Streets of Death

FOUR

After a couple of quiet shifts, the night watch was busy. They had E. M. Shogart back, that stolid plodder who’d put in twenty years in the old Robbery office before it got merged with Homicide, and was still a little unreconciled to the change. He would be up for retirement next year if he wanted to take it, and probably would.

A rather bored Schenke was listening to Piggott talk about his tropical fish, an unlikely hobby which had seized him a while ago, when they got the first call, to a heist up on Seventh. Early, but time meant nothing to the punks. They both went out on it.

It was, expectably, a liquor store, and the owner had been there alone, just about to close. "I got this place up for sale," he told them, "and not before it’s time. I been heisted four times the last nine months."

"Can you give us any description of him?" asked Schenke.

"Description? I could draw you a picture." The owner was a little fat man about sixty, named Wensink. "Talk about adding insult to injury, they not only walked off with the cash from the register, about a hundred and forty, they loaded up a station wagon with a thousand bucks’ retail of my best stuff! There was three of them. One with the gun. The one I saw best was that one. A guy maybe forty, medium-size, not much hair and he had one walleye. And what looked like a forty-five. All business, he was. The other two were younger, one with a mustache, the long hair."

"Well, that’s a switch," said Schenke. "Taking the stock. A station wagon? You got a look at it?"

"I sure did," said Wensink. "They parked right in front, come in just at closing time. Anybody noticed them carrying stuff out, I suppose thought they were just customers. I didn’t get a look at the license plate but it was a Ford nine-passenger wagon, white over brown, about five years old."

He thought the one with the gun might have touched the register, so they called out a man from S.I.D. to dust for prints. Wensink said he’d recognize a mug-shot and would come in tomorrow to look.

When they got back to the office, Shogart had gone out on another call; also a heist, he reported when he came in. An all-night movie-house on Fourth, and the girl in the ticket box was a nitwit, couldn’t say anything except that he’d had a gun. "I wouldn’t even take a bet on that. And God knows they deserve to lose some of their ill-gotten gains, it’s a porno house."

"Amen to that," said Piggott, "but two wrongs, E. M.-" He was interrupted by the phone, and the Traffic man on the other end said he and his partner had just come across a body.

Schenke went out to look at it while Piggott typed up a report on the liquor-store heist. It didn’t, said Schenke when he came back, look like any mysterious homicide to occupy the day watch: an old bum dead in a doorway over on Skid Row; but a report had to be written, an I.D. made if possible.

Piggott had just finished the first report and Schenke was swearing at the typewriter when the phone buzzed and Piggott picked it up. "Robbery-Homicide, Detective Piggott."

There was silence at the other end, and then a cautious male voice said, "You guys picked up Bobby Chard, you got him in your morgue. You read it he got took off by accident like. You better look again."

Piggott didn’t ask who was calling. "Is that so? Why?"

"There was reasons." The phone clicked and was dead.

"Chard," said Piggott to himself. The one Traffic had thought was a hit-run. Well, maybe they’d better look three times instead of twice. Or it might be a mare’s nest. He wrote a note for Higgins and left it on his desk.

On Friday morning, with Glasser off, Palliser roped Landers in to help out on the legwork on Sandra. The two likeliest suspects Stephanie had picked out of Records, on account of their pedigrees, were Richard Lamont and Earl Rank. Lamont’s latest address was Burbank, Rank’s Van Nuys, but as Palliser pointed out, people did move. They went looking.

Landers found Lamont after three tries. Lamont’s sister in Burbank thought he might be staying with a pal in Hollywood; the pal said Dick was living with a woman in the Atwater section, and there Landers ran him to ground, in one side of an old duplex, watching TV. Lamont fit Stephanie’s description, down to the little goatee, but he told Landers earnestly he was real clean. Last time he’d been in, the judge had sent him to one of those head doctors, cured him from wanting to do funny things to girls, and he’d never do a thing like that again.

