The Ace of Spades - Dell Shannon Read online

  "Nymphs," he said. "¡Caray, qué hombre!"

  Hackett looked at the two lines of typing on the scrap of paper. It had been torn off the right-hand top edge of the page, and the typing was double-spaced; there was such a wide margin, however, that only four words were included on the scrap. The top line said, verse, nymph and the end of the line below it said, small dolphin.

  "That is a damn funny one," he agreed.

  "A small dolphin," said Mendoza, leaning back with closed eyes, smoking lazily. "Somehow that makes it sound so much more— mmh— individual, doesn't it? Only a small dolphin. I wonder what it was all about. Nothing else on him? Well, well. You know, that dolphin— to say nothing of the nymph— intrigues me. I think I'll go down and take a look at him."

  "As you please," said Hackett, "but it's just another dope case, obviously. Or are you going to have one of your hunches about it and say he's the heir to a Bulgarian millionaire assassinated by the Communists?"

  "Once in a while," said Mendoza, getting up and going to get his hat, "I read a detective novel— and once in a while I wish I was in one. Everything made so easy for those boys, such complicated problems that inevitably there are only a couple of possible answers. I don't think there are any Bulgarian millionaires left. But I haven't much else to do at the moment, for once, and I may as well take a look."

  He went down to the morgue and looked at the dead man. There were aspects of the dead man which mildly interested him further. Hackett had said, good-looking— that was an understatement. Even several days dead, it was a handsome face: a purity of line like a cameo profile. A young man, twenty-eight to thirty, and his indulgence in heroin hadn't left any apparent marks of dissipation on him. A tallish, well-set-up young man, he'd have been.

  Mendoza went back to his office and sent down word that he'd like the autopsy report expedited. Not that there'd be much in it, but on the other hand— a nymph and a dolphin— it might be something a little more interesting than it looked at first glance.

  * * *

  The dolphin, in fact, stayed so persistently in his mind that he was somewhat absent-minded with Alison that evening, and when she complained he apologized by telling her about it.

  "A dolphin," said Alison, intrigued despite herself. “It sounds exactly like the start of a detective story, doesn't it? That is odd."

  "A small one," said Mendoza almost plaintively. He was relaxed on the end of his spine in her largest armchair, minus jacket and tie; the temperature still stood at ninety.

  "It reminds me of something— what? . . . Did you have any English literature in high school?"

  “That's a long time back," said Mendoza. "Probably some was inflicted on me .... Por Dias, twenty-two years ago, and the school's been torn down— that old Macy Street school— when they built the new Union Station. I had to cross through Chinatown to get there." He laughed. "Then we moved, because Johnny Li-Chong taught me to shoot Chinese craps, and my grandmother was horrified. Gambling's still one of the major sins to her. I was supposed to be selling papers after school, and I never told her when I quit— I found I could earn twice as much running a Spanish Monte bank in the back room of Johnny's father's restaurant over on Main. Caray, she was pleased, the old lady, when I started to bring her five dollars on Saturdays instead of two— I'm a good smart boy to get a raise in salary so quick! You know something, I never did tell her. She'd have raised the roof— another good-for-nothing going the same way as the old man, gamble his last copper— or hers. That five dollars on Saturdays, it came in useful. And the old man sitting on nearly three million bucks then, in a dozen banks, and swearing about a four-dollar gas bill. Damn it, you encourage me to maunder . . ."

  "Earn twice as much?" Alison took him up. "I don't know but what your grandmother's right— "

  “I said Spanish Monte, chica, not three-card. Perfectly legitimate deal. I was never as crazy a gambler as the old man— "

  “¡A otro perrro con ese hueso!— give that bone to another dog!"

  Alison laughed. "You'd gamble the gold in your teeth if you had any."

  “Well, not," said Mendoza, "without asking about the odds. And very young I found out what a lot of gamblers never seem to— the odds always run in favor of the bank. It's simple mathematics. Even at seventeen, I never just sat in at Monte— that way, as somebody's said, madness lies. I saved my money, industrious young fellow that I was, and set up as a banker. But what was it you asked me? There was a poor devil of an English teacher, Mr.— Mr.— Mr. Keyes. The only thing I remember about high school English is that Mr. Keyes had a passion for Chaucer, and it wasn't until he made me read some of Canterbury Tales and I came across the Miller's Tale that it dawned on me there might be something interesting— pornographical1y speaking— in these musty old classics."

