The Knave of Hearts

by Dell Shannon

  And himself. Passing the love of women . . . Oh, sure to God there was something to it—sex loyalty, give it the fancy name .... Angel asking, wondering too, his darling Angel, sharing that certain empathy, that essential thing between: putting it in words, "Could he, Art, I mean the way you say he’s so irritable lately, so—really—unlike him self, I mean, I just wondered . . ." And himself being noncommittal, jocular, changing the subject—easy and affectionate. A different thing. Not to give Luis away, if . . .

  He just wondered if maybe, in that one area, Luis Mendoza was growing up a little bit, finding out the truth.

  And he had a very odd thought just then, staring down unseeingly at Landers’ report. He thought that, looked at one way, Luis Mendoza and this bloody-handed killer of women they were hunting had something in common. Woman—to them it meant the one same thing. Only Luis Mendoza—and that was a very damned peculiar thought too—he was a man on the right side, across the table from the Opponent, and a sane man; and so when all the chips were down he might see that he’d been drawing to the wrong hand—there were higher cards to find in the deck.

  Hackett was annoyed with himself for unaccustomed sentimentality. It was just—he wondered. And maybe hoped. Because, come down to it, passing the love of women . . .

  "You’d started to tell me about a bright idea," he said, "before the summons came to appear before authority. What was it?" Mendoza was swiveled around, brooding out the window. "The beach," he said, "the beach. Could we do something there? I just—"

  Sergeant Lake said from the door, "Excuse me, Lieutenant, but that fellow’s back again, that Lockhart that came in yesterday. He asked me to give you this." He advanced and laid a card on the desk.

  "Persistent," said Mendoza. He swiveled round and picked up the card; and then he sat motionless, head cocked, studying it. After a moment he said softly "¿Y qué es esto, what’s this? Mr. John Lockhart—and in a vile scrawl, Chief of Police, Mount Selah, Illinois—in re the Wood case, etc. ¡No me diga, don’t tell me! Something definite, something helpful, a little break at last? I’ve got a feeling—cross your fingers, Arturo! By God, I wonder. I’ll see him, Jimmy, bring him in pronto!"

  "Needn’t apologize," said Lockhart. "Should have said who I was yesterday, what I come about. The truth is, a place this size, well, it don’t seem like a police station to me somehow, know what I mean. I guess I was figuring, at that, way it’d be back home—not all that much to do, Sergeant Wills says, Somebody to see you, I say, Shove him in. Should have had better sense—place like this, must be hell to keep in order—even in the ordinary way, you’d be busy."

  "That you can say twice," agreed Mendoza.

  "I’d sure be interested, see through this place, how you go to work. If it wouldn’t discommode you any, after I say what I come for. My place looks pretty damn piddling compared."

  "Cops are cops," said Hackett, who had liked Mr. Lockhart on sight. They came all shapes and sizes: you found some small—town ones the inept free-riders, and in big towns too; and then you found the ones like Lockhart, who’d have been good anywhere. Looked small-town, farmerish—but shrewd as they were made. And a cop, first and foremost, that you could see.

  "I was just saying to my wife last night—you know, it makes you wonder if it was meant, some way. Put off this vacation twice, we did, on account of this and that—meant to come two years ago when Marian had the baby, see. That’s our youngest daughter, she lives down in San Diego now, husband’s a regular Air Force officer. So that’s where we landed a week ago. I generally keep up with the news, but you know how it is on a vacation, I didn’t do more’n glance at the headlines, until three-four days ago. And then I saw about this business up here, and I made it my business, get hold of some o’ your local papers to see all about it, what was said about this joker. And I just got to wondering. Now I don’t want to stick my neck out, butt in where I’m not wanted, gentlemen, but I figured I’d better come in and tell you about it. Just in case. Because, you don’t need to tell me, on a thing like this you aren’t fussing about gettin’ together the lawyers’ evidence for later on, you just want to spot this boy for sure. In your own minds, whatever the evidence is or isn’t."

  "And isn’t that the truth," said Hackett.

  "What have you got to tell us, Mr. Lockhart?" asked Mendoza.

  Lockhart wasn’t to be rushed.

