by Dell Shannon
"Thanks very much."
"You can’t miss it, I guess." The deputy added his bit to this fraternization with the foreigner. "Big brick place—there’s a sign. Randolph gets quite a play—fanciest place we’ve ever had around here, liquor license and all. People come in from Temecula and even Elsinore."
"Well, well, how gratifying," said Mendoza. “I’ll find it, thanks."
Their combined, benevolently amused gaze followed him back to the car.
He found it. And why, he wondered, the Apache Inn: a somewhat sketchy memory of native history failed to place any Apaches within five hundred miles. Also, why Murrietta? Perhaps there was something as peculiar about Americans as the rest of the world seemed to think, when they deliberately commemorated the names of their public enemies. (Mendoza regarded the famous Robin Hood of El Dorado from the policeman’s viewpoint, not the romanticist’s: merely another outlaw.) Then, as he got out of the car, he looked thoughtfully at the Apache Inn from another angle, and reflected that maybe the nation was safe as long as Americans went on admiring the outlaws, who in one essential aspect at least were the nonconformists.
It was new, only slightly garish, and well filled this weekend evening with local ranchers and their families, a few tourists and city vacationers from the Elsinore resort. He found Newbolt, who was annoyed.
"You would turn up on a Saturday night, to take one of the girls out of service! Oh, well, can’t be helped, we got to cooperate with the law, I guess. I’ll get her for you."
TEN
"Brother," said Madge Parrott, "don’t go thinking I’m trying to corrupt the cops, but you’re a sight for sore eyes! Somebody from town, that knows the score. Gee, that’s a real nice suit you got on, nice goods. It’s been so long since I seen anybody in coat and pants that match—well, around here you might as well put on a full-dress suit, know what I mean. Brother!" She heaved a sigh at him across the marred narrow table of the little booth, in this nondescript restaurant-bar several cuts below the Apache Inn, where they’d settled at her suggestion.
Mendoza grinned at her. He’d placed Madge at one look: essentially a nice honest girl, just a little too democratic. He was reminded of the sheriff’s sergeant at Julie’s grave the other day—what the hell?—that was Madge. She was in the late twenties, round-faced, brown-haired, not bad-looking. The waiter came up and leaned on the table. "Got a night off or did Randolph fire you, Madge?"
"Night off, Jimmy—real important business, this is a big cop from L.A.—you know that thing I was telling you about."
"Yeah?" Mendoza received a curious stare.
"I want a Daiquiri if the city’s going to pay for it, Lieutenant, it’s kind of expensive—"
"The city can stand it. You can bring me rye, straight. Now, Miss Parrott, first of all I want to ask you—"
"Oh, gee, don’t call me Miss Parrott, I won’t know who you mean! Honest, this one-horse burg! I sure hope I’ll have to come up, testify at the trial or something—you know. Get out of here a while, anyhow." She leaned an elbow on the table, heaved another sigh. "I’d never’ve come back—I was born here, you know, worse luck—if it hadn’t been for Ma getting sick. But there you are, it wasn’t fair to expect Betty to take her, she’s got a husband and kids to look after and I don’t. The doctor says maybe only a year or so," and her face saddened momentarily. "That won’t kill me, and it’s a kind of a duty. But you know how it is—country gives me the jim-jams .... But you didn’t come down to listen to all this. I read in the papers about Julie," and now her expression hardened. "I was—tell the truth, I’d been already doing some thinking, one reason and another—come to that in a minute—and even before I heard you wanted to see me, I was goin’ to call you, because I don’t know but I guess maybe you ought to hear what I got to say."
"I’d rather expected you might feel the way Mrs. Haines does. Stupid cops."
She glanced up, quick and surprisingly shrewd. "You think it’s—the same one did that? The papers I saw said maybe."
He shrugged. "I don’t know. I hope you can tell me something to point one way or the other. Between us, I’d be just as well pleased if something says no. We’ve got enough on our hands right now."
"I guess you have," said Madge. The waiter brought their drinks.
