to the map scale: call it a hundred and fifty square blocks.
'Now isn’t that pretty!' said Hackett. 'And where would you get the army to check all that territory-and for what? The idea, that I go along with, and if your pretty circles happened to have prettier centers, say like Los Feliz and Western, I’d say we might come up with something, just on a check to see who’d moved where recently. But you know what you got here!' He stabbed a blunt forefinger at the first circle. 'About half of this area is colored, and none of it, white or black, is very fancy. Which also goes with bells on for the other area. Out on the Strip, or along Wilshire, a lot of places, you’ve got people in settled lives, and they leave records behind. City directory, phone book, gas company, rent receipts, forwarding addresses. Here-' he shrugged.
'You needn’t tell me,' said Mendoza ruefully. 'This is just a little exercise in academic theory.' In these networks of streets, some of the most thickly populated in the city, drifted the anonymous ones: people who wandered from one casual job to another, who for various reasons (not always venal) were sometimes known by different names to different people, and who owned no property. Landlords were not always concerned with keeping records, and most rent was paid in cash. There were also, of course, settled, householders, responsible people. For economic reasons or racial reasons, or both, they lived cheek-by-jowl, crowded thick; they came and went, and because they were of little concern to anyone as individuals, their comings and goings went largely unnoticed.
'If we had a name-but we’d get nothing for half a year’s hunt, not knowing what to look for.?Que se le ha de hacer! -it can’t be helped! But if the general theory’s right, there’s a link somewhere.'
'I’ll go along with you,' said Hackett, 'but I’ll tell you, I think we’ll get it as corroborative evidence after we’ve caught up with him by another route. Somebody’ll see a newspaper cut, and come in to tell us that our John Smith is also Henry Brown who used to live on Tappan Street. We can’t get at it from this end, there’s damn-all to go on.'
'I agree with you-though there’s such a thing as luck. However!' Mendoza shoved the map aside. 'What did you get out of the Wades?'
'Something to please you.' Circumstantially, the Wades were counted out. Ehrlich and his two attendants at the rink had seen father and son leave, and agreed on the time as 'around ten to ten.' The girl had been a good ten or twelve minutes after them. By the narrowest reckoning it was a twenty-minute drive to the Wades’ home, probably nearer thirty, and a neighbor had happened to be present in the house on their arrival, an outside witness who was positive of the time as ten twenty-live. There hadn’t been time, even if you granted they’d done it together, which was absurd… The Wades, pater and mater familias, might be snobs, with the usual false and confused values of snobs (though much of their social objection to the Ramirez girl was understandable: Mendoza, supposing he were ever sufficiently rash or unwary to acquire a wife and family, would probably feel much the same himself). But it could not be seriously conjectured that a respectable middle-aged bookkeeper had done murder (and such a murder) to avoid acquiring a daughter-in-law addicted to double negatives and peroxide. And if he had, it would hardly be in collusion with the boy.
'The boy,' said Hackett, 'hasn’t got the blood in him to kill a mouse in a trap anyway-all you got to do is look at him.'
'I’ll take your word for it,' said Mendoza absently. He wasn’t interested in the boy, never had been much; the Wades were irrelevant, but he was just as pleased that by chance there was evidence to show that. And the Wades ought to be very damned thankful for it too: they’d probably never realize it, but without that evidence the boy could have found himself in bad trouble. From Mendoza’s viewpoint that would have been regrettable chiefly because it would have diverted the investigation into a blind alley. They had wasted enough official time as it was.
He looked again at his map, and sighed. The lunatic-of this or that sort-was his own postulation, and he could be wrong: that had sometimes happened. Ideally an investigator should be above personal bias, which-admitted or unconscious-inevitably slanted the interpretation of evidence. And yet evidence almost always had to be interpreted-full circle back to personal opinion. There was always the human element, and also what Dr. Rhine might call the X factor, which Mendoza, essentially a fatalist as well as a gambler, thought of as a kind of cosmic card-stacking. Much of the time plodding routine and teamwork led you somewhere eventually; but it was surprising how often the sudden hunch, the inspired guess, the random coincidence, took you round by a shorter way. And sometimes the extra aces in the deck fell to the opponent’s hand, and there was nothing you could do about that. The law of averages had nothing to do with it.
