"This is your offbeat one," said Palliser.
"The wild blue yonder," said Higgins.
"Well, it says a little something.' ' Mendoza lit a cigarette with a snap of his lighter. "But there's a gap between Saturday and Tuesday. Where was she? That library card-this was set up awhile ago. If they, whoever, had arranged the killing, why not do it right away? Grandfather! Could she have been with Grandfather? I can't see any pattern to it at all, damn it."
"Have you heard anything about the possible missing reports?" asked Higgins.
Mendoza had sent out queries to every force in the country about that.
"Nothing's come in yet. Where the hell was she and why? We should be hearing something from the cab companies, if there's anything to get."
"Those Daggetts could tell us something," said Higgins.
"I wonder," said Mendoza. "They know something but maybe not that much. I haven't leaned on them because we haven't a damn thing to go on, for God's sake. There's no smell of legal proof that the girl was the Martin girl. And whoever primed the Daggetts with the Hoffman story, all they have to do is stick by it, we can't prove it's a lie. What the hell use would it be to lean on them, George? They're not big brains, but they understand that much. Grandfather, Grandfather! If only there was some way to find out where she was going, or thought she was going-" He brushed his mustache back and forth angrily.
"There's just no handle to any part of it," said Higgins.
Mendoza picked up the phone, asked Farrell to get Communications, asked if there was anything in, from any force, on a possible missing report on the girl. So far most of the police forces in the country had responded and none had any record of such a report.
"So what does that say?" Mendoza emitted a long angry stream of smoke. "Grandfather! " The phone buzzed at him and he picked it up.
"You've got a new body," said Farrell. "Hoover Street."
"Hell," said Mendoza and took down the address and passed it on to Higgins.
Palliser and Higgins went out on that and Mendoza wandered back to his office and sat staring out the window at the view of the Hollywood Hills, chain-smoking, until Farrell rang him and said he had somebody from the Yellow Cab Company on the line. "Put him through," said Mendoza.
The man on the line was a Mr. Meyers, sounding efficient. "You wanted to know about any passengers picked up at International Airport a week ago today. I've got a list for you from the dispatcher. There were only nine."
"Fine," said Mendoza. "We can cut corners here and save some time. I'd like all those drivers to come in to headquarters to look at a photograph."
"Oh, my God," said Meyers. "What a hell of a nuisance, but we do have to cooperate with the police. All right, where are they supposed to come?"
THE ADDRESS on Hoover Street, a secondary main drag, was in the middle of half a dozen little shops, all in an old building stretching for half a block. There was a shoe-repair place, a women's dress shop, a little variety store, a photographer. Three of the shops were empty, with for rent signs, and there was a dingy independent drugstore on the corner. The squad and the uniformed patrolman were in front of the little variety store. Higgins slid the Pontiac into the curb behind the squad and they got out.
There was a woman with the patrolman, a stout middle-aged black woman. She looked neat and respectable in a dowdy blue cotton housedress, but her round face still wore a shocked expression.
"There are the detectives, ma'am. This is Mrs. Sadler, she found the body."
"That's right," she said. "It's just awful, the poor soul lying there dead, it's terrible the things happen nowadays, all these criminals running around. Mrs. Coffey was such a nice woman, she wouldn't have hurt a fly. To think of a thing like that happening to her-"
The faded sign over the front door said VERNNS VARIETY.
"Mrs. Verna Coffey?" asked Palliser. She nodded. "Just tell us what happened, Mrs. Sadler."
"We1l, I'd run out of green thread. I'm making a dress for myself for my daughter's wedding next week, and I just stepped over here to get some thread. Mrs. Coffey's store is real handy for lots of little things. I just live up the block on Twenty-fourth, it's only a step, and she's always open by eight. The door was open and I went in, but she wasn't there and I waited a few minutes but I didn't hear her in the back. She lives in the back of the store, has a little apartment there, you see. And I called her name and then I went back and just looked in the door and-Oh!" She put her hands to her mouth. "Oh, just terrible! The poor soul, her head all bloody and the place in a mess, I could see she was dead and I called the police on the phone there-"
So they'd have to get her prints for comparison with any others the lab might pick up. But the honest citizens didn't know much about scientific investigation.
There were a few curious bystanders out now, from the shoe-repair shop, the drugstore. Palliser and Higgins went into the little store, dim without lights on, past double counters stocked with the cheap cosmetics, shoelaces, sewing materials, plastic dishes, all the odds and ends of variety goods, to the door at the rear. It led into a small living room, crowded with old furniture-couch, two upholstered chairs, end tables, a T.V. on a metal stand. One of the tables had been knocked over, the drawer from the other one dumped on the floor, three pictures pulled off the wall and thrown facedown. The body was sprawled between the T.V. and the couch, the body of a fat black woman. There was a faded pink nylon housecoat rucked up around her legs. Under it she'd been wearing a pink nylon nightgown. There was dried blood on one temple and the white of the skull showed where one blow had landed on vulnerable thin bone. On the floor beside her was an ordinary hammer with black tape on the handle. On the other side of the body, in front of a side window, a big potted plant on a metal stand had been knocked over and spilled wet earth and leaves over the thin carpet.
"No sign of a break-in in front," said Palliser.
"No. She was undressed for bed, she could've done that early in the evening, but it was after she'd closed the store," said Higgins. "Somebody knocked at the door-somebody she knew?"
They looked through the rest of the small shabby apartment. There was a tiny bedroom with a single bed neatly turned down for the night but showing no signs of having been occupied. The bedroom had been ransacked too. There was a tiny kitchen with a clean sink and counter tops. There was a back door giving on an alley that ran behind this block of shops, and that door was locked and bolted.
"Somebody she knew," said Palliser. "Which could be anybody around here. But she probably wouldn't have opened the door to a stranger. Living alone, she'd keep the doors locked after dark." The dumped drawers, the pictures pulled off the wall, were the earmarks of the pro burglar.
They went back out to the street and Palliser used the radio in the squad to call the lab. Higgins asked Mrs. Sadler,
"Do you know anything about Mrs. Coffey's family?"
"Well, I know she had a married daughter in Pasadena. She had another daughter who died. Her husband, I guess he died quite awhile back."
There had been an address book beside the phone. They would find out.
"Do you know if she kept much money here'?"
"I don't know at all. I don't suppose she got an awful lot from the store-enough to get by on-but I don't know."
Higgins started to explain to her why they'd have to take her prints. She just nodded dumbly. This looked like the crude attack, and there might be prints. It might get unraveled rather easily, or never.
"She was such a nice woman," said Mrs. Sadler. "It's just awful, a thing like that happening."
The mobile lab truck came and later the morgue wagon. Higgins and Palliser waited while Horder dusted the address book, and took it to look at. There was a phone number listed simply under JULIA at a Pasadena exchange and they tried it, but there wasn't any answer.