"Neither my wife nor I can remember exactly."
"Yes, you were tired. Why should you pay attention? But that is not so common a name, and we will look for him also. Her employer-and she said he was not so easy to work for as his uncle. The impression you had, Juliette was a superior type-An office, she said? Not perhaps only a typist?" `
"I don't know your types," said Mendoza. "She was an educated, intelligent girl."
"Yes, and the telephone directory," said Rambeau, "it is not infallible. The current ones are nearly a year old, but we will try. If the Surete have not got her fingerprints, then neither do we. That is no good. But you know that her passport was issued in Paris and that means that she lived ` here. In one of a million places. But," he lit another cigarette and beamed at Mendoza, "but, my friend, I believe we will find out about the little Juliette, and I will tell you why. You yourself said it. If you had not been the one to go to look at that corpse, no one would have suspected it was not the so nonexistent Ruth Hoffman. It is a very pretty little comedy, this. Here there is a Hoffman-with all the plausible identification. An end and no beginning. And there we have Juliette-a beginning and no end. If the beginning is hidden from us. But it was not by chance that you should see the corpse. There are many men under you in your office?"
Mendoza said wryly, "Never enough."
Rambeau laughed. "Here too. But I believe the universe is ordered and men are not governed by chance. Me, I am a good Catholic, which also you should be by your name-"
"Sporadically," said Mendoza with a grin.
Rambeau shook his head in smiling disapproval. "No, it was not by chance it was you. If the devil is always active on one side, there is the good God to combat him, and God is the Stronger. Perhaps one of the good saints intercedes here for the little Juliette, to see she is avenged." He looked at his watch. "Courage-we begin the spadework. I will set men at the telephone directory, and you and I will go to luncheon at a small place where they know how to prepare the omelette, and then you amuse yourself and go to look at Paris while we try to solve your mystery." He stood up and gave Mendoza a joyous smile. "And then we will find who is this mysterious Grandpere, and why Juliette must be murdered. My men are the good trained bloodhounds. We will find out."
ON WEDNESDAY, Records matched up another of the pickup owners with a pedigree, Cesar Montano. The pedigree said armed robbery, assault with intent, burglary. He'd been arrested and charged the last time four years ago.
Hackett called Welfare and Rehab to find out if he was loose, and Montano had been on parole for six months. The address on the registration was Harris Street in City Terrace. Hackett and Glasser went to see if he was at home or at work; his P.A. officer had got him a job with a janitorial service. They found him watching television in the dirty, untidy living room of a cheap apartment, and brought him downtown. They couldn't get the time of day out of him. He just called them a string of dirty names and after that shut up. He was a big hulk of a man about thirty with a pock-marked face and quick-shifting eyes. Dealing with the stupid louts was tedious and only from long experience did they keep their tempers and use patience. They tried for an hour to get something out of him and then they left him in jail and Higgins sent out for a search warrant.
They had another heist to work now and there were indictments scheduled for next week, Myra Arvin, Toby Wells, Randy Nicolletti. Somebody would have to be in court to cover those.
When the search warrant came in, Higgins was out looking for the owner of a Ford pickup who had a record of assault, so Hackett and Glasser went to look at Montano's apartment. It should have been Hackett's day off but they were anxious to get this one cleared up if they could. The apartment was scantily furnished, a cheap, shabby place. There was a little stock of food in the kitchen, a wardrobe full of nondescript old clothes, nothing but underwear and socks in the dresser drawers.
"Of course whoever did the shooting," said Glasser, "may have got shut of that gun, if he's halfway smart."
"But they so seldom are, Henry," said Hackett. He went back to the bedroom, leaving Glasser staring around the squalid living room, and was busy looking through the pockets of the clothes in the wardrobe when Glasser burst out laughing. "My God in heaven! Come and look at this, Art." Hackett went back to the living room. "I just happened to see it reflected in the windowpane."
The T.V. in one corner of the living room still had a tag on it, suspended from the back of the set: the manufacturer's tag, but neatly stuck across. it was a little strip of gummed paper with printing on it. PURDUE'S T.V. AND APPLIANCES. Hackett burst out laughing too. "They are so seldom smart enough to add two plus two. My God, what a stupid damn thing."
They took the T.V. in as evidence, and went to talk to Montano again. He was hardly the biggest brain in the world, but even he saw that the T.V. tied him to that job and he started to talk fast. "For Jesus' sake, you're not goin' to pin that on me, shooting that damn cop- I like to had a fit when Joe shot the cop- I didn't know he had a gun on him even. You don't pin that on me, it was Joe, I don't take no rap for him. I don't even know him so good, I just saw him around, and he needed some eating money, he says, how about we hit that place and I-it was Joe shot that cop. I tell you where to drop on him, it's Joe Vasquez, he got a pad on Fourteenth. No, for God's sake, acourse he ain't got a job, why the hell you think we was knocking off that place? "
With a feeling of warm satisfaction, Higgins and Hackett went out to collect Vasquez, and he wasn't at home, but a helpful neighbor said he spent a lot of time hanging around the pool hall a couple of blocks up and they found him there. He didn't have the gun on him but they got a search warrant and in going through his apartment found a. 45 Colt, a nearly new gun, in a box on the closet shelf. They handed it over to the lab. The lab would, of course, tell them that it was the gun that had fired the slugs into Dubois. And Dubois was conscious and sitting up. Somebody would go to see him and tell him about Montano and Vasquez.
They didn't bother to talk to Vasquez right away. Wait for the ballistics report. When he heard about that and about Montano snitching on him, he might be mad enough to come out with a confession. But it wouldn't matter much. There was the nice obvious evidence on him.
HIGGINS GOT HOME EARLY. With that case broken, just the heist to work, and with all the overtime they'd been doing, they could go slack for a day or two. When he went in the back door, Mary was just taking a cake out of the oven, the kids just home from school, Laura and Steve Dwyer, Steve looking more like Bert every day. But the memory was a little faded now, in Higgins' mind, of Bert Dwyer dead on the marble floor of the bank with the bank robber's bullets in him. They were surprised to see him and Higgins said, yawning, "We cleared up that shooting, so we can all relax some."
"How did you get them?" asked Steve, interested. Higgins told him. "Well, that was a pretty stupid thing for that guy to do."
"They're never very smart, or they wouldn't be what they are. It didn't take any brains to drop on them, just the usual routine."
"Yeah, the lab's the most interesting part of the job. Say, George. The counselor let me switch from Biology One to general science. I figured that'll be more useful to me later on."
"Fine," said Higgins. Someday, about ten years from now, unless he changed his mind, Steve Dwyer was going to be up in the police lab with the other miracle-working technicians.