Streets of Death

EIGHT

After they got him into the car they asked if he’d make a statement, and he said he wasn’t going to say nothing more, embellishing that with various obscenities, so they took him straight down to the Alameda jail. They had enough to get a warrant, and it was to be hoped the charge would stick. After it was passed to the D.A.’s office it was out of their hands.

They got back to the office, nearly at the end of shift. Palliser and Conway were in, nobody else. "It almost had to go back to the restaurant," Conway was saying. "The time element. So this says so all over again, John. Between us we’ve talked to all the other witnesses, and what the hell do they all say?"

"The boss here?" asked Hackett.

"Oh, he took off." Palliser grinned. "Jase had a bright idea on Buford, and when I passed it on our Luis went all absentminded and wandered out-having the same hunch Jase had, I gather. I expect we’ll hear about it. Rich thinks we’ve got somewhere on Ames, which would be gratifying?

"Well, what did we hear?" Conway flung himself back in the desk chair and lit a cigarette. "Talk about nebulous! Which wasn’t surprising, when Ames himself didn’t know he’d been stabbed, apparently. They said they didn’t notice him at all, or just casually saw him come in and sit down-a couple of them recognized him from seeing him there before, didn’t know him-why should anybody have noticed him? But the night watch got all the names and addresses down, and there they are all present and correct to talk to, until I come to this Tom Sawyer. Address turns out to be an empty lot. And all I say-"

"Yes, and I’d agree with you," said Palliser. "It’s too late to do anything about it today, but I think we get back to Mallow on it, and see if Piggott or Shogart can give us any description. You look self-satisfied," he added to Hackett. "Been doing any good?"

"Breaking a case. The Faber thing. Routine does sometimes pay off. What was Jase’s little idea?"

"Interesting," said Palliser thoughtfully. "At least our Luis thought so."

Mr. Sam McAllister was about sixty-five, tall and angular, with a few wisps of gray hair. He was retired from the personnel department of The Broadway department store. He was regarding Mendoza rather sheepishly, and he said, "Now how’d you come to hear about that?"

"Mr. Reinke was annoyed," said Mendoza, grinning back at him. "Never mind. Did you do any good?"

"Well, Millie was annoyed too," said McAllister, involuntarily looking over his shoulder toward the kitchen where an emphatic banging of pans betrayed Millie’s presence. This was a neat little stucco house in the middle of an old block of neat homes, minute lawns in front. "Not too bad, I come out a little ahead. Lordy, but I don’t know when I’ve done such a thing, not in years. We all kind of got carried away, I suppose. Old Charlie fussing about it being illegal-guess he had a point. Tell you one thing, I was bushed when I got home that night-not so young as I used to be!" He laughed.

"Your nephew was in on it too, wasn’t he? Reinke said, a young sailor."

McAllister nodded. "Young Ted Nygard, my niece’s boy. Dropped a little too-I was sorry about that later. He just joined up a while back, green kid from the farm, it was his first leave out here. He’s on a cruiser, real proud of it."

He added the name; he looked at Mendoza with some belated caution; at first he’d just been glad of an audience. "Did I understand, you’re with the state board, something to do with Charlie’s license? Lordy, he did say something, but I just never thought-I sure hope you aren’t going to blame Charlie. It was all my fault we got started, come to think."

"Wel1, we’ll overlook it this time," said Mendoza casually.

"I wouldn’t want to think I got Charlie in any trouble," said McAllister.

Mendoza looked at him, the simple and honest-and rather stupid-old man. "You needn’t worry about that, Mr. McAl1ister."

"That’s good. Oh, Lordy, there’s Millie-don’t like to rush you off, but she likes to be regular with dinner-"

"I was just leaving." Mendoza clapped on his hat against the slight mist; it was already dusk, and trying to work up to rain again. He was going to be late home.

The night watch came on, and not long after Shogart had switched the radio on Mendoza called. He wanted the phone number of the captain in Harbor division. "I think his name’s Noble, Matt. I’ll hang on."

Curious, Piggott consulted the main desk and passed it on. "Now what’s that about?" he asked Schenke.

"Couldn’t say. Look, E. M., tune that thing down, will you? Both of us rode a squad long enough it’s no novelty, you know." Shogart glowered at him but complied. They got their first call at nine-twenty, a heist at a seven-to-eleven dairy store on Hoover. The young fellow alone in the place was scared green; it was only his second week on the job. "I mean, one thing I thought when I took this job," he said to Piggott, "it’s not like a liquor store, a drugstore, where you’re liable to get held up! My gosh! A dairy store! I mean, it’s crazy."

