by Dell Shannon
Commerce started ten or twelve blocks up, at the big freight yards, and dead-ended two blocks down from Humboldt. It was a dreary length of ancient macadam lined mostly with single houses-narrow, one-storey, ramshackle clapboard houses as old as the century or older, and never lovingly cared for: here and there was one with a fresh coat of paint, or a greener strip of grass in front, or cleaner-looking curtains showing, but most were a uniform dun color with old paint cracked, brown devil grass high around the front steps. About halfway down its length, the street grew some bigger houses of two storeys, square frame houses not much younger and no neater: most of those were rooming houses by the signs over their porches. Interspersed with these were a few dingy apartment buildings, a gas station or two, neighborhood stores-a delicatessen, a family grocery; and in windows along nearly every block were little signs-SEWING DONE CHEAP, CANARIES FOR SALE, FIX-IT SHOP, HAND-TMLORING.
Agnes Browne lived behind one of the signs, that said primly, SEAMSTRESS, in the ground-floor right window of the house at the corner of Commerce and Wade, two blocks up from Humboldt. She worked as a waitress at a dime-store lunch counter; the sewing added to her wages some, and anyway she liked to sew and figured she might as well get paid for it. She didn't care much for going out and around; it still made her kind of nervous. She couldn't help but be afraid people were looking at her and thinking, Huh, kind of dark even for Spanish, wonder if- When the landlady said Browne didn't sound very Spanish, Agnes had told her it was her married name and she was a widow. But she was kind of sorry she'd ever started it now; it was like what the minister said for sure, about the guilty fleeing where no man pursueth. It hadn't been the money, she could earn as much anyway, maybe even more, at a dozen jobs colored girls got hired for; but there were other things besides money. Only she felt guilty at making friends under false pretenses, and as for Joe, well, she just couldn't. Joe was a nice boy, he had a good job at a garage, he was ambitious; he'd asked her for a date half a dozen times, but it wouldn't be right she should take up with him. Not without telling him. A lot of girls would have, but Agnes didn't figure it'd be fair. All the same, she liked Joe and it was hard. She was thinking about it this morning as she started for work; seemed like she couldn't think of anything else these days. She was a little late, it was ten past eight already, and she hurried; she could walk to work, it was only two blocks down to Main and four more to the store.
As usual she cut across the empty lot at the corner of Humboldt. There'd been a house on the lot once, but it had been so badly damaged by fire a few years back that what was left of it was pulled down. Now there was just the outline of the foundation left, all overgrown with weed-devil grass and wild mustard. Agnes had tripped over the hidden ledge of the concrete foundation before, and skirted it automatically now; but in the middle of the lot she tripped over something else.
When she saw what it was she clapped a hand to her mouth and backed away without picking up the purse she'd dropped. Then she ran across to Mr. Fratelli's store where there was a telephone. Agnes knew her duty as a citizen, but that didn't say she liked the idea of getting mixed up in such a thing.
Huddling her coat around her, listening to Mr. Fratelli's excited Italian incoherence, she wondered miserably if the cops would ask many questions about herself. Probably so, and go on asking, and find out everything-maybe it served her right for being deceitful, the Bible said that never did anybody no good in the long run, and wasn't it the truth….
***
"I figured you'd like to take a look before they move it," said Hackett on the phone. "The boys just got here. If you want I'll put a hold on the stiff until you've seen it."
"Do that." Lieutenant Mendoza put down the phone and rose from his desk.
Hackett was the one man under him who fully respected his feeling in such matters, though it was to be feared that Hackett put it down to conscientiousness. The truth was less flattering: Mendoza always found it hard to delegate authority, never felt a job well done unless he saw to it himself-which of course was simply egotism, he acknowledged it. He could not do everything. But Hackett, who knew him so well, had a feeling for the nuances; if Hackett thought he should see this, he was probably right.
When he parked behind the patrol car twenty minutes later and picked his way across the weed-grown corner toward the little knot of men, one of the patrol officers there remarked sotto voce, "That your Mex lieutenant? He don't like to get his nice new shoes all dusty, does he?"
