Carnival of Death

by Keene, Day

  When he saw Daly, he pushed the cup of coffee aside. “Well, if it isn’t the great Mr. Tom Daly from KAMPC-TV. What do you want? Don’t tell me you’re here to take pictures of Tim’s funeral so you can show them on your program?”

  “No,” Daly said. “Nothing like that All we want is to ask you a few questions, Mr. Kelly.” He played on the other man’s pride in his younger brother. “Judging from the number of good-looking girls in the chapel, your brother must have been quite a ladies’ man.”

  “He was that,” the drunken guard boasted. “Tim had a way with girls. If he’d wanted to, he could have crawled into bed with a different dame every night, three hundred and sixty-five nights a year.”

  DuBoise smiled, “How interesting. But a trifle enervating, don’t you think? You know. All that crawling in and out.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  DALY SWUNG a straight-backed chair away from the wall and straddled it, facing Kelly. “I suppose Thelma was one of his favorite girls?”

  “Thelma?” Kelly puzzled.

  Daly continued to smile ingratiatingly. “Come on now, Mike. Level with me. Tim must have told you about Thelma. You know. The hot little blonde with the big breasts.”

  Kelly pushed at the cup of coffee Quinlan was offering him. “Could be, Mr. Daly. But then, all of Tim’s girls had big boobies. That’s the way he liked ‘em.”

  Daly persisted. “Think, Mike. The platinum blonde doll who had the cabin up near Big Bear City. Tim must have spent a lot of weekends up there.”

  Kelly lost what little interest he had in the subject. “No. I don’t think Tim ever went up there. He didn’t like the mountains. Sometimes he’d take his girls out on a boat, but he didn’t have to leave town. Like I said, he could have had a different dame waiting every night. Everything to live for, that’s what he had. Then that lousy little spic split-tail had to go and put poison in his lemonade. Just because Tim tried to kiss her and squeeze one of her boobies.”

  Daly looked at Quinlan. “Where was this? At the East Valley Shopping Plaza, Saturday morning?”

  Quinlan set the coffee cup on a table and wiped his hands with his handkerchief. “No. That was the week before. If I remember correctly, at a shopping center in Burbank. We used to bump into the Laredos quite frequently. And the first time Tim saw the girl, he got that way for her and boasted he was going to have him some of that But she wouldn’t even look at him. Then, on the lot in Burbank, he did what Mike just said.”

  “Squeezed one of Paquita’s breasts and tried to kiss her?”

  “That’s right.”

  “As I understand it, Mickey witnessed the incident.”

  “He did.”

  “And warned Kelly to stay away from his wife.”

  “He did more than that He told Tim if he ever touched Mrs. Laredo again, he’d beat his brains in. And you could tell he meant it.”

  “What was Kelly’s reaction?”

  “He laughed.” The guard continued earnestly, “I warned him to lay off the girl, but no. What does he do Saturday morning? I’ll tell you. I’m driving, see. And Laredo is in the same aisle we are, with a bunch of kids following him. Me, I just poke along, waiting for them to get out of my way. But before I can stop him, Tim reaches over and beeps the horn and startles Laredo so bad that when he turns, he falls. Then, not content with that, Tim insults the guy. He calls him the pale-faced hero of the Bay of Pigs, or something like that Then he said, and I remember his exact words, he said, ‘Drive on, James. Now that one-legged clown is out of my way, I want to cop another feel from that pretty little dumb Spanish broad and get me a couple of glasses of pink lemonade before I start toting all this money.’”

  “What was Mickey’s reaction to that?”

  “It was difficult to tell, with all that white stuff on his face. But he didn’t say anything. He just sat there while I drove on.”

  “And then?”

  “I parked the truck as close to the shopping complex as I could get. We draw our guns and walk around to the back of the truck. Mike gives Tim the first two sacks of money we’re delivering. Then we start for the bank and I’m relieved because I think Tim was just needling Laredo. But no. When we pass the lemonade stand, knowing Laredo is watching him, Tim has to stop and ask for a drink.”

