Extra Kill

TEN

Once, they'd been going to destroy the narrow alley with its uneven old brick paving and the gutter down its middle, the leaning ramshackle old buildings flanking it. Nothing to do, that was, with a progressive and fast-growing city proud of its modernity. Then a few civic-minded organizations got up indignant petitions and committees, and in the end it stayed, to become a landmark, one of the places tourists came to see: the first, the oldest street of that little village whose name was nearly as long as the street-the town of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels, of the little portion.

At ten-thirty on a gray February morning it wasn't much to see: shabby refaced buildings, haphazard stalls cheek-by-jowl in a row down the middle, over the old gutter, and most of the shops shut, boards up in the stall windows. Night was its time, when the lights softened down the shabbiness and the tourists came, the buyers (tourists or not), and the famous old restaurant was open midway down the street, and the women who'd marketed and cooked and chatted all day in their ready-made cotton housedresses got out their shawls and combs. There'd be a couple of men with guitars stationed somewhere, and the man at the mouth of the street with his little bags of hot roasted pinon nuts, and the music and laughter drifting out of La Golondrina, the restaurant, and the buyers drifting along looking at everything (the women stumbling on the uneven bricks, in their high heels)-at the gimcrack cheap jewelry and the beautiful handcrafted real stud from the little silversmithies here and south of the border, at the handmade baskets, and braided-leather and to0led-leather shoes, at the hand-blown glass and the hand-woven cotton (also at the boxed cheap linens from Belgium, and the good stud and the bad from Japan, from the Philippines, from everywhere in Europe)-and maybe stopping to have their fortunes told by the old woman at the far end of the street.

And even at ten-thirty in the morning, over the whole street there hung the faint scent of glamour-and that was the combined scents from the little cavelike shop, three breakneck steps down from street level, where the candles were made, the incredible rainbow candles scented with pine, with orange, with jasmine and gardenia, and nameless musky saccharine odors.

Most of the shops were shut, but he knew that behind many of them were living quarters. This was a minor little errand, he needn't have come himself, but-he also knew-he might have a better chance of getting whatever there was to get than the most fluent of his Spanish-speaking sergeants.

He could have wished that the article in question had been something other than a serape. That inimitable object of Mexicana, the long strip of rough cactus cloth or cotton, garishly striped and fringed, was to be had at all but a few specialty shops: but maybe that fact was balanced by another, that it had been raining that night.

He started at the mouth of the street and took one side at a time. Not every shop had quarters attached; not everyone was at home. Everyone who was was anxious to be helpful but remembered nothing of any use to him… To be sure, most places had remained open that rainy evening. When one was under shelter, and it was the regular time for business, why not? There was always a chance that the rain would slacken, that a few people who had decided to come to the street would not be put off by the weather. And so it had been: business had been very poor, of course, but a few buyers had come-chiefly people who had reservations at the restaurant and visited the shops afterward. But many places had closed earlier than usual, ten or ten-thirty. Not all, no. Wine was pressed on him. In one place a very old woman looked on him in contempt and called him a police spy. In the place next door a pretty high-school-age girl asked him please would he talk to her brother and tell him he was crazy: "See, Joe keeps saying he's got nine counts on him to start, being Mexican-what's the use of trying to get educated and so on, he'd never get anywhere, might as well get things however you can. He's in with some real bad fellows, Mama and I get worried-and if you'd just show him-" He took the name and address for Taylor in Juvenile; Taylor would see one of the youth counselors contacted Joe and did what he could… By the time he got to the mouth of the street again, having worked his way right up one side and down the other, Mendoza, who was not a wine drinker, was feeling slightly bilious and disgruntled at this waste of time.

But there, in the end shop-scarcely more than an alcove, now, shut off from the street by a large board, with a single room behind it-he found Manuel Perez, improving the out-of-business hour by making up his accounts. Mr. Perez removed his horn-rimmed glasses, listened gravely to Mendoza's questions, and said at once that he remembered the occasion very well indeed.

"At last I arrive," said Mendoza. "Now why didn't I start here? Tell me."

It seemed that Mr. Perez had kept his shop open later than any other that rainy night, not in the hope of customers but because he was waiting for his son, who had borrowed the family car to take his girl to a school dance. La familia Perez lived a couple of miles away from the street, and especially on a cold wet night Mr. Perez had not fancied the walk home. The dance was to be over at midnight, and Diego, who was a good reliable boy, would then deliver his girl home and come to pick up his father at the shop: which in fact he had done, somewhere around twelve-thirty.

