Exploit of Death llm-34

by Dell Shannon

  "And Gerber was the one who fired the gun and killed the pharmacist," said Hackett.

  "Naturally." Landers picked up his phone, told Sergeant Lake to get him R. and I., and asked if they had a package on Gerber. "Bauman gives us an address-Houston Street in Boyle Heights. We'd better go and see if Gerber's home."

  "After lunch," said Hackett.

  Five minutes later R. and I. called back to say that Gerber had a package with them of two counts of armed robbery.

  It was a quarter past twelve. Palliser finished the report and they all started out for lunch. But as they passed the switchboard, a uniformed man came in and handed Lake a manila envelope.

  "Cable from Paris. You've been asking about it."

  Mendoza seized it eagerly and slit it open with his thumbnail. Twenty seconds later he said exasperatedly,

  "?Diez millones de demonios! " He thrust the cable at Hackett. That prestigious police force, the Surete Nationale, had nothing to say. PRINTS WILL CHECK. INSUFFICIENT DATA YOUR REQUEST INFO MARTIN NO AVAILABLE INFO UNLESS SUPPLY FURTHER DETAILS.

  "?Condenacion! " said Mendoza. "If we had any further details, don't they suppose we'd have said so?"

  "I said you'd never get anything more on it. It's all up in the air," said Higgins. "You don't know anything about the girl-what to ask for-or where. Where she was bound for here. Anything-it's a dead end. If there's anything to it all." And Mendoza gave him a bitter look.

  "In other words, I'm just woolgathering."

  "Don't rile the man, George," said Hackett. "Maybe the lab report will have something useful."

  ***

  THE LAB REPORT wasn't in when everybody came back from lunch. Hackett and Landers took off to look for Albert Gerber, and ten minutes later a new call went down to a bar on Temple. Palliser and Grace went out on that. Five minutes after that information started to come in all at once. American Airlines called Mendoza from New York to confirm as requested that a Juliette Martin had been booked on that flight from New York to Los Angeles with a stop-over at Chicago and a change of planes, last Saturday. Air France called from its New York office to confirm that Juliette Martin had been on its flight from Paris to New York-leaving Orly Airport at eight P.M. a week ago today. "Something to tell the Surete anyway," grunted Mendoza. Then the Customs office in New York called to confirm that French citizen Juliette Martin had passed through Kennedy Airport with a French passport at approximately five P.M. a week ago today. They gave him the passport number.

  "Something concrete," said Mendoza pleasedly.

  "For what it's worth," said Higgins.

  "You're just a little ray of sunshine, aren't you?"

  "And that's impossible. If she left Paris at eight that evening she couldn't get here at-"

  "Time differences," said Mendoza tersely. "Europe's eight hours ahead of us."

  "But it's nothing you didn't know already," said Higgins.

  Then a uniformed man came in with a manila envelope.

  The lab report on the apartment. Mendoza scanned it hastily and said, "Hell, nada absolutamente -or nothing useful."

  The only latent prints the lab had picked up in the apartment were the girl's. There had been a clear print of her right thumb on the top of the handle of the refrigerator-just where it might be expected-and others on the kitchen counter, a table in the living room. Nothing else but smudges anywhere, except for one clear print of her right forefinger on the plastic, medicine bottle. There hadn't been enough residue of anything in that for analysis. And that was all the lab had to tell them. Mendoza passed the report over.

  "And I'm wondering now-how did she get there?" he said dreamily. "Already drugged, already unconscious-"

  He stabbed out his cigarette and immediately lit another, his gaze abstracted on the view over the Hollywood Hills in the distance through the big window behind his desk. "Going to visit her grandfather! No possible way to find out the name this side of France-anywhere in greater Los Angeles-and where the hell was she between Saturday and Tuesday? We haven't got an estimated time of death yet but it looked as if it could've been Tuesday night. No address book there. Well, they'd have got rid of anything informative, of course."

  "The Daggetts?"

  "I don't know," said Mendoza in a dissatisfied voice. He had asked Records about the Daggetts and Helen Garvey. They looked simply like ordinary little people-unimportant. "They know something but it might not be much. But Grandfather comes into it somewhere, George."