"So you can tell me where you were last Tuesday?" asked Landers.

Lamont thought. "All day, sir? Well, I was at my job all day, it’s at McGill’s garage out Vermont, Mr. McGill’s teaching me all about engines and says I take to it good. I got to leave for the job pretty soon too, I don’t go on till noon ’cause we’re open tonight. I just come home-last Tuesday you mean, sir?-and Lilly Ann could say I was here, if that’s good enough, sir. She’s a real honest girl, never been in no trouble, we’re fixin’ to get married. She works at this upholstery place on Jefferson, you could ask and she’d say."

Landers went on to find Lilly Ann; there was no point in hauling Lamont in to lean on him heavier until they were a lot surer. Lilly Ann sounded positive, and had a clean record. This one was up in the air.

He came back to headquarters to find Palliser just bringing in a likelier suspect.

Earl Rank had the kind of record which made him likely, and he hadn’t any alibi; he was living alone in a single room on Fourth, but Palliser had found him at his mother’s place on a tip from a pal at the car-wash where he worked.

"A house down on Ceres," he told Landers. "Two-bedroom place, about what you’d expect, but it could tie in." Ceres Street was five blocks from San Pedro. "And his mother’s just got back from visiting a married daughter in ’Frisco, how about that?"

"I like it," said Landers. "It ties in very neat. Let’s see what he has to say about it."

They took him into an interrogation room and started asking questions. Rank was sullen and belligerent in turns, the usual attitude, and they didn’t get much out of him."Don’t you remember where you were last Tuesday, Rank?"

"Around. Just around." He was about thirty, a pale-skinned black with a wispy little goatee, a thin mustache, secretive eyes, a hard mouth. "I didn’t do anything."

"We’ve got a witness who says maybe you did. You picked up any juvenile females to sweet-talk lately, Earl?"

He’d done that at least once, by his record; the parents had reneged on letting her testify, and there’d been no prosecution.

"I never did no such thing. You can’t prove I done nothing."

They couldn’t. It might be interesting to hear what Stephanie would say about his mother’s house on Ceres Street; but they’d have to show cause and get a court order even to take pictures, and she might not recognize pictures. It was just suggestive, no real evidence at all. "And you know, Tom," said Palliser, scratching his nose, "that girl was so scared, by her own admission, I wouldn’t like to take her description of the man or the house as gospel truth. She couldn’t be certain. You stop to think, she only saw the man three or four times-in a car at night, and at the house. She spent some time at the house, but we couldn’t get much of a description-al1 she could say was, two bedrooms, no rugs, an old refrigerator, the TV was new. She also picked this other mug-shot, Steven Smith. He’s got no sex counts, just B. and E., but I suppose there’s always a first time. But I wouldn’t bet on it."

"They do train us to be thorough," said Landers.

"We’d better look for him too."

They let Rank go, at least temporarily, and went looking for Smith without any luck. He was off parole, he’d moved from the latest address in his tile, and nobody admitted to knowing where he was. There were no relatives listed for him. He could be Stephanie’s Harry, but he needn’t be.

And Palliser said, "I tell you, Tom, I wouldn’t rely on that girl. If I felt surer she’d been sure about that description, I’d like Rank for it a lot. As it is, she picked out two other shots too. In a way, I think we’d be safer just going by the general description and looking at mug-shots ourselves."

"You do like to do it the hard way. You talked to her," said Landers with a shrug. "So where do we go from here?"

"We go call on Earl Rank’s mother," said Palliser. "She may be a perfectly honest woman-nothing says she isn’t, though she didn’t like it much when I brought him in-and if Earl is the X on Sandra, possibly Mrs. Rank noticed something when she came home yesterday. Things missing from the refrigerator-or that nice little greenstriped plane case he forgot to get rid of."

"Well, we can ask," said Landers. He didn’t sound very hopeful.