Meanwhile Mr. Perez had spent a quiet evening sitting in his shop, waiting on the few customers who came. "And you comprehend, later on it's pleasant sitting there alone-a few other shopkeepers who don't live here, they called out goodnight as they left-the Garcias two doors up stayed open late, and Mrs. Sanchez across the way too, it's anything to make a dollar with that one-but the lights go out, one by one, and presently I'm the only one left open, and all is quiet but for the rain, splat-splat-splat, outside… I took the opportunity to write a letter to my brother in Fresno, and later on I read my book-I always keep a book here for the slow times, I'm a great reader and at home with the children it's noisy… " And just about midnight, as Mr. Perez sat reading in his little lonely circle of light, a woman's voice spoke to him from the street.

Startled, he had looked up, and there she was outside the perimeter of light, no more than a dark figure. His glasses were for reading distance and in his surprise he hadn't taken them off, so he could give only a vague description. She spoke hurriedly and with a strange foreign accent on her English; she said she wanted something to protect her hat from the rain; one of his serapes would do, how much were they? The whole, queer little transaction happened so quickly that it was not until she was gone that Mr. Perez told himself it was surely odd, when she wanted to save her hat from the rain, that she had not naturally stepped over the threshold into the shop… "But no, she stays outside, she is really only a hand and arm reaching into the light, you understand?"

On hearing the price, two dollars, she held out the money, said any one would do, and he took it over to her. But she had forgotten the tax, the eight cents for the state, and when he reminded her she had impatiently handed him another dollar bill, said, "That's all right, don't bother about change,” and walked away rapidly. This Mr. Perez had not liked, because he was an honest man and also had his pride, and he did not like to accept tips like a waiter; however, she was gone-"and money is money.”

"That is very true. Was she carrying anything?"

Yes, she had had a suitcase; this she had set down a little in front of her to open her purse, and Mr. Perez had seen it a trifle more clearly than the lady. It had been an old brown leather suitcase. And the purse she was carrying, it had glistened as she opened it, catching the reflection of light from the shop-he thought it might have been of that shiny plastic, or perhaps patent leather, a dark color.

"And her hand-you saw her sleeve and hand?" Mendoza thought of Cara Kingman's silver-enameled fingernails.

Yes, so Mr. Perez had. A light-colored sleeve, of a coat he thought, but could not say whether a long or short coat-and it had a dark cuff, like velvet. As for the hand, the lady had been wearing gloves.

"Of what sort?" asked Mendoza.

"One small thing I can tell you about that," said Mr. Perez. "You comprehend, her hand is closer to me, and partly in the light, so I have a better look-for just that one small moment. She handed the money to me between her fingers, and then when I spoke of the tax, she reached into her purse again-impatient, you know-and held the third bill out on her palm, like so. Her gloves were a very light tan color, like raw leather-I don't know if they were leather or cloth-but they had buttons on the inside of the wrist, and when she held her hand out so, I saw that on that glove-her left hand it would be-the little button was missing."

A small amber-colored button in the loose earth raked over the corpse. " Diez millen demonios negros desde infierno! " said Mendoza.

"This does not, I fear," said Mr. Perez sympathetically, "please you to hear for some reason."

"On the contrary, it is very helpful indeed. But at the moment I don't know what it means-except that I have been wrong somewhere-or exactly what to do with it… "

Hackett's older sister had a couple of kids, and when they were smaller, a few years ago, once in a while he'd got roped in to sit with them, read to them. There was a thing the little girl had been crazy about, The Wizard of Oz; he'd read out of that one a good deal, and right now something in it came back to him. The way one of the wicked witches had just disappeared when she died-nothing left at all, because all there'd been to her was a kind of shell of malice.

He wouldn't, some odd superstitious way, be at all surprised if the same thing happened to Mona Ferne before his eyes. Maybe Mr. Horwitz took a jaundiced general view, but he'd been so right about this one. The front, and that was absolutely all…

"Such a terrible thing, I can't bear to think of it," she said in her light, sweet voice. "Poor darling Brooke. He did have talent, you know, he'd have done great things, I'm convinced-it's a tragedy for that reason as well as for all his friends."

"Yes, of course," said Hackett. "When did you see Mr. Twelvetrees last, Miss Ferne?"

She sat in the same chair her daughter had slouched in yesterday, but easily upright, graceful: everything about her was finished to a high gloss, from the lacquered flaxen coiffure to the fragile patent leather sandals with their stilt heels. Ten feet away, she looked an attractive thirty-five; any closer, no. All artificial: the smallest gesture, the tinkling laugh, the expression, the whole woman a planned thing into which God knew what minute calculations had gone. He didn't know much about such things, but he could guess at all the desperate, tedious, grim effort put forth-over the years more and more-on the front: the important thing. The massage, the cosmetics, the diets, the plastic surgery, the money spent and the time used, so much time that she'd had none left over for anything else at all, and so everything else about her had shriveled and died, and she was an empty shell posturing and talking there. All to preserve the illusion that was no illusion, closer than across a room. Any nearer, you saw the lines and the hollows, the little scars at the temples and in front of the ears, the depth of the skillful cosmetic mask, the little loose fold of skin at the throat, and the veins standing up on the backs of the narrow hands with their long enameled nails, their flashing rings, and the expensively capped front teeth, and the faint blistering round the eyelids from strain because she ought to wear glasses.

