The Knave of Hearts (3 page)

Several good attorneys had fought hard for him too,
but there was just too much suggestive evidence. And after that, the
appeal, the bitter accusations from Mrs. Haines of prejudice and
stupidity on the part of the police, the denial of a new trial, the
sentimental news stories when Mrs. Haines’ baby was born, the date
of execution (twice postponed) finally settled.

Haines had died in the gas chamber thirty days ago,
for a murder nineteen months old.

And yesterday morning a diffident young woman had
walked into a precinct station in Santa Monica and said she wanted to
get something off her conscience.
 

TWO

Mendoza had seen Rose Foster this morning; the job
had been thrown at him because Thompson was four months dead. So he
didn’t have to reread her statement; it had come out more directly,
more convincingly, in her thin little voice than in the steno’s
dead prose.

She was thirty-two, she said, and she looked that in
one way, but in another way much younger. She might have been pretty
had she paid more attention to herself—a slender, frail-looking
woman with a lot of untidy brown hair and timid blue eyes; shabby in
a cheap housedress, mended stockings, no make-up or jewelry.

"Pringle was my maiden name, see, I—I was
giving it out places I looked for work, account some places, they
don’t like to hire married women—give single ones first chance.
And I had enough trouble findin’ work anyways, I ain’t—haven’t
had much education, got to take what I can .... Jack, he’d ’ve
just killed me, sir, if he knew—that was why. Jack, no use not
facin’ it, he wasn’t no good noways, he liked the drink too much.
An’ ever he got drunk, knockin’ me around—that was the way of
it, see .... This business, really how I come to leave him—get up
enough grit, leave him—I was too scared before—he’d ’ve come
after, give me what-for to run off. I felt awful bad about it—but I
just dassn’t do anything about it, while Jack—he’d ’ve killed
me .... Mr. Haines was nice to me. Not many been like that, and with
Jack the way he was—I guess that’s how I come to do such a sinful
thing .... I got to say it, I got to clear my conscience—Reverend
White says I got to, to be truly saved in the Lord—I got to tell
you, it was all just like Mr. Haines said. He was—with me—that
day, just like he told you. Sinning. Maybe you think that’s awful
queer—he’d look at me—but, see, he was sorry for me to
start—first time we met, I’d got turned down for a job that
place, I couldn’t help crying, right out in the street too—it was
hard to get along, get enough to eat and all, with Jack all the time
gettin’ fired for bein’ drunk—and Mr. Haines, he was kind, he
bought me a cup of coffee and talked nice, and he got me a job
cleaning offices, another place. . . .

"And you know—that time—his wife was havin’
a baby, I guess she was kind of crotchety to him, know what I mean,
and he—I guess any woman who was nice to him, he’d ’ve—oh, I
was awful scared that time, for fear Jack’d walk in and— And
after, when it come out in the papers, I about died o’ fright ....
No, sir, Jack, he never read no papers, he didn’t see about it. We
was behind in the rent, I just wanted get away, and I told him the
landlord says we got to get out. Wasn’t nothin’ strange about
that, it was always happening. And he had the offer of this job up in
Banning. We went there, and he never heard nothing, I guess,
about—that murder. But it laid on my conscience day ’n’
night—like the black sin it was—I got so I couldn’t stand it no
longer—even if Jack did kill me .... And the Reverend, he come to a
’vivalist meeting up there, last week it was, and seemed like he
was preaching right at me, he knowed all about it—a strong preacher
he is—and after, I went up an’ talked with him. He said—and it
do seem funny, I never thought about it just so before—there wasn’t
no law I had to stay by such a bad husband, and anyways, Jack or no
Jack, do I want my soul saved alive from Satan, I got to get my
conscience clear I—no matter what you do to me for the awful thing
I done—"

Yes, convincing. If for no other reason than its
appalling human wrongheadedness. He said to Hackett, "What’s
it worth?" but he’d known, listening to Rose Foster, that it
was the truth. The well-used pipe she’d kept, the pipe that Haines
said he must have left there, maybe that wasn’t such good
evidence—but whether it was his or not, it wasn’t very important.

