The Knave of Hearts (5 page)

—
and she sobered. "Unless it’s something
awfully important, maybe it’s just as well you ask me—Mother and
Dad, well, they’ve never really gotten over it, you know—"

"Understandable," said Mendoza, sitting
down.

"Can I get you a drink or something?—I was
just going to have some lemonade, it’s all chilled in the
refrigerator—no trouble .... But what’s this all about, after all
this time?" She had nice topaz-colored eyes, intelligent, and
she cocked her cropped brown head at him shrewdly.

“
Unfortunately," he said, "I’m afraid
you’ll be getting the answer to that in the papers soon. If I told
you all about it now, you might be a little prejudiced against me as
a representative detective. All I—"

"Oh, I don’t know," she murmured.

"All I want to ask you, it’s something you may
not be able to tell me." Maybe it was the contrast of his
reception here, but he felt oddly at home in this big, cool living
room with its comfortable shabby furniture. The girl looked sideways
at him (frankly interested, curious, a little gauche as yet and yet
knowing that: her awareness of herself and him somehow endearing);
and suddenly he knew it wasn’t the room, or the friendly welcome,
made him feel that way. Something more personal. She reminded him of
Alison . . . not in any physical way: in herself. The kind of girl
Alison would have been, eleven or twelve years back. This direct
look, this promise of something more subtle than beauty. Alison. . .

"
¡Caray, soy on loca
completo
—going senile!” he thought to
himself irritably. Let it go, for God’s sake, forget it, no
post-mortems! (And a whisper at the back of his mind saying, but you
know why, don’t you? Just think a minute: you will have to face it,
admit it, sooner or later, you know.)

"What I want to ask you, Miss Wood,"—he
flicked his lighter quickly—"is about your sister’s friends.
If you’ll indulge me a moment without knowing why. She wasn’t
going steady with   anyone? Were there many young men she
dated?—how many?—who were they?" Thompson had covered all
that, but you had to start somewhere.

 
She studied one scuffed toe of her old flat
sandals. "It’s funny, isn’t it," she said irrelevantly,
"after a while you get to a place where you can
be—objective—about it. You know? Where you can look back it
without feeling an awful 1ot." She shot him a quick glance. "If
you know what I mean, you can see that somebody dead—somebody you
really loved—that there were good and bad things about them
....Have you found out Mr. Haines didn’t do it after all?"

"Why should you think that?"

“
Oh, well, I never thought he did, you know. He
hadn’t—that kind of violence in him. If you know what I mean. I
mean, well, you get feelings from people—ideas of what they’re
like. You know? I don’t know, maybe it’s a funny thing to say—Mr.
Haines, well, if Mary Ellen had been the kind of girl who didn’t
care, the casual kind, you know, he’d ’ve—made love to her, and
neither of them would have thought much about it. But he wasn’t the
kind to use any force about it." She was still looking at her
sandal, the visible scarlet-nailed toes. "I never said all this
to Mother and Dad, they never thought but what— And the police were
so sure, too, and after all they ought to know more about it than me.
I just wondered if you’d found out anything more. Maybe I’m only
imagining things, and I won’t ask any"—with a shy
half—defiant grin—"awkward questions. But I don’t know why
you’d be around again now, unless—Oh, well. Maybe we’ve just
got to think, something like destiny .... I—Lieutenant, I guess I
wouldn’t like to have Mother and Dad have to hear this—you know,
sometimes older people think a little different about these things—"

"Off the record," he said. "I
promise." He put out his half-smoked cigarette in sudden
distaste.

A sidelong smile. "Well, I—you know, it was
almost a year and a half ago, I was only seventeen .... You said you
wanted to know about boys she— Naturally, you sort of forget all
the things you— didn’t really like in somebody, when they’re
dead—"

"Sisters," he said, reading between the
lines, making it easy for her, "don’t always get along. Sure.
Off the record." That was one of the little difficulties he’d
often faced: anybody recently dead—hard to get at the truth about
them from conventional relatives and friends.

