The Knave of Hearts (15 page)

Mendoza laughed. "Dot the i’s, because all
he’d have had to do was show up with a couple of the other boys
some night. Sure."

"Listen," she said defensively, "neither
of us ever welcomed just anybody with open arms. It wasn’t that
kind of thing. But I guess you see what I mean, it was account of him
being that way made me think—when I been thinking it over just
lately—he was a kind of loner. Didn’t know any fellows around
there, let alone share a cabin with any, or mix much with any crowd.
You see?"

"Mmh. Logical. Tell on."

"That’s about it. If he told Julie his name
that night, she didn’t remember it or tell me. She wasn’t
interested—neither was I, then. But when I read about what happened
to these others, I thought about him. It could be. I don’t know
what you think about it, and what I’ve said—all I knew about it,
and her—doesn’t look as if she’d ever have gone out on a date
with him, nothing like that. But if he offered her a ride home from
Tony’s some night—we didn’t have a car—or from the store,
why, she’d have said yes quick, anyone would, a little thing like
that."

"Yes," he agreed. And all this was—like
most of everything else they had to go on in this business—a very
small scrap of what was only might-be evidence; but there was another
little list of just possibly suggestive facts which was leading him
on to wonder if it did connect. He stared at his empty glass, and he
thought, Not Mary Ellen. But that was in the middle of the week.
Topanga Canyon—the beach up toward Ventura, the other side of
Malibu (and that was on a Sunday)—the beach street where Julie had
been buried. Yes—no? Coincidence? Meaning anything at all?

He looked up at Madge without seeing her very
clearly. "Yes," he said, "yes.
Tal
vez
—just maybe . . ." Balance the
credits and debits. Another one to add to the list. The press had
already done that, but on the other hand, maybe on this one some much
more useful pointers where to look? He said, "I want a statement
from you on this."

"Sure, anything I can do to help, Lieutenant."

"Let’s see if the sheriff can supply us a
steno at this time of night."

And he wondered doubtfully if they closed up the
police station at nine o’c1ock, maybe, and all went home; but when
they came past there was a light in a rear window, so he parked and
took Madge in. The front office was empty, but there was talk and
laughter from the rear and he went down a little duty hall. There in
a back room sat the sheriff, the deputy Mendoza had met, and three
others round a table under an unshaded electric bulb, over what
looked to be a lively hand of poker. There was a good deal of smoke,
a half-empty bottle, and a general air of camaraderie.

The sheriff laid down his hand, innocently turned his
back on the table, and came up to ask what he wanted. Mendoza
explained. "Oh, sure, I guess we can take care of that for you.
Andy here’s a pretty fair steno if you give him time." He
wasn’t too pleased at having the game interrupted, but he knew his
duty. "Madge really had something for you, eh?"

"Very gratifying, in a way," said Mendoza,
absently. He and Madge and Andy foregathered in the front office and
Madge made her statement. They watched Andy copy it, Madge signed it
neatly, and Mendoza said, "I’ll take you home, Miss Parrott—or
back to work?"

"I guess not much point in that now, they’ll
be through the rush, and Mr. Newbolt’s nice, he won’t grudge me
the pay anyways."

Mendoza took her home through a labyrinth of dark
lanes, and on his way back wished he had blazed the trail to the main
street. He found the police station again, went in, and thanked the
sheriff cordially for his invaluable aid. "I see
you’re—mmh—whiling away the evening with a little friendly
game." He gave them all a vague general smile. "I’ve been
so busy lately, no time to re1ax—but they do say a change of
occupation’s sometimes more restful, don’t they?"

At this broad hint the sheriff looked doubtful,
looked resigned, and then slowly another idea (Mendoza saw it
germinate) occurred to him; his eyes rested a little thoughtfully on
Mendoza’s gold cuff links, custom-made shoes, and Sulka tie. He
said genially, "Like to sit in a few hands, Lieutenant? Glad to
have you, hah, boys?"

