The Knave of Hearts (11 page)

Mendoza laughed. "
¡A
ver, atro chiste
—tell another joke! Sure, I
know, impossible. And so nobody was really much concerned. As you
say, these women drift. But also, they’re apt to come in for this
sort of thing,"—he nodded at the corpse. "What made you
think of our Mr. X?"

"I’ve seen a lot of stiffs, Lieutenant, and a
few this long gone. And like we can see, she’s kept damn well. I
took a good long look, and I didn’t need a doctor to tell me what
happened to her. She was raped and beaten, and I think choked too—"

"You can still see some of the marks,"
agreed Hackett. "Far as the rape goes, maybe it’s just
inference, but her clothes are torn—that’s what it looks like.
Surgeon’ll say for sure, let’s hope he can. But the main thing
is, along with that, she was buried. Like Mary Ellen."

"Y-e-s," said Mendoza. He got up, brushed
down his trousers mechanically, looked at the little book balanced on
his handkerchief-shielded palm. "And it rather looked as if our
Romeo meant to bury Jane Piper too, didn’t it? I see what you mean,
Art, but it’s a little thin. Natural thing to do with a corpse. A
lot of murderers do it. Of course, it isn’t very usual with rape
cases, that I grant you. Our Romeo’s only done it once that we know
of, and maybe meant to once more. Of course—" He was staring
down the hillside, to the glittering stream of traffic sailing by,
beyond to the smooth white beach and the summer-tranquil blue-green
glass of the Pacific coming in in low lazy breakers—"of course
there’s something else. A part-time whore, sure, she meets all
sorts, she’s more apt to meet violence maybe, but on the other
hand, who needs to rape her? . . . Yes. Maybe he didn’t know she
was a whore? And when a rapist assaults a respectable woman, and ends
by killing her, sometimes it’s in the course of stopping her noise
but sometimes too it’s deliberate, with the idea that she might be
able to identify him. Why would it matter here? Even if she knew him,
she wouldn’t be likely to bring a charge, if her reputation was
commonly known—to invite trouble on herself—"

"Yeah," said the sergeant. "Don’t
want to butt in, Lieutenant—I just ride herd on speed demons and
like that—but I read the papers, and I’ve had a couple ideas
about your Mr. X. You got a real job on your hands with this one, any
cop knows—the citizenry, damndest thing, they seem to figure a guy
like Mr. X goes around wild-eyed and acting queer all the time, ought
to be a cinch to spot him. We know better, hah?"

"Don’t we, indeed. Me, I’m a very democratic
fellow, I listen to anybody’s ideas."

"Well, you take women," said the sergeant.
"Sure to God they can drive a man nuts without half trying—but
whatever the head shrinkers say, a man don’t have to be legally
nuts to turn into a rapist. What occurred to me about Mr. X., I just
got to thinking about two guys I picked up. Different times, I mean.
One of ’em, his wife yelled for help and we kept him overnight—she
wouldn’t lay a charge and we had to let him go. Seems he couldn’t
get a kick out of it unless he hurt her. I don’t know why, about
that one—if there was any reason except that it takes all sorts.
The other one was kind of interesting. We picked him up—it was
nearly five years back, around there—on the complaint of a girl
who’d dated him. Said he assaulted her, in his car. There was quite
a legal hassle over it, because she didn’t have too good a
reputation—point is, what came out about him, in his defense. Don’t
ask me if the head shrinkers are right, saying the way Mama
housebroke us accounts for whether we turn out ballet dancers or
hoods. But this guy, his mother had been a lush, and he had the hell
of a grudge on her for, you know, neglecting him, embarrassing him in
front of kids he knew, and bringing men home for a roll in the hay
with the door open, that kind of thing, so he got what he called a
‘distorted view of sex’—you know. Seemed he had a kind of
puritanical complex about it, he had all the normal instincts but he
couldn’t get worked up to really laying a female unless he made it
like rape. I don’t know, it just struck me your boy might be made
that way. So he can’t get there at all unless he gets it by force."

