THE JET DECANTED MENDOZA at Orly Airport into a chilly gray early morning. With the time difference, it was early morning here and already autumn in northern Europe. He was feeling tired and stale, though he'd slept on the plane. The travel agent had got a reservation for him at the Hotel Crillon and he picked up a cab at the airport entrance. It was a big hotel in the middle of the city. What he could see of Paris in the cold morning light was just another old, dirty city. Older than his town and parts of it dirtier, with the occasional streets of new, shining office buildings, apartments. Everybody at the hotel seemed to speak English and he was shepherded to a good-sized room with a private bath on the top floor. He undressed, went to bed and slept for four hours, and woke feeling more alert. He took a shower and shaved, got dressed again, and went downstairs for a cup of coffee at the hotel restaurant. The elegantly uniformed attendant at the main entrance called him a cab. He had taken an unreasonable prejudice against the Surete and said to the cab driver, 'The Prefecture de Police,' as distinctly as possible.'
The cab driver raised a thumb. 'O.K., bud,' he said and let in the clutch with a jerk.
Mendoza had got traveler's checks cashed at the hotel and let the driver pick what he wanted of the sleazy thin paper.
The building was a square grim old pile looking like an old-fashioned military barracks, and he found out later that that was how it had begun life. He started out talking to a uniformed man at the desk in the lobby, who spoke some heavily accented English and presently summoned another man in civilian clothes who spoke more fluently, introduced himself as Delahaye, prefaced with a title Mendoza didn't catch.
'I think,'said Delahaye after deliberation, 'M. L'lnspecteur Rambeau will like to speak with you,' and he used the phone on the desk, spoke rapid French. He took Mendoza up in a creaking elevator to the second floor, down a long gloomy hall. At the end of it he opened a door and bowed Mendoza in. 'The American police officer, Inspecteur.'
The man at the desk in the large plain office stood up. There was a little wooden plaque upright on the front of the desk with lettering: INSPECTEUR LAURENT RAMBEAU.
'Ah,' he said. 'A pleasure to meet a colleague.' He offered a firm hand. 'Once I have visited your country, but not so far as California.' His English was very good. He was about Mendoza's age and size and he had a thick crop of wiry curly black hair and a flourishing black Gallic mustache, inquisitive bright brown eyes. 'Sit down and tell me how we can help you.'
Feeling warmed and welcomed, Mendoza took the chair beside the desk and began to tell the story. Rambeau listened absorbedly, chin planted on hands and elbows on desk, and at the end he sat up, reached to the package of cigarettes on the desk, offered it politely, and said, 'So, do we not all know how it goes. Day by day there is nothing but the little stupid violences, and then all of a sudden, once in ten years, arrives something complicated and strange. This is very interesting. I like it. I like it as a mystery. But the poor little Juliette.' Mendoza had handed over the envelope of photographs and he shook his head over them. 'A beautiful girl. One feels for the poor fiance.'
'The Surete gave us nothing at all. They don't know her fingerprints and I can't give you any more information on her.'
'Ah,' said Rambeau. 'The Surete. These big important men of affairs, sometimes they can be a trifle arrogant.'
'Yes, we have the same trouble with the FBI at times.'
Rambeau laughed. 'You and I, we are the same kind of policemen, I feel. I can see things to do here. We both understand the value of the spadework. There is the telephone directory, first of all. It is a pity it is such a common name-Martin-there will be thousands in greater Paris. Ours is a bigger city than yours, Mendoza. In Paris and its environs there are more than nine million people. But,' he went on briskly, 'there are things to do about this. We are always busy, but I feel as you do about the little Juliette, I want to know why she is dead. Now, the telephone. We will set four or five men to check all the Martins and that will be a long job. The fiance's surname we do not know, and Paul is a common name, too. But there is this M. Trechard-Trouchard, some such name.'
'Neither my wife nor I can remember exactly.'
'Yes, you were tired. Why should you pay attention? But that is not so common a name, and we will look for him also. Her employer-and she said he was not so easy to work for as his uncle. The impression you had, Juliette was a superior type-An office, she said? Not perhaps only a typist?' `
'I don't know your types,' said Mendoza. 'She was an educated, intelligent girl.'
'Yes, and the telephone directory,' said Rambeau, 'it is not infallible. The current ones are nearly a year old, but we will try. If the Surete have not got her fingerprints, then neither do we. That is no good. But you know that her passport was issued in Paris and that means that she lived ` here. In one of a million places. But,' he lit another cigarette and beamed at Mendoza, 'but, my friend, I believe we will find out about the little Juliette, and I will tell you why. You yourself said it. If you had not been the one to go to look at that corpse, no one would have suspected it was not the so nonexistent Ruth Hoffman. It is a very pretty little comedy, this. Here there is a Hoffman-with all the plausible identification. An end and no beginning. And there we have Juliette-a beginning and no end. If the beginning is hidden from us. But it was not by chance that you should see the corpse. There are many men under you in your office?'
Mendoza said wryly, 'Never enough.'
Rambeau laughed. 'Here too. But I believe the universe is ordered and men are not governed by chance. Me, I am a good Catholic, which also you should be by your name-'
'Sporadically,' said Mendoza with a grin.
Rambeau shook his head in smiling disapproval. 'No, it was not by chance it was you. If the devil is always active on one side, there is the good God to combat him, and God is the Stronger. Perhaps one of the good saints intercedes here for the little Juliette, to see she is avenged.' He looked at his watch. 'Courage-we begin the spadework. I will set men at the telephone directory, and you and I will go to luncheon at a small place where they know how to prepare the omelette, and then you amuse yourself and go to look at Paris while we try to solve your mystery.' He stood up and gave Mendoza a joyous smile. 'And then we will find who is this mysterious Grandpere, and why Juliette must be murdered. My men are the good trained bloodhounds. We will find out.'
ON WEDNESDAY, Records matched up another of the pickup owners with a pedigree, Cesar Montano. The pedigree said armed robbery, assault with intent, burglary. He'd been arrested and charged the last time four years ago.
Hackett called Welfare and Rehab to find out if he was loose, and Montano had been on parole for six months. The address on the registration was Harris Street in City Terrace. Hackett and Glasser went to see if he was at home or at work; his P.A. officer had got him a job with a janitorial service. They found him watching television in the dirty, untidy living room of a cheap apartment, and brought him downtown. They couldn't get the time of day out of him. He just called them a string of dirty names and after that shut up. He was a big hulk of a man about thirty with a pock-marked face and quick-shifting eyes. Dealing with the stupid louts was tedious and only from long experience did they keep their tempers and use patience. They tried for an hour to get something out of him and then they left him in jail and Higgins sent out for a search warrant.
They had another heist to work now and there were indictments scheduled for next week, Myra Arvin, Toby Wells, Randy Nicolletti. Somebody would have to be in court to cover those.
When the search warrant came in, Higgins was out looking for the owner of a Ford pickup who had a record of assault, so Hackett and Glasser went to look at Montano's apartment. It should have been Hackett's day off but they were anxious to get this one cleared up if they could. The apartment was scantily furnished, a cheap, shabby place. There was a little stock of food in the kitchen, a wardrobe full of nondescript old clothes, nothing but underwear and socks in the dresser drawers.
'Of course whoever did the shooting,' said Glasser, 'may have got shut of that gun, if he's halfway smart.'
'But they so seldom are, Henry,' said Hackett. He went back to the bedroom, leaving Glasser staring around the squalid living room, and was busy looking through the pockets of the clothes in the wardrobe when Glasser burst out laughing. 'My God in heaven! Come and look at this, Art.' Hackett went back to the living room. 'I just