"That’s very hospitable of you," said
Mendoza; he coughed gently. "I don’t often get the chance of
playing, I’m afraid—they keep me busy, you know." He beamed
around at introductions, advancing to the table. "Very nice of
you indeed, I’ll enjoy a few friendly hands. Oh, nothing to drink,
thanks, I never drink when I’m handling cards .... "
 

ELEVEN

Hackett sat looking at those file cards for a few
minutes after Mendoza had gone, and then got up and stood staring out
the window. There wasn’t really a great deal for him to do right
now. A lot of hard work on this business, but it wasn’t as if there
were a dozen witnesses to be questioned and requestioned by the top
officers: most of the work at his stage was collecting facts—the
men on the street did most of that—and thinking hard about them,
arranging them in different patterns. And he didn’t know that any
amount of thinking was going to get them anywhere.

Maybe a hundred men (he hadn’t counted) who could
be Romeo, just because of a very arbitrary connection somewhere. A
connection to the Haineses’ former neighborhood in general. To
Haines’ office. To sex-offense records. To the neighborhoods around
where Piper and Teitel had met him. Things like that. And all of
these possibles had to be looked at closely to be sure; the L.A.P.D.
simply didn’t have the manpower to do that all at once, and would
have to take them in batches, hoping to climinate as they went along.
You had to start looking somewhere, but on an offbeat one like this
that sort of routine wasn’t always very useful. Chance played such
a large part, sometimes: the random coincidence.

He might never have lived within ten miles of the
Haineses; he might have known about that big back yard and the garden
shed from having visited someone around there once, on business or
socially. He might never have been in trouble with the police:
millions of citizens never had. He might have been in those other
districts, where he’d picked up Piper and Teitel, just on one
occasion.

Hackett sighed. Routine. Sure, it put together a lot
of cases. There had to be routine. But from experience he knew
Mendoza was right in saying that routine, hard work, wasn’t always
the whole reason you got somewhere or didn’t. Mendoza the gambler
seemed to feel it was as if Providence—or Something—sat up there
dealing hands around, and this deal you got a couple of nice fat
aces, next deal nothing but low cards. And on discard-and-draw,
sometimes you got just what you were after to till out your hand, and
sometimes the fellow across the table, the one you had to beat, got
all the court cards instead.

Mendoza, of course, didn’t think there was anything
to it but blind chance, the way the deck got shuffled. Hackett, who
wouldn’t call himself a religious man, persisted in feeling vaguely
that always, when it came to the last deal—when all the chips were
down—the deck was stacked against the Opponent.

And of course—he’d seen that kind of thing work
out more than once—the random chance could favor you as well as the
fellow across the table.

He came back to the desk and without sitting down he
looked at the city map he’d been studying when Mendoza came in.
There was a little thought, he couldn’t call it an idea, in his
mind about that. Something he couldn’t very well explain to Dwyer
or Higgins or Landers, any man out on the street collecting facts:
something he couldn’t formulate except vaguely to himself.

Take a map, any map, but maybe especially one of this
place, the whole city. It told you directions and distances and the
names of streets; it couldn’t show you all the little things, or
the intangible things. What kinds of neighborhoods; where one kind
turned into another kind. Relationships of buildings and houses and
empty lots. What a given place really looked like. Or, of course,
what kind of people lived there.

And it was people who were important. Inevitably.

This place. The biggest city in the world in area,
four hundred and fifty-seven square miles of it. There were jokes
about that; there was an L.A. City Limits sign at Boulder Dam over in
Nevada, another somewhere up in Alaska. Well, it had just grown—one
reason and another—and in all directions. And as far as people
went, they were from all over: take any crowd at random, only about
one in eighteen would be California-born. And all kinds of people.

Very convenient indeed if you could generalize with
confidence, if people fitted nice and neat into the general-type
slots—figuring it economically or any other way. Sure. And you
couldn’t throw in your hand and demand a new deal, but you could
always draw, hoping you’d get something useful. Hackett got his hat
and went out, to chase a will-o’-the-wisp he wasn’t at all sure
was there.

