Lost Lady

by Octavus Roy Cohen

  She sighed. “You win. Just what the victory is worth, I don’t know. If you wanted to make me feel miserable instead of happy, you’ve succeeded.” She got out of the car and went inside the house. She was back within five minutes. “I told Lorena I had returned. I also phoned Robert. Now I’ll drive you home.”

  She climbed under the wheel again, and as we rolled off toward my place she said, “It’s this house, Danny. I didn’t know that it was getting me down, but it probably is. I know it affects you. Let’s stay away from it—when we’re together, that is.”

  I said I didn’t quite understand.

  “You’ll see me again?” she asked.

  “If you’ll let me.”

  “Thanks.” There seemed to be a bit of a barb on that one. “This is what I mean. Suppose we have a date. The logical thing would be for you to come to the house for me. What that means is that we’ll start off on the wrong foot. Let’s don’t play that way. Let’s make a rule that if and when we want to get together, we’ll meet somewhere else, somewhere that has no wrong associations. Oh, I know that sounds schoolgirlish, but it isn’t really. What do you say?”

  I said it was fine. She told me she’d get in touch with me, and we’d try it that way. “Then when we meet,” she said, “it will have a romantic flavor. You won’t start off by looking at my house and wondering what kind of deviltry I may be planning.”

  She let me off in front of my apartment. I made an awkward little speech, thanking her for everything (which seemed rather stilted under the circumstances, considering how much ground that “everything” covered) , and then she drove off.

  I telephoned Chuck to congratulate him on how neatly he’d kept house during my absence. He said, “Aw, hell, Danny. Why didn’t you let me know you were coming back today? I’ve got your car. Mine’s on the blink.”

  “So what? So I can hop a bus. I just wanted to let you know I was on tap again.”

  My next call was to Marty Walsh. He suggested that I hop down to Homicide and give him a full report. I told him I’d take longer than usual because I didn’t have a car. He fixed that by saying he’d pick me up. I gave him the address and apartment number and busied myself unpacking.

  We sat around the living room while I talked. It was all serious: no wisecracks, no kidding. I gave it to him straight from the board so he could figure things for himself. I admitted that I’d had fun and been in a fog at the same time. When I quit talking he kept silent for quite a while and then he shook his head.

  “It’s screwy,” he confessed. “Nice clean fun, but when you add it up, the total ain’t right. I thought I had an angle before you started on the trip. I was wrong.”

  He took some papers out of his pocket and tossed them at me. “My notes on interviews with Dorothy Halliday’s lawyer and with her bank. Just about what I told you on the phone: dry-as-dust facts, figures, and dates. About the only new thing is that your little gal friend is rolling in dough. After taxes she ought to come up owning pretty close to a million bucks. And that ain’t straw.”

  I agreed that it wasn’t. But I said she was still too far off the beam for me. I asked whether he’d turned up anything else new.

  “One thing that looks important, Danny. It took quite a bit of digging. The way it figures is this: Just prior to Dorothy Halliday’s death somebody was putting the bite on her, but good.”

  I asked him to spread that out.

  “She was nicked for at least fifteen thousand dollars in cash. It could be more, but it certainly wasn’t less. It was in three installments, rather close together, and the transactions were on a cash basis.”

  He hitched his chair forward and instinctively lowered his voice. “The reason it was difficult getting this dope,” he explained, “was that it doesn’t appear in her records. I got it from the bank. What happened was that on three occasions she cashed five thousand dollars worth of bonds. Fifteen thousand that we’re sure of. They were bonds and had reached full maturity.

  “Ordinarily she’d have had the amounts deposited to her account. Or, if she’d needed that much dough, she’d have withdrawn it from her checking account, which she kept way up yonder in the high five-figure bracket. But that isn’t how she worked it.