"A lot of things are these days. Could you tell me what he looked like?"

"My gosh, no! He had a ski mask on, covered his face, and a cap-I couldn’t say anything except he was big, about six feet. He got all the cash, about sixty bucks."

So there wasn’t much to do about that but write a report.

When Mendoza came into the kitchen Alison was sitting at the table, hiccuping over coffee. The cats were weaving around her feet, and in the backyard the twins were galloping around with Cedric and Mrs. MacTaggart in pursuit.

"Children!" said Alison with loathing. "Hic! Those little devils know they have to get ready for-hic!-the school bus, why they have to make so much trouble for M-oh, damn!" She leaped up and fled for the bathroom, and the cats dispersed in all directions, El Senor spitting furiously.

Mrs. MacTaggart came in, herding the twins before her breathlessly, and he said, "You don’t think there’s anything wrong, Mairi? I know what the doctor said, but-"

"Ach, doctors!" said Mairi. "She’ll be fine in a bit, it’s just she didn’t expect it, having it easy the first time. That bus will be here any minute and these two heathens not washed-there’s coffee on the stove-"

"I’ll get breakfast out, Mairi." He dodged Cedric slurping from his bowl on the back porch. He backed out the Ferrari, but didn’t head downtown. It was nine-fifty when he walked into the office of Captain Noble of Harbor division and asked, "What about it?"

Noble was a hardbitten middle-aged man, big and stolid. "Well, I’ve got him here for you," he said. "When you called last night I checked with the Shore Patrol and found he was aboard all right. We picked him up this morning, about an hour ago, after a little argument with the chief petty officer. What do you want him for, Mendoza?"

"I don’t know that I want him for anything," said Mendoza. "It’s just a little hunch. And when I checked with the Navy and found the ship was still in port, I thought I’d better talk to him while I could."

Noble shrugged. "He’s in an interrogation room down the hall. Ready to chew nails and talking about his rights as a citizen."

"Lead me to him."

When he went into the little room and shut the door behind him, Ted Nygard swung around belligerently. "Who the hell are you and what the hell’s this all about?" He was about twenty, a good-looking youngster with crew-cut blond hair and a pink and white complexion, trim in his blue uniform. "What is all this, anyway? Police-"

"Lieutenant Mendoza, Robbery-Homicide. Sit down, Mr. Nygard. I’ve just got a few questions for you." Mendoza laid down his hat, got out a cigarette and contemplated him consideringly. "You were on leave about a week, ten days ago. You went to stay with your uncle-or great-uncle-Mr. McAllister, up in L.A."

Nygard flushed, to betray his youth. "My mother asked me to go see them," he muttered. "I was only there a couple of days. Why?"

"You got into a hot poker game while you were there, at a little neighborhood bar."

"You’re Goddamned right I did!" said Nygard.

"Bunch of silly old bastards like Uncle Sam, I thought, and it turned out, I guess I was the sap-they cleaned me out! Not Uncle, he dropped some too, but this one guy was stacking the deck, I could swear. He walked away with a wad, mostly mine." He looked at Mendoza more warily.

"But so what, what’s your business with me? Did you say-"

"The poker session, Mr. Nygard. Was this fellow’s name Buford? And you thought he was ringing in a cold deck? Naturally you were annoyed." Mendoza was filling in gaps, and it was easy to do. "You went home with your uncle that Tuesday night, and he was tired and went right to bed-but you were still missing your money. You went out again and found Buford’s place-mmh, yes, I could guess. You knew his name, and that he lived in the neighborhood-he’d be in the book. Yes, it’s one thing to lose money legitimately, but when you thought he was a sharp-"

"Hell!" said Nygard, flushing deeply. "Did he lay some kind of charge? I wouldn’t think he had the nerve! All I wanted was my money back. Yeah, I found the place, the door was open and I went in and he was sound asleep in front of the TV. If you know so damned much-"

"But he woke up when you started to search him for the money," said Mendoza, "and you had a little scuffle."

"Well, damn it, I didn’t want to hurt him," said Nygard, "he was a lot older than me, but I wasn’t going to let him get away with that loot, and I told him so. Did he lay a charge on me? Damn it-"

"No," said Mendoza, "but I’m afraid we’re going to. He’s dead, Mr. Nygard. We won’t be calling it Murder One, but he got knocked down and cracked his skull and died of it."

