Murder Most Strange (30 page)

"When were you here last?" asked Hackett.

"Thursday. Thursday afternoon. And when I came
today the front door all broken in—to think of them ending like
that, when they'd been good honest hardworking people all their
1ives—I've gotten more and more nervous of coming into
neighborhoods like this, I expect when they bought the house it was a
decent street, but— They bought the house in nineteen-twenty,
that's before I was born . . .

Hackett, looking at the street, reflected that L.A.
had changed in that piece of time: sixty-odd years, God, what had the
street looked like then? A pleasant little house among others
similar, on a narrow quiet street in downtown L.A., long before the
city had amassed a million population. Now, the ancient houses were
ready to fall down, the street was neglected and full of potholes,
and a mongrel dog with its ribs showing was nosing along the gutter.
There wasn't anybody out to stare at the police vehicles, exhibit
curiosity; the people down here didn't like cops, or were afraid of
them.

"It's just too pitiful," she said.

But of course it was the kind of street where the
kind of people lived who might do a thing like this.

"My God," said Landers, "but anybody
should have known they wouldn't have any money, anything valuable.
You'd think."

"Things relative," said Hackett. "Maybe
they had a little more than some along here, Tom."

It had been a very crude, hasty job; the lab might
give them something right away.

The morgue wagon drew up
to the curb silently, behind the lab truck.

* * *

At a little past two o'clock on Sunday, a squad
called in an attempted rape, and Mendoza and Higgins went out on it
in a hurry. It was an apartment house up on Glendale Avenue, an old
red-brick place looking solid and comfortable, and the apartment was
at the front downstairs.

"I thought I'd better call even if I wasn't
hurt," said Eleanor Golinsky cheerfully, "because that guy
is obviously a nut and ought to be tucked away before he hurts
somebody. And I never had such a surprise in my life—me, not
exactly the green girl from the country, and I like to think I've got
some judgment of people!" She grinned at them, but she was still
a little shaken. She was a big girl, at least five eight and sturdily
built, with brown hair in a short no-nonsense cut, a plain round
face, bright brown eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses.

"Whoosh!" she said, appraising them,
dismissing Mendoza as a fop, admiring Higgins' muscles. "I'll
never trust my own judgment again. But he was plausible—God, he was
so plausible and polite, anybody would have believed him! But he
didn't know I know some judo."

"You're very lucky to have gotten away from him,
Miss Golinsky," said Higgins. There wasn't any immediate point
in telling her that he'd already hurt quite a few girls. "We can
guess what he told you, but let's hear it from the beginning."

"Sure," she said. "I was getting ready
to go to work—sheesh, I'm nearly an hour late and I never called
Mr. Boggs, he'll have gone up in a sheet of flame—I'm a checker at
a Safeway on Silver Lake—going to night school to make up enough
credits to get my phys-ed teacher's certificate. Keeps me busy.
Anyway, I was just dressed when he rang the bell—and talk about
gentlemanly! Nobody would have suspected him of anything, and as for
being afraid of him, hah, it is to laugh. Nice-looking fella, tall,
dark, and dressed up to the nines." She flicked a glance at
Mendoza's dapper tailoring, as if in comparison. "He said . . ."
It was the same tale, of course, the misplaced sister, the letter
brought out as if to check the address, the apologetic bewilderment,
the request to call a taxi. "Never so surprised in my 1ife,"
she said, "when he pulled that knife and reached for me. Well,
I'm not going to tell you I wasn't scared, I saw what he had in mind,
and I was scared to death, but I tried to keep my head—and like I
say I know some judo. I also remembered what Mother always said and
the first thing I did was to aim a good hard kick at him—bad luck I
landed too low, but I don't think he liked it. You can see I'm pretty
big and strong, and I got him in a judo hold once but he had enough
height on me to get away—he dropped the knife and I kicked it under
the couch and grabbed up a vase from the end table, nearest thing to
hand, and cracked him over the head—darn it, I liked that vase too,
but what the heck if it saved my virtue—and the first time I'd
gotten hold of him I'd torn his jacket, and I think by then he just
wanted to get away—"

"With some reason," said Mendoza, amused.