  "And how the hell do you make that out?"

  "Grandfather would've been expecting her. Knew she was coming. Was he going to meet her at the airport? We didn't see anything of her after we got off the plane. Grandfather is probably an elderly man-maybe he doesn't drive. Was she expecting to be met?-And-Hell and damnation!" He sat up with a jerk.

  "I just saw that too-not operating on all cylinders," said Higgins. "Better ask the cab companies if she picked up a cab at the airport."

  Mendoza already had the phone off the hook. "And damn it-no way to be sure but show the photos to any cabby who had a fare there. A little legwork. But George, the reason I say Grandfather's in it somehow-he'd be expecting her. If she was intercepted somehow, by whoever, for whatever reason only God knows-and didn't show up, Grandfather would be concerned. The natural thing to do would be to check with the airline, and he'd find out she landed here. If he isn't in on the caper-whatever the hell it is-why hasn't he reported her missing?"

  Higgins passed one hand over his prognathous jaw.

  "Maybe he has."

  Mendoza shut his eyes. " Muy bien. Not operating on all cylinders you can say. Grandfather may not be a villain. He could live anywhere from Malibu to Monrovia, Tujunga to Lakewood-and he may have reported her to one of a hundred police forces. Thank you, George."

  "Well, it was just a thought."

  "So we get on the phone and start asking. The logical force would be Inglewood where the airport is. But what in God's name it's all about- Por Dios, I swear that was a cold-blooded killing, and it was planned out right here, whatever the hell was behind it-and there have got to be some leads if we dig deep enough." He picked up the phone again. "Jimmy, I want to talk to some cab companies."

  Higgins yawned. "There must be people who knew where she was heading. She'd have had friends-there's the boyfriend."

  "Don't suggest that I cable to the Surete again," said Mendoza bitterly.

  ***

  HACKETT AND LANDERS were trailing Albert Gerber in ninety-eight-degree heat. Gerber wasn't at the Houston Street address, which was an old four-story apartment building, and the only tenant at home didn't know him, but the manager lived on the premises and said helpfully that he knew Gerber had a pal who worked at the Shell Station up on the corner of Soto. He didn't think Gerber had a job since awhile back but he was up to date on the rent all right. They had queried the DMV about a car and knew Gerber was driving a ten-year-old Chevy, plate number so-and-so.

  They tried the Shell Station. An indolent-looking fellow with a big paunch, shirt opened to his belt, looked at them lackadaisically over a canned Coke and said, "Oh, him. Yeah, he hangs around here some-working on his car. He's a a friend of Mike's-Mike Sullivan, he spells me part-time and nights, he's supposed to show up at four if you want to talk to him."

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

  The man said reluctantly, "Oh, hell, I got it wrote down somewhere." He moved slowly into the grubby little office, rummaged and found an address scrawled in a ragged ledger. It was Cornwell Street, only a couple of blocks away, a shabby old duplex. The girl who answered the door had a luscious model's figure, clearly visible in a pair of shorts and a halter, and she didn't know where Mike was but she knew where Gerber might be. He'd been dating Marlene Foster pretty heavy lately, she said, she and Marlene had been to school together, and Marlene had just got laid off her job so she might be out somewhere with Al. That address was Pennsylvania Avenue. The air-conditioning in the Monte Carlo barely had time
to get going when they found the place, a single frame house with peeling paint. A shapeless woman in a wrinkled tent dress opened the door.

  "Oh," she said to the question. "No, Al's not here. Him and Marlene went to the movies. Mostly for the air-conditioning. They went to the first show when it opened at one o'clock."

  "Do you know which one?" asked Landers.

  "Sure, the Bijou over on Whittier. Unless they changed their minds. You're cops, aren't you?" She looked doubtfully at Landers. "Even if you don't look old enough to be."

  Landers with his perennially boyish face would be hearing that one until he was a grandfather.

  It was a little past three-thirty then and the first show was probably about over. They looked up the address at the nearest public phone and got to the theater fifteen minutes later. There was a public parking lot half a block away. They looked and spotted Gerber's old Chevy, so they waited.