Mendoza’s insatiable curiosity had fastened on the strange case of Edwin Fleming. There wasn’t much to be done, in the way of the usual routine, on the equally strange rape-assaults or the merely brutal pretty boys, but questions could be asked about Fleming. After a desultory glance at the night report, he went out to ask some; and he’d be covering ground Carey had already been over, but then Mendoza always preferred to ask the questions personally, and he flattered himself he’d get more out of those other girls than Carey had.

He started out at the Globe Grill, where he was resented because they were still busy with the late-breakfast trade. Rappaport wasn’t there. He used the badge without compunction, aware that Marta Fleming was watching him with smouldering eyes. The first one he talked to was Betty Loring, a black-haired buxom female of, he suspected, very medium intelligence.

"I don’t know her very well, like I told the other cop. I mean, she’s all business, she don’t talk much to the rest of us. No, I don’t mean she’s unfriendly exactly, just quiet. What you mean, Mr. Rappaport? Oh, he’s a real gentleman, he don’t allow any funny business from customers. I worked some p1aces"-she rolled her eyes"but he’s real strict. I don’t get why you’re asking about Marta, it’s her husband something happened to, I guess. Cops! All this fuss over him going off."

The other one, Angela Norton, was older and brighter. She said curiously, "All you cops around, just on account of her husband. I don’t know anything about it, she’s a quiet one, but it seems funny. Didn’t he just walk out?"

Mendoza told her about that, and she stared. "I didn’t know that, about him being paralyzed. That’s terrible. She never said a thing, and she’s worked here nearly six months. But you don’t mean you think she had anything to do with it? Honestly, she’s-she wouldn’t have-that other cop asking if she had boyfriends, that strikes me as silly, honestly-she’s so serious, all business. If you want to know, it’s my guess she’s been awful homesick. That sounds silly too, but I think she is."

Mendoza was slightly taken aback. Cigarette halfway to his mouth, he said, "Why do you say that?"

"Oh, well-she’s quiet like I said, but once we took a break together, and I forget what brought it up, somebody’s birthday I think, but she got to talking about Germany, and her family-someplace they’d gone on a picnic for her sister’s birthday, in the country, and she was all different, sort of gay and laughing hard. She’d never talked about her family to me before. I don’t know what you’re thinking about her, but honestly she’s so straitlaced, I wouldn’t think-"

"Cops don’t tell what they think," said Mendoza absently. The other two waitresses here worked different hours, didn’t know Marta as well even as these two had, and Carey hadn’t got anything out of them. Mendoza didn’t ask to talk to Marta; yesterday, with Carey’s report in his mind, he’d thought he had read her, and been amused at Nick Galeano. Now he took the Ferrari up Vermont Avenue to the office of Dr. Sylvester Toussaint, and used the badge to pull rank again.

Dr. Toussaint, annoyed at having routine interrupted, answered questions briefly. "I hadn’t seen Fleming in sometime, there was nothing I could do for him after all. Nothing anybody could do, poor devil. He was referred to me by the specialist in therapy at the General-he hadn’t had a regular physician, and it was just to keep an eye on him generally. Apart from the paralysis-the spine was almost completely severed-he seems to have made a good adjustment-ah, that is, physically. Quite a healthy specimen. Did I understand you to say he’s disappeared? I don’t see how-"

"Neither do we. He could manipulate the wheelchair by himself?"

"Oh, yes. The couple of times his wife brought him in here-as is often the case, he was developing extra strength in his arms. But," said the doctor, "but how on earth-"

"His wife thinks he’s committed suicide. You said, the couple of times he was in. Not regularly? Not in how long?"

"I’d have to look at his file. Not for four or five months, I’d say. I told them there was nothing to be done, and there seemed to be some financial difficulty-there was no insurance. I told her there was no necessity for me to see him on a regular basis."

"You’re an honest man, Doctor," said Mendoza dryly. "What did you think of her, by the way?"

