Susannah Screaming (The Krug & Kellog Thriller Series Book 2)

by Carolyn Weston

  “That’s the story, Harry,” Krug said. “And we got an eyewitness says it was murder.”

  “Begins to sound interesting.”

  Watching Berger swagger across the squad room—paunchy, balding, glossy with self-importance—Casey experienced the same guilty hope which his partner often roused in him: that he was not seeing himself in twenty years.

  “Looks to me like panic time,” Berger was saying. “Barrett fouls up in the dumbest way possible. Then he tries to make a break for it with a bundle before his partners find out—”

  “This foul-up was a broad, maybe?”

  “Right, Al. And a sixteen-year-old at that.” Berger winked at Casey. “Just about right for you, hah, fella?”

  “The older the cat, the younger the bird, Harry—that’s a well-known sociopsychological pattern.”

  “Which makes Barrett what?”

  “An exception to the rule, I guess.”

  Berger chuckled. “Okay, here’s the story: we nailed this chick yesterday for passing counterfeit twenties. Bills are identical with the ones you got off Barrett’s body. Our girl claims she found hers, and she’s sticking to her story. But her girlfriend’s not such a good liar. So far she’s admitted that some guy picked them up Saturday night at a rock concert at Santa Monica Civic. Description sounds like your Barrett, all right. Looks like he cut our teenybopper loose from her girlfriend and balled her someplace. Probably gave her the money. Either that, or she ripped it off when he was asleep. Whichever, it’s for sure he’s part of a setup Treasury’s been looking for since last November. All they had to go on was a phony name and a phony description. But wait a minute,” he interrupted himself, “let me use your phone. I’ll call the feds, see if I can set up a meeting right away. You might as well get it straight from the horse’s mouth.”

  The meeting was scheduled for half an hour—or as soon as the Treasury agents could make it on the freeway from downtown Los Angeles. While they waited, Krug filled in the lieutenant, then silent and sour-faced he caught up on his time sheet. Knowing better than to disturb him, Casey checked downstairs in Communications to see if there was an answer yet to his query about the hit-and-run car.

  There was, the clerk—an old harness bull near to retirement—informed him. “And I’ll tell you something—if I didn’t see it with my own eyes,” the old cop said, “I wouldn’t believe there could be this many people could go out and buy themselves a ten-G car.” He hefted the inch-thick coded reply from Department of Motor Vehicles headquarters—a rundown on all registered owners of Mercedes automobiles in Los Angeles and satellite cities, of which Santa Monica was one. “Find the needle in the haystack. Why we could never get DMV to state color…Better forget it, young fella, you’ll be a year checking out this shit.”

  “Anything in from Washington yet on Barrett?” Casey asked, yawning.

  “Not yet. Sometimes they’re slow answering. Too busy, I guess.”

  As Casey trudged up the stairs again, Haynes caught up with him. Denny Haynes and his partner, Ralph Zwingler, had been assigned to the shoe-leather end of the hit-and-run investigation. Casey noticed that he was limping badly.

  “New shoes,” Haynes explained, his voice hollow with nasal congestion. “Wore the damn things a whole month at home first. Fat lot of good it did. Anything new on Barrett?” But he didn’t wait for an answer. “Been canvassing his neighborhood—you know, liquor stores, that stuff —but nobody knows from nothing about this guy. What we got was zero information.”

  All the outside lines were ringing when they walked into the squad room, and they both took calls. Casey’s was from a nut who habitually claimed to have secret information about cases that appeared in the newspapers. This time his call concerned a suicide that had been reported in yesterday’s Evening Outlook—really a murder, the nut declared, the decedent had been killed by relatives after her money.

  Promising to check into it, Casey thanked the caller for his cooperation and hung up. The file was closed and flagged for dead records, he discovered. Information inside revealed that the decedent had been on Old Age Assistance, mortally ill, and without kin. Death had resulted from asphyxiation. Clearly the old lady had locked the door of her shabby room, turned on the gas heater, and died the lonely death of the elderly and friendless.

