Exploit of Death llm-34

by Dell Shannon

  Feeling warmed and welcomed, Mendoza took the chair beside the desk and began to tell the story. Rambeau listened absorbedly, chin planted on hands and elbows on desk, and at the end he sat up, reached to the package of cigarettes on the desk, offered it politely, and said, "So, do we not all know how it goes. Day by day there is nothing but the little stupid violences, and then all of a sudden, once in ten years, arrives something complicated and strange. This is very interesting. I like it. I like it as a mystery. But the poor little Juliette." Mendoza had handed over the envelope of photographs and he shook his head over them. "A beautiful girl. One feels for the poor fiance."

  "The Surete gave us nothing at all. They don't know her fingerprints and I can't give you any more information on her."

  "Ah," said Rambeau. "The Surete. These big important men of affairs, sometimes they can be a trifle arrogant."

  "Yes, we have the same trouble with the FBI at times."

  Rambeau laughed. "You and I, we are the same kind of policemen, I feel. I can see things to do here. We both understand the value of the spadework. There is the telephone directory, first of all. It is a pity it is such a common name-Martin-there will be thousands in greater Paris. Ours is a bigger city than yours, Mendoza. In Paris and its environs there are more than nine million people. But," he went on briskly, "there are things to do about this. We are always busy, but I feel as you do about the little Juliette, I want to know why she is dead. Now, the telephone. We will set four or five men to check all the Martins and that will be a long job. The fiance's surname we do not know, and Paul is a common name, too. But there is this M. Trechard-Trouchard, some such name."

  "Neither my wife nor I can remember exactly."

  "Yes, you were tired. Why should you pay attention? But that is not so common a name, and we will look for him also. Her employer-and she said he was not so easy to work for as his uncle. The impression you had, Juliette was a superior type-An office, she said? Not perhaps only a typist?" `

  "I don't know your types," said Mendoza. "She was an educated, intelligent girl."

  "Yes, and the telephone directory," said Rambeau, "it is not infallible. The current ones are nearly a year old, but we will try. If the Surete have not got her fingerprints, then neither do we. That is no good. But you know that her passport was issued in Paris and that means that she lived ` here. In one of a million places. But," he lit another cigarette and beamed at Mendoza, "but, my friend, I believe we will find out about the little Juliette, and I will tell you why. You yourself said it. If you had not been the one to go to look at that corpse, no one would have suspected it was not the so nonexistent Ruth Hoffman. It is a very pretty little comedy, this. Here there is a Hoffman-with all the plausible identification. An end and no beginning. And there we have Juliette-a beginning and no end. If the beginning is hidden from us. But it was not by chance that you should see the corpse. There are many men under you in your office?"

  Mendoza said wryly, "Never enough."

  Rambeau laughed. "Here too. But I believe the universe is ordered and men are not governed by chance. Me, I am a good Catholic, which also you should be by your name-"

  "Sporadically," said Mendoza with a grin.

  Rambeau shook his head in smiling disapproval. "No, it was not by chance it was you. If the devil is always active on one side, there is the good God to combat him, and God is the Stronger. Perhaps one of the good saints intercedes here for the little Juliette, to see she is avenged." He looked at his watch. "Courage-we begin the spadework. I will set men at the telephone directory, and you and I will go to luncheon at a small place where they know how to prepare the omelette, and then you amuse yourself and go to look at Paris while we try to solve your mystery." He stood up and gave Mendoza a joyous smile. "And then we will find who is this mysterious Grandpere, and why Juliette must be murdered. My men are the good trained bloodhounds. We will find out."

  ***

  ON WEDNESDAY, Records matched up another of the pickup owners with a pedigree, Cesar Montano. The pedigree said armed robbery, assault with intent, burglary. He'd been arrested and charged the last time four years ago.

