Murder Most Strange (4 page)

"For what it's worth—" said Palliser.

"Wel1. I couldn't believe it, about Joe. Mr.
Moreno, fellow lives across from him and found him, he knew Joe and I
were friends, he called me after he called the cops. I was just,
well, flabbergasted. Joe! Who'd want to knife Joe, for Gossakes?
There's no sense to it at all. He wasn't even robbed—nine bucks and
some change on him, you said, didn't you? It just don't make no
sense. But I just got to thinking about what he said on Wednesday,
and that don't make no sense either but, I mean, there it is. Which
sounds sort of silly, but now this has happened, well, Joe wasn't no
fool."

"He told you about this on Wednesday,"
prompted Palliser.

" 'S right. Wednesday afternoon on his way home.
He said he thought this guy was following him, see. He noticed him
first at the library—Joe was a great one for Westerns, he went to
the library about once a week regular—and then he spotted him at
the market, and then, he said, be damned if the guy wasn't on the bus
when he started home. And seemed to be watching him sort of funny. I
thought he must be imagining things, though that wasn't like Joe. It
was probably just a coincidence, but—well, it's funny."

"Did he tell you what the fellow looked like?"
asked Hackett.

"He just said, a young fellow—blond, ordinary
clothes, ordinary sort of looks, nobody he ever recalled seeing
before. It sounds crazy—Joe just an ordinary guy, never did any
harm to anybody, nobody have any reason to—but now this happens, it
sort of sticks in my mind, y'know? But it is crazy. Somebody knifing
Joe. Mr. Moreno said he never heard a thing, after he heard Joe leave
about an hour before—and he would have, if Joe had had time to yell
or put up a fight—just there he was, all bloody and the bag of
groceries scattered around—" He shook his head. "Crazy.
Sergeant Palliser seems to think—"

"Well, it's interesting," said Palliser.

"So somebody had time to rob him," said
Mendoza.

"Yes, that's the point," said Palliser
absently. "A little off-beat."

"Well," said Hackett, "it may mean
something or not, but I can't see any connection with your Skid Row
derelict."

Palliser rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. "I never
said there was, Art. Except, funnily enough, there was a kind of
resemblance—they were both in the sixties, middle-sized, sandy
coloring—that's just coincidence. Hell, he could have imagined
this, but why should he?"

"But why in hell should anybody be shadowing
Joe?" asked Simms reasonably.

Palliser said, "Well, I'll get a statement typed
up for you to sign. God knows what it means, but we'll put it in the
record."

"Whatever you say. Just, after it happened, I
got to thinking about it, y'know." Simms sat back and looked
interestedly about the big office.

Higgins came in with another suspect heister to
question, and Hackett went to sit in on that, which was also
inconclusive. The suspect offered an alibi; he'd been at a big party
and a lot of people would say so. What that was worth was moot; he
had quite a long record, was four months on parole from a charge of
attempted homicide, and his associates were probably of the same ilk.
But they had to go through the motions. Hackett went out to start
checking while Higgins wrote the follow-up report.

Mendoza wandered down the hall to the coffee machine
about two forty-five; Grace and Landers were just coming in with
another possible suspect. "Nick and Henry are killing time down
in R. and I. waiting for those witnesses to pore over the mug shots,"
said Grace. "I think myself Mutt and Jeff are newcomers to the
crime scene—pair of morons, they'd have been dropped on before now,
and nobody's made them yet, and the lab did pick up some latents from
the register on that first job." His regular-featured
chocolate-brown face with its narrow mustache as neat as Mendoza's
registered amused annoyance. "It's a dull job lately—nothing
but these damn stupid heisters. To think anybody can still imagine
it's a glamorous exciting job—and when I think of all the offbeat
complex mysteries in the damn-fool detective novels—"

"Don't complain, or we may come in for a couple
of those," said Mendoza sardonically. He took his cup of coffee
back to his desk and sat looking out over the city view, ruminating
idly on Mr. Simms, and desultorily on the man with the Doberman.
There was no going anywhere on that, of course. When the new call
went down at three-thirty, everybody else was out or interrogating
suspects, and Mendoza went out on it with Higgins.

