Exploit of Death - Dell Shannon

by Dell Shannon

  "So naturally I looked to see if it's unlocked, if there's maybe some I.D. in it to say who left it, see, and it was. And, Jesus, then I didn't want to know who owns it. You open it and look, just look."

  Hackett pulled the case in front of him. It was the kind that had a zipper all around three sides and he ran it around and the case gaped open.

  There were two things in it. The first was a bunched-up bath towel. It had originally been white, but it was now liberally stained with great rusty smears of long-dried blood. Something showed at the loose end of the bunch. Hackett lifted out the towel and from its folds a knife fell with a little clatter onto the desk. It was an ordinary kitchen knife with a blade about nine inches long and an inch wide, and it was deeply stained with the same rusty brown dried blood, both blade and handle.

  "For God's sake," said Higgins, looking over his shoulder.

  The other thing in the case was a worn imitation leather billfold. Any experienced detective was trained to be careful about disturbing possible latent fingerprints, but there were times when you had to take the risk. Hackett upended the case, the billfold fell out and he eased it open to lie flat with his pen. The first little plastic slot held a driver's license and it had been issued to Mabel Carter, forty-six, brown hair and blue eyes, five two, one hundred and ten pounds. The address was Portland Street.

  "Now I will be good and goddamned," said Hackett in naked astonishment. He sat back and stared up at Higgins. "That hooker who got cut up by a john. There was nothing on it. I shoved it in Pending myself."

  "That's damn funny all right. Do you have any idea which of those fares might have left this?" Higgins asked O'Hara.

  "Well, I have. And if he did I don't want to lay eyes on him again. I got to thinking after I saw that damn thing. Two of the other fares were female and I got a sort of idea it's got to have been the one with the luggage. I think he had a little case like that in his hand when he got in the cab. That was the fare about ten o'clock. I picked him up at the Biltmore and took him to the Holiday Inn on Figueroa."

  "I will be goddamned," said Hackett again. "That was dead. Well, thanks very much, O'Hara."

  "You know who it is? He's done a murder by all that. Well, you're welcome to it," said O'Hara. "Me, I never could stand the sight of blood."

  There wasn't that much urgency about it, surprising and interesting as it might be. They went out and had lunch. They got to the Holiday Inn at about one-thirty and Hackett told the desk clerk they were looking for a man who had checked in about ten this morning. The clerk shied nervously at the badge.

  "I hope there won't be any trouble, we run a quiet place here." He looked at the registration book. "We've only had one guest register this morning. Dr. Walter Thomas, from Indianapolis. He's in room eighteen."

  "Thanks very much," said Hackett. They rode up in the elevator, walked down the carpeted hall. "What the hell can this be, anyway?" He had the dressing case in one hand. The door of room 18 opened promptly to a knock and they faced a large round man in an elegant silk dressing gown. He looked about fifty. He had a dough-colored face with a small prissy mouth.

  "Dr. Thomas?" said Hackett. "By any chance does this belong to you?" Pending a look at this funny thing, they had restored the contents to the case.

  The man seized the case, unzipped it, looked inside and said, "Dear me, yes I am most obliged to you for returning it. Most obliged." He gave them an open, friendly smile.

  "You see I always like to keep the souvenirs of the bad ones. You may call it a little foible of mine. I only bother to kill the bad ones. The others are not so important. I'm very glad to have this returned to me, gentlemen."

  * * *

  MENDOZA WAS NOT a sightseer by nature, and he was not particularly interested in Paris. As far as he could see it was just another city, as sprawled out into suburbs as his own city. He had dutifully, if uninterestedly, been to the Eiffel Tower.

  This morning he had gone to Rambeau's office, but Rambeau was out, the man at the switchboard told him in rudimentary English, on a new homicide. What Rambeau called the spadework was still going on, he supposed. He wandered up the streets from the big Prefecture of Police building and presently came to a large public park. An elderly woman at a tobacconist shop had pressed a guidebook on him yesterday and he consulted it now to find that he was in the Jardin des Tuileries, and the imposing building beyond the lawns and flowers and the octagonal pool would be the Louvre. He sat down on a bench by the pool. Two excited little boys in knee pants were sailing miniature boats on the pool. He hadn't any urge to go into the Louvre, look at paintings and objects of art.

