"Nobody needs to be an expert to deduce from all this that he was a man of no taste," said Mendoza. "The latest fashion, the expensive, but"-he lifted his lip at the cologne bottle-"Main Street masquerading as Beverly Hills." He opened the second case, which was of the tall and narrow kind designated a fortnighter; it contained four suits, six pair of slacks, and four sport coats, all carefully arranged on the hangers, and four more pairs of shoes.
"However," said Mendoza, "all this has something to say besides that," and he looked at the two cases thoughtfully before opening the third.
This was older than the others, of scuffed brown leather instead of plane-weight aluminum; it looked as if it had seen hard usage. When Mendoza lifted the lid, all of them stared in silence, and then Mendoza called Marx and Horder. " Pronto, let's see if there's anything on this."
"Very pretty," said Woods. "Never saw one quite like it-looks kind of antique, would you say? But he wasn't shot, was he?"
"It's an old one," agreed Hackett. "Look at the length of the barrel. A six- or seven-shot of some kind-open cylinder like one of those old colt six-shooters, but not quite the same-" They watched the two men from Prints lift it out carefully and set to work.
Mendoza looked at Hackett pleasedly. " Cuanto apuestas -how much do you bet it's a smooth bore?" he asked happily.
Hackett fingered his jaw. "Walsh's business. You want to hook it up to this. I don't know that I'd lay any bets, Luis, but I can't see any connection offhand."
"Can't you? Well, it's all up in the air yet, nothing solid, but I can see a couple of little things to build a plot on, you know-stories to tell ourselves about it."
"You don't suppose that any surgeon's going to be able to say, this man died at eight o'clock P.M. on Friday the thirtieth? After all this time? What are you trying to make out-that Bartlett saw this murder done and just forgot to mention it to Walsh, and the killer followed them and an hour and a half later shot Bartlett? I used to like fairy tales, about thirty years back, but they don't thrill me any more."
" Tengo paciencia, I'm not filling in that plot yet-we'll just file it for reference. But I'll say this about the Bartlett business. Here we've got a homicide that isn't fresh enough so the surgeon can say within a day or a day and a half when it started to be a homicide. Isn't it a little helpful that we've got this other thing nailed down as to time? Coincidences do happen, but this is just the least little bit suggestive, or it could be. We can't operate on the arbitrary premise that these two things must be hooked up, but let's keep it in mind, because if they are, we've got a much narrower time limit for the corpse than the autopsy could possibly give us. And now let's look at the rest of this." He turned back to the third suitcase.
The top layer here consisted of soiled shirts, handkerchiefs, underwear, and socks, crowded in haphazardly; several ties in need of cleaning, also crumpled together and shoved into a side pocket; clean handkerchiefs, rumpled out of their folds and stuffed into every crevice; two pairs of soiled pajamas and a clean pair crushed in together; a pair of leather slippers. In the bottom was a dressing-gown of scarlet silk moire; it had been neatly folded.
"Yes," said Mendoza, feeling delicately in the pockets of the robe and coming up with another soiled handkerchief and nothing else.
"Yes. It all says a little something, doesn't it? What elementary deduction occurs to you, Art?"
"That Woods hasn't been slandering Mr. Twelvetrees," said Hackett absently. "Or at least, if he wasn't planning any embezzlement, he was planning to leave. With all his lares and penates. Because-"
Mendoza said parenthetically to Woods, "Speaking of foibles, you notice he forgets his favorite role now and then-the big dumb cop. You catch him off guard, he can actually pronounce three-syllable words."
