The Knave of Hearts (22 page)

"Needn’t apologize," said Lockhart.
"Should have said who I was yesterday, what I come about. The
truth is, a place this size, well, it don’t seem like a police
station to me somehow, know what I mean. I guess I was figuring, at
that, way it’d be back home—not all that much to do, Sergeant
Wills says, Somebody to see you, I say, Shove him in. Should have had
better sense—place like this, must be hell to keep in order—even
in the ordinary way, you’d be busy."

"That you can say twice," agreed Mendoza.

"I’d sure be interested, see through this
place, how you go to work. If it wouldn’t discommode you any, after
I say what I come for. My place looks pretty damn piddling compared."

"Cops are cops," said Hackett, who had
liked Mr. Lockhart on sight. They came all shapes and sizes: you
found some small—town ones the inept free-riders, and in big towns
too; and then you found the ones like Lockhart, who’d have been
good anywhere. Looked small-town, farmerish—but shrewd as they were
made. And a cop, first and foremost, that you could see.

"I was just saying to my wife last night—you
know, it makes you wonder if it was meant, some way. Put off this
vacation twice, we did, on account of this and that—meant to come
two years ago when Marian had the baby, see. That’s our youngest
daughter, she lives down in San Diego now, husband’s a regular Air
Force officer. So that’s where we landed a week ago. I generally
keep up with the news, but you know how it is on a vacation, I didn’t
do more’n glance at the headlines, until three-four days ago. And
then I saw about this business up here, and I made it my business,
get hold of some o’ your local papers to see all about it, what was
said about this joker. And I just got to wondering. Now I don’t
want to stick my neck out, butt in where I’m not wanted, gentlemen,
but I figured I’d better come in and tell you about it. Just in
case. Because, you don’t need to tell me, on a thing like this you
aren’t fussing about gettin’ together the lawyers’ evidence for
later on, you just want to spot this boy for sure. In your own minds,
whatever the evidence is or isn’t."

"And isn’t that the truth," said Hackett.

"What have you got to tell us, Mr. Lockhart?"
asked Mendoza.

Lockhart wasn’t to be rushed.

"Might be we can make this short ’n’
sweet—maybe I’m just seeing ghosts. See," he grinned slowly,
"for all Mount Selah can’t claim more than eighteen hundred
population, we got a newspaper, and I’ve had a little experience,
how reporters build up a story. Point is, the papers are all I’ve
seen, and might be they got the evidence twisted some. Any case, they
haven’t had it all to print, I don’t guess—and might be if and
when you tell me what you’ve got on this joker, I’ll have to say,
Sorry, boys, I thought I had a little something, but seems I was
wrong. And on the other hand I might not. I just wondered from what
was in the papers, figured I better find out. I’ll admit, be a
pretty damn big coincidence when you figure the odds—this is a big
country, and there’s a hell of a lot of people in it—and this is
the first time I been out o’ the state of Illinois. Fine thing to
think, maybe Providence sendin’ me here just now, to give you a
little help. And at that, come down to it,"—he brought out a
short fat cigar and began to unwind the cellophane slowly—"even
if there’s any evidence of connection at all, don’t know that
it’d give you much. Except another victim—and a kind of fishy
smell. Which, mind you, was all in my own mind."

Mendoza half rose, holding out his lighter; he looked
a little excited. "You think you know him? Are you telling me
you know him?
Dios mio
,
coincidence, Providence—out of a hundred and eighty million
people—I don’t care what the hell you call it, give us what
you’ve got, friend!"

"Like that, hah?" said Lockhart.
"Thanks,"—he bent to the lighter.

"Me, I don’t usually get stuff like this, o’
course—place like Mount Selah, a Chief of Police isn’t so much
expected to be a detective as, you might say, an M.P. Keep order. The
rambunctious teen-agers, and now ’n’ then a burglar, and the
drunks on Saturday night. You know. But kind of reading between the
lines in the papers, I figured this might be a tough one, even for
you boys .... Where to hell-an’-gone can you start to look? Sure
.... I don’t know, Lieutenant Mendoza, I just don’t know. And I
don’t want to waste your time. I guess best way to get at it, if
you could tell me right off, did the papers print pretty accurate
what you got on this boy, and did they print most of it? The
description and all?"

