Mendoza thanked him and watched him hurry up the street to a newish Ford. Let the S.I.D. boys come and go over the Pontiac for possible physical evidence, in case O’Brien had been jumped in or near it: a very small chance there’d be anything. Put out a description of the crucifix to the pawnshops, just in case.
He got into the big black Ferrari and lit a cigarette, thrusting the key into the ignition; his eyes were cold. Hackett was quite right: the pretty boys had got under Mendoza’s skin. It was reasonless, in a way: it was only that much more of the sordid, wanton violence that stalked any big city in this year of grace, which any cop learned to live with. It wasn’t a dramatic, important piece of crime, the kind that would get written up in the case-history books. The victims weren’t good-looking or very interesting or important people. The louts, when they caught up to them-as by God they would, if the luck ran their way-probably would turn out to be two-bit thugs, not very interesting or important either, just thugs with low I.Q.’s.
But the pretty boys had touched Mendoza on the raw-Mendoza who had been looking at the blood and violence and death for nearly twenty-six years-because in a sense they were a stark symbol for all of it: all the incredibly brutal bloody happenstance of crime in the city. He’d like to catch up to them. He tossed the cigarette out the window, laughed, and said to himself, "?Pues que? " Catch up to them, and then see one of the softheaded judges hand them a six-month sentence with time off for good behavior. He often wondered why he stayed on at this job.
Nick Galeano listened to what Carey had to say a little sleepily. He’d been on night watch for over two years, and his metabolism or something wasn’t yet used to the different hours and sleeping at night. He was night-people anyway and wasn’t operating on all cylinders until past noon. In a way he was glad of the change; there was usually more action on day watch, and more men to work with. He’d only met Lieutenant Carey of Missing Persons a few times before. Carey was a serious, snub-nosed, stocky fellow who wore a perennially morose expression: possibly the result these days of all the myriad missing juveniles he had to look for, thought Galeano, yawning. But what he’d brought to Robbery-Homicide sounded more interesting and definitely offbeat.
"Look," he said, slapping his manila envelope down on Galeano’s desk and shrugging massively at Galeano and Rich Conway. "I can’t prove it’s a homicide, but that’s what it’s got to add up to. It’s a very funny one, boys. And I’ve done all I can on it, and the man’s got to be dead, so I bring it to you and let you go all round the mulberry bush on it. I mean, one way it’s open and shut, but nobody’ll ever prove anything-I don’t think."
"Why not?" asked Conway, his gray eyes interested. "What’s the case?"
"I’ll give it to you short and sweet," said Carey.
"Here’s this Edwin Fleming. Twenty-nine, raised in Visalia, dropout from high school but no record. No relations-he was an only child; his father died when he was just a kid and his mother two years ago. He did a hitch in the Army and got sent to Germany, where he married this girl-her name is Marta, she’s a reasonably good-looking blonde, twenty-six. This was four years ago. He gets out of the service, they come here, and he has trouble finding a job, finally gets one in construction-he’d done that before-only it’s a small-time operation, kind of boss-and-one-helper thing, I gather. I’m just giving you the background. His wife has a baby about a year ago, and just after that he has an accident on the job-fa1ls off a scaffold or something and ends up paralyzed. He was in and out of hospitals, but there wasn’t anything the doctors could do-he was paralyzed from the waist down, and he’d never get better. The boss had insurance that paid for the hospitalization, but that was a1l-on account of technicalities here and there, Fleming wasn’t eligible for any benefits from anybody, the government on down. So there he was, a useless hulk as you might put it, couldn’t earn, had to be tended like a baby-oh, his mind was 0. K., he could even get around some in a wheelchair, but he needed a good deal of attention."
"When does this tale get to be business for us?" asked Conway.
"Ten days ago," said Carey. "Eleven, now. A week ago last Friday, when his wife reported him missing. A man in a wheelchair! It was damned fishy from the start, you can see that. They didn’t have anything but what she could earn, she’s working as a waitress at a restaurant on Wilshire, the Globe Grill. They had an old car, but they’d moved to this place on Westlake so she could walk to work, and they were trying to sell the car, she says she couldn’t afford to run it. It’s a six-family apartment and everybody else there is out at work all day except an old wino named Offerdahl who doesn’t know anything and was probably too drunk to see anything there was to see. The Flemings lived on the second floor and he couldn’t get the wheelchair downstairs by himself, obviously."
Galeano yawned again. "Where’d she leave the baby while she was at work?"
"Oh, they lost the baby about six months ago-it was a girl, I think, it got pneumonia or something and died. Anyway, she calls for cops-this was about six P.M. that Friday-and tells this tale, and of course it got passed on to me. I ask you!" said Carey, and sat back looking contemptuous. "She has the gall to tell me, all innocent and wide-eyed, that she comes home to find her husband gone-a man in a wheelchair-and the wheelchair’s there, but he’s missing. Vanished-whoosh-like that! He couldn’t have crawled three feet by himself. She’s afraid, she says, he’s committed suicide, he’d been very despondent about his condition lately. I do ask you! If-"
"The wheelchair’s still there?" repeated Galeano, suddenly fascinated. "That’s like a magic trick." He had a brief ridiculous vision 'of angels snatching Fleming up to heaven, out of the wheelchair. Or little green men out of a UFO.
"The wheelchair’s still there, and even if it wasn’t, where could he go in it?" asked Carey reasonably. "Even if he’d managed to get downstairs with it, which he couldn’t have? There isn’t an elevator. Wheel himself over to MacArthur Park and crawl into the lake?-even if he had thought of suicide, and there’s not an iota of evidence he ever did. The people in that apartment didn’t know them very well-they’d only been there a little over two months-but I’ve talked to people where they used to live, the few casual friends they have, and everybody says Fleming had adjusted pretty well to being a cripple, he’d talked about taking courses in handcrafts, maybe earning something that way."
"Have you dragged the lake in MacArthur?" asked Conway.
Carey uttered a rude word. "You can if you want. He’d have floated by now. I don’t like having my intelligence insulted, is all. This dumb blonde bats her eyes at me and says he talked about suicide, he must’ve done it, she doesn’t know how but he’s gone, he must have killed himself. And a child of two could see there’s no way! If he really wanted to commit suicide, he could have got out of a window-it’s all cement sidewalk below-or cut his wrists or something, right there."
"Where was the blonde all day? Alibied? Anybody see him, and when and where?" asked Conway.
Carey snorted. "She was at work, like a good girl. Eight to two, and she was supposed to be back for the evening shift, seven to nine. Sure, a neighbor saw him-woman lives across the hall, a Mrs. Del Sardo, she left for work at the same time as the blonde and heard her say goodbye to Fleming, saw him in the wheelchair in the living room. If you ask me, the blonde timed it to have an alibi. And then she says, she had some shopping to do, she didn’t come home till five o’clock and he was gone. Just gone."
"Leaving the wheelchair," said Galeano. The wheelchair had taken possession of his mind; the thing was like a conjuring trick.
"Look, it’s kind of like one of those locked-room puzzles," said Carey, "and then again it’s not. I mean, there’s people all around-apartments, busy streets. Only nobody saw anything. And you remember it was raining like hell all that day. On the other hand, why would anybody see anything? That apartment house-everybody out at work except Fleming and old Offerdahl dead drunk down the hall."