Toussaint took off his glasses and polished them with his handkerchief. "Mrs. Fleming? She seems like a nice young woman-not much to say for herself. She took good care of him, I will say-he was clean and neat."

"Did he ever seem suicidal to you?"

Toussaint put his glasses back on. He was looking very interested now. "That’s a difficult thing to say about anybody, Lieutenant. But the last time I saw him-well, he felt resentful, which I suppose we can both understand. A man his age, a hopeless invalid. He said to me, he could live to be eighty, and it wasn’t fair to his wife. He’d be better off to cut his throat and save everybody the trouble, he said."

Mendoza cocked his head at him. "He said it just like that-cut his throat? I see. Interesante."

"But evidently he didn’t," said the doctor. "How could he have disappeared?"

Mendoza got up and yanked down his cuffs. "Simpler if he had cut his throat. And if he thought of suicide in those terms, and really wanted to-but if I’ve learned one thing at this job, Doctor, it’s that you never can tell what people will do. As I suppose you have, too. Thanks so. much." He left the doctor looking very curious, and ambled slowly back downtown in traffic a little heavier than usual, in the gray mist.

Before he got off the freeway it began to rain again in a hesitant way, short of storm but getting everything very wet. The little side street down from Wilshire was empty, only an occasional car parked along the one side where parking was legal. He was on the wrong side, and had to back and fill around four times to turn the Ferrari’s length. He walked across the street and down the drive of the apartment house. All the garages but one were open and empty; the exception was the one at the left end, and he went around to peer into the little window. Inside was a middle-aged tan Dodge sedan, and by Carey’s report that would be the car owned by Edwin Fleming, the car too expensive to run, which they’d been going to sell. There’d be some red tape to that now, without his signature.

He wondered suddenly if she had a driver’s license. How had she got him to the doctor’s office?

He went back up the drive and into the building. It was as silent as it had been yesterday, everybody out at work. Anything could have gone on here, damn it, and nobody been the wiser. The Archangel Gabriel could have swooped down and carried Fleming off, with no witnesses. More realistically, how easy it would have been for the boyfriend-Rappaport or somebody else-to have walked in, got into the apartment by the simple expedient of ringing the bell, and knocked Fleming out.

"?De veras? " said Mendoza to himself. But why in hell’s name take him away? If that had been the general plan, to fake a suicide, easy enough to slash Edwin’s throat, cut his wrists, leave the knife there with his prints on it, and walk quietly off. There was a good solid suicide, with a reasonable motive behind it, and likely nobody would have asked questions.

Mendoza was annoyed. Untidiness always annoyed him, and the strange case of Edwin Fleming was very untidy.

He climbed another flight of stairs and paused outside the right-hand door. Beyond it Mr. Offerdahl was feeling happy. Filtered through whiskey, the sound of singing emerged into the hall; Mr. Offerdahl was forever blowing bubbles.

The new call went down just after Mendoza left the office, and Hackett and Higgins went out to look at it. Over the years, they had gone together to look at a number of things like it, not that that reconciled them to the necessity; but in the last couple of years there seemed to be more and more such things to go and look at.

"Mr. Weinstein found her and called in," said the uniformed man waiting by the squad car. "It’s a mess. He’s got the pawnshop next door, knew her. Says her name’s Mrs. Ruth Faber. I guess it must have happened last night."

They went in to look. This was a side street off Olympic, still downtown but the kind of half-and-half neighborhood old sections of big cities sprout. There was an access alley between two rows of old two-story buildings here, the first floors business places, old apartments above. This place was a little grocery store. There was a sign over the door that had been there a long time, FAER'S MARKET. Just one big room inside, a small refrigerator case, three walls of shelves with cans and packages, a wooden counter with an old-fashioned cash register, a Coke machine. In the middle of the uncarpeted pine floor lay the body of an old lady, horridly dead. There was blood all around and on her, and they couldn’t tell what she’d looked like in life because her face had been beaten or kicked in. She was a thin old lady, wearing a cotton housedress, and one black felt slipper had fallen off, lay on a pair of smashed steel spectacles five feet from the body.

