Extra Kill - Dell Shannon (25 page)

"This," said Mendoza, "is too much of
a good thing altogether. Must I put locks on all the cupboard doors?
Or keep all the things not intended for curious cats on the very top
shelves?" He put El Senor down on a kitchen chair, went to get
their evening meal from the refrigerator. Somebody else in the same
position in re Trask as the Kingmans. Not surprising. Somebody
refusing to pay—did that account for his ugly temper that day?—but
surely not a reason for him to clear out. Somebody a good deal more
determined than Kingman, walking in on him and killing him ....

As he put down the three dishes, the phone rang. "Oh,
Lieutenant Mendoza, I thought I heard you come in," said Mrs.
Bryson in his ear from the other end of the building. "Did you
find my note? . . . Yes, the oddest thing—really, you know, it
sounds silly but sometimes I'm almost afraid of that absurd kitten!"
Mrs. Bryson was large, buxom, fiftyish, and blonde; she had no
children, and perhaps consequently a deplorable habit of cooing baby
talk to her beloved cats—but one must overlook these faults in
otherwise nice people. "When I came to let them out for a little
run, about two o'clock, he had your record cabinet open and an L.P.
record out on the floor—Bach's Suite N0. 2 in B Minor, it was—and
was sitting looking at it. Really quite uncanny."

"Well, at least he has good taste," said
Mendoza.

"What I called about, I forgot to put down that
your grandmother phoned, and you're to be reminded that her
goddaughter, I think it is, is getting married on Saturday, and
you're expected to come and—"

"And bring a gift," he supplied as she
hesitated. "This autocratic old wretch, I know how she put it!
Thanks very much, Mrs. Bryson .... " He had no intention of
doing either. In the first place, he had not set foot inside a church
for twenty-two years and had no desire to break the record; in the
second, the goddaughter was an unpleasantly smug and pudding-faced
girl whom he disliked.

He let the cats out and got undressed.

Somebody—somebody—from that theater crowd?
Senseless to blackmail someone who hadn't any money .... But there
were other things of value than money: someone, perhaps, who could do
him a favor—introduce him to a producer, cast him in TV?

Mendoza took a bath. He let the cats in. He sat up in
bed smoking, and El Señor sat on his lap and tried to catch the
smoke wisps, batting at them with his large blond paws. "Señor
Ridiculo," said Mendoza. Someone—

He put out his cigarette
and switched off the light. A few more facts, and maybe it would
suddenly come unraveled.

* * *

One small fact came in the next morning, from the
routine gathering of miscellany. About that bank: that it kept
old-fashioned banking hours. And that helped quite a lot in
reconstructing Trask's plans. And then Hackett came in, and abruptly
handed Mendoza a wholly new idea ....

"And where did that idea come from?" asked
Mendoza. "It's definitely a thought, but a little offbeat . . .
that girl Angel. Mmh, yes. Motives, motives . . ." He looked at
Hackett's back in mild curiosity. Hackett, terse and noncommittal,
had put forward this theory walking around the office as he talked,
and stood now looking out the window.

"I know it's one of those things that doesn't
happen often—"

"It's not as odd as all that—kind of thing
that has happened. But what's reached you about it? You're acting as
if you were telling the tale on your sister."

"Sister be damned,” said Hackett. "I know
it's senseless, Luis, but I'm sorry for the girl. She hasn't had much
of a break from life. That damned woman . . ." He shrugged and
turned around.

Mendoza was leaning back looking cynically amused; he
shot Hackett a glance from half-shut eyes. "What heresy is this,
Arturo—my big dumb sergeant smitten?
Cuidado,
amigo!
That's one of the beaten paths to the
trap, feeling sorry for them."

