Felony File (28 page)

They went into the ward to see Billy, who'd had some
blood pumped into him and was sitting up, still  feeling sorry
for himself. He was a big fat lump of a boy who undoubtedly
outweighed the old lady by twenty pounds.

Palliser said, "It wasn't the Tomlinsons' dog
that bit you, was it, Billy?"

"
I dunno," he said. "I guess so. The
only dog around there."

"
What about Mrs. Reid's dog?"

He plucked at the sheet. "That little ole
thing."

"
He went after you pretty hot when you snatched
her bag, didn't he?" said Glasser. "Gave you some trouble
you hadn't expected."

Billy was surprised. "How'd you know that?"

"
Because we're detectives," said Palliser
patiently. "Was that the first time you'd done anything like
that?"

The boy jerked his head once. "I—I saw her
comin' along the sidewalk—everybody says she's got lots of money. I
never thought that little no-count mutt would take after me like
that."
 
It was a piddling
little thing to waste time on, but technically speaking it was
assault. There'd be all the paperwork, and Billy would come up before
a juvenile court judge and be put on probation. But maybe he'd been
scared enough that he'd think twice in the future before acting on
impulse.

There were a couple of new heists to work, left over
from Thursday night. Wanda, Grace and Galeano were still working
through the Traffic records. Mendoza was fidgeting around the office,
after having re-read all the reports on Marion Stromberg and the
Jackmans, when around noon Glasser slapped down the report he'd been
reading and said, "This is a Goddamned waste of perfectly good
time, Lieutenant. Nothing's going to show."

"
Claro que no
,"
said Mendoza absently. "Probably not, Henry. I was woolgathering
again. And damn it, I never talked to Jackman's sister, she might—"

Higgins looked up from his typewriter. "It's a
bastard, Luis, but there's just no handle on that one. If there were
anything to point a direction—but there isn't."

"
No," said Mendoza. And after a moment,
"And of course it'd be no damned use at all to look at that
bulletin board. Hell."

Glasser, Galeano and Wanda went out to lunch. Higgins
finished his report, covered the typewriter, and had just said, "Come
on, Luis, let's go and have lunch," when Sergeant Farrell got a
new call. A body, in an apartment on Hoover. "Oh, hell,"
said Higgins.

They went to take a quick look. It was a pleasant,
unpretentious furnished apartment in a six-unit place, and the owner
lived on the premises. It was the owner who had found the body,
coming to put a new washer in the faucet in the kitchen.

"
He only moved in last month," said the
owner, whose name was Thorkild. "His name's James Amberson. I
don't know much about him. He seemed to be a very nice fellow, a
quiet tenant. I do know he was a retired Navy man—career Navy, he
was in twenty-five years."

Prodded to remember anything else, he said, "Well,
he introduced me to his sister once, she came to see him. I think her
name's Suttner."

The body was that of a Negro male about fifty, and it
looked as if he'd been beaten to death. There was a heavy-duty wrench
on the floor near the body, covered with blood. It had, at a guess,
happened last night.

Higgins called for a lab truck and they looked
through the place desultorily. There was an address book by the
telephone, and an address and phone number for Suttner in it: View
Park. Mendoza was still looking abstracted; Higgins took him out to
Federico's and they had lunch, late. Now there'd be all the paperwork
on this thing, but if Higgins read the signs right at least Mendoza
was admitting that his little idea about the Traffic records was a
dud.

They went out to View Park after lunch. The Suttner
house was a sprawling brick place with an immaculate shaven lawn, and
old trees shading it. The Suttners were both home, and after the
first shock and grief had spent itself they poured out emotion and
information in quantity. Mrs. Lucy Suttner was a buxom brown woman,
still rather pretty at forty plus; he was darker and quieter, a
dental technician at a laboratory downtown.

