from Ehrlich and the two attendants, from the Wades and their visiting neighbor. A great many other people had been questioned, and of course written reports had been turned in on most of this and a new case-file started by the office staff. Again, as six months before, routine inquiry was being made into all recently released or escaped mental patients, and the present whereabouts of persons with records of similar violent assaults. The official machinery had ground elsewhere, arranging for the coroner’s inquest… As inevitably happened, crime had touched the lives of many innocent people, had grouped together an incongruous assortment of individuals whose private lives had in some part been invaded, you could say-if incidentally and with benevolent motive.
And-he finally stopped lingering the cigarette he’d got out five minutes ago, and lit it-he would offer odds that if, as, and when they caught up with this one, it would turn out to be one of the many homicides any police officer had seen, which need never have happened if someone had used a little common sense, or more self-control, or hadn’t been a little too greedy or vain or possessive or impatient.
Like Mrs. Demarest, he sometimes felt it would be nice to believe there was a master plan, that some reason for all this existed. He disapproved on principle of anything so disorderly as blind fate.
'After telling you you’re chasin’ rainbows,' Hackett was saying, 'I’ll give you a little more confirmation. I saw the Wade boy again, and he says maybe there was such a guy, Elena mentioned it to him. Twice. He thinks the first time was about a week ago, but they were out together two nights running and he won’t swear which it was-they came here both nights. Anyway, she asked him did he see the guy sitting there at the side staring at her all the time-'
'Here,' said Mendoza, sitting up. 'Right here? So-'
'Don’t run to get a warrant. The boy says he looked, and there was somebody sitting where she said, but he couldn’t see what he looked like in the dark, just that there was somebody there. He didn’t pay much attention, because he thought it was just one of the other kids, and Elena was imagining things-‘1ike girls do,’ he said-when she said it was the same guy she’d seen in here before, and that he never took his eyes off her. You’ll be happy to know that Ricky also came to this conclusion because he didn’t see how she could recognize a face that far off, in this light-he couldn’t. He wears glasses for driving and movies, and he didn’t have them on, never wears them in here on account of the danger of breakage.'
'?Fuegos del infierno! ' exclaimed Mendoza violently. 'Of course, of course!'
'Go on listening, it gets better. He says Elena told him she’d seen the guy here five or six times, always in about the same spot, but Ricky thought then she’d maybe seen a couple of different kids, different times, and imagined the rest. O.K. On Friday night, when they first got here, she looked, and he wasn’t there. But later on, all of a sudden she spotted him, and made Ricky look, and there he was-or there somebody was. Now, mind you, just like her sister, Ricky didn’t think she was afraid of this fellow, that there was anything like that to it. If he had, if she’d acted that way, all the people she mentioned it to would’ve thought of it right off, and I read it myself that she started out being kind of flattered and annoyed at once, which would be natural, and then just annoyed. Because there was something ‘funny’ about him. So, when she spotted him again Friday night, she acted so worried about it that Ricky decided to get a closer look, to watch for the guy again, if you follow me. Elena said he’d showed up so sudden it was like magic, one time she looked and no guy, and about three seconds later she happened to look again and there he was-'
'Yes, of course. So?'
'So then, finish. Before Ricky gets over to take a close look, Papa comes in breathing righteous wrath and yanks him out.'
This time Mendoza didn’t swear, merely shut his eyes.
'And if you’re still interested, Smith has tagged the Ramirez uncle visiting what is probably a cat-house on Third-at least the address rang a bell, and I checked with Prince in Vice-he pricked up his ears and said we’d closed it twice, and he was glad to know somebody had opened up again, they’ll look into it. After that Ramirez took a bus way across town to treat himself to a couple of drinks at a place called the Maison du Chat, on Wilshire. Which Smith thought was sort of funny because it’s a very fancy layout where you get nicked a dollar and a half for a Scotch highball, and six dollars for a steak because it’s in French on the menu.'
