The Knave of Hearts

by Dell Shannon

  Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast ravished my heart . . . How fair is thy love . . . Turn away thine eyes from me, for they have overcome me . . .

  Very strange indeed that that kind of thing should be part of the Scriptures: Father never would allow that book to be read aloud, or read at all for that matter, and true, true, it was dangerous reading. Whatever it meant, whyever it was included.

  Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb . . . Thy two breasts are like two young roes . . . This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes .... I said, I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of the boughs thereof; now also thy breasts shall be as clusters of the vine . . .

  No, no, that was not the page to find the truth. Where was it, what was it? A strange woman is a narrow pit—it was Proverbs, of course—she also lieth in wait for prey. Thine eyes shall behold strange women, and thine heart shall utter perverse things—

  But hopeless, even by what the Scriptures said, because that went on—how did it go on?—they have stricken me, shalt thou say . . . they have beaten me. . . . When shall I awake? l will seek it yet again.

  Oh, but he must take care, take care and be strong to keep himself from it! This one, she excited him, she disturbed him. And suddenly, thinking about her, he wondered if it was the red hair, if she reminded him of Rhoda. The mind made odd connections: even when they were so different, a dirty slattern like Rhoda and this one—this one with the unusual, rather nice name: Alison.

  Take care. Because she knew him as himself. And he must not, he could not, this time, go looking for a substitute—when they were hunting, alerted. It must not happen again for a long time. Better, never: but perhaps that was too much to hope for.

  And it was time now he left. Get hold of himself, to put up his usual quiet, gentlemanly appearance.

  He had dropped the Times on the floor a while ago, and now he picked it up, tidily folding it together, to leave the room neat. As he did so, a small line of print took his eye, there on an inside page where the front-page story on the murders had been concluded—right in the next column this was.

  Regrading of Beach Street, it said. And below, the name jumping out at him with the effect of being in blacker print.

  Colibri Avenue.

  He started to shake again; the paper rattled in his hand.

  Oh, no, he thought. Not just now. This bad time. When they— Yes, of course it had always been far too steep a grade. Even for an unimportant narrow lane leading off the coast highway there, toward a few scattered houses back in the little canyon. But just now, why in heaven’s name must there come the big bulldozers, the men with spades and picks, just to make it an easier road for a few cars?

  Not a long street, not a wide one. The men with the spades—

  They’d find her now, they’d fund Julie Anderson.

  Oh, God, he thought.

  But, twenty-seven months, nearly twenty-eight. A long time, there might not be much—

  I must be careful, he thought distractedly. Take good care to look and act just as usual.

  And not, not, however hard it was, not let himself get so excited, interested, in this new woman. Or any one. There must not be another one now, soon.

  He took an anxious look in the mirror, was reassured. Must go, they’d be expecting him. It was all right, he could carry it off. The main thing to remember was that there was no possible way for anyone to connect him, the man he really was, with all these women. There mustn’t ever be a way.

  He was afraid this new one, who excited him so, would be there tonight—no help for that, though the less he saw of her the better. But so hard, when it all came boiling up in him, hot and demanding—to keep himself from—

  Must be very careful, and try.

  * * *

  "Oh, all right, all right!" said Alison resignedly. "I’ll be there, Pat."

  "Well, you needn’t sound as if I’d applied the Chinese water-torture to persuade you," said Patricia Moore. "I only thought you might enjoy—"

  "You needn’t waste time on the pretty fiction," Alison told her. "I’m not a fool, and you’re not the only one who’s scheming to cheer up poor Alison. Really, it’s insulting—1 should be allowed some private life, and why everybody’s leaped to the unflattering conclusion that I’ve suffered some tragedy and need cheering up—"

  "You think too much about yourself," said Miss Moore with dignity. "Why you should leap to any such conclusion I don’t know. I know nothing about your private life, or very little, and I’ve always been under the impression that it’s perfectly ordinary behavior to invite a few friends in for the evening now and then."

  "I said all right—sorry to sound cross, Pat, it’s been one of those days when everything went wrong, and I’ve got a headache, that’s all. I’ll see you on Sunday, then." Alison put up the receiver before Pat could say anything more.