"You find them," said Mendoza. "So you
do. And that’s for the lawyers, afterward—what the hell good does
it do us looking for him?" He dropped his cigarette, ground it
under his heel. "What was that one’s name?"

"Brooke Edwards."

"It rings a bell. We’ve been back through the
files on every sex case the last fifteen years—"

"Brother," said the sergeant respectfully.
"And following ’em all up? When’ve you and all the rest of
the L.A.P.D. been eating and sleeping‘?"

Hackett groaned. "Well may you ask! You ask me
too sudden, I’d have to stop and think if my wife’s blonde or
brunette."

"And they turn down the last proposal for a pay
raise," said the sergeant philosophically. "Ridin’ around
in nice late-model cars all day, in natty uniforms, not a thing to do
but hand out traffic tickets to V.I.P.’s who hadn’t ought to be
expected to obey the ordinary laws. And have the gall to ask more
money for such a soft job! I read the letters-to-the-editor, don’t
I know."

"Where did Anderson work?" asked Mendoza
abruptly.

"Joint called Tony’s, about four-five miles up
the road .... Yeah, same owner far as I know. Couldn’t tell you
about the girl friend, that’s quite a while for a dame like that to
stay one place."

"Missing Persons may have something to offer,"
said Hackett.

"Yes—I’d like to talk to the girl friend.
Well, this may be a mare’s nest—maybe one of her customers
thought she’d overcharged him and got mad—but we’ll follow her
up as far as we can to be sure. The press will be a lot surer right
away than I am—"

"They always know," agreed the sergeant.

"Have you had dinner, Art? Suppose we take a
ride up to this Tony’s and see what we can get. The ambulance can
take her away now, downtown—I’ll send a note along to rout out
Bainbridge
immediatamente
,
I want all he can give me right away. Statements and so on, tomorrow
will do. Thanks very much, Sergeant—come on, Arturo."
 

EIGHT

That, of course, had been one place to start a
cast—one of many places, so big and vague an area that a lot of men
had spent a lot of time looking, not sure just what they were looking
for. They’d weeded out about fifty of the known rapists, men
involved in other kinds of sex offenses, from the past twelve or
fifteen years—men who in age, physical description, educational
background, might possibly be their boy, by what had been learned
from the girl friends. And damned little that was.

It added up to confirmation, the same man; but beyond
that, all too vague in detail.

They knew now from Pauline McCandless’s bosom
confidante (a girl who’d shared her room in college) that Pauline
had met this Christopher Hawke at the beach—not that she was the
kind who picked up boys like that—but he’d been really nice, you
could tell, Pauline had said (a little defensively, it could be
deduced). Awfully polite, not forward or anything like that—and
good-looking, tallish and thin with brown hair, about thirty. He was
a bookkeeper or something, some office job, worked for Western Oil,
and he had a new car, sort of racy and bright blue, a hardtop
roadster.

They knew from the apartment manager’s wife and a
girl in Jane Piper’s office a little of how it had gone there; Jane
hadn’t said quite as much as Pauline, and also that was longer ago,
people forgot. Jane had met a Stephen Lord or maybe it was Laird,
some name like that, casually in the bank; they’d got to talking,
and he’d seemed nice and polite, nothing brash, so probably if he’d
asked for a date she’d have said yes, though they couldn’t say if
he had. He had, they seemed to remember, been very generally
described as tall and thin and brown-haired and about thirty.

Which was more or less what they had from the
proprietor of the shop where Celestine Teitel had met him, and from
Miss Evelyn Reeder. One of Mary Ellen Wood’s closest girl friends
had been out of town that relevant week, hadn’t heard anything from
Mary Ellen, but the other one, Wanda Adams, gave them a little
confirmation. Mary Ellen had confided the story of her casual meeting
with him—in the college cafeteria—and her hopes that he’d
follow it up; she was, said Wanda, but really smitten with this
Edward Anthony. Who was described as tallish and brown-haired and
about thirty.