The Haineses had lived a little way up from Franklin
Avenue in Hollywood. Franklin was a minor dividing line of
neighborhoods, right along there, running more or less across the top
of Hollywood east to west. Not very far above it was the line of
foothills, with the San Fernando Valley on the other side, no natural
passes here; there wasn’t much level ground above Franklin. Twenty
or thirty years ago Franklin had been an exclusive street to live on,
as had the few little winding streets north of it then developed and
built on. Down below, there had been and were side streets crossing
Western, Van Ness, Gower, Vine, Cahuenga—the main drags—which
were residential, but not as exclusive: respectable middle-class,
some better than others, some rental-zoned. But business had grown
inexorably all around and between Western and Van Ness, here, and
while there were still quiet residential side streets—the Woods’
house was on one of them—a lot of it to this and that side was
beginning to look a little down-at-heel. As for Franklin—who had
the money to keep up city estates like those now?

Mostly they were two-storey stucco, bastard Spanish
or Mediterranean, at the top of immense sweeps of terraced lawn:
looking down their noses, like a row of elderly dowagers at a modem
miss in a bikini. And not so well kept up these days as they had
been. Hackett reflected, driving past, that falling heir to one of
them when old Aunt Mary died—as a lot of poor devils had—would be
acquiring a white elephant....And here was the street the Haineses
had lived on, Birch Avenue. He
turned up it.

After the trial and the denial of the appeal—probably
when all the money was gone to the lawyers—Sally Haines had sold
the house. Hackett didn’t know who owned it now, but he wasn’t
interested in the house. He drove past it; like some of its neighbors
it was vaguely colonial-style, white stucco and frame, with a low
wall; like most of them, pretty well kept up. This wasn’t a brashly
fashionable area by any means; these houses were just a little newer
than the big places along Franklin, built when it was beginning to be
prohibitive to maintain a twelve-room house. It was conservative
upper-middle-class here; the houses were all twenty or thirty years
old, but the taxes would run higher than Hackett would care to pay.

He turned left at the next narrow street and two city
frontages up saw the mouth of the little alley to the left. It didn’t
continue across; probably its existence was due to some divergence in
the original subdividing of this area. He remembered that it wasn’t
very long—a block or so—and seeing the place in three dimensions,
rather than on a map, he could see why it attracted traffic. These
streets ran diagonally up here, and anyone on foot who was going or
coming from nearby on Birch Avenue, or Archer a block up, or View
Terrace, which he was on now, would find the alley a little short
cut, closer to Franklin.

They had drawn a circle on the map, twenty square
blocks or thereabouts, and men had canvassed the whole area
collecting statistics. And maybe none of it meant a damned thing.
Also, of course, they had looked at this particular small center of
the circle a little closer (and so they had before, at the time of
the Wood case). If there was anything out of the ordinary, anything
here, somebody should have spotted it by now.

Hackett told himself he was a damn fool clutching at
straws, wasting time like this. He parked, walked across the little
street, and started slowly down the alley.

It was wide enough for a car, and up ahead he could
see that some people had put rear double doors on their garages so
they could come in and out by the alley. The first three houses from
the corner, to his left, had achieved privacy by a high brick wall, a
reed fence, and a wire fence overgrown with ivy. The next house
apparently didn’t care who looked into its back yard; there was
just a low stucco wall about two feet high, and he could see the rear
and side of the frame garage, lawn, flower beds, rattan and aluminum
patio furniture, the whole of the house, and a clothesline with a
dozen diapers hung on it. The house next to that was the one the
Haineses had owned.

There wasn’t even a wall here, just a low picket
fence a man could easily step over. Privacy had been arranged by the
hedge—he didn’t know what kind—planted about twenty feet up the
yard, right across except for a gap where there was a wooden gate.
Midway between that and where he stood was the famous garden shed, a
little corrugated-iron affair, utilitarian rather than beautiful,
where tools would obviously be kept. Grass grew listlessly brown in
patches this side of the hedge, but this part of the yard wasn’t
landscaped: there was the big cement slab where an incinerator had
stood before the city outlawed them, and off to the side a
clothesline.