Case Pending - Dell Shannon (3 page)

Hackett shrugged. "Take a look, Luis."

Mendoza walked on a dozen steps to where other men
stood and squatted. The ambulance had arrived; its attendants stood
smoking and waiting, watching the police surgeon, the men from
headquarters with their tape measures and cameras. Mendoza came up
behind the kneeling surgeon and looked at the corpse; his expression
stayed impassive, thoughtful, and he did not trouble to remove his
hat.

"When would you say?" he asked the surgeon.

"Oh—morning. Didn't hear you—you always move
like a cat. It's a messy one, Luis, see for yourself. Between ten and
midnight, give or take a little." The surgeon hoisted himself
up, a stoutening, bald, middle-aged man, and brushed earth from his
trouser legs. "I'll tell you what she actually died of when I've
had a better look-strangulation or blows—my guess'd be the head
blows. There was a sizable rock—"

"Yes," said Mendoza. He had already seen
the rock, jagged, triangular. "She was cutting across from
Commerce, so she knew these streets." A faint track made by foot
traffic, just out from the corner of the house foundation, and the
woman lay across the track.

"Daresay," grunted the surgeon. Hackett
strolled up and the patrolmen followed, the recruit concealing
reluctance. "No identification yet but you probably will have if
she's local. Either she wasn't carrying a purse or he took it away
with him."

"Never get prints off that rock," added
Hackett to that. "You see what I mean, Luis. First off, it looks
like any mugging, for what she had in her bag. I don't say it isn't.
You take some of these punks, they get excited—Doc'll remember the
ten-dollar word for it." Hackett, who looked rather like a
professional wrestler, adopted the protective coloration of acting
like one on occasion; possibly, thought Mendoza amusedly, in
automatic deference to popular expectation. In fact he was—unlike
Mendoza—a university graduate: Berkeley '50. It was a theory that
Mendoza did not subscribe to: he had never found it helpful—or
congenial—to pretend to less intelligence than he had. "They're
after the cash, but they get a kick out of the mugging too.
Horseplay."

"Yes, I know," said Mendoza. "This
doesn't look like horseplay."

"She wasn't raped," offered the surgeon.

"I can see that for myself. She's on her way
home, at that time of night—maybe from late work, from a friend's
house. There's a full moon, and she knows these streets—she doesn't
think twice at cutting across here.But something is waiting." He
sank to his heels over the body, careful to pull up his trouser knees
first, and regarded it in silence for a long minute.

Before it had been a body it had been a young and
pretty woman: in fact, a very young one, under make-up lavishly
applied. The too-white powder, the heavily mascaraed lashes, the
smeared dark-red lipstick, was a mask turned to the pitiless gray sky
of this chill March day. The unfashionable shoulder-length hair,
where it wasn't stiffened with clotted blood, was bleached
white-gold, but along the temples and at the parting showed dark.
"Coat pockets?" he murmured.

"Handkerchief and a wool scarf," said
Hackett.

"To put over her hair in case it rained,"
nodded Mendoza. "Then she had a handbag too."

"So I figured. Dwyer and Higgins are looking
around the neighborhood."

A bag-snatcher, whether or not he was also a
murderer, seldom kept the bag long; it would be tossed away on the
ran.

Her clothes were tasteless, flamboyant-tight
Kelly-green sweater with a round white angora collar, black fame
skirt full-cut and too short, sheer stockings, black patent-leather
pumps with four-inch heels, over all a long black coat with dyed
rabbit round the collar and hem. Mendoza felt the coat absently,
expecting the harshness of shoddy material: cheap, ill-cut stuff.

Two very different corpses, he reflected, this tawdry
pseudo blonde and Carol Brooks. Carol Brooks, six months ago, had
been an eminently respectable and earnest young woman, not very good
looking, and she had died in the soiled blue uniform-dress she wore
for work. Otherwise, no, the corpses weren't so different.

