by Dell Shannon
Yeager's roundish young face looked pinched. "A Mrs. Rose Engel called in. Says she came home and found her daughter dead. The kid was nine. There are some other kids, younger."
"That's it?" said Glasser. "Where was she?"
"She just said, at a party. She left her boy friend with the kids. He lives with her. I just got his name, Leon Fratelli. Maybe he's awake now. She's got the hell of a hangover and wasn't talking very straight."
Glasser said to Wanda, "Maybe you'd better stay out here."
"Don't be silly," said Wanda impatiently. "I'm a cop as much as you are, Henry."
The house wasn't very big: maybe five rooms. It had originally been clapboard, and a number of the boards had been cracked and broken loose. Both front windows were broken. It had been so long since the house had been painted, it was impossible to tell what color it had been. There were wide cracks in the cement walk up to the door; there was no front porch. There hadn't been any grass or plants around it for a long time, if ever.
The front door was open. Glasser shoved it wider with one foot and they went in. Various smells hit them at once. This room, apparently intended for a living room, contained little furniture besides an old army cot and a couple of straight chairs. There was a TV in one corner. The floor, rugless, was thick with dust. A baby about a year old, quite naked, was lying beside one of the chairs; its lower body was caked in filth obviously many days old. It was a boy, and it was crying feebly in a thin whine.
There was a man sitting on the cot, head down, a man about thirty, with several days' growth of beard on a lantern jaw. He was wearing a pair of dirty shorts and nothing else, and he had a fat paunch beneath a mat of dark chest hair. Somewhere children were crying. In addition to the dust, the floor was littered with miscellany: scraps of dry bread, candy wrappers, beer cans, and unmistakable human excrement.
Glasser went into the little hall off that room, Wanda after him. At the front of the house was a tiny kitchen. Counter and stove were littered with piles of dirty dishes and pans, and there was mold in most of them. The floor was dirtier than that in the first room. There was a table about a foot square by the window, and in a chair beside it a woman sat looking dully at a can of beer in one hand. She was a fat, dark young woman in pink pants and a flowered top; both were soiled and spotted. Her back to them, they could see the ingrained dirt on her neck.
Two children, three or four, were tugging at her other arm: children in dirty rags of nondescript clothing. They were both crying.
"Mrs. Engel?" said Glasser.
She looked around slowly. Her eyes were bloodshot, her dark-red lipstick smeared.
"Who're you?" she asked thickly. Glasser showed her the badge. "Oh. 'Bout Alice." She gave the nearest child a casual slap. "Shut up, you. Poor li'l Alice. Don' know what happened."
She waved an arm clumsily. "Inna bedroom."
They went down the hall and came to an open door. The room was about ten feet square. It held a single bed and an unpainted three-drawer chest. The bed was a tangle of gray sheets, an old brown blanket half on the floor. The body was on the bed: the thin, small body of a little girl—an undernourished-looking little girl, the ribs starkly visible. The doctors would say exactly what had been done to her; it was fairly obvious that she'd been beaten and raped. There was dried blood all over her, and on the bedclothes; her face was contorted in one last scream of agony.
Wanda made a strangled sound. Glasser backed out and went on down the hall. Next to the bedroom was a bathroom. The toilet had been cracked and overflowed a long time ago, and the mess never had been cleared up; there were two ancient chamber-pots, both ready to spill over, in the dirt-encrusted bathtub.
Wanda gulped and said faintly, "I'm s-sorry, I'm going to be—"
"If you're sick here the lab will be mad at you for tampering with evidence," said Glasser. "You'd better go get some fresh air." She fled past the man on the cot, and Glasser shook him by one shoulder. "Fratelli! Can you answer some questions?"
The man just mumbled and shook his head. Glasser came out into the rain and took a deep breath of cold wet air. Wanda was sitting in the back of the squad swallowing determinedly. Glasser got in the front and reached for the mike on the radio.
There wasn't anything for detectives to do here, for a while. Take the man and woman in to sober up in jail. Take the kids to Juvenile Hall where at least they'd be washed and fed. Turn the lab loose, and get the body to the morgue. Later on, one of that pair might answer some pertinent questions.