  DuBoise asked, “Did he attempt to become familiar with Mrs. Laredo? Did he attempt to kiss or fondle her?”

  Quinlan shook his head. “No. Tim just asked, as polite as he could be, if he could please have a glass of lemonade. The girl gave him one. And a few minutes later, he was dead.”

  The harried funeral director entered the anteroom. “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but we’re running on a tight schedule and I’ve delayed this as long as I can. We’ll have to begin the Kelly funeral immediately.”

  Quinlan looked at his fellow guard. While he had been talking to Daly, the bereaved brother had fallen asleep. “Okay, mister,” Quinlan said quietly. “Thanks for stalling as long as you have, but go ahead whenever you’re ready. He can hear it as well in here as he could if he was in the chapel.”

  “Thank you, sir,” the man said.

  He left the room and a few moments later the organ stopped playing and the services began.

  “How about you, Quinlan?” Daly asked. “Don’t you want to go into the chapel?”

  “Why?” the other man asked. “You hear one funeral, you’ve heard them all.” He found his cigarettes and lit one. “I just came out of respect for Mike. I was never particularly friendly with Tim. I just worked with the guy. And I didn’t really enjoy that. All he ever talked about was women.”

  “Then you won’t mind answering a few questions?”

  “No,” Quinlan said. “Why should I? I’ve worked for Ramsdale for thirty years and this is the first time a truck of mine ever lost a dime. Now, thanks to that punk out there in the coffin, I don’t know if I have a job.”

  The remark opened a new avenue of thought. Daly pursued it. “Do you think that Kelly could have had something to do with the robbery?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Quinlan said. “But two things are sure. Someone hated him enough to kill him and a lot of money is still missing.”

  Daly returned the chair he was straddling to the wall. “I understand you have identified Davis as the man who told you his name was Dr. Alveredo and who sent you to Dr. Murman’s office for a stomach pump.”

  “That’s right. Down at the morgue. And now the garage super says that an old head like myself shouldn’t have fallen for a trick like that, that I should have stayed with the truck. But how was I to know that the guy was a phony? He talked just like an M.D. Besides, I’d just seen Mike lock the money compartment and put the key back in his pocket.”

  DuBoise said, “Then the clown who threw the silver and the paper money to the crowd had to unlock the money compartment to get at it.” It was a statement, not a question.

  Quinlan nodded. “That’s right.”

  “With a duplicate key.”

  “With a duplicate key. And, believe me, Mister, duplicate keys to armored trucks are hard to come by.”

  “I presume you’re required to turn them in when the truck returns to the garage?”

  “That’s normal operating procedure. But sometimes you forget and take a key home with you. I have. Twice in thirty years.”

  “Then any of you could have had a duplicate made?”

  “Any of us. The inside guard carries the key. We take turns riding inside. But the polygraph cleared both Mike and me. And Tim is lying out there with a priest praying over him.”

  “How about someone at the garage?” Daly asked. “This super you mentioned, for example.”

  Quinlan thought about it for a moment. “It’s possible, but not probable. He’s been with the firm longer than I have.” He hesitated, briefly, then continued talking. “But I was thinking about the key business last night. And there is one way someone could have gotten hold of a key long enough to have had a duplicate made.”


  “I’d like to hear it,” Daly said.

  Quinlan lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of the one he was smoking. “Well, the most careful of us make mistakes. When you’re riding as inside guard and you get back to the garage and your load has been checked in, you’re supposed to turn over your key with your signed tally sheet. But sometimes something happens, and you forget. Like I said, I’ve carried a key home twice. Suppose that happened to Tim one night? And suppose that Mrs. Laredo isn’t all she pretends to be? What if this ‘keep your hands off me’ bit was an act to fool her husband, or us, and she and Tim had something on the fire? Because she liked what he had, or she wanted to get at the key. Then one night, after he had been riding as inside guard and happened to carry the key away with him, they met and went to a motel or up to Tim’s apartment. And after they’d done what they met to do, while Tim was sleeping, she took the key and made a wax impression of it, then put it back in his pocket.”

