dozen women, which is maybe why I'm a cop in the first place.'
TWO
He happened to have a date that night with his redhead, Alison Weir. It was a little different thing, with Alison-he hadn't troubled to figure why-just, maybe, because she was Alison: he could be more himself with her than with any other woman. So over dinner he told her they'd take a little ride out toward Long Beach-something he wanted to look at-and without much prodding added the whole funny little story. 'This boy,' said Alison thoughtfully, “he's not just trying to build up something, get into the limelight?'
'I don't read him that way,' said Mendoza. 'And these days rookies aren't always as young as that-he's twenty-five, twenty-six, old enough to have some judgment. No, I don't know that there's anything in it, and to tell you the truth I've got no idea where to start looking to find out.'
'But- Well, say for a minute it's so, Luis, though it sounds perfectly fantastic-if it was someone who wanted to kill this Bartlett specifically, surely something would show up in his private life, if you looked?'
Mendoza lit cigarettes for both of them and looked consideringly at his coffee. 'Not necessarily. You take a policeman, now-he gets around, and in a lot of places and among a lot of people the ordinary person doesn't. You might say, if you're looking for motives for murder, a cop has a little better chance of creating one than most people. The difficulty is-' He broke off, took a drag on his cigarette, laid it down, drank coffee, and stared at the sugar bowl intently.
' Siga adelante! ' said Alison encouragingly.
'Well, the difficulty is that if it was anything like that-something he'd heard or seen on his job-big enough to constitute a reason for killing him, he'd have known about it himself and made some report on it. And if it was something that had happened just on that tour of duty-which, if we accept the whole fantasy, I think it may have been-young Walsh would know about it too. Because, although some people still cling to the idea that most cops aren't overburdened with brains, we are trained to notice things, you know. And while I've never met a motive for murder that was what you might call really adequate, still nobody would think it necessary to kill the man because he'd seen or heard something so-apparently-meaningless to him that he hadn't mentioned it to anybody. But this is theorizing without data… '
An hour later he pulled up on the shoulder of that stretch of San Dominguez, just up from Cameron. He switched off the engine and the headlights, switched on the parking lights, and gave her a cigarette, lit one himself.
'And what do you expect to find out here?'
'I don't expect anything. I don't know what there is to find out. You've got to start a cast somewhere.'
'Like fox hunting. You just turn the hounds loose where you think there might be a fox? I thought crime detection was a lot more scientific than that these days.'
' Segun y como, sometimes yes, sometimes no.' He was a motionless shadow, only the little red spark of his cigarette end moving there; he stared out at the thinnish passing traffic. 'I'll tell you something funny, chica, with all the laboratories and the chemical tests and the gadgets we've got to help us-Prints and Ballistics and the rest of it-like everything else in life it always comes back to individual people. To people's feelings and what the feelings make them do or not do. Quite often the gadgets can give you an idea where to look, but once in a while you've got to find out about the people first-then the gadgets can help you prove it.' He went on staring out the window.
Alison slid down comfortably against his shoulder and said, 'Oh, I well, at least there's a heater to keep my feet warm. Pity I don't knit, I could be accomplishing something… I have a theory about policemen. Just like musicians, they come in two types-the ones who learn the hard way, by lessons and practice, and the ones who do it by ear, just naturally. You play it by ear. You do it in jumps, a flash of inspiration here, a lucky guess there. What you're doing now is waiting for your muse to visit you, no es verdad?'
He laughed. 'You know too much about me. A ranking headquarters officer, he's supposed to work by sober routine and cold scientific fact, not by ear.'
'Never mind, I'll keep the dark secret,' she said sleepily. 'Then when your hunches pay off and everybody says, ‘The man's a genius,' you can look modest and say, ‘Just routine, just routine'.'
Mendoza went on staring at the boulevard. No place within twenty miles of downtown L.A. was thinly populated, but there were stretches here and there, and this was one of them, where the contractors hadn't got round to planting blocks of new little houses or new big apartments, or rows of shops and office buildings. Half a mile up, half a mile down, half a mile away to each side were close communities, blocks of residence and business, and the port of Los Angeles; here, only an occasional grove of live oaks at the roadside, and empty weed-grown fields beyond. The arc lights on the boulevard were high but adequate; the effect of darkness came from the lack of other lights to supplement them, the neon lights of shop fronts along built-up sections. And from the shadow of the trees, along here.
He wondered if Walsh and Bartlett had been parked under these trees.
Five minutes later a black-and-white squad car came ambling along, hesitated, and drew in ahead of the Facel-Vega. One of the patrolmen got out and came back to Mendoza's window, and he rolled it down all the way.
'Not a very good place to park, sir,' said the patrolman tactfully.
'Unless you're having trouble with your car, I'll ask you to move on.'
'It's O.K.,' said Mendoza, 'not what your nasty low mind tells you. I can think of at least three better places to make love than the front seat of a car. I'm more or less on legitimate business,' and he passed over his credentials.
'Oh-excuse me, sir.' The man in uniform shoved back his cap and leaned on the window sill. 'Anything we can do for you?'
'I don't know. This is about where Bartlett got it, isn't it?'
'Auggh, yes, sir.' The voice was grim. 'By what Frank Walsh says. That was the hell of a thing, wasn't it? A damn good man, Joe was. I'm Gonzales, sir, Farber and I were in on the arrest, maybe you'll know. There when Walsh come up with Joe. I tell you, it was all we could do, keep our hands off those goddamned smart-aleck kids, when we heard
… The hell of a thing.'
'Yes, it was. Walsh much shaken up? He hasn't been in uniform long, has he?'
'No, sir, but he's a good kid. Sure, he was shook, but he'd kept his head-he acted O.K. I tell you, Lieutenant, I guess I was the one was shook-and I've been in uniform seven years this month and that wasn't the first time I'd picked up some pretty tough customers who happened to be Mexican-but I tell you, with those kids, it was the first time I ever felt ashamed of my name.'
'Vaya, amigo, we come all shapes and sizes like other people-good, bad, and indifferent.'
'Sure,' said Gonzales bitterly, 'sure we do, Lieutenant, but a lot of people don't remember it when the names get in the paper on a thing like this.'
Alison sat up and said that it was a pity, while all this research was going on about a cure for cancer and the common cold, that nobody was looking for a cure for stupidity: it was needed much more. Gonzales grinned and said it sure was, hesitated, and added, 'Excuse me, Lieutenant, but-the inquest was yesterday, I mean I was wondering if there was anything-'
'More?' said Mendoza. 'Like maybe have I heard a little something from Frank Walsh?'
'Oh, he did see you? I didn't want to stick my neck out if he'd got cold feet.' At which point Farber up ahead got impatient and came back to see what was going on.
When he heard, he said, 'Walsh is O.K., but he's really reaching on this one, Lieutenant. Overconscientious.' He was an older man than Gonzales, compact and tough-looking in the brief flare of the match as he lit a cigarette.
'Well, boys,' said Mendoza, 'they say better safe than sorry. It won't do any harm to take another look. But there's no need to-mmh-worry Bill Slaney about it unless it appears there's something to tell him. I don't want him breathing fire at me for encouraging one of his rookies in a lot of nonsense, and I don't want him coming down on