  "Really. Maybe I missed something, not finishing high school."

  "Women don't get a kick out of pornography, or so the psychiatrists say."

  "Psychiatrists, hah. Since when do they know what they're talking about? What I was going to say— your small dolphin somehow reminds me of something in— can it be Dickens, or was it Trollope?— there was a housemaid who had an illegitimate baby, and when they criticized her she said, Please, ma'am, it was only a little one."

  He laughed. "And very logical too. Damn it, what could it mean? Unless it's some new pro slang I haven't caught up with yet. Nymph would be easy enough in that connection— if a little fancy— but the dolphin eludes me."

  "Which reminds me further," said Alison, "I have a mystery for you too." She got up and opened the top desk drawer. "I told you some idiot had borrowed my car. Well, when it came back I got round to cleaning it, and I found this in the crack down between the seat and the back."

  Mendoza took the thing and looked at it. "Foreign coin of some kind."

  "Holmes, this is wonderful— how do you do it? That I can see. But no engraving or whatever it's called, to say what country or anything."

  "No. I'll tell you something else, it's old— maybe damned old. Not milled, and not a true circle." It was not very big; and it was a silver coin, or had some silver in its alloy, though darkened. On one side of it was a design vaguely resembling that on some early U.S. coins, an eagle with outspread wings, but head down; it seemed to be holding something in its talons. The other side bore a design he couldn't puzzle out: a thing which might be a stylized flame growing out of a vase, or a bell with curlicues on the top of it, or two roundish triangles point to point.

  "Somebody's pocket-piece," he suggested. "A man's, probably, because owing to the curious fact that tailors still put side pockets in our trousers at an acute angle, things do tend to fall out when we're sitting down. Of course, it might also have got pulled out of a woman's purse when she reached in for a handkerchief or something. Are you sure the thing wasn't in the car when it was stolen?"

  "No, of course not. Which is exactly what that sergeant said. It occurred to me that it might be some sort of clue to whoever'd taken the car, and I thought I ought to tell them about it, you know— so I called, and got hold of the man who brought it back. A very nice obliging young man named Rhodes. And he asked, was I sure one of my own friends hadn't lost it in the car beforehand— which I'm not. Anyway, he said, it probably wouldn't be much of a clue, and I might as well keep it or throw it away. I do want to ask around, see if someone who's ridden with me might have lost it. I suppose it might have been someone's lucky talisman, something like that— but you'd think whoever'd lost it would have said something, in that case— asked me if I'd found it— if it was someone I know."

  "De veras," agreed Mendoza absently, still looking at it. "It feels old, somehow. I wonder if it's valuable at all. Curious. You might take it to an expert and ask."

  "Well, surely nobody'd have lost anything worth much and not tried to follow it up, everywhere they might have— though if it was whoever took the car— Oh, well, I'll keep it awhile and ask everyone, just in case." She dropped it back in the drawer.


  Presently Mendoza put on his tie and jacket and went home, and as he cut up fresh liver for the dignified Abyssinian feline who lived with him, the sleek brown green-eyed Bast, and let her out and let her in, and undressed and had a bath and went to bed— and eventually to sleep, after Bast had walked her seven mystic times around a circle and chosen exactly the proper place to curl up beside him— he did not ruminate at all on Alison's little find, but on his own puzzling small dolphin.

  * * *

  The autopsy report was waiting for him on his desk next morning, and he read it with interest. The deceased, said Dr. Bainbridge, had died of a massive injection of heroin. Probably not long prior to death he had received a blow on the head, a blow severe enough to have rendered him unconscious— a blow to the parietal area on the left side. He had been dead between five and seven days— impossible to pin it down further; say between last Monday and last Wednesday. He had been six feet one inch tall, around a hundred and seventy pounds, and between twenty-six and thirty years of age. He had a medium-fair complexion, black hair, and brown eyes; not much dental work, an excellent set of teeth— no scars or birthmarks— blood type O. His fingerprints were being checked in their own records and in Washington, to try to identify him.

