Felony File (25 page)

He called the lab out to process the place; judges
liked evidence spelled out in black and white. They didn't pick up
Michael Contreras until he trundled the big Arrowhead truck into the
company lot at the end of the working day. When he saw the badges he
said, "Did that little bitch go and snitch?"

"
If you mean your wife, no," said Palliser,
watching him. Contreras was at least six-three, powerfully built; he
looked like an ugly customer. "But you can guess what we want
you for." They expected trouble, but he came quietly enough once
the cuffs were on. At the jail, however, he refused to talk at all;
he just sat and glowered at them, and they finally left him alone.

"
I hope to God they
put him away for a stretch," said Landers, "but would you
bet on it?" He didn't have any record with them. It would be at
least a charge of assault with intent, but a first offense, legally
speaking. It remained to be seen what the D.A. would decide to do
about the girl.

* * *

The day men had done some overtime on that, and
Piggott and Schenke heard about it when they came on night watch;
Palliser was still there finishing a report. "Brother,"
said Schenke, "what we do see on this job. People."

"
Satan going roundabout seeking to convert
souls," said Piggott, and he meant it seriously.

"
He's finding a lot of takers," said
Schenke.

The middle of the week was usually quiet, but
occasionally they got surprised. It turned out to be a busy night.
There was a knifing in a bar, and a hit-run, and they'd just got back
from that when the desk called up a heist. That was at a liquor store
on Beverly, and they both went out on it.

The patrolman was Bill Moss, and he was chatting with
one of the two men in the place. Another one was just standing. And
on the floor, propped up against a glass case of imported wines, was
the flashy blonde female heister.

She didn't look quite as flashy as they'd heard her
described a few times. The blonde hair was a long wig, and she had
resettled it crooked so that some of her own dark hair showed at one
side, and she looked sullen and shaken. She had on a red pantsuit,
and the whole front of it was darkly and wetly stained from shoulder
to hips. She was breathing hard.

"
Evening," said Moss gravely. "You see
we've got a present for you. Mr. Doyle, Mr. Murray, who own this
place."

Murray started laughing. "If you could've seen
Gene's face! Funniest damn thing I ever saw, and me thinking we were
going to lose a day's take—"

Doyle was the one just standing. He was a great big
sandy fellow, and plain on him were the marks of the ex-pro fighter
still in training; the bulging biceps, the narrow waist, the
litheness of quick movement as he turned. He had a heavy bulldog face
with genial blue eyes, but just now he was looking; faintly
horrified.

"
More cops," he said. "My God."

Murray was still giggling. "She came in here and
put the gun on me. We were just closing, I was counting out the take
from the register. And she didn't know Gene was in the back room."

"
My God," said Doyle. "I came out not
knowing anything's going on, and she's got Dean up against the
counter, her back to me—and I think to myself, that is a guy all
dressed up like a female, because anybody knows that females don't go
around pulling heists on liquor stores or any place else. And I'm in
a dandy position, so I just catch the gun arm from behind and haul
the guy around and bring one up from the ground—straight to the
jaw, pow. And it's a female after all! Smack into that display of
domestic wines. It's a female after all!"

In front of the rear counter where the register was,
there was a mess of broken bottles and spilled wine all over the
floor.

"
If you could've seen your face!" gasped
Murray.

"
When you connected—"

"
My God, I never hit a woman in my life,"
said Doyle.

She spoke for the first time. "Nearly busted my
jaw," she said resentfully.

"
Well, my God, I'm sorry, lady—not that you
had any business trying to heist us—why the hell are you going
around pulling heist jobs? A dame ought not to be doing that."

"
Damn it, I wouldn't be," she said
querulously, "if I had a husband to do it for me, but he's in
the joint for the last job he pulled."

Schenke and Piggott began
to laugh then, and she held her jaw and groaned.

* * *

On Wednesday morning, with Hackett off, Mendoza
wasn't in the office five minutes, and the other men just drifting in
talking desultorily, when Scarne came in. "How did you know
where to look?" he asked seriously. "The crystal ball, I
presume."

Mendoza grinned at him slowly. "So," he
said. He went to the door. "George—Jase. Evidently that little
idea off the top of my mind made a hit with the lab."

Higgins and Grace came in looking interested. "It
was a match?"

"The only trouble with these Kromekote cards,"
said Scarne, "is that you need the hell of a lot higher
magnification—they take longer to process. Reason we only get back
to you now. Duke spent all night at it, but I think we've got enough
for you. There were three prints. We made nine points on one, eight
on another, and eleven on the third."

"
Not enough for court," said Mendoza. They
had to show fourteen matching points on a fingerprint before the
court would accept it as evidence. "But enough, I think."

"
Oh, there's no question but it's his prints.
There's a distinctive tented arch—two were the right forefinger,
the other the left middle finger."

"
Muy bien," said Mendoza. He hunched a
shoulder at Higgins and Grace. "Go get him. You'll probably find
him at one place or the other."

Half an hour later, when they brought Newton in,
Mendoza was sitting swiveled around to the window. The rain and gray
skies had gone away, and it was very clear and cold. The back
mountains glistened with new snow.

"
Sit down, Mr. Newton," said Higgins.

Mendoza swiveled back to face the room.

"
Sure," said Newton. "What's this
about? Any way I can help you—"

"
What," asked Mendoza, "was the
argument about, between you and Sanford on Friday night?"

"
There wasn't any, I told you, we were partners
eleven years, we got along fine—"

"Until last Friday night," said Mendoza.
"Then you had a fight with him."

"
I never saw Dick all last week. I told you, I
got in a poker game Friday night, I can tell you the fellows I was
with-"

"Possibly, later on. But at half-past six—or
seven—or sometime, you were in the Wilshire store, and you had a
fight with Sanford. We found your fingerprints there, you see."