Mendoza pulled open the top drawer of the desk and
handed over a sheaf of documents. "You’re welcome to read the
statements. To save time, I’ll say roughly yes. Add up the
secondhand reports we’ve got on him, it comes out—a fellow
between twenty-niné and thirty, around there, five-ten to six feet,
brown hair, take your choice about eye color, thinnish, dresses
pretty well, white-collar worker, nice manners, no noticeable
regional accent, drives—or did drive—a bright blue car, recent
model. And that’s about it."

"That’s all the official evidence," said
Hackett. "The boss here, he can work up the prettiest dreams,
and without eatin’ hashish either, and he’s had one about our
Romeo. How much it’s worth, who knows‘?"

"O.K., so it’s a pipe dream—I keep Sergeant
Hackett around to pour cold water, Mr. Lockhart—he pours enough on
a hunch to drown it, I know it wasn’t much good, but if it keeps
bobbing up, I tell him to go to hell. Like a Geiger counter in
reverse, if you take me. So O.K., I build this one up—from this and
that in the statements, the nuance, the tone of voice, and the kind
of women they were, you know, and so on—I make him coming here from
a smallish inland place about three years ago, liking the beach,
buying or renting a place there to spend his weekends in—raised
with rather old-fashioned manners, quite possibly even a little
diffident in his manner, not aggressive anyway, the kind a nice
modest shy young lady feels safe with, you know? I think this last
three years, approximately, is the first time he’s lived in a
city—I think he’s had a high school education but not college—I
think—"

"I guess you can stop right there," said
Lockhart, "because it sounds mighty close. Nothing like
evidence, I know. The hell of a long chance it’s the same, the size
of this country." He looked at his cigar with a troubled
expression. "If it is so, gentlemen, it’s some my fault these
other women got killed, which isn’t the kind of thought I like to
take to bed with me. But what could I do? The law isn’t interested
in your feelings about a thing, even if you happen to be Chief of
Police. You got to have it in black and white before they let you
charge anybody, and that’s just what I didn’t have."
 

SIXTEEN

"So, what’s the story?" demanded Mendoza.
He lit a new cigarette, nervous and excited. Maybe the break in the
case? "Go on!"

"We1l, I don’t need to waste a lot of time
describing Mount Selah to you—maybe a kind of typical small town.
Most of us know each other, know each others’ business—you’ve
heard all the jokes about small towns. But a place like that, it’s
a bad place to commit a crime, because of that very fact. Now it
might surprise you some,"—and Lockhart grinned—"to know
we usually got four-five professional chippies around town—not a
very good town for their business, not because we’re any more moral
than other folks but because, like I say, you’re a lot more apt to
get found out in a town like that. We don’t as a rule do much about
’em—if it wasn’t the couple we know about, it’d be some we
didn’t, and hell, there that kind is, you can’t legislate
altogether against human nature."

“
Live and let live," said Hackett.

"About that. Rhoda Vann was one of ’em. Been
around town for years, on and off—woman about forty, liked her
drink a little too well, but I will say she usually stayed home to
get drunk, didn’t go round creating disturbances. Not much of a
looker, big red-haired woman, seen her best days. She lived in the
Crosley Hotel, which is a fancy name for a twelve-room fleatrap down
by the river. Couple of other women, much the same sort, had rooms to
each side of hers. You’ll gather, place like that, nobody pays an
awful lot of notice to funny noises in the next room.

"Well, it was three years ago last month Rhoda
got killed. Girl who lived across the hall went in to borrow
something one morning and found her. She’d been killed about ten
P.M. the night before, so the doctor said. It was a damn funny setup
to start with, because nobody as far as we knew or could find out had
any reason to kill her—and like I say, your private business isn’t
so awful private in Mount Selah. She was a good-natured soul,
generous to her friends, never held a grudge, and so on, and as for
what you might call underworld connections—you know, gangster
stuff, like if she maybe had something on somebody—hell, I don’t
think Rhoda’d ever been farther than forty miles from Mount Selah
in her life, there just wasn’t anything possible in that line. She
hadn’t anything a thief’d be after—only a lunatic’d go to
burglarize anybody at the Crosley—and it looked like something
personal, because of the way she’d got it. Beaten and choked to
death—"

"And raped first?"