  But all that was the least interesting of what Bainbridge had to say. "The body," so the report went on, "bore at least two dozen puncture marks in the areas which a drug addict most commonly uses for injections— both arms and thighs. However, when I came to examine these areas in detail, it was evident that none of these had in fact penetrated an artery, or much below the first layers of the epidermis."

  "Well, well," said Mendoza. He called Hackett in and got Dr. Bainbridge on the inside phone. "This corpse. The one with the puncture marks. What did you think about that?"

  "Did you haul me away from work just to ask that? I should've thought even a lieutenant of detectives could reason from here to there. The obvious deduction is that he was not an addict. Maybe somebody wanted to make it look as if he was, or maybe it was him, I wouldn't know—people do damned funny things. Maybe he committed suicide and those marks are relics of where he kept trying to get up his nerve. You get that kind of thing, of course."

  "Yes, but heroin's not a very usual method. And why and where would he get hold of any if he wasn't an addict? And why and where did he get that knock on the head?"

  "That's your business," said Bainbridge.

  "Well, you examined the body pretty thoroughly— "

  "I did. I'll tell you this, Luis. In the ordinary way, an autopsy wouldn't have uncovered that about those puncture marks. No reason to— er— go into such detail. But I happened to notice that not one seemed to have left any cyanosis— he was very well preserved, of course the clothes had helped, and he was on his back, so all the natural death-cyanosis had settled there— and you'd ordinarily expect to find local cyanosis, black-and-blue spots to you, around the most recent of the punctures. And a few others which had faded some, being older. You know, what always shows up on any user. A real mainliner, he's giving himself a jolt two or three times a day, and pretty damn clumsily too— even if he uses a hypo instead of the teaspoon method, he leaves bruise marks. Well, I noticed that, and I investigated, and I think all those marks were made about the same time, and after he was dead, or just before."

  "Now isn't that interesting!" said Mendoza. "I presume the body's still in the morgue— "

  "Did you think I'd take it out to Forest Lawn and bury it myself?"

  "What I meant was," said Mendoza patiently, "you're done with it, you're not doing any further research? It's on file, ready to be looked at by anybody who might know it?"

  "Complete with replaced organs and roughly sewn together, yes. Don't tell me you want a complete analysis of everything."

  "But I do, I do, amigo. Please. If possible, what he had for his last meal, any chronic diseases, any foreign bodies or inflammations, any suspicious differences from other bodies, etcetera. Look at everything."

  Bainbridge uttered a howl of protest. "But, my God, there's no reason! We know he died of heroin, and after all this time there won't be much else— "

  "You go and look. What kind of injection was it, by the way? Could it have been a normal dose?"

  "You know as well as I do how that varies— it could have been. A pretty big one to be called that, but the kind of jolt a lot of users take."

  "Mmh. Well, you go and look." Mendoza put down the phone and grinned at Hackett. "I knew that dolphin had something to say to us, Art. This corpse is a bit more mysterious than you thought."

  "So it seems," said Hackett, still reading the autopsy report. "I'll be damned. But it can still be an ordinary business, Luis. His first shot maybe, and he overdoes it or has an idiosyncrasy for it— like they say."

  Hackett found the role of the big dumb cop useful, and sometimes forgot to lay it aside in private; as he also looked the part, it came as a little surprise to most people that he was, in fact, a university graduate.

  "And he was nervous about the shot and made a lot of tries at it." V

  "Could be," conceded Mendoza. "Could still be .... Cigarettes but no matches. Handkerchief but no billfold— where most of us carry some identification."

  "You've done time down on Skid Row like most of us— you know how they live, hand to mouth. I've picked 'em up, dead, drunk, and sober, without so much as a handkerchief on 'em."

  "Sure," said Mendoza, "and once in a while with a few hundred-dollar bills in a back pocket." He picked up the inside phone again and called the crime lab, and got Dr. Erwin himself. "Over at the morgue is a body, and I presume they still have its clothes. The body of a handsome young man who died of a shot of heroin. I'd like the clothes gone over thoroughly, if you'll be so good." He added the last as a sop to Dr. Erwin's reputation; you didn't give arbitrary orders to a criminological scientist who had several times been consulted by Scotland Yard's C.I.D.

