uniform. But he always wanted to be a police officer-ever since he was a little boy. A good, honest, honorable police officer-like his father.' She raised her eyes from the floor. 'His father was on the force in Chicago. He got shot by a drunk when Don was five. We came out here to live with my sister and her family then.'
'Mrs. Dubois, we're sorry,' said Schenke. There wasn't anything else to say to her.
'We'll all be praying for him,' said Piggott.
'I did quite a lot of praying for Don's father-twenty-one years ago,' she said quietly.
THAT WAS THE MOST IMPORTANT item on the agenda waiting for the day watch on Sunday morning. Hackett called Mendoza at home to tell him about it and Mendoza said, '?Maria y Jose! I hope he makes it. But we might get some leads from the pickup truck.'
'George is talking to the DMV right now.'
'I'll be in,' said Mendoza. 'I'm flying to France on Tuesday, but I'll be in pronto.' '
'My God, you are persistent. You'll never find out a damned thing. You haven't anywhere to start looking and you know about four words of French.'
'By God, I'll have a try at it. I'll be down. Thank God they've got computers in Sacramento.'
The computers, of course, would give them some legwork-a lot of it. The computers would sort out all the Ford pickup trucks registered in L.A. County a lot more quickly than the detectives could take the individual looks at the owners, and while there wouldn't be as many pickup trucks i in an urban area as in a rural one, there would be plenty. The names and addresses were still coming in by the middle of the afternoon, and they had other cases to work, and probably other calls would go down. But there was priority on this pair, who had attacked one of their own.
Dubois was still holding his own, but still unconscious. As the names of those owners came in, the first use they made of them was to run them through the R. and I. Office. It was possible that one or both of that pair had a prior record. It was even probable, given the instant unprovoked attack on Dubois. The break-in artist seldom went armed, and whoever had fired those shots was quick and handy with a gun.
There were more pickup trucks in the county than anyone could have predicted. They did some overtime, but they hadn't finished looking through Records with their own computers by the middle of Sunday evening.
THEY ALL LANDED at the office together, a little early on Monday morning. Palliser had come in even if it was his day off. Mendoza called the hospital. Dubois had rallied a little. There was a full day's work ahead and maddeningly, just as they settled down to it, they had a call. The job was like women's work, never done, and they were always having to drop one thing and pick up another.
And this one would just pose a lot of paperwork, and you could blame it directly on the fact that at eight o'clock that morning, at the intersection of Grand and Sixth Street in downtown Los Angeles, the temperature had hit ninety-nine degrees and was rising.
The patrolman who brought the woman into the office said, 'My God, it's like a battlefield. You never saw such a hell of a thing. There were five squads out and three ambulances. I don't know how many people got killed, but I saw three bodies myself. When we got her out of the car, she looked ready to throw a fit, and then all of a sudden she calmed down. But maybe you ought to get her to a doctor.'
Her name was Laura Fenn and by her driver's license she was forty-four and lived in South Pasadena. She told them in a dead and dull voice that she was a librarian at the main library and asked someone to call the library and explain that she'd be late. Then she just sat and looked at the wall and Wanda Larsen tried to talk to her.
'My goodness, you never saw such a thing,' said the patrolman. Miss Fenn, driving a nine-year-old Dodge without air-conditioning, had caught a red light at that corner on her way to work. A good many other people had caught it too-on both streets. The lights were stuck, both on red. After about four minutes, the horns started, tempers began to rise, and cars began to edge cautiously into any opening. There were also a good many pedestrians on both streets.
The Dodge, second in line at the light on Grand, had gone roaring up onto the sidewalk, sideswiped the car first at the light, charged across the intersection where people on foot were crossing, and finally plowed into a city bus on Grand. When Wanda finally got her to say anything, she just said, 'It was too hot-just too hot. I had a headache and the library's air-conditioned-and there was such a jam on the freeway-and all of a sudden it was just too much. '
When they came to sort it out, she had killed four people and injured eleven seriously and severely damaged three cars. The Dodge was totaled. And Mendoza said exasperatedly, 'Iet the D.A. worry about what to call it. People!'
IT WAS IN THE MIDDLE of Monday afternoon, with a vague idea of clearing up a muddle before he left tomorrow, that he went up to Outpost Drive and talked to Joseph Alisio.
'We'll probably never know,' he told Alisio. 'With so many people there, it's been very difficult to check on who was where, when. It's all up in the air.'
Alisio heaved a sigh. 'I can appreciate that, Lieutenant. One lunatic among all those people. My God. Poor Carl. We knew he was on the way out, the first of us to go, and I don't suppose it makes any difference whether it was now or six mouths from now. But it's a terrible thing he had to go like that. We've all been shook up about it, but poor Randy-I never saw anybody so broken up. He's all to pieces and Mary says he's been drinking some. Well, he was Carl's favorite and I guess it's been a little worry to him, he'd been managing Carl's affairs for him since the cancer got diagnosed last year and Carl was so sick. It was the obvious thing to do, Carl had left him everything anyway, but it's probably made a little extra work for him.' He passed a hand over his bald head. 'I appreciate your coming, Lieutenant. No, I suppose we'll never know what happened. The lunatic getting into the hospital some way.'
A small cold finger inched up Mendoza's spine. The other boys laughed about his hunches. Mendoza's crystal ball. But Luis Rodolfo Vicente Mendoza had been a detective a long time and he knew enough to respect his hunches.
He stood at the curb on Outpost Drive and looked at the haze of smog over the city below him. He said to himself, ' Ridiculo.' His imagination working overtime. He got into the Ferrari and drove over to Glendale to that new high-rise office building.
Randy Nicolletti was at his desk in the big office, but he looked gray and ill. He had dropped some weight. Mendoza stopped beside his desk and Nicolletti looked up at him after a moment, his expression dull and vague.
'You did it, didn't you?' asked Mendoza. 'I'd like to know why.'
And Randy Nicolletti said in an expressionless tone, 'How did you know?'
EIGHT
HE DIDN'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT, and what he said after some prodding was, 'It was all my fault. I know that. Uncle Carl, I was his favorite, but he was always careful about money. The only times he ever got mad at me was about the gambling. I guess that's just in my nature. And he was dying up to a month ago-the doctor said he could go any time-and since he'd been so sick six months ago, he'd signed me onto his checking account, his savings account, so I could pay all the expenses-and it was all left to me anyway-it didn't matter. I got in pretty deep with a couple of fellows at a poker place in Gardena, it was over ten thousand and I was damned worried about it-one of them's kind of a tough customer. I thought it didn't matter, I paid up by cashing in one of the T-bills on his account. He hadn't been up to looking at the statements in months. And then I dropped a couple of thousand
