The Knave of Hearts (20 page)

He roused himself at last and began to look over the
reports. No, it didn’t show, to make an exciting story—the
plodding hard work, the collecting of statistics. They had a lot of
information now, on a lot of their possibles. (And Romeo might not be
on any list they had.) They had, of course—praise heaven for small
mercies—been able to eliminate some, for good reasons: this man had
been in jail for two years; that one was vouched for in San Francisco
at the time of one of the murders; that one had been in the hospital.
But because of the little they had on their man, they hadn’t too
many reasons to eliminate. There might, as Hackett said, be a wife
and family: he might not look the way they thought at all.

Presently Sergeant Lake came in and reminded him of
the man waiting. A Mr. John Lockhart. No, he wouldn’t say what he
wanted, just to talk to the man in charge. No, he wouldn’t be
fobbed off with anything lower.

"I know what he wants," said Mendoza. "He
wants to tell me all about his theory of this case, which he’s sure
I’ll find interesting because for so many years he’s been an
amateur student of crime—or possibly, worse yet, of the
psychopathic criminal. He may even be a professor of psychology or
something. He may be a nut who wants to confess to the murders, and
so we’ll waste time checking and find he hadn’t been released
from Camarillo when McCandless was killed. Tell him to go away,
Jimmy. But tell him politely. Offer him somebody else aga1n."

"That might be," said Lake. "They do
come in. Though he doesn’t look like a nut, Lieutenant."

"Does he match our description for Romeo?"

"Well, you couldn’t hardly say so. About
sixty-five, five-seven, upwards of two hundred pounds, and bald."

"I don’t want him. Shuffle him back in the
pack."

Lake grinned and went out. Mendoza brooded over the
reports some more, and at twelve-fifteen left, to run the gauntlet
again and get some lunch. He had quite a time getting past the press
downstairs. The
Telegraph
story had caught the rest of them off balance; they all wanted to
know about it. Mendoza told them, without naming the witness. They
had questioned approximately lifty people with just as important
information, he told them, and there was no reason to hold any of
them in or out of jail as material witnesses; the police were not
doing so.

"Yah, tell that to the marines!"
Fitzpatrick heckled from the back row. "We’ve got definite
information—"

"From the ex-patrolman, retired, who changes the
targets on the practice range?" inquired Mendoza icily. "You
shouldn’t waste your talents with the
Telegraph
,
Mr. Fitzpatrick—you’d make better money writing pulp fiction."
He pushed past them and they let him go, muttering, breaking up into
little cliques behind him.

But when he was settled in a rear booth in the quiet
dimness of Federico’s, where a lot of headquarters men habitually
lunched, he found he wasn’t hungry. He had not wanted breakfast
either; he had a dull headache from the sleeplessness and, probably,
hunger, and he knew he should eat. He ordered a meal, and had two
fingers of rye, then black coffee, beforehand; when the plate was set
before him, he could not eat more than a few mouthfuls. After a
while, when he’d had a second cup of coffee, he beckoned the waiter
and asked for more rye. It was Adam, the tall, grave Jamaican Negro;
and he leaned on the table and said, "You didn’t eat hardly
any of your luncheon, Lieutenant Mendoza. I never knew you had a
drink middle of the day, except once or twice. It’s in my mind,
you’re worrying over this bad fellow you’re looking for."

"I suppose I am, Adam."

"Liquor and no food, it won’t help you find
him any sooner, Lieutenant. Better you let me bring you something
else—if you don’t fancy the beef, I make up a real nice ham
sandwich. Tide you over, like. And a little brandy in your coffee,
sir, but that rough hundred-proof stuff, it’s only fit for
Irishmen. They like to make whiskey so, let ’em—civilized folk
got no call to drink it."

Mendoza laughed and said, "No, it’s O.K., I’m
not hungry. Bring me the rye. You know when I do want a drink, I want
the most kick for my money."

"Now, Lieutenant—"

"Hell and damnation," said Mendoza softly,
"are you trying to wet nurse me, boy? If I don’t get served
here, there’s a bar three doors down."

Adam bowed his head and said mournfully, "I
serve you, sir."

