The Ace of Spades - Dell Shannon (2 page)

"Well— er— " said Rhodes.

"I mean, it is running?"

"Oh, it runs, sure, I just drove it up, of
course."

"Well, then, that's all right. I still can't
imagine why they took it. Where'd you find it?"

He told her, handing over the receipt and a pen.
"Just kids, probably, out for a joy ride. It'd been sitting
there quite a while, they didn't keep it 1ong."

"Well, thank you very much," said Alison
with a nice smile, handing back the receipt and pen. "I am glad
to have it back."

"No trouble at all," said Rhodes gallantly.
Possibly, he thought, she'd say something to Mendoza: such a nice
efficient officer who brought it back; but in any case he'd been
interested in meeting her. Of course, he reflected further on the
ride back to headquarters, she'd actually have been better off if
they'd wrecked that piece of junk and she could put in the full
insurance claim.

The car had come back on Thursday, and Alison drove
it to her school next morning and back again that afternoon, and
found it just the same as usual. On Saturday she drove it down to the
beach, up past Malibu, where she spent most of the day working on
what turned out to be a rather unsatisfactory seascape. Unloading her
painting gear when she got home, she reflected that the poor thing
was badly in need of a bath— a job she loathed— but it was later
than she'd thought, and she had barely an hour to get dressed before
Luis came to take her out to dinner. Tomorrow, she'd clean the car.
The better the day the better the deed.

So late Sunday afternoon found her in the cramped
apartment garage, equipped with a stiff brush, several rags, and a
pail of water. She started by brushing out the inside— seats and
floor. The front seat had accumulated quite a surprising amount of
sand from her jaunt to the beach, and she brushed vigorously, getting
well down into the crack between the back and the seat, kneeling on
the seat to press it down.

Sand, dust, anonymous fluff, and dirt— and of all
things, a long dried twig with a couple of mummified leaves clinging
to it, probably blew in the window and got crushed down— she ran
two fingers down the crack to be sure of getting it all out, and
suddenly felt something else there, and delved farther. Damn, when
she pulled the opening wider the thing just slipped down— but
eventually, at the expense of a torn nail and several muttered
curses, she persuaded it out, and looked at it.

"
¿Y qué es esto?
"
she said to herself absently, turning the thing over * in her palm.
"What on earth is it and where did it come from? How very odd .
. ."
 
 

TWO

The body turned up that Monday morning, halfway down
a narrow alley opening on Carson Street not far from Main. Unlike a
lot of alleys down there, this one wasn't used for anything much, and
as the corpse was beyond the entrance, it hadn't been discovered at
once; some kids had finally stumbled over it, running through.

Sergeant Arthur Hackett went down with a crew of men
to look at it, and was not enlightened. Or, if the truth were told,
much interested.

It wasn't that he expected the kind of corpses and
mysteries found in the paperback novels at drugstores, every time he
got a call to a new case; that sort of thing just didn't happen; at
least in his nine years' experience of being a cop he'd never run
across it. But some corpses were just naturally more interesting than
others, and this one was, in a word, routine.

"Just another piece of flotsam," he said to
Mendoza when he came back. "On the big H and finally took too
much of a jolt and didn't come out of it. God knows who he was—
probably nobody cares anymore."

"Really," said Mendoza. "Nothing on
him to say?"

"Nada. Maybe he'll get identified by somebody
while he's on file, but maybe not, too. You know how they drift. Not
very important either way, I'd say." Hackett brought out a
manila envelope. "Here's all he had on him. Damnedest thing how
they set out to commit suicide— what it amounts to. He was a
good-looker, and I'd say not over thirty."

"A lot of answers on that one," said
Mendoza, "and maybe as many answers as there are users."
Business had been a little slack lately, and he was unoccupied for
the moment; idly he up-ended the envelope on his desk and looked at
what it disgorged.

