Streets of Death - Dell Shannon (12 page)

It wasn’t even very far away from headquarters, on
Budlong Avenue. Hackett and Higgins drove up there, in Higgins’ car
instead of the scarlet Barracuda in case they found him. It was an
old apartment building, and before they parked they spotted Titus
talking to a man in the driveway, so they went up to him and started
to inform him of his rights. The other man looked surprised and asked
what was going on.

"Who are you, anyway? What right you got to butt
in on a private deal? You want a piece of the action, you wait your
turn!"

"What deal?" asked Hackett.

"Oh, hell," said Titus. "How’d you
know I pulled anything?"

He had the haul from the liquor store neatly stacked
in his garage; the other fellow lived down the block and on being
offered a case of good whiskey at a quarter the retail price, wasn’t
about to ask questions. He was annoyed to miss out on the deal.

At this end of a day, Hackett and Higgins were not
disposed to waste time questioning Titus about the two pals who’d
pulled the job with him. They stashed him in jail; the warrant would
be through presently, and they’d ask him about his pals tomorrow.

Hackett called Mr. Wensink and told him most of the
liquor had been recovered, but it would be impounded as evidence;
he’d get it back eventually.

"Maybe not me,"
said Wensink. "I think I got a buyer for this place, and I’m
getting out. I’m getting too old to worry about heisters all the
time I’m open for business. I’m going to retire and move to the
country somewhere."

* * *

Higgins went home, and after kissing Mary and going
in to see Margaret Emily peacefully asleep in her crib, went back to
the garage to call Steve Dwyer in to dinner. "He’s been out in
that darkroom ever since he got home from school, and I know he’s
got homework," said Mary.

"I don’t know why in hell," Higgins said
to Steve, "you’re set on being a cop. Most boring job there is
a lot of the time."

"Not on the lab end," said Steve. "Gee,
isn’t the place peaceful without Laura at the piano all the time!"
Laura had permission to stay overnight with a girl friend. But dinner
wasn’t exactly restful, the Scottie Brucie bouncing under their
feet, and Steve anxious to get back to his photographic experiments.

"Just until nine o’clock," said Mary
firmly. "I’ll call you."

"Oh, Mother! It’s Friday night!"

"Well, nine-thirty."

"He may invent a new camera or something and
make us millionaires," said Higgins. "I don’t know why I
didn’t go in for the lab end. No brains, I guess. Sometimes I think
it rubs off on us, the stupid people we have to deal with."

"Now, George,"
said Mary.

* * *

Mendoza went home, still thinking about that snake,
and Mrs. MacTaggart greeted him at the door with relief.

"If you’d take them off my hands while I get
at the dinner, then--Alison’s better, she’s had a good long nap,
but I want to get that soufflé in."

"Daddy, come on--" Johnny pulling his arm
urgently--"I want to show you what we learned in school today--"

"Listen to me first, Daddy, I can say a new
poem--" Terry clinging to the other arm. The twins had been in
nursery school for three months and on the whole the effect was good;
they were speaking English--most of the time, at least. Mendoza kept
them occupied in the living room until Alison came in, looking more
like her usual self, when they erupted at her.

"
Mamacita
,
you listen to my new poem--" "It’s a silly poem, Mama, I
can do the Pledge of ’Legiance real good now--"

"The darlings," said Alison fondly when
Mairi had taken them off to their baths. "Yes, I’m
better--knock wood. And I’ve got something to show you, Luis. House
plans. Well, you can’t deny it, this will be too small when the
baby comes. And we ought to have more yard. Later on we might want a
pool--"

"¡Despacia!" said Mendoza. "I can see
you’re feeling better, plotting to spend more money."

There was fish for dinner,
and the cats sat on their feet under the table reminding them that
cats liked fish too. Cedric, who didn’t, went away in disgust and
brought in a dead bird from the backyard.

* * *

On Saturday morning Mendoza had just come in and said
good morning to Sergeant Farrell, who sat in for Lake on days off,
when an agitated voice said, "Oh, Sergeant Hackett!"
Mendoza turned to see Hackett behind him. "I had to come, I got
to make you listen--I tell you, they’re gonna kill that lady!
Honest to God they are! They were talkin’ about it again, I heard
’em!"

