'Say,' said Duke at the lab. 'Did you get that report yet? Good. I meant to put a note in with it. We've been kind of busy and it slipped my mind. I'll tell you what, Palliser, if you ever pick up a good solid suspect on this Coffey homicide, you bring all his shoes along to us. We'll maybe give you some beautiful scientific evidence.'
'Shoes,' said Palliser blankly. 'Why?'
Duke laughed. 'Just don't forget it. We all have our professional secrets, Palliser.'
On Thursday afternoon, the tedious checking into backgrounds of all the employees at the hospital turned up something interesting, and Grace and Galeano brought it to Mendoza rather with the air of two well-trained retrievers fetching in a bird that had been lost in the underbrush.
'?Vaya por Dios! ' said Mendoza, looking at the record. One Alfredo Diaz, employed as a chef in the hospital kitchen, had turned out to be a former mental patient at the Norwalk State Hospital. He had been released after a couple of years there, three years ago. One of the doctors on the hospital board had got him the job. 'We just talked to that one,' said Grace, 'and he nearly bit our heads off.'
'Time is money, Jase. We interrupted his schedule,' said Galeano. 'All these people are growing a prejudice for the damn suspicious fuzz, Lieutenant. They were excited over the murder, but when we came nosing around suspecting that somebody at the hospital did it-'
'Medical people,' said Grace, 'are all temperamental. Supposed to be all efficient and scientific but they're so used to being in charge of everything they're apt to have a tantrum when they're not-if you take me.' Grace might know. His father was the chief of the Gynecology Department at the General Hospital.
'Well, mental patients come all kinds like other people,' said Mendoza. 'One of the chefs-'
'I know,' said Galeano. 'That's the little stumbling block. He says he was in the basement kitchen fixing the dinners with everybody else. He never goes up to the wards-wasn't interested in the patients, and there seems to have been about forty other people there, but that cancels itself out in a way. If he was gone for fifteen minutes- said he was back in the john-would anybody have noticed?'
'What in hell is one like that doing on a hospital staff?'
'The doctor we riled-a Dr. Ackerwood-told us he'd got him the job as a favor for a friend of his, one of the psychiatrists at Norwalk-a Dr. Silverman.'
'I'm not,' said Mendoza, 'constitutionally disposed to believe automatically anything a psychiatrist says, boys. I think at least half of them are a little bit touched themselves. But I suppose it wouldn't do any harm to hear what Silverman has to say about Diaz.'
He saw Silverman on Friday morning at his private office out on Chapman Avenue in Fullerton, and was, grudgingly, favorably impressed. Silverman was fat, bald, friendly and not given to the six=dollar words.
'Well, the man has a low-normal I.Q., Lieutenant. He's a mildly schizoid personality, but I never detected any tendency to violence in the three years I was treating him. He had a great lack of self-confidence-understandable with his mentality, but it took the effect of suicidal impulses rather than outward aggression. As I had rather expected, when we found him a job he could perform satisfactorily, a mechanical job he could do by routine, he responded quite well. He's made a good adjustment.' Silverman was academically interested in the homicide. 'I don't know anything about it, Lieutenant, except what you've just told me, but from my experience with aberrations, I might hazard a guess that you should look for someone with a fixation about death-perhaps,' he reflected, 'a much-indulged son who had lost a beloved mother. I find it interesting, you know, that it is an Italian family. I presume Catholic. Yes. The er-symbolism. But I really think you needn't suspect Diaz. I never detected any violence there-any incipient aggression.'
AND MENDOZA felt a little foolish about it-a little self-conscious. But he told the morgue to send Juliette up to Forest Lawn. God knew he could afford to pay for a simple funeral, but he wasn't sure why he felt obligated, and he thought vaguely as he had thought about another corpse a year or so ago, She fell among thieves. He wondered if Juliette had been Catholic; it was probable. He talked to Father Damian at St. Patrick's in Burbank, and the priest was sensible and practical. He held a brief graveside service. Alison attended that
'I know it's just a ceremony, but somehow I felt I ought to go'-and Mairi was there. Mairi was a very orthodox, traditional Catholic of the old school and for some reason she felt sentimental about Juliette. She said darkly, '‘Dying as a stranger in a strange land-and if you ask me, even if we don't know the ins and outs of it, that grandfather of hers must be a wicked old rogue.'
SEVEN
ON SATURDAY, Palliser finally got around to looking up Toby Wells. The rest of the Coffey family had come in to have their prints taken and these had checked out with the other prints the lab had picked up. Wells worked at a Thrifty drugstore on Hollywood Boulevard, and he was an ordinary-looking young black fellow, round-faced, slow- spoken, and he was frank on answering questions. 'You were in a little trouble a couple of years ago,' said Palliser.
Wells said a little nervously, 'Well, yeah, that was kind of a damn' fool thing to do-steal those clothes-but I like nice clothes, and I had a new girl then and I guess I wanted to show off to her. My grandma paid up for me and I never been in any trouble since. Oh yeah, it's an awful thing about Grandma.' He shied a little when Palliser asked him about that Friday night, but answered readily, -'I was out with my girl, Mae Weaver. We went to a disco down on Jefferson Boulevard. I guess it was about midnight when I got home, we both had to go to work the next day, a course.' He lived with a couple of other young fellows at an apartment on Virgil Avenue. It wasn't worth writing a further report on. Half of them were now doing the legwork on that heister, the rest winding down the investigation at the hospital. That had been a bastard of a thing to work. They must have chased down over a hundred people, trying to identify all the visitors, looking into personal backgrounds, and all for nothing. There was no way to find out who might have done that queer killing-why or when. It was another case that would wind up in the Pending file.
On Sunday morning, the lab report came up on the Holzer car and there was nothing in it at all. The steering wheel had evidently been wiped clean and the only other prints in the car belonged to Edna Holzer and the girl, Frances. The autopsy report came in that afternoon too and she hadn't been raped, just knocked around and strangled manually. The lab hadn't picked up anything significant from her clothes.
Mendoza took the reports out to the communal office to pass on and said to Hackett, 'Just damn all on everything we' re working-nothing.'
'Well, that's the way it goes sometimes, and then all of a sudden we'll get some breaks.'
'Don't philosophize at me,' said Mendoza irritably. He sat down at Higgins' desk and added abruptly, 'And we're never going to hear anything from France, you know. I've got a strong hunch on that.'
'I don't see that, Luis. The girl must've had friends. There's the fiance.'
' Es cierto, se. But that's my hunch.' He was silent for a moment and then said, 'The only way we'll get anything from France is for somebody to go over there and look.'
Hackett took his glasses off to stare at him. 'You're not serious.'
'I might be, Art. At least I've got a passport in order.'
'You don't know where to start looking,' said Hackett.
'But the trail starts there, damn it?Condenacion! Grandfather. If there was just some little lead?'
'You don't even know whether the Martin girl lived in Paris-anywhere in France-'
'The probability is Paris, I think. Such a simple, artful little setup. By God, I'll find out what was behind that if it takes a year,' said Mendoza violently. 'And I think we can let that hospital staff go about its business. We're never going to turn up any evidence on that damn thing.' Hackett agreed thoughtfully. The autopsy on Alisio had said exactly what they expected it to say.
By now, four possible suspects on that heist had been found and questioned, but there was nothing to tie in any of them definitely. Two more heists had gone down last night with no clear descriptions. The heat wave was still with them.
Hackett said, 'We get these spells sometimes. Stymied on everything. Then all of a sudden we'll start to get
