Felony File (27 page)

So far, nothing was showing on this little piece of
research.

And as it happened, Mendoza's two senior sergeants
were fortunate enough to be present that very next morning to see
something new happen to Luis Mendoza. For Hackett and Higgins, inured
to the necessary amount of paperwork the job entailed, had struck at
the stacks of paper from Traffic. "There's nothing in it,"
said Hackett. "Or if there is it wouldn't tell us anything
definite." They were sitting in Mendoza's office talking about
the Jackmans when Lake came in and said there was a fellow here who
said he knew something about Mrs. Stromberg.

"
¡Vamos!
" said
Mendoza. "Don't tell me we're going to start to move on that!
Shove him in, Jimmy!"

The man who came in, carefully shutting the door
behind him, was a nice-looking gray-haired fellow; he looked about
sixty. His dark-gray suit was as beautifully tailored as Mendoza's.
He had blue eyes under strong tufts of eyebrows, and a humorous
mouth.

"
Morning," he said. "You the officers
looking into this?" He had a newspaper in one hand; he showed it
turned to the Times story and picture of Marion Stromberg.

"
We are." Mendoza introduced them all. "Sit
down, Mr.—"

"
Benson. Chris Benson." He sat down and
studied them one by one.

"
You think you can give us some information
about Mrs. Stromberg? Did you happen to see her that Friday night?"

"
No," said Benson. "I hadn't seen her
in more than a year and a half. I must say you all look like sensible
men. I thought it over some time before I came in. I didn't know but
what I'd get laughed at, and nobody likes that much. But the more I
thought, I thought it was something you ought to know. I own a
tailoring shop up on Ivar in Hollywood. I'm a widower—my wife died
of cancer four years ago. Now I'm going to tell you about this plain,
no point beating around the bushes. I suppose we're all men of the
world like they say, and realize that just because somebody's got to
be fifty, sixty years old, they don't necessarily lose interest in
that old devil sex." He got out a packet of little thin brown
cigars, sniffed one and lit it. "My wife had been sick for a
couple of years before she died. Now, gentlemen, I've got too much
sense to go out and pick up with a cheap hooker—and I'd feel a
little strange with a young girl. All the women I know, mostly, were
Nellie's friends—social acquaintances? He drew on the cigar.

"
I'm going back about three years. I overheard a
couple of my clients talking, one of them in for a fitting. They were
joking about it. How these adult bookstores have bulletin boards,
where people—make contacts. I expect you've heard of them.

"
I thought it over awhile. I don't approve of
all this pornography around—seems like people equate sex just for
its own sake with freedom and happiness, which isn't sense. Nellie
and I had a good thing between us, and I hadn't forgotten that. But
there's loneliness too. I felt like a damn fool walking in that
place. All the young people around, but some not so young too. You
see, I was thinking—maybe there were other people who just wanted
to—make contact. Lonely people."

Mendoza said, "
No creo en
semejante cosa
. I don't believe—"

Benson ignored him. "I spotted this one card up
there right away. It just struck me as honest. All it said was, May,
and a phone number, and, widow, 55, straight. I memorized the number.
Didn't get up the nerve to call for a couple of days, but I finally
did. She sounded honest, too. Suggested we meet for a cup of coffee
some place. It was a restaurant way down on Fairfax, I'd guess a
place she'd never go usually. We talked—sort of sized each other
up. We had about the same backgrounds. She was being plenty cautious,
she said right away no last names. That was all right with me. It was
later on, when I took her back to her car—it was dark and maybe
that was easier for her—she came out plain. She said her husband
had died a couple of years before, and she'd been used to a lot of
action with him, she was feeling kind of desperate. She didn't know
any men except her friends' husbands—kind of like me. She didn't
want to get married again. She said she was nervous going in there,
putting up a card—all the queers and kinky kind—but she was,
well, interested in getting together with somebody for mutual
satisfaction, you might put it."

Hackett and Higgins were listening, fascinated. If
Benson had been a younger man he'd have come out with the frank
explicit terms; but he'd grown up in an age of reticence, and walked
cautiously around the subject with euphemisms.

