"How’s that'?" asked Higgins.
"Yi, these old ladies," said Weinstein. "She was old-fashioned, kept her business to herself, which is O.K., but she’d got to know me all this time, that I’m O.K. too, and about six months ago she gives me nearly a heart attack myself. I go in to get a Coke. It was just after that big bank job uptown, and I mentioned it, and she says she never put any trust in banks, keeps her money where she can lay her hands on it. I had a fit, I talked to her like a brother. She was a close old lady, didn’t spend much on herself, and God knows what she mighta had there, saved up fifty years, in a drawer or a closet shelf or somewhere. She finally listened to me and got a lock-box at the bank, I know that, she told me about it."
"You don’t say," said Hackett, exchanging a glance with Higgins. The mobile lab truck slid to the curb behind the squad car. "Well, we’ll ask you to make a statement later, Mr. Weinstein."
"Whatever I can do, gents." He turned away to the little pawnshop across the alley from the market. "Maybe the word hadn’t got round," said Higgins, watching Marx and Horder unload equipment from the truck.
"Or maybe," said Hackett, "it was just what the man said-a hood high on something who didn’t know what he was doing. Bears the general resemblance to our pretty boys, only they’ve been grabbing them off the street. And this kind of violence is not so unusual now." It was to be hoped the hood had left some clues behind for the lab.
Galeano was just as glad it was Rich Conway’s day off. He expected Rich wouldn’t know when to stop kidding him about that blonde. It was like a lot of things in life, he thought: it came back to people, not facts. Maybe people versus facts. Damn it, he thought, when you heard a story like that, you said fishy, you said the gall, but meeting that girl- As he rode up in the elevator, it came to him more clearly just why she’d made an impression on him, and it was a funny word to use: dignity. And maybe that was why Carey and Conway and, for God’s sake, Mendoza, had reacted the way they had. If she’d gone all to pieces, nobody would have thought twice about it, just about the mystery… though, of course, anything happened to a husband you automatically looked at the wife, and vice versa… but, maybe on account of her different upbringing or something, Marta had that dignity, didn’t go parading her feelings in public, and the cynics naturally thought she hadn’t any.
Damn it, I’1l believe her, thought Galeano. That it happened just that way: she’d come home and he was gone. But how and where? And why? The thing didn’t make any sense.
Say he had been murdered by somebody else, there was no earthly reason to conceal the body, was there? But ruminating on it, Galeano had come up with a couple of ideas which might open the case wider. Carey had been thinking just about Marta, and the hypothetical boyfriend; but what about Edwin? There he was all day in his wheelchair, nothing to do. Maybe he listened to the radio, watched TV some, but not all day. They’d only moved to that place a couple of months ago. It could be that he’d spent some time on the phone, talking to old friends where they used to live in Hollywood; they had had friends there. Carey hadn’t located all of them to talk to. It could be, thought Galeano vaguely, that somebody who hadn’t heard about this could give them some ideas about Edwin. Anyway, they ought to chase down everybody who knew the Flemings.
Mendoza had gone out somewhere, and Lake was hunched over one of his eternal books about dieting. Galeano slid into Mendoza’s office and found the manila envelope with Carey’s notes, rummaged through it and took down addresses. People named Frost, Cadby, Prescott, Deal, up in Hollywood: Cahuenga Boulevard, Berendo, Las Palmas.
He drew a blank at the Cahuenga Boulevard apartment; a neighbor just going out told him that Mr. and Mrs. Cadby both worked. He drove down to Berendo. This was the place the Flemings had been living before his accident: one of the old Hollywood streets getting refurbished these days, old houses torn down to make way for new apartments. It was a new, brightly painted two-story building with balconies on the upper floor units, a small blue pool in a side yard, patio tables. The Prescotts lived upstairs at the back; he rang the bell and waited.
The girl who opened the door was a slim leggy brunette in slacks and turtleneck sweater. "Yes?" She looked at the badge in his hand with surprise.
He said economically he’d like to ask a few questions about the Flemings-people who used to live here. "You knew them?"
"Why, yes. What’s the matter, they’re not in any trouble, are they? Pat, it’s a cop about Marta and Ed. This is Mrs. Frost, er-"
"Galeano."
"Mr. Galeano. I’m Marion Prescott. Pat knew them too. But what is the matter? What do you want to know?"
The other girl was smaller, blonde, with a rather scraggly figure. Galeano told them that Fleming was missing and inquiries were being made. "Missing!" said Marion Prescott. "How could he be missing? He couldn’t just walk away, a man in a wheelchair. That poor man! It made us all feel guilty, for-"
"For what?" asked Galeano as she stopped.
"Oh, heavens, you’d better come in," she said. "It’s cold with the door open. Pat and I were just having some coffee, would you like some? I’ll get you a cup, sit down."
"I can’t get over it," said Pat Frost with avid interest. "You mean he’s just disappeared? How funny. It’s not as if he had any imagination?
"How do you mean?" asked Galeano.
"Oh, you know, like all those stories with ingenious plots, people vanishing and then turning out to be the mail carrier," she said vaguely. Mrs. Prescott came back and handed Galeano a cup of coffee.
"There’s cream and sugar on the coffee table. Heavens, I suppose we’d better tell you whatever you want to know. Not that we knew them well, and we couldn’t tell you anything about them since they moved away. It was just, we all lived here, and none of us was working-the wives, I mean-we’d have morning coffee and so on. Marta-she’s not an easy person to know, would you say, Pat?"
"What did you mean about feeling guilty, Mrs. Prescott?"
"Oh-" She flushed. "You’ll think we’re a lot of snobs. Ed’s a nice fellow, but, well, let’s face it, he hasn’t much education, many interests outside baseball and the corniest shows on TV. I don’t mean the rest of us are intellectuals, for heaven’s sake, but my husband’s a broker and Pat’s is a therapist at the Cedars, and the few times we all got together for a potluck supper by the pool, you could see Ed was out of his depth, he just didn’t have anything to talk about to the men. Now Marta’s very well educated, in that very correct German way, I’d say, and I could see she was embarrassed for him. And then when he had that accident, and was paralyzed-"
"Didn’t he have some kind of pension or disability pay or something?" asked Pat Frost; her nose twitched with curiosity just the way Mendoza’s did, Galeano noticed. "We wondered, but she never said a word, and then when they moved-he must have had, hadn’t he? I mean, these days everybody-I know there was a fuss, the man he was working for claimed it was Ed’s own fault, but we did hear he had to pay for the hospital-"
Marta not parading her troubles in public, that just confirmed his convictions. "I’m afraid I couldn’t say about that. Have any of you been in touch with Fleming since they moved?"
"Heavens, no," said Marion Prescott. "It was just proximity, you could say. We hadn’t much in common. As I say, Marta’s difficult to know. Maybe the foreign upbringing, but she’s so formal-well, I’ll say one thing, I think she was homesick, she missed her family, she was always writing to them. I don’t think she’d made any close friends here, I gather they’d moved around a good deal since Ed was out of the service."