The Knave of Hearts

by Dell Shannon

  The Knave of Hearts

  Dell Shannon

  1982

  ONE

  "So that’s all, enough! The same old story—¡siempre la trampa, sure! I’ll be damned if—"

  "Oh, damn you and whatever you want to think—the trap, always the same susp— And what makes you think I’d have you? ¡A ningun precio, thanks very much. Get out, go away, I can’t—"

  "¡Un millón de gracias, le deseo lo propio—-the same to you!" He lost his temper about once in five years, Mendoza, and when he did it wasn’t a business of loud violence; he had gone dead white and his voice was soft and shaking, and his eyes and his voice were cold as death and as hard. "You—"

  "Get out for God’s sake-¡largo de aqui!—you can go to hell for all I—" And she didn’t lose her temper often either, but it didn’t take her that way when she did; she was all but screaming at him now, taut with rage, and if she’d had a weapon to hand she’d have killed him.

  "¡Rapidamente, anywhere away from you! ¡Y para todo, muchas gracias!" That was sardonic, and pure ice; he snatched up his hat and marched out, closing the door with no slam, only a viciously soft little click.

  Alison stood motionless there for a long moment, her whole body still shaking with the anger, the impulse to violence; she breathed deep, feeling her heart gradually slow its pounding. And now, of course, she could think of all she should have said, longed to say to him. This cheap cynical egotist, only the one thing in his mind—every obscene word she knew in two tongues, she’d like to—she should have—

  And then, a while after that, she drew a long shuddering breath and moved, to sit down in the nearest chair. The fury was dead in her now, and that was another difference between them; it never lasted long with her. She sat there quite still; her head was aching slightly, then intolerably—aftermath of all that primitive physical reaction. The little brown cat Sheba leaped up beside her, asking attention, purring; Alison stroked her mechanically. The kitten he had given her, the only thing she had ever let him give her.

  And wasn’t he a judge of women indeed, that way, all ways! It was even a little funny: one of the first things he’d said to her after they’d met—" A respectable woman like you, she’s so busy convincing me she’s not after my money, vaya, she’s never on guard against my charm."

  Ought to take something for this headache.

  She got up, went slowly through the bedroom to the bathroom, swallowed some aspirin. In the garish overhead light there she looked at herself in the glass impersonally. Alison Weir, and not bad for thirty-one either; her best point, of course, was the thick curling red hair, and the fine white skin and green-hazel eyes complemented it. You might think Alison Weir could do pretty well for herself, even with that foolish too-young marriage thirteen years in her past, and no money now, to count. The women you saw—plain, dowdy, careless, and bitchy too—selfish and mean women—who somehow managed to find men for themselves . . .

  "Oh, God," she whispered, and bent over, clutching the slippery bowl against the pain. The aspirin hadn’t taken hold yet, but this was a worse pain than the headache.

  It was true, of course. She had forgotten now exactly what thoughtless little phrase had started the ugly sudden quarrel—his sarcastic answer and her quick, angry protest fanning the flame. But in essence, his cynical suspicion was true, how true. Setting the trap, to have him all hers.

  She could not face the woman in the mirror, the pale woman with the pain in her eyes. She went into the bedroom and sat down on the bed. But from the beginning she had known him for what he was. Not for any one woman: not ever, apart from his womanizing, all of Luis Mendoza for any human person. He was just made that way. Like one of his well-loved cats, at least half of him always secret to himself, aloof. And maybe all because of the hurts he’d taken (for she knew him very thoroughly, perhaps better than he suspected, and she knew his terrible sensitivity). The hurts he’d taken as a dirty little Mex kid running the slum streets—long before he came into all that money. So that he’d never give anyone the chance to hurt him again, ever, in any way. Never let anyone close enough to hurt him. She had known: but knowing was no armor for the heart.

  There was an old song her father used to sing: one of the favorites, it was, around the cook-fires in the evening, in every makeshift little construction camp she remembered—always one of the locally hired laborers with a guitar. The easy desultory talk after the day’s work, sporadic laughter, and the guitar talking too, as accompaniment, in the blue southern night. Ya me voy . . . mi bien, I must go, my love . . .te vengo a decir adios—I have come to tell you goodbye . . . te mando decir, mi bien, como se mancuernan dos—to tell you how disastrously two people can be yoked . . .