Nygard lost all his pink freshness; he stared at Mendoza in dismay, incredulity. "Oh, no," he said, "I just gave him a little push-I didn’t even hit him-I thought he’d knocked himself out and I just-oh, my God! I never meant a thing like that-my God!"

Mendoza got back to the office just after lunch, and met Duke coming in. Hackett was alone in the sergeants’ office, laboring over a report. Mendoza told him about Nygard: Harbor division would send him up to be booked Q in, and there’d be the statements to get, the warrant to be applied for. It was Higgins’ day off, and everybody else was out on something.

"And what have you got?" he asked Duke, sitting down at his desk and reaching for the flame-thrower. "The first report on these Freemans." Duke spread out glossy 8 by 10’s. "The autopsies’ll give you more, but provisionally we think they were attacked by at least two men. They don’t seem to have made much effort to defend. themselves, as if they’d been taken by surprise, both struck down at once maybe. I don’t think they had a chance.

There was the usual mess, and not much there to get-it was raining, and there were some muddy footprints on the hall carpet, but not distinct enough to make anything of." The photographs were just as usual too, not very pretty. "But you called our attention to the phone book, and we took a little trouble there-lifted a very nice set of 1atents."

Duke sounded smug. "All four lingers, for a wonder. They’ve just gone down to R. and I., if we’ve got him on file we’ll know who one of them is anyway."

" Bueno," said Mendoza. "You’ll let us know. Where is everybody, Art?"

"Out. John and Rich got some kind of lead on Ames, and nobody’d done much on that addict who turned up dead, Peralta. Nick had an inquest to cover."

"The Olson girl. That was muy extrano," said Mendoza, and Sergeant Lake buzzed and said the D.A.’s office wanted him. It was one of the juniors, and he wanted to talk about Joey. They didn’t feel it was a case to prosecute formally, and to save time and money a reduced charge would probably be brought. The D.A. would be interested in Robbery-Homicide’s opinion about that; it would really be easier all round if they simply put him away as incorrigible, in which case- "In which case," said Mendoza sharply, "he’ll be automatically released when he turns into a legal adult, with no charge on his record. I wouldn’t go along with that at all. He’s exhibited a good deal of violence, and very likely the minute he’s turned loose he’d continue to do so."

Well, the D.A.’s office felt it wasn’t worthwhile to do anything else. They had quite a case-load here, as Mendoza knew.

"?Que demonios! " said Mendoza to Hackett. "What do you bet that kid will be out and roaming around with a knife again before he turns eighteen? The trouble we go to, and then the damned lawyers-I swear I’m going to get out of this rat race! And somebody’s got to get those statements on Buford, Art."

"I’m going, I’m going," said Hackett hastily. As he went out, Mendoza had opened the top drawer and brought out the deck of cards.

"Tom Sawyer," said Fred Mallow blankly. "Outside of the book, I never heard of one." He looked at Palliser and Conway. "But I said I didn’t know everybody in that night."

"Well, we can try to narrow it down some," said Conway. "You knew most of the people by sight if not name, no? O.K., between us Sergeant Palliser and I have seen all the rest of them, except this bird who gave us the phony name and address. So let’s start from scratch-"

Mallow yawned again, looking puzzled. "I don’t see-oh, I get you. Maybe we could at that. You figure it was this guy, whoever he is, stabbed Ames? I still don’t see how anybody did." They had waked him up again, but he was ready to be cooperative.

"A1l right, the ones you know by name and looks first." Palliser handed him the list. Mallow checked it off obediently: four people, three men and the girl, Edna Willis. "You didn’t know the man with her, but we do, A having talked to him-Michael Jarvis. Who was there you knew by sight and not name?"

"Jesus, I’d have to think back-lessee, there’s a guy about forty, sandy hair, thin, comes in two-three times a week, wears sports clothes usually. Usually in about nine."

Palliser looked at Conway, who said promptly, "That’d be Adrian Forbes. He lives at the hotel around the corner."

"And there was a guy in work clothes, young, long hair dirty blond, about six feet. He’s been in before, not regular but I recognized him."

"Ralph Ensler," said Palliser. "He drives a Times delivery route. I talked to him."