"Mary Ellen and I always got along O.K.,"
she said absently. "Nothing like that. No, I never said so,
nobody’d have listened anyway, but I never could see Mr. Haines
doing it. I did wonder if it might have been the new one, the one
she’d just met."

Mendoza ripped open a fresh pack of cigarettes with
less than his usual care, offered her one, lit both. Talk about
stacked decks! The kind of thing that turned detectives gray. With
all the scientific gadgets they had to help, what the job came down
to was coping with people. You could ask all the indicated questions,
look in all the indicated places, file it all in black and white for
careful study, and still you could never be sure you had it all. Some
quirk of human nature, some irrelevancy, innocently, by chance,
screening the one important piece in the jigsaw puzzle. And coming
out—if it ever did—by chance too ....Thompson had been a good
man. But because a shy seventeen-year-old had hesitated to speak up,
a little something never coming out. "The new one," he said
noncommittally. "Who was that, and what about him made you
think—?"

"I never said anything to anybody about it,
there wasn’t anything to say—just a crazy idea, maybe. I never
met him,” said Edith. "Mary Ellen didn’t talk much to me
about that kind of thing, not as much as she would have to friends
her own age. Like Judy Gold or Wanda Adams. The reason I just sort of
wondered, you know—well, it must have been someone she knew,
mustn’t it? That was one of the reasons the police thought of Mr.
Haines. It was afternoon, broad daylight. Ordinarily, Mary Ellen’d
have come right home after her last class, or if she had a little
shopping to do, she’d have been home by five or half past. So it
must have been right then, and—just as they said about Mr.
Haines—whoever it was offered her a ride home, something like that.
Because she’d never have let herself be picked up, and nobody could
be kidnaped off a city street in broad daylight .... That Sergeant
Thompson was very nice and sympathetic, but"—she cocked her
head, wrinkled her small nose charmingly—"it’s not quite the
same, getting a—a background in questions and answers, as knowing
at first hand. Is it?"

"No. This new boy?"

"Not a boy. Mary Ellen—that’s what I was
getting to—she was awfully particular, too much so. Old for her
age, people said—you know, serious—I guess she was, you know,
mature. She’d never go out with a lot of boys who asked her,
because of some silly little thing about them, the way they dressed
or used slang or drove a car. She thought most boys her age were
uninteresting, didn’t know how to act to a girl. That was why, I
guess, she’d never gone steady with anyone. There were some nice
boys she could have gone with, but—it always seemed to me—she
thought she was too good for them. She expected too much, it you know
what I mean. And that was why she was all excited about this one.
She’d only met him a couple of days before, I think, the way it she
talked. She hadn’t been out on a date with him yet, or we’d have
met him and I could tell you more about him. But she thought he was
going to ask her, she said. I don’t think I ever saw her so—you
know—set up over a b—a man. She was really a little silly about
it. She said he was smooth, had awfully nice manners, and he wasn’t
smart-aleck or kiddish like the boys at college—she thought he was
twenty-nine or thirty. His name was Edward Anthony. I remember, I
said he sounded like a gigolo—somehow I got the impression of
those, you know, courtly manners, a little too smooth—and she got
mad and wouldn’t say any more about him."

Yes; human nature. See those other girls .... "Where
did she meet him, do you know?"

"She got mad before she told me that. This was
the day before she was—was killed, Lieutenant, I ought to have
said. She was really sold on him .... Well, I don’t know that
anybody would have mentioned him to the police—I don’t think
Mother and Dad ever heard about him. Mary Ellen kept things to
herself a lot, that sort of thing anyway—she never said much to me.
And it all went—sort of fast, after they—found her, you know, and
everything seemed to point to Mr. Haines, and—with Mother and Dad
carrying on so, and of course I was—I don’t suppose anyone’d
have listened to me if I’d had anything definite to tell. But since
then—thinking about it without feeling so much—I’ve just
wondered. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all, of course. She
knew a lot of people she’d have taken a ride from if they offered
it. But—most of those, she’d known quite a while and ridden alone
with before, and why just then should one of them—?"

