"The boy," said Hackett, "hasn’t got the blood in him to kill a mouse in a trap anyway-all you got to do is look at him."
"I’ll take your word for it," said Mendoza absently. He wasn’t interested in the boy, never had been much; the Wades were irrelevant, but he was just as pleased that by chance there was evidence to show that. And the Wades ought to be very damned thankful for it too: they’d probably never realize it, but without that evidence the boy could have found himself in bad trouble. From Mendoza’s viewpoint that would have been regrettable chiefly because it would have diverted the investigation into a blind alley. They had wasted enough official time as it was.
He looked again at his map, and sighed. The lunatic-of this or that sort-was his own postulation, and he could be wrong: that had sometimes happened. Ideally an investigator should be above personal bias, which-admitted or unconscious-inevitably slanted the interpretation of evidence. And yet evidence almost always had to be interpreted-full circle back to personal opinion. There was always the human element, and also what Dr. Rhine might call the X factor, which Mendoza, essentially a fatalist as well as a gambler, thought of as a kind of cosmic card-stacking. Much of the time plodding routine and teamwork led you somewhere eventually; but it was surprising how often the sudden hunch, the inspired guess, the random coincidence, took you round by a shorter way. And sometimes the extra aces in the deck fell to the opponent’s hand, and there was nothing you could do about that. The law of averages had nothing to do with it.
"I dropped in to see if the autopsy report’s come through… oh, well, suppose we couldn’t expect it over Sunday. Nothing much in it anyway. Back to the treadmill-" Hackett got up. "I’ve still got some of the kids to see, ones at the rink that night."
"The rink," said Mendoza, still staring at his map. "Yes. We’ll probably get the autopsy report by tonight-the inquest’s been set for Tuesday. Yes- Vaya… todo es posible. Yes, you get on with the routine, as becomes your rank-me, I’m taking the day off from everything else, to shuffle through this deck again, por decirlo asi -maybe there’s a marked card to spot."
He brooded over the map another minute when Hackett had gone, and penciled in a line connecting the two circles. He shrugged and said to himself, Maybe, maybe-folded the map away, got his hat and coat and went out.
Downstairs, as he paused to adjust the gray Homburg, a couple of reporters cornered him; they asked a few desultory questions about the Ramirez girl, but their real interest was in Sergeant Galeano’s husband-killer, who was of a socially prominent clan. The more sensational of the evening papers had put Elena Ramirez on the front page, but it wasn’t a good carry-over story-they couldn’t make much out of a Hartners’ stock-room girl, and the boy friend wasn’t very colorful either. The conservative papers had played it down, an ordinary back-street mugging, and by tomorrow the others would relegate it to the middle pages. They had the socialite, and the freight yard corpse, besides a couple of visiting dignitaries and the Russians; and a two-bit mugging in the Commerce Street area, that just happened to turn into a murder, was nothing very new or remarkable.
Maneuvering the Ferrari out into Main Street, Mendoza thought that was a point of view, all right: almost any way you looked at it, it was an unimportant, uninteresting kill. No glamor, no complexity, nothing to attract either the sensationalists or the detective-fiction fans. In fact, the kind of murder that happened most frequently…The press had made no connection between Elena Ramirez and Carol Brooks. No, they weren’t interested; but if the cosmic powers had stacked the deck this time, and that one stayed free to kill again, and again, eventually some day he would achieve the scare headlines, and then- de veras, es lo de siempre, Mendoza reflected sardonically, the mixture as before: our stupid, blundering police!
Once off the main streets here, away from the blinding gleam of the used-car lots, the screamer ads plastered along store-fronts, these were quiet residential streets, middle-class, unremarkable. Most of the houses neatly maintained, if shabby: most with carefully kept flower plots in front. Along the quiet Sunday sidewalks, dressed-up children on the way to Sunday school, others not so dressed up running and shouting at play-householders working in front gardens this clear morning after the rain. This was all Oriental along here, largely Japanese. When he stopped at an intersection a pair of high-school-age girls crossed in front of him-"But honestly it isn’t fair, ten whole pages of English Lit, even if it is on the week end! She’s a real fiend for homework-" One had a ponytail, one an Italian cut; their basic uniform of flat shell pumps, billowy cotton skirts and cardigans, differed only in color.
At the next corner he turned into Tappan Street; this wasn’t the start of it, but the relevant length for him, this side of Washington Boulevard. He drove slow and idle, as if he’d all the time in the world to waste, wasn’t exactly sure where he was heading: and of course he wasn’t, essentially. It was a long street and it took him through a variety of backgrounds.
Past rows of frame and stucco houses, lower-middle-class-respectable houses, where the people on the street were Oriental, and then brown and black; there, late-model cars sat in most driveways and the people were mostly dressed up for Sunday. Past bigger, older, shabbier houses with Board-and-Room signs, rank brown grass in patches, and broken sidewalks: dreary courts of semi-detached single-story rental units, stucco boxes scabrous for need of paint: black and brown kids in shabbier, even ragged clothes, more raucous in street play. A lot of all that, block after block. Past an intersection where a main street crossed and a Catholic church, a liquor store, a chiropractor’s office and a gas station shared the corners. Past the same kind of old, shoddy houses and courts, for many more blocks, but here the people on the street white. Then a corner which marked some long-ago termination of the street: where it continued, across, there were no longer tall old camphorwoods lining it; the parking was bare. The houses were a little newer, a little cleaner: they gave way to solid blocks of smallish apartment buildings, and all this again was settled middle-class, and again the faces in the street black and brown.
At the next intersection, he caught the light and sat waiting for it, staring absently at the wooden bench beside the bus-stop sign on the near left corner. Its back bore a faded admonition to Rely on J. Atwood and Son, Morticians, for a Dignified Funeral. There, that night, Carol Brooks had got off the bus on her way home from work, and some time later started down Tappan Street. She had had only three blocks to walk, but she had met-something-on the way, and so she hadn’t got home… The car behind honked at him angrily; the light had changed.
Across the intersection, he idled along another block and a half, slid gently into the curb and took his time over lighting a cigarette. Three single-family houses from the corner, there sat two duplexes, frame bungalows just alike, one white and one yellow. They were, or had been, owned by the widowed Mrs. Shadwell who lived in one side of the yellow one. On that September night the left-hand side of the white one had been empty of tenants, the tenants in the other side had been out at a wedding reception, the tenants in the left side of the yellow duplex had been giving a barbecue supper in their back yard, and Mrs. Shadwell, who was deaf, had taken off her hearing aid. So just what had happened along here, as Carol Brooks came by, wasn’t very clear; if she’d been accosted, exchanged any talk or argument with her killer, had warning of attack and called for help, there’d been no one to hear. She’d been found just about halfway between the walks leading to the two front doors of the white duplex, at twenty minutes past nine, by a dog-walker from the next block: she had then been dead for between thirty minutes and an hour.