Streets of Death llm-28

by Dell Shannon

  It looked like a quiet family place, the cheerful red-checked tablecloths, and the fat bartender who was probably Reinke was friendly. It wasn’t once a year Galeano drank anything but an occasional glass of wine, and of course you weren’t supposed to drink on duty, but defying the regulations he ordered a Scotch on the rocks, feeling he needed it.

  There was a friendly game of gin going at a rear table, a little money changing hands, but quiet and orderly. He couldn’t see there was anything to notice about the place. What they’d heard about Buford, if he’d been in here that night he wouldn’t have stayed long: had a couple of beers and left.

  Galeano went back to the office and finding Grace there, told him that. "Card game, huh?" said Grace. "Well, I don’t get too excited about the state regulations either, Nick. This thing is going to wind up in Pending. We now know from Buford’s bank that he hadn’t drawn out any cash in a couple of weeks, and then only fifty bucks. I just had the brother in-he’s been through the house and says there isn’t anything missing, even his new shotgun there. Which is also funny. Because if somebody intended to rob him, you’d have thought they’d have made a job of it. In for a penny, in for a pound as they say. And then again, the brother said Dick was usually home, and he hadn’t been able to reach him for a couple of days. Where was he instead?"

  Galeano wasn’t much interested in Buford or how he’d come to be taken off. He said, "I suppose I’d better go see that Mrs. Chard again." Not that that was very important either.

  He had to look for the address on Constance Street, and by the time he found it, it was raining in buckets. He turned up his collar and dashed for the cover of the deep porch; it was an old California bungalow. Waiting for an answer to his ring, he wondered if Marta had sold the Dodge to Jim Newton; and remembered suddenly of course, Carey a very thorough man-that there’d been an examination of the car too, and nothing had shown up that was at all suggestive. So what if she had driven the car somewhere that day?

  He rang the bell again and thought rather miserably, that part of it could be true. The boyfriend. Edwin Fleming was no good to her as a husband. Say she had a boyfriend, that didn’t mean they had to have plotted a murder. There wasn’t one scrap of evidence that the man was dead. It was hard to see how he could be alive, but queerer things had happened. And, he thought suddenly, hadn’t somebody called Marta straitlaced? If she was just covering up some affair- The door opened and a waft of noise came out at him. "Thought I heard the doorbell," said the man just inside. "What you want?"

  Galeano brought out the badge. The man was little, old, bent over as if he had arthritis or a crooked spine. He said, "Oh. You want Cecelia-it’s about Bob?"

  "Now what the hell have you got the door open for, you silly old bastard?" Mrs. Wilma Dixon came up behind him, glass in one hand, noticed Galeano, gaped for a moment, readjusted her expression to a winning smile and said, "Oh, it’s that police officer who was so nice and understanding about poor Bob. Cissy! You know the funeral’s tomorrow, it’ll be a great relief to have it over. This is my husband, Mr. Dixon."

  "How do," said Dixon, and hobbled away, a hand to his hip.

  "Won’t you come in?" Galeano went in to a TV turned up too loud in a nearby room, an aroma of port and Scotch. Cecelia Chard appeared in the doorway opposite, gestured at someone behind her, and the TV volume lessened abruptly.

  Galeano asked his questions uninterestedly, and Cecelia and her mother looked at each other. "Bob having trouble with anybody? Oh, I don’t think so, any more than usual," said Cecelia. "When he was drinking- Why?"

  "There’s been some suggestion he was deliberately killed," said Galeano absently. "He didn’t owe anybody money, or-"

  "Oh, I don’t think it would be anything like that, Mr. Galeano. He was perfectly all right when he was sober, but when he got to drinking he always got in a fight."

  "Led astray he was," said Mrs. Dixon, "by all the bad company he ran with."

  It really didn’t matter much how Bob Chard had got himself killed. Galeano thanked them and dashed back to his car through the rain.

  ***

  Landers and Glasser, out hunting those possibles on Sandra, accepted the rain as an added hazard. Landers was saying that Palliser was being too subtle anyway. "As far as I can see, Rank is the prime suspect here. The girl picked his mug-shot-sure, with a couple of others, but the same general type-and he’s got the right record for the job. He had access to a house in the right area. Well, only maybe, but he looks better than any of these X others to me. I say, bring him in again and lean on him, get a search warrant for the house-even now S.I.D. might turn up some evidence of the girls being there."