  Hackett called Welfare and Rehab to find out if he was loose, and Montano had been on parole for six months. The address on the registration was Harris Street in City Terrace. Hackett and Glasser went to see if he was at home or at work; his P.A. officer had got him a job with a janitorial service. They found him watching television in the dirty, untidy living room of a cheap apartment, and brought him downtown. They couldn't get the time of day out of him. He just called them a string of dirty names and after that shut up. He was a big hulk of a man about thirty with a pock-marked face and quick-shifting eyes. Dealing with the stupid louts was tedious and only from long experience did they keep their tempers and use patience. They tried for an hour to get something out of him and then they left him in jail and Higgins sent out for a search warrant.

  They had another heist to work now and there were indictments scheduled for next week, Myra Arvin, Toby Wells, Randy Nicolletti. Somebody would have to be in court to cover those.

  When the search warrant came in, Higgins was out looking for the owner of a Ford pickup who had a record of assault, so Hackett and Glasser went to look at Montano's apartment. It should have been Hackett's day off but they were anxious to get this one cleared up if they could. The apartment was scantily furnished, a cheap, shabby place. There was a little stock of food in the kitchen, a wardrobe full of nondescript old clothes, nothing but underwear and socks in the dresser drawers.

  "Of course whoever did the shooting," said Glasser, "may have got shut of that gun, if he's halfway smart."

  "But they so seldom are, Henry," said Hackett. He went back to the bedroom, leaving Glasser staring around the squalid living room, and was busy looking through the pockets of the clothes in the wardrobe when Glasser burst out laughing. "My God in heaven! Come and look at this, Art." Hackett went back to the living room. "I just happened to see it reflected in the windowpane."

  The T.V. in one corner of the living room still had a tag on it, suspended from the back of the set: the manufacturer's tag, but neatly stuck across. it was a little strip of gummed paper with printing on it. PURDUE'S T.V. AND APPLIANCES. Hackett burst out laughing too. "They are so seldom smart enough to add two plus two. My God, what a stupid damn thing."

  They took the T.V. in as evidence, and went to talk to Montano again. He was hardly the biggest brain in the world, but even he saw that the T.V. tied him to that job and he started to talk fast. "For Jesus' sake, you're not goin' to pin that on me, shooting that damn cop- I like to had a fit when Joe shot the cop- I didn't know he had a gun on him even. You don't pin that on me, it was Joe, I don't take no rap for him. I don't even know him so good, I just saw him around, and he needed some eating money, he says, how about we hit that place and I-it was Joe shot that cop. I tell you where to drop on him, it's Joe Vasquez, he got a pad on Fourteenth. No, for God's sake, acourse he ain't got a job, why the hell you think we was knocking off that place? "

  With a feeling of warm satisfaction, Higgins and Hackett went out to collect Vasquez, and he wasn't at home, but a helpful neighbor said he spent a lot of time hanging around the pool hall a couple of blocks up and they found him there. He didn't have the gun on him but they got a search warrant and in going through his apartment found a. 45 Colt, a nearly new gun, in a box on the closet shelf. They handed it over to the lab. The lab would, of course, tell them that it was the gun that had fired the slugs into Dubois. And Dubois was conscious and sitting up. Somebody would go to see him and tell him about Montano and Vasquez.

  They didn't bother to talk to Vasquez right away. Wait for the ballistics report. When he heard about that and about Montano snitching on him, he might be mad enough to come out with a confession. But it wouldn't matter much. There was the nice obvious evidence on him.

  ***

  HIGGINS GOT HOME EARLY. With that case broken, just the heist to work, and with all the
overtime they'd been doing, they could go slack for a day or two. When he went in the back door, Mary was just taking a cake out of the oven, the kids just home from school, Laura and Steve Dwyer, Steve looking more like Bert every day. But the memory was a little faded now, in Higgins' mind, of Bert Dwyer dead on the marble floor of the bank with the bank robber's bullets in him. They were surprised to see him and Higgins said, yawning, "We cleared up that shooting, so we can all relax some."

  "How did you get them?" asked Steve, interested. Higgins told him. "Well, that was a pretty stupid thing for that guy to do."

  "They're never very smart, or they wouldn't be what they are. It didn't take any brains to drop on them, just the usual routine."

  "Yeah, the lab's the most interesting part of the job. Say, George. The counselor let me switch from Biology One to general science. I figured that'll be more useful to me later on."