"She wasn't a fool, she was a lady, and she was
protecting herself pretty sensibly too. How do the British put it?—no
names, no pack drill. She wouldn't have taken up with any
riff-raff—but neither would I," said Benson dryly. "Cut a
long story short, we thought we suited each other all right."

"
You mean—" Hackett was enthralled.

"
I've got a house on Courtney Street. Pretty
well shielded by shrubbery, and all our old neighbors who knew me
have moved away anyway. She used to come there, after dark. We had
something going for a while," said Benson. He looked at his
cigar, which was nearly smoked through, and hesitated, and for the
first time he looked embarrassed.

"
Good God," said Higgins. "That—that
conventional—what was it you said, Luis, cardboard figure,
colorless-visiting the sick and doing good works—"

"
Go on," said Hackett to Benson.

Benson put out the cigar in the ashtray on Mendoza's
desk. He looked down at the floor, and he was looking a little
flushed. He said, "Well, to put it plain, she was crazy for it,
she couldn't get enough. I—quite frankly, she was a little too much
for me to handle."

Hackett laughed. "They do say, some older
women—there was Ninon de Lenclos, George. And Sarah Bernhardt. But
what a story. That prim matron, sipping tea after shopping with her
lady friends—"

"
Well," said Benson, "it occurred to
me that her husband must have been quite a fellow. She was— Well,
after awhile I got the idea that she was seeing another man. I don't
know if that was so, or how she—made contact. Probably the same way
we had met."

Hackett chortled. "You have handed us an epic,
Mr. Benson."

"
I don't know about that," said Benson
soberly. "It was a year and half ago I went down to San Diego on
a visit to my married daughter, and when I came back I—just didn't
call her again. May. That was all I ever knew her by-May. But,"
and he tapped the newspaper, "that's her all right. Well,
gentlemen, that's about it. I'll just say that one of Nellie's old
friends and I are planning to get married, and that's that. But May—"
he looked at the picture thoughtfully— "I've got to tell you,
I don't think she'd have taken to doing without it for a year and a
half. She was—quite a lady for action, gentlemen?

"Of all the damned queer stories," said
Higgins, "this is—"

"
What occurred to me," said Benson, "is
that— Well, I was very sorry to learn that something like this had
happened to her, you know. But I did wonder—and I expect after all
I've been saying, you're wondering about it too—if she had been
still, er, making contacts, well, it could be she'd got a little less
cautious in the kind of men she picked up with."

Hackett said, "Yes, of course that's the
implication. What do you think, Luis?"

But Mendoza, for the first time that anyone
remembered, was stricken speechless with astonishment.
 

TEN

ABOUT FIVE MINUTES after Benson went out, there was a
call to an attempted heist at a supermarket, with some wild shooting
going on; they all went out on that, and it occupied some time, with
the market manager and one of the heisters shot dead and the second
heister wounded.

When they got back, Lake had a little news for them.
The blonde lady-heister had refused to talk, but had now been
identified through her prints; she had a little pedigree for forgery
from four years back. Her name was Emily Bellucci, and her husband
Tony was doing time for armed robbery, in Susanville. And the D.A.'s
office had decided not to charge Alicia Contreras, was turning her
case over to social services.

By then, of course, Mendoza had recovered his usual
equilibrium. "Don't," he said to Hackett, "make it
such a salacious little dirty joke, Art. Human beings and human
nature. And I disagree with you that Marion Stromberg had got down to
picking up anything male, and inadvertently ended up with a violent
hood of some sort.
De seguro que no
.
She was exactly what Benson tells us, cautious and covering up—she
wasn't about to lay herself open to blackmail or any other kind of
danger. Whatever man she was—mmh—meeting at the moment, she'd
have sized him up very carefully, just as she did Benson."

"
So how come she'd taken up with one who ended
up killing her?" countered Hackett. "At least we know now
what that phone call was—my God, she wanted action all right, a
night like that in that downpour of rain—"

"
We don't know how she was killed," said
Mendoza. "But I'll lay a bet, if and when we do come across that
one, Art, he'll be just such another one as Benson—a widower, a
bachelor, around her own age, somebody like herself without many
social contacts—and fairly fastidious."