"But maybe I can tell you something, at that. I don’t know—you’re the one to, you know, kind of put it together. You want to ask questions, I suppose, but can I just go on and—and tell you what I been thinking and all, a while?—you stop me and ask, if there’s anything you want to know special."
"Go ahead."
She took a reflective sip. He thought irrelevantly that it was probably a middling-respectable family, and nobody down here knew the somewhat lesser reputation she’d had up around the big city. It figured. And he sympathized with the way she felt: he was a paving-neon-1ights-and-crowds man himself. A lot of pretty scenery in the country, and no smog, but essentially the country was things instead of people, and people were always so much more interesting.
"I didn’t feel exactly that way about the cops," she said. "I guess I could see how it looked to them. After a while I figured it that way myself. You know how you do—you really know inside it’s a different way, but everybody so sure opposite and telling you good reasons it is—and besides, wasn’t nothing I could do about it. See, it was all little things I guess a man just wouldn’t see was important."
"Try me, Madge."
"Oh, you," she said with a sidelong smile. "I wasn’t born yesterday, don’t need more’n one look at you to know—you know all the answers, it comes to us girls."
"Don’t flatter me, no man ever does."
"And maybe you got something there too," she said abstractedly, moving her glass around in a little circle. "Maybe none of us ever really know all the answers, even about our own selves .... See, it was that new dress she’d just got, real bargain it was, one of those places up in Hollywood sells secondhand stuff but not really secondhand, know what I mean—clothes the movie stars, people like that, turn in—kind of people they can’t be seen in the same thing three times, you know. Things not worn a bit, and specially designed. Julie being a blonde, if she did help it along a little, she could wear black real good, and it was a swell dress, must’ve cost a hundred or so first place. She was crazy about it, she’d only worn it once yet. And there was all her make-up—you know, foundation stuff and powder in big boxes and rouge and cologne and talcum and eye stuff, kind of thing nobody carries in their purse. And her best shoes, transparent vinyl plastic with rhinestone heels, eight dollars she’d paid for those on sale. I said to the cop, sure, O.K., she just migh've gone off, her own self, without saying anything to me—though I know she’d have left a note—if it came up in a hurry, but she wouldn’t ’ve gone off without her new dress, her best shoes, all her make-up. She liked Coty’s, and gee, that’s not dime-store stuff, it’d cost something to get all new .... And that’s one thing about vinyl plastic—it goes with any color, see—and they was good shoes. Even if she’d gone off with Al Bruno, way they said, or somebody else she expected to buy her all new stuff, she wouldn’t have just left things like that. Sure, maybe work clothes, old stuff, odds and ends not worth much, but not those things—or a couple pieces nice costume jewelry and so on. I mean, why should she?" Madge sighed again. "All the same, way they put it, I couldn’t say for absolutely sure. You know?"
"Sure. Logical. You think she’d have let you know? You two, you didn’t just come and go, independent of each other?" He was letting her take her time.
"Just between you ’n’ me ’n’ the gatepost, Lieutenant, I know she’d have told me. I kind of see how the law’s got to figure, but most ways it don’t make much sense. I mean, they say, you got nothing in black and white to prove it, you can’t be sure. But you know ’s well as me, you know for damned certain in yourself—gee, there I go swearing again, sorry—you know what a person’ll do or not do when it comes to little ordinary things like that. All right, maybe
you don’t about big things—people do a lot of funny things that aren’t what you’d expect of them, about big things like falling in love and so on—but about things like that”—she gestured vaguely—"you know, they don’t change. Julie, she was brought up nice, she was a nice girl."
Mendoza didn’t smile; that didn’t strike him as a funny remark; being a realist, he knew that the quality Madge would call Niceness hadn’t much to do with sexual morality.
He said, "That’s very interesting. No, I don’t suppose you got that across to anybody at the time. You mean she wouldn’t have run out on you without explaining."
