The Knave of Hearts (6 page)

Not a great deal to say about Pauline McCandless. You
got the impression, a colorless nonentity of a girl, not many
friends, not many interests outside her home and her work at the
library. She was on duty there, that particular week, from nine to
six; she’d just finished a tour of night duty. And she didn’t
come home after six o’clock, that day. So—

September the fifth. Daylight saving still on, but
even without it not dark then. "
¡Caramba
y todos los diablos del inflerno!
" he
muttered. "Chance—chance! But we’ve been stupid here, damn
it."

Hackett hadn’t been able to contact the mother yet;
he’d talked with a couple of the girls who had worked with Pauline.
They said among other things they’d felt sorry for her, because the
mother was a tiresome hypochondriac who’d never let the girl call
her soul her own—awfully old-fashioned and puritanical.

This isn’t much to go on, sorry. Not much to
get, I’d say. But see times on Piper and Wood. Can’t count in
Teitel on that angle, or can we?—daylight, but not town, lonely
spot. ¿Y pues qué, what of it? I don’t buy the idea yet but,
Galeano wonders too, somebody she knew? Maybe?

Mendoza exclaimed violently, "God damn it to
hell and back!" Sergeant Thoms, who at Sergeant Lake’s desk on
Lake’s days off, put his head in the door and asked if Mendoza had
called. "I did not—there’s nothing,
nada
absolutamente
, you or me or the Chief or the
newest rookie in uniform can do about this! Only one indicated move
occurs to me—the city should instantly requisition enough money to
give every member of the force a course in elementary logic. I’m
going home, Bill. I may take myself straight up to Camarillo as a
voluntary mental patient. Better yet, I may take several precinct
lieutenants and a few of the sheriff’s boys along with me."

"You sound like you need a drink," said
Sergeant Thoms.

"And that is also one excellent idea," said
Mendoza. He tucked Hackett’s notes into his pocket and left and,
unusually, he did stop for a drink on the way home.

After the drive across town in traffic, in
hundred-degree temperature, the air-conditioned apartment was haven.
Two of the cats came to greet him pleasedly, the ruddy brown
Abyssinian Bast and her adolescent daughter Nefertite, who was
convalescent from surgery to insure that the number of cats in the
household remained static. She talked to him loudly all the way
across the room, in the piercing voice she had inherited from her
Siamese father; and Mendoza had a good idea what she was talking
about. "What has he been up to today, this witch’s familiar?
And where is he?
No se preocupe
,
I don’t blame you two well-mannered 1adies!"

The record-cabinet door was open; the electric clock
lay on its face on the mantel; several books had been pulled out of
the bookcase, and the leather case for cuff links, from the dresser
in the bedroom, lay open on the kitchen floor, quite empty. "
¡Qué
exasperación!"
said Mendoza, not
amused. “
¡Señor ladrén malicioso e
ingrato, ven acá!"

El Senor regarded him interestedly from the top of
the refrigerator, but made no move to obey this peremptory command.
Twice the size of his mother and sister, he looked rather like a
small lion in color transposition—his black coat, blond paws,
eyebrows, stomach, and tail tip shining clean, his sea-green eyes
cold for this lack of respect due any member of his race. "What
have I ever done to deserve you?"

Mendoza asked him. He plucked El Senor off the
refrigerator, put all the cats out, and spent half an hour crawling
about the floor searching under the furniture, before recovering all
three pairs of his extra links.

That cat was getting just too damned smart at opening
things; for once he was disinclined to be indulgent.

He poured himself a large drink straight from the
bottle of rye in the kitchen and took it into the living room. It
wasn’t once in six months he had more than one drink a day, but
what with this and that he needed more now. The hell of a state this
force was in, to slip up on one like this, right under their noses!
To have a muddle-minded female civilian spot it first for what it
was. All right, for the wrong reason—or not all the right ones,
just on a wild guess really, but—! And,
clara
que si,
good excuses why it hadn’t been
spotted before. Sure. This was a big town, the biggest city in the
world in area if not quite in population; its police force was
perennially shorthanded, and also—more to the point—different
police forces held tenure within its borders. The county boys,
outside city limits: suburban forces. All cooperating together, but
it added to the difficulty of keeping things straight.