"What a mess," said Higgins. "Stop where you are, Art, or the lab boys’ll chew you out. They’ll have a field day here." There wasn’t anything they could do until the lab men had processed the place for physical evidence, so they called S.I.D. and went to talk to Weinstein, who was waiting at the curb with the Traffic man.

"Yi," he said, "they hire you plainclothes fellows by the yard?" He looked at the two big men with sorrowful interest. He was a squat, square man with a dark good-humored ugly face and very bright black eyes. "This is just a terrible thing. The things that go on nowadays-You read about it, it don’t touch you till it happens to somebody you know. What gets me, being in business, it used to be the places got held up, robbed, were places where anybody’d know there’d be loot-jewelry stores, banks, millionaires’ houses-you know? These days, any place. Half these hoods are high on something, don’t know what the hell they’re doing."

"What can you tell us about this, Mr. Weinstein?" asked Hackett. "You knew her?"

"Nothing much I can tell. That poor old lady, Mrs. Faber, I knew her since I been in business here, that’s thirty years. She and her husband had that little market there maybe forty years, longer. She always ran it, and it was ridiculous she still did. I told her so. She made nothing on it, if she cleared fifty a month that’d be about it, people have cars now, go to the supermarkets. She didn’t need to, she had her husband’s pension from the railroad-he’s been gone ten, twelve years. You ask me, it was habit-she didn’t know how to stop. She lived in the apartment upstairs, and she must’ve been eighty if she was a day. The place was always open when I came to open up mornings, and I’d look in, say good morning. You could say I kind of kept an eye on her-old like she was, she could have a stroke, heart attack, and she hadn’t any family at all. So, today"-he gestured eloquent1y-"I look in, there she is. My God. The poor old soul, these thugs around. At least, for what it’s worth, they didn’t get much, I hope."

"How’s that'?" asked Higgins.

"Yi, these old ladies," said Weinstein. "She was old-fashioned, kept her business to herself, which is O.K., but she’d got to know me all this time, that I’m O.K. too, and about six months ago she gives me nearly a heart attack myself. I go in to get a Coke. It was just after that big bank job uptown, and I mentioned it, and she says she never put any trust in banks, keeps her money where she can lay her hands on it. I had a fit, I talked to her like a brother. She was a close old lady, didn’t spend much on herself, and God knows what she mighta had there, saved up fifty years, in a drawer or a closet shelf or somewhere. She finally listened to me and got a lock-box at the bank, I know that, she told me about it."

"You don’t say," said Hackett, exchanging a glance with Higgins. The mobile lab truck slid to the curb behind the squad car. "Well, we’ll ask you to make a statement later, Mr. Weinstein."

"Whatever I can do, gents." He turned away to the little pawnshop across the alley from the market. "Maybe the word hadn’t got round," said Higgins, watching Marx and Horder unload equipment from the truck.

"Or maybe," said Hackett, "it was just what the man said-a hood high on something who didn’t know what he was doing. Bears the general resemblance to our pretty boys, only they’ve been grabbing them off the street. And this kind of violence is not so unusual now." It was to be hoped the hood had left some clues behind for the lab.

Galeano was just as glad it was Rich Conway’s day off. He expected Rich wouldn’t know when to stop kidding him about that blonde. It was like a lot of things in life, he thought: it came back to people, not facts. Maybe people versus facts. Damn it, he thought, when you heard a story like that, you said fishy, you said the gall, but meeting that girl- As he rode up in the elevator, it came to him more clearly just why she’d made an impression on him, and it was a funny word to use: dignity. And maybe that was why Carey and Conway and, for God’s sake, Mendoza, had reacted the way they had. If she’d gone all to pieces, nobody would have thought twice about it, just about the mystery… though, of course, anything happened to a husband you automatically looked at the wife, and vice versa… but, maybe on account of her different upbringing or something, Marta had that dignity, didn’t go parading her feelings in public, and the cynics naturally thought she hadn’t any.

