wasn't as hot as when he had left, but the air conditioning was still welcome. He found Alison in the living room, curled up in an armchair reading, and she scrambled up in surprise, scattering cats. 'Luis, we didn't know when to expect you.'
When she emerged from his embrace she added, 'You look tired to death, querido.'
'Jet lag,' said Mendoza. 'I want a shower and shave and there's time to get down to the office-'
'Time to go nowhere,' said Alison. 'You're going to lie down for the rest of the afternoon and get some sleep. You're not as young as you were, and you know you're exhausted. I suppose you went to the Folies Bergere every night to whistle at all the lovelies.' He followed her meekly up the stairs, yawning his head off. He wasn't sorry to be overruled.
So it wasn't until Thursday morning that he sat at his desk with Higgins, Hackett, Palliser gathered around him, Hackett missing another day off, and said, 'So, Paul Goulart, the fiance, got himself murdered too. And it could have been a coincidence-the crime rate's up in Paris too-but I don't think so and neither does Rambeau. Goulart was on a late shift at the hospital and would get home at his apartment about midnight. It looked as if he'd surprised a burglar. The place was ransacked and he was stabbed. The door had apparently been jimmied opened with a chisel or something, but the lock wasn't broken. There was a good solid deadbolt. What the detective on the case thought, and what I think, was that somebody was waiting for him. Went in with him on some excuse and set up the burglary. He wasn't known to have any, in the melodramatic word, enemies. No trouble with anyone recently. But Goulart!' said Mendoza. 'Of all the people who knew her, Goulart would never have rested until he located Juliette. He wouldn't have been fobbed off with any polite excuses from the French police or us. And there was no address book in that apartment, and that's an item the burglar seldom bothers with?Como no! And he must have known Grandfather's address. He's the one who would have had it, damn it.'
'I'm following you,' said Hackett cautiously. 'But-'
Mendoza impatiently lit a cigarette from the stub of his old one. 'Iook at it. Just look at the probabilities. What would happen when Juliette didn't come home from America? The Ducasse girl is all wrapped up in a new marriage, and living in another town. I doubt that she'd have Grandfather's address. Juliette was only going to be gone for three weeks, a month. The Ducasse girl would expect to hear from her, she'd be surprised when she didn't. She'd write to the Paris address. Eventually, she might contact the Boyer woman, and she'd have been surprised and worried at not hearing too. But what would they do? How soon? By December the lease would be up on that apartment, but the rent would have been overdue before then, and sooner or later the managers would go in, find personal possessions, assume she'd decamped. Theirs not to reason why. I doubt if they'd take the trouble to look at her accumulated mail. Take Goulart's father. He liked the girl very much, but when she didn't contact him when she was supposed to be back, what would he think? Put her down as a heartless female not worthy of Paul. But Goulart! A young, energetic man with some standing-he'd have been a tiger after her when she didn't come home. He was in love with the girl, he knew where she was going. He'd have moved heaven and earth to find out what had happened to her. Goulart was the key. If Juliette was to vanish quietly away, he had to go. However, he had to be disposed of.'
'I see it,' said Higgins. 'But, my God, Luis. Talk about a wholesale operation-'
'Her other friends, and she probably had a lot of them, mostly middle-class working girls like herself, they'd wonder and speculate. They wouldn't do anything. And if in December or January or February Mrs. Boyer did contact the French police and they contacted us, what is there to find? She landed at International that day and-as Mr. Shakespeare puts it, the rest is silence.'
Mendoza laughed and leaned back in his desk chair. 'So everybody is at a dead end. She had a visitor's permit, good for six months. Muy bien. Immigration isn't going to send out the troops looking for her. But Goulart, that was a different breed of cat, compadres. They had to get rid of Goulart.' He brooded over his cigarette. 'He was killed on the Monday night, after Juliette landed here on Saturday. Somebody had been busy. They had to get her keys, possibly her address book if she brought it with her, for Goulart's address. Somebody started for France that Saturday night. They'd know her address from her letters, of course. Somebody cleared that apartment of anything personal-Grandfather's letters, other letters. And if the address book was there-that, and any list of phone numbers. And somebody set up a little ambush for Goulart.'
'And,' said Palliser. 'Another thing you can deduce. If the Boyer woman or the Ducasse girl had done anything, what would they do? Go to Goulart.'
' Exactamente. He had to go. And that was just the way. it's been at this end-simple and yet-mmh-cunning. Rudimentary, but very damned thorough. And money and lives no object.'
'For God's sake, what could be behind it?' said Higgins.
'Elias K. Dobbs,' said Hackett. 'Another common name. We can start out with the phone books and city directories.'
'It would probably have worked out as smooth as cream,' said Mendoza, 'if I hadn't seen the corpse. Oh, such a nice little plan. And executed so damn smoothly too.'
'Why?' wondered Palliser.
'And we still don't know,' said Mendoza.
'The phone book,' said Hackett.
There were six phone books covering the county. This one had been a bastard to work all the way. Dobbs wasn't as common a name as Smith or Brown, but common enough. And there were a hundred or more in each of the books, even just looking for the initials. And of course the number might be unlisted. They started to work on it, on four books. That was at eleven o'clock, and at noon a bank job went down at a Bank of America on Beverly. Everybody else was out hunting heisters and there'd be dozen of witnesses to question. They all went out on that, and what with talking to the witnesses and taking statements, it occupied the rest of the day.
THE NIGHT WATCH had only one call, but it was a homicide. And it would likely give the day boys some more legwork to do. Conway went out to look at it. The uniformed man was waiting for him with a civilian in front of a little old single-frame house on San Marino Street. The civilian was a middle-aged man, sitting on the front steps with his head in his hands. His name was Richard Scoggins. He said to Conway numbly, 'We were worried when she didn't answer the phone. My mother. She's nearly eighty and pretty frail. We usually phoned to check on her every day. We didn't like her living alone down here but of course she owned the house. My wife couldn't get her all day. I thought I'd better check. Of course I've got a key to the house-and when I saw-' He put his head in his hands again. The old lady was lying on the floor of the bedroom. It looked as if she'd been strangled. There were a few drawers pulled out, an old jewelry box on the dressing table was empty with its lid open. Conway sent the patrolman back on tour after he'd called the lab and while he waited looked I through the rest of the house. He told Scoggins that later they'd want him to look and see what was missing here, and Scoggins just nodded silently. It didn't look to Conway as if the back or front doors had been forced, or any of the windows. But that was the lab's business. Let them get on with it. He went back to the office to write the initial report.
MENDOZA SWORE over the night report. It was Galeano's day off. They were still taking statements from the witnesses on the bank job and now they had this damned homicide to work. And all the damned phone books- He got Jason Grace to get back on that with him. The first thing they had checked on had been unlisted numbers and no Elias K. Dobbs or any E. Dobbs in the county had one. There wasn't an Elias Dobbs listed in any of the six books, but there were at least a hundred and fifty E. Dobbses.
'There's an easier way to do it, you know,' said Grace reasonably.
Mendoza said savagely, 'Hands off the phone, Jase! Grandfather's part of this damn thing and I don't want to set off the alarm on him. ?Dios! We'll have to take a personal look at every one of these damned Dobbses, and whoever pulled this off may be damned canny and crafty but I'll take a bet that when we find Grandfather and let him know that we've connected him with Juliette he'll be surprised enough to show it.'
'Yes, I see what you mean,' said Grace. They set to work to compile a list of possible Grandfathers. And adding insult to injury, they were all over the damn county. There'd be mileage piled up on all their cars, and the only consolation was that the heat wave seemed to be dying a natural death.
