The Knave of Hearts (7 page)

"Yes, that’s the whole point. When it happens
to a respectable female—one who doesn’t pick up strangers, go
roaming around alone at midnight, that kind of thing, to ask for
trouble—it’s because accident put her in the way of it. Like that
Jonas thing—I’ve been looking over this year’s crop—or the
DeVa1le girl. The car stalls in an unsavory district on her way home
from the swing shift, something like that. There’ve been thirty-odd
cases of rape and attempted rape through headquarters this eighteen
months, and in all but seven or eight of them the woman was at least
partly to blame, for voluntarily putting herself in danger. And I’m
not counting the statutory cases, where it’s legally rape because
the girl’s under age—I mean the real thing, sex by force.
Thirteen of those cases ended in homicide. Of those thirteen women,
six can be called—mmh—respectable. The others had asked for it,
just like those where it didn’t end in murder—hanging around bars
alone, picking up strangers, or they lived or worked or visited in
the back alleys of bad districts. And two of the first six, it was
chance putting them in a dangerous place late at night, in the way of
dangerous men. But here we’ve got four women who got in the way of
a rapist-killer at very odd times of day indeed, and odd places. That
is, I think four, depending on what you can tell me about Piper. Mary
Ellen Wood, between three and five in the afternoon—because if she
hadn’t been prevented, she’d have been home by five. Celestine
Teitel left home that Sunday about nine in the morning, probably got
to that stretch of beach by ten or so, and she’d planned to be home
by six, so it was between those times. Pauline McCandless left the
library at six and so far as anyone knew was going straight home—it
wouldn’t be dark until eight or so, and she’d be in the middle of
a crowd on the bus. How does Piper line up on this? She lived
alone—is there any evidence of her plans that evening?"

"As a matter of fact," said Hackett, "there
is. Reason we started to look for her as early as we did. She was
expected at a bridge party in the apartment manager’s place that
evening. They said it wasn’t like her not to call if she couldn’t
make it. And being good friends—she’d lived there five years or
so—the manager and his wife went up and let themselves into her
apartment, to see if she’d been taken sick or something, you
know—called her office to see if she was working late—finally
called us, thinking, maybe, a street accident."

"So there we are. Four. Not late at night, not
in the dark, and not in slum districts. Sure, all right, put a
question mark on Teitel, on that angle—it was a lonely stretch of
beach, anybody might have turned up there. But here’s the Wood girl
in the middle of Hollywood, Piper down on Spring Street surrounded by
members of the Stock Exchange, and McCandless waiting at a busy
intersection for a crowded crosstown bus. I ask you!" Mendoza
shrugged and laughed. "Sure, excuses for us not spotting it.
Like the way you figured it with Jane Piper. That for some reason,
innocent or not, she’d put herself in the way of violence—maybe
walked down to some bar on Main for a drink before going home,
something like that—was coaxed or forced into a car, and driven to
a lonelier spot. The likeliest way it could have happened, that hour,
that place-about the only way it could have happened. And ditto for
the others. We came nearer the truth on Mary Ellen, though we got the
wrong man. It must have been somebody who knew her, that was seventy
percent sure to start. Somebody should have seen the same thing on
these others."

"Barring Teitel, I’ll go along," said
Hackett. He didn’t look very happy about it. "It looks that
way."

Mendoza was leaning back with his eyes shut.
"Unsuccessful women," he said somnolently. "Damn their
minds, their salaries—women without men attached, this reason or
that. Teitel wasn’t bad-looking, neither was Piper, but that hasn’t
much to do with it sometimes. Am I jumping to conclusions to say, on
those two anyway, females just a little too intellectual,
too—mmh—superior and objective, to attract the average male? And
McCandless saddled with a dificult mama who’d discouraged her from
'All That'."

"And if that’s not just the famous Mendoza
imagination," asked Hackett, "what does it say?"