Damn it, I’1l believe her, thought Galeano. That it happened just that way: she’d come home and he was gone. But how and where? And why? The thing didn’t make any sense.

Say he had been murdered by somebody else, there was no earthly reason to conceal the body, was there? But ruminating on it, Galeano had come up with a couple of ideas which might open the case wider. Carey had been thinking just about Marta, and the hypothetical boyfriend; but what about Edwin? There he was all day in his wheelchair, nothing to do. Maybe he listened to the radio, watched TV some, but not all day. They’d only moved to that place a couple of months ago. It could be that he’d spent some time on the phone, talking to old friends where they used to live in Hollywood; they had had friends there. Carey hadn’t located all of them to talk to. It could be, thought Galeano vaguely, that somebody who hadn’t heard about this could give them some ideas about Edwin. Anyway, they ought to chase down everybody who knew the Flemings.

Mendoza had gone out somewhere, and Lake was hunched over one of his eternal books about dieting. Galeano slid into Mendoza’s office and found the manila envelope with Carey’s notes, rummaged through it and took down addresses. People named Frost, Cadby, Prescott, Deal, up in Hollywood: Cahuenga Boulevard, Berendo, Las Palmas.

He drew a blank at the Cahuenga Boulevard apartment; a neighbor just going out told him that Mr. and Mrs. Cadby both worked. He drove down to Berendo. This was the place the Flemings had been living before his accident: one of the old Hollywood streets getting refurbished these days, old houses torn down to make way for new apartments. It was a new, brightly painted two-story building with balconies on the upper floor units, a small blue pool in a side yard, patio tables. The Prescotts lived upstairs at the back; he rang the bell and waited.

The girl who opened the door was a slim leggy brunette in slacks and turtleneck sweater. "Yes?" She looked at the badge in his hand with surprise.

He said economically he’d like to ask a few questions about the Flemings-people who used to live here. "You knew them?"

"Why, yes. What’s the matter, they’re not in any trouble, are they? Pat, it’s a cop about Marta and Ed. This is Mrs. Frost, er-"

"Galeano."

"Mr. Galeano. I’m Marion Prescott. Pat knew them too. But what is the matter? What do you want to know?"

The other girl was smaller, blonde, with a rather scraggly figure. Galeano told them that Fleming was missing and inquiries were being made. "Missing!" said Marion Prescott. "How could he be missing? He couldn’t just walk away, a man in a wheelchair. That poor man! It made us all feel guilty, for-"

"For what?" asked Galeano as she stopped.

"Oh, heavens, you’d better come in," she said. "It’s cold with the door open. Pat and I were just having some coffee, would you like some? I’ll get you a cup, sit down."

"I can’t get over it," said Pat Frost with avid interest. "You mean he’s just disappeared? How funny. It’s not as if he had any imagination?

"How do you mean?" asked Galeano.

"Oh, you know, like all those stories with ingenious plots, people vanishing and then turning out to be the mail carrier," she said vaguely. Mrs. Prescott came back and handed Galeano a cup of coffee.

"There’s cream and sugar on the coffee table. Heavens, I suppose we’d better tell you whatever you want to know. Not that we knew them well, and we couldn’t tell you anything about them since they moved away. It was just, we all lived here, and none of us was working-the wives, I mean-we’d have morning coffee and so on. Marta-she’s not an easy person to know, would you say, Pat?"

"What did you mean about feeling guilty, Mrs. Prescott?"