  "Fine," said Higgins. Someday, about ten years from now, unless he changed his mind, Steve Dwyer was going to be up in the police lab with the other miracle-working technicians.

  ***

  OE COURSE the night watch had heard about Vasquez and Montano and were pleased about it. "But you know what he'll likely get," said Piggott. "A one-to-three and parole in a year. The courts have thrown out the rule, a third-time felony draws life."

  "You never know," said Schenke. "He might get a realistic judge." But they wouldn't bet on it.

  There was a call at nine-fifteen-a dead body. It had been spotted by a squad, passing in front of an empty building scheduled for demolition on Second Street. It was just a body of a man in the twenties-no I.D. or money on him. He'd been stabbed. He smelled strongly of liquor and there was a broken bottle which had held bourbon alongside the body.

  "Somebody rolling the drunk," said Schenke. All they could do was send him down to the morgue. Maybe his prints would say who he'd been-maybe not.

  The end of the week was usually quiet, but they had the weekend coming up. There was always the paperwork and a report had to be typed on the body. Piggott had finished that and they were sitting around talking desultorily when the desk called at ten to eleven. Conway took it and after thirty seconds said, "Jesus, all right. What's the address?"

  He put the phone down. "We've got a triple homicide. All we needed."

  They all rode on it. It was on Thirtieth Place and Bill Moss was waiting for them at the curb in front of the squad. He said, "My God, the rate always goes up in summer, but this is the worst I've seen in a while. I mean, the baby-it just happened about half an hour or twenty minutes ago, it took me a few minutes to get here, I was back uptown on Beverly. The woman who called in lives in the front house, a Mrs. Ballard. The people in the rear house just moved in there a few days ago. She heard screams and saw a man running away. It's one goddamned mess, boys."

  Before they went to look at it they talked to Mrs. Ballard. She was an elderly fat black woman and she was shocked and scared, but she told a straight enough story.

  "They were real nice young people, Rawson's their name, they just moved to California because she had the asthma and the doctors thought she'd be better here. It was her brother rented it for them, he just lives down the street a ways. They moved in on Monday. Yes, sir, I was just getting ready to go to bed when I heard the screaming, oh, Lordy God, it was awful-coming from the back house-and I looked out the window and I saw a man come running out of there. He was a tall, skinny man. No, sir, I don't know if he was black or white. He run across the yard and up the drive into the street. And I didn't hear no more screams, but I called the police, and that policeman out there he says-he says-they're all cut up and dead-"

  The little frame house in the rear had been neat and clean before carnage struck. There were no dirty dishes in the kitchen. The shabby but comfortable furniture was dusted. Clothes hung tidily in the one closet. It was a small place with two meager bedrooms, a tiny living room, kitchen, bathroom and that was all. Now there was blood all over. The man, a stocky, very black man in pajamas, was on the floor of the larger bedroom, blank empty eyes fixed on the ceiling. He had been stabbed and slashed repeatedly, but by his position it didn't look as if he'd put up a fight. Possibly he'd been attacked in his sleep. The woman had tried to get away-probably while producing the screams. She was a thin young black woman in what had been a blue nylon nightgown, and she had got as far as just inside the front door when she died. They could read it. While the killer was busy with the man, she'd wakened up, screamed, tried to run, and been caught. There was more blood in the little hall, in the living room. She'd been stabbed and slashed viciously. The baby, looking to be about a year old, was still in the crib beside the double bed, and its throat had been cut.

  "God," said Conway. "What have we got here, a lunatic?"

  They called the lab and a mobile van came out. All the night watch could do was write the initial report. Let the day men take it from there.

  ***

  "IT MUST'VE BEEN A CRAZY PERSON, that's all," said Alexander Freeman to Landers and Palliser. "That's all anybody could say. Nobody had any reason to do such a thing I to Jim and Paula. It's just crazy."

  They were talking to the Freemans in one side of the duplex, half a block down on Thirtieth Place from Mrs. Ballard's house, on Friday morning. The living room here was clean and neat, if shabby. The Freemans, both medium black, looked like solid citizens. Louise Freeman had been crying; now she sat listlessly on the couch, staring at her clasped hands.

