Her husband broke in diffidently. "We’d like to know when we can, you know, fix up for the funeral."
"The coroner’s office will let you know," said Grace. "Is there any other family, Mrs. Joiner?" asked Hackett, the kind of random question to put witnesses at ease.
Her husband said, "I suppose we got to tell Isabel, Carla," and she just shrugged.
"I’ve got a sister, that’s all."
"Nothing else is missing from the house that you noticed?" asked Grace.
"I don’t think so, except her silver teapot. An old lady she used to work for gave it to her, and she treasured it a lot. I don’t know what it’d be worth," she said miserably.
"Have you contacted the credit-card companies to let them know the cards are stolen?"
"Why, no-we never thought-we don’t have any ourselves-"
"We can do that." Grace smiled at them, and had his mouth open to ask another question when Sergeant Farrell looked in the door.
"Traffic just picked up Benoy and Allesandro. It’s a mess, sounds like-there was a high-speed pursuit down Victory and they rammed the squad-one Burbank man in serious condition, the squad wrecked, and wouldn’t you know the two punks didn’t get a scratch. Burbank’s sending them in."
Hackett and Higgins got up in a hurry and went out, and the Joiners looked questioningly at Grace. "They’re pretty hot suspects for your mother," Grace explained.
"We’ve been looking for them for another homicide, but we think it’s possible they killed your mother too. One of them is definitely tied to the murder of those Freemans, more or less in the same neighborhood."
"Oh," said Carla. "I saw about that in the paper. It was awful. But I don’t see how-I mean, Mother was always careful about locking doors and like that." They had both relaxed slightly, alone with Grace in the office. She looked at her husband. "It said in the paper you-the police-wanted to question some man about that murder, something about what it called an all points-"
"Bulletin," supplied Grace. "That’s him. It’s just turned him up."
"But," said Carla, "it said he’s a white man. I forget all the description, how tall and so on, but he’s white."
"Well?" said Grace.
Carla bent a solemn look on him. "Mr. Grace," she said, "Mother wasn’t a fearful woman or one to borrow trouble as they say, but I’ve got to tell you, she’d never in this world have let a white man in her house after dark, the way it must’ve been. She’d never. Whatever they said as an excuse. A white man she didn’t know. I just don’t see how that could be, Mr. Grace."
Grace suppressed a laugh, looking at their earnest faces. "Well, it was just an idea," he said. "We’ll see what they have to say for themselves."
What Benoy and Allesandro had to say was chiefly obscene. Hackett and Higgins questioned them at the jail, and it didn’t matter much what they heard in regard to the Freeman homicide because Benoy at least was tied to that, but they asked some questions about Mrs. Hopper.
"I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about." Benoy was a big fat young man, gross and unshaven. "We never did nothing here. I don’t know no Freemans or anybody named Hopper."
"Let’s not go the long way round," said Higgins wearily. "We know you killed the Freemans, you left a nice set of prints on that phone book." Benoy began to swear, and his partner looked at him in sudden alarm.
"You said be careful about prints, Neal! You said to-I didn’t leave any, did I?" he asked Higgins anxiously. He was a loose-limbed young fellow with straggly yellow hair. Hackett and Higgins didn’t burst into laughter because they’d met a lot like him over the years.
"Not that I know of. Now let’s talk about Mrs. Hopper, last Tuesday night." They were just guessing that that was when she’d been killed; the autopsy report should be in sometime today.
The two began arguing about where they’d been last Tuesday. They’d been living at an old hotel over in Glendale, but they didn’t know the terrain out here and got confused about directions and distances. They agreed they’d spent last Tuesday night in a bar someplace, but couldn’t say where.
"What the hell does it matter?" said Higgins to Hackett. "We’ve got them for the Freemans anyway. These days, a heavier charge means nothing."
That Saturday night was a busy one for the night watch, three heists and a market clerk shot dead in one of them. There were three witnesses to that, and Piggott, Schenke and Shogart were busy until the end of shift. The witnesses came in on Sunday morning to look at mug-shots, and annoyed Galeano and Phil Landers. As witnesses sometimes were, they were confused by the very number of photographs to look at.
"I just couldn’t say," said Akiko Tomito. "It all happened so fast-that looks like him, but so does this one, some-no, I guess this one here’s more like, only his face was fatter-"
"Oh, dear me, I wouldn’t like to say definitely," said Mrs. Marilyn Vail brightly. "If he’d had dark hair instead of light, he’d look a lot like this man-but then he didn’t, so I guess it wasn’t. On the other hand-"
"Nobody could say, just look at a picture," said Gus Severson with a growl. "Some pictures look like the people and some don’t. I told you what he looked like. Couldn’t say just from a picture."
Galeano suppressed any retort and thanked them for trying. "Description!" he said to Phil when they’d trooped out. "What the hell did they give the night watch? Six feet, five-ten, five-nine, medium, light, sandy, brown, sort of thin, kind of stocky, blue pants, black slacks, tan coat, white coat. I ask you."
Phil laughed. "The civilians aren’t trained to notice things."
They’d be reduced to doing that the hard way, looking for men with the right pedigrees who lit the general description. And before they got down to it, they had a new homicide-a middle-aged man, Harry Schultz, a bookkeeper at a brokerage, stabbed to death as he walked up the drive to his own back door from the garage, just after dark. It was cold and misty, threatening to rain again, and nobody had been looking out windows or had doors open; even though it was a crowded neighborhood, houses on forty-foot lots, there were no witnesses and no leads. His wife said he might have had fifteen or twenty dollars on him.
"Round and round the mulberry bush," said Piggott, typing the initial report. "Just like ancient Rome, E. M. The weakened moral fiber, relaxation of standards, all the easy welfare, bread and circuses-and the pornography and you get all the senseless violence, the killings done for peanuts, the killers given a slap on the wrist and let go to do it again. Makes you wonder where it’ll all end, doesn’t it?" He got no reply and looked up from the typewriter. Shogart had his feet propped up in Landers’ desk chair and his head had fallen forward at an angle. He emitted a small snore. Shogart, up for retirement next year, had ceased a long time ago to get involved with the crime he was paid to look at.
Piggott sighed and went back to the report. "Sodom and Gomorrah," he muttered to himself. Talk about making bricks without straw-***
On Monday morning, in a threatening gray mist, Palliser tried all the book’s suggestions on Trina again, without much noticeable success. When it started to rain he came in, and Trina shook her wet self all over Roberta’s clean kitchen floor. "You know, John," said Roberta, "I’ve had a look at that book too, and it says a few minutes every day, morning and afternoon. You can’t expect to try once a week and get anywhere."
"Damn it, I’m busy all day and tired when I get home," said Palliser. "Even if I could get her to one of these c1asses-"
"Well, you’re not accomplishing anything this way. I wonder how much it might cost to have a professional trainer do it?"
"Too much, if I know anything about prices these days. Yes, she’s a very nice dog," said Palliser, sitting down and looking at the scratches on his shoes where Trina had been pretending to be a teething puppy again, "but why in hell did it have to be me who went out on that freeway accident? Just because I rescued Madge Borman’s champion hound, so she has to give us one of his pups in a burst of gratitude-"