"That’s it. She was always right on time with her share of the rent and all, and it was nearly the end of the month. Julie and I always got on good together—well, of course I’m not the fussy suspicious kind always picking little fights over what brand of coffee to buy and all like that—you know—and neither was she. You got to have some consideration for anybody you live with, and we both did. I mean, well, I was working in Santa Monica, and supposing I found I had to work late, see, I’d call up Julie at the restaurant and say—so’s she wouldn’t expect me home same time, make enough supper for me. And, like if she was getting dressed for a date when I wasn’t home, and got a run in her nylons last minute, say, she’d leave a little note, saying she took a pair of mine and ’d pay me back. And like that. So, O.K., say all of a sudden she decides to go off with Al, and even say it was in such a big hurry she couldn’t phone me where I worked, why, I know she’d have left a note. Just a little scribble some kind to say, and if she was leaving most of her stuff, probably she’d put down something like I could have it all."
"That figures," he agreed.
"But that’s water under the bridge like they say, and I guess too"—another sideways look—"they didn’t pay an awful lot of attention to me on account of they didn’t think a girl like Julie was much loss—or one like me anybody to waste time listening to. I suppose you know what I mean."
Mendoza finished his rye. "I’m not interested in your bed manners, Madge—"
"More’s the pity," and she grinned at him. "No, a cut above my kind, aren’t you? Could I have another drink? Just one—I don’t usually—too expensive and Ma’s death on it, I can’t even have beer in the house. No, but at least you got enough good sense to know just because I’ve slept around a little it don’t say I’m a fool or a liar. . . . Thanks ever so much," as he signaled the waiter. "Look, here’s the way it was, see, and stop me if I talk too much. They looked for Al some, to see if she was with him, but they never found him and I guess after a while they stopped looking. What the hell—you know?" She shrugged. "Julie didn’t have no people, she was raised in a Catholic orphanage back East somewheres. Look, Lieutenant, what I’m goin’ to tell you, it’ll maybe sound like—like those people who say I always knew there was something funny—after a thing’s happened, when they never at all. But, gee, at the time I didn’t have no reason at all to connect it!
"Here’s how it was. It was June when Julie went away like that—twenty-fourth of June—and like I say, I didn’t like what the cops said but I finally thought maybe it was so. Time goes on like it does, and about a year ago—just a year ago this month—I have to come home, look after Ma. Well, I been buried alive in this hole ever since, and you get so’s any little thing out of the ordinary, it makes a change—you gawk out the window at somebody from the next township. So a couple months back when some oil company sends out a crew to do test holes up on old man York’s ranch, I happened drive up there one Sunday afternoon with Betty and Joe—little ride, see. And one of the fellows in the crew turned out to be Al Bruno."
"Ah," said Mendoza. "Chance succeeding where hard work failed. You got together with him, of course—"
"I did," said Madge. "When he was off for the day."
"—And where was he when we wanted him before?"
"In Alaska. He got sent up there, some godforsaken place, right after he left L.A. that time. He didn’t know nothing about Julie, I mean, he didn’t even know she was—gone. We talked it over some, but we both thought, kind of silly to go to the police now—and even if they were interested, if they started looking again, it was all so long ago they wouldn’t be likely— Well, the thing was, it just put the whole business in my mind again, know what I mean. I-I liked Julie, you know. We got along real good .... " She stared at her new drink in silence for a minute. "It wasn’t like her, do nothing like that. I sort of got to wondering about it all over again. And then it started to come out in the papers about—this crazy guy you’re chasing, killed all those girls. I don’t see the papers regular—busy and all, and we just got a weekly here, I see that mostly—but last week, I did see a couple Times, and there was a lot in them about these murders—what those other girls said and all. Like I say, I’d been remembering back on account of Julie, and all of a sudden it connected up in my mind, like, and I thought, Hey, could it be—? But it was pretty far-fetched. Until you found her. Like that. And then I really did some thinking."
"About what?"
"About this guy, this funny guy. Now if you’re goin’ to ask how many times she saw him, or what his name was, or anything like that, I couldn’t tell you. Looking back, it seems quite a while both of us had seen him hanging around. Different places. You know, I guess, we had a shack up Topanga Canyon. Well, places we saw this fellow, it was like in at Tony’s where Julie worked, and another restaurant further up, and six-seven times on the beach along there, and once I do remember at the general store in Topanga, you know that little kind of shopping center halfway up. We had him spotted for a weekender."
