The second door led Mendoza into more than semi-darkness. It was a rectangle within a rectangle: a fifteen-foot-wide strip of dark around all four sides of the skating floor. That was a good hundred and fifty feet long, a little more than half as wide, of well-laid hardwood like a dance floor. There was an iron pipe railing enclosing it, with two or three gaps in each side for access to the occasional hard wooden benches, scattered groups of folding wooden chairs, along the four dark borders. A big square skylight, several unshaded electric bulbs around it, poured light directly down on the skating floor, but not enough to reach beyond: anywhere off the edge of that floor it was dark. The effect was that of a theater, about that quality of light, looking from the borders to the big floor.
Straight ahead from the single entrance, at the gap in the rail there, sat one of the attendants, sidewise in a chair to catch the light on his magazine. Beside him was a card table, a cardboard carton on it and another on the floor; those would hold the skates. Not just the skates, Mendoza remembered from the statements taken: flat shoes with skates already fastened on-something to do with the insurance, because as Hayes (or was it Murphy) had put it, otherwise some of these dumb girls would come in with four-inch heels on. As Elena had, he remembered.
It was shoddy, it was dirty, a place of garish light and dense shadow, of drafts and queer echoes from its very size. No attempt was evident to make it attractive or comfortable: the sole amenities, if you could so call them, appeared to be the Coke machine and, at the opposite side of the floor, an old nickel jukebox which was presently emitting a tired rendition of "The Beautiful Blue Danube." And yet the fifteen or twenty teenagers on the floor seemed to be enjoying themselves, mostly skating in couples round and round-one pair in the center showing off, with complicated breakaways and dance steps-half a dozen in single file daring the hazards lined down the far side, a little artificial hill, a low bar-jump. Those girls shrieked simulated terror, speeding down the sharp drop; the boys jeered, affected nonchalance. It was all very innocent and juvenile-depressingly so, Mendoza reflected sadly from the vantage point of his nearly forty years.
But he hadn’t come here to philosophize on the vagaries of adolescence… If you went straight down to the attendant, to give up your ticket and acquire your skates, you would be noticed; otherwise, he could easily miss seeing you. Mendoza had wandered a little way to the side from the door, and stood with his back to the wall; he was in deep shadow and he’d made no noise. He stood there until his eyes had adjusted to the darkness, to avoid colliding with anything, and moved on slowly. He knew now that it was possible to come in here without being noticed, but could anyone count on it five times out of five?
There would be times Ehrlich was wider awake, for one thing.
He sat down in a chair midway from the railing, twenty feet from the attendant. In five minutes neither the man nor any of the skaters took the slightest notice of him. He got up, drifted back to the wall, and began a tour of the borders.
When he got round to the opposite side of the floor, he made an interesting discovery. In the corner there a small square closet was partitioned off, with a door fitted to it. He tried the door and it gave to his hand with a little squeak. He risked a brief beam from his pencil-flash: rude shelving, cleaning materials, an ancient can of floor wax, mops and pails. Hackett was quite right; nobody had disturbed the dust in here for a long time. He shut the door gently and went on down the rear width of the building.
The jukebox was never silent long; it seemed to have a repertoire only of waltzes, and now for the third time was rendering, in all senses of the word, "Let Me Call You Sweetheart."
He came to the far corner and with mild gratification found another closet and another door. "At a guess, the fuse boxes," he murmured, and eased the door open. A quick look with the flash interested him so much that he stepped inside, pulled the door shut after him, and swept the flash around for a good look.
Fuse boxes, yes: also, of course, the meter: and a narrow outside door. For the meter reader, obviously: very convenient. He tried it and found himself looking out to a narrow unpaved alley between this building and the warehouse next to it.
And does it mean anything at all? he wondered to himself. He retreated, and now he did not care if he was seen or not; he kept the flash on, the beam pointed downward… How very right Hackett had been: this place had not been so much as swept for years. But full of eddying drafts as it was, you couldn’t expect footprints to stay in the dust, however thick. He worked back and forth between the rail and the wall, dodging the chairs. He had no idea at all what he was looking for, and also was aware that anything he might find would either be completely irrelevant or impossible to prove relevant to the case.
Now, of course, he had been noticed; he heard the attendant’s chair scrape back, and a few of the skaters had drifted over to the rail this side, curious. He didn’t look up from the little spotlight of the flash: he followed it absorbedly back and forth.
"Hey, what the hell you up to, anyway?" The attendant came heavy-footed, shoving chairs out of his path. "Who-"
"Stop where you are, for God’s sake!" exclaimed Mendoza suddenly. "I’m police-you’ll have my credentials in a minute, but don’t come any closer."
"Police-oh, well-"
And Mendoza said aloud to himself, "So here it is. But I don’t believe it, it’s impossible." And to that he added a rueful, "And what in the name of all the devils in hell does it mean?"
In the steady beam of the flash, it lay there mute and perhaps meaningless: a scrap of a thing, three inches long, a quarter-inch wide: a little strip of dainty pink lace, so fine that it might once have been the trimming on the lingerie of a very special doll.
Ehrlich went on saying doggedly, "My place didn’t have nothing to do with it." That door, well, sure, the inside one oughta be kept locked, it usually was-but neither he nor the attendants would swear to having checked it for months, all three maintaining it was the other fellow’s responsibility. Mendoza found them tiresome. Hackett and Dwyer, summoned by phone, if they didn’t altogether agree with Ehrlich were less than enthusiastic over Mendoza’s find; Hackett said frankly it didn’t mean a damned thing. He listened to the story of Carol Brooks’ doll and said it still didn’t mean a damned thing.
"I don’t want to disillusion you, but I’ve heard rumors that real live dolls sometimes wear underwear with pink lace on-and just like you say, it is nice and dark along here. Not havin’ such a pure mind as you, I can think of a couple of dandy reasons-"
"And such elegant amenities for it!" said Mendoza sarcastically. "A wooden bench a foot wide, or a pair of folding chairs! I may be overfastidious, but I ask you!"