Case Pending

SIX

Mendoza realized they'd have to let the Danny go: it might not be impossible to find the Danny Elena Ramirez had known, if it would be difficult; but more to the point, there was no way of identifying the right Danny. What was interesting about this matter was that by implication it narrowed the locale.

He had formed some very nebulous ideas-mere ghosts of hypotheses-overnight, out of the evidence a second murder inevitably added to the evidence from a first one; and he thought that a restricted locale was natural, if you looked at it a certain way. At least, it was a fifty-fifty chance, depending on just what kind of lunatic they were hunting. If he was the kind (disregarding the psychiatrists' hairsplitting solemn terms) whose impulse to kill was triggered suddenly and at random, the odds were that his victim would be someone in the area where he lived or worked: and considering the hour, probably the former. If he was the kind capable of planning ahead, then the place of the crime meant nothing, or very little, for he might have cunning enough to choose a place unconnected with him. But to balance that there was the fact that madmen capable of sustained cunning generally chose victims by some private logic: they were the ones appointed by God to rid the world of prostitutes, or Russian spies, or masquerading Martians. Like that. And to do so, they had to be aware of the victims as individuals.

So there was a chance that this one, whatever kind he was, lived somewhere fairly near the place he bad killed. And that might be of enormous help, for it suggested that he had lived (or worked) somewhere near the place Carol Brooks had been killed last September. If he was the man who had killed her, and Mendoza thought he was.

Sunday was only another day to Mendoza; he lay in bed awhile thinking about all this, and also about Alison Weir, until the sleek brown Abyssinian personage who condescended to share the apartment with him, the green-eyed Bast, leapt onto his stomach and began to knead the blanket, fixing him with an accusing stare. He apologized to her for inattention; he got up and laid before her the morning tribute of fresh liver; he made coffee. Eight o’clock found him, shaven and spruce, poring over a small-scale map of the city in his office. When Hackett came in at nine o’clock, he listened in silence to Alison Weir’s contribution of the muchacho extrario who stared, and grunted over the neat penciled circles on the map. In the center of one was the twenty-two-hundred block of Tappan Street, and in the center of the other the junction of Commerce and Humboldt. Each covered approximately a mile in diameter, to the map scale: call it a hundred and fifty square blocks.

"Now isn’t that pretty!" said Hackett. "And where would you get the army to check all that territory-and for what? The idea, that I go along with, and if your pretty circles happened to have prettier centers, say like Los Feliz and Western, I’d say we might come up with something, just on a check to see who’d moved where recently. But you know what you got here!" He stabbed a blunt forefinger at the first circle. "About half of this area is colored, and none of it, white or black, is very fancy. Which also goes with bells on for the other area. Out on the Strip, or along Wilshire, a lot of places, you’ve got people in settled lives, and they leave records behind. City directory, phone book, gas company, rent receipts, forwarding addresses. Here-" he shrugged.

"You needn’t tell me," said Mendoza ruefully. "This is just a little exercise in academic theory." In these networks of streets, some of the most thickly populated in the city, drifted the anonymous ones: people who wandered from one casual job to another, who for various reasons (not always venal) were sometimes known by different names to different people, and who owned no property. Landlords were not always concerned with keeping records, and most rent was paid in cash. There were also, of course, settled, householders, responsible people. For economic reasons or racial reasons, or both, they lived cheek-by-jowl, crowded thick; they came and went, and because they were of little concern to anyone as individuals, their comings and goings went largely unnoticed.

"If we had a name-but we’d get nothing for half a year’s hunt, not knowing what to look for.?Que se le ha de hacer! -it can’t be helped! But if the general theory’s right, there’s a link somewhere."

"I’ll go along with you," said Hackett, "but I’ll tell you, I think we’ll get it as corroborative evidence after we’ve caught up with him by another route. Somebody’ll see a newspaper cut, and come in to tell us that our John Smith is also Henry Brown who used to live on Tappan Street. We can’t get at it from this end, there’s damn-all to go on."

"I agree with you-though there’s such a thing as luck. However!" Mendoza shoved the map aside. "What did you get out of the Wades?"