Detective-Sergeant Arthur Hackett said, "That's enough about Mexes, boy. For my money he's the best we got." He watched Mendoza stepping delicately as a cat through the tall growth: a shin, dark man, inevitably impeccable in silver gray, his topcoat just a shade darker than his suit, his Hamburg the exact charcoal of the coat and with the new narrow brim, tilted at the correct angle and no more. Mendoza's tie this morning was a subtle foulard harmony of charcoal and silver with the discreetest of scarlet flecks, and the shoes he was carefully guarding from scratches were probably the custom-made gray pigskin pair.
"My God, he looks like a gigolo," commented the patrolman, who was only a month out of training and meeting plainclothes men for the first time on the job. "What brand of cologne does he use, I wonder. Better get ready to hold him up when he takes a look at the corpse."
He hadn't enjoyed the corpse much himself.
"Don't strain yourself flexing those muscles," said Hackett dryly. "Like Luis'd say himself, las apariencias enganan -appearances are deceiving."
Mendoza came up to them and nodded to the patrolmen at Hackett's mention of their names. At close quarters, the young recruit saw, you could guess him at only an inch or so under your own five-eleven, not so small as he looked; but he had the slender Latin bone structure, minimizing his size. Under the angled Hamburg, thin, straight features: a long chin, a precise narrow black line of mustache above a delicately cut mouth, a long nose, black opaque eyes, sharp-arched heavy brows. A damn Mex gigolo, thought the recruit.
"I thought you'd like to see it," Hackett was saying. "It's another Carol Brooks."
Mendoza's long nose twitched once. "That is one I'd like to have inside. You think it's the same?" His voice was unexpectedly deep and soft, with only an occasional hint of accent to say he had not spoken English from birth.
"Your guess, my guess, who knows until we get him?-and maybe not then."
Hackett shrugged. "Take a look, Luis."
Mendoza walked on a dozen steps to where other men stood and squatted. The ambulance had arrived; its attendants stood smoking and waiting, watching the police surgeon, the men from headquarters with their tape measures and cameras. Mendoza came up behind the kneeling surgeon and looked at the corpse; his expression stayed impassive, thoughtful, and he did not trouble to remove his hat.
"When would you say?" he asked the surgeon.
"Oh-morning. Didn't hear you-you always move like a cat. It's a messy one, Luis, see for yourself. Between ten and midnight, give or take a little." The surgeon hoisted himself up, a stoutening, bald, middle-aged man, and brushed earth from his trouser legs. "I'll tell you what she actually died of when I've had a better look-strangulation or blows-my guess'd be the head blows. There was a sizable rock-"
"Yes," said Mendoza. He had already seen the rock, jagged, triangular. "She was cutting across from Commerce, so she knew these streets." A faint track made by foot traffic, just out from the corner of the house foundation, and the woman lay across the track.
"Daresay," grunted the surgeon. Hackett strolled up and the patrolmen followed, the recruit concealing reluctance. "No identification yet but you probably will have if she's local. Either she wasn't carrying a purse or he took it away with him."
"Never get prints off that rock," added Hackett to that. "You see what I mean, Luis. First off, it looks like any mugging, for what she had in her bag. I don't say it isn't. You take some of these punks, they get excited-Doc'll remember the ten-dollar word for it." Hackett, who looked rather like a professi
onal wrestler, adopted the protective coloration of acting like one on occasion; possibly, thought Mendoza amusedly, in automatic deference to popular expectation. In fact he was-unlike Mendoza-a university graduate: Berkeley '50. It was a theory that Mendoza did not subscribe to: he had never found it helpful-or congenial-to pretend to less intelligence than he had. "They're after the cash, but they get a kick out of the mugging too. Horseplay."
"Yes, I know," said Mendoza. "This doesn't look like horseplay."
"She wasn't raped," offered the surgeon.
