Felony File (2 page)

At the other end of the living room a cross hall led
to the kitchen, two bedrooms with a bath between. The kitchen was
square, its old soapstone counters polished clean, no dishes visible,
the worn linoleum on the floor clean except for the pool of Dave
Whalen's blood spread around his body. He lay flat with his arms out
in front of him, as if he was still trying to push himself to his
feet. He had been another long, thin man, with scanty gray hair; they
couldn't see his face. There was a small service porch, and the
outside door there was half open.

"
He says they both had knives," said
Zimmerman behind them. "His brother was just ready to leave for
work—he's a clerk at the J and M Liquor Store down on Fourth, three
to closing—when they heard a noise at the back door. He went to
look, this one here I mean, and these two louts pushed right in. Both
young and black. The other one didn't know his brother'd been killed
until they took off—they took his brother's wallet, he hadn't one
on him, grabbed some loot from the bedrooms and ran out. That's all
he can say, they were young and black. After he called us he called
the neighbor woman. She didn't see a thing, and says most of the
people along here are at work all day, there wouldn't be many home."

"
The lab may pick up something," said
Higgins sadly, looking at the body.

"
By what she told me," said Zimmerman, "the
poor old fellow in the wheelchair's been crippled all his life—polio
or something—and his brother always looked after him. Never
married, just stayed home and took care of him, after their parents
died. Seems to've been a quiet, hard—working guy—never much
money, but they got along. Like he says, the louts out after a little
loot, why the hell did they have to kill him?"

But it was, of course, the kind of thing the louts
did. Maybe high on something, or just not caring what they did.

The lab truck would be on the way. Mendoza and
Higgins went back to the living room. Daniel Whalen was still sitting
in his wheelchair staring at the opposite wall. Mrs. Meeker had come
in and was talking to him, but he didn't seem to be listening. .

"
We managed," he said suddenly. "We
always managed, whatever happened. I always just prayed it would keep
on that way. I can get myself to the bathroom, fix myself snacks,
when Dave was at work. We knew there might come a time when I
couldn't—we just hoped—I'm fifty-nine and Dave was sixty-one.
Only sixty-one. And now—and now—what I always dreaded.
Just—done—in—half a minute. Dave dead. And I'll have to go to
one of those homes—I'd rather be dead myself. I wish I was."

Mrs. Meeker was crying again. Daniel Whalen beat one
hand on the arm of the wheelchair, feebly. "I can't even—open
a can for Merlin," he said. "The counter's—too high. I'm
no use—"

There was, Mendoza saw, a large wicker basket at one
side of the gas-heater in the imitation hearth, lined with pieces of
old blanket. In the basket was curled a rather portly black-and-white
cat with very long whiskers and green eyes slitted just now at the
strange men.

"
Oh, Dan, you know I'll do that—"

"
Dave always had to have a cat. I can't even
take care of a cat, let alone myself. Why they had to kill him—about
twelve dollars, and Father's old railroad watch and Masonic ring and
Mother's cameo pin, that's all—not worth anything really, just
sentiment—"

The cat Merlin decided that there was too much
disturbance in the room for comfort, and rose and stretched. He had
four white feet and a white tip to his plumed tail. Slowly he walked
to the front door and waited. Mrs. Meeker hastened to open the door
for him and he stalked out.

The lab truck was pulling up outside. Scarne got out
of it with Johnson, and Mendoza and Higgins went to brief them. There
was always a chance that the lab work would turn up something; they
had to try. The louts might have left some latent prints, and they
might be in L.A.'s records. The autopsy surgeon might tell them
something about the knife. They would get a statement from Daniel
Whalen; it might be worthwhile to ask him to look at books of
mug-shots. The little loot sounded very ordinary, but if it ever
turned up in a pawnshop, he could probably identify it.

Both Mendoza and Higgins were aware that there was a
very long chance that the louts would ever be dropped on, a good
enough legal case made to charge and try them if they ever were. It
was just one of those things.