"It says I’ll give you ten-to-one odds that if
we can get the evidence, if anybody remembers, Jane Piper and Pauline
McCandless had recently met an answer to a maiden’s prayer. Just
the way we know now Mary Ellen and Celestine Teitel had. A young or
youngish man, who seemed attracted, who looked like—to put it
crudely—a good bet. A man of the type to appeal to these women,
which means he put up a good appearance, he was—for want of a
better word—a gentleman. A man who seemed trustworthy. A man,"
said Mendoza, suddenly sitting up, opening his eyes, getting out a
cigarette, "those women would not only be attracted to, because
that in itself says nothing—the most respectable high-minded women,
nine times out of ten they’ll feel the animal attraction to the big
male brute, never mind if he’s the plumber or the garage mechanic
or whatever—but a man of some, what do I want to say, address,
prestige. A man who used correct grammar, dressed well, had nice
manners. Yes, I see it going like that—"

"Slow down, c
hico
,"
said Hackett dryly. "This is what the textbooks call theorizing
without data."

"Sure, sure!" Mendoza knocked ash into the
brass ashtray angrily.

"That’s for sure. But those women, what man
but one like that could take them so easy, those places and times?
I’m telling you, Art, that’s the way it was, the way it must have
been—
¡no cabe duda!
—I
can see it. When they vanished from crowded places like that, in
broad daylight, and the times so tight. Mary Ellen, here’s this
fellow she’s just met—older than the college boys she knows, more
sophisticated, more exciting—meeting her that day, making a date
for after her last class. Teitel, that’s the one we can’t say
definitely about, but I think she belongs on the list—and how might
it have gone there? Did she happen to meet him casually on her way to
the beach that morning, or suddenly decide to invite him along? Or
maybe they had a date, unknown to Miss Reeder—who’d probably
cautioned Celestine about strange men, so Celestine didn’t mention
it to her, to encourage more moralizing. This fellow with the looks,
the manner, to attract Piper—another mature woman, an intelligent
woman—but lonely women are too often fools—meeting her, calling
her, that day—saying, maybe, I’ll drive you home, or let’s have
an early dinner together, I’ll get you home in time for your bridge
party. And, God help us, Pauline McCandless!—from what you got, a
walkover for any male who paid her a little attention! And she
wouldn’t have mentioned him to Mama, but she might have to a girl
friend her own age—"

"None of those at the library had anything to
say about that."

"Did you ask specifically? We will, but she
hadn’t been there long, probably didn’t know any of those women
intimately. What we want is a girl she’d known longer, maybe a
college classmate—and of course, even if there was somebody like
that she’d confide in, she might not have had the chance since
she’d met our Romeo. But I think she’d met him, Art. And that
when she left the library that day, she had a date with him, if just
to have a cup of coffee at a counter—because Mama expected her home
at the usual time."

"This same smooth-talking collar ad who already
had those other three to his account. I don’t know, you’re
building an awful lot on awful little, Luis." Hackett passed a
hand over his jaw thoughtfully. "It could be, I agree with you
it looks like a man they knew—or men—”

"Figure the odds on that!" said Mendoza.
"Three different men, even in a town this size, with the same
qualifications?
¡No hay tal!
Be like drawing a royal flush in the first deal—theoretically it
could happen, but does it ever? What tripped us up here, it’s the
fact that almost without exception when a woman gets raped, and
occasionally murdered as an outcome of that, it’s the outside
thing—the random thing. The way Miss Evelyn Reeder put it—anyone
people like us know, not that kind! It’d be very damned convenient,
in all sorts of ways, if we could generalize like that—say for sure
what kind of intelligence, personality, capability, occurs in this
class, this race, this nationality, place, age, city area, economic
level, educational level—
¡ay qué ris!
—
people aren’t made that way. Miss Reeder says to me, a mental
defective. Maybe it’s a sad commentary on the state of human
culture, but how many convicted rapists you know of have been either
lunatics or morons?"

"About one in ten, I’d say, show pretty low
I.Q.’s, but not always moron level—and the other nine,
generalizing, are just given to violence, smart or dumb."

