'Oh-morning. Didn't hear you-you always move like a cat. It's a messy one, Luis, see for yourself. Between ten and midnight, give or take a little.' The surgeon hoisted himself up, a stoutening, bald, middle-aged man, and brushed earth from his trouser legs. 'I'll tell you what she actually died of when I've had a better look-strangulation or blows-my guess'd be the head blows. There was a sizable rock-'
'Yes,' said Mendoza. He had already seen the rock, jagged, triangular. 'She was cutting across from Commerce, so she knew these streets.' A faint track made by foot traffic, just out from the corner of the house foundation, and the woman lay across the track.
'Daresay,' grunted the surgeon. Hackett strolled up and the patrolmen followed, the recruit concealing reluctance. 'No identification yet but you probably will have if she's local. Either she wasn't carrying a purse or he took it away with him.'
'Never get prints off that rock,' added Hackett to that. 'You see what I mean, Luis. First off, it looks like any mugging, for what she had in her bag. I don't say it isn't. You take some of these punks, they get excited-Doc'll remember the ten-dollar word for it.' Hackett, who looked rather like a professional wrestler, adopted the protective coloration of acting like one on occasion; possibly, thought Mendoza amusedly, in automatic deference to popular expectation. In fact he was-unlike Mendoza-a university graduate: Berkeley '50. It was a theory that Mendoza did not subscribe to: he had never found it helpful-or congenial-to pretend to less intelligence than he had. 'They're after the cash, but they get a kick out of the mugging too. Horseplay.'
'Yes, I know,' said Mendoza. 'This doesn't look like horseplay.'
'She wasn't raped,' offered the surgeon.
'I can see that for myself. She's on her way home, at that time of night-maybe from late work, from a friend's house. There's a full moon, and she knows these streets-she doesn't think twice at cutting across here. But something is waiting.' He sank to his heels over the body, careful to pull up his trouser knees first, and regarded it in silence for a long minute.
Before it had been a body it had been a young and pretty woman: in fact, a very young one, under make-up lavishly applied. The too-white powder, the heavily mascaraed lashes, the smeared dark-red lipstick, was a mask turned to the pitiless gray sky of this chill March day. The unfashionable shoulder-length hair, where it wasn't stiffened with clotted blood, was bleached white-gold, but along the temples and at the parting showed dark. 'Coat pockets?' he murmured.
'Handkerchief and a wool scarf,' said Hackett.
'To put over her hair in case it rained,' nodded Mendoza. 'Then she had a handbag too.'
'So I figured. Dwyer and Higgins are looking around the neighborhood.'
A bag-snatcher, whether or not he was also a murderer, seldom kept the bag long; it would be tossed away on the ran.
Her clothes were tasteless, flamboyant-tight Kelly-green sweater with a round white angora collar, black fame skirt full-cut and too short, sheer stockings, black patent-leather pumps with four-inch heels, over all a long black coat with dyed rabbit round the collar and hem. Mendoza felt the coat absently, expecting the harshness of shoddy material: cheap, ill-cut stuff.
Two very different corpses, he reflected, this tawdry pseudo blonde and Carol Brooks. Carol Brooks, six months ago, had been an eminently respectable and earnest young woman, not very good looking, and she had died in the soiled blue uniform-dress she wore for work. Otherwise, no, the corpses weren't so different.
'Yes,' he murmured, and stood up. 'He didn't intend murder, to start with-I don't think. He hadn't any weapon but his hands. And he didn't reach out to find one, blind, like that, and pick up the rock-it wasn't used that way, Art. He had her down, she was fighting him, trying to scream-he was strangling her, finding it not quick enough-and he slams her down on the ground, hard, just by chance on the rock. I can see it going like that. Unpremeditated violence, but once it unleashes itself-he looked down at the body again-'insane violence.'
'Here comes Bert,' said Hackett, 'with the handbag. Not that it'll maybe take us very far.'