'I dropped in to see if the autopsy report’s come through… oh, well, suppose we couldn’t expect it over Sunday. Nothing much in it anyway. Back to the treadmill-' Hackett got up. 'I’ve still got some of the kids to see, ones at the rink that night.'
'The rink,' said Mendoza, still staring at his map. 'Yes. We’ll probably get the autopsy report by tonight-the inquest’s been set for Tuesday. Yes- Vaya… todo es posible. Yes, you get on with the routine, as becomes your rank-me, I’m taking the day off from everything else, to shuffle through this deck again, por decirlo asi -maybe there’s a marked card to spot.'
He brooded over the map another minute when Hackett had gone, and penciled in a line connecting the two circles. He shrugged and said to himself, Maybe, maybe-folded the map away, got his hat and coat and went out.
Downstairs, as he paused to adjust the gray Homburg, a couple of reporters cornered him; they asked a few desultory questions about the Ramirez girl, but their real interest was in Sergeant Galeano’s husband-killer, who was of a socially prominent clan. The more sensational of the evening papers had put Elena Ramirez on the front page, but it wasn’t a good carry-over story-they couldn’t make much out of a Hartners’ stock-room girl, and the boy friend wasn’t very colorful either. The conservative papers had played it down, an ordinary back-street mugging, and by tomorrow the others would relegate it to the middle pages. They had the socialite, and the freight yard corpse, besides a couple of visiting dignitaries and the Russians; and a two-bit mugging in the Commerce Street area, that just happened to turn into a murder, was nothing very new or remarkable.
Maneuvering the Ferrari out into Main Street, Mendoza thought that was a point of view, all right: almost any way you looked at it, it was an unimportant, uninteresting kill. No glamor, no complexity, nothing to attract either the sensationalists or the detective-fiction fans. In fact, the kind of murder that happened most frequently…The press had made no connection between Elena Ramirez and Carol Brooks. No, they weren’t interested; but if the cosmic powers had stacked the deck this time, and that one stayed free to kill again, and again, eventually some day he would achieve the scare headlines, and then- de veras, es lo de siempre, Mendoza reflected sardonically, the mixture as before: our stupid, blundering police!
Once off the main streets here, away from the blinding gleam of the used-car lots, the screamer ads plastered along store-fronts, these were quiet residential streets, middle-class, unremarkable. Most of the houses neatly maintained, if shabby: most with carefully kept flower plots in front. Along the quiet Sunday sidewalks, dressed-up children on the way to Sunday school, others not so dressed up running and shouting at play- householders working in front gardens this clear morning after the rain. This was all Oriental along here, largely Japanese. When he stopped at an intersection a pair of high-school-age girls crossed in front of him-'But honestly it isn’t fair, ten whole pages of English Lit, even if it is on the week end! She’s a real fiend for homework-' One had a ponytail, one an Italian cut; their basic uniform of flat shell pumps, billowy cotton skirts and cardigans, differed only in color.
At the next corner he turned into Tappan Street; this wasn’t the start of it, but the relevant length for him, this side of Washington Boulevard. He drove slow and idle, as if he’d all the time in the world to waste, wasn’t exactly sure where he was heading: and of course he wasn’t, essentially. It was a long street and it took him through a variety of backgrounds.
Past rows of frame and stucco houses, lower-middle-class-respectable houses, where the people on the street were Oriental, and then brown and black; there, late-model cars sat in most driveways and the people were mostly dressed up for Sunday. Past bigger, older, shabbier houses with Board-and-Room signs, rank brown grass in patches, and broken sidewalks: dreary courts of semi-detached single-story rental units, stucco boxes scabrous for need of paint: black and brown kids in shabbier, even ragged clothes, more raucous in street play. A lot of all that, block after block. Past an intersection where a main street crossed and a Catholic church, a liquor store, a chiropractor’s office and a gas station shared the corners. Past the same kind of old, shoddy houses and courts, for many more blocks, but here the people on the street white. Then a corner which marked some long-ago termination