  There was a little girl sitting on the grass, watched over by a woman on the bench opposite his. She was a pretty little girl with dark hair, about six. She reminded Mendoza of Terry. He smiled at her and she smiled back shyly. He supposed he ought to go and have some lunch.

  NINE

  BOTH HACKETT AND HIGGINS had had a number of varied experiences in their combined years on the L.A.P.D., but Dr. Thomas was something new to them. He agreed quite amiably to accompany them to meet a friend and they waited while he dressed in a new gray suit, clean white shirt and tie. They took him straight out to the psychiatric ward at Cedars-Sinai and left him there, and went back to look at the hotel room. There was a suitcase full of nearly new clothes and in one of the side pockets was nearly seventy thousand dollars in cash. They also found a few of his other souvenirs, bloodstained knives and four other wallets with female I.D.'s in them, all the addresses in New Jersey.

  "This is the damndest thing I ever remember," said Hackett. Somebody in the lab went out and took his prints and he wasn't in their records, so they wired them to the Feds and NCIC. Just before six o'clock they got a teletype back from NCIC. The prints belonged to Richard Conroy who was an escapee from a state mental asylum in New Jersey. He had been committed, further information added later, for twenty-five years and was known to be homicidal. Prior to the commitment, he had raped eleven women and murdered five. He had escaped five months ago and New Jersey was looking for him hard. There was evidence that since he had got out, he had raped three more women and was thought to be responsible for the murder of a prostitute in Newark. One of the rape victims had had nearly ninety thousand dollars in cash hidden in the house and he had walked away with it.

  Palliser said, "Good God. The things we see."

  Hackett fired off a teletype to the New Jersey State Police. On Saturday morning, a Captain Runyon called him.

  "Thank God you picked up that nut. We've had visions of him leaving a trail of bodies all over the state. I wonder how in hell he ended up in California, he's never been out of the East as far as we know. But of course he had all that cash. I swear to God, I sometimes wonder who is sane and who isn't. The idea of keeping that much cash loose in a box on a closet shelf—my God in heaven."

  Hackett said, "People will do it. Well, he's tucked away safe. I suppose you want him back?"

  Runyon said, "It's a goddamn nuisance. But, yes, we'll have to send somebody out to fetch him. How did you drop on him, by the way?" When he heard, he laughed. "We do sometimes get the breaks, don't we? Well, a lot of females can sleep easier tonight. There's been a little wave of terror around the southern part of the state where the asylum is. I'll get back to you and let you know who'll be out to get him."

  "Any time," said Hackett.

  It was still hot but not as bad as the last few weeks and by the middle of October it would probably slack off. The night watch had left them another heist and everybody seemed to be out on something except Palliser who was on the phone. After a minute he put it down and said, "Just trying to prod the lab on this Rawson thing. They didn't pick up any good latents in that place except the victim's. That's got to be something else insane. Like your fruitcake. The drunk running amuck, something like that."

  "It sounds that way. And another one without a handle, if there's no lab evidence. God, I'll be glad when we get into fall and it cools off. This
has been a rough summer. I wonder how Luis is doing in Paris. Damn it, there must be some record of that girl there, But just how to find it—"

  Palliser said, "I just hope he's not getting high blood pressure arguing with the Sûreté." Landers came in with another heist suspect and he went to sit in on the questioning.

  Higgins and Galeano had prodded at Vasquez some more yesterday but he wasn't about to give them a confession and it didn't matter.

  There were no five possible heist suspects they were looking for. The tedious legwork was always there to be done. When Hackett came back from lunch, Lake greeted him with some relief. "I was afraid I wouldn't see any of you the rest of the day. Something new's gone down, half an hour ago. A couple of bodies on Allesandro Street."