"Don't be a fool—and you can keep your
opinions to yourself. Just because you make a hobby of collecting the
free samples without any intention of buying—"

"
Ay qué risa!
Where've you been hibernating, friend—since when is it free? This
one I don't believe,
de veras
absolutamente
—Hackett the impervious, and
old enough to look after himself, God knows—Hackett the
stolid—Hackett who never so far as I know, the ten years I know
him, takes out the same girl three times running—and not because
he's looking for free samples but because he's got a wide streak of
caution, having some common sense if not quite as much as me! You
don't tell me."

"No, I don't tell you, damn it! I said I felt
sorry for her and that's exactly what I meant, no more and no less.
For which reason I'd also be sorry to prove that she killed a man.
I'm well aware that you keep your emotions all carefully locked away
in a secret compartment somewhere to take out and look at once in a
long while—but if you think real hard, you may remember one or two
occasions, maybe when you were a tender young rookie answering
traffic calls and manhandling drunks, when you had a kind of feeling
of sympathy for somebody who'd got knocked around a little through no
fault of their own. I don't,” said Hackett, "say you ever did,
because about you I wouldn't be sure, but maybe there was just once
you felt a little something along that line for a second, hah?"

"
Esto queda entre los
dos
, only for your ear—because I wouldn't
want it to get around that this thinking machine Mendoza is a real
live human being—if I sat here quiet and concentrated a while I
might remember a couple of those times. But I won't tell you about
them, to set a bad example. I've got a reputation to maintain, you
know. Everybody thinks Mendoza's always been what he is now, you drop
a little problem in one slot and his month's pay in another, and
click-click-click, out comes the right answer—
no
es verdad
?"

"
Es verdad. Lo siento
muchisimo
—sorry, boy," said Hackett
tiredly. "I just—I can see it happening, that's all. The way
she is, that girl—all tied up in knots, poor little devil, and that
woman hardly knowing she's alive. I don't know, but I'd bet you she's
got nobody on the face of the earth to talk it out to, to give her
any little sympathy, and you know as well as I do that's damned
important. If you can blow off steam to somebody, even a stranger on
a bus, it's a safety valve. You talk enough, you don't do anything
about it. A hate, a grievance, a—desire. And she's not the kind
who'd ever have made friends, at school or later on—ever had
anybody. All this eating at her inside, keeping her—al1 to herself.
If you get me. She'd put people off, she'd never have reached for it
.... She's just a—a mess, to look at. And prickly, because she's
been hurt. Another thing I thought of, it's on the cards she got
started acting standoflish because when she was just a youngster and
that woman was still in the big-time, more or less, a lot of the kids
she knew'd have pretended to like her because of who her mother was.
And kids know these things. Just stiffened her up all the more,
suspicious, you know, so she couldn't trust anybody enough to be
friends. So it's all got magnified inside her, because it's stayed
inside—and nobody to sympathize a little—"

"That's all very true," said Mendoza. He
swiveled his desk-chair around and looked out the window himself, and
for about five seconds he thought about the time when he was
graduating from the sixth grade into junior high. Nobody down there
that side of Main Street had much money, but every other boy in the
class had some sort of new suit for that occasion, even the Los Reyes
kid and Johnny Li-Chong; and his grandmother had tried to get a few
dollars out of the old man; she'd gone on asking a long time after he
had, himself. The old man, with all those bankbooks tucked away then
(if they'd only known it), sitting on a fortune out of canny
investments of his gambling takes, and grudging her the five bucks a
week for groceries, the twenty a month for rent of the cold-water
flat .... He'd been ashamed, getting up there with the rest of them
in the same shabby old pants and mended shirt he'd been wearing all
year. But she'd said to him afterward, how proud she'd been that he
was the tallest boy there, and how Mr. Jackson the principal had told
her he was a good smart boy and a credit to her .... And somehow the
clothes hadn't mattered quite so much. Little things like that, they
weren't always so little in the long run. Somebody to listen to you,
somebody to share a feeling. Even if there was nothing to do about
it.