  It was true, of course: a horrible day. And what other sort did she expect, an old-maid teacher? Teacher: what it came down to, though it sounded so glamorous and exciting, a charm school, where doubtless all sorts of romantic secrets were dispensed .... So romantic, she thought viciously, teaching these shallow little dunces to wash their faces occasionally, not to wear four-inch heels and dangly earrings to work, or shave off all their eyebrows! Damned little morons. Gum-chewing fat fools like that Green girl, no self-discipline to go on a diet, expecting she’d turn into Cleopatra by a sort of osmosis if she sat through a six-week course. And the Bernstein girl— But I don’t get it, Miss Weir, I mean about not using too much make-up. Listen, my cousin Rose, she just plasters it on, what I mean, and she caught a real nice fella, makes good money too, he don’t seem to care—

  She leaned on the table there a minute, resting her forehead on the cool impersonality of the telephone. Be-all and end-all: a real nice fella. Well, so it was, so it was inevitably—women being women. ¿Qué mas, what else?

  Never mind the girls, they weren’t so bad really. Not the girls: her own friends, so damned irritating . . .

  She laughed, and sat up, and found suddenly, shamingly, that she was crying; she blew her nose, took herself in hand firmly. She never cried, Alison the competent and cheerful, who’d stood on her own feet and weathered enough trouble so far to stand up to this—this disgustingly conventional kind of trouble, losing a man!

  Of course when it came to one’s private life, no one needed to go around telling. Friends talked, guessed—how they talked and guessed! None of them knew anything definite, naturally; but somehow these things got round. And quite suddenly, she was being besieged on all sides by all these well-meaning people. As if they’d got together and—Well, no. Because several different sets of them, as it were, had different candidates to trot out before poor Alison (or the other way round). And come to think, that must represent some hard undercover work, some cunning social traps, because unattached men weren’t so easy to find.

  It was really very funny, looked at objectively. She could imagine the anxious debates about poor Alison: Well, I never met him, did you?—and I wonder what sort of thing it was, none of our business of course, but I gathered from what Pat said once—oh, not gossip, because she doesn’t, but anyway . . . Such a pity Alison was still single, such a nice girl, if she’d only meet some really nice man— And inevitably, Who do we know who might do?

  Funny, and completely exasperating. How could people be so obtuse?—to think, apparently, that it was like a mathematical problem, one canceling out one-of anything.

  Even Angel, she thought helplessly. Angel, of all people, who ought to know better. After the time she’d had with Art Hackett, knowing he was the only one she wanted as soon as she’d laid eyes on him, and Art so maddeningly gentle and careful and friendly, not saying a word, not even holding her hand at the movies—all because he’d got the idea it wasn’t fair not to let her look around a little—she’d never known many young men, been around much. Angel complaining she could kill him, he made
her so mad, and what more could she do or say to the big dumb ox?

  Oh, Angel ought to know how useless it was, trying to substitute one man for another. But even Angel had a candidate to exhibit .... It was funny: a very respectable, rather shy young man, he was, Bruce Norwood, with such punctilious manners: a wholesale candy salesman, for heaven’s sake, and he shook hands coming and going, and never said damn or hell. Suddenly it was so hilarious that Alison laughed aloud.

  After Luis. Luis.

  But all of them, any of them . . . Pat Moore’s offering (and what could these people think of her, to choose such men?) was almost as ridiculous; that one she’d only met the other night—a cadaverous, solemn young man named Markham who worked in a bank. And the Corders across the hall insisting that she come over for dinner, just a few friends, nothing formal—and pairing her off just as insistently with an earnest, oddly courtly young bond salesman named Richard Brooke. People. Meaning so well. So incredibly stupid. After Luis.

  And the pain like a cancer there again, forever, so that she couldn’t bear it. God, it must get less after a while, after a long while? The telephone rang under her hand, and her heart jumped at the sudden clamor: force of habit: always the quick fierce thought, it might be—he might— But it never was, it never would be.

  Some one of these well-meaning silly people. Or one of their impossible choices of a man for poor Alison.

