Extra Kill - Dell Shannon (7 page)

"Let's look," said Hackett, "for clues
that might exist, friend, not ones we dream up ourselves, hah?"

Marx said from the other side of the room, "The
gun's clean, Lieutenant. Not a thing on it anywhere."

"Yes, of course,” said Mendoza. "I don't
know why we bother to take you boys out on a job at all any more.
Even those six-year-old shoplifters Juvenile's getting these days
know about fingerprints." He got up and wandered into the
bedroom. "A large stout paper bag," he murmured to himself,
"or a bag made for the purpose—a cotton laundry bag, with a
slit in it, or drawstrings. You see them at dime stores, with stamped
patterns for embroidering." He lay down prone and looked under
the bed. “My grandmother has one, a hideous thing, with a design of
hollyhocks on it. Red and orange. And Laundry spelled out
underneath." He went into the closet.

"I get the general idea," said Hackett
patiently. "But there are things called hampers too."

"Not here." Mendoza came out of the closet
looking dissatisfied. "The bathroom isn't big enough."

"You were just saying a while ago that bachelors
living alone don't pay much attention to these things. Now you want
to make out—and it's a piddling little thing anyway, what does it
matter‘?"

"It may not matter a damn, I'd just like to
know. You miss the point. It's a personal thing. You take me, I
wouldn't notice about the kitchen floor needing waxing or the mirrors
needing to be washed, it's only me and my personal things that have
to be just so—and he was like that, by his clothes and packing ....
What do you do with soiled laundry?"

"I've got a drawer for it. Easiest thing.
Logical thing. Probably he did too."

"No. Not here. Not enough drawers, with all the
stuff he had." Mendoza gestured at the one bureau. "And not
logical, but slipshod, that is. You ought to get married, be taken
care of properly."

"Give advice, never take it," said Hackett.

"But that's just it, I don't need a wife for
that, which is the only reason to acquire one in the long view. I'm
much more particular at looking after myself than most women, and I
can afford to hire the housekeeping done. Caray, dirty clothes in a
drawer, I'm surprised at you." He looked in all the drawers;
Marx and Horder had left them liberally covered with gray powder, and
a number of nice prints had showed up: with very little doubt they
would prove to belong to the dead man, or Mrs. Bragg. All the drawers
were empty except for sheets of clean newspaper. "I take it,"
he said to Woods, "that Mrs. Bragg hadn't got round to cleaning
in here between my visit and yours, and that you hadn't let her in
since?"

“
This is all very interesting," said Woods,
sitting down on the bed and looking more like an earnest postgraduate
than ever. "You've got Twelvetrees down pat, Lieutenant, by what
I've got on him. The Kingmans and a couple of other people—members
of that, er, sect—they all say he was a sharp dresser and finicky
about himself. One woman said to me, and it kind of stuck in my mind
as an apt description, you know—this Miss Webster it was, the only
one I've talked to who didn't like him—she said he was like a big
black tomcat preening himself .... And that's right as far as I know,
about Mrs. Bragg. I told her on Wednesday afternoon not to touch
anything here. But it didn't seem important enough to put a seal on
the door. Matter of fact, of course, there wasn't anything here
really useful to me, I just wanted to keep it open a day or so, maybe
have a closer look. But it's her property and she's got a key, I
couldn't say whether she's been in or not."

"Yes. A paper bag she might have taken
away—we'1l ask. But I don't think an ordinary laundry bag."

"What does it matter?"

Mendoza stood in the middle of the room, hands in
pockets, and stared vaguely at the maroon flowers in the rug. "Well,"
he said, "well—it might just be—yes, I can see it
happening—that somebody wanted to carry away something—and for
some reason wanted something to carry it in. Like that. Because it
was, say, a lot of little somethings awkward to carry unwrapped—or
revealing somehow—or because the somebody didn't have any pockets
to carry it in. Or a handbag big enough. And there was the bag ready
to hand .... A big black tomcat, you said, Woods? Tomcat that way as
well as this?"

