The Knave of Hearts

by Dell Shannon

  "I’ve given you all you’re going to get," said Mendoza, smiling at Fitzpatrick. "And the rest of you might give some thought to the old saying about birds of a feather. Quite frankly, after Mr. Fitzpatrick’s exhibition today, I don’t feel inclined to tell any of you anything ever again. Very damn nervous I’d feel, telling you that my cat had kittens—the next edition would headline the front page with the news that I keep seven lions in separate cages in my living room."

  Edmunds grinned mirthlessly and said, "Don’t generalize, Lieutenant."

  "Doubletalk!" jeered Fitzpatrick. "The whole Christdamn bunch of you trying to cover up—and cover up what?—that the taxpayers might as well throw their cash down the sewer for all the good they get—you free-riders sitting around on your fat asses all day! Tell you what l’d like to know, Sherlock—"

  "What would you like to know, Mr. Fitzpatrick?" asked Mendoza dreamily. He was rocking very slightly, heel to toe, and he was still smiling steadily.

  And little Rodriguez, who had once most fortunately been at the scene of arrest of a certain gunsel who had previously accounted for one of Mendoza’s sergeants, looked twice at him, stepped smartly back and murmured to Edmunds, "¡Cuidado!—give him room!"

  "I’d like to know just how many innocent men like Allan Haines have been railroaded to the pen or the gas chamber by your bunch of—"

  "I just told you a lie, Mr. Fitzpatrick," said Mendoza gently, and he took three steps past the rest of them, to face the big man scowling and shouting at him. "I told you I’d given you all you’d get. A black lie, Mr. Fitzpatrick—" and his fist connected sudden and solid, three times, and the big man went down without a sound and stayed there.

  "Oh, very nice," said Edmunds. "I’ve often wanted to do that myself."

  "And not a cameraman in the crowd, oh, Jesus," moaned Wolfe, "what a break, what a—"

  "Go and write up the new headlines, boys!" said Mendoza, swinging on them savagely. "Tell the public all about its cops—half of them cretins and the other half gangsters! Blow it up, make it a good story, you’1l all get gold medals from your editors for increasing circulation! And if we never catch up to Romeo, what the hell, it’s only five women—we kill thousands per year on the freeways! Has anyone else any questions, friends?"

  They scattered before him, making for the nearest phones, Wolfe still moaning No cameraman. The elevator operator peering excitedly out of his cage withdrew hurriedly as Mendoza came stalking toward him.

  * * *

  "If I were you," said Mrs. Lockhart, cold-creaming her face briskly,"I’d just forget the whole business. I don’t care who or what anybody is, there’s such a thing as decent manners. Treating you as if you were just some no-account know-nothing coming in to waste their time! Well, of course it said in the paper the one running the investigation is a Mexican—I suppose you couldn’t expect anything else. For certain, the few of those brace-air-ohs as they call them, I’ve seen, they bring in for harvest, I wouldn’t say they were very smart."

  "Now, Mother," said John Lockhart mildly, "let’s not jump to conclusions and go off half-cocked. There’s people and people, and funny enough it is, you find smart and dumb everywhere. Policemen aren’t so very damn different, I guess, Tokyo to London, as you might say—or small town or big. And these boys got an awful big headache here, they got no time—I can see that—to waste on damn-fool civilians coming in with crackpot ideas. I guess where I wasted my time was not getting that sergeant to take in a little message, say who I am."

  "Three days wasted," she said resignedly. "We’ve only got three weeks. Marian was going to take us to Palm Springs, and we figured to stop at Las Vegas on the way back, just to see—I don’t hold with gambling, but interesting to see."