He said, "Very damned dirty linen to wash, even
in private. But it happens." Because, with the most intelligent
and honest police force, the fairest trial, the cleverest lawyers,
with all these, chance—and the human element—sat in the game too,
and sometimes stacked the deck. For every once that this happened, it
happened ninety-nine times the other way round: somebody who was
guilty got off, because of the finicky rules about evidence, the
little legal loopholes, the design of the law to give the innocent
every chance.

"What do we do about it?" asked Hackett. As
Mendoza didn’t say anything at once, he took a last drag on his
cigarette, put it out in the ashtray, and stabbed a finger at the
second sheaf of papers on Mendoza’s desk. "Don’t drag your
heels so hard,
amigo
.
I got an idea what those are. While you were in with the Chief I met
Farley downstairs and had a little chat with him. He says you
requisitioned all those letters Sally Haines has been sending us for
quite a while, and he told me something about ’em. Very
interesting."

Mendoza said softly, violently, "
¡Diez
millon es de demonios negros desde el infierno!
Hay que poner en claro este lio
—this
mess we’ve got to clear up, pronto. Interesting! If there’s an
ounce of truth in these, I can think of better words." He pushed
the second sheaf across the desk.

"Take a look and
suffer some more—for the honor of the force!”

* * *

Sally Haines had fought harder for her husband than
his lawyers; she’d never given up fighting, and it looked as if
she’d never forget her bitter grudge against the police. There were
a dozen letters in the pile, all addressed to the Chief. Mendoza
said, "The top three. The rest are just random accusations."

Hackett read, grunted, grimaced, reached for another
cigarette. "Oh, brother. Piper’s close to home, I had that
one." He started to read the letters again.

The first was dated a week after Haines’ trial.
It
should be evident to the stupidest policeman that the murderer of
Mary Ellen Wood is still free—and still murdering. Three days ago
another girl was found dead in very similar circumstances. I refer to
Celestine Teitel. If and when you arrest the criminal in that case, I
beg you to question him, investigate him, in re Mary Ellen Wood—he
may have been her killer too. I pray my husband will be cleared of
guilt when the real killer is found.
The
second was dated nearly six months later.
You
did not find Celestine Teitel’s murderer—now he has killed Jane
Piper. Can you protest there is not a strong probability that these
murders were done by the same man?—as was the murder of Mary Ellen
Wood! If you ever arrest him, I pray you get to the truth about that
at last!

The third was dated fifteen days ago.
Now
the real murderer of Mary Ellen Wood has another death to his
account—Pauline McCandless. Surely the most casual investigation
shows the similarity of these crimes—are you still so sure that my
husband murdered Mary Ellen? Celestine Teitel—Jane Piper—Pauline
McCandless—they died the same way as Mary Ellen, and I swear by the
same hand! You have not caught him yet—if you ever do, ask him
about Mary Ellen Wood! It is too late to save my husband’s life,
but his name may yet be cleared.

Hackett said, "I’m not up on Teitel and
McCandless, but I’ve got to say she could be right about Piper.
Just on the bare facts. And what’s that worth?"

"Not the hell of a lot, at first glance."
All those killings had been the same kind; but it was an ordinary
kind in any big metropolitan place with its inevitable share of the
violent ones, the mentally unstable ones, the professional muggers
prowling dark streets.

Celestine Teitel. (Mendoza had looked back over those
cases only superficially as yet; he’d look deeper.) Age thirty,
unmarried. Elementary school teacher. Taught at a public school in
Hawthorne, shared an apartment with another teacher. Regular, quiet
habits, not many friends. An amateur painter: often went out on
weekends, to the beach, the mountains, to paint. One Sunday she
didn’t come home again, so her roommate called the police. She was
found two days later, by a couple of surf-fishers, in a lonely cove
up the coast toward Ventura, where apparently she’d been
sketching—all her equipment there, untouched. She’d been raped,
beaten, and strangled.