  "I didn't go to work," Freeman said. "I knew the police would be here and I didn't like to leave Louise. There's just no sense to it."

  "You said Mr. and Mrs. Rawson had just moved to California?" asked Landers.

  "That's right. They lived back in Wisconsin, that's where Louise and Jim were raised, but the winters were awful hard on Paula and they thought they'd try it out here. I even got Jim a job, a good job, same place I work, the Parks and Recreation Department. He was working for a big nursery back there so he was experienced at that kind of job, and we were so glad to find that house for them so close. It was a good deal for them, see, because they was getting it at a lower rent than usual. Jim was going to do all the yard work for part of the rent. Mrs. Ballard's been a widow a long time and she couldn't keep up the yard. It was all in a mess, and Jim had started to work on it, just since they got here. They drove in last Sunday night and moved in there Monday."

  Freeman was smoking nervously. His wife started to cry again. "There's no sense to it because Jim and Paula didn't know a soul out here and nobody knew them. Not a soul. Unless it was some drunk, a crazy person, but to kill the poor baby too-"

  "They hadn't even met any of our friends," she said in a thick voice. "They'd been so busy getting settled, and Jim had to start right in on that yard. He didn't need to do it all at once, but that was Jim for you-always had to be busy. And he never could stand anything in a mess, liked everything just so. We were going to have the Pattersons and the Greens over for dinner on Sunday-"

  "That's so," he said, "I told Jim to leave it, I'd help him on my day off. That place had been let go, weeds a mile high and there was even one of those old incinerators there from before the city stopped people using them. Jim said he could make a real nice barbecue out of it. And I'd have been glad to help him but I'm not off until Saturday, he hired some fella to help him cut the weeds. That's a big yard. He'd been busy at it all yesterday. A fool for work. He was starting on the P. and R. job on Monday, see."

  "They didn't have any family or friends here, except you?" said Palliser.

  "That's right. Look, even if there could have been any reason-only there couldn't be a reason for that-but you know what I mean, any reason for anybody to have a grudge on them-and Jim and Paula were both easygoing people, didn't get across anybody anytime-where was the time for it to happen? They just got here! They hadn't hardly been out of the house since Monday. Louise and Paula went to the market on Monday-"

  "And the laundromat," she said. "That was all. We did
n't talk to anybody."

  "And Jim was getting things put away in the house and then working in the yard. I don't suppose they'd talked to anybody since they got here, except us and Mrs. Ballard and, oh, that guy he hired to help in the yard."

  "Rawson hired him? It's not his yard," said Palliser.

  "No, but it was in a mess. Jim said one good cleanup and it'd be easier for him to keep up without so much work."

  "Where did he hire the man?"

  "Drugstore down at the corner. There's a bulletin board, people put up ads. But it was a crazy man, or a drunk. I haven't taken it in yet-all of them gone-like that. Jim and Paula-they were the best-and such a cute baby. He was named for Jim." Freeman was shaking his head blindly.

  "Just no sense. Nobody here even knew them, to want to do such a thing-"

  Landers looked at Palliser. Often there wasn't much sense in the violent crimes, but there seemed to be less in this one than most. They walked up the street and talked to Mrs. Ballard, but she knew even less to tell them, except to repeat that she'd seen the man running away. A tall, skinny man. She didn't know what color.

  "There's nowhere to start looking," said Landers. "The house wasn't robbed. There was forty dollars in his wallet and thirty in her handbag."

  "The lunatic or the drunk," said Palliser, rubbing his nose. "There may be prints."

  "And even if there are, they might not be in Records."

  "Well, time will tell. I don't see that there's much we can do on it until we see the lab report, and the autopsies should tell us something about the knife."

  "For whatever it's worth," said Landers pessimistically.

  ***

  HACKETT WAS JUST starting out to lunch with Higgins on Saturday when a man came into the office past Rory Farrell at the switchboard. "The desk man downstairs said to come up here." He was a pudgy middle-aged man with thinning red hair and a bulldog jaw. "With this. You're welcome to it." He held out a small imitation leather case, the kind made to hold a man's shaving tackle.