"I can see that for myself. She's on her way home, at that time of night-maybe from late work, from a friend's house. There's a full moon, and she knows these streets-she doesn't think twice at cutting across here. But something is waiting." He sank to his heels over the body, careful to pull up his trouser knees first, and regarded it in silence for a long minute.
Before it had been a body it had been a young and pretty woman: in fact, a very young one, under make-up lavishly applied. The too-white powder, the heavily mascaraed lashes, the smeared dark-red lipstick, was a mask turned to the pitiless gray sky of this chill March day. The unfashionable shoulder-length hair, where it wasn't stiffened with clotted blood, was bleached white-gold, but along the temples and at the parting showed dark. "Coat pockets?" he murmured.
"Handkerchief and a wool scarf," said Hackett.
"To put over her hair in case it rained," nodded Mendoza. "Then she had a handbag too."
"So I figured. Dwyer and Higgins are looking around the neighborhood."
A bag-snatcher, whether or not he was also a murderer, seldom kept the bag long; it would be tossed away on the ran.
Her clothes were tasteless, flamboyant-tight Kelly-green sweater with a round white angora collar, black fame skirt full-cut and too short, sheer stockings, black patent-leather pumps with four-inch heels, over all a long black coat with dyed rabbit round the collar and hem. Mendoza felt the coat absently, expecting the harshness of shoddy material: cheap, ill-cut stuff.
Two very different corpses, he reflected, this tawdry pseudo blonde and Carol Brooks. Carol Brooks, six months ago, had been an eminently respectable and earnest young woman, not very good looking, and she had died in the soiled blue uniform-dress she wore for work. Otherwise, no, the corpses weren't so different.
"Yes," he murmured, and stood up. "He didn't intend murder, to start with-I don't think. He hadn't any weapon but his hands. And he didn't reach out to find one, blind, like that, and pick up the rock-it wasn't used that way, Art. He had her down, she was fighting him, trying to scream-he was strangling her, finding it not quick enough-and he slams her down on the ground, hard, just by chance on the rock. I can see it going like that. Unpremeditated violence, but once it unleashes itself-he looked down at the body again-"insane violence."
"Here comes Bert," said Hackett, "with the handbag. Not that it'll maybe take us very far."
"That's a loaded question for the so-called expert," said the surgeon, looking interested over the flame of his lighter, "but I'll say this, at least-he must have gone berserk for some reason. Nobody can say sane or insane just on that evidence-unnecessary violence. That sort of thing is apt to be vicious personal hatred, or a couple of other quirks."
"You're so right," said Mendoza. "You'll make a report all embellished with the technical terms, but to go on with for the moment?"
"Her neck's broken. Excessive laceration of the throat. Half a dozen head wounds, all but one on the back of the skull-the one that killed her, I think, is this here, on the temple. Maybe she turned her head in struggling and- The left shoulder is dislocated. She was struck repeatedly in the face with a fist. You can see the cyanosed areas, there. Her right arm is broken just below the elbow. The whole torso has been damaged, kicked or maybe jumped on. Fractured ribs, I think, and internal injuries. It's on the cards some of that was done after death, but I don't know that it'll be provable-probably a very short time after, of course. There's some damage to the left eye, as if a finger or thumb had been-"
"Yes. It was Dr. Bainbridge who made the autopsy on Brooks," said Mendoza. "You wouldn't remember. That is the one thing of positive resemblance. Otherwise?-he flicked away the burnt match and drew deep on his cigarette, shrugging-"any mugger after a woman's bag, who used a little too much violence."
"So?" said the surgeon. "Ever catch that one?" Mendoza shook his head.
"Well, here we are," announced Hackett, who had gone to meet Dwyer. "In plain sight in the gutter a couple of blocks away." It was the bag one would have predicted she would carry: a big square patent leather affair with a coquettish white bow cluttering the snap-fastener.
" Ya lo creo, as we might put it, huh?"
Mendoza lifted his upper lip at it. "Before you get promotion and cease to be my junior in rank, Arturo, you will have perfected your vile accent. It may take years."