At one-fifteen Mendoza came back to the big new
police building, and he was walking carefully and watching himself.
The liquor he’d had, Hackett or another man would be feeling just a
pleasant glow, but he wasn’t used to more than two at once, and it
never took much to set him feeling it anyway. He knew logically he’d
have been better off to force himself to eat, but the alcohol had set
his brain working at normal speed, and that was what he’d expected
and reached for. Just to take him over the afternoon, put some
spurious energy in him, and tonight he’d take a couple of the
little non-barbiturate sleeping tablets he’d got at the drugstore,
and get a decent night’s sleep. And tomorrow he’d be himself
again, operating on all cylinders.

He didn’t know what the hell had got into him,
letting a thing take him down physically like this. Getting old
maybe. Maybe just that he was an egotist, couldn’t take criticism,
couldn’t stand failure—even temporary. But the liquor had picked
him up beautifully, if that was only temporary; he had stimulated a
few vague ideas to buzzing round the back of his mind.

Which was excellent, but no legwork himself
today—better not drive. And if the one bright idea came to him, the
inspired hunch—stirred up from the subconscious (if there was such
a thing)—it’d be worth any little hangover afterward.

He walked into the lobby and they were still there,
waiting around in their little cliques. They formed the gauntlet
again.

"I just dare you, Sherlock, tell us anything
definite you know about the killer yet! Don’t give us that one
about warning him before you’re ready to close in—you admit it,
you’re not in fifty miles of—"

"I’ve given you all you’re going to get,"
said Mendoza, smiling at Fitzpatrick. "And the rest of you might
give some thought to the old saying about birds of a feather. Quite
frankly, after Mr. Fitzpatrick’s exhibition today, I don’t feel
inclined to tell any of you anything ever again. Very damn nervous
I’d feel, telling you that my cat had kittens—the next edition
would headline the front page with the news that I keep seven lions
in separate cages in my living room."

Edmunds grinned mirthlessly and said, "Don’t
generalize, Lieutenant."

"Doubletalk!" jeered Fitzpatrick. "The
whole Christdamn bunch of you trying to cover up—and cover up
what?—that the taxpayers might as well throw their cash down the
sewer for all the good they get—you free-riders sitting around on
your fat asses all day! Tell you what l’d like to know, Sherlock—"

"What would you like to know, Mr. Fitzpatrick?"
asked Mendoza dreamily. He was rocking very slightly, heel to toe,
and he was still smiling steadily.

And little Rodriguez, who had once most fortunately
been at the scene of arrest of a certain gunsel who had previously
accounted for one of Mendoza’s sergeants, looked twice at him,
stepped smartly back and murmured to Edmunds, "
¡Cuidado!
—give
him room!"
 
"I’d like
to know just how many innocent men like Allan Haines have been
railroaded to the pen or the gas chamber by your bunch of—"

"I just told you a lie, Mr. Fitzpatrick,"
said Mendoza gently, and he took three steps past the rest of them,
to face the big man scowling and shouting at him. "I told you
I’d given you all you’d get. A black lie, Mr. Fitzpatrick—"
and his fist connected sudden and solid, three times, and the big man
went down without a sound and stayed there.

"Oh, very nice," said Edmunds. "I’ve
often wanted to do that myself."

"And not a cameraman in the crowd, oh, Jesus,"
moaned Wolfe, "what a break, what a—"

"Go and write up the new headlines, boys!"
said Mendoza, swinging on them savagely. "Tell the public all
about its cops—half of them cretins and the other half gangsters!
Blow it up, make it a good story, you’1l all get gold medals from
your editors for increasing circulation! And if we never catch up to
Romeo, what the hell, it’s only five women—we kill thousands per
year on the freeways! Has anyone else any questions, friends?"

They scattered before him,
making for the nearest phones, Wolfe still moaning
No
cameraman
. The elevator operator peering
excitedly out of his cage withdrew hurriedly as Mendoza came stalking
toward him.

* * *

"If I were you," said Mrs. Lockhart,
cold-creaming her face briskly,"I’d just forget the whole
business. I don’t care who or what anybody is, there’s such a
thing as decent manners. Treating you as if you were just some
no-account know-nothing coming in to waste their time! Well, of
course it said in the paper the one running the investigation is a
Mexican—I suppose you couldn’t expect anything else. For certain,
the few of those brace-air-ohs as they call them, I’ve seen, they
bring in for harvest, I wouldn’t say they were very smart."

