He stood up, stretched, and popped a cigarette into his mouth, lit it with a wooden match rasped against his thumbnail; there was a deep black notch on the nail from the habit. “Come along, the loot wants to sit in on this.”
So we went into another office, and I met Lieutenant Miller, who was wearing a white smock, like a mad scientist in a movie, if they still make that kind of movie. Hands got shook, I got a chair, Miller and I lit cigarettes to match the one Ernie had already gulped halfway down.
The sarge leaned back. “I don’t have to tell you two that there’s two kinds of evidence: the kind we can believe in ourselves, and not bring into court, and the kind that’s legal evidence. Wanta hear it?”
Lieutenant Miller said of course we did.
Ernie shook his dogged little head. “You understand, in a case of this kind, if some cop goes on what I’m saying and makes a pinch, he’s liable to end up with a false arrest charge. So okay. Our guy is in his late thirties, early forties. That I make from the condition of his hair; it’s not grey, but the pigment count is way down. Not heavy, but a stocky kind of fellow. He was dressed in tropical worsted suntans, not GI but like the kind an officer, Army or maybe Air Force or even Navy might buy for himself. I mean, if it was Air Force or Navy, the officer’d be a couple of shades off regulation, but for wearing on leave or into town or to the Officers’ Club – whoever called an officer down for a couple of shades?”
“Men who used to be officers give their uniforms away when they wear out at the knees,” I said. “I mean, we use them for gardening, or even as summer slacks, but there’s plenty of expensive cloth left when the pants get to the Goodwill or the Salvation Army.”
Ernie nodded. “Yeah, sure. And I didn’t get enough cloth to decide if it was clean, or greasy and sweat-stained. You got it in mind that a bum did this.”
“I got it in mind,” I said. “It’s a bum’s kind of crime. Assault in an open field.”
Lieutenant Miller put out his cigarette and fished a pipe out of a desk drawer. Southern California makes actors of them all; the time had come for deep thought, and deep thought required a pipe for a prop. He got the pipe going and said: “Not always, Lieutenant Bastian. I mean, not only bums commit assault. But, take Ernie’s man, and for a minute let’s pretend he is, if not rich, at least getting along. In two ways; he’s getting along in years, too, ending his thirties, starting his forties. . . . Like all of us here,” Miller said.
I stared at him. Ernie fidgeted in his chair. Miller raised the pipe by its bowl, and waved it at us. “You’ve been a young man of promise. All of a sudden you realize you’re not going to be young ever again. Your wife no longer admires you; she loves you, you’re in the habit of each other, but she knows you for what you are, and, hell, who of us can stand that kind of examination?” He laughed. “I can’t. So there’s a young girl – nineteen, Ernie? – and she flaunts herself in your face every time she sees you. There’s one in every neighbourhood. And because she’s young, you think how it would be – I don’t mean how she doesn’t know enough to know you’re bluffing your way through life, you aren’t half as wonderful as you thought you were going to be when you were nineteen. And then, of course, you find she’s just having fun with you, practising on you, making sport of your thinning hair. So, one night –”
He made a sweeping gesture with the pipe and popped it into his mouth. Me, I was thinking how different this talk was from what Olga’s white collar friends must imagine cop talk to be like.
Ernie said: “Hell, Bill, I got a million things to do in the lab. Lemme finish, and then you two brains put it together. I’m just a technician.”
“I still favour the bum theory.”
Ernie said: “Andy, I don’t think so. In my opinion, the guy was wearing some expensive kind of clothes, good tropical worsted, and it was his own, not a hand-me-down. Second, he had expensive bridgework. So I’m afraid your bum is out, Andy.”
Now it was Lieutenant Bill Miller’s turn to get excited. “Bridgework? Great grief, Ernie, that’s the finest kind of clue. Why, stiffs we pick up along the highway, we’d never identify a third of them without bridgework.”
Ernie looked out the window of his boss’s office. You could see him thinking that if everybody did his police work as neatly as a lab technician, life would be a lovely thing. He said: “Take it easy, loot. I don’t mean this guy took his plate outa his mouth, and then went away and forgot it. I mean the girl got her fingers in his mouth while they were struggling, and he bit down on them. I looked in on her last night, in County Hospital. She was still knocked out.”