"That’s it," said Mallow, looking at the list. "These others, I don’t know the names. Toombs, this Sawyer-Pace and Woods. But, say, where’s-"

"Forget about everybody else but Sawyer. The others are O.K., we’ve talked to them. Now, the big question is, what does Sawyer look like? This is a secondhand description, Mr. Mallow, and you may not place it even if you’d seen him before." Considering all they knew now about Don Ames’ reputation, it seemed hardly conceivable that anyone had had a grudge on him, deliberately sought him out; but you never knew. "You remember it was our night watch came out on it. We’ve talked with the two officers and tried to get anything they remembered about the witnesses." It had been a roundabout way to do it: the witnesses had been just strange faces to Piggott and Shogart, but on the other hand they were trained to notice faces. And it could be that this shy witness had defeated his own purpose with the false name, because it had caught Piggott’s attention as he took it down, and remembered more about the man.

"Well, shoot," said Mallow obligingly. "I’ll see what he sounds like."

"The best we can get, he was on the young side, between twenty and thirty, medium height, stocky, with light hair going thin, and glasses," said Palliser. "He might have been wearing a tan jumpsuit."

Mallow stared. "Why, that’s Georgie," he said. "I just now noticed on this list, Georgie’s name isn’t here and he was there that night. I saw him talking to the officers when they were taking names. You don’t mean it was Georgie who-"

"We don’t know. Maybe he was just shy of giving police his name for some reason," said Conway, his gray eyes hooded. "Georgie who?"

"George Little, he works at the Shell station kitty-corner from the restaurant. But Georgie wouldn’t do a thing like that! I don’t know him except as a customer, but he seems a very decent guy." Mallow was troubled. "I can’t make out why he should give a wrong name."

"Well, we’ll hope to find out. Thanks very much, Mr. Mallow."

They weren’t feeling certain that this was going to provide an answer. People did foolish, impulsive things for all kinds of reasons and no reason: it was just a lead that had to be followed up. As they left the apartment building where Mallow lived, Palliser buttoned his coat and said, "I don’t know when we’ve had so much rain in January.”

"Probably mean an extra-hot summer," said Conway. They were using his Buick. They made the eight blocks to the little chain restaurant quickly, in the middle of the day, and Conway slid into the left-turn lane, crossed and pulled into the Shell station.

A young kid came up, long hair falling over his eyes, and said indolently, "Yuh?"

"Is George Little here?"

"That’s him over there." The kid jerked his head at a broad back bent over the raised hood of a car away from the pumps.

"O.K." Conway pulled to the side of the apron and they both got out. "Mr. Little?"

The man straightened and turned. "That’s me," he said; and then he saw the badge in Palliser’s hand and stood very still. "Cops."

"That’s right. Is there somewhere where we can talk to you? The station-"

"Sure," said Little dully. He was mechanically wiping his hands on a rag, over and over. "Sure." He tossed the rag away and turned to the little glass-fronted station; they followed him in. "I bet I know how you found me," he said. "It was a damn fool thing to do, give you guys a wrong name. Fred Mallow knew I was there." And of course one small annoying thing about it was that they needn’t have gone the long way round; if they’d shown the list to Mallow he’d have told them right away who wasn’t on it and should have been.

"That’s right. Why did you do it?" asked Palliser. Little sat down on the edge of the desk. "Because I was scared," he said in a low voice. "I didn’t believe it, when Mallow went over and said he was dead. I just didn’t believe it. But then when the squad car came-and they said we all had to stay for the detectives-I was scared. I just wanted to get away." He raised his eyes briefly.

"Why?” asked Conway.

