" No lo niego," said Mendoza. "Funny is the word. But she didn’t drive him anywhere, if the Dodge was out of the garage at one o’clock. She didn’t get off work until two."
"That’d skipped my mind," said Galeano. "But she could have given the keys to somebody."
"Or he could," said Mendoza thoughtfully. "It’s a tangle-I don’t see through it at all. And talk about things being up in the air-" He had been turning a cigarette round in his fingers and now reached for his new cigarette lighter and pressed the trigger, bent to the flame.
"This Faber thing," said Hackett. "I’ve been telling him, sometimes S.I.D. hands us the answer right off, but this time all they’ve done is make more work for us. My God, you should see the list of names we got from Pendleton! Hundreds-and that’s only military personnel, there’d be no way to check on all the civilians wandering around, wives and so on. George is feeling pessimistic. He said ten to one that cigarette pack was already there when X came in, but I don’t think so. I talked to Weinstein again and he said she was a persnickety old lady, never would have let a thing like that lie around her clean floor. And there was something in what Scarne said-the autopsy will say definitely but they thought she’d been killed just before she was found, and that early in the morning he could have been staying or living right around there. What we’re doing now is checking with Pendleton for original home addresses. It’s the hell of a bore, but if we do find some airman who hailed from two blocks west of Faber’s Market and was on leave to see his sick mother-"
" De veras. The routine paying off again." Galeano had wandered out, and Mendoza added ruminatively, "Human nature is a queer thing, Art."
"A profound remark."
" Vaya el diablo. That Marta Fleming’s a nice-looking girl, nothing spectacular, but to see Nick fall for her-I’ll be damned if I can even guess what might have happened there, but if she was mixed up in some piece of collusion to get rid of her husband, I’d be sorry to see Nick knocked out over it. Last man in the world, you’d think."
"I seem to remember you once said that to me," said Hackett dryly, and Mendoza laughed.
"Hard to guess what people see in each other, fortunately for the continued existence of the human race."
One of the annoyances to police work was that something new was always coming along to interrupt other routine. With the continued hunt for Sandra’s killer reduced to the dogged routine, Palliser was now handed this new one by the night watch, Don Ames. It looked from the report as if there’d be a good many people to see, so he roped Conway in on it too.
"I think," he said as Conway digested Piggott’s report, "I’d like to see what a doctor had to say about this first. On the face of it, it’s another impossibility-by this, he was sitting alone in a booth, nobody near him."
"Let’s," agreed Conway. "Though I remember a case, when I was still riding a squad car-"
They found Dr. Bainbridge in his office, conscientious or with nowhere else to go on a rainy Sunday. He said he hadn’t seen the body, snorted interestedly over the report, and said, "Humph. I can tell you better after I’ve had him open, but let’s take a look anyway." He led the way down to the cold room and located the right tray; in a morgue the size of L.A.’s bodies tended to pile up. The corpse looked oddly young and defenseless, naked there; and Bainbridge poked at the minute brown line on his left breast, scarcely an inch long.
"There you are," he said. "I can guess what I’ll find inside. It was a very thin blade, he probably didn’t bleed at all immediately. The witnesses said he’d been sitting p alone there about five minutes before he suddenly fell down dead? Typical. He could have been stabbed fifteen, twenty minutes before and not realized it himself."
"I saw a case something like it once," said Conway, nodding.
"It’s possible he never felt the knife, didn’t know he’d been stabbed. Depending how it happened, he’d have felt a blow on the chest, thought nothing of it."
"That might put it before he got into the restaurant," said Palliser.
"I don’t say it was that long, I don’t know," said Bainbridge. "I just said it could be."
"Well, thanks anyway." And that was at ten o’clock; Palliser had already been to Ames’ address in Hollywood, where he’d lived with his parents, and been through that harrowing scene.
They started out at Dick’s Tow Service where he’d worked, and found out from the owner that-as usual, he said-a couple of employees hadn’t shown up for the night shift, and he’d been there alone with Ames since five o’clock. They hadn’t had a call in an hour before Don went off on his break, and nothing unusual had happened; they’d just been sitting there talking. He couldn’t make out what had happened to Don-"I thought a lot of him, hard worker, nice fellow, and he didn’t go around picking lights, even getting into arguments. I just can’t make it out."
He was a straightforward type, so that seemed to put it right back to the restaurant again, and they looked up Fred Mallow, who was annoyed at being waked up, and heard a firsthand account. "He came in, gave his order and went into the rest room? How long was he there?" asked Palliser.
"Oh, three, five, six minutes-I wasn’t watching the clock. Not long. And like I said, he came out and sat down in the booth perfectly O.K., and then five minutes later--"
"All right. Was anybody else in the men’s room at the same time?"
"My God, I don’t know. I was counting the receipts, I’d just taken over from Powell. I suppose there could’ve been, but I couldn’t say."
"Well, suppose you take a look at this list and tell us which are employees there and if you know any of the witnesses."
By this time fully awake, Mallow accepted a cigarette and looked at the list of names and addresses. "Sanchez and De Carlos are the busboys. The cook’s Bob Smith. Lessee, well, a lot of our regulars I just know by their faces, but I know some of these names. Javorsky, he has the tape and record shop up the block, usually stops in after he closes up. Kravits, he’s from the twenty-four-hour pharmacy up the other way, a pharmacist I think. I think I heard this name Cobbler too, if I place him he works somewhere around, comes in pretty regular. This Edna girl, I didn’t know her name was Willis, she’s from that pharmacy too, been in with other girls, I heard them call her Edna. But she was with a guy last night, I don’t know his name, must be one of these others. I’m not saying I don’t know these guys, I just don’t recognize the names. Michael Jarvis, Joseph Toombs, Tom Sawyer-say, that’s kind of familiar at that, wasn’t it a movie'?"
"Also a book." But they were both common names, thought Palliser. It seemed easier to start out knowing something about the witnesses; and it was going to be a tedious job to get all their stories and fit them together. And if none of them had seen or heard anything significant, where to go on it then? Obviously, none of them-if they were all honest witnesses-had seen anything they thought was important, or they’d have come out with it last night.
"I know we’ve got to do the routine," said Conway, "but it looks like a waste of time to me. Are we operating on the premise that he got the knife between Dick’s and the restaurant booth? On the street or in the rest room?"
"It looks as if that’s the only possibility."
"And just as Bainbridge said, never realized he’d been stabbed, or he’d have raised a fuss, hung on to the guy.
He could have run into a drunk in the street, or- But why? There was hardly time for him to’ve had a fight with anybody, even an argument. Dick said he left about nine-twenty, and Mallow said he was sitting in the booth by about nine thirty-five."