"Quite the little publicity agent," said Mendoza, "wasn't he?"
"Oh, I said he was clever. And once you get a business like that started, you know, the women tell each other-it gets around. Not that I ever had any experience of it before," she added hastily. She wasn't, at this late date, going to connect herself again to the Sally-Ann business.
"And he was good, too. Never the hint of any trouble, he was always so careful, everything all sterile, and he always put them right out with the morphine… I don't know where he got that. No, that's level, I reely don't. I know he'd have liked to use a regular anesthetic, like sodium pentothal or something like that, but there was no way for him to get hold of it, you see. He was very careful, about the morphine-he always tested their hearts first and took their blood pressure. He'd have made a good surgeon. Right from the first, it all went as smooth as could be… You'd be surprised, how many of the girls who called me, who'd meant to go on and have the baby and put it out for adoption, because they didn't know where to go, you see-they jumped at it, when they found how Doctor wanted to help them."
"How did he charge?"
"Well, that was the only trouble there ever was," admitted Margaret Corliss. "Not all of them could raise the kind of money he was asking. You see, the-well, call them patients-he wanted to get, he said from the first, were the ones with money. Who could pay anything up to five hundred or more. You know, the college girls with big allowances, or society girls and women. Like that. And we did get some of those, too. Sometimes he'd be sorry for a girl and do it for less. The way we worked it was, I'd meet the girl outside somewhere, like in a park, and size her up, what she was good for, and make the deal. Then, when she'd raised the money, we'd make an appointment at my apartment. Doctor'd meet us there and drive us to the office-it was always at night, and he'd go round all different ways so she wouldn't be quite sure where she was, see-and do the job, and then I'd keep the girl overnight. But he was so careful, there was never any trouble. They never knew a thing about it, under the dope, and it was just like in a regular hospital, everything sterile and all. They never knew his name, of course… The lowest I ever remember was two hundred, he was sorry for that girl. He always asked five at least and if we could see it was a woman with real money he'd get seven-fifty. A couple of times we got a thousand. Because it was all guaranteed absolutely safe, you see. Those two were older women, and we figured they were married-maybe society women of some kind, you know."
"Did he keep a list of them?"
A little reluctantly she said, "It's in the safety box. Of course most of them gave wrong names, I suppose" "Just about as he started practice-both legitimate and otherwise," said Mendoza, "he claimed to have had a legacy. Do you know anything about that five thousand bucks?"
She shook her head. "Not reely. He spent a lot of money fixing up the office, and I did ask him how he could afford it, because he paid cash. He just laughed-he was always laughing, Doctor, such a handsome man…" She brushed away genuine tears. "And he said something about casting your bread on the waters."
"Oh, really. Well, and so who was the appointment with on Tuesday night?"
"There wasn't one. No, reely there wasn't. I'd know, I was always there, just like I told you. There wasn't any job set up for that night. I don't know what he'd be doing at the office."
"All right. You knew he was stepping out on his wife-did he use the office to meet women?"
"I wouldn't know," she said primly. "It was just business between Doctor and me- I'd heard him say things about women he went out with, but not to reely know anything about them, or where he took them or like that. He might have, but I wouldn't know."
He accepted that. Quite a story, he thought; Nestor had been an enterprising fellow. Saw where there was money to be had and went for it the shortest way. And when you looked at it from one angle, it could be he'd saved a lot of suffering and maybe a few lives, those women coming to him, instead of some drunken old quack or dirty midwife.
"Was there any recent trouble over a patient? Over the payment, or anything else?"
No, there hadn't been, she said. There had been a couple of girls lately who'd had difficulty raising the money, and one of them-this had been about a month ago-had somehow managed to get it, and came back, but Nestor had refused to do the job because it was too late, he said-over three months. "You see how good he was, he said it wouldn't be safe for her. She was awf'ly mad, and argued with him a long time, but he stuck to it."
Nestor a very canny one, too. Legally speaking, the abortion of a foetus more than three months old was manslaughter. Which Nestor had undoubtedly known.
"Well, what do you think happened?" he asked suddenly. And he'd once thought, maybe it was this woman and Webster had assaulted Art, if… But he was a long way from being sure about that now. He thought she was leveling, and at a second look he didn't feel she'd be capable of that. "You hadn't any quarrel with him-"
"The idea! Of course not, we got along fine, Doctor was reely a very nice man."
"Did he keep a gun in the office? He didn't. Well, who do you think shot him?"
She looked a little surprised. "Why, it was the burglar, wasn't it? Did you think it might be some-some private reason? Oh, that reely couldn't be. Nobody had any reason to want him dead. Everybody liked him. He had ever so many friends, he was always going to parties
… Well, sometimes it'd be with his wife, sometimes not, I guess, from what he said. Nobody seemed to like her much, she's a funny kind of woman, the little I've seen of her. But he was popular… "
She was helpful, but not to the extent he'd hoped.
Still, it cleared this part of the puzzle out of the way; and he thought she'd spoken the truth when she denied that Nestor had had an appointment-a professional appointment-that Tuesday night.
Meeting a woman in the office, maybe, and her husband suspecting, following her?
Glasser took Margaret Corliss up to the County Jail and saw her booked in, with Webster. Mendoza sent a routine note up to the Narcotics office about them, though the narco charge wasn't anything really, a formality.
It was ten-forty; he ought to go home. He sat on of inertia, reading reports… There'd been men out, covering this crowded downtown area, asking questions wherever rooms were rented, at hotels, at random. They had reported evidence from several places of men with burnscarred faces, and they had turned up three such men, all on Skid Row. Considering the importance of that, all were being held overnight for the Garcia boy to look at in the morning. One little lead looked more promising, even though it had come to nothing. A man with such a scarred face had taken a room at a house on Boardman Street, giving the name of John Tenney. The landlady had thought he was in, but when they looked, he wasn't, and all his few possessions were gone. It was possible he'd overheard the plainclothesman asking questions and slipped out the back door. But of course that didn't say he'd been the Slasher-and it didn't say where he'd gone. Ought to go home, thought Mendoza. He wasn't accomplishing anything here… He heard the phone ring on Farrell's desk, and Farrell's voice. And then, "Lieutenant? Call in from a squad car-another Slasher job, but the woman got away-"
"?Dios! Where?"
"San Pedro, between Emily and Myrtle. It just happened ten minutes ago."
"I'm on my way. Send another car."