" Estese quieto, I'm deducing," said Hackett. "He didn't do all that packing in fifteen minutes, and the way he's been so careful to sort and fold everything all neat and tidy, it was him did it. He expected to be using all this stuff for some time to come, it represents quite an investment. It looks as if he'd been packing, he'd got almost everything in, except the stack of clean handkerchiefs and all his dirty laundry, and at that point something happened to put him in the hell of a hurry all of a sudden. He just shoved everything else in, cramming it down any old way-"
"Or somebody did it for him,” said Mendoza. "You may get to be a lieutenant someday after all. Yes. You know, I think somebody finished his packing for him. Because from the state of the other cases, he was a finicky customer. Like me. We can't help it, it's an automatic thing, like-like cats washing themselves. I don't, maybe, go quite so far as this one did with his flame-of-love cologne and his nail buffer and his- vaya por Dios, are these bath salts?-but I'm enough like that myself to guess at the kind of thing he'd do or not do. And however much of a hurry this one was in, I think he'd have put all that soiled laundry into a bag for packing. I think he'd have had that bag handy, laid out ready for when he wanted it, and so he wouldn't have had to waste time getting it and skipped it for that reason… 1 wonder what happened to it, that bag. It wasn't in the bedroom on Wednesday morning… "
"Let's look," said Hackett, "for clues that might exist, friend, not ones we dream up ourselves, hah?"
Marx said from the other side of the room, "The gun's clean, Lieutenant. Not a thing on it anywhere."
"Yes, of course,” said Mendoza. "I don't know why we bother to take you boys out on a job at all any more. Even those six-year-old shoplifters Juvenile's getting these days know about fingerprints." He got up and wandered into the bedroom. "A large stout paper bag," he murmured to himself, "or a bag made for the purpose-a cotton laundry bag, with a slit in it, or drawstrings. You see them at dime stores, with stamped patterns for embroidering." He lay down prone and looked under the bed. “My grandmother has one, a hideous thing, with a design of hollyhocks on it. Red and orange. And Laundry spelled out underneath." He went into the closet.
"I get the general idea," said Hackett patiently. "But there are things called hampers too."
"Not here." Mendoza came out of the closet looking dissatisfied. "The bathroom isn't big enough."
"You were just saying a while ago that bachelors living alone don't pay much attention to these things. Now you want to make out-and it's a piddling little thing anyway, what does it matter‘?"
"It may not matter a damn, I'd just like to know. You miss the point. It's a personal thing. You take me, I wouldn't notice about the kitchen floor needing waxing or the mirrors needing to be washed, it's only me and my personal things that have to be just so-and he was like that, by his clothes and packing… What do you do with soiled laundry?"
"I've got a drawer for it. Easiest thing. Logical thing. Probably he did too."
"No. Not here. Not enough drawers, with all the stuff he had." Mendoza gestured at the one bureau. "And not logical, but slipshod, that is. You ought to get married, be taken care of properly."
"Give advice, never take it," said Hackett.
"But that's just it, I don't need a wife for that, which is the only reason to acquire one in the long view. I'm much more particular at looking after myself than most women, and I can afford to hire the housekeeping done. Caray, dirty clothes in a drawer, I'm surprised at you." He looked in all the drawers; Marx and Horder had left them liberally covered with gray powder, and a number of nice prints had showed up: with very little doubt they would prove to belong to the dead man, or Mrs. Bragg. All the drawers were empty except for sheets of clean newspaper. "I take it," he said to Woods, "that Mrs. Bragg hadn't got round to cleaning in here between my visit and yours, and that you hadn't let her in since?"
“This is all very interesting," said Woods, sitting down on the bed and looking more like an earnest postgraduate than ever. "You've got Twelvetrees down pat, Lieutenant, by what I've got on him. The Kingmans and a couple of other people-members of that, er, sect-they all say he was a sharp dresser and finicky about himself. One woman said to me, and it kind of stuck in my mind as an apt description, you know-this Miss Webster it was, the only one I've talked to who didn't like him-she said he was like a big black tomcat preening himself… And that's right as far as I know, about Mrs. Bragg. I told her on Wednesday afternoon not to touch anything here. But it didn't seem important enough to put a seal on the door. Matter of fact, of course, there wasn't anything here really useful to me, I just wanted to keep it open a day or so, maybe have a closer look. But it's her property and she's got a key, I couldn't say whether she's been in or not."