returning it. Most obliged.' He gave them an open, friendly smile.
'You see I always like to keep the souvenirs of the bad ones. You may call it a little foible of mine. I only bother to kill the bad ones. The others are not so important. I'm very glad to have this returned to me, gentlemen.'
MENDOZA WAS NOT a sightseer by nature, and he was not particularly interested in Paris. As far as he could see it was just another city, as sprawled out into suburbs as his own city. He had dutifully, if uninterestedly, been to the Eiffel Tower.
This morning he had gone to Rambeau's office, but Rambeau was out, the man at the switchboard told him in rudimentary English, on a new homicide. What Rambeau called the spadework was still going on, he supposed. He wandered up the streets from the big Prefecture of Police building and presently came to a large public park. An elderly woman at a tobacconist shop had pressed a guidebook on him yesterday and he consulted it now to find that he was in the Jardin des Tuileries, and the imposing building beyond the lawns and flowers and the octagonal pool would be the Louvre. He sat down on a bench by the pool. Two excited little boys in knee pants were sailing miniature boats on the pool. He hadn't any urge to go into the Louvre, look at paintings and objects of art.
There was a little girl sitting on the grass, watched over by a woman on the bench opposite his. She was a pretty little girl with dark hair, about six. She reminded Mendoza of Terry. He smiled at her and she smiled back shyly. He supposed he ought to go and have some lunch.
NINE
BOTH HACKETT AND HIGGINS had had a number of varied experiences in their combined years on the L.A.P.D., but Dr. Thomas was something new to them. He agreed quite amiably to accompany them to meet a friend and they waited while he dressed in a new gray suit, clean white shirt and tie. They took him straight out to the psychiatric ward at Cedars-Sinai and left him there, and went back to look at the hotel room. There was a suitcase full of nearly new clothes and in one of the side pockets was nearly seventy thousand dollars in cash. They also found a few of his other souvenirs, bloodstained knives and four other wallets with female I.D.'s in them, all the addresses in New Jersey.
'This is the damndest thing I ever remember,' said Hackett. Somebody in the lab went out and took his prints and he wasn't in their records, so they wired them to the Feds and NCIC. Just before six o'clock they got a teletype back from NCIC. The prints belonged to Richard Conroy who was an escapee from a state mental asylum in New Jersey. He had been committed, further information added later, for twenty-five years and was known to be homicidal. Prior to the commitment, he had raped eleven women and murdered five. He had escaped five months ago and New Jersey was looking for him hard. There was evidence that since he had got out, he had raped three more women and was thought to be responsible for the murder of a prostitute in Newark. One of the rape victims had had nearly ninety thousand dollars in cash hidden in the house and he had walked away with it.
Palliser said, 'Good God. The things we see.'
Hackett fired off a teletype to the New Jersey State Police. On Saturday morning, a Captain Runyon called him.
'Thank God you picked up that nut. We've had visions of him leaving a trail of bodies all over the state. I wonder how in hell he ended up in California, he's never been out of the East as far as we know. But of course he had all that cash. I swear to God, I sometimes wonder who is sane and who isn't. The idea of keeping that much cash loose in a box on a closet shelf-my God in heaven.'
Hackett said, 'People will do it. Well, he's tucked away safe. I suppose you want him back?'
Runyon said, 'It's a goddamn nuisance. But, yes, we'll have to send somebody out to fetch him. How did you drop on him, by the way?' When he heard, he laughed. 'We do sometimes get the breaks, don't we? Well, a lot of females can sleep easier tonight. There's been a little wave of terror around the southern part of the state where the asylum is. I'll get back to you and let you know who'll be out to get him.'
'Any time,' said Hackett.
It was still hot but not as bad as the last few weeks and by the middle of October it would probably slack off. The night watch had left them another heist and everybody seemed to be out on something except Palliser who was on the phone. After a minute he put it down and said, 'Just trying to prod the lab on this Rawson thing. They didn't pick up any good latents in that place except the victim's. That's got to be something else insane. Like your fruitcake. The drunk running amuck, something like that.'
'It sounds that way. And another one without a handle, if there's no lab evidence. God, I'll be glad when we get into fall and it cools off. This has been a rough summer. I wonder how Luis is doing in Paris. Damn it, there must be some record of that girl there, But just how to find it-'
Palliser said, 'I just hope he's not getting high blood pressure arguing with the Surete.' Landers came in with another heist suspect and he went to sit in on the questioning.
Higgins and Galeano had prodded at Vasquez some more yesterday but he wasn't about to give them a confession and it didn't matter.
There were no five possible heist suspects they were looking for. The tedious legwork was always there to be done. When Hackett came back from lunch, Lake greeted him with some relief. 'I was afraid I wouldn't see any of you the rest of the day. Something new's gone down, half an hour ago. A couple of bodies on Allesandro Street.'
'Oh, hell,' said Hackett. 'More paperwork.' Galeano came in just then so they went to look at it together. It was a small apartment in an old building on that narrow street and there were two bodies-a rather pretty young blond woman in the mid-twenties and a little girl about four. Patrolman Zimmerman said, 'Where the hell have you been? I called in forty minutes ago when I got sent up here. I didn't know what to do with the woman. She's sitting in the squad still crying. Well, the girl was her daughter. She found them about an hour ago.' Even Zimmerman, taking a casual look at the scene, had read it as faked. 'I had to turn the gas off. There wasn't much built up in here, but I figured it was safer. These old windows are so loose, there wasn't much gas in here at all, just enough smell so you'd notice it. It was the oven turned on and the pilot light off, but it could be there was a clogged line.'
Galeano said, 'Hell, you touched the knob.'
'Well, I tried to be careful, sir. I'm sorry about any prints, but I thought it'd be safer.'
The girl was on the livingroom floor, on her side in front I of the couch. She was wearing a white sundress and thong T sandals. Hackett squatted down and looked at her. There was a dark bruise on one side of her jaw. She'd been alive when she got that or it wouldn't have showed. He felt carefully through the disheveled blond hair and said to Galeano, 'She's had the hell of a crack on the skull here-just back of the temple. Feels as if the bone's caved in.'
Galeano said, 'Anyway, neither of them died of the gas.'
The bodies were the wrong color for that. Victims of gas poisoning showed bright pink skin. The little girl was in a chair in the living room, lying across one arm of the chair, her head twisted at an odd angle to her shoulders. She had on a skimpy playsuit and thong sandals.
'I'd have an educated guess her neck is broken,' said Galeano.
'Yes,' said Hackett. 'Somebody trying to set up the fake suicide, Nick, and a damned crude one. You'd think any fool would know the autopsies would show it up. We'd better talk to this woman, find out who they were.'
She was sitting in the back of the squad and she had stopped crying now. Galeano got into the backseat with her and Hackett into the front. She was a woman probably in the forties, plain-faced with greying brown hair. Her name was Ena Schwartz. She said the bodies were her daughter Gloria and Gloria's little girl, Joan. Gloria Pratt. She said, 'Gloria'd never kill herself. That's just impossible. And I besides, there wasn't hardly any gas- I'd never believe that, and she'd sure never want to kill Joan. They'd just moved in here, got settled, and had everything arranged and it was going to work out good- I was so glad when she left that man, he's a no-good drunken bum. I tried to
