"So?" said the surgeon. "Ever catch that one?" Mendoza shook his head.
"Well, here we are," announced Hackett, who had gone to meet Dwyer. "In plain sight in the gutter a couple of blocks away." It was the bag one would have predicted she would carry: a big square patent leather affair with a coquettish white bow cluttering the snap-fastener.
" Ya lo creo, as we might put it, huh?"
Mendoza lifted his upper lip at it. "Before you get promotion and cease to be my junior in rank, Arturo, you will have perfected your vile accent. It may take years."
Very delicately Hackett delved with two fingers into the bag's interior and came up with a woman's wallet, bright pink plastic, ornamented all around the border with imitation pearls. Mendoza regarded it with satisfied horror: the very object this girl would have admired. "Lot of other stuff here-doesn't look as if he took a damn thing. Funny he put the wallet back after grabbing the cash, ifHe might've figured the wallet alone'd be spotted quicker and picked up, but then again muggers don't think so far ahead usually, and this one, I don't see him in a state to think at all, after that. If-"
"?Basta! One thing at a time."
"Her name was Elena Ramirez. No drivers' license. Dime-store snapshot of herself and, I presume, current boy friend. Social Security card. Membership card in some club. I.D. card-address and phone-little change in the coin purse-that figures, of course, he'd take the bills-"
Dwyer said, "Prints are going to love you for putting your fat paws all over that cellophane."
"All right," Mendoza cut off Hackett's retort abruptly. "Give me that address, Art. I'll see the woman who found her and then the family-if there is one. Dwyer, you and Higgins can begin knocking on doors did anyone hear a disturbance, screams perhaps? When we know more of the background, maybe I'll have other jobs for you. They can take her away now."
Hackett drifted over to Fratelli's grocery behind Mendoza. In two hours, tomorrow, Hackett would be the man nominally in charge of working this case; a lieutenant of detectives could not devote all his time to a relatively minor case like this. The fact annoyed Mendoza, partly because he had an orderly mind, liked to take one thing at a time, thoroughly. Even more did it irritate him now because it was intuitively clear to him that this girl and Carol Brooks had met death at the same hands, and he wanted very much to get that one inside, caught in a satisfactory net of evidence and booked and committed for trial.
If one murder was more or less important than another, neither of these was important: the kind of casual homicide that happens every week in any big city. This girl did not look as if she would be much missed, as if she had been a human being with much to offer the world, but one never knew. Carol Brooks, now, that had perhaps been a loss-yes. He remembered again the warm gold of the recorded voice a trifle rough as yet, a trifle uncertain, but the essential quality there.
However, his cold regret at missing her murderer had nothing of sentiment in it. The reason was the reason, in a wider sense, why Luis Mendoza was a lieutenant of detectives, and-most of the time-regarded fondly by his superiors.
There are people who enjoy solving puzzles: he was not one of them. But-probably, he told himself, because he was a great egotist, and his vanity was outraged to be confronted with something he did not know once a puzzle was presented to him he could not rest until he had ferreted out the last teasing secret. It was not often that he was faced with a complex mystery; the world would grow a great deal older before police detectives in everyday routine met with such bizarre and glamorous situations as those in fiction. Por desgracia, indeed: unfortunate: for complex problems inevitably had fewer possible solutions.
This thing now, this was the sort of puzzle (a much more difficult sort) that Mendoza, and all police detectives, met again and again: the shapeless crime that might have been done by anyone in the city-mostly impersonal crime, this sort, with destiny alone choosing the victim. The shopkeeper killed in the course of a robbery, the woman dead at the end of attack for robbery or rape, the casual mugging in an alley-nothing there of orderliness, the conveniently limited list of suspects, the tricky alibis, the complicated personal relationships to unraveclass="underline" criminal and victim might never have met before. Or perhaps it might be an intimate business, a personal matter, and only all arranged to look otherwise-and if it were, so much the easier to find the truth, for one had then only a few places to look.
But so often it was the casual, shapeless thing. And there are always, in any efficient city police force, the policemen like Luis Mendoza, single-mindedly, even passion lately concerned to bring some order and reason, some ultimate shape, to the chaos. Not necessarily from any social conscientiousness-Mendoza cared little for humanity en masse, and was a complete cynic regarding the individual. Nor from any abstract love of truth or, certainly, of justice-for all too often the criminals he took for the law evaded punishment, this way or that way; and Mendoza sometimes swore and sometimes shrugged, but he did not lose any sleep over that. Being a realist, he said, Lo que no se puede remediar, se hade aguantar -what can't be cured must be endured.
Nor from ambition, to gain in rank and wages through zeal-Mendoza desired no authority over men, as he resented authority over himself, and his salary would not begin to maintain his wardrobe, or a few other personal interests. Nor even solely from earnest attention to doing one's job well.
The only reason for such men, the end goal, is the contemplation of the solved puzzle: the beautiful completeness of the last answer found. It is so with all these men, whatever kind of men they may be otherwise. Having the orderly mind, they must know where every last oddshaped small piece belongs in the puzzle, no matter if the picture comes out landscape or portrait or still life, so to speak.
Mendoza, in fact, forced to file away an unanswered question-as he had six months ago in the Brooks case-felt very much the way an overnice housewife would feel, forced to leave dinner dishes in the sink overnight. It worried him; it irritated him; and in every free moment his mind slid back to the thing left undone.
He said now absently to Hackett, " Eso se sobre entiende, it's not so good that he's been loose for six months-one like that." With only a few people he didn't watch his tongue, or even let it drift into the Spanish deliberately; and that (as Hackett was fully aware) was a mark of affection and trust.
"Oh, I don't know, Luis. One dame every six months, pretty damn moderate, come to think." Hackett glanced at him sideways. "So you think it's the same joker too."
"That eye. It's a little psychological point, maybe-Mendoza tossed away his cigarette and paused with his hand on the shopdoor.
"Or am I being too subtle? In a fight with another man, anything goes-one of you may have an eye gouged out. But to do that to a woman, and a woman you have already made helpless-Well, what do we call insane? You and I have seen it, there are men just turns sadistic, and they're not legally insane. But I don't think this is one of those, Art. I didn't think so with Carol Brooks. Because of that eye business. And Bainbridge says to me, de paso, just what Dr. Victor says now-probably much of the damage is made after death. Only just after, but- Due para mi, it's a wild one, never mind the double-talk of the psychiatrists.
A real, hundred-percent, guaranteed genuine wild one- mucho loco ."
"Hell, I said the same thing. And you know what that means, chico -work or brains don't count in catching him. He's got no sane reason for picking this girl or that. It'll be luck, that's all, if we do. My God, he might not know himself what he's done, and a hundred to one the only way we'll ever put a name to him is if he happens to have a brain storm in front of witnesses next time. Probably he's living quiet as you please, an ordinary guy nobody'd look at twice, maybe going to work every day, comin' home prompt at six to kiss his wife and look at the sports page before dinner-goes to church every Sunday-never done a thing anybody'd think queer. It'll just be the way the cards fall, if and when and how soon we get him."