Hackett looked down at Mr. Yeager and wondered if the
man was slightly nuts. Hearing voices. "Now, look, Mr. Yeager--"

"No, you gotta listen to me, you gotta do
something! They’re goin' to murder her!" Yeager yanked at his
sleeve in excitement. "I heard ’em say so!"

"Where were you this time?" asked Hackett.
"Fixing the faucet in the kitchen? I’m sorry, Mr. Yeager, but
I just can’t believe--"

"You gotta listen to me!" Yeager looked
ready to cry. "I tell you, I heard ’em say so!"

"How?"

Yeager took a step back. "Well, I did. I did so.
I--the door was open, and him and his girl friend--"

Hackett had met his share of the nuts, and Yeager was
not unlike some he’d met, the ones with fixed ideas, mild
delusions. He wasn’t wasting time on figuring out this one, and
caught Farrell’s eye. He said gently, "Now look, Mr. Yeager, I
looked at this and there’s nothing to it. Suppose you go on home
and stop worrying about it." He brushed past as Farrell took
Yeager’s arm and started ushering him out. Grace and Conway had
just come in.

"What’s that about?" asked Mendoza.

"Nothing," said Hackett. "Makes you
wonder about Freud. He said he didn’t like these people, and I
suppose a confirmed Freudian would say he just wants to get them in
trouble. These Lamperts. I went and looked around a little, but
there’s nothing to it. Well, one like that Roy Titus might go
discussing a projected murder with the door open, but this Lampert
doesn’t seem to be working regular but seems to be on perfectly
good terms with his mother-- looks like a weak sister to me. I just
can’t see--I hope Yeager isn’t going to be a nuisance."

Mendoza went on into his office. Hackett collected
Higgins when he came in and they went up to the jail to  follow
up on Titus. Palliser roped Conway in with Landers to get back at the
legwork on Sandra. Galeano, Grace and Glasser were still there when
Scarne came in with some S.I.D. reports, and the autopsies came up
from Bainbridge’s office at the same time.

"So let’s see what we’ve got, boys,"
said Mendoza. He glanced over the autopsies first. "There you
are, the girl was raped and strangled. Short and sweet. Not,
obviously, where she was found." He handed the report to
Palliser, who’d just been leaving when Scarne came in. "What
did the lab get on her clothes and so on? ¡Condenación! Those
prints on the suitcase belong to Stephanie Peacock. Very helpful. And
that is that.
Nada absolutamente
.... Buford. Well, that gives us a little, not much. He died of a
skull fracture. The lab found blood and hair on the leg of a chair in
the house, hair his, blood his type. Inference, there was a scuffle
with somebody and he was knocked down and cracked his skull."

"The door wasn’t forced," said Grace. "He
must have let the somebody in."

"So it was somebody he knew."

"Somebody he’d just had a run-in with at that
bar, and the bartender knew it, but why the hell shouldn’t he tell
us? Unless--" Grace paused, looking thoughtful. "Well, I’d
like to know more about him, that’s all."

"Not even any surprises about the time of death.
Both Tuesday night. Sandra between seven and ten, Buford between ten
and midnight." Mendoza slapped the reports down. "Are you
sure enough about that Rank to ask for a search warrant on the house,
John?"

"No," said Palliser. "It’s
fifty-fifty. He could be X, but we’d never pin it down. If that
plane case was there, it isn’t now. But I get the impression--just
the impression--that his mother’s an honest woman, and she says he
doesn’t have a key to the house. It’s a double deadbolt. We can’t
really rely on Stephanie’s identification, anyway. I think we do it
from scratch, look at men with the right records and weed ’em out
by the general description. The right one might fall apart."

Mendoza shrugged. "There’s not much routine to
do on Buford, when the lab didn’t turn anything else. And nothing
says it had anything to do with that bar, Jase."

"No," admitted Grace. "But I’d like
to talk to some of the people there that night, hang around and meet
some of the regulars there. Only of course the owner knows me as a
cop. It’s a pity Tom was with me--he could wander in all innocent,
nobody ever takes him for a cop."