  "Might be we can make this short ’n’ sweet—maybe I’m just seeing ghosts. See," he grinned slowly, "for all Mount Selah can’t claim more than eighteen hundred population, we got a newspaper, and I’ve had a little experience, how reporters build up a story. Point is, the papers are all I’ve seen, and might be they got the evidence twisted some. Any case, they haven’t had it all to print, I don’t guess—and might be if and when you tell me what you’ve got on this joker, I’ll have to say, Sorry, boys, I thought I had a little something, but seems I was wrong. And on the other hand I might not. I just wondered from what was in the papers, figured I better find out. I’ll admit, be a pretty damn big coincidence when you figure the odds—this is a big country, and there’s a hell of a lot of people in it—and this is the first time I been out o’ the state of Illinois. Fine thing to think, maybe Providence sendin’ me here just now, to give you a little help. And at that, come down to it,"—he brought out a short fat cigar and began to unwind the cellophane slowly—"even if there’s any evidence of connection at all, don’t know that it’d give you much. Except another victim—and a kind of fishy smell. Which, mind you, was all in my own mind."

  Mendoza half rose, holding out his lighter; he looked a little excited. "You think you know him? Are you telling me you know him? Dios mio, coincidence, Providence—out of a hundred and eighty million people—I don’t care what the hell you call it, give us what you’ve got, friend!"

  "Like that, hah?" said Lockhart. "Thanks,"—he bent to the lighter.

  "Me, I don’t usually get stuff like this, o’ course—place like Mount Selah, a Chief of Police isn’t so much expected to be a detective as, you might say, an M.P. Keep order. The rambunctious teen-agers, and now ’n’ then a burglar, and the drunks on Saturday night. You know. But kind of reading between the lines in the papers, I figured this might be a tough one, even for you boys .... Where to hell-an’-gone can you start to look? Sure .... I don’t know, Lieutenant Mendoza, I just don’t know. And I don’t want to waste your time. I guess best way to get at it, if you could tell me right off, did the papers print pretty accurate what you got on this boy, and did they print most of it? The description and all?"

  Mendoza pulled open the top drawer of the desk and handed over a sheaf of documents. "You’re welcome to read the statements. To save time, I’ll say roughly yes. Add up the secondhand reports we’ve got on him, it comes out—a fellow between twenty-niné and thirty, around there, five-ten to six feet, brown hair, take your choice about eye color, thinnish, dresses pretty well, white-collar worker, nice manners, no noticeable regional accent, drives—or did drive—a bright blue car, recent model. And that’s about it."

  "That’s all the official evidence," said Hackett. "The boss here, he can work up the prettiest dreams, and without eatin’ hashish either, and he’s had one about our Romeo. How much it’s worth, who knows‘?"

  "O.K., so it’s a pipe dream—I keep Sergeant Hackett around to pour cold water, Mr. Lockhart—he pours enough on a hunch to drown it, I know it wasn’t much good, but if it keeps bobbing up, I tell him to go to hell. Like a Geiger counter in reverse, if you take me. So O.K., I build this one up—from this and that in the statements, the nuance, the tone of voice, and the kind of women they were, you know, and so on—I make him coming here from a smallish inland place about three years ago, liking the beach, buying or renting a place there to spend his weekends in—raised with rather old-fashioned manners, quite possibly even a little diffident in his manner, not aggressive anyway, the kind a nice modest shy young lady feels safe with, you know? I think this last three years, approximately, i
s the first time he’s lived in a city—I think he’s had a high school education but not college—I think—"

  "I guess you can stop right there," said Lockhart, "because it sounds mighty close. Nothing like evidence, I know. The hell of a long chance it’s the same, the size of this country." He looked at his cigar with a troubled expression. "If it is so, gentlemen, it’s some my fault these other women got killed, which isn’t the kind of thought I like to take to bed with me. But what could I do? The law isn’t interested in your feelings about a thing, even if you happen to be Chief of Police. You got to have it in black and white before they let you charge anybody, and that’s just what I didn’t have."

  SIXTEEN

  "So, what’s the story?" demanded Mendoza. He lit a new cigarette, nervous and excited. Maybe the break in the case? "Go on!"