They stood on the little
front porch, lighted cigarettes and looked at the gray veil of rain.
"Another wet winter, probably," said Higgins. And after a
moment, "I wonder what the other new body was."

* * *

The call had come in from the squad car at
one-twenty, just as Glasser had come back from lunch. He hadn't seen
any of the other men since eight o'clock this morning; Landers,
Palliser and Grace were out on the Bullock's heist, the others on
something else, but somebody had to mind the store.

Their policewoman, Wanda Larsen, who was bucking for
detective rank, promptly got up and followed him out. "New
call?"

Glasser cocked his head at her trim blonde person.

"
You so hot for street experience," he
said. "You'll catch pneumonia. Haven't you got a coat?"

"
It was such a nice morning—I'll be all
right." She had a fairly heavy cardigan. Downstairs, they made a
dash from the front entrance to Glasser's Gremlin in the lot. "Where
are we going on what?" asked Wanda brightly.

"Don't know—squad just said a body. It's
Darwin Avenue."

That was one of the oldest streets in the oldest part
of Los Angeles, a shabby, dirty, narrow street of ramshackle old
houses. The houses had never been owned by anyone with much money,
and a good many of the owners and renters had always been people who
spent what money they had on less mundane things than plumbing
repairs, broken windows and leaking roofs; most of the houses looked
ready to fall down, long unpainted and neglected. They sat on meager
city lots; and even the city seemed to have forgotten the street, so
that the sidewalks were cracked and broken, the blacktop of the
street spotted with potholes.

Patrolman Yeager was sitting in the squad in front of
one of the houses waiting for them. "I just decided," he
told Glasser, "I don't like this damn job. I'm going to quit the
force and start selling insurance or something." He looked at
Wanda a little uneasily. "You going in there?"

"Certainly," said Wanda. "What have we
got?"

"
A bloody mess," said Yeager. "You
want me to come with you?"

Glasser didn't think Yeager had been riding a squad
long: a year or two on the force maybe. Even in that time, a cop
ought to be used to some of the bloody messes they saw on the job. He
said mildly, "Well, give us a quick rundown, will you?"

Yeager's roundish young face looked pinched. "A
Mrs. Rose Engel called in. Says she came home and found her daughter
dead. The kid was nine. There are some other kids, younger."

"
That's it?" said Glasser. "Where was
she?"

"
She just said, at a party. She left her boy
friend with the kids. He lives with her. I just got his name, Leon
Fratelli. Maybe he's awake now. She's got the hell of a hangover and
wasn't talking very straight."

Glasser said to Wanda, "Maybe you'd better stay
out here."

"
Don't be silly," said Wanda impatiently.
"I'm a cop as much as you are, Henry."

The house wasn't very big: maybe five rooms. It had
originally been clapboard, and a number of the boards had been
cracked and broken loose. Both front windows were broken. It had been
so long since the house had been painted, it was impossible to tell
what color it had been. There were wide cracks in the cement walk up
to the door; there was no front porch. There hadn't been any grass or
plants around it for a long time, if ever.

The front door was open. Glasser shoved it wider with
one foot and they went in. Various smells hit them at once. This
room, apparently intended for a living room, contained little
furniture besides an old army cot and a couple of straight chairs.
There was a TV in one corner. The floor, rugless, was thick with
dust. A baby about a year old, quite naked, was lying beside one of
the chairs; its lower body was caked in filth obviously many days
old. It was a boy, and it was crying feebly in a thin whine.

There was a man sitting on the cot, head down, a man
about thirty, with several days' growth of beard on a lantern jaw. He
was wearing a pair of dirty shorts and nothing else, and he had a fat
paunch beneath a mat of dark chest hair. Somewhere children were
crying. In addition to the dust, the floor was littered with
miscellany: scraps of dry bread, candy wrappers, beer cans, and
unmistakable human excrement.