  "Oh, hell," said Hackett. "More paperwork." Galeano came in just then so they went to look at it together. It was a small apartment in an old building on that narrow street and there were two bodies—a rather pretty young blond woman in the mid-twenties and a little girl about four. Patrolman Zimmerman said, "Where the hell have you been? I called in forty minutes ago when I got sent up here. I didn't know what to do with the woman. She's sitting in the squad still crying. Well, the girl was her daughter. She found them about an hour ago." Even Zimmerman, taking a casual look at the scene, had read it as faked. "I had to turn the gas off. There wasn't much built up in here, but I figured it was safer. These old windows are so loose, there wasn't much gas in here at all, just enough smell so you'd notice it. It was the oven turned on and the pilot light off, but it could be there was a clogged line."

  Galeano said, "Hell, you touched the knob."

  "Well, I tried to be careful, sir. I'm sorry about any prints, but I thought it'd be safer."

  The girl was on the livingroom floor, on her side in front I of the couch. She was wearing a white sundress and thong T sandals. Hackett squatted down and looked at her. There was a dark bruise on one side of her jaw. She'd been alive when she got that or it wouldn't have showed. He felt carefully through the disheveled blond hair and said to Galeano, "She's had the hell of a crack on the skull here—just back of the temple. Feels as if the bone's caved in."

  Galeano said, "Anyway, neither of them died of the gas."

  The bodies were the wrong color for that. Victims of gas poisoning showed bright pink skin. The little girl was in a chair in the living room, lying across one arm of the chair, her head twisted at an odd angle to her shoulders. She had on a skimpy playsuit and thong sandals.

  "I'd have an educated guess her neck is broken," said Galeano.

  "Yes," said Hackett. "Somebody trying to set up the fake suicide, Nick, and a damned crude one. You'd think any fool would know the autopsies would show it up. We'd better talk to this woman, find out who they were."

  She was sitting in the back of the squad and she had stopped crying now. Galeano got into the backseat with her and Hackett into the front. She was a woman probably in the forties, plain-faced with greying brown hair. Her name was Ena Schwartz. She said the bodies were her daughter Gloria and Gloria's little girl, Joan. Gloria Pratt. She said, "Gloria'd never kill herself. That's just impossible. And I besides, there wasn't hardly any gas— I'd never believe that, and she'd sure never want to kill Joan. They'd just moved in here, got settled, and had everything arranged and it was going to work out good— I was so glad when she left that man, he's a no-good drunken bum. I tried to tell her when she married him, but she was only eighteen and you can't talk to a girl in love. She found out—she put up with him too long, but she finally had the sense to leave him, and the divorce just got final. She was going to get alimony and support for Joan—not much, but with the job she could make it all right. She'd just got the job, going to start Monday, at a drugstore up on Vermont, and this place was handy to me. I'm just over on Rowena. She was going to drive Joan over to me every morning—"

  "What's her husband's name?" asked Galeano.

  "Neil Pratt. He's a no-good bum. He never supported her and he was mad when she had the baby."

  "Do you know where he lives?" asked Hackett.

  "They had an apartment on Fountain, I don't know if he still lives there. Why? Please, can I go home now? This has been an awful shock to me, I want to call my sister. Oh, I'm thankful my husband's dead, and that's a terrible thing to say, but this would have broke his heart, he loved Gloria so much. We tried to stop her marrying that guy—but Gloria'd never kill herself and the baby, she'd got over that ‘ man. She was going to have a better life. Everything was all arranged—"

  "Are you all right to drive yourself home, Mrs. Schwartz?" asked Galeano.

  "Yes, I'm all right. Thank you." She got out of the squad and walked down to an old Chevy at the curb.

  Hackett said, "Let's hope there'll be some lab evidence. But it looks open and shut, Nick. Unless people have got more complicated since the last time I noticed."

  "We can poke around here a little," said Galeano. "See who's home."

  The apartment was on the second floor and there was a manager on the premises, in a downstairs front apartment. There were four apartments down and four up. And on a hot Sunday, only five people were at home. Four of them said they'd been watching T.V. or reading, didn't know if anybody had come visiting other tenants. But the manager, a sharp-eyed elderly woman named Potts, said, "Why, yes. I noticed a man come in about nine this morning, I'd just stepped out to get the paper—the boy comes by about then. What's this about that girl killing herself? I never had any police here before, any trouble like this. No, he was a stranger to me."