"Yes," he murmured, and stood up. "He
didn't intend murder, to start with—I don't think. He hadn't any
weapon but his hands. And he didn't reach out to find one, blind,
like that, and pick up the rock—it wasn't used that way, Art. He
had her down, she was fighting him, trying to scream—he was
strangling her, finding it not quick enough—and he slams her down
on the ground, hard, just by chance on the rock. I can see it going
like that. Unpremeditated violence, but once it unleashes itself—he
looked down at the body again-"insane violence."

"Here comes Bert," said Hackett, "with
the handbag. Not that it'll maybe take us very far."

"That's a loaded question for the so-called
expert," said the surgeon, looking interested over the flame of
his lighter, "but I'll say this, at least—he must have gone
berserk for some reason. Nobody can say sane or insane just on that
evidence—unnecessary violence. That sort of thing is apt to be
vicious personal hatred, or a couple of other quirks."

"You're so right," said Mendoza. "You'll
make a report all embellished with the technical terms, but to go on
with for the moment?"

"Her neck's broken. Excessive laceration of the
throat. Half a dozen head wounds, all but one on the back of the
skull—the one that killed her, I think, is this here, on the
temple. Maybe she turned her head in struggling and— The left
shoulder is dislocated. She was struck repeatedly in the face with a
fist. You can see the cyanosed areas, there. Her right arm is broken
just below the elbow. The whole torso has been damaged, kicked or
maybe jumped on. Fractured ribs, I think, and internal injuries. It's
on the cards some of that was done after death, but I don't know that
it'll be provable—probably a very short time after, of course.
There's some damage to the left eye, as if a finger or thumb had
been—"

"Yes. It was Dr. Bainbridge who made the autopsy
on Brooks," said Mendoza. "You wouldn't remember. That is
the one thing of positive resemblance. Otherwise?—he flicked away
the burnt match and drew deep on his cigarette, shrugging—"any
mugger after a woman's bag, who used a little too much violence."

"So?" said the surgeon. "Ever catch
that one?" Mendoza shook his head.

"Well, here we are," announced Hackett, who
had gone to meet Dwyer. "In plain sight in the gutter a couple
of blocks away." It was the bag one would have predicted she
would carry: a big square patent leather affair with a coquettish
white bow cluttering the snap-fastener.

"
Ya lo creo
,
as we might put it, huh?"

Mendoza lifted his upper lip at it. "Before you
get promotion and cease to be my junior in rank, Arturo, you will
have perfected your vile accent. It may take years."

Very delicately Hackett delved with two fingers into
the bag's interior and came up with a woman's wallet, bright pink
plastic, ornamented all around the border with imitation pearls.
Mendoza regarded it with satisfied horror: the very object this girl
would have admired. "Lot of other stuff here—doesn't look as
if he took a damn thing. Funny he put the wallet back after grabbing
the cash, if— He might've figured the wallet alone'd be spotted
quicker and picked up, but then again muggers don't think so far
ahead usually, and this one, I don't see him in a state to think at
all, after that. If—"

"
¡Basta!
One thing at a time."

"Her name was Elena Ramirez. No drivers'
license. Dime-store snapshot of herself and, I presume, current boy
friend. Social Security card. Membership card in some club. I.D.
card-address and phone—little change in the coin purse—that
figures, of course, he'd take the bills—"

Dwyer said, "Prints are going to love you for
putting your fat paws all over that cellophane."

"All right,"
Mendoza cut off Hackett's retort abruptly. "Give me that
address, Art. I'll see the woman who found her and then the family—if
there is one. Dwyer, you and Higgins can begin knocking on doors did
anyone hear a disturbance, screams perhaps? When we know more of the
background, maybe I'll have other jobs for you. They can take her
away now."

