The Knave of Hearts (14 page)

He shrugged. "I don’t know. I hope you can
tell me something to point one way or the other. Between us, I’d be
just as well pleased if something says no. We’ve got enough on our
hands right now."

"I guess you have," said Madge. The waiter
brought their drinks.

"But maybe I can tell you something, at that. I
don’t know—you’re the one to, you know, kind of put it
together. You want to ask questions, I suppose, but can I just go on
and—and tell you what I been thinking and all, a while?—you stop
me and ask, if there’s anything you want to know special."

"Go ahead."

She took a reflective sip. He thought irrelevantly
that it was probably a middling-respectable family, and nobody down
here knew the somewhat lesser reputation she’d had up around the
big city. It figured. And he sympathized with the way she felt: he
was a paving-neon-1ights-and-crowds man himself. A lot of pretty
scenery in the country, and no smog, but essentially the country was
things instead of people, and people were always so much more
interesting.

"I didn’t feel exactly that way about the
cops," she said. "I guess I could see how it looked to
them. After a while I figured it that way myself. You know how you
do—you really know inside it’s a different way, but everybody so
sure opposite and telling you good reasons it is—and besides,
wasn’t nothing I could do about it. See, it was all little things I
guess a man just wouldn’t see was important."

"Try me, Madge."

"Oh, you," she said with a sidelong smile.
"I wasn’t born yesterday, don’t need more’n one look at
you to know—you know all the answers, it comes to us girls."

"Don’t flatter me, no man ever does."

"And maybe you got something there too,"
she said abstractedly, moving her glass around in a little circle.
"Maybe none of us ever really know all the answers, even about
our own selves .... See, it was that new dress she’d just got, real
bargain it was, one of those places up in Hollywood sells secondhand
stuff but not really secondhand, know what I mean—clothes the movie
stars, people like that, turn in—kind of people they can’t be
seen in the same thing three times, you know. Things not worn a bit,
and specially designed. Julie being a blonde, if she did help it
along a little, she could wear black real good, and it was a swell
dress, must’ve cost a hundred or so first place. She was crazy
about it, she’d only worn it once yet. And there was all her
make-up—you know, foundation stuff and powder in big boxes and
rouge and cologne and talcum and eye stuff, kind of thing nobody
carries in their purse. And her best shoes, transparent vinyl plastic
with rhinestone heels, eight dollars she’d paid for those on sale.
I said to the cop, sure, O.K., she just migh've gone off, her own
self, without saying anything to me—though I know she’d have left
a note—if it came up in a hurry, but she wouldn’t ’ve gone off
without her new dress, her best shoes, all her make-up. She liked
Coty’s, and gee, that’s not dime-store stuff, it’d cost
something to get all new .... And that’s one thing about vinyl
plastic—it goes with any color, see—and they was good shoes. Even
if she’d gone off with Al Bruno, way they said, or somebody else
she expected to buy her all new stuff, she wouldn’t have just left
things like that. Sure, maybe work clothes, old stuff, odds and ends
not worth much, but not those things—or a couple pieces nice
costume jewelry and so on. I mean, why should she?" Madge sighed
again. "All the same, way they put it, I couldn’t say for
absolutely sure. You know?"

"Sure. Logical. You think she’d have let you
know? You two, you didn’t just come and go, independent of each
other?" He was letting her take her time.

"Just between you ’n’ me ’n’ the
gatepost, Lieutenant, I know she’d have told me. I kind of see how
the law’s got to figure, but most ways it don’t make much sense.
I mean, they say, you got nothing in black and white to prove it, you
can’t be sure. But you know ’s well as me, you know for damned
certain in yourself—gee, there I go swearing again, sorry—you
know what a person’ll do or not do when it comes to little ordinary
things like that. All right, maybe you don’t about big
things—people do a lot of funny things that aren’t what you’d
expect of them, about big things like falling in love and so on—but
about things like that”—she gestured vaguely—"you know,
they don’t change. Julie, she was brought up nice, she was a nice
girl."

Mendoza didn’t smile; that didn’t strike him as a
funny remark; being a realist, he knew that the quality Madge would
call
Niceness
hadn’t
much to do with sexual morality.

He said, "That’s very interesting. No, I don’t
suppose you got that across to anybody at the time. You mean she
wouldn’t have run out on you without explaining."