"Ah, you know why." He was silent, and they gave him time; he made several false starts at it, ran oily fingers over his thinning hair, and finally said, "The whole thing don’t make any sense at all. I don’t know why it happened. Yes, I do, but it was-it wasn’t-I don’t know. See, there’s this girl. She goes out with me sometimes. I-that night, I wanted to call her, but not from the station, I-the boss-he don’t mean anything but he likes to kid people. I went over to the restaurant on my break." He was talking expressionlessly, head down, as if under a compulsion to explain just how senseless it had been. "There’s a public phone just outside the rest rooms, down that little hall the other side from the counter. I’d just got up to it when I found out I didn’t have any change, and this guy came up just then, this Ames-I didn’t know his name, I’d seen him there before. And I asked him for change for a dollar, and he gave it to me and went into the rest room. So I called Dorothy-I still had the rest of the change in my hand-only she wasn’t home, her sister said she was out with somebody. And I was, I guess, so mad and kind of upset about it, I just stood there, and then I looked at the change in my hand and it was only eighty cents, he’d short-changed me a dime. And then he came out and I told him so, and he said he hadn’t, and I was still mad, I put the change in my pocket and there was my knife--" He brought it out slowly and showed it, an only slightly oversized pocketknife with a white handle. "It’s a gadget," he said, and pressed a catch on the top to fold and unfold the blades, one long and one short, very thin and pointed. "I did it before I knew I would, just like a little kid-I-I-just wanted to hurt somebody," he said. "And I never thought I’d really hurt him-I called him a name and he looked kind of surprised and then just went by me, and after a minute I came out and sat at the counter and had some coffee. And then-over in that booth-And Mallow said he was dead! I swear to God, I thought he’d had a heart attack, it couldn’t’ve been what I- And then that one big plainclothes cop said he’d been stabbed. I couldn’t believe it." He raised his head. "You’ll arrest me now, I guess."

"That’s right, Mr. Little. We’ll want to get all this down in a formal statement."

"Me, killing somebody. I still can’t believe it," said Little. "All right, I know you got to. I better call the boss to come in. That snotnosed kid can’t fill a tank without falling over his own feet."

What with one thing and another, not much had been done about Rodrigo Peralta, the addict found knifed on Monday night. Landers had started out to do some legwork on it, had talked to Walter Pepple and failed to find the other two tenants at home. They had turned up a record for Peralta, a petty pedigree of narco possession and B. and E., and that had given them the address of a relative, an uncle, Rubio Gonsalves. Glasser hadn’t found him yesterday, so now Landers tried the address again, down on Santa Barbara, and found him home. He was sitting in his single room, clad in underwear and slacks, reading a Spanish-language newspaper. He listened to Landers impassively and said, "The boy is dead? Let God judge him. He was nothing to me any more."

"You don’t know who any of his friends were?"

" No se. Nor I did not care. He had chosen his own road." He shrugged massively and picked up his paper again.

It didn’t seem to be the best moment to tell him that the coroner’s office would come down on him to pay for the funeral. Landers went downstairs again, into the dirty, dingy city street where refuse blew down the sidewalks and collected in the gutter, to where he’d left the Corvair down the block. It had begun to rain again, rather hard. He got into the car, and the engine was dead, wouldn’t even try to turn over. Landers said a few things, got out and looked under the hood, decided it was hopeless to do anything in the rain. He found a public phone, called the auto club and huddled in the overhang of a building for thirty minutes until the tow truck came.

The driver had a look at the Corvair’s innards, slammed the hood and said, "She’ll have to go in, mister. She’s about had it. Good little car, but a car’s only good for so many miles, you know. You need practically everything new. Oh, sure, a garage can fix her up, but it’ll only be a question of time before she goes out again."

Landers said a few more things. "Well, tow it in to the agency," he said. "I’ll talk to them about it."

He called a cab and got back to the office in the middle of the afternoon.

Hackett had just got back to the office at five o’clock, after getting the formal statement from Nygard and starting the machinery on the warrant. It was pouring rain outside, and he was wet. He found Landers blowing off steam about his car to Glasser, who said they’d all been telling him to trade that thing in for a year.

"Phil thinks it’s so funny," said Landers. "Saying I’ll have to break down and buy a new one, and my God, it isn’t that I’m stingy, but the payments-"

"Get a Gremlin," said Glasser. "You’ll get damn good mileage."

"I know, I know, I’ve driven Phil’s."

"Oh, Sergeant Hackett! Listen, I gotta make you believe me this time, they’re-"

"Oh, for the love of God!" said Hackett disgustedly. Mr. Yeager had plunged through the doorway with Sergeant Lake in pursuit.

"You’ve gotta listen, they’re gonna do it tonight, they’re gonna murder that woman! I heard ’em planning just how to do it, they’re gonna hit her on the head and put her in the bathtub and make it look like an accident, like she slipped and fell, and-"

"Now, Mr. Yeager," said Hackett. "If you’re going to tell me you were in the hall again and the door was open, don’t. Why don’t you just try to forget about it-"

"-And the girl’s going off after she’s helped him, see, nobody knows he’s got a girl, his ma, Mis’ Lampert, she’s kind of jealous of him-and then he’l1 pretend to find her and act all sorry and cry and carry on-"

"Now listen, Mr. Yeager. Just calm down. Try to explain to me just how you heard all this. You know you can’t. You’re just imagining-"

Yeager took a step back, licking his lips and looking in despair between Hackett and Lake. Then he said sullenly, "Oh, hell. Well-well, if you gotta know, I-I got the place bugged."