  "We1l, I don’t need to waste a lot of time describing Mount Selah to you—maybe a kind of typical small town. Most of us know each other, know each others’ business—you’ve heard all the jokes about small towns. But a place like that, it’s a bad place to commit a crime, because of that very fact. Now it might surprise you some,"—and Lockhart grinned—"to know we usually got four-five professional chippies around town—not a very good town for their business, not because we’re any more moral than other folks but because, like I say, you’re a lot more apt to get found out in a town like that. We don’t as a rule do much about ’em—if it wasn’t the couple we know about, it’d be some we didn’t, and hell, there that kind is, you can’t legislate altogether against human nature."

  “Live and let live," said Hackett.

  "About that. Rhoda Vann was one of ’em. Been around town for years, on and off—woman about forty, liked her drink a little too well, but I will say she usually stayed home to get drunk, didn’t go round creating disturbances. Not much of a looker, big red-haired woman, seen her best days. She lived in the Crosley Hotel, which is a fancy name for a twelve-room fleatrap down by the river. Couple of other women, much the same sort, had rooms to each side of hers. You’ll gather, place like that, nobody pays an awful lot of notice to funny noises in the next room.

  "Well, it was three years ago last month Rhoda got killed. Girl who lived across the hall went in to borrow something one morning and found her. She’d been killed about ten P.M. the night before, so the doctor said. It was a damn funny setup to start with, because nobody as far as we knew or could find out had any reason to kill her—and like I say, your private business isn’t so awful private in Mount Selah. She was a good-natured soul, generous to her friends, never held a grudge, and so on, and as for what you might call underworld connections—you know, gangster stuff, like if she maybe had something on somebody—hell, I don’t think Rhoda’d ever been farther than forty miles from Mount Selah in her life, there just wasn’t anything possible in that line. She hadn’t anything a thief’d be after—only a lunatic’d go to burglarize anybody at the Crosley—and it looked like something personal, because of the way she’d got it. Beaten and choked to death—"

  "And raped first?"

  "Well, not exactly," said Lockhart, "but nobody needed to go raping Rhoda, and everybody in town’d know that. But the coroner—Dr. Williams—he did say she’d had relations with somebody just before. Maybe that don’t say much. Point is, there wasn’t any motive we could turn up, on anybody who knew her. And she hadn’t been as you might say receiving callers that day and night. She’d been feeling poorly, coming down with a cold, she said to a couple of other girls, and she’d stayed in alone with a couple of bottles for company.

  "I’ll make this as short as I can. Among her stuff there was a brand-new bottle of aspirin, unopened, and it came from Wise’s drugstore. Everybody knew the Wises too. Damn funny pair. The old man, old Abraham Wise, had just died, couple o’ months before, and Gideon—his boy—was running the store alone. Nobody ever had much to do with the Wises. Old man wouldn’t let ’em, what it came to. He was a religious crank, puritanical as they come and a little bit more, and the list of things he didn’t like—called sinful—I guess it’d reach from here to Kingdom Come. That kind. Quite a character—and a strong character, not to say a tyrant. My wife and some other womenfolk always said he browbeat his wife to death—and all I know, maybe he didn’t always use his tongue either. She died when the boy was about three, and the old man brought him up.

  "Gideon never mixed hardly at all with other kids—one thing, the old man kept him too busy, he had to come right home from school, get to work on his chores and so on. Had him helping in the store before he was ten—which is all right, I’m all for giving kids responsibility, but Gideon, seemed like, was expected to do a man’s work. Old man was too stingy to buy anything new, make life a little more comfortable—they still cooked on an old wood stove, for instance, and most days you’d see Gideon out behind the house chopping wood. Old-fashioned—damn foolishness, I call it. People used to feel sorry for Gideon, but the old man kept him so much under his thumb, he hadn’t no chance to get out and mix much, even if he’d wanted. The old man’s religion was old-fashioned too, he didn’t think there was a church in town really holy enough, and they didn’t go to any. Once in a while they’d go over to Pisgah to a revivalist meeting—they had an old broken-down Model A Ford—but ask me, main reason the old man didn’t go to church regular was the collection."