  What a business, Casey thought. Depressed by the misery and aberration which is the policeman’s unvarying climate, he stared out the second-story windows. Four hours’ sleep had only made him groggy. No time to catch up, either, because they had been transferred to day tour. But with nights off again. Ah, yes, night, he thought, nights, and his spirits soared, expanded by visions of tomorrow evening. She’d definitely sounded eager this time. Well, maybe not exactly eager, he corrected himself realistically, but her voice over the phone this afternoon had seemed warmer, hadn’t it? As if she’d been thinking about him, too?

  Ms. Joanna Hill. Joey. And to think, he marveled, he’d almost missed her. Casey thought private parties were kid stuff, and he had grudgingly attended the one where he had met Joey only to keep from offending a buddy. He had spotted her immediately when he had walked in—a together-type blonde, very short pompon curly hair, big blue eyes behind granny glasses—staring unbelievingly at the buffet table loaded with delicatessen goodies and gallons of Ripple. “Time,” she was saying to no one in particular, “marches backward? It’s 1963 and I’m a teenybopper again.” A soulmate.

  She had arrived alone, too, she admitted, sandbagged like Casey by their host’s insistence; he was a salesman for the firm where she worked.

  “Tinytown Toys?” Delighted to have found out so quickly where to locate her, Casey blurted before he thought, “You a secretary there or something?”—a bad mistake, he knew, the instant the words were out of his mouth.

  Ms. Joanna Hill was a toy designer, it turned out, and very much a professional woman. Cuddlies were her specialty, she told him after he had apologized for his male chauvinist assumption as to the nature of her work. “You know—teddy bears, bunnies—the fuzzy items.”

  “Then it’s predestination.” No response, and Casey’s laughing explanation that he qualified for instant interest as a fuzzy item, too—“A cop, you dig?”—did not amuse her. Well, you win a few, you lose a few, he thought philosophically. One man’s giggles, et cetera. Must watch it from now on, though. This was a serious lady…

  Because he was on night tour, he had seen Joey only once since the party, a hasty hamburger lunch near her toy firm. But for the better part of two weeks since then he had fantasized about her almost continuously, his strong attraction stubbornly resisting any messages conveyed by her Lib-type cool. Definitely she’s for me, he assured himself happily for the hundredth time as he stared out the second-story squad-room window. All I’ve got to do is convince her over dinner tomorrow—

  “Okay”—Krug’s harsh voice intruded on his daydream—“let’s go. Time for show-and-tell on Barrett, G. H. Berger’s pals from Treasury just got here.”

  EIGHT

  “Your phone number’s like riches burning a hole in my pocket. But I thought I’d get your call service. I was just dialing for practice.”

  “Want me to hang up so you can try again?”

  Rees laughed unsteadily. “Not unless you really want to.” He hesitated, savoring the syllables of her name before he spoke it. “Susannah, you sound sleepy. Sorry if I woke you.”

  “Always with the ‘sorry.’ Terrible habit.” He heard her yawn. “What time is it?”

  “Five after five. Susannah,” he said again, urgently, “have dinner with me, will you?”

  “Where, for instance?”

  “Why—anyplace you say.”

  “Not only sorry, he’s agreeable. Agréable,” she repeated, nasally Parisian. “ ‘Monsieur est agréable.’ That was my first line as a dues-paying member of the acting profession.”

  “Sounds very convincing.”

  “The director didn’t think so. Silly little faggot. What time?�
�� she asked abruptly.

  “Uh—six? Seven? You name it, I’ll be there.”

  “Agréable. How about eight or so? We can catch the scene at the Ultimate Perception. Strictly groovy,” she added, giggling. “What you might call a variation of the love-bead set.”

  Feeling as if he had run a race he had almost lost, Rees lay back on the bed after he had hung up, speculating on the Ultimate Perception. Restaurant? Coffeehouse? Ellen had loved the coffeehouses of San Francisco—the real Italian places with darkly varnished interiors, huge steaming espresso machines, locals parked for hours at the tables reading newspapers with incomprehensible headlines.