"Something to please you." Circumstantially, the Wades were counted out. Ehrlich and his two attendants at the rink had seen father and son leave, and agreed on the time as "around ten to ten." The girl had been a good ten or twelve minutes after them. By the narrowest reckoning it was a twenty-minute drive to the Wades’ home, probably nearer thirty, and a neighbor had happened to be present in the house on their arrival, an outside witness who was positive of the time as ten twenty-live. There hadn’t been time, even if you granted they’d done it together, which was absurd… The Wades, pater and mater familias, might be snobs, with the usual false and confused values of snobs (though much of their social objection to the Ramirez girl was understandable: Mendoza, supposing he were ever sufficiently rash or unwary to acquire a wife and family, would probably feel much the same himself). But it could not be seriously conjectured that a respectable middle-aged bookkeeper had done murder (and such a murder) to avoid acquiring a daughter-in-law addicted to double negatives and peroxide. And if he had, it would hardly be in collusion with the boy.

"The boy," said Hackett, "hasn’t got the blood in him to kill a mouse in a trap anyway-all you got to do is look at him."

"I’ll take your word for it," said Mendoza absently. He wasn’t interested in the boy, never had been much; the Wades were irrelevant, but he was just as pleased that by chance there was evidence to show that. And the Wades ought to be very damned thankful for it too: they’d probably never realize it, but without that evidence the boy could have found himself in bad trouble. From Mendoza’s viewpoint that would have been regrettable chiefly because it would have diverted the investigation into a blind alley. They had wasted enough official time as it was.

He looked again at his map, and sighed. The lunatic-of this or that sort-was his own postulation, and he could be wrong: that had sometimes happened. Ideally an investigator should be above personal bias, which-admitted or unconscious-inevitably slanted the interpretation of evidence. And yet evidence almost always had to be interpreted-full circle back to personal opinion. There was always the human element, and also what Dr. Rhine might call the X factor, which Mendoza, essentially a fatalist as well as a gambler, thought of as a kind of cosmic card-stacking. Much of the time plodding routine and teamwork led you somewhere eventually; but it was surprising how often the sudden hunch, the inspired guess, the random coincidence, took you round by a shorter way. And sometimes the extra aces in the deck fell to the opponent’s hand, and there was nothing you could do about that. The law of averages had nothing to do with it.

"I dropped in to see if the autopsy report’s come through… oh, well, suppose we couldn’t expect it over Sunday. Nothing much in it anyway. Back to the treadmill-" Hackett got up. "I’ve still got some of the kids to see, ones at the rink that night."

"The rink," said Mendoza, still staring at his map. "Yes. We’ll probably get the autopsy report by tonight-the inquest’s been set for Tuesday. Yes- Vaya… todo es posible. Yes, you get on with the routine, as becomes your rank-me, I’m taking the day off from everything else, to shuffle through this deck again, por decirlo asi -maybe there’s a marked card to spot."

He brooded over the map another minute when Hackett had gone, and penciled in a line connecting the two circles. He shrugged and said to himself, Maybe, maybe-folded the map away, got his hat and coat and went out.

Downstairs, as he paused to adjust the gray Homburg, a couple of reporters cornered him; they asked a few desultory questions about the Ramirez girl, but their real interest was in Sergeant Galeano’s husband-killer, who was of a socially prominent clan. The more sensational of the evening papers had put Elena Ramirez on the front page, but it wasn’t a good carry-over story-they couldn’t make much out of a Hartners’ stock-room girl, and the boy friend wasn’t very colorful either. The conservative papers had played it down, an ordinary back-street mugging, and by tomorrow the others would relegate it to the middle pages. They had the socialite, and the freight yard corpse, besides a couple of visiting dignitaries and the Russians; and a two-bit mugging in the Commerce Street area, that just happened to turn into a murder, was nothing very new or remarkable.

Maneuvering the Ferrari out into Main Street, Mendoza thought that was a point of view, all right: almost any way you looked at it, it was an unimportant, uninteresting kill. No glamor, no complexity, nothing to attract either the sensationalists or the detective-fiction fans. In fact, the kind of murder that happened most frequently…The press had made no connection between Elena Ramirez and Carol Brooks. No, they weren’t interested; but if the cosmic powers had stacked the deck this time, and that one stayed free to kill again, and again, eventually some day he would achieve the scare headlines, and then- de veras, es lo de siempre, Mendoza reflected sardonically, the mixture as before: our stupid, blundering police!

