"My God, he looks like a gigolo," commented the patrolman, who was only a month out of training and meeting plainclothes men for the first time on the job. "What brand of cologne does he use, I wonder. Better get ready to hold him up when he takes a look at the corpse."
He hadn't enjoyed the corpse much himself.
"Don't strain yourself flexing those muscles," said Hackett dryly. "Like Luis'd say himself, las apariencias enganan -appearances are deceiving."
Mendoza came up to them and nodded to the patrolmen at Hackett's mention of their names. At close quarters, the young recruit saw, you could guess him at only an inch or so under your own five-eleven, not so small as he looked; but he had the slender Latin bone structure, minimizing his size. Under the angled Hamburg, thin, straight features: a long chin, a precise narrow black line of mustache above a delicately cut mouth, a long nose, black opaque eyes, sharp-arched heavy brows. A damn Mex gigolo, thought the recruit.
"I thought you'd like to see it," Hackett was saying. "It's another Carol Brooks."
Mendoza's long nose twitched once. "That is one I'd like to have inside. You think it's the same?" His voice was unexpectedly deep and soft, with only an occasional hint of accent to say he had not spoken English from birth.
"Your guess, my guess, who knows until we get him?-and maybe not then."
Hackett shrugged. "Take a look, Luis."
Mendoza walked on a dozen steps to where other men stood and squatted. The ambulance had arrived; its attendants stood smoking and waiting, watching the police surgeon, the men from headquarters with their tape measures and cameras. Mendoza came up behind the kneeling surgeon and looked at the corpse; his expression stayed impassive, thoughtful, and he did not trouble to remove his hat.
"When would you say?" he asked the surgeon.
"Oh-morning. Didn't hear you-you always move like a cat. It's a messy one, Luis, see for yourself. Between ten and midnight, give or take a little." The surgeon hoisted himself up, a stoutening, bald, middle-aged man, and brushed earth from his trouser legs. "I'll tell you what she actually died of when I've had a better look-strangulation or blows-my guess'd be the head blows. There was a sizable rock-"
"Yes," said Mendoza. He had already seen the rock, jagged, triangular. "She was cutting across from Commerce, so she knew these streets." A faint track made by foot traffic, just out from the corner of the house foundation, and the woman lay across the track.
"Daresay," grunted the surgeon. Hackett strolled up and the patrolmen followed, the recruit concealing reluctance. "No identification yet but you probably will have if she's local. Either she wasn't carrying a purse or he took it away with him."
"Never get prints off that rock," added Hackett to that. "You see what I mean, Luis. First off, it looks like any mugging, for what she had in her bag. I don't say it isn't. You take some of these punks, they get excited-Doc'll remember the ten-dollar word for it." Hackett, who looked rather like a professional wrestler, adopted the protective coloration of acting like one on occasion; possibly, thought Mendoza amusedly, in automatic deference to popular expectation. In fact he was-unlike Mendoza-a university graduate: Berkeley '50. It was a theory that Mendoza did not subscribe to: he had never found it helpful-or congenial-to pretend to less intelligence than he had. "They're after the cash, but they get a kick out of the mugging too. Horseplay."
"Yes, I know," said Mendoza. "This doesn't look like horseplay."
"She wasn't raped," offered the surgeon.
"I can see that for myself. She's on her way home, at that time of night-maybe from late work, from a friend's house. There's a full moon, and she knows these streets-she doesn't think twice at cutting across here. But something is waiting." He sank to his heels over the body, careful to pull up his trouser knees first, and regarded it in silence for a long minute.
Before it had been a body it had been a young and pretty woman: in fact, a very young one, under make-up lavishly applied. The too-white powder, the heavily mascaraed lashes, the smeared dark-red lipstick, was a mask turned to the pitiless gray sky of this chill March day. The unfashionable shoulder-length hair, where it wasn't stiffened with clotted blood, was bleached white-gold, but along the temples and at the parting showed dark. "Coat pockets?" he murmured.
"Handkerchief and a wool scarf," said Hackett.
"To put over her hair in case it rained," nodded Mendoza. "Then she had a handbag too."
"So I figured. Dwyer and Higgins are looking around the neighborhood."
A bag-snatcher, whether or not he was also a murderer, seldom kept the bag long; it would be tossed away on the ran.
Her clothes were tasteless, flamboyant-tight Kelly-green sweater with a round white angora collar, black fame skirt full-cut and too short, sheer stockings, black patent-leather pumps with four-inch heels, over all a long black coat with dyed rabbit round the collar and hem. Mendoza felt the coat absently, expecting the harshness of shoddy materiaclass="underline" cheap, ill-cut stuff.
Two very different corpses, he reflected, this tawdry pseudo blonde and Carol Brooks. Carol Brooks, six months ago, had been an eminently respectable and earnest young woman, not very good looking, and she had died in the soiled blue uniform-dress she wore for work. Otherwise, no, the corpses weren't so different.
"Yes," he murmured, and stood up. "He didn't intend murder, to start with-I don't think. He hadn't any weapon but his hands. And he didn't reach out to find one, blind, like that, and pick up the rock-it wasn't used that way, Art. He had her down, she was fighting him, trying to scream-he was strangling her, finding it not quick enough-and he slams her down on the ground, hard, just by chance on the rock. I can see it going like that. Unpremeditated violence, but once it unleashes itself-he looked down at the body again-"insane violence."
"Here comes Bert," said Hackett, "with the handbag. Not that it'll maybe take us very far."
"That's a loaded question for the so-called expert," said the surgeon, looking interested over the flame of his lighter, "but I'll say this, at least-he must have gone berserk for some reason. Nobody can say sane or insane just on that evidence-unnecessary violence. That sort of thing is apt to be vicious personal hatred, or a couple of other quirks."
"You're so right," said Mendoza. "You'll make a report all embellished with the technical terms, but to go on with for the moment?"
"Her neck's broken. Excessive laceration of the throat. Half a dozen head wounds, all but one on the back of the skull-the one that killed her, I think, is this here, on the temple. Maybe she turned her head in struggling and- The left shoulder is dislocated. She was struck repeatedly in the face with a fist. You can see the cyanosed areas, there. Her right arm is broken just below the elbow. The whole torso has been damaged, kicked or maybe jumped on. Fractured ribs, I think, and internal injuries. It's on the cards some of that was done after death, but I don't know that it'll be provable-probably a very short time after, of course. There's some damage to the left eye, as if a finger or thumb had been-"
"Yes. It was Dr. Bainbridge who made the autopsy on Brooks," said Mendoza. "You wouldn't remember. That is the one thing of positive resemblance. Otherwise?-he flicked away the burnt match and drew deep on his cigarette, shrugging-"any mugger after a woman's bag, who used a little too much violence."