"Now, Mother," said John Lockhart mildly,
"let’s not jump to conclusions and go off half-cocked. There’s
people and people, and funny enough it is, you find smart and dumb
everywhere. Policemen aren’t so very damn different, I guess, Tokyo
to London, as you might say—or small town or big. And these boys
got an awful big headache here, they got no time—I can see that—to
waste on damn-fool civilians coming in with crackpot ideas. I guess
where I wasted my time was not getting that sergeant to take in a
little message, say who I am."

"Three days wasted," she said resignedly.
"We’ve only got three weeks. Marian was going to take us to
Palm Springs, and we figured to stop at Las Vegas on the way back,
just to see—I don’t hold with gambling, but interesting to see."

Lockhart took off his shirt and draped it across the
back of the straight hotel-room chair. "Now, Mother,” he said,
"you want, I’ll put you on the train back to San Diego, you
and Marian go on, have a good time. It isn’t fair, make you miss
your whole vacation on account of this. I never meant to. But way it
is, well, you’re either one kind or the other. There’s a lot of
people, they can leave a jigsaw puzzle in the middle, and a lot too
who can figure, Hell, it’s none o’ my business, and turn their
backs, and sleep sound. And then there’s people, you might say,
born to be cops—in or out of uniform. Nothing to do with good or
bad, just the way you’re made. Like you find good dogs in any
litter, but some of ’em, they just come built to run a trail or
work cows. Nothing you teach ’em, they just got it installed as you
might say. I often thought, you take a cop—if he’s a good one,
Martha, he didn’t start being a cop day he got into uniform. He
always was, and he always will be. And he isn’t the cop just eight
hours out o’ the twenty-four. Way I figure, this one these boys are
after, whoever he is—whether it’s Gideon or not—he’s a bad
one, and if I’ve got any help to offer ’em, it’s my duty as an
ordinary citizen, cop or no cop."

"Oh, I’m to go back to San Diego, am I! While
you racket round Hollywood on your own! I may think you’re a fool,
John Lockhart, but that’s all the more reason to stay and see you
behave yourself."

Lockhart grinned at her, hanging up his pants. "Now,
that’s a compliment—afraid some o’ these here starlets’d find
me so interesting, maybe corrupt my morals if I hadn’t a wife
along, keep me in line! I’m sorry, hon, I know it kind of spoils
the vacation, but there it is .... These fellows really got trouble."
He came to the bed, looked down at the afternoon edition of the Daily
News spread out there. "Can’t say I blame this Mendoza for
taking a poke at that reporter. Beats all how they seem to figure. I
guess," and he sighed, for he was something of an amateur
philosopher, "it’s just human nature. Not liking any kind of
authority .... What I seen of this place, must be hell with the lid
off, try to police it. Seems to go on forever, city limits. Way down
to the ocean—why, that must be thirty miles. Makes you think. Quite
a job. Must be they got four, five thousand men. Makes you wonder how
the hell-an’-to-gone they start."

"We’re on a vacation," said his wife,
tying a hairnet over her neat gray sausage curls.

"Sure, honey. I’m damn sorry it turned out
this way. But I couldn’t do nothing else. I mean, you got to
figure, it’s not just that I want to know for sure about Rhoda—what
the hell, one like that. It’s just—I can’t say, what’s the
odds, none o’ my business. If I got any help to give, I got to give
it. I mean, it’s-like it might be Marian. Anybody. . .The fellows
call themselves psychiatrists—way I read ’em they make out
everybody’s a little nuts. Well, I don’t know . . ."

"Downright rudeness!" she said. "Not
as if you were just anybody!"

Lockhart took up his pajama coat and stared at it
earnestly. "I got to get in and tell them, Martha. Just in case.
It’s my duty. The oath, it don’t specify Illinois or Maine or
California—not the sense of it. These fellows, they got trouble on
their hands. Don’t blame ’em for maybe bein’ short-tempered. I
would be .... The very hell of a place to police, this must be. And I
read somewhere, a while ago, it’s supposed to be a crack city
force, the best in the country, it said. Wonder how they operate on a
thing like this—start to look—place this size." He put on
the pajama coat absently, began to button it—thinking, speculating.