"What?" said Hackett. Landers laughed.

"I-well, hell, I don’t have much to do, nights," said Yeager weakly. "I took a course in electronics once. I-I did it first, we had a couple sets of newlyweds in the place-" Lake and Glasser began to laugh helplessly. "And it was kind of interesting, and-well-well," said Yeager half defensively, "it was, you know, kind of like picking a channel on TV-"

"What the hell’s going on here?" asked Mendoza, coming across the hall to find all his available staff convulsed with merriment and Yeager standing in the middle looking miserable.

Hackett pulled himself together and told him, and Mendoza began to laugh too. "It’s not so funny!" said Yeager. "It was-you coulda knocked me over, I heard ’em talk about it the first time-and damn it, I tried to get you to believe me, so you’d stop ’em, but you wouldn’t pay no attention! And I knew I hadda do something, so I-I got all the rest of it down on tape. The other times they talked." He reached into his pocket and produced three cheap sixty-minute tape cassettes. "Now you gotta believe it!"

"Well, I will be Goddamned!" said Hackett. "If this isn’t one for the books-you mean that innocent-looking fellow is really-Damnation, and we’ll have to do something about it." He looked at his watch. "I’d better call Angel. Luis?"

"I wouldn’t miss hearing those tapes for a million bucks," Mendoza said, grinning.

The tapes would make excellent evidence; this would be one trial that wouldn’t cost much time or money. They went out with Piggott and Schenke to surprise the quarry, and they did. Mendoza had laughed over Mr. Yeager’s homemade entertainment; and in the course of twenty-six years at this sordid job, he had seen violence and blood, tragedy and death, brutality and mayhem of all sorts, but he wouldn’t soon forget the look on Mrs. Lampert’s face as she listened to what they knew, how they knew it. Looking from them to her son-a little too good-looking, Edward Lampert, with a weak chin and pale eyes-she aged twenty years in a moment. Expectably, he blustered and was sullen in turns, but finally parted with the girl’s name, Diane Ashley, and her address. Hackett went to add her to the party, and collected some fingernail scratches to match Piggott’s.

They ended up at the jail at eleven o’clock, booking them in.

"But you know, Mr. Yeager," Hackett had said before that, "you’ll really have to remove all the bugs. Apart from anything else, it’s invasion of privacy."

"I guess so," said Yeager. He sighed deeply. "I’m sorry it had to come to that, I hadda tell you, get you to believe me. But I guess I better. But you just got no idea, Sergeant Hackett-it was interesting as hell!"

About two o’clock that morning Patrolmen Zimmerman and O’Neill were handed a call to a disturbance on Alvarado. When they got to it, they found an interested little crowd, mostly black, around a couple outside an all-night restaurant, beside a car at the curb.

"You take him in and lock him up!" the woman shouted at them as they got out of the car. "He tried to kill me! Tried to strangle me!" She was a young woman, not bad-looking and decently dressed. They calmed her down and she gave them a name, Ruby Blake. "I just stopped in that place, have a bite to eat before I go home after work-I work at a rest home, night shift. He got talking, acted all nice and polite, and offered me a ride home. And then when I got in his car, he started fooling around and tried to strangle me!" She was crying then, and she opened her coat to show them a couple of darkening bruises.

They couldn’t get anything out of the man at all. He was light-skinned, clean-shaven, about thirty: looked ordinary. He just looked at them sullenly and wouldn’t answer questions. They looked in the car and it didn’t have any registration, so they called in the plate-number. It had been reported stolen in Beverly Hills that afternoon.

"Would you make a statement charging him, Miss Blake?" asked Zimmerman.

"I surely would! You just tell me where to do it. Treat a decent girl like that-"

"It’ll be assault with intent," said O’Neill. "Robbery-Homicide."

"The night watch has gone by now. Leave a report with the main desk," said Zimmerman, "and stash him in jail." They called the garage to tow the car in and put him in cuffs and drove down to the Alameda facility. He never said a word all the way.