It was an old apartment building, about sixteen
units, on Vendome down from Beverly. The black-and-white squad was
sitting in front; mostly on the Central beat they ran two-man cars,
and Patrolman Zimmerman was at the entrance waiting for them, said
Gomez was upstairs securing the scene.

"Looks like some sort of O.D.," he told
them. "Maybe suicide. Hell of a thing, the little kid found her.
The daughter, kid about ten or eleven. She went to the neighbor, who
called us. Mrs. Werner, it's apartment fourteen—the corpse is next
door in sixteen. A Mrs. Marion Cooper."

It was a shabby old building, the rents probably
middling low. Up the uncarpeted stair and down a narrow dark hall
they came to Patrolman Gomez, massive in navy uniform, being
noncommittally polite to a plump middle-aged woman. "I don't
understand what you mean by an O.D.—why, she was just a young
woman, I know young people can have heart attacks too but—heavens,
it's just terrible to think of Harriet finding her like that. What
could have happened? . . ."

She'd had a shock, and the talk was compulsive, but
she looked like a normally sensible woman, plainly dressed, graying
dark hair.

"Mrs. Wemer," said Gomez, looking relieved
at the advent of Mendoza and Higgins. "These are the detectives,
ma'am."

"We'll want to talk to you shortly,"
Higgins told her.

"All right. I've got—I brought Harriet into my
place. It seemed— She's only eleven. I suppose we ought to call her
father. I just don't understand—I didn't know Mrs. Cooper very
well, but she was just a young woman, couldn't be much over thirty—"

"We'll get back to you," said Higgins. She
retreated into her own apartment, and Gomez edged the door of
apartment sixteen farther open with one toe.

"It looks like an 0.D. There doesn't seem to be
any suicide note."

Mendoza stopped inside the threshold and looked
around with distaste. Expectably, in an apartment of this vintage,
the walls needed painting, the furniture was old and dun-colored; but
the little living room hadn't been cleaned or straightened for some
time, there were clothes and dirty dishes on every surface in wild
disarray, and the place smelled stale and fusty. Past the living room
to the left was a glimpse of a small kitchen with just enough space
for a tiny square table and a couple of chairs at one end. In the
other direction a minute cross hall led directly to a small square
bathroom, a pair of equally small bedrooms to each side.

The body was in the bedroom on the left, quite
peacefully reposing in the bed. "The covers were all pulled up,"
said Gomez apologetically. "We had to see if she might still be
breathing, but——"

She looked to be about thirty, and no dead body is
beautiful but they could see that she'd been a pretty woman: a taffy
blonde, with a heart-shaped face, a small pouting mouth, and in the.
low-cut blue nylon nightgown her figure was curvaceous. She had died
easily and comfortably without struggle. One hand was curled up
around her head, a small plump hand with the nails painted dark red.
The bedroom was in disorder too, the top of the bureau and dressing
table heaped with miscellany, clothes on the one straight chair, the
foot of the double bed; the door to the little closet was open, and
that looked cluttered and untidy.

There was a little two-drawer nightstand at one side
of the bed; it held a small ceramic lamp with a ruffled shade, an
ashtray, and a used glass with a few dregs at the bottom.

Higgins bent over and took a sniff. "Scotch."

"And maybe something else," said Mendoza.
He looked at Gomez. "Get on the mike and rustle up a lab unit,
will you?" He went out of the bedroom, across the living room,
to the kitchen.

The sink was stacked with dirty dishes, but the
little table was oddly clean and empty. Standing at one edge of the
counter nearest the table was a pint bottle of a low-priced brand of
scotch; there was only about a jiggerful left in it.

"So," said Mendoza.

"Turn the lab loose on it. They'll give us all
we'll get on this."

"Maybe," said Mendoza. When they came out
to the hall, Gomez was coming back. He said a mobile unit was on the
way.

The door of the next apartment was ajar. Mendoza
tapped on it and went in. Mrs. Werner got up anxiously from a sagging
couch across the room. "Oh, have you found out anything? What
have you—"

"Are you the policemen?" asked a thin
little voice.