  “She’d cash the bonds, take the money, and go. The third time she did it, which was just a few days before her death, the guy at the bank wanted to know what it was all about, and she was polite but evasive. She emphasized the point that it was a strictly confidential matter, and pledged him to secrecy. You couldn’t miss the fact that she didn’t want the transactions to appear on any financial record—checkbook stubs or anything like that. In other words, unless I’d got it out of that lad at the bank, there would have been no way of knowing.”

  I asked Marty how he figured it.

  “You can figure it only one way,” he said. “Blackmail. Maybe not as crude as the word sounds, but that’s what it would add up to. Somebody had a hold over her. She was playing ball and not wanting anyone to know. So whatever it was must have been good. My hunch is that it was the same person she had a date with the night she was killed. That would explain why she left her personal jewelry with Bayless. Whoever she was meeting was evidently in strong enough to demand the jewelry— and get it.”

  I said, “You think the money angle would eliminate Iris Kent?”

  “Why not? The one thing she didn’t need was dough. Figure it all out, and she probably had more than her sister. Certainly as much.”

  “Who else?”

  “Take your choice. Dolores had been getting it out of Dean Halliday, and passing it along to Vince Montero. They were both doing all right, but that doesn’t signify they didn’t have ambitions to do better. Even Robert Bayless could use money.”

  I laughed. “Sure,” I said. “Sure he could. But he didn’t have to kill anybody to get it. Dorothy—or Iris, for that matter—would have given or loaned him all he might want. Also, he was practically engaged to Iris. For a guy who only had to ask for it, it’s hard to figure him going at it the hard way.”

  “You ain’t telling me anything I don’t know, Danny. Or anything I haven’t figured.” He laughed, and the laugh was not untinctured with bitterness. “You know, kid, I’ve never been on a long-drawn-out investigation in my life where I felt so unsure of myself. There ain’t anybody that can give you a day-by-day story that sounds a hundred per cent, but when nothing has happened, that ain’t important. When there’s murder involved, those discrepancies quit sounding normal. They’re all magnified. That’s one of the things you gotta watch.”

  I was in complete agreement. It was good to feel that one of the shrewdest homicide men in the L.A.P.D. was mixed up. It made me feel like less of a dope.

  He asked me about my plans, and I said I didn’t see why I shouldn’t report in for regular night-watch duty in my division the next afternoon. I’d always be available if I were needed, but meanwhile this special detail had left them a bit short-handed. “Like as if I was in the police band,” I explained. “They’re carrying me, but I’m not contributing anything.”

  He thought that was a good idea. He told me to fix it up With Bert Lane, who was night-watch commander, to know where I was at all times.

  I told Marty finally about Iris’ idea of getting together with me occasionally anywhere but at her house. He said he saw her angle. “You did all right in Vegas, didn’t you? I can see where that house would put the whammy on romance. How strong you figuring to play her, Danny?”

  “Line of duty,” I answered. “And I’m not kidding. She’s no dame for a working cop to go overboard about.”

  For the next three days I worked. I came in for a lot of razzing from the boys, but it was good-natured and easy to take. I’d had one or two chats with Iris over the telephone, but nothing important. I hadn’t asked for a date, and she hadn’t suggested one.

  On the fourth day after the return from Las Vegas, I loaned my car to Chuck. His was still out of order. It had some chronic ailment. Old age
, I reckon. A pair of crutches might have helped.

  Our outfit was busy. There had been a long series of candy-store stickups. Two guys, armed. We had their descriptions and knew their method of operation. We had two detective crews staking on them. If we had pegged them right, they’d be certain to hit tonight.

  I was staking with Elsie Barker. He was my pet gin-rummy pigeon, but it was a pleasure to lose to him, which I did frequently and painlessly. Sometimes our sessions cost me as much as eighteen or twenty cents.

  I was sitting in the office about seven o’clock when Iris telephoned. She sounded bright and gay, but her voice was held low, as though she didn’t want anything overheard. She wanted to know what I was doing that night, and I said I’d never be so busy that I couldn’t get around to seeing her.