"You O.K.?" said Yeager to Wanda. "I said you'd better not go in—"
"I'm O.K.," said Wanda faintly.
"She's getting street experience," said Glasser, and flicked on the mike.
* * *
At five o'clock Landers and Grace were talking again to the two security guards from Bullock's, Dick Lee and Bob Masters, who had spent the afternoon looking at mug-shots down in records. They had come up blank.
"I guess I shouldn't have said I might make one of them," said Masters ruefully. He was black; Lee was white. "It was just a second, when those last two took their masks off, just as the elevator door was shutting—I couldn't swear to anything, except they were both white and one had dark hair."
"All I could say, about the same," said Lee. "It was so fast—their timing was so good—they sure as hell knew what they were doing."
"It was a damned slick operation all right," said Landers. He and Grace had been over in the Accounting department of Bullock's most of the afternoon, looking at the terrain, talking to the clerks there. "What sticks out at first glance is that they knew your whole routine."
"And we heard something about that this morning," said Jason Grace in his gentle voice, "but I'd like to run through it again, to get it straight." His regular-featured brown face, with its moustache as neat as Mendoza's, wore a deceptively lazy expression. "What struck me about it—thar's a big store, with a lot of different departments on seven floors. It must take some doing to collect the day's take from everywhere in such a short time."
"Not really, sir," said Masters. "It's planning that does it, all right—a set routine. Like we told you, the store closes at six except for Saturdays when it's open till nine. So at around five-fifteen, the different department heads start to close out the cash registers, see? The amount in every register is totaled and entered on a little form. Then they add up the total of all the checks and put that down too. The cash goes in one little bag and the checks in another, and then they both go in a bag together, marked for that department. By this time it'll be getting on to a quarter of six, and there aren't usually many last-minute customers but if so it's easy enough to add in those sales. As soon as the doors close at six-come to think, it is a kind of split-second timed thing—the department heads take their bags to number three freight elevator. There's one of us on every floor right by that elevator—I'm on the seventh floor. Elevator collects the first-floor bags, goes up to the second floor, and so on. After it's gone up, the guards on the first, second, third and fourth floors, they go down to secure all the street entrances, check the rest rooms, be sure all the people are out. The rest of us go up to Accounting with the bags."
"That would be about what time usually?" asked Landers.
"It doesn't take long," said Lee. "About twenty past?"
He consulted Masters.
"Twenty past to half past six," said Masters. "Split the difference. It's all kind of down pat, see? In Accounting—I mean the hall by the elevator where the door to Accounting is—we wheel all the bags in on a big dolly, and there'll be five or six men to handle 'em. They take it in turns. They take the paper forms out of each bag, and seal the bags—that takes maybe another twenty minutes. Tell the truth, I don't know where those forms go, files somewhere, I suppose, they just take 'em into the Accounting office and then they leave and we take the bags down by freight elevator five, that's the one closest to the alley between the buildings."
Bullock's store had two separate building
s joined by an arcade below, a mezzanine above. "By that time Decker—he's the ground-floor guard—has brought the van around, we load the bags and drive straight to the bank. That'll be about seven-fifteen, it's only a couple of blocks. The guards there are always waiting, and in three minutes we've handed over to them and the bags are on the way to the vault."
"These birds had to know that routine," said Grace, "to catch you all flat-footed the way they did."
"You can sure as hell say that again," said Lee feelingly. "What the men in Accounting say—they come out to the elevator about six-fifteen, to be there when we come up—these jokers must have hid some place, probably on the seventh floor, until about ten past six. And something else, they knew how to get up to the eighth floor, which not everybody would. That elevator's not for general use, and it's way down at the end of a dead-end aisle in Ladies' Lingerie on the seventh floor. It only goes from seven to nine, where Lost and Found is. Anyway, they showed up at the door to Accounting at ten past six on the dot, and of course there was only six guys there, everybody else had left. All four of 'em had guns, and Mr. Anderson said it didn't take three minutes, three of 'em went to work—they had the rope with 'em—and got them all tied up like packages. Just in time to come out to the elevator and meet me and Bob peacefully riding up with all that loot. There wasn't one damned thing we could do. In about another two minutes they had us tied up, and down they go in the elevator."