  Lockhart took off his shirt and draped it across the back of the straight hotel-room chair. "Now, Mother,” he said, "you want, I’ll put you on the train back to San Diego, you and Marian go on, have a good time. It isn’t fair, make you miss your whole vacation on account of this. I never meant to. But way it is, well, you’re either one kind or the other. There’s a lot of people, they can leave a jigsaw puzzle in the middle, and a lot too who can figure, Hell, it’s none o’ my business, and turn their backs, and sleep sound. And then there’s people, you might say, born to be cops—in or out of uniform. Nothing to do with good or bad, just the way you’re made. Like you find good dogs in any litter, but some of ’em, they just come built to run a trail or work cows. Nothing you teach ’em, they just got it installed as you might say. I often thought, you take a cop—if he’s a good one, Martha, he didn’t start being a cop day he got into uniform. He always was, and he always will be. And he isn’t the cop just eight hours out o’ the twenty-four. Way I figure, this one these boys are after, whoever he is—whether it’s Gideon or not—he’s a bad one, and if I’ve got any help to offer ’em, it’s my duty as an ordinary citizen, cop or no cop."

  "Oh, I’m to go back to San Diego, am I! While you racket round Hollywood on your own! I may think you’re a fool, John Lockhart, but that’s all the more reason to stay and see you behave yourself."

  Lockhart grinned at her, hanging up his pants. "Now, that’s a compliment—afraid some o’ these here starlets’d find me so interesting, maybe corrupt my morals if I hadn’t a wife along, keep me in line! I’m sorry, hon, I know it kind of spoils the vacation, but there it is .... These fellows really got trouble." He came to the bed, looked down at the afternoon edition of the Daily News spread out there. "Can’t say I blame this Mendoza for taking a poke at that reporter. Beats all how they seem to figure. I guess," and he sighed, for he was something of an amateur philosopher, "it’s just human nature. Not liking any kind of authority .... What I seen of this place, must be hell with the lid off, try to police it. Seems to go on forever, city limits. Way down to the ocean—why, that must be thirty miles. Makes you think. Quite a job. Must be they got four, five thousand men. Makes you wonder how the hell-an’-to-gone they start."

  "We’re on a vacation," said his wife, tying a hairnet over her neat gray sausage curls.

  "Sure, honey. I’m damn sorry it turned out this way. But I couldn’t do nothing else. I mean, you got to figure, it’s not just that I want to know for sure about Rhoda—what the hell, one like that. It’s just—I can’t say, what’s the odds, none o’ my business. If I got any help to give, I got to give it. I mean, it’s-like it might be Marian. Anybody. . .The fellows call themselves psychiatrists—way I read ’em they make out everybody’s a little nuts. Well, I don’t know . . ."

  "Downright rudeness!" she said. "Not as if you were just anybody!"

  Lockhart took up his pajama coat and stared at it earnestly. "I got to get in and tell them, Martha. Just in case. It’s my duty. The oath, it don’t specify Illinois or Maine or California—not the sense of it. These fellows, they got trouble on their hands. Don’t blame ’em for maybe bein’ short-tempered. I would be .... The very hell of a place to police, this must be. And I read somewhere, a while ago, it’s supposed to be a crack city force, the best in the country, it said. Wonder how they operate on a thing like this—start to look—place this size." He put on the pajama coat absently, began to button it—thinking, speculating.

  "A vacation,” she said. "And then this has to come up." And there was in her tone, besides exasperation, pride in his sense of responsibility, his strength as a man of honor.

  "I got to try," he said soberly. "Just in case. You go and have a good time on your own, Mother, wherever you fancy .... Thing is, man’s made a certain way, he’s got to do certain things. Funny way to figure, too, I can’t help thinking—we put off this vacation twice, and so I land here just this time, to see the stories in the papers. Not to make out I’m all that important, but it makes you wonder if it was meant. Maybe all for something, make something happen or stop it happening. You don’t know. Coincidence—maybe so. And maybe meant."

  "You go along again in the morning, if you feel you’ve got to," she said gently. "I’ll mak
e out all right."

  FIFTEEN

  "Oh, damn," said Alison to herself. She hung up the receiver, resisting the impulse to bang it back in place. Lame ducks! she thought. Why do I have this fatal attraction for them?

  Funny—or, of course, if you looked at it deeper, maybe only natural—all these substitutes foisted on her, lame ducks. Natural, perhaps, because a man who hadn’t acquired a wife before he was thirty or so was apt to be either a little, well, backward in some way—irresponsible, something like that—or the habitual wolf, nothing permanent. Unless he was just unlucky—some people were, both sexes. Hard to figure a reason, maybe. And about nine of the first kind to one wolf, out of my random ten.