Jane Piper. Age twenty-eight, unmarried. Also a very
respectable young woman—and successful, a legal secretary to an old
and staid firm of corporation lawyers. Lived alone in a three-room
apartment near Silver Lake. Drove a good car. But the best cars now
and then needed expert attention; so there she was, her car
temporarily at a garage, leaving her office one day at five o’clock
to go home by bus. No one who knew her saw her alive after that. She
was found up in Topanga Canyon, a little way off the road, next day.
She had been raped, beaten, and choked to death. There was some
indication that the intention had been to bury her—someone had
started to dig a hole, anyway, about twenty feet down the hillside.

Pauline McCandless. Age twenty-four, a librarian,
just graduated and working at the Culver City main library.
Unmarried. Not very pretty: a serious intellectual girl. Lived with
her widowed mother in Hollywood. Regular habits, no known male
friends. She failed to return home one night, so the police went
hunting her; they didn’t have to hunt long. She was found in an
empty lot in Walnut Park; she’d been raped, beaten, and strangled.

Looked at like that, anyone might make the hasty
judgment—obviously the same murderer. It wasn’t so simple, so
neat; that kind of crime happened too often, committed by too many
types of men. Sometimes women almost asked for it, walking dark
streets late and alone, picking up with any stranger who bought them
a drink; but it happened to respectable women too. Over this period
of eighteen months perhaps a dozen women had met similar deaths
within Los Angeles County. Offhand Mendoza remembered a few details
on those. A woman assaulted, strangled: the killer, a near-moronic
eighteen-year-old with a record of petty theft—"I just had to
stop her yelling, I only squeezed her throat a little bit, didn’t
go to kill her." A girl raped, beaten: the killers, a gang of
juveniles riding high on cheap whiskey. Another one, another one—all
the same pattern, the assault, the blows, the choking: this killer a
respectable middle-aged family man who’d lost his head just once;
that one, an equally respectable-looking mama’s boy who’d
suddenly gone berserk. When a woman was killed in the course of an
assault, it was almost bound to happen that way: the man tried to
stop her noise and, lacking any weapon, used his hands. Men who went
in for rape were predisposed to violence to start with, and without
intending murder frequently committed it.

The only difference about those three, Teitel, Piper,
and McCandless, was that they’d never got anyone for them. Those
cases were still marked Pending.

"Well?" said Hackett. "Do we work them
all over again?"

"On a civilian’s random hunch?" said
Mendoza sharply. Absently he lined things up on the desk in more
precise order, calendar, desk box, blotter, ashtray; brushed ash off
the polished wood. He looked tired and all of his forty years for
once, if as natty and dapper as always: a slender dark man with a
black hairline of moustache and widow’s peak of thick black hair,
the sharp arch of heavy brows accenting unremarkable regular
features. He sat back, twisting the heavy gold seal-ring round his
finger in aimless gesture. "The Haines business we’ll work
over again, but hard. These others—we’ll see. Who’s still on
McCandless?—Galeano. You’ve been on that Braxton thing—turn it
over to Galeano, and get what he’s got on McCandless. I want you in
this with me .... And,
de paso
,
you’d better tell your loving bride to expect you when she sees you
while we’re busy on this—we’ll all be working overtime."

"That you needn’t tell me," said Hackett
equably.

“
Look at McCandless. I’m going back over Wood.
And in the meantime, let’s both look for any common denominator.
Before we—mmh—jump to the unflattering conclusion that Mrs.
Haines is brighter than I we are, I want something a lot more
definite to say there’s a hookup in these cases. I’m going to
brood over them tonight—I’ll see Mrs. Haines tomorrow. I want any
inspiration that comes to you on McCandless by tomorrow afternoon."

"O.K., I’ll get on it." Without further
wasted words, Hackett heaved his bulk up and went out in search of
Sergeant Galeano.

Mendoza sat staring at the Foster statement for a
minute, vaguely; roused himself, summoned Sergeant Lake, and sent him
to rummage in the back files for all those records.

While he waited for them,
he did some thinking about common denominators.

* * *

Hackett got home finally about eight o’clock. The
indefinable new warmth flooded him—there inside the door with Angel
in his arms, the smell and look of this their own place not yet quite
familiar, but home. She nuzzled his collar and said she’d kept
something hot for him.