Very delicately Hackett delved with two fingers into the bag's interior and came up with a woman's wallet, bright pink plastic, ornamented all around the border with imitation pearls. Mendoza regarded it with satisfied horror: the very object this girl would have admired. "Lot of other stuff here-doesn't look as if he took a damn thing. Funny he put the wallet back after grabbing the cash, ifHe might've figured the wallet alone'd be spotted quicker and picked up, but then again muggers don't think so far ahead usually, and this one, I don't see him in a state to think at all, after that. If-"
"?Basta! One thing at a time."
"Her name was Elena Ramirez. No drivers' license. Dime-store snapshot of herself and, I presume, current boy friend. Social Security card. Membership card in some club. I.D. card-address and phone-little change in the coin purse-that figures, of course, he'd take the bills-"
Dwyer said, "Prints are going to love you for putting your fat paws all over that cellophane."
"All right," Mendoza cut off Hackett's retort abruptly. "Give me that address, Art. I'll see the woman who found her and then the family-if there is one. Dwyer, you and Higgins can begin knocking on doors did anyone hear a disturbance, screams perhaps? When we know more of the background, maybe I'll have other jobs for you. They can take her away now."
***
Hackett drifted over to Fratelli's grocery behind Mendoza. In two hours, tomorrow, Hackett would be the man nominally in charge of working this case; a lieutenant of detectives could not devote all his time to a relatively minor case like this. The fact annoyed Mendoza, partly because he had an orderly mind, liked to take one thing at a time, thoroughly. Even more did it irritate him now because it was intuitively clear to him that this girl and Carol Brooks had met death at the same hands, and he wanted very much to get that one inside, caught in a satisfactory net of evidence and booked and committed for trial.
If one murder was more or less important than another, neither of these was important: the kind of casual homicide that happens every week in any big city. This girl did not look as if she would be much missed, as if she had been a human being with much to offer the world, but one never knew. Carol Brooks, now, that had perhaps been a loss-yes. He remembered again the warm gold of the recorded voice a trifle rough as yet, a trifle uncertain, but the essential quality there.
However, his cold regret at missing her murderer had nothing of sentiment in it. The reason was the reason, in a wider sense, why Luis Mendoza was a lieutenant of detectives, and-most of the time-regarded fondly by his superiors.
There are people who enjoy solving puzzles: he was not one of them. But-probably, he told himself, because he was a great egotist, and his vanity was outraged to be confronted with something he did not know once a puzzle was presented to him he could not rest until he had ferreted out the last teasing secret. It was not often that he was faced with a complex mystery; the world would grow a great deal older before police detectives in everyday routine met with such bizarre and glamorous situations as those in fiction. Por desgracia, indeed: unfortunate: for complex problems inevitably had fewer possible solutions.
T
his thing now, this was the sort of puzzle (a much more difficult sort) that Mendoza, and all police detectives, met again and again: the shapeless crime that might have been done by anyone in the city-mostly impersonal crime, this sort, with destiny alone choosing the victim. The shopkeeper killed in the course of a robbery, the woman dead at the end of attack for robbery or rape, the casual mugging in an alley-nothing there of orderliness, the conveniently limited list of suspects, the tricky alibis, the complicated personal relationships to unravel: criminal and victim might never have met before. Or perhaps it might be an intimate business, a personal matter, and only all arranged to look otherwise-and if it were, so much the easier to find the truth, for one had then only a few places to look.
But so often it was the casual, shapeless thing. And there are always, in any efficient city police force, the policemen like Luis Mendoza, single-mindedly, even passion lately concerned to bring some order and reason, some ultimate shape, to the chaos. Not necessarily from any social conscientiousness-Mendoza cared little for humanity en masse, and was a complete cynic regarding the individual. Nor from any abstract love of truth or, certainly, of justice-for all too often the criminals he took for the law evaded punishment, this way or that way; and Mendoza sometimes swore and sometimes shrugged, but he did not lose any sleep over that. Being a realist, he said, Lo que no se puede remediar, se hade aguantar -what can't be cured must be endured.