"
Eso es
. . . Random violence, that’s the pattern. You don’t go looking
among the family and friends. But that’s where he was in these
cases, and just by the law of averages, it’s one man, not three or
four. No, we’ve got very little evidence yet, but I’ll give you
odds that as we get more it’1l show the pattern I can already see
here. Mary Ellen had just met this maiden’s dream, was hoping he’d
ask for a date. Edward Anthony—and I hope to God these girl friends
can give us a little more on him, what he looked like, where she met
him, what job he was in—All the sister knows is that he was about
thirty, a smooth talker. Damn, eighteen, nineteen months ago—casual
little things like that, people forget. We’ll see .... Celestine
Teitel, as we now know, had recently met a fellow she described to
Evelyn Reeder as charming. His name was Mark Hamilton, and she met
him at the music-and-art-supply shop where she bought sketching
materials—he was a customer too, they got talking casually. Miss
Reeder couldn’t say whether they’d ever been out together, except
for once when he bought Celestine a cup of coffee at the drugstore
next to the shop. Now we’ll go looking on Piper and McCandless, and
I think we’ll find that they’d just met somebody like that—with
another euphonious, respectable-sounding Anglo-Saxon name—and that
if we get descriptions, they’ll match up."

"Maybe—maybe. You sound damn happy about it,"
said Hackett. "My God, what the press boys’ll say about this
one!"

Mendoza sat back and shut his eyes again. "Crossing
bridges. Let’s wait and see." The press stories this morning
had been all Haines and Rose Foster; they hadn’t got hold of the
mass-killer idea yet. "Wishful thinking, that Mrs. Haines won’t
come out with it to the first reporter who interviews her. I’d like
to shut her up, if for no other reason than that it might not be such
a good idea to let him know these cases have been linked up. But, on
the other hand, it might be a very smart idea indeed. Let him know
we’re looking. You never know with these characters. I’d rather
like to keep these others in the background—get him for Mary Ellen,
and just quietly mark off the other three as incidentally solved. No
lése majesté
from
the press, or not as much—not as much public viewing-with-alarm.
But Mrs. Haines feeling the way she does, understandably, that we
can’t hope for .... We’ll be using every man we’ve got, there
are a lot of places to look—"

"And damn all to go on," said Hackett
gloomily.

"Oh, I don’t know. On Mary Ellen, there’s
Haines—I don’t buy Mrs. Haines’ detective-story plot, somebody
who wanted to get him in trouble, but our Romeo must have known a
little something about that yard, that garden shed—he didn’t just
stumble on it as a convenient place to stash a body. He lived around
there, or he knew somebody around there. He had some reason to
frequent the neighborhood, to walk down that alley—once or twice
anyway. Then there’s the shop where Teitel met him. I think. We’ll
get other starting points, with luck, from people who knew Piper and
McCandless. Really too many places to look, too many directions to
put out a cast. We’ll get him—we’ll get him in the end—it may
be a long hunt, but by God we’ll get him ....Happy?
¡No
seas tonto!
—don’t be funny! But before I
start figuring out the answer to a problem, it’s a help to know
just what the problem is."

"How do you build him?" asked Hackett after
a pause. "A nut? One of those where it doesn’t show?"

"Let’s not go all psychological," said
Mendoza almost amusedly. "Your guess is as good as mine, on that
.... They knock themselves out, the head doctors, trying to tabulate
what’s normal, what isn’t, when it comes to that old devil sex.
Can’t be done. Comes right back to the individual. It’s a damn
funny thing, you know, and I suppose I’d get sued for slander to
say it in public, but the psychiatrists have a lot in common with the
Communists—such a desperate effort to classify people, make rules
applying to the general type. Talk about waste of time .... This one?
Sure, there’s something wrong with him, obviously. God knows there
are always enough willing women, nobody needs to get it by force,
¿como no?
" He
put out his cigarette, immediately groped for another. And his tone
on that was rueful, cynical. He hadn’t enjoyed the blonde much,
last night. A silly female. Just, in effect, a female—compliant—and
obtuse. Nobody to talk to, to enjoy being with, just for herself. You
might say, on a par with the waitress who fetched you a meal when you
were hungry. That kind of thing. Not like—