A clean folded handkerchief, plain white, cheap
cotton, dime store variety. A flat longish box bearing the name of a
chain drugstore and containing a much=used and dirty hypodermic
syringe and several needles. A cheap pocketknife. Forty-eight cents
in change. A crumpled package of cigarettes with three left in it. A
scrap of paper, irregularly torn across one edge, about four inches
wide at the broadest part and narrowing down to a point. Torn off a
corner of something.

"What's this?"

"Piece torn off a letter or something, I
suppose. I wouldn't have seen it at all, but the staple bit my finger
when I was going through his pockets. You can see the holes— there
were a couple of pages, or more, stapled together. I just stuck it
in, thought there might be something on it to say who he was, but—
"

"Yes," said Mendoza, "and an odd sort
of letter it seems to have been. Nymphs and dolphins.
¡Comó,
oyé!
I'd heard that heroin gives some people
hallucinations, but what superior hallucinations!"

"What? Let's see, I didn't— "

Mendoza passed it over. Automatically he began to
tidy the desk, setting the deceased's possessions in a neat little
pile at one side, brushing off tobacco crumbs, lining up the ashtray
with the blotter and desk-box.

That was Mendoza: the orderly mind,
place-for-everything— everything-in-its-place. Probably one of the
reasons he had acquired a little reputation as an investigative
officer: ragged edges worried him, the thing left all untidy,
patternless. He might be and often was irritable at the frustration
of continually being presented with another box of jigsaw pieces to
put together, but he was constitutionally unable to leave them alone
until every last little piece had been fitted in where it belonged.

He glanced up at Hackett, and got out a cigarette: a
slim dark man, the black hairline moustache, the sharp arch of heavy
brows, the widow's peak, punctuation marks to a long nose and a long
jaw: impassive, an unremarkable if regular-featured face, but it
could flash into sudden charm when a smile touched the dark eyes.

"Nymphs," he said. "
¡Caray,
qué hombre!
"

Hackett looked at the two lines of typing on the
scrap of paper. It had been torn off the right-hand top edge of the
page, and the typing was double-spaced; there was such a wide margin,
however, that only four words were included on the scrap. The top
line said,
verse, nymph
and the end of the line below it said,
small
dolphin
.

"That is a damn funny one," he agreed.

"A small dolphin," said Mendoza, leaning
back with closed eyes, smoking lazily. "Somehow that makes it
sound so much more— mmh— individual, doesn't it? Only a small
dolphin. I wonder what it was all about. Nothing else on him? Well,
well. You know, that dolphin— to say nothing of the nymph—
intrigues me. I think I'll go down and take a look at him."

"As you please," said Hackett, "but
it's just another dope case, obviously. Or are you going to have one
of your hunches about it and say he's the heir to a Bulgarian
millionaire assassinated by the Communists?"

"Once in a while," said Mendoza, getting up
and going to get his hat, "I read a detective novel— and once
in a while I wish I was in one. Everything made so easy for those
boys, such complicated problems that inevitably there are only a
couple of possible answers. I don't think there are any Bulgarian
millionaires left. But I haven't much else to do at the moment, for
once, and I may as well take a look."

He went down to the morgue and looked at the dead
man. There were aspects of the dead man which mildly interested him
further. Hackett had said, good-looking— that was an
understatement. Even several days dead, it was a handsome face: a
purity of line like a cameo profile. A young man, twenty-eight to
thirty, and his indulgence in heroin hadn't left any apparent marks
of dissipation on him. A tallish, well-set-up young man, he'd have
been.

Mendoza went back to his
office and sent down word that he'd like the autopsy report
expedited. Not that there'd be much in it, but on the other hand— a
nymph and a dolphin— it might be something a little more
interesting than it looked at first glance.

* * *

The dolphin, in fact, stayed so persistently in his
mind that he was somewhat absent-minded with Alison that evening, and
when she complained he apologized by telling her about it.

"A dolphin," said Alison, intrigued despite
herself. “It sounds exactly like the start of a detective story,
doesn't it? That is odd."