  There wasn't any shade and the sun beat fiercely on the sticky blacktop. They waited another fifteen minutes and a couple walked up to the car laughing and talking.

  "Albert Gerber?" asked Hackett.

  "Yeah, that's me." He recognized them for what they were instantly and said, "What the hell you want anyways?" He was tall and dark with a heavy tan and bulging muscles. The girl was small and blond. She looked scared.

  "You," said Landers and brought out the badge. They had already applied for the warrant.

  Gerber came out with a string of obscenities and the girl began to cry. "You promised you wouldn't get into any more trouble," she wailed.

  "I haven't done a thing, the dirty fuzz just pick on anybody got a little pedigree-"

  "Well, Joe Bauman says you were with him on that heist the other day, and it's a charge of murder two this time, Gerber. That pharmacist is dead."

  Gerber said this and that about Bauman. "I don't know what the hell you're talking about."

  "Come on," said Landers. "We're taking you in."

  Gerber fished out his car keys and gave them to the girl. He said, "You get hold of Mike and tell him I'll need some bail money. The goddanm fuzz."

  They ferried him down to the jail and booked him in. Hackett said, "We can talk to him some more later on, Tom-after they've got the air-conditioning fixed."

  The air-conditioning was still off at the jail and it felt hotter than it had outside, stuffy and stagnant.

  ***

  Mendoza left early and got home by six o'clock. It was a little cooler up in the hills above Burbank, but the sun was still fairly high and unrelentingly bright. Beyond the tall iron gates which opened politely as he shoved the gadget on the dashboard, the green pasture on either side of the drive looked pleasantly pastoral. The Five Graces, the woolly white sheep to keep down the weeds, were peacefully huddled in a little cluster grazing industriously. Ken Kearney had the sprinklers going on the pasture. The Kearneys would be relaxing over dinner in their apartment attached to the stables for the ponies, Star and Diamond.

  At the top of the hill, where the big old Spanish ranch house sprawled behind its concrete block wall, Mendoza slid the Ferrari into the garage beside Alison's Facel-Vega and Mairi's old Chevy and went in the back way. In the rear patio, Cedric, the Old English sheepdog, greeted him amiably. His long pink tongue was out; in this weather his heavy coat must be a burden. He followed Mendoza in through the service porch.

  Mairi MacTaggart was at the stove, Alison busy making a salad. She glanced up. "You're early, mi vida. The rat race just as usual?"

  He bent to kiss her. " Estoy rendido – I'm exhausted, for no good reason."

  "Is there anything new on the Martin girl?"

  " Nada -and maybe nothing ever will show," he said moodily.

  "Now that," said Mairi, shaking her silver curls at him, "is a verra strange business indeed. I wonder what happened to that poor thing? Now, you go and sit down with the man, achara, I'll finish that."

  "I need a drink," said Mendoza.

  El Senor, the half-Siamese, could hear that particular cupboard opened the length of the house away, and came floating up to the counter top demanding his share in a raucous voice. Mendoza poured him half an ounce of rye in a saucer. "Shortening your life,"' he said.

  "I'll have a glass of sherry, carina."

  In the living room the twins scrambled up from coloring books to greet him. Baby Luisa was staggering around with a stuffed dog in her arms. The other three cats, Bast, Nefertiti, and Sheba, were dozing in a tangle on the couch. Cedric sprawled at Alison's feet and Mendoza gratefully sank into his big armchair and sipped rye. It cost a fortune to run the air-conditioning in the big house, but it was worth it.

  "Have you heard from the French police?" asked Alison.

  "That's a dirty word," said Mendoza.

  "I wish to goodness I could remember anything else she said. I've got the definite feeling there was something more, but it just won't come."