* * *

Hackett drifted over to Fratelli's grocery behind
Mendoza. In two hours, tomorrow, Hackett would be the man nominally
in charge of working this case; a lieutenant of detectives could not
devote all his time to a relatively minor case like this. The fact
annoyed Mendoza, partly because he had an orderly mind, liked to take
one thing at a time, thoroughly. Even more did it irritate him now
because it was intuitively clear to him that this girl and Carol
Brooks had met death at the same hands, and he wanted very much to
get that one inside, caught in a satisfactory net of evidence and
booked and committed for trial.

If one murder was more or less important than
another, neither of these was important: the kind of casual homicide
that happens every week in any big city. This girl did not look as if
she would be much missed, as if she had been a human being with much
to offer the world, but one never knew. Carol Brooks, now, that had
perhaps been a loss—yes. He remembered again the warm gold of the
recorded voice a trifle rough as yet, a trifle uncertain, but the
essential quality there.

However, his cold regret at missing her murderer had
nothing of sentiment in it. The reason was the reason, in a wider
sense, why Luis Mendoza was a lieutenant of detectives, and—most of
the time—regarded fondly by his superiors.

There are people who enjoy solving puzzles: he was
not one of them. But—probably, he told himself, because he was a
great egotist, and his vanity was outraged to be confronted with
something he did not know once a puzzle was presented to him he could
not rest until he had ferreted out the last teasing secret. It was
not often that he was faced with a complex mystery; the world would
grow a great deal older before police detectives in everyday routine
met with such bizarre and glamorous situations as those in fiction.
Por desgracia
, indeed:
unfortunate: for complex problems inevitably had fewer possible
solutions.

This thing now, this was the sort of puzzle (a much
more difficult sort) that Mendoza, and all police detectives, met
again and again: the shapeless crime that might have been done by
anyone in the city—mostly impersonal crime, this sort, with destiny
alone choosing the victim. The shopkeeper killed in the course of a
robbery, the woman dead at the end of attack for robbery or rape, the
casual mugging in an alley—nothing there of orderliness, the
conveniently limited list of suspects, the tricky alibis, the
complicated personal relationships to unravel: criminal and victim
might never have met before. Or perhaps it might be an intimate
business, a personal matter, and only all arranged to look
otherwise—and if it were, so much the easier to find the truth, for
one had then only a few places to look.

But so often it was the casual, shapeless thing. And
there are always, in any efficient city police force, the policemen
like Luis Mendoza, single-mindedly, even passion lately concerned to
bring some order and reason, some ultimate shape, to the chaos. Not
necessarily from any social conscientiousness-Mendoza cared little
for humanity
en masse
,
and was a complete cynic regarding the individual. Nor from any
abstract love of truth or, certainly, of justice—for all too often
the criminals he took for the law evaded punishment, this way or that
way; and Mendoza sometimes swore and sometimes shrugged, but he did
not lose any sleep over that. Being a realist, he said,
Lo
que no se puede remediar, se hade aguantar
—what
can't be cured must be endured.

Nor from ambition, to gain in rank and wages through
zeal—Mendoza desired no authority over men, as he resented
authority over himself, and his salary would not begin to maintain
his wardrobe, or a few other personal interests. Nor even solely from
earnest attention to doing one's job well.

The only reason for such men, the end goal, is the
contemplation of the solved puzzle: the beautiful completeness of the
last answer found. It is so with all these men, whatever kind of men
they may be otherwise. Having the orderly mind, they must know where
every last oddshaped small piece belongs in the puzzle, no matter if
the picture comes out landscape or portrait or still life, so to
speak.

Mendoza, in fact, forced to file away an unanswered
question—as he had six months ago in the Brooks case—felt very
much the way an overnice housewife would feel, forced to leave dinner
dishes in the sink overnight. It worried him; it irritated him; and
in every free moment his mind slid back to the thing left undone.

He said now absently to Hackett, "
Eso
se sobre entiende
, it's not so good that he's
been loose for six months—one like that." With only a few
people he didn't watch his tongue, or even let it drift into the
Spanish deliberately; and that (as Hackett was fully aware) was a
mark of affection and trust.