"I might be, Art. At least I've got a passport in order."
"You don't know where to start looking," said Hackett.
"But the trail starts there, damn it?Condenacion! Grandfather. If there was just some little lead?"
"You don't even know whether the Martin girl lived in Paris-anywhere in France-"
"The probability is Paris, I think. Such a simple, artful little setup. By God, I'll find out what was behind that if it takes a year," said Mendoza violently. "And I think we can let that hospital staff go about its business. We're never going to turn up any evidence on that damn thing." Hackett agreed thoughtfully. The autopsy on Alisio had said exactly what they expected it to say.
By now, four possible suspects on that heist had been found and questioned, but there was nothing to tie in any of them definitely. Two more heists had gone down last night with no clear descriptions. The heat wave was still with them.
Hackett said, "We get these spells sometimes. Stymied on everything. Then all of a sudden we'll start to get the breaks."
"Pollyanna," said Mendoza.
What broke on Monday afternoon was another homicide, at a junior high school down on Vernon Avenue. One of the teachers, Mrs. Vera Robertson, was found by another teacher, knifed to death in her own classroom. Mendoza and Higgins went out to have a first look and talked to a shaken and angry principal, Lee Olliphant.
"We've never had anything as bad as this," he said. "There's always the dope problem. You can't do anything with some of these damn kids, they come to school stoned on the dope, on the liquor, or both. About all we can do is try to see they don't disturb the kids who are teachable. Mrs. Robertson had complained to me of several boys in her class, the first week of school. It was her first semester with us, you know. She'd been transferred from a junior high school in Hollywood." He was a big pear-shaped man in a baggy wrinkled suit and he eyed Mendoza's fastidious dapperness with faint disapproval. The knifing had apparently happened during the lunch hour. She had been found at twelve-thirty by the other teacher, Wilma Fox.
She said, "Vera just hated it here. Heaven knows the kids anywhere are bad enough nowadays, but down here it's worse than other places, more of the kids on dope and some of the rest impossible to teach for other reasons, and I'm sorry if I sound prejudiced, but that is the plain truth. But this-I'm going to be scared to come to work and I've got to earn a living-"
Olliphant said heavily, "My God, I'm thankful I'm due to retire next year. It's not unusual for the boys here to carry knives, there's a lot of gang activity and the decent kids get intimidated for the lunch money and so on." He sighed. "Not an easy job. Yes, I can give you the names of the boys she complained about-showing up high on dope, resisting discipline-but that doesn't say it was one of them who did it. We have a lot of difficult youngsters."
Half of the names were Latin-Ortiz, Gonzales, Lopez. The rest of the boys were black. Classes were out by then, the lab men busy in the classroom, but they wouldn't turn up anything useful. They couldn't print juveniles, and with all the kids milling around at the lunch hour nobody would have noticed any disturbance in that classroom, and nobody would tell the fuzz if they had. Her handbag was missing. She had kept it in a drawer in her desk. She had been thirty-five, had a husband and two young daughters. The husband was a bookkeeper at a savings-and-loan company in Hollywood, and he told them that she never carried more than a few dollars to school. She had had her wallet rifled the first day she was there and there wasn't a lock on any of her drawers. "These goddamn punk kids. Not a white kid in that damn place. All the spicks and dinges. And you want to arrest me for being prejudiced, go ahead. I told her for God's sake not to turn her back on any of them. All of those goddamn kids carrying knives or worse. Damn it, if we hadn't needed her salary, she wouldn't have been there-"
It was a waste of time to talk to the kids. The biggest one of those she'd complained about was Rudy Ortiz, a hulking fourteen-year-old. He didn't like the fuzz worth a damn but he knew they couldn't do anything to him. He said sullenly what the other ones had said, as if it were the same record being played. "She just hated anybody with a Latin name-like she hated all the black kids. All the kids knew that. Nobody liked old lady Robertson, but I don't know nothing about what happened."
Her handbag turned up the next day, in a trash container behind the school cafeteria. Her wallet was in it, empty of the few dollars it had held. This was another one that would go into Pending after a couple of follow-up reports. But on the following Thursday, the unexpected happened. The Security Pacific Bank which had issued Edna Holzer's Visa card called headquarters to report, as requested, that an attempt had been made to use that account. The routine check had showed up the hold on it. The card had been presented at the Broadway Department Store at Hollywood and Vine in the women's dress section.
Mendoza and Hackett went up there in a hurry and talked to the clerk who had checked the card. She was an amiable middle-aged woman who'd worked there for years, and she said, "It's funny how you get feelings, sort of a sixth sense, when somebody's trying to pull something, a shoplifter or something like this. I kind of had a feeling about that girl as soon as I saw her. It was funny."
"Can you describe her?" asked Mendoza.
"Oh, sure, I think I can do better than that for you. Of course, she didn't get away with the merchandise, she'd picked out a couple of dresses and a blouse, and these credit cards get stopped for a lot of reasons-I couldn't know she'd stolen it, I just let her walk out. But I'd seen her before, you know, and when the department head said the police were interested, I did some thinking on it, and I can tell you where to find her."
"By God, Art, you're a prophet," said Mendoza. "Don't tell me we're going to get a break. Where and who?"
"She's a waitress at this coffee shop just up the block. Faye's Cafe. I drop in there for lunch sometimes. She's about twenty-five, size twelve, she's got red hair. Yes, I'm sure it's her. I'd swear to it."
They picked her up at the cafe. Her name was Sally Pitman and at first she wouldn't tell them anything, just kept denying she'd done it. But Higgins came and loomed at her and she didn't like him at all, or the big businesslike detective office. Finally she said weakly, "I didn't really do anything, did I? I just thought if I could use that card to get some things-well, it'd be easy. I didn't know there was anything wrong with it. Somebody just lost it."
"Where did you get it?" asked Higgins for the third time.
"I found it. I told you. I just found it on the sidewalk."
They went on pounding at her about that and finally in exasperation they left her alone for five minutes and turned Wanda Larsen on to her.
"You know, Lieutenant," said Wanda sweetly, "there's an old saying that you catch more flies with honey. Why did you try to scare the poor kid? All she needed were a few sympathetic words. I think she'll talk to you now."
"Thank you so much," said Mendoza.
Sally Pitman was still sullen but ready to talk straighter. "Oh, for God's sake," she said wearily. "I found the damn card in my boyfriend's pocket. We were just sitting around the other night and I was out of cigarettes and I looked to see if he had any in his jacket."
"Boyfriend's name?" asked Hackett briskly.
"Ray Siemens. He doesn't know anything about it either."
"Did you ask him about it?"
"He found it. He just found it in the street. He said he forgot he'd picked it up and I better throw it away, it was no good. But I just thought-but he doesn't know anything about all this. He told me to throw it away."
Ray Siemens worked at a gas station on Western. They brought him in to talk to and he laughed at them. He was a big husky dark-haired fellow about twenty-five, and he didn't appreciate being grilled by the fuzz, but they couldn't shake his story. He'd found the card on the sidewalk right outside the station. Didn't know why he bothered to pick it up. He'd forgotten he had. He told Sally to thrown it away, it was no good to anybody. He went on saying that over again and of course there was no evidence on him at all. He could have found it where the X on Edna Holzer had dropped it. The car had been clean. He had a little pedigree with them-one count of assault with intent. He had served a year in the men's colony at San Luis Obispo. Both Mendoza and Hackett liked that, but without any definite evidence they'd never tie him in.