'That's a loaded question for the so-called expert,' said the surgeon, looking interested over the flame of his lighter, 'but I'll say this, at least-he must have gone berserk for some reason. Nobody can say sane or insane just on that evidence-unnecessary violence. That sort of thing is apt to be vicious personal hatred, or a couple of other quirks.'
'You're so right,' said Mendoza. 'You'll make a report all embellished with the technical terms, but to go on with for the moment?'
'Her neck's broken. Excessive laceration of the throat. Half a dozen head wounds, all but one on the back of the skull-the one that killed her, I think, is this here, on the temple. Maybe she turned her head in struggling and- The left shoulder is dislocated. She was struck repeatedly in the face with a fist. You can see the cyanosed areas, there. Her right arm is broken just below the elbow. The whole torso has been damaged, kicked or maybe jumped on. Fractured ribs, I think, and internal injuries. It's on the cards some of that was done after death, but I don't know that it'll be provable-probably a very short time after, of course. There's some damage to the left eye, as if a finger or thumb had been-'
'Yes. It was Dr. Bainbridge who made the autopsy on Brooks,' said Mendoza. 'You wouldn't remember. That is the one thing of positive resemblance. Otherwise?-he flicked away the burnt match and drew deep on his cigarette, shrugging-'any mugger after a woman's bag, who used a little too much violence.'
'So?' said the surgeon. 'Ever catch that one?' Mendoza shook his head.
'Well, here we are,' announced Hackett, who had gone to meet Dwyer. 'In plain sight in the gutter a couple of blocks away.' It was the bag one would have predicted she would carry: a big square patent leather affair with a coquettish white bow cluttering the snap-fastener.
' Ya lo creo, as we might put it, huh?'
Mendoza lifted his upper lip at it. 'Before you get promotion and cease to be my junior in rank, Arturo, you will have perfected your vile accent. It may take years.'
Very delicately Hackett delved with two fingers into the bag's interior and came up with a woman's wallet, bright pink plastic, ornamented all around the border with imitation pearls. Mendoza regarded it with satisfied horror: the very object this girl would have admired. 'Lot of other stuff here-doesn't look as if he took a damn thing. Funny he put the wallet back after grabbing the cash, ifHe might've figured the wallet alone'd be spotted quicker and picked up, but then again muggers don't think so far ahead usually, and this one, I don't see him in a state to think at all, after that. If-'
'?Basta! One thing at a time.'
'Her name was Elena Ramirez. No drivers' license. Dime-store snapshot of herself and, I presume, current boy friend. Social Security card. Membership card in some club. I.D. card-address and phone-little change in the coin purse-that figures, of course, he'd take the bills-'
Dwyer said, 'Prints are going to love you for putting your fat paws all over that cellophane.'
'All right,' Mendoza cut off Hackett's retort abruptly. 'Give me that address, Art. I'll see the woman who found her and then the family-if there is one. Dwyer, you and Higgins can begin knocking on doors did anyone hear a disturbance, screams perhaps? When we know more of the background, maybe I'll have other jobs for you. They can take her away now.'
Hackett drifted over to Fratelli's grocery behind Mendoza. In two hours, tomorrow, Hackett would be the man nominally in charge of working this case; a lieutenant of detectives could not devote all his time to a relatively minor case like this. The fact annoyed Mendoza, partly because he had an orderly mind, liked to take one thing at a time, thoroughly. Even more did it irritate him now because it was intuitively clear to him that this girl and Carol Brooks had met death at the same hands, and he wanted very much to get that one inside, caught in a satisfactory net of evidence and booked and committed for trial.
If one murder was more or less important than another, neither of these was important: the kind of casual homicide that happens every week in any big city. This girl did not look as if she would be much missed, as if she had been a human being with much to offer the world, but one never knew. Carol Brooks, now, that had perhaps been a loss-yes. He remembered again the warm gold of the recorded voice a trifle rough as yet, a trifle uncertain, but the essential quality there.
However, his cold regret at missing her murderer had nothing of sentiment in it. The reason was the reason,
