Case Pending - Dell Shannon by Dell Shannon Read Free Book Online

relieve you." He took Higgins back to
headquarters to pick up another car and ferry the father down to the
morgue.
    Himself, instead of returning to his office where he
should be attending to other matters, he set off to see the Wades.
There should be just time before lunch. It was a very routine errand,
something for Hackett or even one of Hackett's underlings, and not
until he was halfway there did Mendoza realize clearly why he felt it
important to see to it himself, why he had gone to the Ramirez house.
The sooner all this personal matter was cleared out of the way,
proved to be extraneous, the better.
    And he must satisfy himself doubly that it was
irrelevant, because it was always dangerous to proceed on a
preconceived idea. He had been seized by the conviction, looking at
the body, that this girl had been killed by the killer of Carol
Brooks—but it was little more than a hunch, an irrationality backed
by very slender evidence.
    Carol Brooks, three miles away over in East
L.A.—maybe a bigger loss than this girl had been. A young, earnest,
ambitious girl, who had earned her living as a hotel chambermaid and
spent her money not on clothes but voice lessons—with an expensive
trainer of high repute, too, who thought a good deal of her, was
giving her a cut price. He had said she needed constant
encouragement, because she didn't believe a black girl could get very
far, unless she was really the very best, and she'd never be that
good. Maybe she would have been; no one would ever know, now.
    Nothing very much to support his conviction, on the
surface evidence. And he must guard against holding it blind, if
other evidence pointed another way. As it would-as it did. Nobody
lived long without giving at least a few people reasons for dislike,
sometimes reasons for murder. They might turn up several here. And
that was the easy way to look for a murderer, among only a few, the
immediate surroundings and routines of the girl who'd been killed.
    If he was right, they'd need to spread a wider net.
For someone quite outside, someone without logical motive. Someone,
somewhere among the five million people in this teeming metropolitan
place sprawling in all directions—someone who was dangerous a
hundred times over because the danger from him was secret,
unsuspected.
    This time Mendoza would like to get that one. Because
he had missed him six months ago, another girl was in a cold-storage
tray at the city morgue now.
 

    FOUR
    They met for a not-too leisured lunch at Federico's,
out on North Broadway. Hackett left him to mull over what meager
information they had; his own next stop was obviously the skating
rink. The waiter whisked away the relics of the meal, apologetically;
they never hurried you at Federico's, you could sit as long as you
pleased. "More coffee, sir?"
    "Please." Mendoza brooded over his refilled
cup; he should go back to his office and occupy himself at being a
lieutenant; there were other cases on hand than this.
    The girl who had found the body, nothing there
immediately: nothing known against her, but little emerged of her
background either. It was a very long chance that she had anything to
do with it, but of course she had to be investigated. As did every
aspect of the Ramirez girl's life. And after that, where to look?
    He drank black coffee and dwelt for a moment on Mrs.
Elvira Wade. In her appalingly cluttered, tasteless,
middle-class-and-proud-of-it living room: a God-fearing upright
citizen, Mrs. Wade, who had spread a little too much in the waist and
hips, not at all in the mind.
    "Of course we didn't like it, to say the least—a
Mexican girl—and such a girl, all that cheap-looking bleached hair
and perfectly dreadful clothes, but of course they're always so fond
of garish colors, you know. And then of course there was the
religious question. Really, boys have no sense, but it's beyond me
how a son of mine could be so taken in, after all you'd think he'd
have some finer instincts, the way I've