"Oh-" She flushed. "You’ll think we’re a lot of snobs. Ed’s a nice fellow, but, well, let’s face it, he hasn’t much education, many interests outside baseball and the corniest shows on TV. I don’t mean the rest of us are intellectuals, for heaven’s sake, but my husband’s a broker and Pat’s is a therapist at the Cedars, and the few times we all got together for a potluck supper by the pool, you could see Ed was out of his depth, he just didn’t have anything to talk about to the men. Now Marta’s very well educated, in that very correct German way, I’d say, and I could see she was embarrassed for him. And then when he had that accident, and was paralyzed-"

"Didn’t he have some kind of pension or disability pay or something?" asked Pat Frost; her nose twitched with curiosity just the way Mendoza’s did, Galeano noticed. "We wondered, but she never said a word, and then when they moved-he must have had, hadn’t he? I mean, these days everybody-I know there was a fuss, the man he was working for claimed it was Ed’s own fault, but we did hear he had to pay for the hospital-"

Marta not parading her troubles in public, that just confirmed his convictions. "I’m afraid I couldn’t say about that. Have any of you been in touch with Fleming since they moved?"

"Heavens, no," said Marion Prescott. "It was just proximity, you could say. We hadn’t much in common. As I say, Marta’s difficult to know. Maybe the foreign upbringing, but she’s so formal-well, I’ll say one thing, I think she was homesick, she missed her family, she was always writing to them. I don’t think she’d made any close friends here, I gather they’d moved around a good deal since Ed was out of the service."

"And I’ll tell you something else," said Pat Frost, her eyes bright with interest in gossip. "And that is, Marta wasn’t in love with Ed and never had been. I got the idea she just married him to get here and have more money, a better life. Well, she got disappointed there, Ed ending up in a wheelchair." She laughed.

Galeano looked at her with dislike, and decided the laugh was malicious. "You can’t say that for certain, Mrs. Frost."

"Well, girls do know girls, don’t we, Marion?"

"She was awfully broken up about the baby," said Marion hastily. "A darling little girl, she was named Elisa for Marta’s sister."

"Have either of you seen her since they moved? Has she contacted either of you?" And why would she, these two, lightminded women, what had they in common? "Neither of your husbands been in touch with Fleming?"

"I told you, there’d be no reason," said Marion. "We were sorry-when that happened to him-but that’s all there was to it. I don’t even know where they moved."

"I see,” said Galeano, and stood up.

"Do the police think Marta had something to do with Ed’s disappearing?" Pat Frost’s eyes were uncomfortably sharp. "He is-was-a lot of care, I suppose. My goodness, Marion! If she did something-my goodness! But I wouldn’t be surprised, is all I can say."

"That’s slander, Mrs. Frost," said Galeano mildly.

"Don’t tell me Marta’s corrupted our cops, Mr. Ga1eano," she said sweetly.

Marion Prescott said, "Yes, your Jack did rather fall for her, didn’t he, dear? Until you hauled him back into line."

Galeano escaped.

He’d have to put that in a report, and what it sounded like-Conway and Mendoza would pounce on that Jack Frost, God, what a name, for the boyfriend. There was nothing in it, couldn’t be anything in it: lots of men would be attracted to Marta. And Carey had talked to the Cadbys, said they hadn’t had any contact recently. Which was exactly what they would say if there was any reason not to admit it.

Yielding to impulse, Galeano stopped at the Globe Grill for an early lunch. The place was crowded and another girl waited on him, but he could see Marta across the coffee shop, neat in her uniform. Yes, a lot of men-more money, a better life. He didn’t know what place she came from. There were still a lot of places in Europe, off the beaten track, where people still thought all Americans were millionaires. She got disappointed there. So there she was, with a husband less well educated, likely not much in common (after the baby died), and then a permanent invalid.

She happened to turn and catch his eye on her just then, and a slight flush showed on her cheekbones, her wide mouth tightened.

Cops keeping an eye on her, thought Galeano. Suspecting her.