  She let it ring three times before deciding to answer.

  SEVEN

  "Oh; my God," said Hackett resignedly. "No rest for the wicked. But do I have to go and look at it? Farnsworth can—"

  "Wel1, I don’t know, Art," said Sergeant Lake. "Maybe bein’ around our Luis so much, it’s rubbed off on me—getting hunches. Or maybe everybody’s just jittery, with the papers building it up. But only reason the sheriff's boy called in is, he spotted it for maybe the same one—and he sounds damn convincing?

  "Good God, another? I’d better talk to him. Switch the call through, will you, Jimmy?" Hackett was sitting at Mendoza’s desk, at the end—or so he’d thought—of another grueling day on this business. (Why the hell did the tough ones always come in hot weather?) The county-patrol sergeant was hanging on the phone patiently. Hackett got the details from him, swore, asked the exact location; told Lake to assemble a homicide crew for him from the night men just coming on, and called his own number. As he listened to the phone ring his expression was grim (another field day for the press tomorrow, another dead woman), but it softened when Angel answered.

  "Did I catch you in the middle of something that’s got to be stirred, or measured in millimeters?"

  "I don’t," she said indignantly. "Inspired cooks use guesswork, mostly. And you’re going to tell me you won’t be home. I think the police ought to have a union, you weren’t in until eleven last night—"

  "That’s a dandy idea, only first we’d have to unionize all the crooks, pro and amateur—they don’t keep regular hours either. Just one of those things, my Angel. . . . I don’t know when, darling. I’m just leaving for some place down near Malibu."

  "For heaven’s sake . . . You needn’t ask, I always miss you. Shall I keep something hot? . . . Well, maybe you’d better stop somewhere, if it’s all hours. I don’t know why more detectives don’t have chronic indigestion, the irregular hours they— All right, but try to come home some time, just to let me know I am married."

  On his feet, hat in hand, Hackett hesitated. Spoil Luis’ evening with this?—he grinned to himself briefly. Mendoza had called in ten minutes ago; he’d had a busy and irritating day, and had announced that he was taking the evening off to soothe himself at the poker table with any pigeons he could pick up at his very respectable club. Just three things Mendoza was good at—in fact, brilliant—his job, women, and poker; Hackett’s heart had bled momentarily for the unlucky pigeons who got inveigled into a game with him.

  He dialed quickly. Probably catch him in the middle of that necessary (if he was going out) second shave, or a bath—fussy as one of his cats, Luis was. Come to think, Hackett would feel sorry for any woman who succeeded in marrying him. One of those people who couldn’t sit in a room with a picture crooked on the wall or a wrinkle in the rug, and a damn sight more persnickety about his person than most society ladies. Tomcat, thought Hackett, listening to the phone ring at the other end: both affectionately and ruefully he thought it: a lean, sleek black tomcat, that way and this way.

  Mendoza answered and he broke the news. "¡Fuera!" said Mendoza. “¿Qué mono, isn’t this pretty? Where? . . . ¡Santa Maria!—I trust you realize you have robbed me of approximately five hundred bucks, friend—I was counting on sufficient luck tonight to win back a pittance of my income tax .... All right, ¡allá voy, I’m coming, I’m coming! I am also dripping bath water all over the carpet, and El Senor is using my left leg to sharpen his claws. ¡A tú, mil maldicianes! I’ll meet you there, damn it."

  * * *

  It was, of course, the worst hour of the day for getting somewhere in a hurry. Mendoza cursed steadily all the way down Sunset Boulevard from La Brea to Beverly Glen, before he took himself in hand. One very damned good way to get ulcers or a heart attack: getting mad at traffic. He made fairly good time at that, down to Pacific Palisades—not much choice of routes; all of them were jammed at this time of day, and like most residents he’d learned to stay off the freeways at crowded hours. Then, where Chautauqua took that sharp left turn and dropped suddenly down a steep little hill, just before its end, of course he got balked—you always did, there—it was the hell of a place to get by. Narrowing to about a third of the usual width. And down there was the Malibu road, the main drag, the coast highway, with another secondary street running up diagonally, Chautauqua jutting down at another: one of those three-way signals timed to outlast eternity, whichever of the three you waited for. But he got the green at last, and swung the Facel-Vega onto the coast road and made tracks up toward Malibu.