  Daly asked, “And turned the impression over to Mickey?”

  “That’s the way it could have been. Then, Saturday morning, to create a diversion and make sure no one traced the key back to her, she slipped chloral hydrate in Tim’s lemonade.”

  “It could have happened that way,” Daly said. “But there are two things wrong with your reasoning. One, Paquita would have laid herself open to exactly what she’s charged with, murder in the first degree. Two, it’s difficult for me to believe that Paquita would cheat on Mickey, or that he would allow her to prostitute her body for any amount of money or for any cause.”

  Quinlan asked, “But if the Laredos aren’t mixed up in this thing, if Mrs. Laredo didn’t give Tim the chloral hydrate, how did he get it? One thing’s for sure. Knowing the guy as I did, I know he didn’t commit suicide.”

  DuBoise cracked open the door leading into the chapel and studied the faces of the young women mourning the dead guard. All of them seemed to be sincerely grief-stricken. “I’m afraid I’ll have to buy that,” he said.

  Daly explored another angle. “How is the money carried, Mr. Quinlan?”

  “How do you mean how is it carried?”

  “How is the inside of an armored truck arranged? Is the money to be delivered just sacked and tagged and lying on the floor plate in piles?”

  “No. It used to be. Because it’s so bulky we still carry silver that way. But after that Cape Cod job where a couple of men took an armored mail truck for over one million and a half dollars, Ramsdale inaugurated a new system. A sort of delaying action, you could call it. They built what amounts to steel filing cabinets into their trucks, each compartment bearing the name of the firms and the banks we service on that particular route.”

  “Are these compartments locked?”

  “No, they aren’t.” Quinlan shrugged. “And I can’t see that the new system turned out to be much protection. By the time I got back to the lot and fought my way through the mob around the truck, all of the compartments were standing open and empty.”

  “How long would you say the actual commission of the robbery took?”

  “Not more than a minute or two.”

  DuBoise was incredulous. “A minute or two would be all the time it would take to empty an armored truck of one hundred seventy-eight thousand dollars?”

  “That’s all.”

  “But surely that much money must weigh a considerable amount.”

  “In silver, yes. A thousand silver dollars weigh approximately forty-five pounds. Even ten thousand dollars in silver would be more than two or three men could handle easily. But the clown in the truck threw most of the silver to the crowd. The bulk of our load was in bills.”

  “Have you any idea what it weighed?”

  Quinlan thought a moment. “Well, as I recall the tally sheet, we were carrying seventy-five thousand dollars in one dollar bills. Forty-five thousand in fives, thirty thousand in tens. And twenty thousand in twenties. A thousand dollar sheaf of one dollar bills weighs an ounce and a half. A five hundred dollar sheaf of ten dollar bills, the same. A five hundred sheaf of twenty dollar bills, half that.” He made a quick mental calculation. “So, figuring it all in, but not counting the silver, the whole load couldn’t have come to more than twenty-five pounds.” Quinlan added, “But there’s one thing I don’t understand. There is something very wrong with this whole caper.”

  “How so?” Daly asked him.

  Quinlan told him. “All we were doing was delivering change. Any gang of pros would have known that. Why didn’t they wait until a Monday or a Tuesday afternoon when we were on our way back to the vault, with the truck carrying maybe a million and a half or two million dollars?”

  Chapter Twenty

  EVEN THIS early in the morning, Daly’s car was only one of twin streams of cars traveling in both directions on the boulevard. There might be four feet of snow in the mountains, but here the night was unseasonably warm and the sidewalk cafes along the Sunset Boulevard Strip were all doing a good business.

  Normally, he would have waited at the studio for DuBoise. He might have treated Terry to a late supper. He might have dropped into one of his favorite bars for a few drinks and some local gossip. This morning, for one of the few times in his life, he wanted to be alone.

  There were a number of reasons for his feeling as he did. After his program of the night before, featuring Luisa, the program he’d just completed had been dull and anticlimactical. He’d had nothing new to offer on the robbery. Both of his guests had been dull, and he couldn’t care less whether the mayor or the City Council won out on the current rubbish issue. What difference did it make if the taxpaying public sorted their tin cans from the rest of their rubbish or put everything into one container? Fifty years from now who would know the difference? Who would care?

