Murder Most Strange (19 page)

"Yes. Obviously the only way we'll get
identification. I'll get back to you on it," said Mendoza.

It was the beginning of rush-hour traffic, and the
freeway was jammed. He got held up at the Stack where he got off the
San Diego Freeway, but he got to the apartment on Clinton at
six-twenty. "Oh—" said Rose Mooney. "Oh—is
there—is there anything—"

"Miss Mooney," said Mendoza, "I just
don't know. What I came to ask is what dentist your sister went to."

"D-dentist. Dr. Westfall on Sunset Boulevard.
Why? Why?" Her eyes widened in fear.

They knew, now, about the background of the Mooney
girls. Orphans, the parents killed in an accident, and raised by
elderly grandparents who were both dead now. Two nice girls, making a
life together, and then the stupid irrational punk like Bartovic—

He said, "There's a body. We don't know that
it's Eileen. There's only one way to be sure."

"Oh—my—God," she said dully. "Oh,
no—"

"Now it might not be," he said.

She huddled on the couch, her head down. She said
thickly, "Yes, I know." And there was a sudden rattle at
the door, and her gaze fixed over his shoulder, and she screamed.

"Eileen—"

"Yes, darling, here we are—surprise,
surprise!"
 

SEVEN

"Where have you been? And what's Randy—"

"Why, what do you— Darling, we sent you a
wire! Do you mean to say— They swore you'd get it by five o'clock,
of course I knew you'd worry when I didn't come to work, so you could
tell Mr. Fox too— Didn't you get it?"

"You left— All that— Everybody thought Rudy
Bartovic had kidnapped you and m-murdered— He just came to tell me
they'd found your body—"

"What?"

"Your tote bag—with all the blood—and you
didn't come home—the police have been looking and looking, and I
was so scared—"

They turned blank gazes on Mendoza, and he said, "And
just what did happen to you, Miss Mooney?" She was even prettier
than her picture, the copper-blond hair in a flip short-cut, the
tip-tilted nose impudent with its freckles. He was a stocky young
fellow with a square amiable face, genial blue eyes, sandy hair.

"Not Miss Mooney, it's Mrs. Penner!" She
held out her left hand proudly to show. "You mean you never got
it? You didn't know? Whatever do you—"

"The police—everybody thought— They had Rudy
in jail but— All the things in the park, it looked as if—"

They both started to laugh hysterically. "Oh,
darling! Oh, dear, I know it's really not funny, but we couldn't know
you wouldn't get the wire, how could we? I'm as sorry as I can be,
but it's all right now, isn't it? You see, we'd both been so
miserable, and of course I knew Randy would come back and
apologize—and of course he knew I liked to sit in the park, and so
when he came that morning—I suppose Mrs. Lally just didn't see
him—and I wasn't there, he came down to the park—"

"Oh, my God!" he said, choking on laughter.
"The blood! Oh, my God, that's funny—the police—a murder—"
They were giggling helplessly. He pulled himself together with an
effort. "I'd had this accident at work—I work at the big Sears
warehouse on Olympic—case of glasses fell down and I got this bad
cut on my arm—reason I was off work—" He pulled off his
jacket, and still had a bandage on his left arm. Suddenly he doubled
over again, laughing. "That blood! The police! Looking for a
body! Oh, my God!"

"Darling!" she said. "You see, he
came, and we made up—" They beamed at each other fatuously.

"My lucky day. I'd just won a thousand bucks on
a horse, and I'm not usually good with the ponies—"

“
And I promised to marry him if he swore solemnly
he'd never bet more than five dollars on anything ever again. So we
decided just to go and do it—"

"Oh, my God!" he said. "The police
thinking—" They were both highly amused. "Well, we were
clinching each other, we were both pretty excited, we'd sat down
right there, and I knocked my arm against the tree and started the
damn thing bleeding again. By the time I noticed it, it'd made a
little mess. I just tied my handkerchief around it—"

"And just why didn't you come home for some
clothes?" asked Mendoza coldly. "If, as I gather—"