Newton hadn't sat down. He was very natty in beige
and brown sports clothes. He gave Mendoza an incredulous,
contemptuous smile. "What's with you stupid cops anyway? I was
part owner of the place, I was in and out, every reason my prints'd
be there all around. You're the one wanted 'em to compare, weed them
out from any others. So what if you found my prints?"

"
You see, they were in a rather special place,
Mr. Newton," said Mendoza gently. "They were on the girl's
naked body."

Newton stood very still. "You can't—make
fingerprints on a—"

"
Oh, yes, you can. The difficulty up until
recently has been to lift specimens clear enough to be read. But
there's a new technique for that now. And three prints from the
body—the girl's left arm and left thigh—are a perfect match for
yours, Mr. Newton. And that proves that you were there, that you
arranged that very obvious rape scene."

Very deliberately Newton smacked the flat of one hand
down on the desk, in one display of temper, and uttered one heartfelt
obscenity. Then he sat down. "All right," he said dismally.
"So I lost the gamble. I thought it was worth taking."

"
We'd like to hear about it."

"
You'll hear about it," said Newton,
"because it was a Goddamned accident. I was mad at Dick but I
never meant to kill him, for God's sake. I'd suspected he was getting
into the accounts, and I'd been doing some looking, and he had. He
usually stayed late on Friday nights, and I dropped in to have it out
with him. He tried to bluster it out, claimed there was some
mistake—when I could show him the figures!—and I got mad and
lammed him one. We were in the office, and he went down against that
file case—I swear I heard his skull crack. And I was just going
over to see—see if he was O.K. when there was that damned girl,
right outside the door! How the hell did I know the cleaning people
came on Friday night? Mine come on Saturdays. She was scared, she'd
seen the whole thing, and I could see she was about to let out a
scream, so I just took hold of her by the throat to stop it, that's
all. I kept telling her I'd pay her to keep her mouth shut, but all
of a sudden I realized she'd gone limp, I—she was dead! I never
meant—"

"
It's a very easy way to kill somebody,"
said Mendoza.

"
Now I know," said Newton bitterly. "Jesus,
there I was with both of them, and one thing I did know— there'd be
a crew of cleaning people around. I stood there just sweating, and
all of a sudden I looked at her and thought what a good-looking chick
she was—and the whole idea came to me right then. If the cops
thought some nut was after her and Dick just got in the way, you
wouldn't go looking for a reason on Dick. I thought it was worth a
try. I got her clothes off, and made it look—" He shrugged and
fell silent.

"
But she wasn't raped," said Mendoza.
"Which made us think twice. You shouldn't underestimate us, you
know." He laughed. "Especially our scientific lab boys."

Higgins stood up. "Come on, Mr. Newton. We'll
get you booked in before lunch." Newton got up, looking surly,
and preceded him out without another word.

"
At least," said Mendoza to Grace, "we
can stop hunting up the rapists to question. Shortsighted fellow, Mr.
Newton. An accident—so it may have been, with Sanford. But I hope
the D.A.'ll decide to land him on a Murder One for the girl."

"
I'll take a bet," said Grace promptly. "He
said that was an accident too."

"
Go away and hunt heisters."

"
There's one we don't need to. You haven't
looked at the night report. And Bob left a note."

Mendoza grinned over the blonde. But with this latest
little puzzle out of the way, his mind inevitably slid back to
others. Why the hell the Stromberg car hadn't been picked up— Well,
the only answer was that it was hidden somewhere. Why? Then he sat
up. It could also have been driven across a state line by the day
after the murder. They hadn't identified her for three days. That
would be one very good reason that a six-county A.P.B. hadn't turned
it up. And what the hell had happened to the woman? That colorless,
conventional woman living the sterile quiet existence, not many
interests, not much personality—on a rainy night, making a phone
call from the Brown Derby, vanishing—getting stashed in Lafayette
Park, dead, two hours later. Barely  two hours later. After
she'd had two more drinks. Where? And just then Scarne called and
told him the kickback from the Feds was in, on the prints from the
Jackman house. They didn't have them. Nobody had them. They'd gone to
NCIC too.

"
¡Diez millénes de demonios desde el
infiemo!
" said Mendoza. The hell of that
was, it didn't say that somebody somewhere didn't have them. The
National Crime Information Center had been a good idea, and computers
were very useful for shortcuts and storing information; but even NCIC
didn't have enough computers to keep everything stored forever. As
soon as a misdemeanor or felony was cleared up, anywhere in the
nation, the information on it sent to NCIC by the local force was
wiped out of the record.

The irrational one, the violent kook who had killed
the Jackmans might be known somewhere as violent, as dangerous. He
might even have killed before. And one thing Mendoza knew from long
experience of dealing with crime: one like that would have given the
warning rattle.

He got up and went out to the big office. Glasser and
Wanda were talking, Glasser sitting on the corner of her desk; Grace
was typing a report, and Galeano apparently daydreaming out the
window. His black eye had faded.

"
Goofing off," said Mendoza. "Where
are John and Tom?"

Galeano jumped and looked around. "Down at the
D.A.'s office talking about Contreras. They're in a little tizzy
about the girl down there. Of course it's six of one, half dozen of
the other. You can call her an accomplice because she could have
walked out and come to us, but looking at it from her viewpoint—"

Mendoza wasn't interested in that right now. He said,
"We're back where we started on the Jackmans. And I've had
another idea. This joker didn't start out a criminal career stabbing
an elderly couple over a hundred times. He's been in little trouble,
and more trouble and possibly big trouble, before. It's going to be
the hell of a job, but we're going to look through all the Traffic
calls in that general neighborhood for the last three months."