  "Maybe," said Glasser doubtfully. "John saw her, and he’s pretty good at judging people, Tom."

  They went looking, and of the nine they were hunting found just one at home, in a single room a block away from Skid Row. He had several counts of rape behind him, and except for the goatee he conformed to the description, but how long did it take to shave one off? They brought him in to question when it was apparent he couldn’t produce an alibi and seemed nervous. But of course there was nothing conclusive about it, and they let him go.

  "Waste of time," said Landers.

  At least Hackett and Higgins hadn’t had to go out on the legwork in the rain. They were still getting fed information from Pendleton Air Force Base, and so far, said Hackett when Glasser asked, they hadn’t come across any enlisted personnel who hailed from anywhere near downtown L.A. By some quirk, they hadn’t even found any originally from anywhere in California. There must be some, they just hadn’t showed up yet.

  Landers wandered down to the Records office and said to Phil, "If you want to take off early, I’ll take you out to dinner."

  "And what a night for it. I was rather looking forward to getting home, but I’d better take you up on that while you’re feeling generous. Not the Castaway-no night for a view."

  "The London Grill," suggested Landers. "All quiet and dignified. I’ll even buy you a drink."

  "It’s a deal. I’ll just tell the captain I’m goofing off."

  They drove up to Hollywood separately. Ensconced in a booth over drinks, it was rather nice to watch the rain drumming down the windows. "I was talking to Margot Swain this afternoon," said Phil presently.

  "That Conway. He was afraid she’d get a rope on him. I think he’s back to playing the field."

  Phil laughed. "Don’t worry about Margot. She’s mad at him, but there are a few bachelors at Wilcox Street too. She’s been dating Bob Laird."

  "Good."

  "And, Tom, I’ve been thinking," she went on seriously, "about a house. Before we start a family. While we’re both still earning--"

  "Hey!" said Landers, alarmed. "The payments--"

  "But we’d be investing in something for the future, darling. It’s the same as rent really-"

  "Phillipa Rosemary!" said Landers. "It’s not just the payments, damn it, there’s yard work and upkeep of everything and- What?"

  "Excuse me, sir, would you care for another drink?"

  "Yes," said Landers. "Now look, Phil-"

  ***

  On Monday morning, his day off, Palliser got up and discovered that it had stopped raining. He reread some of the dog book over breakfast. "It sounds perfectly simple," he said to Roberta. "It shouldn’t be very hard with an intelligent dog."

  "I’l1 reserve judgment," said Roberta. The baby began to yell and she added, "Damn," abandoned the dishes and headed for the nursery. Palliser said to Trina, "You’re going to be a smart girl and learn all the lessons, aren’t you?"

  Her eyes and tongue assured him earnestly that she would. He took her leash and put it on; Trina, thinking they were going for a walk, leaped joyfully in circles and got the leash wound around his legs. "No! Come on now."

  He took her out into the drive, shortened the leash, got her on his left side and said hopefully, "Now heel! Heel, Trina!" He took a few steps forward. Trina stayed where she was. "C
ome! Come on now, heel."’ She suddenly noticed the neighbors’ Siamese on the fence along the driveway and lunged forward, taking Palliser unaware and nearly pulling him off his feet. "No! Down! Come, Trina-heel!"

  Ten minutes later, as he urged her patiently to Come and Heel, Trina was lying flat begging to know what she’d done wrong. Roberta said from the kitchen window, "Perfectly simple."

  "It takes time and practice, damn it,” said Palliser. "You can’t expect her to learn all at once, Robin. The book said-"

  "Look out!" said Roberta, too late. The Siamese floated down into the driveway with a contemptuous look for a dog on a leash, and Trina took off. Not expecting it, Palliser was yanked off balance and sprawled flat, losing the leash. The Siamese swarmed up the tree in front and Trina began jumping up and down barking.

  "You know, John," said Roberta, watching him pick himself up, "I think it might be simpler in the long run if you just asked for Saturdays off so you could take her to that obedience class."