"A small one," said Mendoza almost
plaintively. He was relaxed on the end of his spine in her largest
armchair, minus jacket and tie; the temperature still stood at
ninety.

"It reminds me of something— what? . . . Did
you have any English literature in high school?"

“
That's a long time back," said Mendoza.
"Probably some was inflicted on me ....
Por
Dias
, twenty-two years ago, and the school's
been torn down— that old Macy Street school— when they built the
new Union Station. I had to cross through Chinatown to get there."
He laughed. "Then we moved, because Johnny Li-Chong taught me to
shoot Chinese craps, and my grandmother was horrified. Gambling's
still one of the major sins to her. I was supposed to be selling
papers after school, and I never told her when I quit— I found I
could earn twice as much running a Spanish Monte bank in the back
room of Johnny's father's restaurant over on Main. Caray, she was
pleased, the old lady, when I started to bring her five dollars on
Saturdays instead of two— I'm a good smart boy to get a raise in
salary so quick! You know something, I never did tell her. She'd have
raised the roof— another good-for-nothing going the same way as the
old man, gamble his last copper— or hers. That five dollars on
Saturdays, it came in useful. And the old man sitting on nearly three
million bucks then, in a dozen banks, and swearing about a
four-dollar gas bill. Damn it, you encourage me to maunder . . ."

"Earn twice as much?" Alison took him up.
"I don't know but what your grandmother's right— "

“
I said Spanish Monte,
chica
,
not three-card. Perfectly legitimate deal. I was never as crazy a
gambler as the old man— "

“
¡A otro perrro con ese hueso!
—
give that bone to another dog!"

Alison laughed. "You'd gamble the gold in your
teeth if you had any."

“
Well, not," said Mendoza, "without
asking about the odds. And very young I found out what a lot of
gamblers never seem to— the odds always run in favor of the bank.
It's simple mathematics. Even at seventeen, I never just sat in at
Monte— that way, as somebody's said, madness lies. I saved my
money, industrious young fellow that I was, and set up as a banker.
But what was it you asked me? There was a poor devil of an English
teacher, Mr.— Mr.— Mr. Keyes. The only thing I remember about
high school English is that Mr. Keyes had a passion for Chaucer, and
it wasn't until he made me read some of Canterbury Tales and I came
across the Miller's Tale that it dawned on me there might be
something interesting— pornographical1y speaking— in these musty
old classics."

"Really. Maybe I missed something, not finishing
high school."

"Women don't get a kick out of pornography, or
so the psychiatrists say."

"Psychiatrists, hah. Since when do they know
what they're talking about? What I was going to say— your small
dolphin somehow reminds me of something in— can it be Dickens, or
was it Trollope?— there was a housemaid who had an illegitimate
baby, and when they criticized her she said, Please, ma'am, it was
only a little one."

He laughed. "And very logical too. Damn it, what
could it mean? Unless it's some new pro slang I haven't caught up
with yet. Nymph would be easy enough in that connection— if a
little fancy— but the dolphin eludes me."

"Which reminds me further," said Alison, "I
have a mystery for you too." She got up and opened the top desk
drawer. "I told you some idiot had borrowed my car. Well, when
it came back I got round to cleaning it, and I found this in the
crack down between the seat and the back."

Mendoza took the thing and looked at it. "Foreign
coin of some kind."

"Holmes, this is wonderful— how do you do it?
That I can see. But no engraving or whatever it's called, to say what
country or anything."

"No. I'll tell you something else, it's old—
maybe damned old. Not milled, and not a true circle." It was not
very big; and it was a silver coin, or had some silver in its alloy,
though darkened. On one side of it was a design vaguely resembling
that on some early U.S. coins, an eagle with outspread wings, but
head down; it seemed to be holding something in its talons. The other
side bore a design he couldn't puzzle out: a thing which might be a
stylized flame growing out of a vase, or a bell with curlicues on the
top of it, or two roundish triangles point to point.