Teitel: she’d been found just within the county
border, along the beach, so the sheriff’s boys had looked at her
first, and then when she was identified the Hawthorne police came in
because she’d lived there. Piper: also found in the county, and
later handed over to the Wilcox Street precinct on account of her
Hollywood residence: later turned over to Headquarters.

McCandless: headquarters got her right away, because
Walnut Park wasn’t an incorporated suburb, was within the regular
L.A.P.D. jurisdiction.

Not as if one investigating officer had been in on
all those cases from the start. Not as if they were offbeat
homicides, to get a lot of publicity, so that all the details were
common property. Hawthorne had one, the L.A.P.D. had two, and those
two nearly nine months apart.

Teitel, a year ago last July: nearly fifteen months
ago, two and a half months after Mary Ellen Wood. Piper, last
January, six months after Teitel. McCandless, two weeks and a day
ago—September fifth—nine months after Piper.

And what in between, in this sprawling metropolitan
place with its fifty or sixty suburbs, its six and a half million
people? Other assaults, rape and attempted rape, and a few ending in
murder.

He finished the rye, all but a mouthful. All right,
for God’s sake! he said to himself. Wasting time tabulating the
excuses. Too much time wasted already. Get busy doing some
constructive thinking about it.

He swallowed the last mouthful, sat there laxly,
empty glass in hand. After a while he noticed that there were a
couple of notes propped on the desk: notes from Mrs. Bryson or Mrs.
Carter, his neighbors who ran in and out waiting on the Cats, or from
the maid-of-all-work, Bertha. Presently he’d read them; right now
he was too tired, suddenly.

No more little black-scrawled notes from his
grandmother. Never any more, since six weeks ago. No more of her
fondly automatic orders about regular meals, late nights, this
pernicious habit of gambling: the transparently cunning little traps
to get her Luis safely married to some decent, modest wife who could
coax him back to the priests.

He got up, went to the kitchen to pour another drink.
He could hear her saying disapprovingly, Better you get yourself a
good solid meal, you are tired and irritable because your stomach is
empty, boy—men, they never know how to take care of themselves,
like children they are.

"Damn," he said to his drink softly. Things
tied up. True enough, he hadn’t eaten since morning—in a while
he’d get something, or go out but that wasn’t altogether the
reason he was so violently out of sorts with himself. And his new bad
business wasn’t, either. He’d been this way before that, and
sooner or later he’d have to look at it square, straighten it out
with himself. As that small voice kept telling him.

Alison . . . Because you got into trouble lying to
yourself, rationalizing. Let yourself get by with it once, after a
while you couldn’t tell lie from truth, about anything.

All right.
He swallowed
half the new drink. He was beginning to feel it now; he eyed the rest
of it dubiously.
In vino veritas?
—maybe.
If so, not very flattering to think the real Luis Rodolfo Vicente
Mendoza was the one that showed in liquor. Spoiling for a fight with
anybody who crossed his path: which was the reason he didn’t drink
much.

All right.
He’d been
sorry to break with Alison that way, but it had been boiling up for
five weeks. Admit it: not for the usual reason, the one he’d told
himself it was. For a reason a lot of people would think was lunatic.
But then, they weren’t Luis Mendoza.