"Yes, that's right," said Mendoza.

"What—what happened to Mama?" She was a
nice-looking little girl, if not exactly pretty: thin and pale, with
dark-brown hair in a modified Dutch bob, and steady hazel-green eyes,
a straight little mouth.

"Our doctor will find out," said Mendoza.
He hesitated; questioning a child could be tricky; but she looked
back at him gravely and began to answer questions unasked.

"She never got up as early as me, I always get
my own breakfast. Her alarm's set for eight, so she can get the
nine-fifteen bus—she doesn't have to go to work till ten, see. So
I—I never saw her this morning—it wasn't till I got home from
school—I saw she was still—still in bed, and it was funny—"
Suddenly the square little chin quivered, and she clamped her jaw
tight. "I thought—I'd better ask somebody—if she was sick—"

"You did just right, honey," said Mrs.
Werner.

Mendoza sat down uninvited. "What about last
night, Harriet?" he asked gently. "Did your mother have a
friend come, or was she out somewhere? Or—"

"Oh, she was out. Like usual," said
Harriet. She sounded surprised that he hadn't known that. "She
went out most nights, someplace where there were people to talk to,
and TV. Barney's, or the Ace-High Bar, mostly. I was asleep when she
came home, I usually am. I didn't hear her come home, but this
morning I saw—I saw she was in bed—just like usual, and—"
She swallowed. "Please," she said, "she's—she's
dead, isn't she?"

Nobody said anything until Mrs. Werner got out
stiffly, "Yes, honey, I'm afraid she is."

"I thought—prob'ly she was," said
Harriet. A tear rolled down one cheek, and she sniffed valiantly. "I
suppose—somebody'd better call Daddy. I mean Grandma. Daddy'll be
at work, but Grandma's usually home."

Mrs. Werner, who had sat down again, got up with
sudden decision and said to Harriet, "Yes, we'll do that in just
a minute. I just want to talk to the officers a little while, you
stay here, honey." She led them out to the hall, and shut the
door behind them, went down the hall. She had a rather sheeplike
face, and continually reached to push overlarge fashionable
spectacles up on her nose, but her eyes were unexpectedly
intelligent. "Now I don't know anything about this," she
told them uncompromisingly, "but I guess neither do you yet, and
I might as well tell you what I do know about Mrs. Cooper."

"Yes, Mrs. Werner?" Mendoza waited
interestedly.

"Which isn't all that much, but a woman can read
another woman, you take me. That's a nice little girl in there, nicer
than you'd expect a woman like that to have. But I don't think there
was any harm in her—she was just flighty. Sort of, you know,
irresponsible. She held a job—she was a waitress at a coffee shop
on Beverly," and she named it. "I've only been in her place
a time or two, we didn't neighbor, but you could see she was a
terrible housekeeper—dressed her- self up like a bandbox, but that
was as far as it went. And she left Harriet alone a lot too much,
even when she first moved here four years ago when Harriet was just a
little thing. She was divorced from Harriet's father, he has her on
weekends, I only met him once but he seems like a real nice steady
fellow."

"I see," said Mendoza.

"She didn't die of anything natural, did she?"
she asked shrewdly. "Well, all I'll say is, I don't think there
was any harm in her. She didn't throw wild parties, or bring men
home, or get drunk or anything. I was sorry for the little girl, she
wasn't any kind of mother to her, but that's the worst anybody could
say."

"Thanks very much," said Mendoza.

"I suppose somebody had better phone the father.
I mean, she can't be left alone, and he always has her weekends—"

Mendoza and Higgins consulted mutely and shrugged at
each other. That certainly made more sense than taking the child to
Juvenile Hall. They went back to the Cooper apartment and found Duke
and Scarne just finishing the photography. There was an address book
beside the phone in the living room, and Duke told them to keep their
paws off it, nothing had been printed yet. "Preserve calm,"
said Mendoza, and used his pen to turn the pages. There was a number
for Dan listed under the C's. "Disorganized females." He
went back to the apartment next door.