Once off the main streets here, away from the blinding gleam of the used-car lots, the screamer ads plastered along store-fronts, these were quiet residential streets, middle-class, unremarkable. Most of the houses neatly maintained, if shabby: most with carefully kept flower plots in front. Along the quiet Sunday sidewalks, dressed-up children on the way to Sunday school, others not so dressed up running and shouting at play-householders working in front gardens this clear morning after the rain. This was all Oriental along here, largely Japanese. When he stopped at an intersection a pair of high-school-age girls crossed in front of him-"But honestly it isn’t fair, ten whole pages of English Lit, even if it is on the week end! She’s a real fiend for homework-" One had a ponytail, one an Italian cut; their basic uniform of flat shell pumps, billowy cotton skirts and cardigans, differed only in color.

At the next corner he turned into Tappan Street; this wasn’t the start of it, but the relevant length for him, this side of Washington Boulevard. He drove slow and idle, as if he’d all the time in the world to waste, wasn’t exactly sure where he was heading: and of course he wasn’t, essentially. It was a long street and it took him through a variety of backgrounds.

Past rows of frame and stucco houses, lower-middle-class-respectable houses, where the people on the street were Oriental, and then brown and black; there, late-model cars sat in most driveways and the people were mostly dressed up for Sunday. Past bigger, older, shabbier houses with Board-and-Room signs, rank brown grass in patches, and broken sidewalks: dreary courts of semi-detached single-story rental units, stucco boxes scabrous for need of paint: black and brown kids in shabbier, even ragged clothes, more raucous in street play. A lot of all that, block after block. Past an intersection where a main street crossed and a Catholic church, a liquor store, a chiropractor’s office and a gas station shared the corners. Past the same kind of old, shoddy houses and courts, for many more blocks, but here the people on the street white. Then a corner which marked some long-ago termination of the street: where it continued, across, there were no longer tall old camphorwoods lining it; the parking was bare. The houses were a little newer, a little cleaner: they gave way to solid blocks of smallish apartment buildings, and all this again was settled middle-class, and again the faces in the street black and brown.

At the next intersection, he caught the light and sat waiting for it, staring absently at the wooden bench beside the bus-stop sign on the near left corner. Its back bore a faded admonition to Rely on J. Atwood and Son, Morticians, for a Dignified Funeral. There, that night, Carol Brooks had got off the bus on her way home from work, and some time later started down Tappan Street. She had had only three blocks to walk, but she had met-something-on the way, and so she hadn’t got home… The car behind honked at him angrily; the light had changed.

Across the intersection, he idled along another block and a half, slid gently into the curb and took his time over lighting a cigarette. Three single-family houses from the corner, there sat two duplexes, frame bungalows just alike, one white and one yellow. They were, or had been, owned by the widowed Mrs. Shadwell who lived in one side of the yellow one. On that September night the left-hand side of the white one had been empty of tenants, the tenants in the other side had been out at a wedding reception, the tenants in the left side of the yellow duplex had been giving a barbecue supper in their back yard, and Mrs. Shadwell, who was deaf, had taken off her hearing aid. So just what had happened along here, as Carol Brooks came by, wasn’t very clear; if she’d been accosted, exchanged any talk or argument with her killer, had warning of attack and called for help, there’d been no one to hear. She’d been found just about halfway between the walks leading to the two front doors of the white duplex, at twenty minutes past nine, by a dog-walker from the next block: she had then been dead for between thirty minutes and an hour.

It occurred to Mendoza that he was simply wasting time in the vague superstitious hope that the cosmic powers would tap his shoulder and drop that extra ace into his lap. He tossed his cigarette out the window, which was now by law a misdemeanor carrying a fifty-dollar fine, and drove on a block and a half: glanced at the neat white frame bungalow where Carol Brooks had lived, and turned left at the next corner. This was a secondary business street, and it marked one of the boundaries: that side Negro, this side white. The streets deteriorated sharply on the white side, he knew, lined with old apartment buildings only just not describable as tenements. He turned left again and wandered back parallel to Tappan, turned again and then again and came to the corner where the bus stopped, past the two duplexes, and drew into the curb in front of the bungalow numbered 2214.

A woman came up the sidewalk from the opposite direction, turned in at the white house, hesitated and glanced at the car, and turned back toward it. Mendoza got out and took off his hat. "Mrs. Demarest. I wondered if you still lived here."

