Extra Kill - Dell Shannon (6 page)

“
That's funny, neither do I. Use your lighter!"
he advised Mendoza heartlessly.

There followed a period of silence but for the
muffled sounds of Mendoza moving around cautiously down there; then
another curse and a longer silence. Suddenly Mendoza straightened up
through the trap and demanded an implement of some kind. "Failing
the trowel, a soup ladle or something—look in the drawers. The
place is furnished, there ought to be tablespoons, a cake server—"

Hackett rummaged and offered him a tablespoon, a hand
can opener, and a long wooden fork. "Nada mds? A big help you
are," and Mendoza vanished again with the spoon and fork.

"Does it come on him often?" asked Woods
sympathetically, offering Hackett a cigarette.

"Thanks. Five days out of seven he's as sensible
as you please. I've thought tranquilizers might help, but on the
other hand, just once in a while he does hit pay dirt. I got it
figured that it's because essentially he's a gambler—he's in the
wrong line, he ought to have been a cardsharp. He calls himself an
agnostic, but that's a lie—he's superstitious as hell about his
hunches, whether he'd admit it or not."

"Well, we all have foibles," said Woods. "I
knew a fellow once who collected paper bags, had a closet full of
them. Card player, is he? I kind of fancy myself at bridge, does he
go in for it?"

"I think that's a little genteel for Luis, he
likes poker. But he won't play for the kind of stakes you and I could
stand."

Mendoza's upper half appeared through the trap; he
rested an elbow on the ledge and laid the fork and spoon tidily on
the floor. His shoulders had collected a good deal of dust and his
tie was crooked, but he looked pleased with himself.

"If you've finished slandering my character, and
the phone's still working,
chico
,
you can go and call the rest of the boys."

"Hell and damnation," said Hackett
incredulously. "You don't mean he is down there?"

"Didn't you hear me fall over the suitcases?
Give me a hand." Mendoza hauled himself out of the hole up into
the kitchen, and began to brush down his clothes fastidiously. "You
can stop looking for your embezzler, Woods, and hand over what you've
got on him to us."

"Holy angels in heaven," said Woods mildly.
"No wonder I couldn't find him. How, when, and where exactly,
Lieutenant?"

"Not being a doctor and having only the lighter,
I'll pass that one. He's not very deep, only six inches or so on top
of him, and I just dug away enough to be sure. The hell of a job it
must have been to get him there—and of course I'm premature in
saying it is Mr. Twelvetrees, but it's somebody, and in male
clothing, I think. And, at a guess, he's been there just about the
time Mr. Twelvetrees has been missing. About four feet from the trap,
say under the door to the living room. And three suitcases alongside
him, not buried."

"I will be damned," said Hackett. "This
one you really got by radar, boy. And I suppose from now on you'll
quote it every time anybody laughs at your hunches." He looked
at the gaping black hole of the trap— "And how the boys are
goin' to love that job." He went to call headquarters for a
homicide detail.
 
 

FOUR

It was six o'clock before they were finished at the
apartment. Mendoza went down again with the surgeon and the men to
fix up some kind of light; all of them let out frequent curses,
crowded together down there. Woods went down to look at the corpse
when its face emerged; he provoked an outburst of profanity on his
way up by inadvertently pulling out the wire from the nearest outlet
down the trap, and plunging the laborers into darkness. He shoved the
plug back in and said to Hackett tersely, "Twelvetrees, all
right."

Down below, Mendoza could be heard telling someone to
keep his clumsy paws to himself, they'd get to the corpse all in good
time, but if there was any little something buried with it by
accident, he'd like to see it before it got buried again. "Well,
well," said Hackett. "It is, is it? How?"

"Surgeon thinks a bang on the head, or several
bangs."

Hackett grunted. They sat smoking, carefully sharing
the ashtray out of the Facel-Vega to avoid using anything here, until
Marx and Horder climbed out of the hole laboriously with all their
equipment and Marx called back down, "What d'you want up here,
Lieutenant!"

