"Just no sense. Nobody here even knew them, to want to do such a thing-"
Landers looked at Palliser. Often there wasn't much sense in the violent crimes, but there seemed to be less in this one than most. They walked up the street and talked to Mrs. Ballard, but she knew even less to tell them, except to repeat that she'd seen the man running away. A tall, skinny man. She didn't know what color.
"There's nowhere to start looking," said Landers. "The house wasn't robbed. There was forty dollars in his wallet and thirty in her handbag."
"The lunatic or the drunk," said Palliser, rubbing his nose. "There may be prints."
"And even if there are, they might not be in Records."
"Well, time will tell. I don't see that there's much we can do on it until we see the lab report, and the autopsies should tell us something about the knife."
"For whatever it's worth," said Landers pessimistically.
HACKETT WAS JUST starting out to lunch with Higgins on Saturday when a man came into the office past Rory Farrell at the switchboard. "The desk man downstairs said to come up here." He was a pudgy middle-aged man with thinning red hair and a bulldog jaw. "With this. You're welcome to it." He held out a small imitation leather case, the kind made to hold a man's shaving tackle.
"What's this?"
"Well, I wouldn't know," said the man. "But I thought the cops had better see it. Sure as hell I thought so. My name's O'Hara, and I drive a cab for Yellow."
"Yes, Mr. O'Hara. Come in and sit down. What's this all about‘?"
In the communal office, O'Hara put the case down gingerly on Hackett's desk. "I don't want one damn thing to do with it. So I tell you. I carried five fares since I come on duty at eight. This is the hell of a town for cabs. Everybody and his brother got cars, see. And when I dropped the latest fare it was an old lady and I got out to help her up on the curb and I see that thing. Somebody's left it in the back seat, and she says it's not hers. So I don't know who it belongs to. One of the other fares."
"Yes." Hackett offered him a cigarette.
"So naturally I looked to see if it's unlocked, if there's maybe some I.D. in it to say who left it, see, and it was. And, Jesus, then I didn't want to know who owns it. You open it and look, just look."
Hackett pulled the case in front of him. It was the kind that had a zipper all around three sides and he ran it around and the case gaped open.
There were two things in it. The first was a bunched-up bath towel. It had originally been white, but it was now liberally stained with great rusty smears of long-dried blood. Something showed at the loose end of the bunch. Hackett lifted out the towel and from its folds a knife fell with a little clatter onto the desk. It was an ordinary kitchen knife with a blade about nine inches long and an inch wide, and it was deeply stained with the same rusty brown dried blood, both blade and handle.
"For God's sake," said Higgins, looking over his shoulder.
The other thing in the case was a worn imitation leather billfold. Any experienced detective was trained to be careful about disturbing possible latent fingerprints, but there were times when you had to take the risk. Hackett upended the case, the billfold fell out and he eased it open to lie flat with his pen. The first little plastic slot held a driver's license and it had been issued to Mabel Carter, forty-six, brown hair and blue eyes, five two, one hundred and ten pounds. The address was Portland Street.
"Now I will be good and goddamned," said Hackett in naked astonishment. He sat back and stared up at Higgins. "That hooker who got cut up by a john. There was nothing on it. I shoved it in Pending myself."
"That's damn funny all right. Do you have any idea which of those fares might have left this?" Higgins asked O'Hara.
"Well, I have. And if he did I don't want to lay eyes on him again. I got to thinking after I saw that damn thing. Two of the other fares were female and I got a sort of idea it's got to have been the one with the luggage. I think he had a little case like that in his hand when he got in the cab. That was the fare about ten o'clock. I picked him up at the Biltmore and took him to the Holiday Inn on Figueroa."
"I will be goddamned," said Hackett again. "That was dead. Well, thanks very much, O'Hara."
"You know who it is? He's done a murder by all that. Well, you're welcome to it," said O'Hara. "Me, I never could stand the sight of blood."
There wasn't that much urgency about it, surprising and interesting as it might be. They went out and had lunch. They got to the Holiday Inn at about one-thirty and Hackett told the desk clerk they were looking for a man who had checked in about ten this morning. The clerk shied nervously at the badge.
"I hope there won't be any trouble, we run a quiet place here." He looked at the registration book. "We've only had one guest register this morning. Dr. Walter Thomas, from Indianapolis. He's in room eighteen."
"Thanks very much," said Hackett. They rode up in the elevator, walked down the carpeted hall. "What the hell can this be, anyway?" He had the dressing case in one hand. The door of room 18 opened promptly to a knock and they faced a large round man in an elegant silk dressing gown. He looked about fifty. He had a dough-colored face with a small prissy mouth.
"Dr. Thomas?" said Hackett. "By any chance does this belong to you?" Pending a look at this funny thing, they had restored the contents to the case.
The man seized the case, unzipped it, looked inside and said, "Dear me, yes I am most obliged to you for returning it. Most obliged." He gave them an open, friendly smile.
"You see I always like to keep the souvenirs of the bad ones. You may call it a little foible of mine. I only bother to kill the bad ones. The others are not so important. I'm very glad to have this returned to me, gentlemen."
MENDOZA WAS NOT a sightseer by nature, and he was not particularly interested in Paris. As far as he could see it was just another city, as sprawled out into suburbs as his own city. He had dutifully, if uninterestedly, been to the Eiffel Tower.
This morning he had gone to Rambeau's office, but Rambeau was out, the man at the switchboard told him in rudimentary English, on a new homicide. What Rambeau called the spadework was still going on, he supposed. He wandered up the streets from the big Prefecture of Police building and presently came to a large public park. An elderly woman at a tobacconist shop had pressed a guidebook on him yesterday and he consulted it now to find that he was in the Jardin des Tuileries, and the imposing building beyond the lawns and flowers and the octagonal pool would be the Louvre. He sat down on a bench by the pool. Two excited little boys in knee pants were sailing miniature boats on the pool. He hadn't any urge to go into the Louvre, look at paintings and objects of art.
There was a little girl sitting on the grass, watched over by a woman on the bench opposite his. She was a pretty little girl with dark hair, about six. She reminded Mendoza of Terry. He smiled at her and she smiled back shyly. He supposed he ought to go and have some lunch.
NINE
BOTH HACKETT AND HIGGINS had had a number of varied experiences in their combined years on the L.A.P.D., but Dr. Thomas was something new to them. He agreed quite amiably to accompany them to meet a friend and they waited while he dressed in a new gray suit, clean white shirt and tie. They took him straight out to the psychiatric ward at Cedars-Sinai and left him there, and went back to look at the hotel room. There was a suitcase full of nearly new clothes and in one of the side pockets was nearly seventy thousand dollars in cash. They also found a few of his other souvenirs, bloodstained knives and four other wallets with female I.D.'s in them, all the addresses in New Jersey.