  “What for?"

  "Anything. If I knew specifically I'd have told you."

  "Really, Luis," said Dr. Erwin, annoyed, "must you be so difficult? We do like to have some idea, you know."

  "Me, I'm not a chemist," said Mendoza. "I read in the papers that criminological scientists make miracles these days— peer at the microscope and tell the cop on the case just who and what to look for. Science, it's wonderful, ¿no es verdad? You just take a general look and see what turns up."

  "Really," said Erwin. "Oh, well, we'll do our best."

  "I wonder— " Hackett was beginning, when Sergeant Lake looked in the door and said Lieutenant Carey would like to see whoever had that Carson Street homicide. Carey of Missing Persons.

  "Ah," said Mendoza happily, "the next installment of this thrilling mystery, maybe. Bring him in, Jimmy."

  THREE

  Carey was a big stocky man with a pugnacious jaw. He'd been a lieutenant only a few months; neither Hackett nor Mendoza knew him well. He came in on the sergeant's heels and nodded at them. "I had a memo from Sergeant Hackett— about this latest unidentified corpse you've got. It might be somebody we're looking for."

  "Sit down and let's hear the details. Have you looked at the corpse yet?"

  "Just got back from the morgue. I didn't have a photo, but I think it's him all right. Stevan Domokous, working as a clerk. Greek, but had his first papers."

  "My God," said Hackett, "I must have caught it from you, Luis— hunches— that's close enough to Bulgaria, isn't it? Was he a millionaire's son, Carey?"

  "I don't know," said Carey, looking a little surprised. "But he's been missing about the right time, and the description matches. Fellow came in to report it last Wednesday— head of a local import and export firm, an Andreas Skyros— I'd lay a bet on that one being a millionaire, all right. Dressed to the nines, diamond ring, gold tooth, custom-made suit, the works. He's a citizen, but came from the old country— you can cut his accent with a knife."

  "I take it this Domokous hadn't any family here, if it was this
fellow came in. Friend, or is he a relative?"

  "Employer. Domokous was working for him. Skyros said he felt kind of responsible, the guy was lonely, didn't speak English so well yet, you know. Which was how come, when Domokous didn't show up for work last Tuesday, he went round to see him, see if he was sick— or maybe sent one of the other fellows, I don't know. Domokous had a cheap room in a hotel on Second Street, we went over it. Not much there, a few odds and ends of clothes— no cash— album of family pictures from the old country— stuff like that. He paid by the week and it was almost up, they wanted the room— they'd seen him last on Monday— so seeing there wasn't much and it looked as if he hadn't taken off voluntari1y— I mean, Skyros said probably he wouldn't have had much else but what was there— we impounded it, cleared out the room. Skyros says, and of course he's got something, that a stranger here, he's apt to get in trouble easy— wander into the wrong part of town, run into a mugger, something like that— "

  "Which happens to a lot of people who've lived here all their lives," said Hackett ruefully.

  "And Skyros said too that he maybe felt a little worried sooner than he would have about anyone else because the guy wasn't the kind to take up with any cheap skirt all of a sudden, or go off on a bender. Anyway, when Domokous didn't show up on Wednesday, he comes m."

  "So we'd better have Mr. Skyros take a look at the corpse," said Mendoza. "But even if it is Domokous— very nice to know, but it doesn't explain much besides. Where do we find Skyros?"

  * * *

  "Oh, this is very sad," said Mr. Andreas Skyros. He sat down on the bench along the corridor and brought out a handkerchief to polish his bald head and his glasses. "I don't pretend, gentlemen, I had any great— you know?— emotion about the young man, this way, that way— " he shrugged massively. "He was such a one to feel sorry for, you know what I mean? But a very good, honest, hard-working young man."

  As Carey had said, Mr. Skyros had a thick accent, but he also had a good command of English; for the rest, he was large, round, genial, and obviously prosperous. "Tell me, how does he die?"