"Oh, well, I wouldn't say definitely. Myself, I
think he'd have liked people to think so, and that's about the extent
of it. You've seen his picture?" Woods hauled out the photograph
again and handed it to Hackett. It had been blown up from a
not-very-good snapshot and was a little fuzzy, but the subject had
distinctive enough features that that didn't matter. On the back were
noted his vital statistics. Brooke Twelvetrees, if that was his real
name, had been just a little too handsome, with fair skin, blue eyes,
wavy black hair, a strongly cleft chin, a consciously winning smile
showing even white teeth: five-nine, a hundred and sixty, age
estimated as thirty-two or thereabouts. "Quite the ladies' man,
in that sense only, I'd say."

Mendoza looked over Hackett's shoulder and laughed.
"Oh, yes, I see. The arm-patter and door-holder—not
necessarily the bed-jumper. These collar ads, usually not much else
to them but front. And the same goes, of course, for the female of
the species. They get by so easily on their looks, no reason for them
to develop in other directions. So let's hear something about the
Temple set-up."

"I wouldn't like to say whether it's a planned
racket," said Woods. "Maybe the Kingmans are seriously sold
on this Mystic Truth business. I didn't pay much notice to the ins
and outs of it, but this Madame Cara—er—missionizes at everybody,
and I gather it takes in a little bit of everything, from astrology
to something called Pyramidology. I went and saw Amhelm in Rackets,
but he's got no record of complaints, they've kept within the law.
It's been a going concern for about five years, and it started on
capital given to the Kingmans—outright gift—by half a dozen
wealthy people, all of whom are still members of the sect. That—"
He paused as the preparations for bringing up the body reached a
climax. The ambulance men tramped in with their basket: Dr.
Bainbridge hoisted his tubby middle-aged self out of the trap with
some difficulty. Dwyer and Landers below heaved the body up to
reaching hands, head first; it was an awkward thing to handle in that
space, but they got it into the basket at last and took it out in a
hurry. The burial and the clothes had helped, but it had still been
dead a week or so.

As they went out, the men inside heard a long
pleasurable sound from the little crowd gathered. A couple of men
were questioning the other tenants, those who were home, and a number
of the neighbors had drifted over to watch.

. Dr. Bainbridge sat down on the other end of the
couch, wiped his brow, and lit a large black cigar. "Next time,
Luis, let's make it in a more accessible place, shall we?"

"Not my idea. What have you got to give me right
now?"

"Not a great deal. Don't know that I can tell
you much more after an autopsy, except odds and ends like what he had
for his last meal. Though the body's very well preserved. He was
killed by a blow on the head, several blows were struck and it may
have been just one that did for him or a combination of all of them.
Blows were struck from the front and side, the left side—his, that
is. Nearest I can say as to time of death is between five and seven
days. Say between a week ago yesterday and last Sunday."

"Could he have died round about seven-thirty
that Friday night?"

"Certainly. Or the next night. Or ten o'clock
Sunday morning. You pays your money and you takes your choice."

Dwyer, who'd gone back down the hole, emerged again
with a lidless carton and presented it to Mendoza. "Contents of
the pockets. I labeled 'em for you."

"Ah," said Mendoza, but he didn't look at
them immediately. "Tell me, Bainbridge, just to reinforce my own
opinion—about getting him down there, would it have taken great
strength? Could a woman have done it?"

"Oh, well, you have presumably heard of the law
of gravity," said the surgeon. "Always easier to get a
thing down than up. If he was put down there more or less at once
after death, when he was still limp, it wouldn't have been much of a
chore, no—question of dragging him to the trap and sliding him
through. And anybody can dig away enough dirt, even with a trowel, to
cover a body as thinly as he was covered. It'd take a little time,
and it's an awkward place to work—especially without light—though
the kitchen light would have penetrated down the trap some, of
course. But it'd just be a matter of patience and care. Certainly, a
healthy woman could have done it."

"Mmh, my own idea, Apologies to interrupt you,
Woods, just go on talking while I look at this." Mendoza
regarded the little collection interestedly.