Alison, always a little different thing with her,
from the start: not the ordinary woman. He could talk with Alison. A
rapport there, sympathy aside from sex. So that in the end, he had
betrayed himself to her .... As long as he could remember anything,
it had been the two of them together, the old lady and himself: his
parents dead in an accident before he was a month born—there’d
never been anyone else. His grandfather didn’t count, the old
miser, an ogre-on-the-hearth, and the two of them contriving little
schemes to bypass his wrath, to get enough out of him for the luxury
of a pound of sugar on the grocery bill, new two-dollar shoes instead
of new soles on the old ones. (The old man sitting on all that money
then, nobody knowing.) The only person, she was, who had ever known
Luis Mendoza inwardly, seen him without all his defenses. And she’d
been eighty-seven, she’d gone quick and peaceful, and it was just
in the nature of things: but loss of someone like that was still a
loss.

And so there he’d been that night, the urbane,
suave Mendoza, stripped of his camouflage, betrayed by that sympathy
between. He could feel now the comforting circle of Alison’s arms,
the softness of her breasts, hear her soothing murmur; and suddenly
he downed the other half of the rye and swore aloud. The galled
bitterness of humiliation, for unavoidable memory—of having nakedly
revealed himself in weakness .... And ever since, awaiting the excuse
to break with her. . . because she knew too much of him, she had got
too close.

Running, not for the usual reason: not bored with
her, not really wanting to be done with Alison, not taking alarm at
the trap set. So now he’d got it straight with himself, what he’d
been dodging in his own mind, and it wasn’t as important as it had
seemed, unexamined. Just the way he was made. He was still sorry for
the quarrel, but this way or that way, probably just as well: better
stay away from the path to the trap, these respectable women with
standards—
¡pues si!

All of a sudden, for getting that uneasily postponed
self-examination off his mind, he felt much better; he felt fine, no
longer tired. Maybe it was the rye. For the Erst time in six weeks he
felt wholly himself, the old Mendoza.

Because another rather peculiar thing had happened to
him when she ldied. He’d never given much thought to time: the
year, it was four figures on a letterhead, no more. He wasn’t
conscious of feeling any different this year than last, and the man
he faced in the shaving mirror didn’t look any different—the hair
just as thick and as black, the stomach just as flat, and in spite of
all the paper work, the eyes just as sharp. But quite suddenly, when
she was gone, it came to him that half his life had gone with her.
Maybe more: you couldn’t know. That he’d turned forty years old
last February.

He’d been having some odd and unaccustomed thoughts
about it, at intervals, since.

Now he forgot all about it, and he was back to where
and what he’d always been. He felt fine. Which was a very good
thing, because he had some intensive work and thinking ahead of him:
come to think, this would probably be the last evening he had to
himself for some time. Might as well enjoy it.

A meal of some kind—it was still early—and then,
who was he likely to find unspoken for at short notice? That blonde,
Florence Something, look up the number—she’d do. Nine o’clock.
Meanwhile, do a little ruminating on this case . . .

He began to cut up fresh liver for the cats, and his
mind switched off the blonde temporarily to dwell on four dead women.
 

FIVE

"Four of them," he said to Hackett next
morning. "I don’t say yes and I don’t say no to all four,
but there are points in common that might say a very loud yes. And I
wonder if we’ve missed others."

"Now that’s something," said Hackett. "A
mass murderer in business for nineteen months, and nobody noticing
it?"

"
Caray
,
you call four a mass? Well, I don’t like it much either, and the
Chief is going to like it less, but there are excuses for us, Art—we
had some good solid evidence on Mary Ellen Wood, and of the other
three we only handled two, nearly a year apart .... Spilled milk.
Point is, no one man ever looked at all four. And it doesn’t mean
much, the common denominator Mrs. Haines spotted—that all four were
quiet, respectable females. Put any kind of woman in the right place
at the right time, that kind of thing might happen to her."

"
Claro está
,"
said Hackett. "Admitted. It’s the times, which I don’t
suppose Mrs. Haines knew about from the papers."

"
¡Ay de periédicos
todos!
" said Mendoza. "To hell with
all scandal-mongering pressmen—don’t mention them to me!"
The story had broken this morning; both the conservative and radical
press had devoted some space to it, and it would be featured in their
sister afternoon papers too.