  She said she’d be free around nine-thirty, and suggested that we rendezvous at a road that dead-ended at the boundary of Griffith Park. I started to kid along with her, and she said she couldn’t talk much. She said she had visitors, and I asked who they were.

  “Robert Bayless and two others.” She giggled. “A social call.”

  “Who are the other two?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Montero.”

  “What the hell are they doing there?”

  “Bread-and-butter call. They’re thanking me for all I did to make their honeymoon a success.” She seemed to think it was quite amusing. “I left them downstairs with Robert. I’m using the phone extension in my bedroom.”

  I said something about strange bedfellows, and she cracked back that I ought to qualify as an expert on that. She again checked the spot where we were to meet and I noted it down in my book. We said good-by.

  I laid my problem in Bert Lane’s lap. He said he’d get somebody else to take my place with Elsie Barker. A date with the Kent girl was more important than a routine stake-out. Sergeant Ehrlich offered to substitute, which was fine all the way around, and would have stayed that way if something hadn’t busted loose at twenty minutes after nine.

  It was in the form of two telephone calls: one from downtown and one from a radio car. It reported that shots had been fired and that an officer needed help.

  That call “Officer needs help” is one that no policeman ignores. You drop everything for that. For all you know, you might be the next one.

  I grabbed for the telephone and dialed Iris’ number. The other boys were already on their way out. I told Elsie I’d be with him in a second. Ehrlich had already left with one of the other dicks.

  I telephoned Iris to tell her I couldn’t make it. After a long time I got Lorena Marshall, the cook, on the phone. She said that Miss Iris had left the house about ten minutes previously. I knew what that meant. She had gone to our meeting place.

  Elsie Barker was jumping around as though he had ants in his pants. That “Officer needs help” call was making him nervous. He wanted in.

  I rang my apartment. Fortunately, Chuck Morrison was still there.

  I gave it to him fast. I told him about my date with Iris, and described the place we had planned to meet. I asked him to meet her, and to explain that I’d get there as soon as possible, but she wasn’t to wait too long. If I were detained, I’d telephone her later.

  Chuck assured me he’d leave right away, and that he’d attend to everything diplomatically.

  I dashed downstairs with Elsie Barker. We jumped into a car and roared toward the spot where an officer needed help.

  I felt all right. I knew Chuck could handle things fine. I had no way of knowing that within a few short minutes he would be dead.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  By the time we reached the spot where the officer had needed help, he had all he could use and more. Radio cars, detective cars, traffic cars, and motorcycles had swept into that area from everywhere.

  One of our stake-out teams had hit pay dirt. A candy-store—part of a chain they’d been hitting—had been held up. One of the robbers ran out of the place, leaped into a car, and took off. One of the policemen fired at him twice (those were the shots that had been reported), missed, and gave chase. He figured the other holdup man was still inside. The second officer remained to cover the spot until his partner got back. He didn’t barge in after his man, not under those circumstances. He merely covered the single exit, his gun drawn and cocked.

  The policeman in the car that was pursuing the holdup man radioed in for help—not for himself, but for his partner, who was waiting outside the candy store for his man to show. The man showed, all right, but he wasn’t one man—he was two. That was one more than had been counted on.

  The cop got the drop on them, but that was all he could do. He couldn’t try to handcuff them, he couldn’t do a thing but stand there alone, hoping for assistance, knowing that his captives might be armed and that they certainly were desperate.

  The rest was easy enough. The first pair of officers to reach the spot snagged the two suspects. The escaping holdup man actually eluded the second officer, but the number of his escape car was broadcast and he was picked up south of the city going hell-bent for somewhere else.

  The police convention dispersed. Cars and motorcycles took up their usual business. Elsie and I rode slowly back to the station. The minute we stepped into the dicks’ bureau I sensed that something was wrong. Bert Lane called me into the Skipper’s room. Captain James was there, looking too grave and somber. Lieutenant Carlton of the day watch was standing in a corner. Ford and Gadsden of the Hollywood homicide detail were there. Someone popped into the room to say that Marty Walsh had been contacted and was on the way out.