  "And it could turn out to be a dead end." Mendoza sipped rye and tried to turn his mind off. No use worrying at the thing; it was futile. He sighed and leaned back. Someday maybe he would retire and be rid of the thankless job.·

  ***

  Lander's Sportabout wasn't air-conditioned and he was perspiring and exhausted when he got home to the Hollywood apartment. The apartment, thank God, was air-conditioned, and Phil-whose parents had christened her Phillipa Rosemary before she decided to be a police-woman-looked cool and comfortable. She had got home just, ahead of him, but she had spent the day in air-conditioning down in the R. and I. office. She was bulging a good deal in the midsection these days; the baby was due at the end of December, and at the end of this month she'd be taking maternity leave and then she could stay home until the end of March. And by that time, he reflected without much enthusiasm, they'd be moved into that claptrap house in Azusa-Azusa, my God, forty miles farther to drive-and her car was eight years old and sooner or later she'd have to have another one, and he wasn't due for a raise until next year-and there'd be the house payments-and a baby-sitter.

  "You look as if you had quite a day," said Phil in a concerned voice.

  "Well, you look fine," said Landers. He kissed her, his cute little blond Phil with the freckles on her nose. "The rat race. I need a drink before dinner."

  "It's just cold cuts and potato salad and odds and ends, unless you'd like a hamburger."

  "That's fine. I'll fix us some drinks and we can take our time."

  ***

  THE BRAWL in the Temple Street bar had been time consuming and took a little sorting out. There was only the one patrolman there and he said apologetically that a couple of witnesses had been long gone before he could get their names. There had been quite a little crowd in the place and most of them excited, but he'd done his best. Both Palliser and Grace had served apprenticeships riding squads and knew how awkward that kind of situation could be. "But. I've got the one who did the knifing. His name's Tony Aguilar." He had the man in cuffs, sitting at one of the battered wooden tables. "I got here just about as it happened. The owner had called in-"

  "Because I don't want no trouble." The man leaning on the bar was thickset rather than fat, with a flourishing full black mustache and bushy black eyebrows. He looked nervous. "Tony, he's got a temper on him. He starts to cuss out this guy, I don't know the dude-he just come in off the street-and Tony's started fights before, I don't want no busted furniture and bottles, I says to him, Cool it, Tony, but I see he's about to blow up, and I'm sorry, I don't want to get him in trouble, Tony's a right guy mostly-it's just he's got a temper on him. He's not drunk. You can see he's not drunk. I don't let guys get stoned in here. I run a quiet place."

  "All right, Mr.-"

  "Perez, I'm Bob Perez."

  "Mr. Perez. What were they fighting about, do you know?" asked Grace.

  Perez licked his lips. "I'm an honest man," he said irrelevantly. "I don't run no clip joint, boys. It was just a little game of draw-nothing important."

  That, of course, spelled out the situation
. Unrealistic as it might seem, it was against the law to gamble in public, except inside the racetrack-the only place it was legal around here was down in Gardena where all the cardrooms were located.

  Aguilar raised his eyes from the handcuffs and said morosely, "He was cheating. He had cards up his sleeve or something. He took every pot and Diego called him a cheat and quit the game. I was fool enough to stay in, but I'm not fool enough to let him get by with a royal flush when one of the high cards already got played, and I said-"

  The dead man still had the knife in his chest, a big hornhandled jackknife.

  "You shoulda listened to me, Tony," said Perez mournfully. "Now what's your wife gonna say? So he was a cheat, you didn't have to go and kill him, Tony."

  "I didn't mean to kill him, for God's sake."

  There were eight or ten other men there standing around watching. The squad-car man had a list of names. "Does anyone know who this is?" asked Grace.

  Perez shrugged. "Who knows? He just come in off the street. Had three or four beers and got into the game."

  Palliser squatted over the corpse and felt in the pockets, came up with a billfold. There were eighty-four dollars in it and in the first plastic slot a driver's license for Alfredo Delgado. He'd been a moderately handsome man in the mid-thirties, and the address was Brooklyn Avenue in Boyle Heights.

  They talked to the other three men who had been in the game, who told the same story.

  "Diego who?" asked Grace. "Diego Allesandro. He's a regular here. He left before it happened. He wasn't here," said Perez. "You going to lay a fine on me?"

  Grace surveyed him amusedly, brushing his narrow mustache in unconscious imitation of Mendoza. "I don't know, Mr. Perez. It would be up to the district attorney's office, but I don't suppose they'll bother." The token fine, the unrealistic rules weren't going to stop the card games in bars or anywhere else.