Streets of Death - Dell Shannon

Streets of Death

Dell Shannon
1976

Our Playwright may show
In some fifth act what
this wild drama means
---The Play, Alfred,
Lord Tennyson
 
 
 
 

ONE

MENDOZA CAME INT0 THE KITCHEN, hat in hand, and
asked, "Feeling better,
cara
?"
Mrs. MacTaggart was just starting on the breakfast dishes. Alison was
hunched over a cup of coffee at the kitchen table, her red hair
slightly tousled, still in her robe. She gave him a glance of burning
resentment.

"Ah, she’ll be fine," said Mrs.
MacTaggart.

"
If I had ever," said Alison,
"dreamed--hic--after I felt so fine all the time I was carrying
the twins, that--hic--this time I’d develop morning sickness, I’d
never have--damn--" She leaped up and fled precipitately for the
bathroom at the end of the hall.

"Poor lamb," said Mrs. MacTaggart. "But
she’s near three months along now, it should clear away in a bit."

"I certainly hope so," said Mendoza. "I’m
beginning to feel like an outcast around here, Máiri." Mrs.
MacTaggart laughed as he went out the back door.

The four cats were sensibly indoors this chill
January morning, but the twins, now officially four, were tearing
around the backyard with Cedric the Old English sheepdog galumphing
after them. They both hung on to his collar helpfully as Mendoza went
out the gate, and then hung over the fence to watch him back out the
Ferrari. He waved back at them, thanking God absently for M
á
iri
MacTaggart; Terry and Johnny were a lively pair these days, none the
worse for their accidental kidnapping last August, and in her present
state Alison wasn’t up to coping with them. He wasn’t worried
about Alison; the doctor said she’d be fine once she got past the
morning sickness. He hoped he wasn’t beginning to feel his age,
with a forty-sixth birthday coming up, but he felt a little stale and
tired as he slid down the winding road toward Hollywood Boulevard,
thinking of the various business on hand at the Robbery-Homicide
office of LAPD headquarters. The perennial violence, death, blood and
guilt which had to be looked at and reduced to reports and filed
away. Always more of it coming along, seemingly faster and more
furious than ever. Of all the cases on hand right now, still being
looked at or eventually to be filed in Pending, only two really
interested him, and there didn’t seem to be much chance that either
would be tidily cleared up soon. There was no handle at all on those
queer rape-assaults, and as for the pretty boys--

Mendoza’s mouth tightened, thinking of the pretty
boys. Those three he’d like to catch up to, but there wasn’t any
handle there either.

For once he was early; it was five to eight when he
walked into the office, and found Sergeant Lake talking to an
agitated-looking citizen in the anteroom. In the communal sergeants’
office Hackett, Landers and Palliser were in; Wednesday was Higgins’
day off and the others would be drifting in. He went on into his
office and found the report from the night watch centered on his
desk. Lake followed him.

"Look, this guy was waiting when I got here,"
he said. "I don’t think it’s anything, but I suppose
somebody’s got to listen to him."

"About what?"

"He says, about a murder going to be committed.
I think he’s just got an imagination," said Lake.

"Shove him off on Art. You’d better check with
the hospital and see if that Beaver woman can talk to us."

Mendoza picked up the report in one hand and his new
cigarette lighter with the other, and Lake took a step back, eyeing
it nervously.

"Shove who off on me?" Hackett came in,
looming bulkily as usual, and added, "If you don’t set fire to
the building with that flame-thrower you’ll at least singe your
mustache off some day. Where Alison found that thing--"

Mendoza regarded it rather fondly; he liked gadgets.
It had been a Christmas present from Alison; it was an oversize
revolver with a gleaming pearl handle and a fearsome-looking
attachment on the barrel which emitted a flame like an acetylene
torch when the trigger was pulled. He pulled it now, the flame
belched, and he lit a cigarette.

"Jimmy has a nut-case," he said. "But
we have to listen to the citizens." Galeano and Conway came down
the hall talking. Lake went back to the switchboard. Mendoza was
glancing at the night report, and suddenly sat up and exclaimed,
"
¡Mil rayos. ;Es el colmo!
"

"What’s up?"

"This damned--I’ll bet you, here they are
again!" said Mendoza angrily, slapping Shogart’s report down
on his desk. "Same M.O., same general area, and for God’s
sake--I’d better check with the hospital--Jimmy!"

Hackett scanned the report rapidly, and his eyes
turned cold. "Our pretty boys all right, a hundred to one."

Over the last two months, the trio had been
described, well enough to mark them as the same, by seven senior
citizens who had been attacked, mauled and robbed on the street. None
of them had had much to be robbed of; the biggest haul the thugs had
got had been seven bucks. Two of the victims were still in the
hospital. All the attacks had been in a radius of eight blocks, from
Temple Street up to Beverly, and from the partial descriptions the
men at Robbery-Homicide had pieced together a picture of the same
three louts. All young, probably under twenty, one with long blond
hair--"real handsome," said three of the victims--tall and
thin, and dressed in natty sports clothes: two others, not as tall,
one heavier than the other, also dressed in flashy clothes--an oddity
for the area. And for whatever reason or lack of reason, they had
used the wanton violence on the old people they had jumped: kicking,
gouging, and clubbing. To date there had been four women, the
youngest seventy, and three men, all over eighty: old people living
little quiet lives in the inner city, on pensions, on Social
Security, all but one of them living alone in tiny apartments, rented
rooms.

And now this report, devoid of description, but
Hackett would take a bet it was the eighth victim: found on the
street by a Traffic unit at nine-twenty, just up from the Union
Station behind the church at the Plaza, an elderly man in clerical
clothes, no I.D., apparently beaten. He was in Central Receiving.