  ***

  Landers wanted to discuss Rank with Mendoza; he thought Palliser was reaching on this one, when they had Rank under their noses. But the inquest on Sandra was called for this morning, and he’d have to cover that. At least it wasn’t raining, and the night watch hadn’t left them anything new.

  Conway went out to finish talking to the witnesses on Ames, and Hackett and Higgins were still doggedly working through the list from Pendleton. Grace and Glasser started out again hunting the other possibles on Sandra. Galeano hadn’t come in yet.

  He came in about eight-thirty; he hadn’t been able to get to sleep and then when he did overslept. He’d had a funny dream, of Marta driving that old Dodge up a snaky winding mountain road, and always somebody with her, but continually changing to different people: Rappaport, Jim Newton, Offerdahl, little bent-over Mr. Dixon, Conway, Carey, Mendoza. He got up feeling stale and unhappy, and when he got to the office he wanted to talk over this new idea with Mendoza, about the possible boyfriend but no involvement with the disappearance. Whatever else, Mendoza was always acute at diagnosing human emotions. But Mendoza had already gone out somewhere.

  "I don’t know where," said Sergeant Lake. "The autopsies are in on that bum on the Row and somebody named Altmeyer. And we just had a new one go down-you can take it."

  "Oh, hell," said Galeano. But the habit of routine was strong in him, after fifteen years on this force, and he took down the address and went.

  It was an apartment over on Commonwealth, and there was a red truck outside: the paramedics from the Fire Department. They were both leaning on the truck, one smoking, waiting for him. "She was D.O.A. when we got here," said one of them, "but we went through the gestures. O.D. of some kind, just at a guess sleeping tablets-the mother had some, and says the bottle was nearly full. She left a suicide note, the girl." He spat aside. "Makes you wonder, only twenty. Life can be trouble and worry and work, but never a bore, hah?"

  "You’ve got a point," said Galeano. "Where is it?"

  "Upstairs, right."

  It was a nice apartment, old but good furniture, everything neat except in the bedroom where the body was. There, the paramedics had created disorder, getting her off the bed to work on her. Galeano was gentle with the silent gray-haired little woman who said stiffly she was Mrs. Olson, it was her daughter Nella.

  He looked at the body and like the paramedic he wondered. Nella Olson had been twenty, and pretty: a true blonde, neat small features, a nice figure. She’d put on a fancy pink nylon nightgown to die in. There was the suicide note, in a finicky small handwriting in green ink. Dear Mama, please don’t think I am not aware of what I’m doing. It’s just that when I know how much more beautiful it is over on the other side, I would rather be there than here. Daddy and I, and Grandma and all of them will eagerly await your coming. Your loving Nella.

  Galeano said, "I’ll have to take this for the inquest, Mrs. Olson. Do you know what she meant by this? About the other side, and-"

  Mrs. Olson said fiercely, "It’s all them wicked books she was always reading! There oughta be a law against people writing such awful books! Always bringin’ home another one from the public liberry, and even bought ’em she did, good money spent on all them wicked books!" She pointed with a trembling finger. "As the Lord’s my judge, if she hadn’t read all them awful books, she’d be alive this minute. They oughta put all them writers in jail."

  Galeano looked. There was a bookcase under the window, with a good many books in it. Pornography? He bent to look. Hidden Channels of the Mind, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, Noted Witnesses for Psychic Occurrences, Life After Death, You Do Survive Death, a lot of paperbacks, True Experiences with Ghosts, Communications with the Dead, Telephone Between Worlds, Strange Spirits, Voices From Beyond. Galeano didn’t know much about this kind of thing, but he recognized one name on several books: Rhine. Respected scientist, he remembered from an article somewhere, not a crackpot.

  "All them stories about dead people!" said Mrs. Olson with a sob.

  "You don’t believe in any, er, afterlife?" asked Galeano, somewhat at a loss.

  "Don’t you call me no heathen! Good people get to heaven and the rest go to the bad place, but if the Lord’d wanted us to know what heaven was like He’d have put it in the Bible," she said loudly. "Al1 that about dead people talking and it don’t make any difference what church you go to and all-it’s-it’s unsettling, that’s what, and if she’d never read all them books-"

  Galeano might have found it funny, some other day; as it was, he got down names and facts for a formal report, and went back to base to type it up.