  "And one very damn good reason it is," said Mendoza, "among others." He was leaning back, eyes shut, smoking lazily. "Just as we go along, I expect old Abraham’s brand of religion listed Woman pretty far down on the tabulation of important things—"

  "And pretty high up on the list o’ sinfulnesses. I never paid all that much attention to what he believed, but that I can say. He was always quoting John Milton—he’d had a good education, you know—"

  "That passage about what a pity it is God didn’t find a purer way for people to produce offspring." Mendoza laughed. "Very curious idea—illogical thinking. If there was, it’d take on all the same connotations the present method gives rise to. Me, I’m old-fashioned myself, quite satisfied with the status quo. Yes. Young Gideon didn’t mix, he was a loner. So he didn’t get much ordinary human background to compare with his home life."

  "I don’t suppose. Time he got to the age when he could have got out, tried to break away from the old man—high school, along there, the rest of the kids dating and so on—he didn’t seem to want to, didn’t know how to go about it, and by then I guess he’d been so filled up with these ideas, he thought that kind of thing was sinful anyway. You take some kids brought up too religious that way, they can’t wait to get away, turn against it soon as they can. But some like Gideon, they swallow it all serious and just carry on where their folks left off.

  "Well, there’s Gideon Wise. He was twenty-six when the old man died, looked some older, maybe because he was so serious. Not a bad-looking young fellow, nothing extraordinary either way—you wouldn’t turn to look at him twice. Round about five-foot-ten or a bit more, brown hair and eyes, kind of sallow complected and built thin—usually dressed sort of formal, way the old man had, a suit and white shirt. I said both of ’em had a decent education—Gideon graduated from high school at seventeen—average bright and maybe then some. The old man had raised him strict about manners, and he was always a lot more polite, in a kind of funny old-fashioned way, than most young fellows these days."

  "Arturo," said Mendoza dreamily, "do you feel a little tingling sensation up your spine? Don’t keep us in suspense, Mr. Lockhart—what evidence did you have?"

  "Gentlemen, damn all—except for a bottle of aspirin. What the hell did that mean? I didn’t think much about it to start with. Why should I? Gideon Wise—last man to think of in a thing like that! I went and asked him about the aspirin, because I was kind of surprised to find it there. They had their own label for stuff like that, is how I knew where it came from. I didn’t see Rhoda going into Wise’s for anything. The old man wouldn’t have served her, probably chased her out, and anyway he neve
r would stock liquor the way the other drugstore—Bill Green’s place—does. Green’s was where most people went, because he carries everything you expect to find in a drugstore. Old man Wise never stocked any women’s cosmetic stuff, or wine and liquor, or magazines—a lot of stuff he thought was foolish and sinful, you see."

  "¡Uno queda aturdido-you overwhelm me!" said Mendoza. "At least the courage of his convictions, but why didn’t he starve to death?” Lockhart grinned. "I often wondered. Funnily enough, though—well, I’ll come to that in a minute. Like I say, I went and saw Gideon, and he said—looking me in the eye honest as you please—Rhoda called the store a couple of nights before she was killed, asked him to bring her the aspirin. He said he didn’t realize right off who it was calling, or maybe he’d have said no, but as it was, he’d said he’d bring it—he was just closing up—and though he knew Father’d have disapproved, well, a customer was a customer. And he took it over to her and she paid him and that was that. He said it was Tuesday night—she was killed on Thursday—and Green’s was closed, which was why she called him.

  And he just couldn’t say why she hadn’t opened the bottle and taken a couple. That kind, he said, who knew what they’d do? He’d never had anything to do with that sinful woman before or after, and that was all he knew.

  "And right there, gentlemen, I had a kind of little tingle up the spine, and I knew. I couldn’t tell you why—something about the way his eyes looked when he said her name—something about the way he looked at up me—I don’t know. I just knew, all of a sudden, he’s the one did it. I couldn’t figure why—I still can’t. But I went away and thought about it, and I asked the other girls on that floor in the Crosley, and one of ’em remembered Gideon coming, knocking on Rhoda’s door. She—this girl—she was just coming out, see, and saw him there. She got quite a kick out of it, because of course she knew who he was—the holy Gideon Wise—and was kind of disappointed, she said, when she saw he had a little parcel with him, so he was probably just delivering something, not calling on Rhoda for the usual reason. But she couldn’t remember which night it was, hadn’t been that interested. She wasn’t the girl who found Rhoda, or maybe she would have. It was just a little thing she remembered, hadn’t noticed much at the time—it passed right out of her mind after, until I asked. It might have been Tuesday night.