'Well, that wasn't done when he went over the cliff in his car, you know. It wasn't done on anything in the car. I've had these under the microscope, and I took scrapings to look at closer. You know what was in those scraped spots? Asphalt. Asphalt and,' Duke added dreamily, 'crankcase oil, and bird droppings, and decayed leaves. Traces, you know.'
Mendoza sat up. 'What the hell? Does that say-'
'Me, I'm only a chemist,” said Duke. 'You're the detective. But we aren't exactly disinterested in this one, and I saw what Dr. Erwin said about that skull fracture. The back of the skull, more to the left side. I think this does tell us a little something?
'Asphalt--'
'The way I read it,' said Duke, 'and stop me if I don't make sense, is that he got that first blow outdoors, on the street. Literally on the street-a blacktop street. He got knocked backwards, maybe tripped over something or it was just a very hefty blow-and his feet went out from under him, scraping the street, and he went down hard on something-as Erwin said-broad and hard and flat.'
'But not the street itself,' said Mendoza slowly, 'because there wasn't a trace of anything like that in the wound or on the scalp. Of course he had on a hat, but you didn't find anything like that on it. Nothing extraneous.'
'That's right' said Duke. 'I just thought I'd pass it on.”
'And isn't it interesting,' said Mendoza. 'Thanks very much… ' He thought about that story he'd built up, on Art. The louts jumping him. The outside thing? Or, if you were bound to link it with another case, had he shown some suspicion, and been followed outside?
The nice neat detective-story plot-Art stumbling across the X in the Nestor case, or the Slasher-he had bought it, but now he wasn't so sure.
Art attacked in the street. A blacktop street. Like how many thousand streets in L. A. County?
What the hell?
And that was when the man from Ballistics came in. A paunchy, elderly fellow named Hansen, who said, 'I think we've cleared one up for you, Lieutenant. That chiropractor that got himself shot. We've got the gun.'
'?Parece mentira! Don't keep me in suspense-where the hell did you-'
'Well, the Wilcox Street boys sent it down, and I fired a few test slugs, and they looked sort of familiar-I did the tests on that slug out of the chiropractor. It's a Harrington and Richardson Sportsman 999-nice little gun. Nine- shot revolver, retails for about fifty bucks.' He laid it on Mendoza's desk.
'And where did the Hollywood boys get it?'
'Attempted break-in at a drugstore, Saturday night,' said Hansen. 'Three juveniles. They got this off one of them.”
'?Un millen demonios! ' said Mendoza exasperatedly. '?Ya se ve! So it was the outside thing on Nestor-just what it looked like. The outside thing-too.'
FIFTEEN
Mendoza called Wilcox Street and set up an immediate date with Sergeant Nesbitt at the County Jail. Damn it, this turned the whole case upside down. The facts that Nestor had been an abortionist, had been cheating on his wife, didn't matter a damn; he hadn't been murdered for a personal reason; it had been just what it looked like, the break-in, the burglars finding him there, using the gun in panicky impulse. So the Nestor thing hadn't anything to do with the assauly on Art; he hadn't stumbled onto the personal killer there because there wasn't one. And there wasn't any way he could have stumbled onto these actual killers, either.
So, a hundred to one, the assault on Art had been the outside thing too. Because, to hell with the train wreck, Mendoza didn't see one like the Slasher setting up that faked accident-elementarily faked as it had been. If Art had stumbled onto the Slasher that night, the Slasher would probably have just yanked out his homemade knife and
… And, buying the detective-story plot, they'd wasted three days on that. Where to look now? Nowhere. They hadn't a clue as to where or when the first assault on Art had happened.
He said to Sergeant Lake, 'If I'm not back when Mrs. Sheldon comes in, ask her to wait, will you?' He went downstairs to the lot and headed the Ferrari for North Broadway.