  Ellen. Like a slow sickness, the dreary sense of loss returned, and with it came apprehension again. The temptation that had plagued him all the time he had tried to nap came back strongly—to call Stevens in San Francisco, confess that he had lied to the police here, that he had broken his parole, and ask for help. But as he summoned the fattish pedantic face of his parole officer, Rees was certain what Stevens’s answer would be: “You knew the rules, Paul, and what would happen if you broke them.” That he had done so unintentionally, drunk with freedom, would not move Stevens, for he was a cop, too, wasn’t he? And behind that gloss of social-worker policeman’s professional compassion and understanding lived a bureaucrat blunted by dealing with misery. I’m not a man to any of them, I’m a case, Rees thought. There was no one anywhere he could really trust.

  The bare-walled windowless interrogation room downstairs which Lieutenant Timms had chosen for their meeting was already thick with tobacco smoke by the time Casey and Krug entered. Seating seemed to be scarce, Casey noticed while the lieutenant briefly introduced them: the two federal agents had either taken or been given the only decent chairs, leaving a rickety metal stool meant for suspects’ discomfort and a canvas folding affair which looked ready for collapse. Both bulky men, Berger and Timms had wisely passed up these, choosing instead to perch on opposite ends of the heavy, scarred oak table.

  “Grab a seat,” Timms told them impatiently. “We’re getting caught up on background so we see what we’re up against.”

  With a disgusted grunt, Krug hooked the metal stool closer with his foot and squatted on it near the door. Having no choice, Casey settled himself gingerly into the creaking canvas chair as the younger of the federal men briskly began the briefing.

  “Two years ago, our agents in Detroit busted a petty crook named Joe Delgado. The charge was passing. That’s all we could hang on him. Weren’t able to crack his claim he’d bought the bundle from some character he’d never seen before. The bills he passed were twenties. Classy stuff. Printed on paper that was so close to the real thing you couldn’t tell the difference. Near-perfect engraving. Reproduction that made even the experts sweat a little. All that clinched it for queer was the serial numbers—they didn’t match the Treasury run. Okay! So Delgado gets sent up, and we wait for the next batch—”

  “And we keep waiting,” the older federal agent interrupted. “And the longer we keep waiting, the more we worry. You get a little batch of stuff this good,” he explained, “nothing showing up anywhere but one spot, you know the counterfeiter’s stockpiling. Usually means a bulk sale for a big discount to a syndicate, and we brace ourselves for a flood of paper across the country.”

  “You think Barrett was tied in with a mob?” Lieutenant Timms asked. “Mafia, maybe?”

  “Not a chance. That’s why he was so hard to track. No record anywhere, no connections.”

  “Our shadow link,” his partner added. “All we knew till today was that he existed somewhere. Now at least we’ve got the location pinpointed.” He smiled apologetically. “How about saving the questions and answers for later when I’ve finished?”

  Flushing slightly, Timms nodded.

  “Okay,” the young Treasury man went on, “it’s watch-and-wait time after we nail Delgado. We know somebody’s got the plates and equipment. The question is, Why isn’t he—or they—printing any more of this nearly foolproof paper?”

  The answer, he said, came six months later when Delgado made a break from the prison farm where he had been sent after a period of good behavior in a federal cellblock. Knowing he’d probably had help in the break, authorities watched his family and known friends, particularly a woman he’d been seeing before he was sent up. Nothing happened for a week—Delgado was hiding out obviously—then suddenly his girlfriend turned up missing.

  “Cherchez la femme,” Krug muttered, grinning at Casey. “See, it still works.”

  Both federal agents smiled, but it was obvious that the younger one resented the interruption. “Delgado’s girlfriend delivered a car and some money to him,” he continued in a slightly louder tone. “Pretty clever about it, too. Delgado would have been long gone if he hadn’t piled up in a rainstorm and panicked. His leaving the wreck got the local police interested, and they traced the car back to his girlfriend. Meanwhile Delgado kept stealing cars, driving a hundred miles or so, then abandoning them. Left a trail so clear even a blind man could have followed it. We traced him to a town in Kentucky, just across the Ohio border. Asked for cooperation from the local police, of course. What we wanted them to do was keep their eyes open, and when they spotted Delgado, to leave him to us. But instead some eager beaver dropped on him.”

  “These local cops.” Timms shook his head mournfully. “On TV they always foul up, too.”