"Oh, that was my fault. I said we'd just live it
up and have a blowout, damn the money, maybe we'd never have that
much to blow again, and we'd get clothes over there. We didn't have
to stay at a fancy place, but make it a honeymoon to remember—so we
just drove up to the airport and got the eleven-o'clock flight to
Vegas—"

"And I was so excited I never thought about my
knitting—oh, it's all too silly! And we got a suitcase and new
clothes and everything in Vegas, and we were married that night—and
of course we thought you knew all about it! We didn't know how long
we'd stay, so I didn't tell you that, but of course we thought—"

"Well," said Mendoza, brushing his
mustache. "All's well that ends well, but I do hope you both
realize that you've cost us a good deal of time, work, and taxpayers'
money. We really thought we had a homicide to work.”

They went into gales of laughter again, and Penner
controlled himself to say contritely, "We're very sorry, sir—but
my God, of all the ridiculous—that blood—oh, God!"

"Well," said Rose shortly, looking at them
with cold eyes.

"I'm going to call Western Union." She
looked up the number and dialed, explained, waited a long time while
they checked records, and finally said, "I see. Well, thank you
. . . They couldn't get anyone to answer the phone. I was over at
Mrs. Lally's—we were just wild, of course, worrying. The police
were hunting for Bartovic and looking for your body— And of course
they don't deliver telegrams by hand anymore. They sent it by mail.
On Wednesday."

This was the culmination of the joke. They broke down
again, leaning on each other in helpless mirth. "The m-m-mail!"
wailed Eileen. "You'll p-probably get it tomorrow—Oh, darling,
I am sorry but it's such a scream—"

"That blood," he said happily. "Police
out looking—oh, my God—"

Mendoza went out to the
Ferrari and started home. Eileen was a very nice girl, but at the
moment he could have murdered her himself. At home, after a belated
and warmed-over dinner, he called the night watch and gave them the
news.

* * *

And of course on Monday morning everybody was
interested to hear about that, and did some cussing and laughing
about it. Overnight, by the description, the hair-trigger heister had
pulled another job—he hadn't gotten much loot on the last one—at
a movie house down on Main; the ticket seller would be coming in to
make a statement. At least, as far as they knew, the rapist hadn't
been out again yesterday. And Martin Unger, said Hackett, had told
them who Bernard Seton was: a representative of the public relations
firm managing the political campaign for Upchurch. "He's staying
at the Beverly Hilton, but I couldn't raise him last night up to
eleven, and he's probably not up yet."

"Yes," said Mendoza, "and we still
don't know whether the man died of a heart attack or what." He
took up the phone and told Lake to get him Bainbridge's office.
Bainbridge came on himself.

"Well, I was very sorry to hear about it, when I
came in yesterday. Upchurch had impressed me as a very sound man, I
was going to vote for him. I wonder what in hell could have happened
to him."

"Well, that's what I called to ask you, Doctor."

"Oh. Well, I haven't done the autopsy yet, but
as far as cause of death goes, there's not much doubt about what I'll
find. Depressed skull fracture. Bang on the head—however it
happened—you can feel it under the hair just behind the right
temple. Probably sometime on Saturday night, yes. It could have been
caused by a fall on some hard surface—could have been an accident,
of course. I'll be able to tell you more later."

Mendoza relayed that. "By that note, Seton saw
Upchurch sometime on Saturday afternoon, and may have known where he
intended to go that evening. And there's also this great white
brotherhood bunch; if possible I suppose we should try to find which
brother took Parmenter off. There's enough to do." Hackett and
Landers went out, and Mendoza listened to Grace's conclusions on the
Patterson case, agreed with them. Higgins could wait for the ticket
seller. Grace went down to SID to see if the lab had anything for
them yet.

The ticket seller came in at nine o'clock, a luscious
dark girl named Maria Ortiz. The movie house was a big one, running
exclusively Mexican films, and usually drew a full audience at night;
the heister had gotten away with around a hundred and fifty bucks.
She described the heister graphically.

