"Then what the hell are they doing down here, jumping the senior citizens?" said Higgins. "For kicks?"
" Es posible," said Mendoza. He pressed the trigger, the flame shot out and he lit his cigarette. "They haven’t made any kind of haul. Any halfway smart four-year-old around here would know that the average senior citizen in this area isn’t exactly loaded, or he wouldn’t still be living in the area. It’s possible our pretty boys in their fancy clothes-from somewhere a little way up the social scale-are prowling around here just for the kicks, beating up the senior citizens for fun. Mmh. Como no -maybe with the idea that cops wouldn’t go to much trouble over these particular senior citizens."
"That’s a little far out," said Higgins, "or is it?"
"He smells these things," said Grace seriously. "I’ll add, what you might call a mixed population down here. One of these here racists, Loo-tenant suh?"
Mendoza laughed. "I don’t know if I smell anything or not, Jase. Just off the top of my mind, if I remember right, two of the victims were Mexican, three black, the rest just people-and O’Brien. They must have seen his priest’s collar-but it was dark. But-? vaya historia! -that 'dirty peasant’ sticks in my mind. Not Temple Street. More like U.C.L.A."
"Which may be a thought, but it doesn’t take us anywhere to look," said Conway. "Have you had a chance to look at the offbeat thing Carey handed us? I like it, as a story, but it’s going to be a lot of work for nothing. I want to see that blonde."
Mendoza picked up the night report, didn’t start reading it. "You’ll tell me about it. A blonde?"
"I’m bound to say," said Galeano, "it’s the wheelchair that sort of caught my imagination-the empty wheelchair. You can see what Carey means-it’s a locked-room puzzle in a sort of way."
"An empty wheelchair," said Mendoza, cigarette suspended. "So, I’ll hear about it."
Sergeant Lake looked in. "There’s a Mrs. Chard here and some other people. A Mrs. Moseley and a Mr. and Mrs. Peacock asking for Palliser."
"So the night watch got hold of the Chard woman," said Galeano. "I’d better talk to her, Jimmy. John hasn’t showed up yet. You can tell the boss about the wheelchair, Rich."
Mrs. Cecelia Chard identified the body with loud sobs and groans. She was a thin dark hard-faced woman with shrewish black eyes, and Galeano didn’t take to her at all. She was supported by her mother, Mrs. Wilma Dixon, and her brother Elmer, both generally resembling her.
"Poor Bob," she lamented, drying her eyes with a Coty-scented handkerchief when they’d got back from the morgue and Galeano had settled them down in the office to make a statement. "Like I said, Mr. Galeano, I never reported him missing because I thought he was off on a bender, like he did every now ’n’ then, and goodness knows-Mother and Elmer can bear me out. I’m not about to say he was the best husband in the world, Mr. Galeano, but I wouldn’t have wished him a terrible death like that-he must’ve got into a fight with somebody when he was drunk. I got to say, he used to get fighting mad with any liquor in him, it takes some like that, you know."
"A regular mean man in drink he was, all right," said Elmer, and giggled.
"He certainly was," said Mrs. Dixon with a long sigh.
"It’s a sorry thing he should’ve come to such a bad end, but running around with riifraif the way he did, in all them bars, no wonder. I’m sorry to say it, Mr. Galeano, but I guess my girl’s rid of a bad bargain."
Galeano didn’t think much of them at all, but there was the one about birds of a feather. Their estimation of Chard was probably right. He’d been found about half a block down the side street from a bar on the corner of Venice Boulevard, and it was very likely he’d got into a brawl with some other drunks and died of it. It was just more of the sordid violence cops got paid to cope with, and it made him feel tired.
He got the gist of that down in a statement, and Mrs. Chard signed it. He told them they’d be notified when the body could be released, and they thanked him and went away.
And he supposed that somebody ought to ask a few questions at that bar, try to find out who the other drunks were-not that it seemed very important.
Mendoza scanned the night report before he listened to Conway, and handed the Buford thing to Landers and Grace. It didn’t look as if there’d be much handle to it, unless S.I.D. turned up something.
Then he heard all about Carey’s blonde and the empty wheelchair, and like Galeano he was fascinated. Luis Rodolfo Vicente Mendoza was not, perhaps, temperamentally suited to be a cop, who by the nature of the job had to deal with physical evidence, facts and figures and tangibilities. The men who worked with him were convinced that his natural calling was that of a cardsharp, that most innocent of con-men who relied on instinctive knowledge of human nature.
"I see what Carey means," he said amusedly. "Masterly gall. Please, sir, he’s gone, I don’t know where. But the empty wheelchair-which was probably quite inadvertent, if we’re reading it right-it’s a nice touch.?Me gusta! "
"So all we do is find the boyfriend," said Conway.
"I thought Carey’d made kind of heavy weather of it. In spite of the-er-imaginative touch, it looks open and shut to me."
Mendoza regarded him sardonically. "Yes and no, Rich. In this job, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, things are just exactly what they look like. Just occasionally they aren’t. But I want a look at Carey’s blonde and the wheelchair. That so eloquently empty wheelchair!"
"So does Nick. But there’s only one obvious answer, isn’t there?"
" Es posible," said Mendoza. "Go see if he’s back from the morgue."
Palliser had got caught in a jam on the freeway, a pileup backed up for a mile, and it was nearly nine o’clock when he came into the office to find four forlorn-looking people waiting to see him. Mrs. Anita Moseley, Mr. and Mrs. Simon Peacock, and Stephanie Peacock.
Mr. Peacock offered to go to the morgue to make the identification. "I knew Sandra all her life, since she and Stephanie started school together. I wish you’d let me, Anita-save you the agony-" But Mrs. Moseley said tautly she had to see for herself and be sure. She was a nice-looking woman, late thirties, brown hair, good figure, conservatively dressed. They were all nice people, Palliser could see, in the euphemistic phrase: upright middle-class people: Peacock an insurance agent, the two women ladies. At the morgue, Mrs. Moseley looked at the body and said thinly, "Yes, that’s Sandra. That’s her. Oh, my God, to have it all end like this-I tried so hard- To see her like that- No, I’m all right. Honestly, I’m all right. But when it was all for nothing-no reason for her to-"
Back at the office, Palliser got Wanda Larsen in for support, and she was briskly sympathetic but businesslike, their very efficient policewoman; Mrs. Moseley talked mostly to her, and Wanda took unobtrusive notes.
"I have to say, she-Sandra-had been more and more difficult-since the divorce," she said painfully. "You see, I divorced her father last year. He-that doesn’t matter, the reasons, but you see he’d always spoiled her dreadfully, and I’m afraid-she’s just a child really, she didn’t understand about the divorce, she always idolized " her father and I didn’t want to-to destroy any of that-maybe that was a mistake, if I had told her-but I guess that doesn’t matter now either. I tried to discipline her-sensibly-God knows I tried. But-"