"Why, where else would I be?" She was a tall, slim, straight-backed woman, and had once perhaps been beautiful: the bones of beauty were still there, in her smooth high forehead, delicate regular features, small mouth. Her skin was the color of well-creamed coffee. She was neat, even almost smart, in tailored navy-blue dress and coat, small gold earrings. She might be seventy, she might be older, but age had touched her lightly; her voice was firm, her eyes intelligent. "It’s Mr. Mendoza," she said. "Or I should say ‘Lieutenant.’ You know, if I was a superstitious woman, Lieutenant, I’d say there’s more in it than meets the eye, you turning up. Did you want to see me about something?"

"I don’t know. There’s been another," he said abruptly. "I think the same one."

"Another colored girl?" she asked calmly.

"No. And miles away, over on Commerce Street."

"That one," she said, nodding. "I think you’d best come in, and I’ll tell you. It’s nothing much, though it’s queer-but it’s something you didn’t hear about before, you see. At first I thought I might write you a letter about it, and then I said to myself"-they were halfway up the walk to the house, and he’d taken the brown-paper bag of groceries from her-"I thought, it’s not important, I’d best not trouble you. But as you’re here, you might as well hear about it." She had been away from Bermuda half her life, but her tongue still carried the flavor, the broad A’s, the interchange of V’s and W’s, the clipped British vowels. She unlocked the front door and they went into the living-room he remembered, furniture old but originally good and well cared for. "If you’ll just fetch that right back to the kitchen, Lieutenant-you’ll have a cup of coffee with me, we might as well be comfortable and it’s always hot on the back of the stove. Sit down, I’ll just tend to the Duke here and then be with you."

The cat surveying him with cold curiosity from the hallway door was a large black neutered tom; he established himself on the kitchen chair opposite Mendoza and continued to stare. "I didn’t remember he was the Duke," said Mendoza.

"The Duke of Wellington really, because he always thought so almighty high of himself, you know. We got him Carol’s second year in high, and she was doing history about it then. Cats, they’re like olives, seem like-either you’re crazy about them or you just can’t abide them. I remembered you like them. It’s why I was out, after his evaporated milk. Fresh he won’t look at, and the evaporated he lets set just so long till it’s thick the way he fancies it. You see now, he knows I’ve just poured it, he won’t go near. You take milk or sugar?-well, I always take it black too, you get the flavor."

She set the filled cups on the table and sat in the chair across from him. "You’ll have missed your granddaughter," he said. It was another absurd superstitious feeling, that if he asked, brought her to the point, it would indeed be nothing at all.

"Well, I do, of course. Sometimes it doesn’t seem right that there the Duke should be sitting alive, and her gone. It’d be something to believe in some kind of religion, think there was a God Who’d some reason, some plan. I never came to it somehow, but maybe there is. I’ve had two husbands and raised six children, and luckier than most in all of them-and you could say I’ve worked hard. It was a grief to lose my youngest son, that was Caro1’s dad, but I had to figure I’d five left, and the other grandchildren too. Take it all in all, there’s been more good than bad-and what you can’t change, you’d best learn to live with content. I enjoy life still, and I don’t want to die while I’ve still my health and my mind, but you know, Lieutenant, I won’t be too sorry in way when the time comes, because I must say I am that curious about the afterward part."

"It’s a point of view," he agreed amusedly. "So am I now and then, but I’d rather be curious than dead."

She laughed, with a fine gleam of even white teeth. "Ah, you’re lucky, you’re half my age! But I said I’d something to tell you. It’s just a queer sort of thing, maybe doesn’t mean much." She sipped and put down her cup. "Maybe you’ll remember that that night when Carol was killed, I told you I hadn’t been too worried about her being late home, because sl1e’d said something about shopping along Hawke Street, that’d be when she got off the bus. It was a Monday night, and all the stores along there, they stay open till nine Mondays and Fridays. There’s a few nice little stores, and it’s handy-not so crowded as downtown, and most everything you’d want, drugstore and Woolworth’s, besides a Hartners’, and a shoe store and a couple of nice independent dress shops, and Mr. Grant at the stationery-and-card place J even keeps a little circulating library-and then there’s Mrs. Breen’s."

He remembered the name vaguely; after a moment he said, "The woman who had a stroke."