Mendoza was on the phone, looking grim. Sergeant Lake
came in again and said plaintively, "Look, this guy is about to
have kittens."

"All right, all right, I’ll talk to him,"
said Hackett.

Mendoza put down the phone and stood up abruptly,
yanking down his cuffs. As usual he was dapperly dressed, in
dark-gray Dacron, snowy shirt, a discreet dark tie. He said, "Well,
the hospital’s found out who he is--he came to a while ago. It’s
Father O’Brien from the Mission Church."

"I will be damned," said Hackett.

"No, they will be," said Mendoza. "By
the good God, Art, I’d like to get this unholy trio. I’m going
over to see if he can give us anything."

"They wouldn’t have got much from him either,
I wouldn’t think."

"They don’t seem to care. You go talk to the
nut. And somebody’ll have to cover that Roundtree inquest."
Mendoza took up his hat.

In the corridor, Henry Glasser was talking earnestly
to their policewoman Wanda Larsen; Jason Grace had just come in.
Palliser was on the phone in the other office, Galeano swearing as he
typed a report, Conway and Landers arguing about something. The
switchboard was keeping Lake busy. Another day was under way for the
Robbery-Homicide office, and it looked as if it was to be the usual
kind of day.

Hackett watched Mendoza out, and massaged his jaw,
grinning a little to himself, humorlessly. Mendoza was as touchy as
the devil about emotions, and nobody in the office made any cracks
about his going back to church after many years as the professed
agnostic; for some reason the pretty boys had got under Mendoza’s
skin anyway, but now that they’d jumped a priest he was really
annoyed. It would be nice to get hold of some tangible lead to those
boys, but Hackett didn’t really hope for one.

He put the report on Mendoza’s desk and went out to
look at Jimmy’s nut-case. As he came into the anteroom he ran into
Lieutenant Carey, who had a manila envelope in one hand and was
looking harassed.

"If you’ve got anything for us, go away. We’ve
got enough to do already."

"I can’t help it," said Carey. "It’s
a hundred percent sure this guy is dead. It’s a homicide if not
Murder One, so it’s your business. I’ve got all these
statements--"

"Tell it to Galeano or Landers," said
Hackett resignedly.

"This is Sergeant Hackett, Mr. Yeager,"
Lake was saying. "You just tell your story to him."

"Yeah, yeah, I got to tell somebody, you got to
do something about it, I been up half the night worrying and I said
to myself, I got to tell the cops, we got to do something, see, and
so I came--"

"
Just come in here and sit down, Mr. Yeager,"
said Hackett soothingly. Yeager might be a nut at that. He was a
scrawny middle-aged man in a shabby brown suit; he had a prominent
Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down as he talked, and bulging
pale-blue eyes, and a high reedy voice. Hackett settled him in the
chair beside his desk and prepared to listen. There were other things
he could be doing. That Beaver woman who’d been assaulted and raped
ought to be able to answer questions sometime today; there was that
inquest--a straightforward suicide; there’d been other things on
the night-watch report, by the length of it, and without much doubt
something new would show up today. But cops got paid by taxpayers,
and had to listen to them when they came in. "What’s it all
about, Mr. Yeager?" he asked.

"Well, it’s about a murder," said Yeager
nervously. "I didn’t hardly know what to do, but my God, I got
to do something--I been worried to death--I didn’t hardly believe
it but I-- Listen, I don’t like the guy, he’s given me a hard
time, and his ma too, always complainin’ about the furnace makin’
noise and the faucets drip and like that, but my God, I never thought
he’d do a thing like that! A murder!"

"Now slow down and let’s have it from the
beginning," said Hackett patiently. "What murder?"

"His own ma, for God’s sake! They live
together, see, and I’m the manager of the apartment. This lady,
Mis’ Lampert, she’s a widow, no other kids, and he’s a young
guy but he don’t work, she does. At a dress shop someplace. And
he’s got a girl friend comes to see him afternoons, and I heard ’em
talk about killing the old lady to get her money." Yeager
paused, breathing hard.

"Heard them? How? Where were they?"

"Uh--in the apartment," said Yeager
uneasily. "Uh--the door was kind of open and I was fixing the
window in the ha1l."

Hackett sat back and his chair creaked. "Well,
now, people do some funny things, Mr. Yeager, but it’s a little
hard to believe this pair would go discussing a murder with the door
open and other people around. Are you sure you didn’t just
misunderstand something they said?"

"No, I didn’t! They was talking about killing
her!" said Yeager excitedly. "Listen, you got to do
something about it--"

Hackett sighed. Across the
room he saw Carey gesticulating at Galeano and Conway, and Palliser
was still on the phone. Landers was on the way out, and Jason Grace
typing a report. "Now, Mr. Yeager--"

* * *

Mendoza bent over the hospital bed. "He’s only
been conscious the once," said the nurse. "It’s a bad
concussion, they’d have operated already except for his heart. When
we got in touch with his own doctor--"

"Can you hear me, Father? Can you try to tell us
who did this?" Three mornings ago, Mendoza had listened to the
old priest say Mass at the little church in the old Plaza: a very
traditional Mass, nothing new and progressive about Father Joseph
Patrick O’Brien. He was probably in his eighties: a stocky, round
little man with a broad snub-nosed Irish face, scanty hair and
eyebrows. He lay on his back, his breathing slow and irregular, and
Mendoza straightened up.

"The doctors don’t think there’s a good
chance," said the nurse in a troubled tone. She was slim and
black and rather pretty. "It’s just terrible what goes on, a
priest, and such an old man--just terrible."