  What use had it been to know? It was all her own fault. Maybe she deserved whatever pain there would be, was—she had known how it would end. Quarrel or no, he would have gone eventually. When he’d had enough of her, when he’d found a new quarry—when instinct told him she was coming too close, wanting too much of him. And she did not need telling that all this while she alone hadn’t held him—there’d been others, for variety.

  Toma esa llavita de oro, mi bien . . . take this gold key, open my breast and you’ll see how much I love you . . . y el mal page que me das——and how badly you repay me . . .

  And the time had come, and he had gone; she would not see him again; the interlude was over. It was for Alison Weir to pick up the pieces the best way she could, and go on from here. Toma esa cajita de oro, mi bien . . . take this gold box, look to see what it contains . . . lleva amores, lleva celos—y un poco de sentimiento—love and jealousy, and a little regret . . .

  Shameful, shameless, that she could not feel any resentment, any righteous hatred, that—for what he was—he had left her to this pain. No self-respect as half—armor against it: despicable, that she could summon no shred of pride to keep anger alive.

  It was going to be very bad indeed, somehow finding out how to go on—somewhere—without him. That was no one’s fault, hers or his. No one deliberately created feelings; they just came. No one could be rid of them deliberately, either.

  It was going to be very bad. All the ways it could be, not just the one way. Because there had been also (would it help, this objective terminology for emotions?) a companionship: their minds operating on the same wave length, as it were.

  "But I should be ashamed," and she was startled to hear her own voice. "I should be ashamed—" not to hate. She put her hands to her face; she sat very still, bracing herself against the pain.

  "Post-mortems!" said Mendoza violently. "Religion! ‘Saved from Satan and thus confessing my sins!’ " He slapped Rose Foster’s signed statement down on his desk. "What the hell are we supposed to do with this?"

  "Don’t look at me,” said Hackett, "I didn’t handle the Haines case, and neither did you—by the grace of God. All for the best in this best of all worlds, isn’t it?—damn shame Thompson had to drop dead of a heart attack at fifty, but at least it’s saved him from some rough handling by the press. What’d the Chief say?"

  "You don’t need the answer to that one," said Mendoza. "Tomemos del mal el menos—the lesser of two evils. Nothing definite to the press—no statements for the time being. Get to work on it and find out, find out everything, top to bottom! But no washing dirty linen in public."

  He lit a cigarette with an angry snap of his lighter and swiveled round in his desk-chair to face out the window, over the hazy panorama of the city spread below. He didn’t like this business; nobody in the department who knew anything about it liked it; but he might not be taking it so violently except for that damned fight with Alison last night.

  He smoked the cigarette in little quick angry drags, nervous. Women! There
was a saying. Sin mujeres y sin vientos, tendriamos menos tormentos—without women and without wind, we’d have less torment. Absolutamente, he thought grimly. Scenes like that upset him; he liked it kept nice and easy, the smooth exit when an exit was indicated and that was that. Usually he managed it that way, but once in a while—women being women—a scene was unavoidable. He might have known it would be, with Alison: not the ordinary woman. He was sorry about it, that it had ended that way. Apart from anything else, he had liked Alison—as a person to be with, not just a woman—they’d understood each other: minds that marched together. But women—! Always wanting to go too deep, put it on the permanent basis. Sooner or later the exit had to be made. He was only sorry, hellishly sorry, that this one had had to be made that way.

  But it was water under the bridge now, and the sooner he stopped brooding on it the better.

  God knew he had enough to occupy his mind besides.

  Abruptly he swiveled back and met Hackett’s speculative stare. Art Hackett knew him too damned well, probably guessed something was on his mind besides this business .... Hackett didn’t matter. Hackett nice and cozy in his little trap, not knowing yet it was one: Hackett two weeks married to his Angel, still the maudlin lover.

  He picked up the Foster woman’s statement again and looked at it with distaste. I know I done awful wrong and now I been saved into the true religion I want to clear my conscience once for all . . .