Those carefully made-up brown eyes widened on him. "Heavens, Sergeant, you can't think I had anything to do with-? No, no, I see you must ask everyone, mustn't you? Well, now, let me see-I believe it must have been that Thursday, the twenty-ninth it would be. Yes. Brooke dropped by and asked me to go to dinner with him, but I had an engagement already… I never could bring myself to believe it was so, what dear Martin thought-Brooke would never-I've been quite upset about it, but then all of us who knew him-and now to have this terrible thing happen! I've hardly taken it in yet, but I'll try to help you however I can-"

"Yes, thank you." This house, Hackett thought-something haunted about this house, with that great tree brooding over it, the rooms like caves until you turned on a light. But this wasn't the ghost who haunted it: the ghost was the other one… She had let him in-looking like hell again, today in an old-womanish gray cotton dress, ugly clumping shoes, her sullen face naked without cosmetics in the daylight from the door. Yet that clear pale skin-looking at her there, he suddenly saw that her eyes were beautiful, her good hazel-brown eyes clear as brook water, framed in heavy lashes. It was an oddly disturbing discovery, and almost immediately he'd made another which disturbed him even more.

And that wasn't his kind of thing, either-the intuitive understanding of emotional secrets. He was a cop, not a psychologist; his business, and one he was pretty good at, was collecting facts and fitting them together to make a picture. Mendoza was the one with the crystal ball….

It was the way she did it, the tone of her flat voice-turning to call up the stairs, "Mother!" All of a sudden he knew about this Angel Carstairs… You'd think she could do something, Mr. Horwitz said. I'm twenty-six years old and,… But she was doing something: the same thing she'd been doing, probably, most of her life. She was punishing Mona-for being her mother, for being what she was. And so anything Mona was or did or said, she had to go the opposite way-just to annoy. It was the negative approach, and also a trap she'd got caught in; because now for such a long while this had been the one reason for Angel Carstairs' existence, she couldn't stop and turn another way and go out to find life away from Mona. Maybe she understood that, maybe she didn't; either way she lived in a little hell she'd made herself, because every way she tormented Mona (reminding her with every mocking Mother of their ages, making herself the graceless ugly duckling in mute rebellion against the creed that beauty was the sole importance), she was tormenting herself too.

Yesterday he'd felt sorry for her; today, she made him mad. At the deliberate waste, the senseless negation.

And at the same time, facing this empty shell of a woman, he understood it.

He didn't want to stay in this house any longer than necessary, but he had questions to ask; he went on asking them. Mendoza had guessed right on one thing: it had been Mona Ferne who introduced Twelvetrees to the Kingmans and their Temple. She had met him through a small theatrical group-very careful to emphasize, not amateurs, but studio extras, bit players, that sort-"These brave young people, so ambitious and hard-working! I was one myself at one time, you know, and I realize how much it means, any little encouragement and support."

Now and then they put on shows, in a community theater they could rent cheap, near Exposition Park; it was at one of those she'd met Twelvetrees. He'd been a new member of the group then; this was four years ago, he'd have been here only a few months. "I saw at once he had talent-oh, he needed training and experience, but the essential thing was there. The work this splendid little group was doing was excellent for him, though the poor boy was impatient at the lack of recognition."

Did she (he didn't expect much on this one) remember any comments Twelvetrees had made about the Temple or the Kingmans, after his first visit there? Well, nothing specific; he had, of course, been tremendously impressed, as anyone would be. Such a spiritual atmosphere, and dear Martin so impressive in his robes.

"Yes. Do you happen to know whether Twelvetrees owned a revolver?"

"A revolver-heavens, I don't think so, did you find one, I mean in his apartment? Oh, I mustn't ask questions, of course, I'm so sorry! I don't think I ever saw him with-But there," she said with a coquettish little moue, "I'm telling a lie. I did. But I don't think it was his. It was when he was in a play they were doing, oh, all of a year ago it must have been-and he only had it on the stage, of course, it would have been a prop." She angled her new cigarette in its jeweled holder at him, in expectation; perversely he bent over his notebook, pretending not to notice, and let her light it herself.

"And if you don't mind, just for the record, Miss Ferne-were you at home on that Friday and Saturday night?-the thirtieth and thirty-first, that was."

