didn't mention it at all. But with one like that, who could say? She might, if he asked her, say, Oh, that. I'd suspected it all along.
'As long as you're here, Mrs. Nestor, I'd just like to go over it with you again-about Friday night, when Sergeant Hackett came to see you… ' He took her all through it again, and she gave him the same answers, disinterested.
He let her go, dispiritedly. His head had begun to ache again. He couldn't see where to go from here-if nothing turned up on that button. But he didn't know yet that those juveniles were in the clear, of course. And if they weren't, where else to look on Art?
It was one forty-eight. It seemed to him that lately, the last few days, time had slowed down somehow so that there were twice as many hours in a day. He wondered what the boys were getting on their searching jobs. Sergeant Lake came and looked at him disapprovingly and told him to go get some lunch.
'Yes,' said Mendoza, and dialed the offices of Cliff Elger and Associates. He was told that Mr. Elger was out to lunch with a client. Where? Well, probably Frascati's on the Strip or the one on Wilshire.
Mendoza tried Frascati's on the Strip first, as the nearer place, and spotted his man at once. Elger's great bulk, clad in loud tweed, was perched on a bar stool. He was doing most of the talking, gesturing widely, laughing. The man sitting next to him was much smaller, presenting a thin, narrow-shouldered back and a bald spot.
Mendoza climbed up on the stool at Elger' s other side. Elger was halfway through a martini: probably not his first. The other man, a depressed-looking middle-aged man, was staring silently at a glass of beer.
'-just got to take it in your stride,' Elger was saying heartily. 'You know? Script writers always change a book around some. What should you care, you've got the money. You worry too much, friend.'
The depressed-looking man said in a surprising Oxford accent, 'But she wasn't a chorus girl, she was the vicar's daughter. It all seems quite pointless to me, and rather silly.'
'Now you just stop worrying, old boy,' said Elger.
The bartender came up and Mendoza said, 'Straight rye. Mr. Elger!'
Elger swung around, looking surprised. 'Oh-it's you,' he said.
Mendoza smiled offensively at him. 'Business as usual? I thought you'd be keeping a closer eye on your Ruthie. Or have you hired a private eye?'
Instantly Elger's expression darkened. 'What the hell d'you mean by that? That bastard Nestor-and I wasn't surprised when I saw the Times this morning! Ruthie told you how it was, she hardly knew the guy, it was just to spite me she-'
'Naive, Mr. Elger!' said Mendoza cynically. 'They can sound quite convincing, that sex.'
'Damn you-'
Mendoza picked up the shot glass and swallowed half the rye. 'Don't sound so upset,' he drawled. 'Happens in the best of families-'
Elger swung on him and he ducked, alert for it, and caught the man's wrist in both hands. It had been an awkward swing, from a seated position; but if Elger had been on his feet…
He said incisively, 'Hold it, Elger! Take it easy. Now what did I really say? Nothing much. You lose your temper that easy very often? Because, if you do, I'm surprised you haven't got stuck with a corpse-or a near corpse-long ago!'
'What the hell,” said Elger sullenly. He shook his arm free of Mendoza's grip. The other man was watching interestedly. 'You talking about Ruth-damn cop-'
'To see what little thing might set you off. Look at me!' said Mendoza sharply. 'Did you lose your temper last Friday night, Elger? Did you? Because of some little remark Sergeant Hackett made to you? Did-'
'I told you I never heard of that guy!'
'Did you follow him down to the street and attack him there, Elger? And then find you'd nearly killed him? And there he was, right in front of your apartment-and if he came to, he'd talk-or he might just die, so we'd get you for manslaughter if nothing worse-and there's your business and reputation gone. Was it like that?'
'I don't know what the hell you're talking about,' said Elger roughly. He threw the rest of his martini down his throat so fast he nearly choked on it.
'So you thought of the clever little plan- If you did that, Elger, by God, I'll get you for it? said Mendoza. In that moment he was nearly persuaded that Elger was his man: Elger so quick to hit out in blind fury, over very little; and the suppressed savagery in his tone, the expression in his eyes, made Elger draw back a little.
The bartender was looking worried. They didn't like disturbances in a high-class place like this. Mendoza finished his rye. 'Make no mistake,' he said, 'if it was you, we'll get you. I'll be seeing you again, Elger.' He slapped down a bill and stood up…
And where had that got him? He knew that a very small thing might trigger Elger's temper.
The lab, he thought. They really did work miracles these days, those boys. Would there be any difference in the composition of blacktop-could they tell its age, or degree of wear-something to pin down the locality?
A forlorn hope. He could ask.
He ate a flavorless sandwich at a drugstore and went back to the office. Sergeant Lake was leaning back reading a teletype.
'Here's our boy,' he said, handing it over. 'Not that it helps us much on catching him.'
Mendoza read the teletype standing. It was from the sheriff of El Dorado County up north of Sacramento. The inquiries on any known knifings with the same M.O. as the Slasher's had been out for nearly three days; this was the first response.
What Sheriff Jay Hampton had to tell them was that there'd been two murders in a little place called Georgetown, about three months back. Quite a surprise to Georgetown, which had a population of about eight hundred-Mendoza found on consulting an atlas-and probably hadn't had a murder since the frontier was officially closed in 1890, You could read between the lines of Sheriff Hampton's terse statement. The first victim had been Betty Riley, a local girl well known and liked. Engaged to the son of the town's bank president; her father was one of two doctors in town. A pretty girl, popular and virtuous. She had been to see a girl friend, Martha Glenn, a block away from her own home, on the night of April thirtieth. Had left there about nine o'clock to walk home, and next turned up dead on her own front lawn, at ten-forty. Found by her father as he came home. She had been stabbed and slashed to death, and mutilated afterward. The sheriff had called in the state boys, the B.C.I. from Sacramento, and their crime lab had said that the knife used had a partly serrated edge. Absolutely no clue had turned up; it looked like the random killing of a lunatic. She had not been raped, and evidently hadn't had time to scream.
'?Y pues que?' said Mendoza irritably.
The second victim, found next day in a field outside of town, had been one Giorgiono Cabezza, an itinerant agricuItural laborer who'd just been fired from his job on a local ranch. Here they turned up something more definite. Cabezza had been seen in several bars the night before; he'd been talking about leaving town, finding another job farther south. Toward the end of the evening, around midnight, he'd been seen with another man, a transient just passing through-nobody in town knew him-possibly a hobo. Nobody in Georgetown had ever seen him before, and nobody had heard his name. But the surgeon said Cabezza had been killed about 2 AM., and the transient was the man last seen in his company. They had a good description of him: a man about forty, very thin, hollow-cheeked, middle height, and he had a very noticeable scar from an old burn across the center of his face. No evidence actually pointed to him as the murderer, but he had not been seen anywhere around since, and Georgetown had had no more knifings.
'What the hell does that tell us?' demanded Mendoza. 'For God's sake!' He'd been hoping that if the Slasher had killed before, especially in a small town, something more definite might have been got on him. This was just nothing but continnation of what they knew. And he should have known it wouldn't be anything more; if any other force had got anything definite on the man there'd have been flyers sent out.
And the papers yelling their heads off about inefficient police. Mostly. Spare a moment to be grateful to the Times, which had run a thoughtful editorial pointing out all the difficulties of the hunt for the random killer. He put the teletype down and dialed the Hollenbeck station. 'Well, I was just about to call you, Lieutenant,' said the sergeant he'd talked to before.
'Anything?'
'It seems your Ballistics man gave you a false alarm. Our boys just got back from checking. I looked up the record on that break-in-TV store on Soto Street-and it didn't close until eight-thirty so the break-in was after that.