  "If that," said Hackett, "is so, it’s damned dirty linen, Luis. And it can’t be kept a secret forever. There was the hell of a lot of publicity over Haines, not too long ago. It’d be news with a capital N—and when it comes to that, would it be such a hot idea to hide it up, for the honor of the force so to speak?" He shrugged and shook his head.

  "That," said Mendoza, "is just one unfortunate aspect. As you say, at least Thompson’s dead and whatever they say about him he won’t hear. Also, he makes a very convenient scapegoat, doesn’t he, tucked away underground? We can always give it out the poor fellow was failing—all very sad, but such things will happen, obviously he was prematurely senile and didn’t know what he was doing. Which is one damned lie. And what the hell is this worth?" He flicked the statement contemptuously. "Sure, a lot of publicity—before the trial, after the trial. A lot of people sympathetic to Haines and his family, believing in him. Here’s a damn-fool female turned religious fanatic—who’s to say she didn’t make the whole thing up, just to get her name in the papers?"

  "She had his pipe," said Hackett. “The wife’s identified it."

  "All right—¡vaya por Dios!—the wife was panting to identify it," said Mendoza irritably. "Did she really look at it so close?"

  Hackett got out a cigarette and turned it round in his fingers, looking at it. "You taking the stand we can’t be wrong? It happens, Luis. Not often, but it happens."

  "No lo niego, I don’t deny it. It happens. If it happened here, sure, the press boys’ll get hold of it, and you know what they’ll say, what the outcome will be, as well as I do. Stupid blundering cops—prejudiced evidence—and the muddleheaded editorials about the death penalty and circumstantial evidence! ¡Es lo de siempre, the same old story—¡por Dios y Satanás!" He laughed without humor.

  "And bringing it up again," agreed Hackett, "every time somebody we get for homicide looks wide-eyed at a press camera and says, ‘I swear I’m not guilty.' You needn’t tell me. But there it is."

  They both looked at the couple of stapled sheets on the desk with resentment.

  The Haines case had been officially closed on the police books, for over a year. Haines had appealed the verdict, of course; there had been delays, the desperate little seeking of legal loopholes, but in the end he’d gone to the gas chamber for the murder of Mary Ellen Wood. And all that time, during and after the trial, no police officer who’d worked on the case had had any smallest doubt of his guilt. That wasn’t prejudice, or carelessness, or stupidity: it was the way all the facts pointed. There was a lot of nonsense talked about circumstantial evidence; people very seldom committed serious crimes before witnesses, so circumstantial evidence was usually the only evidence there was, and quite valid evidence too. In fact, as Mendoza remembered hearing a judge remark once, witnesses being as prone to error as they were, circumstantial evidence was frequently worth more than eyewitness testimony.

  This was an efficient, modern police force, noted for its integrity and competence, its high standards for recruits. Detective-Sergeant Thompson had happened to get the Haines case, but it might have fallen to Mendoza or any of his sergeants, and if it had, none of them would have come up with a different answer—not on all the evidence that showed.

  Mary Ellen Wood, nineteen months ago, had just turned twenty. She was a pretty girl, brown-haired and brown-eyed, and she was popular on the L.A.C.C. campus; but by all accounts she was a shy, serious girl who didn’t spend much time fooling around with the boys in study hour or afterward. She was majoring in English literature and history, and she was a good student. She lived with her parents and two younger sisters in a nice middle-class house in a nice middle-class neighborhood in Hollywood. She had worked at temporary office jobs a couple of summers, to earn her tuition and buy clothes, but during the school year she held no regular job, did occasional baby-sitting for a little extra money. The Haineses—Allan Haines and his wife Sally—had hired her for that a number of times. They lived only a few blocks away from the Woods, and they’d met Mary Ellen through Sally Haines’ twenty-year-old brother Jim Fairless, who went to L.A.C.C. too. The Haineses had two small children, a boy six and a girl four, and were expecting another.

  Most people seemed to have liked Mary Ellen, and those who knew her best (outside her family: you couldn’t always go by what the family said) said she was "a nice girl"—not the kind of girl to, well, do anything she shouldn’t—and a steady girl too: usually dated only on week-ends, and helped her mother around the house. So the family had been somewhat alarmed almost right away when she didn’t come home at her regular time that Wednesday afternoon. By six o’clock her father was calling the hospitals, and by seven the police.