  Then Bert broke the news. I think I had known what was coming even before I heard it, though even after he told me realization took a long time to sink in.

  Chuck Morrison had been killed. He had been sitting in my car right where a certain street dead-ended at Griffith Park. He’d been shot twice through the head. With a rifle.

  I’d seen some war and a lot of police action. I thought I was hardened to violence and the thought of violence. But this was different. This hit so close to home it hurt all the way through. Now I understood why people went to pieces when death struck suddenly. Sometimes I’d been impatient with them because they’d be out of control when I wanted to ask questions. Now I was out of control.

  I was still trying to make myself understand that this was true; that the best friend I had in the world, the only honest-to-God friend I’d ever had, was dead.

  I was beginning to steam inside. The anger grew slowly, but it was a terrible anger. I wanted to do something about it. I wanted to get my hands on whoever had killed Chuck. I didn’t give a damn for legality or police procedure or any of the other things I’d been trained to care about.

  Marty Walsh came in. With him was a homicide dick whose name I didn’t even know. Walsh started talking—not to me, but to the gang of detectives in the Skipper’s room. Bert Lane must have briefed him over the phone because he knew all about the date I’d had with Iris—the one I’d been forced to break. He knew that I’d sent Chuck Morrison to explain to her, having failed to get her on the telephone myself.

  He and Captain James started barking orders at our Homicide team. He wanted everybody rounded up and brought in. He wanted Iris Kent and Dolores Laverne and Vince Montero and Robert Bayless.

  The horror of what had happened was growing in me. I started cursing. I didn’t talk loud, but I talked steadily. Profanity seemed to fit, not because it was appropriate, but because it made my anger easier to express. I still couldn’t get it through my head that Chuck had been killed. I suppose I cried out against the injustice of it because Bert Lane stood by me and put one arm around my shoulders. He said, “Take it easy, Danny. This isn’t doing you any good.”

  I didn’t pay any attention. I kept on saying whatever popped into my head. I kept saying it in the only way, and with the only words, I could think of. Marty Walsh broke in. He said, “Whoever did it, Danny, was trying to kill you. If it hadn’t been for that emergency call, you
’d be dead right now.”

  I said something about having it coming to me. I said I was responsible for Chuck’s being dead. They told me I was talking like a nitwit. Sure it was tough luck. It was a goddamned bad break. They were sorry. But couldn’t I see how it added up?

  They drew a picture of it. I was still detailed to the case, but this time I was looking for my own murderer. I was looking for the person who even now probably thought I was dead.

  They had it right, of course. Iris probably knew the license number of my car; she’d seen it several times. She had left the house ten minutes before I had talked to the cook on the telephone, so she hadn’t known that I wasn’t keeping the date.

  I knew the spot where we had been supposed to meet; the place where Chuck Morrison was sitting in the car when he was killed. It was dark there. He’d probably have dimmed his lights, but not have turned them off completely. That meant that his dashboard lights would have been on—enough light to make him a perfect target without making him recognizable—from rifle distance.

  So somebody had wanted me dead; somebody had tried to kill me; somebody probably thought at this very moment that he or she had succeeded.

  A telephone call came in. Two police cars, each containing two men in plain clothes, were staking Iris Kent’s home on Valleycrest Drive. So far she hadn’t showed. As soon as she turned up, we’d be notified.

  I knew the answer now. Las Vegas or no Las Vegas, liking the girl or not liking her, the thing was right there in front of me.

  I said, “That damn dirty little bitch. I’d like to break her neck.” I choked it off because I was losing control and that was no good.

  Elsie Barker reminded me that it didn’t have to be Iris; not personally, anyway. Hadn’t she said that she had visitors when I spoke to her on the phone and set up the date? Bayless, Dolores, and Montero. Couldn’t any one of them have done the actual killing? Wouldn’t it be more in character for one of them—Vince Montero, say—to have pulled the job if there had been enough money in it for him? Or if he were directly involved in the two previous murders?