"That’s right. She’s had that little shop a long while, and sometimes you find things there that’re, you know, unusual, different from the big stores. You mightn’t remember, no reason you should, but on the one side she’s got giftware as they call it-china figures and fancy ash trays and vases and such-and on the other she’s got babies’ and children’s things. Real nice things, with handwork on them, the clothes, and reasonable too. You’ll remember that your men asked around in all the shops if Carol had been in that night, to get some idea of the time and all. And that was the very night Mrs. Breen had a stroke, so you couldn’t ask her if Carol’d been in there, and it didn’t seem important because you found out that she’d been in the drugstore and a couple of other places."

"Yes-nothing unusual anywhere, no one speaking to her, and she didn’t mention anything out of the way to the clerks who waited on her."

"That’s so. It didn’t seem as if Mrs. Breen could’ve told any more. She was alone in her place, you know, and all right as could be when her daughter come at nine or a bit before, to help her close up and drive her home. It was while they were locking up she had her stroke, poor thing, and they took her off to hospital and she’s been a long while getting back on her feet. Well, Lieutenant-let me hot up your coffee-what I’m getting to is this. It went out of my mind at the time, and when I thought of it, I hadn’t the heart to bother about it, didn’t seem important somehow-and Mrs. Breen was still in the hospital and her daughter’d closed up the shop. It’d have meant asking her, Mrs. Robbins I mean, to go all through the accounts and so on, and with her so worried and living clear the other side of town too, I just let it go."

"You thought Carol had been in and bought something there?"

"It was for Linda Sue," she said, and the troubled look in her eyes faded momentarily. "My first great-grandchild, see, my granddaughter May-that’s Carol’s cousin, May White-Linda Sue’s her little girl. May and Carol were much of an age, and chummed together, and Carol was just crazy about Linda Sue. It was along in June, I remember, Carol saw this in Mrs. Breen’s, and she wanted to get it for Linda Sue’s birthday in October. She told me about it then, and if I thought it was foolish, that much money, I kept still on it-she wanted to get it, and it was her money. Twenty dollars it was, and she asked Mrs. Breen if she could pay a bit on it every week or so. Mrs. Breen’s obliging like that, and she said it was all right, but she left it in the window for people to see, case anybody wanted one like it she could order another."

The Duke, who had been drowsing between them, suddenly woke up and began to wash himself vigorously. Mrs. Demarest finished her coffee and sighed. "It was a doll, Lieutenant-and while that seems like an awful price for a doll, I must say it was a special one. It’d be nearly as big as Linda Sue herself, and it was made of some stuff, you know, that looked like real flesh-and it had real hair, gold hair it was, that you could curl different ways, and it had on a pink silk dress with hand smocking, and silk underwear with lace, and there was a little velvet cape and velvet slippers, rose color. Well, Carol was buying it like that. I wasn’t sure to a penny how much she still owed on it, up to that night. And of course Monday wasn’t a payday for her, I didn’t think it was likely she’d stopped in at Mrs. Breen’s that night, because she’d do that the day she got paid, you see. It was just that she had paid on it, but as say, way things were, I didn’t bother about going ahead with it. There was time to sort it out, Mrs. Breen and Mrs. Robbins are both honest. I got other things for Linda Sue’s birthday, and once in a while I just said to myself, some day I’d best ask about it, straighten it out with Mrs. Breen.

"Well, just last week Mrs. Breen came into her shop again. She was sick quite a while, and then up-and-down like at her daughter’s, and now she’s better, but not to be alone any more, and she’s selling off what stock she has and going out of business. So I went round, last Thursday it was, to ask about Carol’s doll.

"And Mrs. Breen says that Carol came in that night and paid all the rest she owed, and took the doll away with her. She remembers it clear-the stroke didn’t affect her mind, she’s a bit slower but all there. She didn’t hear about Carol for quite awhile, naturally, being sick and all, and of course when she did, she naturally thought everyone knew about the doll. Because you remember-"

"Yes," he said. He remembered: in the glare of the spotlights, the stiffening disfigured corpse and the several small parcels scattered on the sidewalk. A card of bobby pins, two spools of thread from the dime store: a magazine, a bottle of aspirin, a candy bar from the drugstore: an anniversary card from the stationery store. He looked at Mrs. Demarest blankly. "That’s very odd," he said. "She had it-the woman’s sure?"