Glasser went into the little hall off that room,
Wanda after him. At the front of the house was a tiny kitchen.
Counter and stove were littered with piles of dirty dishes and pans,
and there was mold in most of them. The floor was dirtier than that
in the first room. There was a table about a foot square by the
window, and in a chair beside it a woman sat looking dully at a can
of beer in one hand. She was a fat, dark young woman in pink pants
and a flowered top; both were soiled and spotted. Her back to them,
they could see the ingrained dirt on her neck.

Two children, three or four, were tugging at her
other arm: children in dirty rags of nondescript clothing. They were
both crying.

"
Mrs. Engel?" said Glasser.

She looked around slowly. Her eyes were bloodshot,
her dark-red lipstick smeared.

"
Who're you?" she asked thickly. Glasser
showed her the badge. "Oh. 'Bout Alice." She gave the
nearest child a casual slap. "Shut up, you. Poor li'l Alice.
Don' know what happened."

She waved an arm clumsily. "Inna bedroom."

They went down the hall and came to an open door. The
room was about ten feet square. It held a single bed and an unpainted
three-drawer chest. The bed was a tangle of gray sheets, an old brown
blanket half on the floor. The body was on the bed: the thin, small
body of a little girl—an undernourished-looking little girl, the
ribs starkly visible. The doctors would say exactly what had been
done to her; it was fairly obvious that she'd been beaten and raped.
There was dried blood all over her, and on the bedclothes; her face
was contorted in one last scream of agony.

Wanda made a strangled sound. Glasser backed out and
went on down the hall. Next to the bedroom was a bathroom. The toilet
had been cracked and overflowed a long time ago, and the mess never
had been cleared up; there were two ancient chamber-pots, both ready
to spill over, in the dirt-encrusted bathtub.

Wanda gulped and said faintly, "I'm s-sorry, I'm
going to be—"

"
If you're sick here the lab will be mad at you
for tampering with evidence," said Glasser. "You'd better
go get some fresh air." She fled past the man on the cot, and
Glasser shook him by one shoulder. "Fratelli! Can you answer
some questions?"

The man just mumbled and shook his head. Glasser came
out into the rain and took a deep breath of cold wet air. Wanda was
sitting in the back of the squad swallowing determinedly. Glasser got
in the front and reached for the mike on the radio.

There wasn't anything for detectives to do here, for
a while. Take the man and woman in to sober up in jail. Take the kids
to Juvenile Hall where at least they'd be washed and fed. Turn the
lab loose, and get the body to the morgue. Later on, one of that pair
might answer some pertinent questions.

"You O.K.?" said Yeager to Wanda. "I
said you'd better not go in—"

"I'm O.K.," said Wanda faintly.

"
She's getting street
experience," said Glasser, and flicked on the mike.

* * *

At five o'clock Landers and Grace were talking again
to the two security guards from Bullock's, Dick Lee and Bob Masters,
who had spent the afternoon looking at mug-shots down in records.
They had come up blank.

"
I guess I shouldn't have said I might make one
of them," said Masters ruefully. He was black; Lee was white.
"It was just a second, when those last two took their masks off,
just as the elevator door was shutting—I couldn't swear to
anything, except they were both white and one had dark hair."

"
All I could say, about the same," said
Lee. "It was so fast—their timing was so good—they sure as
hell knew what they were doing."

"
It was a damned slick operation all right,"
said Landers. He and Grace had been over in the Accounting department
of Bullock's most of the afternoon, looking at the terrain, talking
to the clerks there. "What sticks out at first glance is that
they knew your whole routine."

"
And we heard something about that this
morning," said Jason Grace in his gentle voice, "but I'd
like to run through it again, to get it straight." His
regular-featured brown face, with its moustache as neat as Mendoza's,
wore a deceptively lazy expression. "What struck me about
it—thar's a big store, with a lot of different departments on seven
floors. It must take some doing to collect the day's take from
everywhere in such a short time."