"That’s it. She was always right on time with
her share of the rent and all, and it was nearly the end of the
month. Julie and I always got on good together—well, of course I’m
not the fussy suspicious kind always picking little fights over what
brand of coffee to buy and all like that—you know—and neither was
she. You got to have some consideration for anybody you live with,
and we both did. I mean, well, I was working in Santa Monica, and
supposing I found I had to work late, see, I’d call up Julie at the
restaurant and say—so’s she wouldn’t expect me home same time,
make enough supper for me. And, like if she was getting dressed for a
date when I wasn’t home, and got a run in her nylons last minute,
say, she’d leave a little note, saying she took a pair of mine and
’d pay me back. And like that. So, O.K., say all of a sudden she
decides to go off with Al, and even say it was in such a big hurry
she couldn’t phone me where I worked, why, I know she’d have left
a note. Just a little scribble some kind to say, and if she was
leaving most of her stuff, probably she’d put down something like I
could have it all."

"That figures," he agreed.

"But that’s water under the bridge like they
say, and I guess too"—another sideways look—"they
didn’t pay an awful lot of attention to me on account of they
didn’t think a girl like Julie was much loss—or one like me
anybody to waste time listening to. I suppose you know what I mean."

Mendoza finished his rye. "I’m not interested
in your bed manners, Madge—"

"More’s the pity," and she grinned at
him. "No, a cut above my kind, aren’t you? Could I have
another drink? Just one—I don’t usually—too expensive and Ma’s
death on it, I can’t even have beer in the house. No, but at least
you got enough good sense to know just because I’ve slept around a
little it don’t say I’m a fool or a liar. . . . Thanks ever so
much," as he signaled the waiter. "Look, here’s the way
it was, see, and stop me if I talk too much. They looked for Al some,
to see if she was with him, but they never found him and I guess
after a while they stopped looking. What the hell—you know?"
She shrugged. "Julie didn’t have no people, she was raised in
a Catholic orphanage back East somewheres. Look, Lieutenant, what I’m
goin’ to tell you, it’ll maybe sound like—like those people who
say I always knew there was something funny—after a thing’s
happened, when they never at all. But, gee, at the time I didn’t
have no reason at all to connect it!

"Here’s how it was. It was June when Julie
went away like that—twenty-fourth of June—and like I say, I
didn’t like what the cops said but I finally thought maybe it was
so. Time goes on like it does, and about a year ago—just a year ago
this month—I have to come home, look after Ma. Well, I been buried
alive in this hole ever since, and you get so’s any little thing
out of the ordinary, it makes a change—you gawk out the window at
somebody from the next township. So a couple months back when some
oil company sends out a crew to do test holes up on old man York’s
ranch, I happened drive up there one Sunday afternoon with Betty and
Joe—little ride, see. And one of the fellows in the crew turned out
to be Al Bruno."

"Ah," said Mendoza. "Chance succeeding
where hard work failed. You got together with him, of course—"

"I did," said Madge. "When he was off
for the day."

"—And where was he when we wanted him before?"

"In Alaska. He got sent up there, some
godforsaken place, right after he left L.A. that time. He didn’t
know nothing about Julie, I mean, he didn’t even know she was—gone.
We talked it over some, but we both thought, kind of silly to go to
the police now—and even if they were interested, if they started
looking again, it was all so long ago they wouldn’t be likely—
Well, the thing was, it just put the whole business in my mind again,
know what I mean. I-I liked Julie, you know. We got along real good
.... " She stared at her new drink in silence for a minute. "It
wasn’t like her, do nothing like that. I sort of got to wondering
about it all over again. And then it started to come out in the
papers about—this crazy guy you’re chasing, killed all those
girls. I don’t see the papers regular—busy and all, and we just
got a weekly here, I see that mostly—but last week, I did see a
couple
Times
, and
there was a lot in them about these murders—what those other girls
said and all. Like I say, I’d been remembering back on account of
Julie, and all of a sudden it connected up in my mind, like, and I
thought, Hey, could it be—? But it was pretty far-fetched. Until
you found her. Like that. And then I really did some thinking."

"About what?"