She nodded vigorously. "She showed me the accounts book, Lieutenant. There’s the date, and while there’s no time put down, it’s the next-to-last entry that night, and she says the last customer came in was a woman she knows, a Mrs. Ratchett, and it was just before nine. She thinks Carol came in about eight-thirty, a few minutes before maybe. Probably it was the last place Carol stopped, you see-nobody else remembers her with a big parcel. She paid Mrs. Breen seven dollars and forty-six cents, all she still owed, and she didn’t have the doll gift-wrapped because she wanted to show it to May and me first. And she took it with her." Mrs. Demarest held out her hands, measuring. "Like that it’d have been-a big stout cardboard box, white, a good yard or more long, and maybe eighteen inches wide and a foot deep. Heavy, too. And inside, along with the doll, three yards of pink silk ribbon and the tissue paper for wrapping it, and a birthday card. The whole thing was wrapped up in white paper and string, and Mrs. Breen made a little loop on top for her to carry it by."

They looked at each other. "But that’s very damned odd indeed," he said softly. "Not much time there, you know. She was dead by nine, at the latest. It’s possible that someone else came by and found her first, didn’t want to get involved, but picked up the biggest parcel, maybe the only one he noticed in the dark, on the chance that it was worth something. But you think, in that case, he-or she, of course-might have taken time to snatch up the handbag too, after cash

… and that hadn’t been touched, the strap was still on her arm."

"I guess you’d better hear how she came to get the money, not that it matters. One of the girls worked at the hotel with her came to see me, two-three days afterward-a nice girl she was, Nella Foss-to say how sorry they all were, and give me a little collection the hotel people’d taken up. They thought maybe I’d rather have the money, you know, instead of flowers for the funeral-it was real thoughtful of them. Well, Nella said that very afternoon there’d been a lady just checked out of the hotel came back after a valuable ring she’d left, and Carol’d already found it, doing out the room you know, and turned it in. And the lady gave her five dollars as a present. I expect Carol decided right off she’d finish paying for the doll with it. At the time, I thought of course what was in her purse, three-eighty-four it was, was what she’d had left out of the five."

"Yes… but so little time! Do we say it was the murderer took it away? Just that?-not a finger on her handbag after cash? And why?"

"Now, that I couldn’t say," said Mrs. Demarest, placidly. "It’s queer, certainly. I’d say the same as you-well, I guess detecting things is just a matter of using common sense and reasoning things out. I suppose somebody might think there was something valuable in a big parcel like that, and steal it just on the chance-but a thief who’d do that, it’s just not logical he wouldn’t take the handbag too, at least rummage through it." She cocked her head at him, and her brown eyes were bright as a sparrow’s. "Lieutenant, would you think I’m a woolgathering silly old woman-you’re too polite ever say it, if you did-if I said, Maybe whoever took it knew right well what was in that parcel?"

"You’d say whoever killed her? For a doll-"

"I don’t know that. Maybe somebody else, first-or afterward. But I can tell you something else. I’ve studied about it, and I went back to ask Mrs. Breen a couple other things. I said she’d left the doll in the window, didn’t I? Well, I go past there three-four times a week, up to the market, and I do think I’d’ve noticed if that doll had been gone out of the window right after Carol was killed, and put two and two together, and asked then. But Mrs. Breen took it out of the window about a week before, so I didn’t expect it there, if you see what I mean. And she says now, reason she did is that she had notice from the factory or whatever that made them, that they weren’t making this particular doll any more-so she didn’t want to show it, and have to disappoint anybody wanted one. And, this is what I’m getting at, the morning of that day Carol was killed, there was a woman came into the store and wanted to buy that doll. She wanted it real bad, Mrs. Breen said she was almost crying that she couldn’t have that one or get Mrs. Breen to order another, and she stayed a long while trying to argue Mrs. Breen into selling her the one Carol was buying."

An extra ace to pad his hand, Mendoza had hoped: but could it be? Such a small thing-such a meaningless thing!

"Did she know this woman?"

"She’d seen her before. It was a white woman, Lieutenant, from over across Hunter Avenue. She couldn’t call the name to mind, but she thinks she’s got it written down somewhere because the woman made her copy down her name and address and promise to find out couldn’t she get a doll like that somewhere. You’d best see Mrs. Breen and ask, if you think it means anything at all… She thinks she remembers it was a middling-long sort of name, and started with an L."