  ***

  Mendoza attended the requiem Mass for O’Brien. He was feeling unaccountably annoyed at Carey, who had foreseen everything. That idle thought about Rappaport as Marta Fleming’s hypothetical boyfriend had now been squashed. Looking back through Carey’s voluminous reports, he had found that Carey had already thought of it. Rappaport had a good-looking wife he seemed to be crazy about, and a new house with somewhat astronomical payments. He hadn’t been straying from home.

  And Marta Fleming was really no femme fatale. A boyfriend there very likely was, but where was he? Mendoza had also looked at Jack Frost, and discovered that Frost had for six months been working such odd hours at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital that it was unlikely he had time to be anybody’s boyfriend.

  He went up to Federico’s for lunch and got back to the office about one-thirty. "Tom wants to see you," said Lake. "He just came in."

  "About Sandra," said Landers, hearing him and coming out of the communal office. "I think John’s woolgathering. We’ve got this perfectly good hot suspect, this Rank-the Peacock girl picked him, and he’s got the right record. It’s a waste of time to-"

  Lake swung around from the switchboard. "You’ve got another rape-assault, in the series, it sounds like. Just an attempt-but what Traffic says, it was the same one."

  "?Pues vamonos ya! " said Mendoza. "Let’s go! What’s the address, Jimmy?"

  ***

  Like all the other women, she was respectable and matronly: large-bosomed, elderly, slate-colored, indignant. The squad car was still there but they hadn’t called an ambulance; she wasn’t really hurt. But the men riding the black and whites were briefed on this and that the plainclothes divisions were working, and an alert patrolman had recognized the description.

  Her name was Mrs. Alice Drews. "Hurt?" she said, sitting very erect in an awesomely flowered armchair in her crowded living room. "I didn’t take no hurt, after forty years with a man got mean in drink, many’s the time I wiped the floor with him, let him know who’s boss. I was just a bit surprised, you might say. This little bitty boy asking to cut my grass, real polite he acted, and then askin' for a drink, and bringin’ out that knife-but I just lowered the boom on him, little kid like that, and he skedaddled. Only I figured, him tryin’ a thing like that, police ought to hear."

  "If you could give us a description-" And it would be the sa
me one, unproductive.

  "I surely can. It was kind of queer, when I first laid eyes on him I thought to myself, that looks like the Perkins boy from down where I useta live on Stanford Street. I moved here a year or two back, hadn’t seen that kid since, but this one surely looked like that Perkins boy," said Mrs. Drews. "But what I recall, he didn’t act like him!" She chuckled richly. "That Joey Perkins, he was sure-enough a piddlin’ no-account youngster."

  SEVEN

  "And what else did I say?" demanded Mendoza. "Only if by some millionth chance one of the women spotted him on the street-I will be eternally damned!"

  "You didn’t say it was, you said it could be, Mrs. Drews," said Landers dampeningly. "Stanford Avenue, that's not very far from here."

  "My Lord, you don’t think it was that boy? I didn’t know the family real good, but they seemed like honest folks, it don’t seem likely-not but what that wasn’t the first thing crossed my mind when I saw him-"

  She didn’t know the address, only the block. Mendoza called in to see what help was available, and Grace was there, said he’d meet them. It was the first lead of any kind they’d had on this, and while it was a very thin one, Mendoza was hot to follow it up.

  The block on Stanford was a staid and drab middle-class block, mostly of old single homes reasonably well maintained, and a long block. Mendoza started at one end, Landers and Grace at the other; after ringing four doorbells without any result-two eliciting no response and two a couple of housewives who didn’t know the Perkinses-Mendoza came out to the sidewalk to see Grace beckoning down the street. They hurried to join him.

  "Here we are," said Grace. "This is Mrs. Perkins." He was on the doorstep of a big old white frame place, four doors in from the corner.

  "But what do you want?" she asked. "You said you’re police? We’re ordinary honest folk, never anything to do with the police-" She looked it: she was a thin yellow-brown woman, decently clad in a blue cotton dress, thick stockings; the living room behind her looked clean and neat.