Hackett gave a crack of laughter and said that wasn't
exactly the word he'd have used. "And why should a man like that
steal her car? When the A.P.B. hasn't turned it up in eleven days—"

"
You can fill that in for yourself," said
Mendoza. "He didn't. Somebody else did."

"
Why drag your heels on it, Luis? Anybody can
see what must have happened to the damned-fool woman."

"
If you do, it's more than I can," said
Mendoza stubbornly. "If there's one thing I can claim some
knowledge of it is—"

"
Women," said Hackett. "I think you've
lost your sure touch, boy."

"
I was going to say, human nature," said
Mendoza.

But of course the entire
office was titillated by Benson and his interesting little story
about Marion Stromberg.

* * *

Schenke, sitting alone on night watch with Piggott
off, got called out at ten-thirty to a rather queer thing.

It was a quiet block on Reno Street, but a good many
neighbors had been attracted out by the screams and the barking, and
could supply answers for him: Mrs. Nora Reid had lived in the old
four-unit apartment for years. She must be getting on for eighty,
they told Schenke. She always took her dog out for a last walk around
the block about ten o'clock; and tonight about that time a good many
people heard screams and snarling and came out to find the poor old
lady sprawled unconscious on the sidewalk, her handbag missing, and
the dog, as one woman put it, "slavering at the mouth."

Schenke wouldn't have quite said that. The dog was
excited and had blood on its muzzle. It was a brown-and-white mongrel
about the size of a large fox terrier. The old woman hadn't a mark on
her; it looked as if she'd been knocked down on the sidewalk. But
there was a good deal of blood around, and it made a regular trail
leading down the block to the corner. Using a flashlight, Schenke
followed it up to the corner, where it tapered off: some temporary
bandage slapped on? Everybody said the dog was a good watchdog, would
have taken after anybody who attacked the old lady. As it evidently
had. Schenke found her handbag in the street just past the corner;
the billfold in it contained four dollars and some change. Somebody
called her daughter up in Hollywood to come and get the dog; she had
lived alone.

Well, it was to be hoped she would go on living; she
had a concussion and was still unconscious when the ambulance had
come. Schenke got Duke out from the lab to get samples of the blood,
and Duke said, squatting over a splotch on the curb, "You know,
this looks like arterial blood to me, Bob. The way it was pumping out
in spurts. I'll bet that dog caught somebody in a vital spot—femoral
artery for choice."

"
Yes," said Schenke. It could conceivably
turn into a homicide. He went back to the office and alerted all the
emergency wards and clinics around to report anybody in with severe
dog bites. Nothing else came in, and he had time to write the report
on it.

Palliser got in early on Saturday morning; even
Farrell wasn't there. He hadn't sat down when there was a call from
the desk downstairs: the emergency ward at the General.

"
Yes?" said Palliser. It was a doctor
talking about a patient with dog bites. The patient was still there,
they'd been asked to inform this number, the doctor understood it was
a police matter. "Thanks very much, we'll get back to you,
Doctor," said Palliser. And then Farrell came in and behind him
Mendoza.

The night report explained the dog bites. Palliser
went over to the hospital with Glasser. The old lady would probably
be all right, but of course she could have been killed; she was
little and thin. "I don't know what the Homicide office is doing
in this," said the doctor who had called. "He's only a
child. We ought to track down that dog, he said it attacked him
without any provocation at all—I've called Animal Regulation? The
child was twelve-year-old Billy Bowes, who lived in the block down
from Mrs. Reid; his mother had brought him in last night, and was
glad to see the police taking an interest. Her boy might have been
killed—just going up to the pizza parlor on Third to bring back a
snack for everybody, and it must have been that great big dog of
Tomlinson's, the thing was always getting over the fence, and it had
attacked Billy for no reason at all, it ought to be shot, he'd been
bleeding like a stuck Pig—