He put three fingers in his own mouth and came down on them gently, to show us. Then he held them out, shiny with saliva. Tooth marks were visible, but they faded while we watched. “Of course, he gave them a hell of a harder bite than that, but it isn’t like a bite in the fleshy side of the palm. Now, once I got one of those –”
Ernie broke off before he could violate his own sense of neatness by reminiscing. “There’s good dental work,” he said, “and there’s cheap stuff, like a wino might get done in a clinic. I’m not getting up before some smart lawyer and saying this was an expensive job, but I’m willing to tell you lads that I think it was. Cheap teeth are all the same – China clippers. Good ones are a little irregular, to make ’em look real. But they don’t bite like real, as you know if you got a bridge.”
Bill Miller smiled at me. “Your bum theory is going out the window of Ernie’s lab, Andy,” he said, cheerfully. It was the first time he’d called me by my first name.
Ernie stood up. “There’s more, but it’s pretty positive stuff, you got it in writing. Five feet eight to five feet nine. A hundred and fifty to sixty pounds.” He started for the door. “I got a million things to do; that lab never catches up. I could use three more technicians, Bill.”
And he was gone.
Bill Miller picked up a typed report from the desk, peeled a carbon off and handed it to me. Except for the hair, there was nothing on it Ernie had given in his confidential report. It mentioned the teeth marks, but not that they had been made by artificial teeth.
Miller said: “Were there any military meetings in Naranjo Vista that night? Reserve officers of Guard, or something like that? Ernie seemed to favour a uniform.”
“Sheriff’s posse?”
The words hung in the air between us. Bill Miller was a Sheriff’s Lieutenant of Deputies; like all officers in unincorporated territory, I was a sworn deputy myself.
The posse consisted of everybody who liked that sort of thing and who could help the sheriff get re-elected. Rich men, influential men. Men who could afford tailored uniforms and silver saddles and palominos and pearl-handled guns so they could march in a parade once in awhile.
Bill Miller said: “Ernie is damned good, by the way. I’m supposed to be in charge of all laboratory work, but Ernie really runs the lab. What I do is keep small-time police chiefs off his neck, and politicos; he’s not the most tactful guy in the world. He likes you, for some reason.”
“Thanks.”
“I mean, he seldom likes anything big enough to be seen without a microscope.”
Lieutenant Bill Miller glanced out his window at the police parking lot, and smoothed the bowl of his cold pipe with a calloused thumb. ‘What Ernie tells you, you can usually act on. I don’t think I have to tell you that. If he didn’t like you, we wouldn’t have passed all this stuff on to you – just the usual report, unidentifiable tooth marks, wool fibres of such and such a grade, not Ernie’s conclusions.”
Standing up, I said: “The conclusions are my own, the lab work is credited to you.”
“Well, Ernie did say that you collected better specimens for him than he usually gets. . . . It sounds like a big shot, doesn’t it?”
“A very big shot.”
“But big shots don’t commit assault. Despite all that nonsense I gave you about guys of forty. Girl next door to me. I’ve got a radio shack on my garage roof. Every tim
e I’m up there, she gets in her garden in a bikini to sunbathe. But I haven’t assaulted her, have I?”
“That I wouldn’t know,” I said. “My jurisdiction is just Naranjo Vista, so the squeal wouldn’t come to me.”
He looked at me for the space of a full second, and then burst into laughter. Standing up, he put his hand out. “Nice to meet you, Andy. Next time your business brings you up here, let’s eat lunch. You interested in radio?”
When I shook my head, he said: “It’s my hobby. Damned interesting.”
“Should think you’d be running communications instead of lab.”
His thumb threw all that out the window. “Repairman stuff. What I have is like a little Jodrell Banks; missile tracking, and analysing cosmic rays.”
Before I left his office, I called County General. Nora Patterson was still under sedation; the County had a detective standing by to question her when the doctor said it was all right.
Norman Patterson was resting comfortably, the desk in the prison ward said, and the wino, who had called himself John Davis, had made a legal phone call – out of town, collect – and was now dallying with the idea of the DTs.