  "Damn," she said again. She wasn’t interested, by any remote stretch of the imagination, in this one—or any of them these well-meaning people had urged (so subtly) on her. But there was that thing called empathy, making her uneasily aware of other people’s feelings. She supposed it was odd, when she set herself up as an authority (in a way) on social behavior, that she should be so inept at that kind of thing, the easy excuses of prior obligations and so on. But, inevitably, the empathy told her of the other person’s feeling, and almost without thought she softened the phrase, flavored it with the friendliness, the warm apology, that invited insistence . . . and so there she was, stuck.

  And if she had to go out with the man, if she had to saddle herself with him for an evening on that account, why hadn’t she said, all right, tonight, get it over! Now, four days to have it hanging over her. Saturday night.

  Damn. He’d been so very persistent.

  She wandered back into the living room. Ought to do her nails tonight. Sheba had had a catnip orgy in the middle of a sheet of newspaper spread on the floor; she was asleep on her back, four black-gloved paws in the air, still wearing an ecstatic expression.

  Probably not an awful lot of money, thought Alison vaguely; no need to dress up. The amber silk: it was old, but good.

  Luis had always liked it.

  Funny. This particular lame duck—funny about people. Not bad-looking, enough intelligence and, oh, manner, to hold that kind of job, but—nothing there, somehow. A window dummy animated, very correct, very courteous, and very empty. She didn’t want to go out with him, Saturday night or any other: why on earth hadn’t she said so? All very well to be polite, but you got yourself into things, unavoidably, if you cou1dn’t be just a little rude sometimes.

  Of course, some people, you had to make it more than a little to get through to them.

  Empathy.

  She reached down for the paper, folding it over, and Mendoza looked up at her from the top of the second page there. It wasn’t a good picture, a candid shot snatched last year—she remembered when they’d hrst run it—taken when there was all that fuss during the Ackerson trial. He was coming out of some building, hat in hand, glancing up sharp and annoyed at the photographer. Reprinted here to illustrate this multiple-murder business there was such a clamor about .... She hadn’t been following, it, she wasn’t much interested; but it seemed—now she thought—quite a while they’d been featuring it. A tough one, maybe. He must be worrying at it—that terrific single-mindedness, that drive she knew so well—if he’d lost his temper far enough to have a fight with this reporter, so the headline said ....

  She folded the paper and took it out to the kitchen. She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat at the table drinking it slowly, warming her hands on the cup. A hot, humid night, but her hands cold. Cold hands, warm heart. Didn’t they say too—lucky at cards, unlucky in love. Unlucky! Well, it depended which way you looked at it.

  (Toma esa llavita de oro, mi bien .... Open my breast and see how much I love you .... Y el mal pago que me das . . . and how badly you repay me .... )

  Live and learn, she thought a little numbly. Trying to make it the cynical, the sardonic reflection. At least, live and learn. Long ago, that anonymous woman who’d insisted on talking to her on a train somewhere—funny, couldn’t remember where—"It just don’t matter, how he is or what he is, or how he is to me, if he’s just there, that’s all. They keep saying better leave him—they don’t know, that’s all. It just don’t matter—"

  A lot of women like that. Silly women, muddle-headed women. Men drunkards, thieves, bullies, leading them unspeakable lives. She’d always wondered at it, felt a little scornful. How could they, how did they? No pride, no self-respect as a human person. No—no human entity of their own, was that it? Not Alison, the high-headed, the self-sufficient, with standards and ambitions! Never proud Alison, to let a man degrade her so.

  (Tama es cajita de oro, mi bien .... Take this gold box, my love, look to see what it holds . . . lleva amores, lleva celos—love and jealousy .... )

  She knew now what women like that were talking about. Shameful, shameless, but it was so: it didn’t matter. Nothing else mattered at all, if he was just there.

  Not that you could ever imagine Luis being unkind, cruel, any way. All that sleek cynical surface, veneer; he worked so hard to cover up that awful softness in him, that he was a little ashamed of, somehow. Empathy again . . . Luis, smiling one-sided and cynical on some sardonic little remark—and his hand so gentle on the kitten in his lap.