"He was very big, he had light hair, oh, rough
and long"—she touched the lobe of her ear—"and he was
very sure of himself, very confident, you know? I was frightened, I
had never seen a gun so close before, and at first I didn't know what
to do—and when I didn't open the register he put the gun closer to
me and he said it again in Spanish—give me the money."

"Oh, really?" said Mendoza, interested.

She nodded. "It wasn't good Spanish, you know,
but understandable. He said,
Deme la moneda,
chica
."

She signed the statement and Higgins filed it away.
He said, "Well, if he is one of these jokers we heard about from
NCIC, somebody should know if one of them speaks bastard Spanish. But
if you ask me that singles out this Leroy Rogers. He's originally
from Texas, and there's a lot of coming and going over that border.
Rogers is wanted in Atlanta, but I don't know if they've got his
whole record on file." He got on the phone to Atlanta; a Captain
Moreau told him that Rogers had been fingered by the pal who'd pulled
the job with him, he hadn't any record with them, and he was also
wanted for a bank heist in Dallas, where most of his record had been
piled up. Higgins called Dallas, where a Lieutenant Fitzwilliam
pulled Rogers' record and confirmed that he spoke some Spanish. They
had a mug shot and would wire a copy immediately.

"And probably," said Higgins, “if we do
pick him up, Atlanta will have priority, damn it. But come to think,
Georgia still has the death penalty in force, doesn't it?"

Grace came back and said
that SID had picked up a lot of latents in the Patterson house, and
was still processing them; they had gotten all the family's prints
for comparison, and it might take a while.

* * *

"It's a great tragedy, of course," said
Bernard Seton. "The loss of a very able man, who'd have been a
credit to our government, I'm sure." He looked at Hackett and
Landers firmly, very much in control of the situation, which was
something of a feat under the circumstances. He had been caught
completely off base when they knocked at his door ten minutes ago; he
hadn't heard of Upchurch's death; and he was just out of bed,
unshaven, and wearing a bathrobe over pajamas. For about thirty
seconds he had been startled and shaken, and then some inward
automatic mechanism had operated to erect the smooth facade. "A
very mysterious accident, it seems to be."

"We're still investigating," said Hackett.
"We found a note from you in his pocket. Could you tell us—"

"Oh, yes," said Seton. He was a very sleek
product: about forty, tall and lean, with a lantern jaw and swift
dark eyes, the dark coloring that would make a second shave necessary
if he was going out of an evening. He sat in the one armchair in this
untidy colorless hotel room with the unmade bed behind him, talking
easily up at the two standing detectives, and explained the position
carelessly. His firm, Douglas-Hocking Public Relations, handled all
kinds of publicity matters as well as political campaigns. "The
days are gone, you know, when politicians wrote their own speeches
and went around kissing babies, a good campaign needs professional
planning and management. I was out here—our headquarters are in
Chicago, of course—to evaluate how Upchurch's campaign was going,
attend a few speeches, but I had a few other clients to see for the
firm on other business, as long as I was here. Upchurch had come to
Los Angeles primarily to tape an interview for a TV program, a public
service thing called ‘Meet the Candidates,' I suppose you've heard
of it. Then he had this speech in San Diego on Tuesday, and he was
flying back to Sacramento that night. Yes, I knew he'd be at this big
Rotary meeting at eight A.M. on Saturday morning, I'd arranged it—it
was in one of the banquet rooms here—God," and he shuddered,
"deliver me from Rotarians, the hearty breakfast meetings!
However. I left that note for him there, I had an appointment later
that morning."

"And did you see him that afternoon‘?"

"Yes, he came here about one-thirty Saturday
afternoon."

Seton had ordered coffee sent up, and sat sipping it;
he had offered some to Hackett and Landers, politely. "We sat
and talked for a couple of hours. I made a few suggestions about
getting important points across, and so on—not important now—oh,
it was all on a perfectly friendly basis—and he left around
three-thirty, I think."

"Do you know what his plans were for the rest of
the day?" asked Landers.