No money in going over there to question any of them.
Driving back along the freeway, I thought how little most people know about cops. Sergeant Ernen, with his test tubes and his reactors, or Lieutenant Miller, with his analysis of cosmic rays, didn’t fit the picture of the old-fashioned bull with a rubber hose and a gun butt and a pair of flat feet.
Then I thought of several officers I knew who socked first and asked questions afterwards, and of many more, who had no curiosity at all, and no interests outside their jobs except maybe football and horse racing. These were in the great majority, and they made, in and out, the best cops. Ernen and Miller would never rise above lieutenant; the scientific mind was not rough enough to command a precinct or even a detective squad.
But the sun was still shining on Southern California, and the wind was in the wrong direction to bring us smog from Fontana or Los Angeles, our two big sources. A very nice day, and the case was coming along. Like Bill Miller, I didn’t doubt Ernie’s analysis. It was no passing bum that had assaulted Nora Patterson.
Shooting in and out of traffic, making good time back to Naranjo Vista, I thought: neither is it necessarily a bit shot, Ernie had jumped to a very old-fashioned conclusion.
Nowadays, factory hands make enough to buy the best woollen slacks and shirts; filling station boys can afford the best.
I came to the turn-off for Naranjo Vista and then there was three miles through poinsettia fields to the town itself. Obeying all traffic signals, I was going thirty when I hit our model village.
I slowed down some more, and made my decision. Instead of parking in front of the station, I pulled up at the other end of the Community Centre, where two of our four doctors had their offices.
Their joint receptionist was a middle-aged lady with artificially whitened hair. She wore a flowered dress instead of a nurse’s uniform; psychology to put the patients at their ease?
Dr. Levy had a patient in with him, and would be tied up awhile. Dr. Crossen ought to be free in a moment.
Two dames restraining kids glared at me as I went in to Dr. Crossen’s office ahead of them. The good doctor was about five years younger than I, in his early thirties, and neat looking in his high-buttoned white jacket. He was standing alongside his desk when I came in. “What can I do for you, lieutenant?”
“You got the bulletin about reporting a man with a scratched face to us?”
“Yes, yes. And I can assure you I’ll be glad to cooperate, but really, I am a pediatrician. None of my patients has grown a beard yet.”
His tone of obvious superiority gave me an ache. Twenty-odd years of training helped me to keep said ache to myself. “No, you’re hardly my man. But doctors cross the lines of their specialities, and doctors get confidences.”
“Which they keep to themselves, officer,” he said, deliberately demoting me.
“I’m looking for a guy with a badly frustrated sex life, doctor.”
As soon as I’d said it, I knew I was making a fool out of myself. I stood and let his amusement claw at me. “Look wide, lieutenant,” he said, “and look close. Whose sex life is not frustrated, in our little semi-tropical paradise? Why, it is the trademark of our community, sir, the stigma of our times. The sorts of jobs our neighbours do lead to frustration in all departments.
“I suppose so,” I said. “Examining kids for diaper rash all day would leave me kind of pent up, I imagine.”
So much for twenty-odd years of training. I left him knowing I’d lost the encounter; he’d kept his temper and his cool superiority; I’d lost mine.
Outside the receptionist said: ‘You can go in now, Mrs. Spratt,” and then told me that Dr. Levy was free.
But I was staring at the door closing on Dr. Crossen’s office. “That Mrs. Bailey Spratt?”
The receptionist nodded. “Yes, and little Dwight.”
I should have paid more attention. All I remembered was a dame like any other thirty-odd-year-old dame; neither very good looking nor very ugly; neither well dressed nor a slob. With a kid, two years or five years or three months old. Little Dwight. I wondered if Bailey Spratt had named his offspring after Eisenhower. . . . I should have been more attentive. I should have given her the well-known smile. Her husband was out to get me, and a little softening on the distaff side would have been politically useful.
Ah, to hell with politics. I had been brought up to do my job, and leave the rest to my superiors. But now I only had one superior, Jack Davis, and he was my friend.
Anything I did reflected on him. I had no right to lose my temper, no right to make enemies; I owed it to Jack not to.
