"Good lord!" she exclaimed. "Well, come in, Lieutenant-you're lucky to catch me, I've just got in myself."
"Then you're excellent advertisement for your business. Any woman who can come in out of a rainstorm looking so charming-" It was the usual apartment of this vintage, but the personal touches were firmly individuaclass="underline" a good many books in cheap low cases against the wall, a row of framed pen sketches above them, a coffee table with Chinese teak underpinning topped with a large Benares brass tray, in serene indifference to incongruity with the rest of the furniture, and an enormous aerial photograph of a suspension bridge over the simulated hearth. He sat down facing that, at her gesture, on the sofa, and disposed his hat and coat beside him.
"I shouldn't give myself away," she smiled, "but I came in looking like a drowned rat, I'm afraid. I'd be in a hot bath now if Marge hadn't called to warn me that a mysterious sinister-looking strange-"
"That one's not such a good advertisement," he grinned.
"But I can't keep books. what's all this about the Ramirez girl? Cigarettes in that box, by the way-and don't you usually hunt in couples?"
"I've got no business hunting at all," said Mendoza, lighting her cigarette, then his. "I ought to be in my office doing this and that about a dozen other cases. As it is, I'm tying up loose ends-"-he gestured-"you might say, on the perimeter of this business. I don't think it was a personal business, you see-I think it was more or less chance that the Ramirez girl was the one killed-but we have to be sure. I don't know what I expect from you, but you've been seeing the girl five days a week for the last couple of weeks, and anything she said to you-any little problem she mentioned, maybe-?"
"I see." Alison studied her cigarette. "You're always reading about these things in the papers-never think of its happening to anyone you know. The poor kid… I don't know that I can tell you anything."
"I'm hoping you can't," he said frankly. "We've already run across a couple of things in her personal life that might-just might-have led to murder. They have to be looked into. If you tell me something else, that's got to be investigated too. And I don't believe anything personal is behind it, I don't want to waste time on that."
"I see," she said again. "One of these psychos, blowing off steam every so often, on anyone convenient at the moment."
"They exist. Something like that, anyway. And I don't think this is his first, either. I'd like to find him before he, shall we say, has the impulse again."
"Amen to that," she said seriously. "But how on earth do you even start to look for a man like that? It might be anybody."
"I could give you a superior smile and say, We have our methods." He shrugged. "There are places to start looking. The records of any recently discharged mental patients-our own records of similar assault ex offenders who might have graduated to something more serious. We went through all that on the first case."
"And didn't come up with anything? So then what do you do?"
"Then," said Mendoza rather savagely, "you file all the records neatly away marked Case Pending, and you wait for it to happen again. Of course ideas occur to you about other places to look-but to put them into effect, I'd need about three times the number of men I've got." He sighed and put out his cigarette. "Of course, if one like that kills a dozen people a week, and obligingly leaves evidence to show it's all his own unaided work, the upper echelons get excited-and I get the men. But nobody, not even a lunatic killer, reaches the top of his career all at once-there's a build-up."
"Everyone has to start small?" She smiled briefly. "I see what you mean. Well, I don't think I can add anything to what you've probably got from her family and so on, but fire away-what do you want to know?"
"Did you have much to do with the girl personally? You teach classes, or whatever they're called, yourself?"
"Oh, lord, yes, I'm all there is. It may sound like a racket, Lieutenant, and maybe it is in some cases, but I think I offer them something, you know." She leaned to the table to put out her cigarette; her smile was wryly humorous. "The ones like this girl-and some others who might surprise you. Natural good taste and so on isn't standard equipment with the so-called upper classes. I've known girls from the same sort of background as Elena Ramirez who knew how to dress and had better instincts, as we say, than girls from wealthy homes. Mostly I get girls who are serious about improving themselves, but what they want to know, all I try to get over to them, is pretty simple. The very basic things about clothes and make-up and manners. You wouldn't believe what some of them look like when they come-"
"But I would," said Mendoza sadly. "I've seen them in the street, for my sins. Generally in those things mistakenly called toreador pants."
She threw back her head and laughed, and he admired the clean white line of her throat. "Oh, my lord, I know!"
"I have no moral objection whatever, you understand-in fact it's enough to turn a man celibate for life-it's the aesthetic view I object to."
"And how right you are, with most of them. Well, as you might say yourself,?A que viene eso? What-"
"You speak Spanish, Miss Weir?"
"By accident. I was born in Durango-my father was a structural engineer and worked in Mexico a good deal. That"-she nodded at the big photograph-"is his last piece of work. Funny sort of decor for a living room, I suppose I'm sentimental about it-he was very proud of it." She lit another cigarette. "In a sort of roundabout way, that's how I got into this business. You see, I'm a painter-or shall we say I hope I am-and that doesn't bring in much of a living unless you're really good-or at least known. Dad didn't leave me much, and I have to earn a living some way. What with moving around the way we did for his work, I got a rather sketchy education, and then like a fool I quit high school to get married-which turned out a mistake in more ways than one-and, well, I thought I'd try this, and it's worked out surprisingly well.
Leaves me a fair amount of time for my own work, and at the same time I really enjoy it, you know. Not to bore you-"
"But how could you indeed?"
"And this isn't getting to what you want to know, anyway. It's a fairly small group, I never take more than twenty-five in a class and it's usually around twenty girls. I try to keep it on a more or less personal basis, you see. The course is six weeks, five days a week, but some of that time is spent on group reading and some on-private counseling, to give it a fancy name. Generally, I'll see each girl privately, oh, say a total of two hours or so a week. So you see, while I knew the girl, you can't say I knew her intimately."
"But you're no fool at sizing up people," he said placidly, leaning back, arms folded behind his head. "And the girl poured out her problems into your sympathetic ear?"
"That she did. You probably know about that-the superior boy friend and his family's objections. She was rather a pathetic little thing, really-awfully earnest, but-" She paused for a word.
The first one comes to your mind about her," he prompted softly.
"Stupid," said Alison unhesitatingly. "She was stupid. She had no imagination, subtleties of any sort just didn't penetrate-you know the type. Oddly enough, her older sister is quite intelligent-I met them in town one day-"
"Yes, that girl has brains."
"Elena was honest, and-though she didn't look quite a respectable girl, in the old-fashioned sense. Immature for her age. But stupid."
"Immature and honest," he murmured. A little something there. The man Tomas, if there was anything in that, this girl would probably have been too stupid to discover it. If anyone in that household had seen something suspicious about the visiting uncle, it would not have been Elena, but the sharp-eyed Teresa. "That's no surprise," he said, half to himself. "Even dead, she was-unsubtle. I haven't met the boy yet-judging by Mrs. Wade, I'd say that his persistence was less attraction to Elena than rebellion against his mother."