"Well--
¡vamos!
"
said Mendoza. "I’ve got a little idea myself. Oh, that
Chard--the anonymous call. I don’t suppose there’s anything in
it, but somebody might ask his wife if he’d had any trouble with
anyone lately. He was no loss, however he got taken off."

He sat there for a minute when the men had gone, his
mind wandering over Fleming, over the rapes, over the pretty boys.
Fleming--there wasn’t anything routine could do there. Carey had
done it. There’d been a search for a block around, not that there’d
be many places in that bare city block where a man could be hidden
away, and Fleming couldn’t have crawled much farther. Where the
hell was the man'?

The rapes. Very queer. It would do no harm to ask if
somebody at Juvenile had any ideas.

The pretty boys-- He roused himself, told Farrell to
get him the Mission Church, and found the younger priest there. There
would be a requiem Mass for Father O’Brien on Monday morning at ten
o’clock.

He got up and said to
Farrell, "I’ll be over in Juvenile if anybody wants me."

* * *

Roy Titus, aggrieved and surprised at having been
dropped on so quick, parted with the names of his two pals without
much persuasion--Floyd Sporler and Bob Bovers. They were both in
Records and Sporler was also still on parole, which made the whole
caper all the more stupid. Hackett and Higgins tried Sporler's
address first, and found both of them there, trying to get Titus on
the phone. They were just as surprised as he’d been, and asked how
the cops had found out it was them.

"You ever read detective stories, George?"
asked Hackett as they came out of the jail.

"Seldom."

"Fairy tales," said Hackett. "The
cunning intellectual criminals. I’ve never run across one yet."

They stopped for lunch at Federico’s and went back
to the office. Wanda Larsen was on her way out. She eyed Hackett’s
notebook and said firmly she was busy, it was her week to qualify at
the range. "I’m supposed to be a police officer, not just your
secretary, boys."

"So I’ll toss you for who types the report,"
said Higgins to Hackett, and won the throw. But as Hackett stripped
off his jacket and sat down, Duke came in with a fat manila envelope.

"Oh, good, I caught you. Understand you were out
on this. We’re still looking at some of the stuff there, blood
types and so on, but I thought you’d like to see this." He
opened the manila envelope and spread out a sheaf of glossy black and
white 8 by 10’s.

Hackett and Higgins looked at them without comment,
the mercilessly clear pictures of the carnage worked on the old lady,
her place in life. The twisted frail old body was frozen by the
camera, its grotesquely smashed-in face, the blood, the bruises, the
torn clothes. The little grocery store had been ransacked, cans and
packages thrown down from shelves, the cash register opened, but the
havoc there was nothing compared to that in the apartment upstairs.
They’d seen all this yesterday, after the lab men had been through
it; they looked at it again, in the photographs which were somehow
worse to look at--a curious effect of timeless photography. The tiny
living room with its ancient flowered rug, fat old furniture: the
smaller bedroom with its sagging double bed, skimpy carpet, high
chest of drawers and chair in golden oak--it had all been ruthlessly
torn apart, drawers flung out, upholstered furniture slashed to
ribbons, rugs pulled up, the mattress crisscrossed with knife-cuts
and off the bed.

"Hunting for the loot, we said at the time,"
said Higgins. "And it’s a toss-up whether it was somebody who
knew her reputation--if that was generally known--for keeping cash
around, or just somebody picking her at random. And no way to guess
what he got or didn’t."

"No," said Duke, "but there are
points. For one thing, you didn’t see the body near to--being good
little boys, keeping clear not to spoil evidence for us eagle-eyed
scientific types. It was pretty clear she hadn’t been dead long
when Weinstein found her. The blood was hardly dry. I think she’d
just come down to open the store--he said she was usually open by
seven-thirty--she was dressed, you notice. And a customer walked in
early. Sorry, we didn’t pick up any useful latents--the ones on the
register too smudged to be any good. But that says to me, when it
happened at that time, the odds are it was somebody who’d been
living or staying right around that neighborhood, recently. And in
the midst of all that mess, there was this."