"Everything, everything! And don't forget the
bottoms of window sills and the tops of doors!”

Marx sighed and shrugged at Horder; they went into
the bathroom to start. Mendoza came up and hauled out the suitcases,
one by one, as they were handed to him. "O.K., boys, now we get
busy." He sat down on the davenport and produced a folded
envelope.

"Treasure-trove from the grave."

They looked at the thing he shook out into his palm—a
small round pearl-finished button. "Could've fallen down the
trap any time and rolled," said Hackett dubiously.

"Don't think so. It was about an inch under the
surface, in the loose dirt shoveled over him. Couldn't have been
there very long, either by the look of it, even if it just happened
to be there when he was covered up. And I think it tells us what
we're going to find out anyway—someone was smart enough to wear
gloves."

"Why?"

"It could be off a number of things, this shape
and size and color." It was flat on top like a stud, not
rounded, it had a shank, it was amber-colored. "A woman's
blouse. A man's sport shirt. A dress, even a skirt, though I'd say it
was too small for that. But what I think it came from was a glove—a
glove with a button, or buttons, at the wrist." He put it away
carefully. "Now, the suitcases. They've all been printed
outside, and they're clean. Which is very odd indeed, only not in
this case, of course." He laid the first one beside him on the
couch, brought out a key ring—“From the corpse, I haven't
searched him, except for these, when I found the cases were
locked"—and opened it. Clothing, neatly packed: six
solid-colored sport shirts, in two layers, on top—just back from
the laundry, by the way they were folded and pinned: the kind of
shirts that sold for fifteen dollars and up. Two of them monogrammed.

Another half-dozen less expensive white dress shirts
underneath. A leather case with eighteen or twenty ties neatly folded
in it. Clean socks rolled up in pairs. Shorts and undershirts, almost
all of knit nylon. Three pairs of silk pajamas, all of exotic colors.
Two pairs of shoes, on trees and wrapped in paper: one pair tan
suede, the other black.

"Thirty bucks at a guess," said Mendoza,
setting them down carefully without touching the shoe trees. Under
the tied-down flap of the lid was a leather case containing an
electric razor, a manicure set, and a number of jars and bottles, all
bearing the same green-and-gold label and, in tortured script, the
words
Flamme d'Amour
.

"
Qué hombre!
”
said Mendoza, removing the top from a bottle of cologne with
handkerchief—shielded fingers, and sniffing.

"He wouldn't like himself much right now,"
commented Woods. Another fitted case with hairbrushes and comb. Six
belts, tidily rolled up. A flat leather jewel case containing half a
dozen pairs of links, tie clasps, a monogrammed sterling buckle.

"Don't," said Hackett to Woods earnestly,
"ask him for any deductions or we'l1 be here all night. One of
the things he's an expert on is clothes."

"Nobody needs to be an expert to deduce from all
this that he was a man of no taste," said Mendoza. "The
latest fashion, the expensive, but"—he lifted his lip at the
cologne bottle—"Main Street masquerading as Beverly Hills."
He opened the second case, which was of the tall and narrow kind
designated a fortnighter; it contained four suits, six pair of
slacks, and four sport coats, all carefully arranged on the hangers,
and four more pairs of shoes.

"However," said Mendoza, "all this has
something to say besides that," and he looked at the two cases
thoughtfully before opening the third.

This was older than the others, of scuffed brown
leather instead of plane-weight aluminum; it looked as if it had seen
hard usage. When Mendoza lifted the lid, all of them stared in
silence, and then Mendoza called Marx and Horder. "
Pronto
,
let's see if there's anything on this."

"Very pretty," said Woods. "Never saw
one quite like it—looks kind of antique, would you say? But he
wasn't shot, was he?"

"It's an old one," agreed Hackett. "Look
at the length of the barrel. A six- or seven-shot of some kind—open
cylinder like one of those old colt six-shooters, but not quite the
same—" They watched the two men from Prints lift it out
carefully and set to work.