"Taking off the masks as they went," said Landers, "to, hopefully, slide out without any trouble downstairs. As indeed they did."
"Yeah," said Lee. "See, the men on the first floor then aren't usually very near that alley door. Two men—Decker and Robinson, but usually Robinson'd be on his way up to the second floor around then. Decker'd have got the van from the parking lot and brought it around to the alley, left the keys in it. And we told you these bastards had on uniforms—not really like ours, but blue—and unless Decker was close enough, he couldn't see it wasn't us, if they slid out in pairs."
"A very smart little operation indeedy," said Grace.
They had put out an A.P.B. for the van, and it had been spotted an hour ago parked over on Garondelet. It was now in the police garage being gone over by the lab men.
"Not to tell you your business," said Masters diffidently, "but we kind of wondered—maybe one of them used to work as a guard at the store. Knew the routine from that, see?"
"It is a thought," said Grace. That, of course, had occurred to them.
Lee was looking around the big office, at the two detectives, with interest. Only Glasser was there, bent over his typewriter. Lee said to Landers, "Excuse me, but you don't look old enough to be a detective, you know?"
Of necessity, after long suffering, Landers had learned to bear his cross philosophically. He just had the kind of face that would look about twenty until he was a grandfather, and he had to live with it.
It was nearly the end of shift. They thanked the two guards and saw them out. Grace left, and Landers was just going out the door when the phone on his desk rang. He went back to pick it up and found his wife at the other end.
Phillippa Rosemary, unfortunately christened by parents who never dreamed she would turn into a policewoman, was annoyed. "These damn Narco men," she said. "I'm going to be here—" here was Records and Identification downstairs— "for at least another hour, Tom—they've got three citizens looking for a pusher. So will you please pick up a pound of hamburger and some frozen french fries on the way home?"
"Certainly," said Landers. "Maybe this kind of thing will convince you to start a family and turn into an old-fashioned homemaker."
"I'm thinking about it, I'm thinking about it," said Phil. "What with all the stupid civilians I've had to deal with today, and now Lieutenant Goldberg telling me all about his allergies—"
Landers laughed. "We'll discuss it later at closer quarters. I'll expect you when I see you."
* * *
The chief accountant at Bullock's had come up with a rough estimate of the loot: somewhere around three hundred and fifty grand. Sergeant John Palliser drove home through the steady rain thinking about that very smart job. He had never been especially gifted with ESP—Mendoza was the one with the crystal ball—but a dim presentiment moved in his mind, and as he pulled into the drive of the house on Hillcrest Road in Hollywood he thought, that ought to be enough to last them for a while, but-
Roberta had really been working with the big black German shepherd Trina, who hardly jumped on them anymore at all. She brought him a Scotch-and-water, said there were pork chops for dinner and she'd just got the baby to sleep. "Have you been on that Bullock's thing?—it was on the noon news. That bunch really thinks big—are there any leads on it'?"
"Not so far. And I do just wonder—" said Palliser.
* * *
Hackett went home, having failed to find any beautiful blonde heisters in their records, to an annoyed Angel and two noisy children. "Seven people came to see the house," said Angel, "and I have had it, Art. Let's for heaven's sake go to those Gold Carpet people they'll buy the house outright, and we can move." She sounded cross and tired. They had put a down payment on the new house she had found, high up in Altadena, a nice house on a dead-end street; but here they still were in Highland Park, with the local crime rate soaring and two house payments to make for the second month. "I know they only offered seventy thousand, but we might not get much more anyway."
"You're probably so right," said Hackett. "We'd better. George and Mary were lucky." In the background, Mark was being an airplane and Sheila imitating him.
"The happy home."
Angel hugged him. "I mean, when we know we're moving, I want to get on with it. I'll call them in the morning."