It added; but that was just defining the problem.
They started to work on it the best way they could, by routine. They
looked at the sex offenders; they looked at other files. They drew an
arbitrary circle on the map, its center the Haineses’ former house
(because you couldn’t take the whole damned town—it was a
nightmare of a job even for twenty square blocks) and looked to see
who had lived there at the time and moved since. No guarantee that
their circle took in the right block—or if he’d lived within ten
miles, then—or that he had moved, of course. No guarantee that, if
he hadn’t lived around there long, a landlady would remember him,
give any kind of description. And he might, even if he’d been
there, have been then and now a family man, or living with relatives,
in a private house. But just to give the boys another little job, out
there tramping the streets in this heat, Mendoza was having them
conduct as detailed a canvas as possible on all single men renting
apartments or rooms in the district.

That was odds or evens: pure luck if anything turned
up there. They drew a blank, expectably, at the L.A.C.C. registrar’s
office. Mary Ellen had said he’d told her he was thinking of
registering for an adult evening class in woodworking. But the
registrar didn’t have his name, that one at least: so they took a
long hard look at every male then and presently registered in any of
those courses. None of them who answered the physical description
even vaguely corresponded otherwise; they all looked like upright
citizens.

There was a lot of routine that had to be done even
though it was thin hope; you just never knew where you’d hit pay
dirt. They looked at all the men listed in the phone books and city
directories who were surnamed Anthony, Hamilton, Hawke, Lord, Laird.
They annoyed the local offices of Western Oil and got a list of all
their male office help to look at. They looked at all the male
employees of that bank building where Piper had met him, and at all
the shops and offices around that music shop where Teitel had met
him.

Inevitably they’d got repercussions from the press
stories. Sometimes publicity helped; it jogged the public memory; and
they couldn’t pass up any bet, however absurd it looked. So they
wasted time investigating about a dozen men suggested by nervous and
imaginative people phoning in to say excitedly they were sure he was
the one, he acted so queer. Among those, they did pick up an escaped
mental patient from Camarillo, a gentle, bewildered middle-aged man
who assured them that his only motive in talking to strangers in
public was to spread the news that any day a superior race of
Venusians was due to invade the earth and destroy all life, and he
wanted to urge as many souls as possible to seek out salvation in
time. "It matters not the church, you know, if they are received
into some faith—so many scoffers and sinners, all doomed to
perdition unless they take immediate steps—"

And Hackett said, "Welcome the Venusians! At
least we wouldn’t have to worry about Romeo any more."

The rest of those were all innocent as day—at least
of any connection with this case: two amateur poets, three amateur
inventors, a medical student in the throes of studying for finals,
and assorted ordinary citizens.

They hammered at Sally Haines grimly, and at
Fairless, ignoring the jibes and insults: they got a list of the
Haineses’ acquaintances, of men who might have had some kind of
imagined grievance against Haines—or her. They looked at everybody
who’d worked in Haines office. Maybe ten or fifteen years back that
vague description of Romeo’s car as racy would have helped a
little: but you could use the word for a lot of standard models this
year, and bright blue wasn’t so unusual a color.
That
was something to check against any suspect when they isolated a few
with something definite on them.

From all the places they had made casts, they’d
drawn fish; and that was one of the worst headaches they had to cope
with now—keeping tabs on all the might-be’s. They knew now of
approximately a hundred men, one of whom might be their boy. Men
whose general physical descriptions tallied, out of the list of sex
offenders; residents near the Haineses; employees in that building
(and of Western Oil, and Haines’ old office, and places around that
shop); even a few men from the phone list of those names, and—just
groping in the dark—from their files of men with any sort of
record. As time went on, they’d doubtless collect more. And an eye
had to be kept on them; they had to be investigated in the hope of
narrowing it down more, eliminating, and pinpointing.

Of the names thus singled out they hadn’t found all
of them in person, not yet. Some had changed addresses, drifted
away—who could say where?—and they had to be located, looked at,
just to be sure. Some of them would be honest citizens—a press
appeal would bring them in to report and clear themselves; some of
them would have reasons for staying clear of the cops, and would have
to be found the hard way if at all; and the one they wanted would be
lying very low indeed.