Lake swung around from the switchboard. "You’ve got another rape-assault, in the series, it sounds like. Just an attempt-but what Traffic says, it was the same one."
"?Pues vamonos ya! " said Mendoza. "Let’s go! What’s the address, Jimmy?"
Like all the other women, she was respectable and matronly: large-bosomed, elderly, slate-colored, indignant. The squad car was still there but they hadn’t called an ambulance; she wasn’t really hurt. But the men riding the black and whites were briefed on this and that the plainclothes divisions were working, and an alert patrolman had recognized the description.
Her name was Mrs. Alice Drews. "Hurt?" she said, sitting very erect in an awesomely flowered armchair in her crowded living room. "I didn’t take no hurt, after forty years with a man got mean in drink, many’s the time I wiped the floor with him, let him know who’s boss. I was just a bit surprised, you might say. This little bitty boy asking to cut my grass, real polite he acted, and then askin' for a drink, and bringin’ out that knife-but I just lowered the boom on him, little kid like that, and he skedaddled. Only I figured, him tryin’ a thing like that, police ought to hear."
"If you could give us a description-" And it would be the same one, unproductive.
"I surely can. It was kind of queer, when I first laid eyes on him I thought to myself, that looks like the Perkins boy from down where I useta live on Stanford Street. I moved here a year or two back, hadn’t seen that kid since, but this one surely looked like that Perkins boy," said Mrs. Drews. "But what I recall, he didn’t act like him!" She chuckled richly. "That Joey Perkins, he was sure-enough a piddlin’ no-account youngster."
SEVEN
"And what else did I say?" demanded Mendoza. "Only if by some millionth chance one of the women spotted him on the street-I will be eternally damned!"
"You didn’t say it was, you said it could be, Mrs. Drews," said Landers dampeningly. "Stanford Avenue, that's not very far from here."
"My Lord, you don’t think it was that boy? I didn’t know the family real good, but they seemed like honest folks, it don’t seem likely-not but what that wasn’t the first thing crossed my mind when I saw him-"
She didn’t know the address, only the block. Mendoza called in to see what help was available, and Grace was there, said he’d meet them. It was the first lead of any kind they’d had on this, and while it was a very thin one, Mendoza was hot to follow it up.
The block on Stanford was a staid and drab middle-class block, mostly of old single homes reasonably well maintained, and a long block. Mendoza started at one end, Landers and Grace at the other; after ringing four doorbells without any result-two eliciting no response and two a couple of housewives who didn’t know the Perkinses-Mendoza came out to the sidewalk to see Grace beckoning down the street. They hurried to join him.
"Here we are," said Grace. "This is Mrs. Perkins." He was on the doorstep of a big old white frame place, four doors in from the corner.
"But what do you want?" she asked. "You said you’re police? We’re ordinary honest folk, never anything to do with the police-" She looked it: she was a thin yellow-brown woman, decently clad in a blue cotton dress, thick stockings; the living room behind her looked clean and neat.
"It’s about your boy Joey, ma’am," said Grace.
"Joey?" The bewilderment grew in her round eyes.
"Joey? You’re not trying to tell me Joey’s in some kind of trouble? Why, I never had the least worry in the world with Joey-I worried like sin over the others, running around like they did, Johnny wild as a hawk when he was a kid, and the girls-but Joey, never any cause to worry over him, quiet and good like he is. Why, since my husband got killed last year, Joey’s kind of been man of the family, last one at home-you aren’t telling me-"
"We don’t know, Mrs. Perkins, we’d like to talk to him," said Grace gently. "Is he home?"
"I reckon I heard him come in just a while ago-"
Reluctantly she turned and called. "What do you think he did, for the Lord’s sake?"
Grace just shook his head. "Joey!" she called again. "You come here, boy-some gentlemen want to see you. I’m sure you’re wrong, sir-Joey’s a good boy, he’s had a good Christian raising."
They waited. In a moment there was a shuffling light footstep along the hall, and a boy came up beside her, head down. He might be fourteen, not a very big fourteen. "Let’s have a look at you, Joey," said Grace in his soft friendly voice, and slowly the boy raised his head.
"Why, Joey!" said his mother. "What you been up to, getting all marked up like that?" He had a big darkening bruise on one cheek, a cut on the other, a swollen lip.
"What about it, Joey?" asked Grace.
"Wel1, I guess," said Joey in a thin treble voice, "it’s from where that ole Mis’ Drews hit me. I guess you know about that, you’re police, ain’t you?"
They looked at each other. "Joey, what you talking about?" asked his mother. "You done something'? Mis’ Drews? That lady used to live down the block?"
"Yes, ma’am," said Joey. "I was supprised see her, I was scared she knew who I was. I guess you know all about it, don’t you?" And he looked at the men calmly.
They told her they’d have to take him in to question; she protested, just a little boy, there was some mistake. In the end she went along too, and at the office they got Wanda to take charge of her, settle her down with coffee, while they started out talking to Joey in Mendoza’s office. "That’s good," said Joey in his reedy voice. "She’s gonna be awful upset." He didn’t seem unduly upset himself, or sorry for how she was feeling. "I kinda wondered if you’d ever find out about it."
"Would you like to tell us about it, Joey? Just how it happened?" Mendoza had called Loomis of Juvenile; this was one to handle with kid gloves, on account of his age, if there was going to be any prosecution at all.
"Oh, sure. I’ll tell you, I’d like to tell you," he said thoughtfully, looking around the office. "The ladies, sure. There was one over the next block and Mis’ Walker down the street and about six other ladies I don’t know their names, I did the same way, ask about mowing their grass and could I have a drink. And besides the ladies there was a lot of girls, some girls I know in school live right around. I guess mostly they didn’t tell anybody about it. I’d tell ’em things like there was a stray kitten back of this billboard and they’d come to see."
"Just hold on a minute." Grace raised his eyebrows at Mendoza. Loomis came in and was briefed. "Now, aren’t you making up some stories, Joey? The four ladies we know about. Are you sure-"
"More like nine or ten," said Joey. "I guess just like the girls they didn’t all tell, some reason. And I guess I might as well tell you too, I did the burglary at the drugstore up from us. The one on Venice. And another one at the lunch stand the next block, and the store next to it too. And I busted into the school lots of times and broke a lot of stuff. The first day the new teacher was there I took all the money out of her purse, but after that she kept it locked in a drawer."
"Now wait just a minute here, Joey. That’s quite a lot you’re telling us. Aren’t you making some of it up?"
"No, sir. I oughta know what I did."
"?Porvida! " said Mendoza to Grace. "Maybe we’d better get somebody from Burglary to listen to this too. What the hell is all this?"
Before the session was over, they did rope in Burglary, to find that the various break-ins Joey was so readily talking about were indeed in the files, unsolved. "I tole you," said Joey. The only one of the first victims they knew about who was home was Rena Walker; she came in and identified him right away, as did Mrs. Drews. They found the knife on Joey, a big eight-inch snickersnee he said he’d bought at a hardware store. In the intervals, Mendoza and Grace had a long talk with Mrs. Perkins, who was more incredulous than anything else.