She didn't answer immediately, and then she said, "Oooh, I will begin to think you suspect me! Was that when he was-? Do you know, I mean? I thought-the papers said-but you police are so clever, I expect you have ways of finding out things." And by now Hackett was unwillingly fascinated, at the apparent extent of the woman's faith in her private illusion. A pretty sixteen-year-old innocent on her first date might get by with such provocative glances and giggles, such arch wriggling girlishness; from this woman it should have been absurd, and instead was somehow horrible. "Wel1, let me see. Of course I know you have to ask, it doesn't mean you think I- As if I'd any reason, my dear Brooke-but I mustn't make a parade of feeling, one has to bear these things… Let me see. That was a week ago last Friday and Saturday? Oh, of course, on the Friday night I went to see Miss Kent. Janet Kent-do you want the address? She's an old servant actually, she was Angel's nurse, such a reliable woman, but she was quite old then and now she can't work anymore, and hasn't much to live on, poor thing. She's very proud, she won't take money, but I do give her clothes and things like that, you know, and-not to sound as if I'm praising myself or anything-I do go in as often as I can, if it's just for a minute or two, to cheer her up a little, you see. It's rather tedious sometimes-old people can be such bores, can't they?-but I try to do what I can."

"Yes. What time did you get there and when did you leave?"

"Well, it felt like eternity, I couldn't get away from her that night, she wanted to talk-she gets lonely, poor thing-and she does so love to play cards, I had to sit down and play with her. I couldn't tell you exactly when I got there, but I think it must have been about seven-thirty, because I left right after dinner here-and when I did get away, I felt so exhausted-such a bore-I thought it must be midnight, but it was only a quarter of eleven. I came straight home

… And the next night, of course, I was at the Temple for the service, as I am every Saturday night."

"Thank you," said Hackett, and stood up.

"Is that all you want to ask me? I do hope I've been of some help, though I don't see how I could tell you anything important."

"One more thing," said Hackett, and made himself smile at her, sound sympathetic, "I hope you don't mind a personal question, Miss Ferne, but-well, you'd been out with Mr. Twelvetrees socially quite a bit, and-er-well, was there anything like a formal engagement, or-er-?" He thought he'd done that quite well, the insensitive cop trying to be delicate.

"Ah," she said, clasping one hand to her cheek, lowering her eyes. "I-I shouldn't like to feel that such a private matter would go into your records, to be pawed over by anyone-" An appealing glance. He produced a very obviously admiring smile and murmured something about off-the-record. "I-1 can't say what might… But there were difficulties, you see? Dear Brooke was so proud, and of course I do have more money than he did. And there was a little difference in our ages, nothing to matter, but he-I'm sure you understand. But mostly, it was-Angel. I'm afraid the poor girl was quite foolishly in love with him-oh, quite understandable, of course, but utterly hopeless, naturally. Brooke never- She never said anything to show she was jealous, or-but I knew, and so did Brooke, of course. The way she behaved. I've seen her look quite-quite wild, sometimes, when we were going out somewhere together. These young girls… But it would have made difficulties. Brooke was so understanding, he hadn't said a word to me, yet, but we both knew-you do see what I mean?"

Hackett said he did. She added suddenly, a little nervously, "I do hope you won't have to question her, Sergeant-she's so odd, she never shows what she feels. Now I simply can't help it, a bundle of emotions, but then most women are, aren't we? But she hasn't been herself at all the last-well, since we knew, I expect it's been, though she's been very quiet and strange for a week or so. I really wouldn't like her upset further-"

"I don't think it's necessary." Hackett didn't know when he'd been more anxious to get out of a place; it was an unhealthy house, as if a miasma hung over it like that damned tree, darkening the spirit as the tree darkened the rooms. He went out to the entry hall, her high heels clacking sharp and light on the parquet floor there, behind him. And there was the girl again, swinging the door open for him, mocking, metallic…

"What, isn't he arresting you, Mother dear? What a disappointment!" He felt the hate like an invisible sword poised.

"Darling, you mustn't joke to the police, they might take you seriously. And I hoped you were lying down, you've not been at all yourself lately, you know."

"What d'you mean? I'm all right! What on earth-oh, I see, showing how solicitous you are of me! How ridiculous, I-" And she caught his glance, that held anger and pity because he couldn't help it, and suddenly, astonishingly, shamed color flooded her face. She flung around furiously and ran away from both of them, up the stairs.

"So difficult-young girls," murmured the woman. "So unpredictable. Quite wild, sometimes-she has always been- But I mustn't bore you with my troubles. I do hope you'll find whatever wicked person did this dreadful thing, soon. You've been so kind and understanding, Sergeant-"