usually drove right down there after work on Fridays.
But this was more important, naturally. She had been reluctant,
hadn’t wanted to go out with him at all, which was a little
unflattering, but he didn’t think for a moment that she had any
idea— Probably that evil in her sensing the holiness in him, and—

It was extremely uplifting, this wonderful knowledge
of justification. Saturday night. Other Saturday nights. Others. As
many as he liked, any time at all.

He would tell her they were going to a restaurant
along the beach. A lot of fashionable places down here, she’d think
nothing of it; people thought nothing, here, of driving thirty miles
for dinner. And once he stopped, at his place, no one to hear if she—

Saturday night. Other Saturday nights.

If he could just calm down a little, if he could go
to sleep maybe and not wake up until it was time—if he could- Must
put up his usual appearance, but he’d manage that all right then—
Only, all the other times, he hadn’t planned it out at all, it had
just happened; and this was so much more exciting . . .

He made a little ceremony of getting out the knife,
unwrapping it. It was a good knife, good and sharp, but he was still
of two minds about it, whether he’d been right in buying it. He
wasn’t at all sure it would be as—as satisfying, as uplifting,
somehow, with the knife. And of course a great deal more blood—which
might be better in a way, and yet—