The day watch had hardly come in, on Thursday morning, when there was a heist reported at a drugstore on Spring Street. Galeano went out on it, and the pharmacist gave him a good description. He was so mad, he said he’d come over right now and look at mug-shots. He did, and within tive minutes of the time Phil Landers had settled him down with a book, he picked one. "That’s him!" he told Galeano positively. "I’d know him anywhere, that ugly mug! He didn’t even have a hat on, I’d know him in the dark!"

It was a picture of one Adam O’Hara, and he had the right record for the job: two counts of armed robbery and a few other things. There was a fairly recent address, and Galeano went looking for him. It was a small apartment on Sunset Avenue, and he got no answer to his ring, but the door across the hall opened and a nice-looking little gray-haired woman asked, "Are you looking for the O’Haras?"

"That’s right," said Galeano. "Do you know where Mr. O’Hara is?"

"Why, yes. He’ll still be at the hospital. He said he’d let me know, but it’s a first baby and I expect she’ll be some time. What? Oh, it’s the French Hospital. He was so worried, poor boy, I had to call the doctor for him."

Galeano went over to the French Hospital and discovered Adam O’Hara in beaming transports over a fine boy, nine pounds three ounces, born twenty minutes before. A whole staff of nurses, nurses’ aides and other prospective fathers could say that O’Hara had been there since two o’clock that morning.

Galeano was annoyed, and for some reason he also felt queerly desolate. Even as Mendoza said about the citizens, They have eyes and see not. It was likely that the pharmacist, angry and excited, had mistaken O’Hara’s mugshot for somebody who looked like him-he wasn’t an unusual type-but Galeano hadn’t any immediate impulse to browse through the books looking.

It was raining now in a halfhearted sort of way. He went to have lunch at the Globe Grill, and Marta wasn’t there. He sat where she would have waited on him, but the buxom dark girl came up instead. He waited till she brought his order and asked, "Isn’t Mrs. Fleming here?"

"No, she’s off sick." She hardly looked at him, didn’t seem to recognize him as one of the cops who had been here.

Galeano ate his macaroni and cheese, not thinking much. Come down to it, Carey and the rest of those damned cynics had done all the thinking on it. All from the old viewpoint, drilled into any cop as any lawyer, what was the crime, who profited, how was it done, by whom. Damn it, he felt sorry for her: and maybe he was being stupid. He could follow the way Mendoza and Carey thought, logically-and there were questions to be answered about Marta Fleming. But he found that sometime just in the last couple of hours he had come back to simple feeling, and what the feeling said was, that’s an honest girl, telling the truth. And if that was simple in another sense, the hell with being too smart.

He paid the bill, put on his coat, went out and drove down to Westlake Avenue. He had to turn to park on the legal side. The place was quiet except for a faint hint of singing in a whiskeyish voice, from the top floor. He pushed the bell; pushed it again. After a while the door was pulled back and she stood there. She had a navy wool robe belted tightly around her, and her russet-blonde-tawny hair was uncombed, her nose red.

"Mrs. Fleming-"

"You!" she said. "Police again! Am I never any more to have peace?"

"Now listen," said Galeano. "I-"

"Gott im Himmel! Go away!" she said furiously. "I do not wish to talk to you-is that for you enough plain language?"

Galeano began to feel slightly irritated. All the various things the people he’d talked to had said about her slid past his mind. "If you’d just 1isten-"

"I will not listen to you, stupid pig of a policeman! Go away!" she said arrogantly.

Galeano, that mild and even-tempered man, quite suddenly lost his temper. He reached out and took her by the shoulders and shook her hard, back and forth. "Who’s stupid, you damned silly woman? It’s no wonder you haven’t made any friends here, keeping your damned stiff-necked pride, never meeting people halfway! All I wanted to tell you, damn it, is that I believe your damned silly story-I think you’re honest-and God forgive me for maybe being a fool! Now if you want to go on being a Goddamned martyr, it’s perfectly all right with me, but all I can say is, I think you’re a bigger Goddamned fool!"

He shook her again and let her go and stepped back.

"Oh!" she said, and for a minute he thought she was going to hit him, and then she crumpled against the door-frame and began to cry in great gulping sobs. "But I am not a martyr-all my fault-because I was weak-and nobody, nobody, nobody to talk- sehr einsam, niemand-Ach, die kleine Keitzchen, die kleine Katzchen, aber -all my fault- ach, so richt, I cannot talk with people, tell how-" She fell forward, sobbing, and Galeano caught her in his arms.