  "Could you describe him, Mrs. Potts?" asked Galeano.

  She considered. "I guess he was about thirty, dark hair, I didn't take much notice. Well, I might know him again."

  They'd let Zimmerman go back on tour. Hackett had called the lab and a man was busy in the apartment. "You want to bet?" asked Galeano sleepily.

  "No bets," said Hackett. Mrs. Schwartz had given them the address on Fountain. They drove up there and found Neil Pratt blearily watching T.V. and drinking straight Scotch. He was more than half drunk and they couldn't question him like that, so they took him down to the jail and left him there. They could hold him twenty-four hours I without a warrant.

  * * *

  RAMBEAU CALLED MENDOZA at the hotel just as he was finishing breakfast. "It marches, my friend. On Juliette, no—the number of Martins in the Paris directory is formidable. But we have found the employer. His name is Trennard, M. Pierre Trennard. And you and I are now going to talk to him. I will call for you in fifteen minutes."

  "My God, I'd begun to think you'd never come up with anything. I'll be waiting."

  "Some of my men have the little imagination. They looked for similar names and M. Trennard was turned up ten minutes ago. It is an address on the Boul'St. Germain."

  Mendoza collected his hat and was waiting in front of the hotel when Rambeau drove up in a middle-aged Renault.

  "Do you know what the business is?"

  "We will discover." When Rambeau located the address he said, "There," and pointed. It was an old four-story building with a modest sign over the entrance, BEAUMONT FOURNIER ET CIE. "This is a district for publishers. This will be one of them if I guess right." He parked the car in a public lot across the street and in the small lobby of the building, a blond receptionist answered his questions, regarding them incuriously. There was an elevator and Rambeau pressed the button for the top floor. There, in a carpeted hallway, three doors faced them. The one opposite the elevator bore the lettered name PIERRE TRENNARD and Rambeau opened it on a square little office with windows facing the street, a desk, a covered typewriter on a lower typing desk, a desk chair, another upholstered chair. A man came out of an inner office and asked questions in staccato French, and Rambeau answered him. The man looked at Mendoza with faint interest. He was a tall dark man foppishly dressed in a dark business suit, white shirt, and rather flamboyant tie. He said in English, "Yes, I speak the English very well. You are police? The man who telep
honed to ask if I know Juliette Martin?"

  "This is an American police officer, monsieur, Mr. Mendoza, and he has no French so I ask you to speak in English. Juliette Martin, she is in your employ? I will ask you to look at these photographs."

  Trennard looked and said, "This is Juliette, my secretary, yes. But these, they do not look— Why do you ask?"

  "She is dead, M. Trennard. Murdered."

  He was startled. "But this is a tragedy you tell me! She is only a young woman. In America? She was going to America—it was most inconvenient to me. No doubt she was due to take a holiday, but it was impossible to find a temporary replacement meanwhile. She was to return on the first of the month. This is very sad news, gentlemen. You had better come into my office." It was an expensively furnished office with upholstered chairs, a large mahogany desk. He sat at the desk and indicated chairs. He said formally, "I am very desolated to hear this. Mlle. Martin had been with us for five years and was a most excellent secretary. She was useful to me, you understand, because she spoke English and German and we have branch offices in both countries. But I can tell you very little about her personally. You see, I have been in the Paris office only eight months. My uncle, M. Fournier, was the head of the firm until then and Miss Martin was his secretary. It put everything wrong when he died suddenly last February," and he gestured. "There are no other partners. All the staff here is experienced and capable, the business runs itself in a way, but since I am now in sole charge—I was in our London office— I mean to strike out on new lines. My uncle was an old man and had not changed his business methods in many years. You understand me, I do not criticize—" he gave a vast, Gallic shrug "—We have a very profitable business, we publish the textbooks, art works, reprints of the classics, all very well no doubt—the learned, scientific works on the archaeology, history, travel—but one must modernize any business, and I intend to try a line of fiction."

  Rambeau said, "Come back to Miss Martin, monsieur."