“
Edward Anthony," said Mendoza. "Yes.
Maybe it means something, maybe not." He looked at her, getting
up: at her direct eyes and the something in the cock of her brown
head that reminded him of Alison. "I’m sorry, it’s going to
be hashed over again, Miss Wood. Not nice for any of you. Just one of
those things."

"He wasn’t the one, you’ve found out. How
awful," she said. "How awful—for everybody. Poor Mrs.
Haines—and you too."

"That’s probably the first and last sympathy
we’ll be offered in this mess," he said bitterly. "Thanks
very much for the kind thought."

And he was already, that early in the case, beginning
to have a nightmare vision .... They cracked jokes, in Homicide,
about Mendoza’s hunches: Luis and his crystal ball. Hunches didn’t
come out of nowhere; he knew himself well enough to acknowledge that
it was an almost feminine sensitivity for people, so that the nuances
got through to him by something like radar, which produced most of
his hunches. And they would be very damned helpful sometimes,
pointing a direction to make a cast. But right now he didn’t
welcome the hunch he had, and he hoped to God he was wrong.
 

FOUR

He got addresses from Edith Wood; he looked up those
two girls she’d mentioned, friends of Mary Ellen’s. Neither was
home, this summer Sunday. He made appointments to see them later,
with a curious Mr. Gold and an alarmed Mrs. Adams. He sat in the car
and looked at some other names and addresses he’d taken down. The
law offices would be closed, of course. Finally he turned back east
and drove down to Hawthorne, to the apartment house where, sixteen
months ago, Celestine Teitel and Evelyn Reeder had shared quarters.

Miss Reeder had moved, the manageress told him
crossly (he’d disturbed her afternoon nap, by her
déshabillé
).
No, not then: about two months ago. She’d got transferred to
another school, and wanted to be closer. Well, she’d left the new
address, on account of letters and so on .... Yes, the manageress
could look it up, she supposed, if it was urgent. Mendoza exerted
himself to put out a little charm; she thawed, I and retreated to
rummage through her desk.

Three o’clock found him back in Hollywood, out west
this time. He ran his quarry down in the upper apartment of an old
duplex: a dreary, neatly sterile place of drab color and content.
Miss Reeder resembled her apartment. She sat bolt upright on a
sagging sofa and regarded Mendoza uneasily; he deduced with no
difficulty that in Miss Reeder’s philosophy all males were slightly
suspect to start with, and one with a moustache, smooth address, and
elegant tailoring was admitted to a
téte-a-téte
at obvious peril to any virtuous female. She was about forty,
sandy-haired and spectacled.

"Celestine—" she said with a little gasp
when he’d explained, asked his question. "Such a terrible
thing—an awful warning of what can happen. I’d been nervous about
it, I begged her to use more caution, you know—going off to such
lonely places to do her sketching—one never knows what dangerous
characters—"

He listened to her, murmured agreement, asked his
question again.

She stared at him a little fuzzily, her pale eyes
enlarged by thick lenses, seen full on.

"Oh, Celestine was a very quiet person, never
one for-for much social life. I—neither of us went out a great
deal—only her sketching that took her out to such places ....
Gentlemen? Well, I don’t think—no, I don’t recall that she
ever— But surely, Lieutenant, I’m afraid I don’t quite
understand, it wouldn’t have been anyone she knew! Some
criminal—some mental defective—lurking—"

He asked the question
again, patiently. Miss Reeder adjusted her pink plastic glasses and
looked thoughtful, looked startled. She said slowly, "Well, it
is a peculiar coincidence—now you ask about it
specifically—naturally it never entered my head to mention at the
time, because, my goodness, the kind of person people like ourselves
would know—it just didn’t seem at all relevant—but now you
recall it to my mind . . ."

* * *

He dropped in at his office downtown an hour later.
Hackett had been and gone; he had left a page of notes on McCandless
centered on Mendoza’s desk. Mendoza glanced over them without
sitting down. Hackett didn’t know about this little idea, but
Hackett wasn’t lacking in brains or imagination; if something had
suggested it to him too, it would be just more confirmation.