  “No offense intended, Lieutenant,” the older agent said soothingly. “All we’re trying to do is fill you in.” He nodded to the other one to go on.

  As usual, his partner continued, Delgado refused to talk, and he was extradited from Kentucky to stand trial for additional sentencing. Meanwhile, working on the assumption that Delgado might have been headed for the counterfeiter for a second crack at the big score he had missed the first time, Treasury agents in Kentucky canvassed the border town and the surrounding countryside searching for the counterfeiting plant. “Finally found it in an old barn out in the country,” he said ruefully. “What was left of it, that is. A small press, and a pile of waste they hadn’t even bothered to bum. No mistaking it was the place we were looking for. But all the valuable stuff was gone, naturally. Plates, cameras, photo-processing equipment. We knew they could set up again anywhere they could find an offset press.”

  “Where does Barrett fit in?” Timms asked impatiently.

  “That we’re not sure of, Lieutenant. Either he was part of the original operation, or he came in later when they relocated.”

  “Kansas,” the senior agent said. “Just outside Lawrence. But by the time we caught up with them—it was a family, incidentally—our master counterfeiter was dying of cancer, and the equipment had disappeared. This was months later. And with everything gone, no evidence, our hands were tied. We figured the wife had sold out, but there wasn’t any way of proving it.”

  “But we had one thread left,” his partner added. “A guy one of the daughters had been seen with. The name he used was Howe. Jerry Howe. A floater, according to the local police. Lived in a rooming house, no bank accounts, no voter registration, no past or future we could catch up with.”

  “Barrett,” Casey said.

  “That’s a pretty good guess.”

  “Not so good,” Harry Berger corrected him irritably. “I already told ’em Barrett was probably our man.”

  “ ‘A phony name,’ ” Casey quoted, “ ‘and a phony description.’ Has to be the one the family sold out to. Why else would they try to protect him?”

  “Wait a minute,” the younger agent said, “you’re missing some parts. Don’t forget a lot of time has elapsed in this story. What we figure is, they planned a big sale of paper to a Detroit syndicate, and Delgado was to arrange it. The paper he had was sample stuff to show the quality.”

  “A crook is a crook,” Timms sighed. “Couldn’t resist the temptation to spend some, right?”

  “Something like that. We think it scared our counterfeiters when they heard h
e’d been busted. They were amateurs, don’t forget. And by this time, their technician was probably good and sick. Anyway, when Delgado showed up again, they panicked and took off.”

  “ ‘Last chance in Kansas,’ ” Krug said. “The dying counterfeiter. Sounds like soap opera stuff.”

  “Yeah, it is in a way,” the senior federal man agreed. “We had an agent sitting in the hospital while the guy was dying. Took him three months. Poor bastard wouldn’t admit anything—didn’t want to incriminate his family, of course. Kept saying all he wanted was to leave them some money. It was an obsession with him. We think he’d known for three years or more he had cancer. And he was a master engraver—what else was he going to think up to make a fast fortune? The only thing he forgot was he’d have to deal with crooks after he’d done his own work.”

  “About Barrett,” Timms reminded him.

  “Yes. Well. What we think is, he wanted in, but by this time, the family was finished with Daddy’s big scheme. But Barrett—or Howe, as he called himself then—wouldn’t let it go.”

  “Should’ve married the daughter,” Krug grunted. Then he peered at the older agent. “Or did he?”

  “Nothing on record we know of, Sergeant. On the other hand,” he added, “he did all right for himself. Managed to persuade them to give him a chance to buy the stuff. We were pretty sure of that because the day after the father was hospitalized for the last time, Howe disappeared. Went looking for financing obviously.”

  “And you think he found it here?” Timms asked.

  “Got to be, Lieutenant. He made his connections, and before the month was up he was back in Kansas. According to neighbors there, a U-Haul truck moved some stuff out of the house the family had rented. Out of the basement, they claimed. And all of a sudden, there was money for the hospital bills the family claimed they couldn’t pay two days earlier.” He spread his hands. “Figures, doesn’t it? They sold out to Barrett. He brought the stuff here. Since last December, he’s been busy setting up and manufacturing.”