"Well, not exactly," said Lockhart, "but
nobody needed to go raping Rhoda, and everybody in town’d know
that. But the coroner—Dr. Williams—he did say she’d had
relations with somebody just before. Maybe that don’t say much.
Point is, there wasn’t any motive we could turn up, on anybody who
knew her. And she hadn’t been as you might say receiving callers
that day and night. She’d been feeling poorly, coming down with a
cold, she said to a couple of other girls, and she’d stayed in
alone with a couple of bottles for company.

"I’ll make this as short as I can. Among her
stuff there was a brand-new bottle of aspirin, unopened, and it came
from Wise’s drugstore. Everybody knew the Wises too. Damn funny
pair. The old man, old Abraham Wise, had just died, couple o’
months before, and Gideon—his boy—was running the store alone.
Nobody ever had much to do with the Wises. Old man wouldn’t let
’em, what it came to. He was a religious crank, puritanical as they
come and a little bit more, and the list of things he didn’t
like—called sinful—I guess it’d reach from here to Kingdom
Come. That kind. Quite a character—and a strong character, not to
say a tyrant. My wife and some other womenfolk always said he
browbeat his wife to death—and all I know, maybe he didn’t always
use his tongue either. She died when the boy was about three, and the
old man brought him up.

"Gideon never mixed hardly at all with other
kids—one thing, the old man kept him too busy, he had to come right
home from school, get to work on his chores and so on. Had him
helping in the store before he was ten—which is all right, I’m
all for giving kids responsibility, but Gideon, seemed like, was
expected to do a man’s work. Old man was too stingy to buy anything
new, make life a little more comfortable—they still cooked on an
old wood stove, for instance, and most days you’d see Gideon out
behind the house chopping wood. Old-fashioned—damn foolishness, I
call it. People used to feel sorry for Gideon, but the old man kept
him so much under his thumb, he hadn’t no chance to get out and mix
much, even if he’d wanted. The old man’s religion was
old-fashioned too, he didn’t think there was a church in town
really holy enough, and they didn’t go to any. Once in a while
they’d go over to Pisgah to a revivalist meeting—they had an old
broken-down Model A Ford—but ask me, main reason the old man didn’t
go to church regular was the collection."

"And one very damn good reason it is," said
Mendoza, "among others." He was leaning back, eyes shut,
smoking lazily. "Just as we go along, I expect old Abraham’s
brand of religion listed Woman pretty far down on the tabulation of
important things—"

"And pretty high up on the list o’
sinfulnesses. I never paid all that much attention to what he
believed, but that I can say. He was always quoting John Milton—he’d
had a good education, you know—"

"That passage about what a pity it is God didn’t
find a purer way for people to produce offspring." Mendoza
laughed. "Very curious idea—illogical thinking. If there was,
it’d take on all the same connotations the present method gives
rise to. Me, I’m old-fashioned myself, quite satisfied with the
status quo. Yes. Young Gideon didn’t mix, he was a loner. So he
didn’t get much ordinary human background to compare with his home
life."

"I don’t suppose. Time he got to the age when
he could have got out, tried to break away from the old man—high
school, along there, the rest of the kids dating and so on—he
didn’t seem to want to, didn’t know how to go about it, and by
then I guess he’d been so filled up with these ideas, he thought
that kind of thing was sinful anyway. You take some kids brought up
too religious that way, they can’t wait to get away, turn against
it soon as they can. But some like Gideon, they swallow it all
serious and just carry on where their folks left off.

"Well, there’s Gideon Wise. He was twenty-six
when the old man died, looked some older, maybe because he was so
serious. Not a bad-looking young fellow, nothing extraordinary either
way—you wouldn’t turn to look at him twice. Round about
five-foot-ten or a bit more, brown hair and eyes, kind of sallow
complected and built thin—usually dressed sort of formal, way the
old man had, a suit and white shirt. I said both of ’em had a
decent education—Gideon graduated from high school at
seventeen—average bright and maybe then some. The old man had
raised him strict about manners, and he was always a lot more polite,
in a kind of funny old-fashioned way, than most young fellows these
days."