Extra Kill - Dell Shannon Read Free Page B

you'll get in any trouble over it."
    "Do you think—?”
    "I don't think anything right now," said
Mendoza. He put out his cigarette carefully in the brass tray. "We
haven't got enough to think about. But maybe it wouldn't do any harm
to take a little closer look at this thing. Todos
come tomes errores —we all make mistakes—and
peculiar coincidences do occur, no denying."
    "Now look," said Hackett, "if you've
got one of your hunches, Luis, tell it to go away. Of all the
far-fetched—"
    "No hunch," said Mendoza. "I'd just
like to look at it a little closer. To be sure." He looked at
Walsh. "We'll keep this quiet for a while. If it turns out
you've been exercising your imagination, I don't want it to get round
that you fooled Mendoza for a minute—everybody knows I'm never
wrong! But if there seems to be something in it, I'll want to see you
again."
    "Yes, sir," said Walsh, grinning and then
canceling the grin as he remembered Bartlett.
    Hackett shut his eyes and said, " Lo
mismo me da —all the same to me—I'm only
the wheel horse that'll do all the work. The games you think up,
Luis! Working a case twice, just to be sure."
    "Well, this is one we'd like to be very damned
sure about, isn't it?"
    "That's why," said Walsh. "I mean, I
thought I ought to tell somebody, sir, on account of those kids. That
cashier's still alive. If he doesn't die, it wouldn't be a homicide
charge—except for Joe."
    "Oh, that," said Mendoza. He got up,
straightening his tie, yanking down his cuffs; his cuff links, Walsh
noticed, were heavy gold monogrammed ones. "What the hell, about
the kids? They're no good to anybody and the chances are very small
they ever would be. They're all under eighteen and wouldn't get the
death penalty anyway. This way or that way"—he took down his
hat, a rather high-crowned black Homburg, and brushed it—"they'll
be around quite a while to make work for us and deviltry for a lot of
other people. It's not on that account I'd like to know more about
this. I just want to know what really happened. I'm told I've got as
much irrational curiosity as a dozen women, which is maybe why I'm a
cop in the first place."
 
    TWO
      He happened to have a date that night with his
redhead, Alison Weir. It was a little different thing, with Alison—he
hadn't troubled to figure why—just, maybe, because she was Alison:
he could be more himself with her than with any other woman. So over
dinner he told her they'd take a little ride out toward Long
Beach—something he wanted to look at—and without much prodding
added the whole funny little story. "This boy," said Alison
thoughtfully, “he's not just trying to build up something, get into
the limelight?"
    "I don't read him that way," said Mendoza.
"And these days rookies aren't always as young as that—he's
twenty-five, twenty-six, old enough to have some judgment. No, I
don't know that there's anything in it, and to tell you the truth
I've got no idea where to start looking to find out."
    "But— Well, say for a minute it's so, Luis,
though it sounds perfectly fantastic—if it was someone who wanted
to kill this Bartlett specifically, surely something would show up in
his private life, if you looked?"
    Mendoza lit cigarettes for both of them and looked
consideringly at his coffee. "Not necessarily. You take a
policeman, now—he gets around, and in a lot of places and among a
lot of people the ordinary person doesn't. You might say, if you're
looking for motives for murder, a cop has a little better chance of
creating one than most people. The difficulty is—" He broke
off, took a drag on his cigarette, laid it down, drank coffee, and
stared at the sugar bowl intently.
    " Siga adelante! "
said Alison encouragingly.
    "Well, the difficulty is that if it was anything
like that—something he'd heard or seen on his job—big enough to
constitute a reason for killing him, he'd have known about it himself
and made some report on it. And if it was something that had