"
If he only hadn't taken up with that woman!"
she burst out. "I know that's what's behind this—you know it's
got to be, Clyde! Didn't I try to tell him—he was a plain fool to
get married for the first time at nearly fifty! Just retired from the
Navy, he made chief petty officer, a good pension, and he has to meet
that woman! Oh, she puts on a good front, and of course she flattered
him and buttered him up no end, just looking for an easy meal
ticket—any woman could see through her kind, but men—"

"
Well, I'm bound to say even I saw through her,"
said Suttner wryly. "Myra Carpenter, he met her at a party
somewhere, and she really got him corraled—of course she's quite a
looker."

"
Well, he found out!" said Mrs. Suttner.
"He wasn't married to her a month before he found out! She's got
a son by her first marriage, and he's a wild one—we heard he's got
a police record and I'll swear he's a dope addict—always at her for
money, and the money she took off Jim! And bringing his no-good
friends around—"

"
But we understood," said Higgins, "he'd
just moved into that apartment?

"
Last month. He'd had enough, and he came to his
senses and saw what a fool he'd been. He'd left her, he was going to
divorce her. And I know she's behind this somehow! Her and that
terrible boy of hers. Oh, why did Jim have to meet her? He could have
had such a good life, the pension, he was only fifty .... "

They told Mendoza and Higgins where she was living;
they supposed she was still there, an apartment on Hampton Court in
Hollywood.

"
This," said Higgins as they got back into
the Ferrari, "looks pretty damn obvious, doesn't it? He was
going to divorce her, so they had the bright idea of killing him
while she was still eligible for his Navy life insurance. It makes
you tired, Luis."

"
Yes," said Mendoza, but he still sounded
abstracted. Instead of heading for Hollywood he started back
downtown. "You can write a first report on it, George," and
then he was silent all the way back to the office.

There, he told Farrell to get Jackman for him; and he
so far remembered his manners that before asking the question he
wanted to, he inquired after the well-being of the family. "Well,
the funeral was yesterday," said Jackman. "We got the
notice that we could have the bodies. They're buried up at Forest
Lawn. At least it was a nice day."

"
Yes," said Mendoza. "Is your sister
better?"

"
Oh, yes, she's O.K. I got a cleaning service
to—deal with the house," said Jackman. "We'll put it up
for sale, of course. No reason to keep a place down there."

"I never talked to her. I'd like her address."

"
Oh, surely."

It was Mrs. Helen Burley, an address in Burbank.
Somebody had said her husband was manager of a chain market. He found
the place, tucked away at the end of a dead-end street; it was a
good-sized Spanish house behind a good deal of shrubbery.

She was tall like her brother, but had once been
pretty and was still nice-looking; she had kept a good figure and
there was little gray in her brown hair. She asked him in, and asked,
"Have you—found out anything?"

He didn't tell her there was nowhere to look. "I
wanted to ask you, Mrs. Burley—you see, you saw your parents later
than any of the rest of the family, didn't you?"

"
That's right. It was two weeks ago today. Oh,
dear. We were all busy getting ready to go over to the wedding, you
know. Oh, they'd have loved to go—their youngest
great-granddaughter—but of course the trip would have been too much
for them. They were looking forward to hearing all about it."
She blinked. "I'd just run down to take Mother a pan of leftover
gelatin salad, we'd be gone a week, no sense wasting it."

"
Do you remember what they talked about? Did
they mention any little worry, any disturbance, anything at all
unusual? However unusual?" This was, of course, a waste of time;
there'd have been nothing; they'd had no warning.

"
There wasn't anything wrong, no," she said
in mild surprise. "That's a sort of backwater, that street,
pretty quiet. But crime these days—" She cast her mind back.
"We just talked about ordinary things, the wedding mostly, and
the awful prices—whether they might get a new TV set, the old one
was about on its last legs. And Mother was saying how the
neighborhood had changed, so many of the people they knew moved away
or died—we'd got talking about old times when Bill and I were
growing up down there. Oh, she told me the house next door had
finally got rented and the people just moved in—they seemed nice
enough, they'd come asking to use the phone, theirs not in yet."