* * *
The Higginses had been lucky because the house on Silver Lake Boulevard—the house which Sergeant Bert Dwyer and Mary had bought sixteen years ago when they were expecting their first baby—had been in a location where the soulless new condominiums were going up. The years had passed too quickly, since it had been a quiet family home on a not-too-busy street; and Bert Dwyer had died on the marble floor of the bank with the heister's slugs in him, and that confirmed bachelor George Higgins had finally persuaded Mary to marry him. These days they had their own Margaret Emily who had turned two in September. Steve Dwyer was past fifteen and Laura thirteen, and—a good thing—they both adored George Higgins. But the years went by too fast.
He knew it had been a wrench for Mary, leaving the old house. The realty firm had bought it, and it would be torn down to make room for another tall condominium. But the new house was occupying her attention; a nice four-bedroom house on a quiet street in Eagle Rock, it needed a good deal of paint and tender loving care. Fortunately, Steve and Laura liked the new school. When Higgins got home that Friday night Mary informed him that she'd given the kitchen the second coat of paint. "I wanted to get it done, George. But it did take longer than I'd thought, I'm afraid dinner isn't—"
Higgins surveyed her fondly, his lovely Mary, and said, "I see you did. You've got paint all over your face."
"I only finished ten minutes ago—Laura did offer to help but she had her music lesson to study, and Steve just got home—"
"Go wash the paint off," said Higgins, "and I'll take us all out to dinner."
He wasn't thinking about the Whalens, or the other body he'd looked at that day; that was just the job, and after the years he'd spent at the job, he'd learned to leave the current work at the office. See what showed tomorrow.
* * *
Mendoza, not thinking much about the Whalens, or Hackett's female heister, or the Bullock's job, drove home through the rain, which seemed to be coming down harder. The house on Rayo Grande Avenue in Hollywood wasn't going to be home much longer. Alison's estate—the old estancia and winery in the hills above Burbank—was ready to be moved into. The new apartment, constructed for their newest retainers Ken and Kate Kearney in part of the old winery building, was finished; t
he fence around the four and a half acres was up, and the special wrought-iron gate bearing the name of the house, La Casa de la Gente Feliz, the house of happy people. These last few days, Alison had been in a frenzy of sorting out possessions and consulting with movers; they would be in the new house by Christmas.
But he came home to a tranquil atmosphere tonight. The twins Johnny and Teresa, just turned five in August, greeted him exuberantly but settled down again to coloring books. Alison had been curled in her armchair with the latest House Beautiful, while the new one rolled on a blanket on the floor. The new one, Luisa Mary, was fulfilling the prophecy of that nurse in the obstetric ward: she was a live wire all right, and her hair—coming in more vigorously by the day—as red as Alison's.
"I have no doot," said Mairi MacTaggart in the door to the dining room, "she'll turn out left-handed, the way she has of going backwards at things. You stay where you are, it's only the steak to broil—give the man time for a drink."
Certainly, when Mendoza was settled in his armchair with the drink (having necessarily provided El Señor, the alcoholic half-Siamese, with his own half-ounce of rye) Luisa Mary was energetically making swimming motions backward and complaining vociferously that she was no nearer her objective—the complicated tangle of the other three cats—Sheba, Bast and Nefertite—curled on the big, round, velvet ottoman.
"We're going to be in before Christmas if possible," Alison was exulting. "It's going to be hell, sorting everything out, but Mairi says better to do it at this end—Lord, we've been here five years, not all that long, but the things you accumulate—"
Cedric the Old English sheepdog galloped into the room with Mairi in hot pursuit. "The creature!" she said crossly. "In the wading pool all summer and footprints all over, and now bringing in the mud—"
Mendoza leaned back and shut his eyes. One of these days he might quit the job, and spend more time with the feudal household his Scots-Irish girl had wished on him. Or maybe not .... With the rye warm in his stomach, he was thinking again about that very sharp operation at Bullock's. Dimly, the same presentiment Palliser had known moved in his mind.
