He put out his cigarette and switched off the light. A few more facts, and maybe it would suddenly come unraveled.
One small fact came in the next morning, from the routine gathering of miscellany. About that bank: that it kept old-fashioned banking hours. And that helped quite a lot in reconstructing Trask's plans. And then Hackett came in, and abruptly handed Mendoza a wholly new idea…
"And where did that idea come from?" asked Mendoza. "It's definitely a thought, but a little offbeat… that girl Angel. Mmh, yes. Motives, motives…" He looked at Hackett's back in mild curiosity. Hackett, terse and noncommittal, had put forward this theory walking around the office as he talked, and stood now looking out the window.
"I know it's one of those things that doesn't happen often-"
"It's not as odd as all that-kind of thing that has happened. But what's reached you about it? You're acting as if you were telling the tale on your sister."
"Sister be damned,” said Hackett. "I know it's senseless, Luis, but I'm sorry for the girl. She hasn't had much of a break from life. That damned woman…" He shrugged and turned around.
Mendoza was leaning back looking cynically amused; he shot Hackett a glance from half-shut eyes. "What heresy is this, Arturo-my big dumb sergeant smitten? Cuidado, amigo! That's one of the beaten paths to the trap, feeling sorry for them."
"Don't be a fool-and you can keep your opinions to yourself. Just because you make a hobby of collecting the free samples without any intention of buying-"
" Ay que risa! Where've you been hibernating, friend-since when is it free? This one I don't believe, de veras absolutamente -Hackett the impervious, and old enough to look after himself, God knows-Hackett the stolid-Hackett who never so far as I know, the ten years I know him, takes out the same girl three times running-and not because he's looking for free samples but because he's got a wide streak of caution, having some common sense if not quite as much as me! You don't tell me."
"No, I don't tell you, damn it! I said I felt sorry for her and that's exactly what I meant, no more and no less. For which reason I'd also be sorry to prove that she killed a man. I'm well aware that you keep your emotions all carefully locked away in a secret compartment somewhere to take out and look at once in a long while-but if you think real hard, you may remember one or two occasions, maybe when you were a tender young rookie answering traffic calls and manhandling drunks, when you had a kind of feeling of sympathy for somebody who'd got knocked around a little through no fault of their own. I don't,” said Hackett, "say you ever did, because about you I wouldn't be sure, but maybe there was just once you felt a little something along that line for a second, hah?"
" Esto queda entre los dos, only for your ear-because I wouldn't want it to get around that this thinking machine Mendoza is a real live human being-if I sat here quiet and concentrated a while I might remember a couple of those times. But I won't tell you about them, to set a bad example. I've got a reputation to maintain, you know. Everybody thinks Mendoza's always been what he is now, you drop a little problem in one slot and his month's pay in another, and click-click-click, out comes the right answer- no es verdad?"
" Es verdad. Lo siento muchisimo -sorry, boy," said Hackett tiredly. "I just-I can see it happening, that's all. The way she is, that girl-all tied up in knots, poor little devil, and that woman hardly knowing she's alive. I don't know, but I'd bet you she's got nobody on the face of the earth to talk it out to, to give her any little sympathy, and you know as well as I do that's damned important. If you can blow off steam to somebody, even a stranger on a bus, it's a safety valve. You talk enough, you don't do anything about it. A hate, a grievance, a-desire. And she's not the kind who'd ever have made friends, at school or later on-ever had anybody. All this eating at her inside, keeping her-al1 to herself. If you get me. She'd put people off, she'd never have reached for it… She's just a-a mess, to look at. And prickly, because she's been hurt. Another thing I thought of, it's on the cards she got started acting standoflish because when she was just a youngster and that woman was still in the big-time, more or less, a lot of the kids she knew'd have pretended to like her because of who her mother was. And kids know these things. Just stiffened her up all the more, suspicious, you know, so she couldn't trust anybody enough to be friends. So it's all got magnified inside her, because it's stayed inside-and nobody to sympathize a little-"
"That's all very true," said Mendoza. He swiveled his desk-chair around and looked out the window himself, and for about five seconds he thought about the time when he was graduating from the sixth grade into junior high. Nobody down there that side of Main Street had much money, but every other boy in the class had some sort of new suit for that occasion, even the Los Reyes kid and Johnny Li-Chong; and his grandmother had tried to get a few dollars out of the old man; she'd gone on asking a long time after he had, himself. The old man, with all those bankbooks tucked away then (if they'd only known it), sitting on a fortune out of canny investments of his gambling takes, and grudging her the five bucks a week for groceries, the twenty a month for rent of the cold-water flat… He'd been ashamed, getting up there with the rest of them in the same shabby old pants and mended shirt he'd been wearing all year. But she'd said to him afterward, how proud she'd been that he was the tallest boy there, and how Mr. Jackson the principal had told her he was a good smart boy and a credit to her… And somehow the clothes hadn't mattered quite so much. Little things like that, they weren't always so little in the long run. Somebody to listen to you, somebody to share a feeling. Even if there was nothing to do about it.
He swiveled around again, absently straightening his tie, brushing a small fluff of cat hair from his sleeve. He was still of two minds about this suit-he should have looked at the bolt by daylight first, he reflected: you couldn't exactly call it loud, but the faint pattern was a good deal less discreet than he had thought. A nuisance; he'd call Harrington down for it too, the fellow ought to know better with a good customer. He said, "Well, we can kick this around a little, and I'd like to see those two, you've aroused my curiosity. But I'm wondering if and how that might fit in with a couple of suggestive little things in that story of Kingman's. Something burned in an ashtray. That laundry bag. Something else there besides the stuff on the Kingmans, and it looks as if whoever killed him was interested in it. Maybe… Sure, sure, if you take the Kingmans' story as gopsel. But-"
"There wouldn't be anything like that with her," said Hackett doubtfully. "I don't know if I do take that story or not-it hangs together, sure. And on the face of it, it's more likely that it was somebody with that kind of motive."
Mendoza agreed. "Let's see what we've got on these people." They looked, and besides Hackett's character analysis as gleaned from Mr. Horwitz and his own observation, there wasn't much and it didn't look remotely interesting. Higgins, sent out routinely to see the old Miss Kent that Mona Ferne had visited that evening, reported everything in order: the old lady confirmed that Miss Ferne had been with her that night from about a quarter to eight until half past ten or so. Where the girl Angel had been, that they'd find out.
"It's just-bits and pieces, and it could be I'm crazy. But that first time I met her, she didn't seem interested at first in who'd been murdered, and when she heard it was Twelvetrees, she was very casual about it, who'd want to kill him and so on. And then two minutes later she was ready to go into hysterics. Keeping up a front, it could be, and not quite managing it. And then yesterday the Ferne says to me-and not realizing what she said, because she couldn't be less interested in the girl, you know-that ‘Angel's been odd' for a week or so. It just added up in my mind, the way I say-"