"
Yes," said Mendoza. Nothing, of course.

"She said she thought
their son might be retarded, he looked a little odd. Poor souls. I
can't think of a worse cross—thank God mine were all just fine,"
said Mrs. Burley placidly.

* * *

"
You think there's anything in this?" said
Hackett.

"Mrs. Burley didn't realize that the Burroughs
aren't young people, or she might have done some thinking and
worrying about it," said Mendoza. He braked the Ferrari and they
got out. The old Jackman house looked already deserted, though you
couldn't tell from outside that it was empty. The house beside it was
just another pleasant old California bungalow, one of the porch steps
cracked, its paint a little dingy. They went up to the porch and
Mendoza shoved the bell.
 
When Mrs.
Burroughs opened the door he said to her, "We'd like to see your
son, Mrs. Burroughs. May we come in? You never mentioned that you
have a son-of course there wasn't any reason to, was there?"

She backed away and put one hand across her mouth. In
the house for the first time, they saw it held the usual shabby
nondescript furniture of a rented place. Harry Burroughs was there,
relaxed in old clothes and slippers, reading a newspaper. He got up
and came over. "Did he do it?" she whispered. "Was it
him, was it Tommy? When I heard, I was afraid—I was afraid, because
you never know what he'll take into his head to do. But he's never
done anything—anything as bad as that. I looked the best I could—he
doesn't like anybody touching his things—I told you, Harry, I
looked, but I couldn't see anything with blood on it—and—he's
never done anything as bad as that." She was trembling all over.

"They told us he'd be better at home," said
Burroughs tightly. "My God, my God, if I thought he'd  done
that—" He was a tired man, defeated by life. He took off his
glasses and rubbed his eyes. "He's got medicine he's supposed to
take, some kind of tranquillizers. He's what they call schizophrenic.
The doctors told us that ten years ago when he was eleven, when he
started to act—queer. He was up at Camarillo two years after that,
and then they said he'd be better in a home atmosphere, as long as he
takes the medicine. He'd be home awhile, and then he'd throw a
tantrum and—do things—"

"He wouldn't know what he was doing," she
said.

"
Like when he killed that kitten—he didn't
know. But when they sent him home again this time, we thought the
neighbors in Montebello knew about him, we thought maybe if he could
start fresh somewhere where nobody knew—not that he ever goes out
much except to the library—"

"
He's always reading," said Burroughs.
"He's always quiet, doesn't like to go out of the house. That's
why it never crossed our minds it was possible—God, it isn't
possible! He's a smart boy—the doctors said the ones like him
usually are. Only their brains don't work just the way other people's
do—and they get what that one doctor called fixations. Like the way
Tommy all of a sudden got so religious, the last time he was in
Camarillo. You never know what he'll go off on—"

"
Religious," said Mendoza. "What sort
of religion?"

"
Oh, he's always spouting about Satan and
hellfire and Armageddon. They always told us, just don't cross him,
just let him do what he wants and see he takes the medicine. It keeps
Amelia pretty tied down. But—you—coming asking— You don't
think—"

"
Where is he?" asked Mendoza.

"
In his room." Her voice was barely
audible. "It's where he is all the time. Reading and thinking."
She pointed the way down the hall mutely.

It was the back bedroom of the two, about twelve feet
square. There was a single bed, an armchair, a chest of drawers. As
they stopped in the doorway, the young man sitting in the armchair by
the window looked up sharply. "Tommy," said his mother in a
weak voice behind them.

He was quite a good-looking young man, dark and tall
and well built; but there was a wildness about him that was nearly a
tangible aura. His eyes moved in nearly constant restlessness. In one
lithe movement he was on his feet. "Who are they?" he asked
her loudly.

"
Tell them to go away!" He had been reading
a Bible.

"
Now, Tommy," said Burroughs, "don't
be like that. You ought to—"