"He got the door open and ran, and you know, I
darn near started after him—I was good and mad by then—and then
reason, as they say, prevailed, and I locked the door and called for
cops."

"Well, we're very glad you weren't hurt, Miss
Golinsky."

Higgins was moving the couch out to retrieve the
knife; he slid it into an evidence bag. "He's a dangerous man.
We've been chasing him for some time without any luck. All we've got
is his description and the M.O.—"

"Come again."

"His
modus operandi
.
The gimmick about the sister."

"Oh," she said. "Well, if it'l1 do you
any good, in the general melee he dropped his prop. I suppose when I
tore his jacket—I think he'd put it back in that pocket just before
I let him in. I found it on the floor just before the Marines
arrived," and she smiled at the squad—car man.

"What? His—"

"That letter he was waving around, supposed to
be from his sister." She picked it up from the coffee table and
handed it to Higgins.

It was a handwritten
envelope addressed to Mrs. Cheryl Stack, at an address on Hillside
Avenue in Hollywood.

* * *

The house was an old bungalow on that old street, on
a corner, and reasonably well kept up, with lawn in front. "How
exactly do we play this?" asked Higgins as Mendoza shoved the
doorbell.

"By ear."

The woman who came to the door was middle-aged,
plump, with a placid face. She looked at them enquiringly. "Mrs.
Stack?" asked Mendoza.

"That's right."

He showed her the badge. "Police officers. I
wonder if you can tell me how—"

He had the letter in his hand ready to show her, but
at sight of the badge the small puzzlement left her eyes and she
said, "Oh, it's about that arson case, I suppose. Well, I should
think you'd know better than to try to get hold of Douglas on a work
day. But there, excuse me, I expect policemen work regular hours and
you wouldn't realize—he's at work, at the fire station, of course.
But there again"—she considered—"could be you didn't
know where he got transferred?

"Douglas Stack?" said Higgins tentatively.

"Well, who else are
we talking about? My son Douglas, that's who you want to see, isn't
it? He used to be at the station on Third, but last month he got
transferred to the one on Jefferson downtown. I don't know why he was
always set on being a fireman, the crazy hours they have to work."

* * *

"My God," said Higgins, "he was
operating in Hollywood's territory and then they sent him downtown
and he started prowling around there. Of all the—and a fireman—they
have pretty stiff requirements, but—"

"But not," said Mendoza, "all the
psychological testing we run on prospective cops, George. One thing,
if he's due on the job sometime soon, he'll still be carrying the
marks of Miss Golinsky's battle for her virtue."

The captain of the fire station on Jefferson was
incredulous.

"Stack? My God, he's been on the department for
four years, I had his record when he got transferred, of course, and
there's not a mark against him. Very reliable man. A little moody,
maybe, but one of the boys—I can't believe this."

"Well, we want to talk to him at least, there's
a definite link," said Mendoza diplomatically. But they didn't
have to do much talking: when Douglas Stack showed up to go on duty
at four o'clock he was wearing his uniform, but he bore several deep
angry gashes on one temple and was limping slightly. "And damn
all the rules and regulations," said Mendoza softly as they saw
him come in, "that suit will be in his car and we'll have to get
a warrant before we can open a door."

But they took him in, and called Eleanor Golinsky
down to take a look at him. "That's him all right," she
said, "and I see I marked him. Good.” Tomorrow they would
bring in all the other girls, and they would recognize him too.

He was, as all the girls had said, an attractive man
if not exactly handsome: young, tall, well set up, with presence
enough and sufficient educational background to put up that good
front. He could have attracted the girls easily enough. But a
surprising number of the violent rapists were of the same ilk; that
was quite irrelevant to what made them tick. They couldn't get him to
say anything for quite some time; and then he seemed to get impatient
with all the repetitious questions and said, "It was Sally. I
never did anything like that until that damn little bitch walked out
on me."

"Sally who'?" asked Mendoza.