“A weekender—?"
"You know, somebody comes to the beach just weekends, regular. The boating crowd does that, but they hang around Santa Monica mostly on account of the harbor and boat docks. Some people have
beach cottages, or know people who do—and sometimes the family’ll be there all week, on vacation, and the man just comes weekends—but a lot of young fellows, ones that like swimming and surf-fishing and so on, they’ll make a beeline for the beach after work Fridays, stay at a cheap motel or rent a cheap cabin, you know. Sometimes a bunch of them go in together for a cabin. Especially in the summer."
"I get it. He looked like one of those?"
"Well, I guess the reason we thought so must’ve been we only saw him around on weekends, or mostly. But I don’t think he’d be in with a bunch of fellows, for a couple reasons I’ll say in a minute. If you’re goin’ to ask why we noticed him at all, well, it was a kind of joke really. It was because he acted like he’d fallen hard for Julie, and he was"—she made a helpless gesture—"he wasn’t dry behind the ears, you could tell. Like a yokel getting his first eyeful of burleycue. You know? A regular Snerd. I mean, there he’d be, gawking at Julie as if he was trying get up his nerve, ask her for a date. Like I say, it got to be a little joke between us. She’d spot him somewhere and nudge me and say, 'Don’t look now but here’s my biggest fan.' You know?"
"Mmh. For how long?"
"I’ve done some thinking on that too, and the nearest I can say is, just that spring and summer. I mean, if you get me, it wasn’t anything either of us was keeping tabs on. I’d say probably from around end of April, beginning of May, to—to when Julie left. Got—killed, the way we know now."
She looked up at him suddenly. "Can I ask you something? I guess, nobody to—claim her, like—the city’ll bury her, won’t they? It don’t seem exactly right. I haven’t got much, but I’d like to do something—one thing, I guess you could say I owe it to her, taking all her stuff like I did. I don’t know how Catholics do—Julie didn’t go to church, but from a couple things I heard her say, I guess she’d want a Catholic funeral, and maybe I could pay the priest or whatever they—?"
"We can see there’s a service read and so on, sure. Go on, tell me about this fellow."
"Well—he acted like that. Real gone on her. When I said a Snerd, I didn’t mean he was homely. I mean, far’s I rememb
er, you wouldn’t turn to look at him for any reason. He—"
"Dios mio,” said Mendoza softly, "could you identify him?"
Madge lifted her shoulders hopelessly, spread her hands. "Mister, I saw him maybe a dozen times, sure, but across a restaurant, just for a minute in the store or maybe thirty feet away on the beach—and not to notice him, I mean to really see what he looked like, were his eyes blue or his nose straight or his teeth crooked-just seeing he was there. We weren’t interested in him as a fellow, just his being there again. No reason to memorize what he looked like as a fellow—it was just the joke!"
"Yes, I see, damn it. I know what you mean. Hell,” said Mendoza. "And it’s a very long chance he’s the same one."
"I don’t know, I just wondered," said Madge miserably. "I been over and over it, trying to remember better. But all I come up with, he could’ve been, from what these other girls said. He was a little bit taller than average, I seem to remember, not an awful lot but some—maybe an inch taller’n you are—and built just ordinary, and I think he had browny kind of hair. Awfully ordinary, really. That’s all I can say. And I never got any closer to him, never heard him talk. Now don’t go asking me what day it was, because I just plain don’t remember, but I’ve sort of got the feeling it wasn’t very long before Julie left. She came home one night and told me—she laughed a lot about it—this country boy’d finally got up nerve enough to talk to her. I don’t know where, Tony’s or some place else—I don’t remember if she was out on a date that night or working, see. She said he come up and, you know, tried to start a conversation with her, and just like you’d expect he kind of stammered and didn’t know what to say. It was really funny, because—well—"
Mendoza laughed. "Dot the i’s, because all he’d have had to do was show up with a couple of the other boys some night. Sure."