  But this way or that way, it just didn’t matter. And she wasn’t—that was how far she’d come—even ashamed at any loss of pride; she was just trying to get through this painful time as best she could, because surely to God after a while it would stop being so bad—it had to. And intellectually she knew it was as well she couldn’t shut herself up brooding here, had a living to get-must let people crowd in on her, day by day—but that didn’t make it easier to take.

  She finished the coffee. Ought to do her nails tonight. It didn’t seem very important, worthwhile: fussing over herself, for—other people. For this—this ridiculous and suddenly persistent store-window dummy. It wasn’t funny any more, it was almost tragic. What you asked of life, what you got.

  And that was perilously near to maudlin self-pity, which was a dangerous thing. She forced herself up, emulating briskness; she went into the bathroom, got out the nail-polish remover. That coppery color, if she was going to wear the amber silk on Saturday . . .

  * * *

  "Oh, well, after all he was in a rather awkward position, the Chief," said Mendoza with a one-sided mirthless grin. "Officially—even to me—he can’t approve that kind of thing, but at the same time he’s a cop too, and he sympathized with my feelings. He said so—off' the record."

  "Justifiable, but don’t do it again?" said Hackett.

  "That’s about it."

  "It wasn’t just an awful smart thing to do, Luis. Makes it look, in a sort of way, as if there was something behind Fitzpatrick’s charges."

  "Al1 right, so it wasn’t. These things happen."

  “They do say," remarked Hackett, "that the fellows like you, couple of drinks set them spoiling for a fight, are overcompensating for an inferiority complex."

  "I’m," said Mendoza, "being subjected to sufficient irritation by this case and the press, and I can do without the reported maunderings of the head doctors."

  "It was a joke," said Hackett hastily, "—the idea of you feeling inferior to anybody, from the Archangel Gabriel down." He eyed Mendoza covertly, wondering. About a couple of things. Because, while this thing was enough to get anybody down, he’d known Mendoza a long time and he didn’t remember ever seeing him quite like this. He just wondered.

  It took people a little different, but in most ways the same. Kept his private life very damn private, Luis, but circumstance had put Hackett in the way of knowing Alison Weir; and Hackett looked, maybe, like the big dumb cop of notion, but he saw more than he showed or talked about. It wasn’t hard to figure Alison; Mendoza was a different story. The camouflage, the front to the world. Didn’t matter why .... Sharp enough to cut himself, Luis, except just here and there. They said the wolves, woman after woman, were proving themselves: that figured. Other ways too, with most o
f them. Not that you could generalize. Go back to beginnings—maybe because his name was Luis Rodolfo Vicente Mendoza, this place and this time, and he’d got the dirty stupid Mex routine so often. Reason he’d make himself a little reputation as one of the bright boys. Had to show better than anybody else. Not that the head doctors had all the answers, but—

  Same time, reflected Hackett (looking at the page of Tom Landers’ notes in his hand without seeing it very clearly), same time, there was something else—individual, and yet in a way another generalization. The wolves. Part that natural charm: part too, damn what the head doctors said about inferiority complexes, part the extra-strong sex drive. They contradicted themselves there: admitted that was the engine power, that old devil sex—direct drive, or rechanneled in other directions——that was the power plant for the whole works. The ones who lived the longest, lived the hardest, lived the highest—the producers, the creators, the leaders, always the ones with the stronger-than-average sex drive. And also the bad ones, the violent ones, too: naturally.

  Equal to aggression: just depended which direction the aggression took, right or left. Dexter or sinister . . .

  So, sure, say the Freudians had a little something: that was what it went back to, essentially. Trouble with the wolves, a lot of them never found out there might be, there could be something more important to a woman than just the one thing. That there was always one woman more important than all the rest put together.

  The head doctors, Freudian or Adlerian or whatever, had a little something too when they said Areas—The water-tight mental compartments for different subjects. The ultimate civilized man, Luis Mendoza, a lot of ways; just, maybe, one way still the ultimate Neanderthal (as God knows aren’t we all, this way or that).

  Hackett just wondered, looking at him. Such the hell of a smart boy, any other way.