"But you know, Mr. Yeager," Hackett had said before that, "you’ll really have to remove all the bugs. Apart from anything else, it’s invasion of privacy."
"I guess so," said Yeager. He sighed deeply. "I’m sorry it had to come to that, I hadda tell you, get you to believe me. But I guess I better. But you just got no idea, Sergeant Hackett-it was interesting as hell!"
About two o’clock that morning Patrolmen Zimmerman and O’Neill were handed a call to a disturbance on Alvarado. When they got to it, they found an interested little crowd, mostly black, around a couple outside an all-night restaurant, beside a car at the curb.
"You take him in and lock him up!" the woman shouted at them as they got out of the car. "He tried to kill me! Tried to strangle me!" She was a young woman, not bad-looking and decently dressed. They calmed her down and she gave them a name, Ruby Blake. "I just stopped in that place, have a bite to eat before I go home after work-I work at a rest home, night shift. He got talking, acted all nice and polite, and offered me a ride home. And then when I got in his car, he started fooling around and tried to strangle me!" She was crying then, and she opened her coat to show them a couple of darkening bruises.
They couldn’t get anything out of the man at all. He was light-skinned, clean-shaven, about thirty: looked ordinary. He just looked at them sullenly and wouldn’t answer questions. They looked in the car and it didn’t have any registration, so they called in the plate-number. It had been reported stolen in Beverly Hills that afternoon.
"Would you make a statement charging him, Miss Blake?" asked Zimmerman.
"I surely would! You just tell me where to do it. Treat a decent girl like that-"
"It’ll be assault with intent," said O’Neill. "Robbery-Homicide."
"The night watch has gone by now. Leave a report with the main desk," said Zimmerman, "and stash him in jail." They called the garage to tow the car in and put him in cuffs and drove down to the Alameda facility. He never said a word all the way.
The day watch had hardly come in, on Thursday morning, when there was a heist reported at a drugstore on Spring Street. Galeano went out on it, and the pharmacist gave him a good description. He was so mad, he said he’d come over right now and look at mug-shots. He did, and within tive minutes of the time Phil Landers had settled him down with a book, he picked one. "That’s him!" he told Galeano positively. "I’d know him anywhere, that ugly mug! He didn’t even have a hat on, I’d know him in the dark!"
It was a picture of one Adam O’Hara, and he had the right record for the job: two counts of armed robbery and a few other things. There was a fairly recent address, and Galeano went looking for him. It was a small apartment on Sunset Avenue, and he got no answer to his ring, but the door across the hall opened and a nice-looking little gray-haired woman asked, "Are you looking for the O’Haras?"
"That’s right," said Galeano. "Do you know where Mr. O’Hara is?"
"Why, yes. He’ll still be at the hospital. He said he’d let me know, but it’s a first baby and I expect she’ll be some time. What? Oh, it’s the French Hospital. He was so worried, poor boy, I had to call the doctor for him."
Galeano went over to the French Hospital and discovered Adam O’Hara in beaming transports over a fine boy, nine pounds three ounces, born twenty minutes before. A whole staff of nurses, nurses’ aides and other prospective fathers could say that O’Hara had been there since two o’clock that morning.
Galeano was annoyed, and for some reason he also felt queerly desolate. Even as Mendoza said about the citizens, They have eyes and see not. It was likely that the pharmacist, angry and excited, had mistaken O’Hara’s mugshot for somebody who looked like him-he wasn’t an unusual type-but Galeano hadn’t any immediate impulse to browse through the books looking.
It was raining now in a halfhearted sort of way. He went to have lunch at the Globe Grill, and Marta wasn’t there. He sat where she would have waited on him, but the buxom dark girl came up instead. He waited till she brought his order and asked, "Isn’t Mrs. Fleming here?"
"No, she’s off sick." She hardly looked at him, didn’t seem to recognize him as one of the cops who had been here.
Galeano ate his macaroni and cheese, not thinking much. Come down to it, Carey and the rest of those damned cynics had done all the thinking on it. All from the old viewpoint, drilled into any cop as any lawyer, what was the crime, who profited, how was it done, by whom. Damn it, he felt sorry for her: and maybe he was being stupid. He could follow the way Mendoza and Carey thought, logically-and there were questions to be answered about Marta Fleming. But he found that sometime just in the last couple of hours he had come back to simple feeling, and what the feeling said was, that’s an honest girl, telling the truth. And if that was simple in another sense, the hell with being too smart.
He paid the bill, put on his coat, went out and drove down to Westlake Avenue. He had to turn to park on the legal side. The place was quiet except for a faint hint of singing in a whiskeyish voice, from the top floor. He pushed the bell; pushed it again. After a while the door was pulled back and she stood there. She had a navy wool robe belted tightly around her, and her russet-blonde-tawny hair was uncombed, her nose red.
"Mrs. Fleming-"
"You!" she said. "Police again! Am I never any more to have peace?"
"Now listen," said Galeano. "I-"
"Gott im Himmel! Go away!" she said furiously. "I do not wish to talk to you-is that for you enough plain language?"
Galeano began to feel slightly irritated. All the various things the people he’d talked to had said about her slid past his mind. "If you’d just 1isten-"
"I will not listen to you, stupid pig of a policeman! Go away!" she said arrogantly.
Galeano, that mild and even-tempered man, quite suddenly lost his temper. He reached out and took her by the shoulders and shook her hard, back and forth. "Who’s stupid, you damned silly woman? It’s no wonder you haven’t made any friends here, keeping your damned stiff-necked pride, never meeting people halfway! All I wanted to tell you, damn it, is that I believe your damned silly story-I think you’re honest-and God forgive me for maybe being a fool! Now if you want to go on being a Goddamned martyr, it’s perfectly all right with me, but all I can say is, I think you’re a bigger Goddamned fool!"
He shook her again and let her go and stepped back.
"Oh!" she said, and for a minute he thought she was going to hit him, and then she crumpled against the door-frame and began to cry in great gulping sobs. "But I am not a martyr-all my fault-because I was weak-and nobody, nobody, nobody to talk- sehr einsam, niemand-Ach, die kleine Keitzchen, die kleine Katzchen, aber -all my fault- ach, so richt, I cannot talk with people, tell how-" She fell forward, sobbing, and Galeano caught her in his arms.
NINE
He was alarmed. She was sobbing so hard her whole body shook, and she made strangling noises in her throat. He half carried her over to the couch, and she lay huddled over one arm uttering great gulping sobs. He didn’t know what to do; he’d never seen anything like it.
"Hey," he said uneasily, "are you all right? Marta?"
Gradually the sobs lessened in intensity; she shook with several long shudders, half straightened up, put her face in her hands, and then after a long moment she ' sniffed, groped in her pocket for a handkerchief, and blew her nose. She was still shaking a little, and she said in a muffled voice, "I am ashamed. I am sorry-to lose control so-"
"Don’t you feel better?" asked Galeano.
She blew her nose again. "Yes, I do," she said, sounding surprised. "It-it is not easy that I-"
"Everybody needs to let off steam once in a while," said Galeano. "You just kept it all bottled up too long."