An old woman, at least seventy, came out of Hal Levy’s office. People that age were a rarity in Naranjo Vista. She smiled at the receptionist and left, and I was told to go in.
Hal Levy and a girl in a nurse’s uniform were drinking coffee together; he was sitting on his desk, she in the doctor’s chair. Hal waved his cup at me, and said: “Hi, Andy. You know Priscilla Hanford, don’t you?”
I shook my head. “My loss.”
“A gallant cop,” Miss Hanford said. “I’ll get you a cup of coffee, Mr. Bastian.”
She went into the next room with a swish of starched white skirts above very good legs. The sight of her cheered me up considerably; she was very good looking, and Hal’s relationship with her seemed informal, to say the least. Maybe I was nuts to be jealous of his friendship with Olga.
“You can certainly pick nurses, Hal.”
“Oh, Priss isn’t a nurse. They take some sort of course in being office assistants. How to say: ‘Doctor is out, why don’t you take two aspirins and I’ll have him call you when he gets in.’”
I laughed. From the open door, Priscilla Hanford said: “You look like a black coffee man, Mr. Bastian. Right?”
“Lay off, Priss,” Hal said. “Andy’s happily married. You sick, Andy, or just social?”
“Neither,” I said. “Police business in a half –” I looked at Priscilla and changed what I was going to say: “half-hearted way. We have reasons to believe – I can give it to you, but it’s technical, and maybe dull – that the man who assaulted that girl last night was someone of possible importance and standing here in Naranjo Vista. It changes the whole case.”
Priscilla Hanford sat down and crossed her legs. I looked, and went on: “Up till now, we’ve been counting on a Skid Row pickup to break the case. Of course, the L.A. cops and the county men will continue searching along those lines. But I think we’re going to find our man right here in Naranjo Vista.”
Hal Levy whistled gently. Priss Hanford uncrossed her legs and bent forward to look at me.
“Which means,” I said, “that there’s a good chance that somebody with a scratched face will come to one of the four doctors here to be treated.”
Hal shook his head. “
People treat their own colds and scratches these days. You would do better to alert the drug stores.”
Priss Hanford said: “There’s a heavy make-up that will cover that sort of thing. A man buying it might be a hot clue.”
“We know a little more about him,” I said. “Five feet eight, about. Hair light brown, beard darker. Belongs, probably, to one of the reserve units that wears suntans, to the posse or to the gun club.”
Hal Levy fished a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. Unlike Dr. Crossen, he was in a business suit, not a white outfit. He said: “I wouldn’t care to make you mad at me, Andy. Bailey Spratt has a bruise, not a scratch.”
“You mentioned his name, not I.”
The phone rang. Priss Hanford went to the desk and picked up the receiver. “Dr. Levy’s office. . . Oh, certainly.” She hung up. “Dr. Crossen wants me to help him a minute.”
When the door had closed behind her, I said: “That’s one hell of a good looking gal you have there, Hal.”
He shrugged. “Why not? I’ve got to look at her all day. When she isn’t helping out Crossen. His practice isn’t big enough to pay for an assistant yet.”
“He’s got a damned poor bedside manner.”
Hal Levy laughed. “You cross nightsticks with Crossen? He doesn’t like cops. Something when he was an intern, I don’t know what.”
I stood up. “Bring Priss to dinner some night.”
Hal frowned. “I don’t know. It’s supposed to be a bad idea to mingle with your help. But she looks like she’d make such nice mingling, I’m weakening. . . . Andy, has Olga told you what we’ve been talking about?”
“You mean, going into partnership?” All of a sudden I was tired of horsing around. “That’s one reason I’ve been pushing you at Miss Hanford.”
His laughter was deep and rich and natural. “Jealous, pal? Maybe ten years from now, but at the moment Olga’s the most in-love girl I know. I’ll admit I’ve regretted it, a time or two. Yes, I offered her a partnership when she gets her Ph.D. But, frankly, I’ve also told her she’s a fool not to go on and get her M.D., too. With the courses she’s already taken, she could knock it off in three years.”
A Nice Girl Like You (Lt. Andy Bastian Mysteries Book 2) Page 9