He swiveled around again, absently straightening his
tie, brushing a small fluff of cat hair from his sleeve. He was still
of two minds about this suit—he should have looked at the bolt by
daylight first, he reflected: you couldn't exactly call it loud, but
the faint pattern was a good deal less discreet than he had thought.
A nuisance; he'd call Harrington down for it too, the fellow ought to
know better with a good customer. He said, "Well, we can kick
this around a little, and I'd like to see those two, you've aroused
my curiosity. But I'm wondering if and how that might fit in with a
couple of suggestive little things in that story of Kingman's.
Something burned in an ashtray. That laundry bag. Something else
there besides the stuff on the Kingmans, and it looks as if whoever
killed him was interested in it. Maybe . . . Sure, sure, if you take
the Kingmans' story as gopsel. But—"

"There wouldn't be anything like that with her,"
said Hackett doubtfully. "I don't know if I do take that story
or not—it hangs together, sure. And on the face of it, it's more
likely that it was somebody with that kind of motive."

Mendoza agreed. "Let's see what we've got on
these people." They looked, and besides Hackett's character
analysis as gleaned from Mr. Horwitz and his own observation, there
wasn't much and it didn't look remotely interesting. Higgins, sent
out routinely to see the old Miss Kent that Mona Ferne had visited
that evening, reported everything in order: the old lady confirmed
that Miss Ferne had been with her that night from about a quarter to
eight until half past ten or so. Where the girl Angel had been, that
they'd find out.

"It's just—bits and pieces, and it could be
I'm crazy. But that first time I met her, she didn't seem interested
at first in who'd been murdered, and when she heard it was
Twelvetrees, she was very casual about it, who'd want to kill him and
so on. And then two minutes later she was ready to go into hysterics.
Keeping up a front, it could be, and not quite managing it. And then
yesterday the Ferne says to me—and not realizing what she said,
because she couldn't be less interested in the girl, you know—that
‘Angel's been odd' for a week or so. It just added up in my mind,
the way I say—"

Mendoza said, "Yes? Yes .... Girl have a car?"

"I don't know. Probably."

"She'd have money of her own. There was
something said about a trust fund from the father. Not really big
money, maybe, but substantial."

"I'd think so," said Hackett heavily.

"I don't know that
you sell me on this, quite. But we'll have a look. No harm. Suppose
we go and see them if they're home." Mendoza got up and reached
for his hat.

* * *

They were home. When the sour-faced maid opened the
door to Hackett and Mendoza, letting a little light into the dingy
entrance hall, the first thing they heard was the girl's shaking
voice, loud, from the living room: "That's a lie—you know it's
a lie!"

Mendoza handed his hat to the maid and walked past
her, ignoring her protesting query, to the doorway of that room. He
looked at the pair of them interestedly, and added a few mental
comments of his own to Hackett's.

Mona Ferne was elegantly slim in honey-beige and dark
brown today. Evidently she'd been about to leave the house: her
alligator bag, gloves, a chic little brown felt hat with a veil
waited on the arm of the couch. He paid academic tribute to the
finished article, while guessing far more accurately than Hackett how
much time and effort had gone into it. The gleaming perfect flaxen
coiffure, the figure, the face-a very expert piece of work, all of
it; and from fifteen feet away, before he heard her speak or saw her
move, he knew it was all just about as emotionally affective as a
combustion engine .... The girl. Could be pretty. Alison would say,
and be right, built to wear clothes—the height and the figure. Not
one of the types he admired himself.

"Darling," said the woman, "I'm only
saying—" And she saw them then in the doorway, and for the
fraction of a second her eyes held an expression which surprised
Mendoza very much indeed.

Vaya, qué demonic,?
he
said to himself.

And the girl turned to follow her glance, and looked
startled—looked confused, and took a step back to bring up against
the white brick hearth, and leaned there.

"Why, it's the nice police sergeant back
again—do tell me, Sergeant Hackett, have you found whoever it was
did this awful thing? Is there something else I can do for you
now?—I'm only too anxious—" But her eyes were busy on
Mendoza, recognizing him as worthier quarry. She came forward
gracefully.