  As he drove past the Gaiety Delicatessen, Daly debated stopping in for a bottle of beer and a corned beef sandwich, then decided to do without them. At this time of morning the tables and booths would be filled with fellow television commentators and musicians and agents and other radio and television personalities. All of them would be smug and superior as they asked what progress he and Gene DuBoise were making in their two-man crusade to keep Paquita and Mickey Laredo from winding up in the gas chamber.

  The answer to that was a big zero. Seemingly, everything he and Gene had done so far, including talking with Quinlan at the cemetery, had done the Laredos more harm than good.

  As the armored truck guard had pointed out, and it sounded logical, no group of pros in their right minds would have robbed an armored truck of less than two hundred thousand dollars when by a little better timing they could have gotten two million dollars.

  That threw the whole thing right back into Mickey Laredo’s lap. And, the way the police were reasoning, into the willing but amateur hands of two or more members of the ill-fated Cuban invasion brigade — presumably the two Spanish-speaking men who had slugged him in the KAMPC-TV parking lot. That, and Mickey’s appearance on his program, had been what had sucked him into the affair in the first place.

  “Un momento, senor. We will not detain you long. But please to give a message to Chico. Tell him not to try it. Tell him that we are watching and that one is our pigeon”.

  On the surface, the warning had to be a plant, an attempt to alibi Laredo. No professional thieves, intent on committing a robbery, would have called attention to themselves.

  Nor had the murder of Davis and the discovery of his body opened any particularly new avenues of thought. The police and the District Attorney’s office reasoned that being the type of man he was, an overamorous former M.D. who would do anything for a dollar, Davis had been hired by the exile group to play a specific part in the affair. For X number of dollars he’d agreed to get Quinlan off the parking lot and away from the truck about to be robbed. He’d probably furnished the chloral hydrate with which Kelly had been killed. Then, ostensibly as lagniappe but in reality to conserve money for the cause and prevent him from ever identifying them, one of the wives or swe
ethearts of one of the members of the group had first stayed with, then murdered him.

  As Charlie Schaeffer had pointed out, the still missing Thelma Banks could be the wife or girl friend of one of Laredo’s gang. Quite a few women of Spanish origin were blonde. Instead of an amorous hideaway, the cabin in the mountains could well have been a rendezvous for the plotters. To an organized gang of professional hold-up men, one hundred and seventy-eight thousand dollars wasn’t very much money. It was a tax-free fortune to a group of impoverished exiles led by a one-legged former circus aerialist whose only tangible assets were three heavily mortgaged kiddy rides and a wife who was two months pregnant.

  Daly drove down the ramp of the subterranean garage under the apartment building in which he and DuBoise shared a penthouse, stopped his car and waited for the attendant. When the attendant didn’t appear, he drove on back to his marked stall.

  It might be best, he thought, if he dropped the Laredo affair. He’d gone way out on a limb for them. Now if it should turn out that Mickey and Paquita were guilty, he was going to be caught with egg on his face. Not only would his rating plummet, he would be laughed at from one end of the network to the other. Seemingly he and Gene were the only two people in the city who didn’t believe the Laredos were guilty.

  He got out of his car, walked down the narrow space between his and the next car and tripped over an animate object. He sprawled his full length on the cement, bruising his shoulder on the fender of his car as he fell and landing with one cheek resting in a pool of oily water.

  Almost simultaneously a male voice apologized, “Sorry, Mr. Daly. But as one of a committee of two, I’ve been waiting for an hour to talk to you about Mickey Laredo.”

  Daly sat up and wiped oil and water from his face. “Now look, fellows,” he protested, “have a heart. Let’s not go through that again. We did this bit last Friday night We …”

  Seeing no one in front of him, he stopped speaking and the male voice that had spoken before said testily, “You’re looking too high, Mr. Daly. I’m down here. In back of you. You just fell over me. Remember?”