'I don’t give one damn about Ramirez’ taste in women, let Prince look into that. The other, yes, we’ll follow it up-find out what you can about it, it may be a drop for a wholesaler. If anything definite shows up, throw it at Narcotics then and let them take over.'
'I’m ahead of you. I got Higgins and Farnsworth on it. All they got so far is the owner’s name, which is Nicholas Dimitrios.' Hackett dropped his cigarette and put a careful heel on it. 'Just what’s your idea about all this, anyway?-dolls, yet! I don’t see you’ve got much to get hold of.'
'?Me lo cuenta a mi! -you’re telling me! But I’ll tell you how I see it happening. Somewhere around here is our lunatic-and don’t ask me what kind he is-nor I won’t even guess why he finds a back way into this hellhole and gets a kick out of watching these kids on skates. It makes a better story if you say he was following Elena. Anyway, here he is, and nobody else seems to have noticed him particularly. Neither of the attendants has much occasion to come down to this end of the floor, and if any of the kids noticed him, they took him for one of themselves. And about that, de paso, I think we can deduce that he’s a fairly young man. Elena called him a boy, and the odds are an older man would have been noticed by others in here, would have stood out-as it is, I think he was seen, casually, by some of the kids, and accepted as one of them. On the other hand, he seems to have taken some care not to be noticed much, sitting back against the wall-' Mendoza shrugged. 'It’s pretty even, maybe, but I think the balance goes to show he’s fairly young. All right. She had seen him at least once elsewhere, with another boy or several others, one of whom is named Danny-'
'A1l of which is very secondhand evidence.'
'Don’t push me. He was here on Friday night, he saw her leave alone. Evidently he hadn’t made any attempt before to approach her, speak to her, and I think he did then because he saw her boy friend taken out and thought this was his chance. He followed her, using his private door, so Ehrlich and the attendants didn’t notice him leave. So he had to walk round the building, which put him just far enough behind her that he didn’t catch up for a block or so. Finish. And I don’t know why he killed her, if that was in his mind from the start or a sudden impulse. I’m inclined to say impulse, because you couldn’t find two girls more different than Brooks and this one-so he doesn’t pick victims by any apparent system, though there’s holes in that reasoning, I grant you-he may have some peculiar logic of his own, of course.'
'I’ll buy all that, but there’s no evidence at all, a lot of hearsay and a lot of ifs. And how do you tie in Brooks and the doll?'
'Oh, damn the doll,' said Mendoza. 'I can’t figure the odds on that, if it ties in or not-it’s just as possible that somebody stumbled on Brooks after the killer left her, and stole the thing-or that she was robbed of it before she ran into the killer. And I can say- claro esta! -it’s a lunatic, and the same lunatic-and when we find him, we’ll find that last September he had some reason to frequent Tappan Street. There’s even less evidence on all that.' He stood and took up his hat from the bench, flicked dust off it automatically. 'Here’s Clawson. I’m going home.'
'I might’ve expected that-walk off and leave me enough work so I can’t try to beat your time with that redhead.'
'That,' said Mendoza, 'to quote another classic tag line, would be sending a boy to do a man’s work. But you have my permission to try, Arturo-I never worry about competition.'
EIGHT
All the same, that doll intrigued him; it was such an incongruous thing.
When he unlocked the door of his apartment, automatically reaching to the light switch as he came in, the first thing that met his eyes was the elegant length of the Abyssinian cat draped along the top of the traverse-rod housing across the front windows, a foot below the ceiling.
Which meant that Bertha was here. Bast intensely resented Bertha and her vigorous maneuvers with mop, dustcloths, and vacuum cleaner, and took steps to keep out of her way. He was unsurprised to find her there on a late Sunday afternoon; the seven or eight people who shared Bertha’s excellent services were used to her ways. If she felt like doing a thorough job on the Carters’ Venetian blinds when she ought to be at the Elgins’, or got behind because she’d decided to turn out all the Brysons’ kitchen cupboards, she was apt to turn up almost anywhere at