  So eventually there were quite a few trained men looking for Mary Ellen and asking questions about her. For nearly a week they looked and asked. They learned, among other things, that Mary Ellen had confided to one of her girl friends that she’d had a little trouble with the husband at a place she’d been baby-sitting: no names mentioned. When it appeared that she hadn’t vanished voluntarily, they began to look at the people she’d worked for. But before they got round to the Haineses, Sally Haines happened to go into a little garden shed in the Haineses’ back yard looking for a rake, and she found Mary Ellen’s brown handbag on the shelf there. The girl’s belongings were all in it, including identification. Mrs. Haines realized at once what it was, and like an honest citizen she called the police.

  Probably Sally Haines had done some bitter thinking about her behavior as an honest citizen. Because then, of course, the police had taken a good look at the Haineses and their property; and without much difficulty they had found Mary Ellen, hastily buried in the earth floor of the garden shed. Sergeant Thompson had taken over then, and within thirty-six hours he had arrested Allan Haines on a charge of murder.

  The autopsy showed that the girl had been raped and shortly afterward beaten and strangled: two of many blows or the strangulation could have been the actual cause of death—the surgeon thought it had been the blows.

  She had last been seen, by anyone who knew her, at a little past three o’clock on the campus that Wednesday. She’d been offered a ride home, but declined, saying she already had one—she was meeting someone. However, no one of her acquaintances on campus had been her date, as far as could be ascertained—and Thompson had looked very thoroughly. Especially, of course, he had looked at young Jim Fairless, who would have had knowledge of and access to the Haineses’ garden shed. But Fairless had never gone around with Mary Ellen, he had a girl of his own; and he also had an
excellent alibi—you couldn’t ask for a better. The surgeon had pinned down the time of death to between that Wednesday afternoon and the following afternoon or evening. It was midterm, and Jim Fairless had cut the last two days of classes that week for a vacation. He’d left Wednesday noon with his girl, a young married couple as chaperones, and an engaged couple, both of whom were classmates of his at college, for Lake Arrowhead and a few days of winter sports. All five of them said he’d been with them continuously over that weekend.

  So then Thompson looked at Haines, and it appeared that Haines had left his office at around one-thirty that Wednesday and couldn’t prove where he’d been and what he’d done afterward. He was a salesman for a wholesale garden-supply firm and didn’t keep regular office hours; nobody thought anything of his being out that afternoon. Questioned, he’d told a lie about where he’d been; and when that fell through—by then he understood that he was the number-one suspect—he said all right, he’d tell the truth, God forgive him but he’d gone to see this woman, this Rose Pringle. He said he’d met the woman at one of the companies he sold to: she wasn’t an employee, she’d been applying for a job there. He didn’t know much about her except her name—he’d only met her twice. Just one of those things—he must have been crazy, but there it was. He gave an address, where he said he’d been with her that afternoon; it was a shabby run-down apartment off Vermont Avenue and the tenants had just moved, but the name had been Foster, not Pringle. A couple of neighbors who’d known them casually said they didn’t think it likely that Mrs. Foster’d be up to nothing like that, she was a real quiet modest little thing and not very pretty anyways. Press appeals were made, and radio appeals, for the Fosters to come forward, but they never did. They might not have liked the idea of publicity, or they might have gone out of the state and never heard they were wanted.

  And then Edith Wood, Mary Ellen’s seventeen-year-old sister, admitted that Allan Haines had been the husband who’d—well, call it made advances—to Mary Ellen once, when she was baby-sitting for them. He usually brought her home afterwards, of course, like the fathers always did, and it had been one of those times, in his car. But Mary Ellen had told Edith he let her go right away when she struggled, and seemed ashamed of himself, apologized: he’d been a little tight, hadn’t known what he was doing—Mr. Haines was really a nice man, he’d never do anything like that in his right mind, so to speak. And she told Edith for goodness sake not to tell their parents about it, or they’d never let her take another job at the Haineses’, which was silly because he’d been terribly ashamed and nothing like that would ever happen again, she knew.