But he retained a wide streak of peasant common sense, and as he picked up his bill, it suddenly said to him, What did she gain by it? Which was a question. Read it the obvious way, that the hypothetical boyfriend was to get rid of Edwin-fake a suicide, the easiest thing. Galeano couldn’t imagine any circumstances in which that would have gone so wrong as to necessitate taking the body away. But even if it somehow had, and there was no blood, nothing suspicious in the apartment,. they’d have got together to make up a tale. Ed was in the hospital for more tests; he was sick in bed and couldn’t be seen. There was just no reason at all for her to tell the LAPD that very funny story-unless it was true. Damn it, thought Galeano, that is an honest girl.

When he got back to the office, ready to argue the case with Mendoza, he found Hackett and Higgins just sitting, Hackett reading a report just typed, and Grace on the phone. Higgins told him about the new one. They were hoping the lab could give them a lead. It had already given them a lead on one of the heists last night, at the liquor store: the boys had picked up a dandy set of latents from the cash register, being run through to see if they were in Records. If not LAPD’s, maybe somebody’s: NCIC or the FBI would tell them.

Grace put the phone down and said, "That’s funny."

"What?" asked Higgins.

"That bartender," said Grace. "Who was nervous. When Tom and I asked him about Buford coming in that night. A funny little thing, and funny little things make me nervous. I just thought I’d find out about him. And-·"

"Goddamn!" said Higgins suddenly. "Talking about funny little things just reminded me. Matt had an anonymous call-somebody said that Robert Chard thing was a deliberate kill. Probably means damn all."

"Anyway," said Grace, brushing his mustache back and forth, "that bartender-his name’s Reinke, Charles Reinke-owns that place, holds the liquor license, which in this state says he’s very clean and respectable. Which is also funny."

"The boss here?" asked Galeano.

"I don’t know where he is," said Hackett.

Mendoza came in briskly, announced that it was still raining, and went into his office. Galeano followed him and without preamble gave him the gist of what he’d turned up. "If it means anything," he added. "Which I’m not convinced it does. For one thing, I just don’t see what it gained her to tell that tale. If there’d been collusion to kill him and something went wrong, why in hell hide the body? And even so, why should she-"

" De acuerdo," said Mendoza. "I got there too, Nick. But I can imagine circumstances where-mmh-she couldn’t very well have done anything else. Jack Frost.?Porvida! But we’d better talk to him. Just in case." He opened the top drawer of the desk and brought out the inevitable pack of cards, stacked it neatly on the blotter, got out a cigarette and operated the flame-thrower. "That’s a very curious thing. Homesick, she said."

"Oh, Luis," said Higgins, poking his head in, "I forgot to tell you about this anonymous call on that Chard.

And S.I.D. just called, they made those prints off that heist last night, he was in our records, Roy Titus. Art and I are just going out to have a look for him. They picked up some latents from that new job, the old lady, but they aren’t processed yet."

" Bueno." Mendoza took the deck in his long, strong hands and began to shuffle it. "Good hunting." He squared the deck and cut it precisely to show the ace of diamonds.

"Oh, yes, I’ve seen you do that before," said Higgins, and went out. Mendoza shuffled, squared the deck and cut it to the ace of spades; shuffled and cut the ace of hearts.

"Plotting," he said absently to Galeano, "can be complicated. Most of what we see isn’t plotted. Anything but."

"I see what you mean," said Galeano. Mendoza cut the deck, contemplated the ace of clubs, and the phone buzzed. He picked it up.

Loud enough for Galeano to hear, it sneezed at him. "Hello, Luis."

"God bless you, Saul. What do you want?"

"We’ve got a very pretty little homicide for you," said Lieutenant Goldberg of Narcotics, and blew his nose.

"You want to come look at it? Damn these allergies. Pat and I are both here, it’s a very classy apartment on Wilshire. Do come and see, Luis, we’ve got something interesting to show you."

"?Condenacion!" said Mendoza resignedly. "What’s the address?"