  Just before the entrance to Topanga Canyon, Hackett had said. The traffic department played a little game with L.A. County residents, finding the best places to hide street signs, behind light poles and bushes and traffic signals; but he spotted the street easily, not by its sign but by the two big bulldozers parked there for the night. Two hundred feet up the narrow winding road he came on the scene of activity. An ambulance; Hackett’s car; two county patrol cars; a battered sedan probably belonging to the foreman on the job. Men standing around talking and smoking, not doing much, Hackett looming in the midst of the little crowd talking to a diminutive wiry fellow. The county sergeant introduced himself, shook hands.

  "I was just telling Sergeant Hackett, Lieutenant, I took one look and says to myself, this one belongs to the downtown boys—it’s just maybe another of your current Mr. X’s jobs, same kind of thing anyway, way she looks."

  "I don’t know that it’s worth missing your five hundred for, Luis," contributed Hackett. "Though I kind of think it might be our boy, too. Held it for you to look at—not much the doctors can do here—maybe not anywhere else. At a guess, the corpse got to be a corpse somewhere around two years ago, a bit less."

  "Ah," said Mendoza. "Like that? Well, well. I said I wondered if we’d missed any."

  ". . . and, my God, Joe thinks a dead dog or something at first, you know, when he hits it, and then he sees the hair and yells—and, my God, it’s—" The little fellow was still excited and shaken.

  Mendoza walked on to where the interns from the ambulance stood smoking. No, not a very savory corpse, though quite well preserved by burial: this was sandy soil up here—that had helped; and she was dressed too, which helped some more. Hard to figure the time, maybe: the autopsy-surgeon would want soil samples. She’d been blonde. What looked like a cotton skirt and blouse, black with a red print—traceable?—the remnants of black sandals, but yes, everything surprisingly well preserved.

  Hackett said beside him, "And treasure trove, a handbag buried with her." Dwyer had it laid out carefully a few feet away, on a
tarpaulin; he and Higgins squatted over it looking doubtful.

  "Don’t think we can expect any prints after all this time, on this rough plastic stuff, Lieutenant. You want to take a chance handling it a little?"

  "With tenderness, Bert. Just in case . . . don’t touch that metal clasp, I beg you—or anything smooth and stiff—"

  "All right, all right, I’ve been to kindergarten." And there came out on the tarp, in the still-blazing late afternoon sunlight, a collection of humble objects. They all squatted close around; no move to touch anything yet. The little everyday things any woman’s bag might contain, unimportant while she lived—maybe a man’s life (and other women’s lives) depending on them when she was dead. A crumpled handkerchief. A cheap, much-tarnished dime-store compact. Three half-used packets of matches. A dilapidated pack of Luckies, a few cigarettes left in it. A purse-sized bottle which had held cologne. A blackly tarnished once-silverplated lighter. Two lipsticks, brass-gold cases decayed black. A dirty powder puff. Four or five little papers, probably sales receipts—

  "¡P0r el amor de Dios, get them!"—as the hill breeze swirled them off the ground; Dwyer made a grab for them and Mendoza received them tenderly. A scarlet leather wallet, bulging-fat. What had been a piece of Kleenex, lipstick-stained. A quarter-size bottle of aspirin. Nine brass bobby pins. A small black address book.

  "¡Una donación de la Providencia!" said Mendoza happily and, for once careless of his clothes, knelt close over the address book, unfolded the clean handkerchief from his breast pocket, with utmost care inserted the tip of a shrouded forefinger under the cover of the book and lifted it. Hackett delicately held down the first page there as the breeze swept over them again.

  One of those I. D. inserts with lines indicated for name, address, phone. Carefully filled out in a round childish scrawl. Julie Anne Anderson, General Delivery, Topanga—

  "Christ!" said the little wiry man loudly. He had come up behind them there, curious, in time to hear Hackett read that aloud. They looked up at him. He’d been lighting a cigarette, dropped the match