"Sally Forcell. She was my girl ever since high
school. I'd always been good enough before, till she ran into that
dude with the foreign car and all the loot. Kicked me in the teeth
and took off with him. I guess"—he looked at them from under
his brows—"I started to feel all women were like that. I had
to get back at Sally."

It was the opening move in the gambit of trying to
claim insanity, of course. It wasn't likely he'd get away with that,
when such obvious plotting had gone into achieving the rapes. He
would get the psychiatric evaluation, but nobody was going to think
this one was crazy. They booked him into jail, and were both late
home.

At nine o'clock Piggott called Mendoza to say that
the warrant for his car had come through; it had been towed in, and
they had looked. His natty suit and white shirt were there, only the
suit wasn't so natty, with a pocket nearly torn off.

"And isn't that gratifying," said Mendoza.
“I must remember to call Barth in the morning. His mistake, of
course, was in picking on Miss Golinsky to tackle this time—quite a
girl, Miss Golinsky—and you know, that confirms a suspicion in my
mind. The only casing he did was looking for female names on the mail
slots. If he'd ever laid eyes on Miss Golinsky before he made the
attempt on her, he'd never have rung her doorbell."

Piggott laughed. "She sounds like an Amazon."

"I also think he must be a frustrated actor,"
said Mendoza. "Why, he had a beautiful setup without all that
elaborate bedtime story, Matt. All he'd have had to do was show up in
his uniform and say he was checking for gas leaks or something. What
honest citizen would be afraid of the stalwart young firefighter?"

"Too simple for him.
He got some of his kicks out of the approach," said Piggott, who
occasionally surprised Mendoza with unexpected imagination.

* * *

On Monday morning Higgins and Landers were just
leaving the office to hunt more heisters—there hadn't been a lab
report on the Eggers house yet, of course, and they had put Fuller in
Pending—when Lake beckoned Higgins as they passed the switchboard.
"Long distance for you."

Higgins went back to his desk and picked up the
phone.

"Sergeant Higgins."

"This is Chief Lombard, Stamford P.D.,"
said a heavy voice in his ear. "You'll be the LAPD man who sent
us some prints and a query about Robert Gillespie? Don't tell me
you've got him. What for? They're his prints all right. Have you got
him?"

"Only," said Higgins, "in a manner of
speaking. Why?"

"Because if you've got him we want him. For
murder."

"I'll be damned," said Higgins. "Now
we know. He's dead," and he told the chief what had happened to
Mr. Gillespie.

"That is really one for the books," said
Lombard. The distinctive New England accent rang a little strange on
Higgins' ear. "We'll never know the whole truth of the matter
now, but that winds up one of the queerest cases I've ever had, and
I've been on this force for thirty-two years."

"Who did he kill?"

"His wife. He had a hardware store here, just
another little humdrum medium-successful businessman. Set your clock
by him. Careful of money. Opened the store at nine six days a week,
closed at five—had a good many friends around town, he was born and
brought up here—member of Rotary and the Masons, went to church
every Sunday with his wife. She was the same kind—local girl. They
never had a family. She played bridge with other women, gave dinner
parties, taught a Sunday-school class. Once a year they went to the
Cape for a week on vacation. Married nearly thirty years, never any
sign of trouble between them. Then one day eight years ago he closed
up the store one Saturday night, went home and shot his wife through
the head, buried her in the back yard, packed a couple of bags and
vanished."

"I will be goddamned," said Higgins.

"By the time it came to light and we found
her—some of her friends wondering why she hadn't come to church,
wouldn't answer the phone—the trail was cold. We traced him to New
York, and for all the signs there were he might have gone to
Timbuctoo, or just rented a room in the Bowery as John Smith. We had
flyers out on him for quite a while, had him listed as wanted with
NCIC, but we never had a smell of him. The only thing we did know was
that he took a bundle of cash with him. Before he went home that day
he visited his bank and closed out his whole savings account—had a
hell of an argument with the manager because he asked for cash, but
he finally got it. The manager thought he was crazy, and then when
the store didn't open on Monday—and the ladies got talking—"