"About this guy, this funny guy. Now if you’re
goin’ to ask how many times she saw him, or what his name was, or
anything like that, I couldn’t tell you. Looking back, it seems
quite a while both of us had seen him hanging around. Different
places. You know, I guess, we had a shack up Topanga Canyon. Well,
places we saw this fellow, it was like in at Tony’s where Julie
worked, and another restaurant further up, and six-seven times on the
beach along there, and once I do remember at the general store in
Topanga, you know that little kind of shopping center halfway up. We
had him spotted for a weekender."

“
A weekender—?"

"You know, somebody comes to the beach just
weekends, regular. The boating crowd does that, but they hang around
Santa Monica mostly on account of the harbor and boat docks. Some
people have
beach cottages, or know people
who do—and sometimes the family’ll be there all week, on
vacation, and the man just comes weekends—but a lot of young
fellows, ones that like swimming and surf-fishing and so on, they’ll
make a beeline for the beach after work Fridays, stay at a cheap
motel or rent a cheap cabin, you know. Sometimes a bunch of them go
in together for a cabin. Especially in the summer."

"I get it. He looked like one of those?"

"Well, I guess the reason we thought so must’ve
been we only saw him around on weekends, or mostly. But I don’t
think he’d be in with a bunch of fellows, for a couple reasons I’ll
say in a minute. If you’re goin’ to ask why we noticed him at
all, well, it was a kind of joke really. It was because he acted like
he’d fallen hard for Julie, and he was"—she made a helpless
gesture—"he wasn’t dry behind the ears, you could tell. Like
a yokel getting his first eyeful of burleycue. You know? A regular
Snerd. I mean, there he’d be, gawking at Julie as if he was trying
get up his nerve, ask her for a date. Like I say, it got to be a
little joke between us. She’d spot him somewhere and nudge me and
say, 'Don’t look now but here’s my biggest fan.' You know?"

"Mmh. For how long?"

"I’ve done some thinking on that too, and the
nearest I can say is, just that spring and summer. I mean, if you get
me, it wasn’t anything either of us was keeping tabs on. I’d say
probably from around end of April, beginning of May, to—to when
Julie left. Got—killed, the way we know now."

She looked up at him suddenly. "Can I ask you
something? I guess, nobody to—claim her, like—the city’ll bury
her, won’t they? It don’t seem exactly right. I haven’t got
much, but I’d like to do something—one thing, I guess you could
say I owe it to her, taking all her stuff like I did. I don’t know
how Catholics do—Julie didn’t go to church, but from a couple
things I heard her say, I guess she’d want a Catholic funeral, and
maybe I could pay the priest or whatever they—?"

"We can see there’s a service read and so on,
sure. Go on, tell me about this fellow."

"Well—he acted like that. Real gone on her.
When I said a Snerd, I didn’t mean he was homely. I mean, far’s I
remember, you wouldn’t turn to look at him for any reason. He—"

"
Dios mio,
”
said Mendoza softly, "could you identify him?"

Madge lifted her shoulders hopelessly, spread her
hands. "Mister, I saw him maybe a dozen times, sure, but across
a restaurant, just for a minute in the store or maybe thirty feet
away on the beach—and not to notice him, I mean to really see what
he looked like, were his eyes blue or his nose straight or his teeth
crooked-just seeing he was there. We weren’t interested in him as a
fellow, just his being there again. No reason to memorize what he
looked like as a fellow—it was just the joke!"

"Yes, I see, damn it. I know what you mean.
Hell,” said Mendoza. "And it’s a very long chance he’s the
same one."

"I don’t know, I just wondered," said
Madge miserably. "I been over and over it, trying to remember
better. But all I come up with, he could’ve been, from what these
other girls said. He was a little bit taller than average, I seem to
remember, not an awful lot but some—maybe an inch taller’n you
are—and built just ordinary, and I think he had browny kind of
hair. Awfully ordinary, really. That’s all I can say. And I never
got any closer to him, never heard him talk. Now don’t go asking me
what day it was, because I just plain don’t remember, but I’ve
sort of got the feeling it wasn’t very long before Julie left. She
came home one night and told me—she laughed a lot about it—this
country boy’d finally got up nerve enough to talk to her. I don’t
know where, Tony’s or some place else—I don’t remember if she
was out on a date that night or working, see. She said he come up
and, you know, tried to start a conversation with her, and just like
you’d expect he kind of stammered and didn’t know what to say. It
was really funny, because—well—"