Mendoza looked at Hackett pleasedly. "
Cuanto
apuestas
—how much do you bet it's a smooth
bore?" he asked happily.

Hackett fingered his jaw. "Walsh's business. You
want to hook it up to this. I don't know that I'd lay any bets, Luis,
but I can't see any connection offhand."

"Can't you? Well, it's all up in the air yet,
nothing solid, but I can see a couple of little things to build a
plot on, you know—stories to tell ourselves about it."

"You don't suppose that any surgeon's going to
be able to say, this man died at eight o'clock P.M. on Friday the
thirtieth? After all this time? What are you trying to make out—that
Bartlett saw this murder done and just forgot to mention it to Walsh,
and the killer followed them and an hour and a half later shot
Bartlett? I used to like fairy tales, about thirty years back, but
they don't thrill me any more."

"
Tengo paciencia
,
I'm not filling in that plot yet—we'll just file it for reference.
But I'll say this about the Bartlett business. Here we've got a
homicide that isn't fresh enough so the surgeon can say within a day
or a day and a half when it started to be a homicide. Isn't it a
little helpful that we've got this other thing nailed down as to
time? Coincidences do happen, but this is just the least little bit
suggestive, or it could be. We can't operate on the arbitrary premise
that these two things must be hooked up, but let's keep it in mind,
because if they are, we've got a much narrower time limit for the
corpse than the autopsy could possibly give us. And now let's look at
the rest of this." He turned back to the third suitcase.

The top layer here consisted of soiled shirts,
handkerchiefs, underwear, and socks, crowded in haphazardly; several
ties in need of cleaning, also crumpled together and shoved into a
side pocket; clean handkerchiefs, rumpled out of their folds and
stuffed into every crevice; two pairs of soiled pajamas and a clean
pair crushed in together; a pair of leather slippers. In the bottom
was a dressing-gown of scarlet silk moire; it had been neatly folded.

"Yes," said Mendoza, feeling delicately in
the pockets of the robe and coming up with another soiled
handkerchief and nothing else.

"Yes. It all says a little something, doesn't
it? What elementary deduction occurs to you, Art?"

"That Woods hasn't been slandering Mr.
Twelvetrees," said Hackett absently. "Or at least, if he
wasn't planning any embezzlement, he was planning to leave. With all
his
lares
and
penates
.
Because—"

Mendoza said parenthetically to Woods, "Speaking
of foibles, you notice he forgets his favorite role now and then—the
big dumb cop. You catch him off guard, he can actually pronounce
three-syllable words."

"
Estése quieto
,
I'm deducing," said Hackett. "He didn't do all that packing
in fifteen minutes, and the way he's been so careful to sort and fold
everything all neat and tidy, it was him did it. He expected to be
using all this stuff for some time to come, it represents quite an
investment. It looks as if he'd been packing, he'd got almost
everything in, except the stack of clean handkerchiefs and all his
dirty laundry, and at that point something happened to put him in the
hell of a hurry all of a sudden. He just shoved everything else in,
cramming it down any old way—"

"Or somebody did it for him,” said Mendoza.
"You may get to be a lieutenant someday after all. Yes. You
know, I think somebody finished his packing for him. Because from the
state of the other cases, he was a finicky customer. Like me. We
can't help it, it's an automatic thing, like—like cats washing
themselves. I don't, maybe, go quite so far as this one did with his
flame-of-love cologne and his nail buffer and his—
vaya
por Dios
, are these bath salts?—but I'm
enough like that myself to guess at the kind of thing he'd do or not
do. And however much of a hurry this one was in, I think he'd have
put all that soiled laundry into a bag for packing. I think he'd have
had that bag handy, laid out ready for when he wanted it, and so he
wouldn't have had to waste time getting it and skipped it for that
reason .... 1 wonder what happened to it, that bag. It wasn't in the
bedroom on Wednesday morning .... "