Wait a minute. Were there any leads? Even small ones. It could have been the way he'd outlined it to Palliser, a little gang of juvenile louts drifting the streets, jumping Art on impulse. In that case, a very small chance indeed that they could ever be identified, charged. But-the terminus a quo. He was all right when he left Mrs. Nestor's apartment on Kenmore. He'd meant perhaps to see the Elgers, see the Corliss woman, see the desk clerk, but they didn't know where he'd actually headed from Mrs. Nestor's. But Mendoza thought that Margaret Corliss was leveling with him now, and she'd denied again that Art had been to see her that night. All right. Mendoza was thinking again about Cliff Elger. None of these people had had anything to do with taking Nestor off, and it looked pretty farfetched that any of the rest of them could have had anything to do with the assault on Art; but Cliff Elger? That big boy, bigger than Art, who had the hair-trigger temper? Could he have got so mad at something Art said-about his wife, probably-that he struck that first violent blow, and found himself stuck with a badly injured cop? And with the reputation to preserve… Art attacked in the street. His heels scraping a blacktop street as he fell-but he hadn't fallen onto the blacktop, or there'd have been the same traces of asphalt and so on in the wound.
'I'm a fool,' said Mendoza to himself suddenly, braking for a light. It was, when you thought about it, obvious. Whoever had struck that blow. Art standing at the curb or in the street-he could see it-car keys in his hand, ready to walk round the car to the driver's door. Either he'd been already facing someone, talking, or someone had spoken to him and he'd turned. And the blow struck-the violent blow-and he had fallen backward, feet sliding out from under him, and gone down hard on the broad, flat expanse of the car trunk. There wouldn't have been traces on the car, after the accident; he'd been wearing a hat.
That said a little more, but it wasn't any lead to who. Cliff Elger, roaring mad at something Art had said, following him down to the street, getting madder when he couldn't rouse Art's temper in return… Maybe. Normandie was a blacktop street.
So was the street Madge Corliss' apartment was on. So were a lot of streets-including Third and the side streets around there. Wait a minute again. If that little build-up about how it happened was so, didn't it say probably that the car had been parked along the curb, not diagonally? And that wasn't much help either, because on most streets in L.A. and Hollywood the street parking wasn't diagonal. You got that in a lot of towns around- Glendale, Pasadena, Beverly Hills-but not much here.
'Hell,' said Mendoza, and parked, pocketed the keys, and walked up to the jail.
Sergeant Nesbitt was waiting for him at the top of the steps. 'Lieutenant Mendoza? Nesbitt.' He was a square, solid man about forty, with a square stolid face. 'I understand you're going to claim my young punks on a murder rap. Well, glad to oblige. They're all under eighteen, though, you won't be getting the gas chamber for them.'
'What's the story?' They went inside.
'Well, we've been having quite a little wave of break-ins up in my stamping ground. Drugstores, independent markets, dress shops, and so on. The cheaper stores. where the buildings are old and the locks not so good, you know. It's been mostly petty stuff, we figured it was juveniles-not much cash, and stuff they wouldn't get much for- I think myself some of it was stolen to give away to their girl friends, make them look big. You know. Cigarettes, liquor, clothes from the dress shops, and so on. Well, Saturday night a squad car touring out on Fountain spotted what looked like a flashlight in the rear of this drugstore on a corner, took a closer look, found the back door forced, and picked these three up in the stock room. They had an old Model A Ford sitting by the back door, half full of stuff they'd already piled in it.' Nesbitt rummaged and produced his notebook. 'One Michael Wills, Joe Lopez, George Kellerman. They're all from down around your part of town, and they've all been in a little trouble before. Wills was picked up and warned once for carrying a switchblade, and the other two have one count each of Grand Theft Auto- little joy riding, you know. Probation. Wills and Kellerman are seventeen, Lopez sixteen.'
'Well, they've got into big trouble this time,” said Mendoza. 'Who had the. 22?'
'Wills. I'd say he's the ringleader.'