". . . That," Woods calmly picked up where
he'd left off, "hadn't really a thing to do with Twelvetrees and
the money, I just had a look because I was curious. But anyway, you
can say that this Mystic Truth is a profitable business, because
evidently it's attracted people with more money than sense, whether
the Kingmans planned it that way or not. Judging from the fact that
an average month's gross was twenty-three hundred bucks. Twelvetrees
and this old Miss Webster—I say old, but she's sharp as they
come—even if she did fall for the Mystic Truth—were the
only—er—officers of the Temple aside from the Kingmans. Have some
fancy titles for themselves I don't recall off hand."

Left trouser pocket, where the keys had been,
forty-eight cents in change, a half-used packet of matches from some
place called the Voodoo Club on La Cienega. Right trouser pocket, a
slightly soiled handkerchief, a small automatic pencil, and a
cigarette case, a handsome aifair of rolled gold plate, alternating
bands of dull Florentine finish with bright modern: it had a lighter
in the top, and on the inner left side was a line of engraving in
script: Brooke, affectionately, Mona. It was half full of Pall Malls.

". . . Miss Webster, who I gather is fairly well
off, doesn't take any salary for whatever she does—she volunteered
that herself—but Twelvetrees was getting five hundred per for
whatever he did, which seems to have been banking the take every
week. Miss Webster wasn't at all surprised that he should run away
with money that didn't belong to him. She never trusted him, a young
man out for what he could get if you asked her, and not particular
how he got it."

Breast pocket: clean handkerchief. Inside coat
pocket: used handkerchief, wallet. Mendoza looked at both
thoughtfully. And nothing in the other pockets except another
handkerchief in the shirt.

"The—er—church property is owned
outright—former store building way out on Wilshire. They've fixed
it up some, and no makeshift do-it-yourself job either. The Kingmans
live on the premises, there's a second storey done up as an
apartment—I didn't see that. The whole business is incorporated, as
I say, and the Kingmans take a very comfortable living out of the
net. They bank at the Security on Western. As of right now there's
$14,840 in the term savings account, and a little over $7000 in the
checking account. All four officers had access to the accounts, as
representatives of the Temple."

Dr. Bainbridge sniffed loudly. "Most successful
con game ever put over on the human race, organized religion.
Infallible. You'd think we'd have seen through it in a quarter of a
million years or so, but most people never seem to."

"
Me lo cuenta a mi
—you're
telling me!" said Mendoza. "And essentially as crude a con
game as the old pigeon drop, too." But he said it absently; he
picked up the wallet and began to go through it.

"Twelvetrees," said Woods, "became a
convert to the sect about four years ago, in its early days. He'd
then just landed here from some place back East, the Kingmans aren't
sure exactly where, and was trying to break into the movies, without
much success. Everybody liked him—except old Miss Webster—in fact
he ingratiated himself so well that within a couple of months he was
appointed treasurer at this comfortable salary, so he quit his job as
a clerk in a men's store to devote all his time to the Temple."

"From rags to riches," said Mendoza.
"Country boy makes good. Only he wasn't a country boy. Not when
he habitually carried his wallet in his inside breast pocket."

"Did he?" said Hackett, interested. "Yes,
that's the smart place—I do myself, so do you—but a lot of men
don't, even city livers. He'd been around some, to do that."

"I went," said Woods, "to the place
he'd been working, to see if I could get a line on where he was from,
references he might have given, and so on. But it's a small shop, not
a chain, and they don't keep such records that long. The manager
remembered vaguely that Twelvetrees said he was from some place in
New England. The studio agency he'd put himself on file with didn't
have anything on that at all, all they were interested in was his
physique and experience. For what it's worth, Twelvetrees had had a
little vocal training and played the piano. He'd stayed on the
agency's books, and got a little extra work now and then. And that's
just about all I can give you."

"And a few possibly helpful points there, thanks
very much." Mendoza had all the contents of the wallet spread
out before him. Not too many contents, compared with the usual
clutter a man accumulates in this substitute for a woman's bag.
Everything had been fingerprinted, and the only prints were the dead
man's, at first glance. Two fives, a ten, three single bills.
Driver's license; and that lacked the optional thumbprint. Nothing
too odd about that, of course: some people still connected
fingerprinting solely with criminal records, and refused to give the
D.M.V. a print. Social Security card. In the plastic slots, two
snapshots, one of himself with a blonde woman, the other of a dark
woman alone.