Hackett got on the phone to Pendleton Air Force Base, and a cooperative sergeant began feeding him long lists of base personnel, military, who had been on leave or otherwise off base yesterday. It was a frighteningly long list. And of course the nonmilitary personnel resident there or having business there could patronize the PX too. Hackett I began to feel less enthusiastic about that little clue.
Altogether, Saturday was an unproductive day.
Saturday night was always busy for Traffic, sometimes for the night watch at Robbery-Homicide; it varied. Tonight they didn’t get a call for some time, and Shogart amused himself by listening to the Traffic calls-drunk drivers, drunks on the street, speeders, accidents, one high-speed pursuit.
"Makes you feel kind of safe here, out of all that mayhem," said Schenke, and the desk buzzed them. There was a body reported by Traffic.
Piggott went out on it with Shogart. It was an all-night restaurant on Alvarado, a chain place with a good reputation. The black and white was at the curb, and inside they found Patrolman Bill Moss and some excited, bewildered people. It was just nine-thirty, the place wasn’t crowded, but the short-order cook and two busboys had come out to add to the crowd.
"But, my God, he’s just a young guy! It could’ve been a heart attack, anybody can have one, but my God-"
"The night manager, Fred Mallow," said Moss. "He can identify him."
"Identify him!" Mallow was tall and thin, flapping his arms all around. "His name’s Donald Ames, he’s only twenty-three, twenty-four, he works at the tow service down the street, always comes in here middle of the evening for a sandwich. A nice young guy, quiet, I just can’t get over this! I can’t believe it! Sitting there in a booth, like always, waiting for Beatrice to bring his sandwich, and all of a sudden he falls on the floor, and I rush over, and he’s dead! Dead! I can’t believe it-"
Shogart was squatting over the body, which lay stretched out awkwardly between the rows of booths. Ames was a good-looking young man, dark hair cut short; he had on a white jumpsuit with red stitching over the breast pocket: Dick’s Tow Service. Shogart stood up and sniffed, getting out his handkerchief; a minute red stain came off his fingers. "He was stabbed,’° he said. "Thin blade, right in the heart I’d say. Hardly any blood."
Moss looked surprised; Mallow was incredulous. "Stabbed?" he said. "Why, that’s impossible! That’s just ridiculous! Nobody came near him! It’s early, we’re not crowded-you can see, only one couple in a booth, six-seven people at the counter-and he walked in here perfectly O.K., looked just the same as usual, he says to Beatrice, fix me the usual-which is a Reuben sandwich with coleslaw on the side-and he goes into the rest room and comes out again and sits in the booth and lights a cigarette. There wasn’t anybody in ten feet of him! Nobody could have stabbed him!"
"I can’t help that," said Shogart. "He was knifed." He looked around at the little crowd. "Were you all here when he came in? Then we’d better take all your names and addresses, please."
It took a while; there were ten men and four women, including the restaurant staff. Five people definitely confirmed that not a soul had approached Ames as he sat in the booth, so there wasn’t much point in calling out S.I.D. to process the place. It was just another offbeat thing.
Piggott searched the body and came up with I.D.-an address in Hollywood. Let the day watch break the news and try to figure out what had happened to him.
They got back to the office at eleven-thirty, and Schenke told them what they’d missed. Roger Perryman, seventy-nine, on the way from the movies to his rented room on Elden Place-his weekly night out. Jumped and beaten up by the thugs. They’d got a dollar and eighty-four cents, left out of his Social Security. Mr. Perryman had been lucky; they hadn’t roughed him up much when a squad car came round the corner and they ran off. There were three of them, he said, one with long blond hair and real sporty clothes, he remembered a plaid jacket.
"My God, those punks," said Shogart.
On Sunday morning, Galeano went to early Mass for the first time in years. He hardly knew why he did; he’d got out of the habit, since moving out here away from the family. He went to the nearest church downtown, the old Mission Church, and was surprised and oddly embarrassed to spot Mendoza there, in one of the back pews. He slipped hurriedly out afterward.
And, mulling over Carey’s report in his mind, he hadn’t got any further about Fleming at all. The other tenants in that building-could there be anything there? Carey had seen them all, and to anyone who knew city people, the results were understandable. That, said Carey, was a place to sleep. There was only one couple, the Del Sardos, people in their fifties, both working. Offerdahl. An old maid in one ground-floor unit, out all day at a job. Two men, Lathrop and Harrigan, both bachelors, also out at jobs. And the Flemings. And the Flemings had only been there a couple of months-the others didn’t know much about them, or care. It wasn’t the kind of place, they weren’t the kind of people, for fraternizing.
Like Mendoza, Galeano told himself that Carey had looked: there had been a thorough physical search for the man all up and down that block. Carey the cynic, looking for the boyfriend, had looked at the single men Lathrop and Harrigan. Lathrop, he said, was a fag: hung out at a known fag joint uptown. Harrigan had a steady girl friend he was practically living with.
They said she was homesick. No close friends. She wrote her family all the time. Galeano wondered-he had sisters, but he didn’t know about females-if she’d have written home about a boyfriend; he rather thought not, but you never knew. But there’d be no way to get at those letters.
Whatever else you could say about Carey, he was a competent man at his job. So far as the physical evidence went.
Galeano parked in front of the apartment and looked at the terrain. The empty house: Carey’s men had searched the yard, all the yards down the block. The newer apartment on the other side was a bare box of a place. The half block behind, just cleared for a new building, was nothing but raw earth.
But it wasn’t just a physical problem.
He got out of the car, climbed the stairs and rang Marta’s bell. It buzzed emptily at him. She wasn’t home.
After a moment he turned and pushed the bell across the hall.
The door was opened by a little perky-looking gray-haired woman. He had read all the statements, and somehow he had pictured Mrs. Del Sardo as buxom and dark. He showed her the badge.
"Oh," she said, "cops again. That really is a funny thing, isn’t it? I’ve got a theory about it." He saw that her slate-colored eyes were shallow and foolish. "I think he was a fake, not a cripple at all. They were going to sue somebody, he was just pretending to be paralyzed."
Galeano stared at her. "I’m afraid that wasn’t-"
"You can’t trust doctors, they’ll say anything," she told him. "And if you ask me Mrs. Fleming is a real sly one. Look at the way she made sure I saw them together that morning, her saying good-bye and him in the chair there-"
"You usually leave the same time?" asked Galeano. "It wasn’t the first morning you’d seen her leave when you came out too?"
"Well, no, but now I think about it- And then all the fuss and excitement that afternoon- And it wasn’t till later I found out from one of the cops, she said she came home at five that day, and it was earlier, and the more I think about it I think there was some kind of plan that maybe went wrong, to cheat an insurance company or something. I thought-"
Galeano fastened on the one thing she’d said. "What do you mean, it wasn’t five when she came home?"
"Well, it wasn’t. I came home early that day, I know the day because of all the fuss and the cops. I was coming down with a cold, I felt terrible, and the boss said take the afternoon off. So I did, and this place isn’t exactly the Rock of Gibraltar"-she laughed-"you can hear neighbors. That Offerdahl! He was never so bad as this before. Anyway, she-Mrs. Fleming-she came home just after I did. I heard her running up the stairs like she always does. Call it two-thirty. And a minute after, down she goes again. So I guess he was all right then, or she was pretending he was. If you ask me he always was all right, prob’ly he’s just lying low somewheres. Like I say-"