Streets of Death - Dell Shannon (13 page)

His blunt forefinger came down on one photograph, of
the front part of the store. Just beside the front door, a small
crumpled object lay on the floor. He removed that photograph and
substituted a close-up. The object now showed as a crumpled empty
package that had once held cigarettes--Camels.

"Big deal," said Hackett.

"Oh, but you haven’t seen this," said
Duke. He pulled out another close-up. This one looked as if it had
been made under a microscope: the finest details of the little
package showed up clear and clean. They could see where it had been
torn open from one end across the top, and the blue seal or part of
it left, and another seal superimposed.

"By God!" said Higgins. "By
God--eagle-eyed, you’re damn right."

The little seal, torn across, still showed part of a
stamp with black letters. PDL TN px.

"That’s beautiful, Duke," said Hackett.
"Pendleton Air Force Base PX. It can’t be anything else."

"Narrows it down to whatever personnel has
access to the post exchange and wasn’t there yesterday morning,"
said Higgins. "Or come to think, was this thing here when he
walked in? What says he dropped it?"

"Don’t nitpick, George," said Hackett. "I
like it. It’s a damned good lead if you ask me. And it makes a
picture-- him tearing the place to pieces hunting for the loot, after
he’d killed her, and then--whatever he got or didn’t get--just as
he walked out, lighting the last cigarette in the package. That’s
nice work, Duke."

"I thought you’d
like it," said Duke complacently.

* * *

"It just occurred to me," said Mendoza to
Captain Loomis of Juvenile Division, "on these rape cases we’ve
got--the description the women gave us, just a kid. About fifteen. He
won’t be in any records complete with mug-shot at that age, but if
he’s out on this caper that young, it could be he’d given the
warning rattle some way before and got into your records."

"
That’s the hell of a thing," said
Loomis. "Rape, at that age? Well, it does happen. We get ’em
in here at four and five, budding pros at burglary and you name
it--but we can’t take pictures either, Mendoza. These days, we’re
just a sociological counseling service. Let’s hear that description
again. Well, it doesn’t ring a bell with me, but let’s ask
Melinda and Betty." He opened the office door and beckoned.
"Both damn good officers, and they’ve been here six-seven
years, they might have some idea."

Melinda and Betty, both trim in uniform, were
respectively black and white, and efficient. They listened to the
description, consulted with each other, and Melinda asked, "If
he has been in trouble before, Lieutenant, would you have any idea
what kind?"

"Not a clue. I only thought he might have been
in little trouble before he graduated to big."

"Peter Ricksey?" said Betty to Melinda.
"He’d be about fifteen, and he’s baby-faced. The last time
we had him in was eighteen months ago, for beating up the other kids
for their lunch money. He’d fit the description."

"He doesn’t sound like the nice polite
youngster our victims say he is," Mendoza said with a grin.
"Could he act it?"

Betty laughed. "I wouldn’t think so. He’s
completely illiterate, and not very polite by nature. I just can’t
think of any boy to fit that description, Lieutenant."

"It was just an idea.
For all we know, he’s never so much as stolen a nickel from Mama’s
purse," said Mendoza. "But you can see, there’s no way to
look for him, damn it. Well, thanks anyway."

* * *

Palliser, Conway and Landers came up with nine men
out of Records to hunt for, by a process of weeding out the ones with
suggestive records who lived or had lived on the Central beat and
looked something like the Harry Stephanie had described. They went
out looking for them, without any conspicuous success.

Hackett got on the phone to Pendleton Air Force Base,
and a cooperative sergeant began feeding him long lists of base
personnel, military, who had been on leave or otherwise off base
yesterday. It was a frighteningly long list. And of course the
nonmilitary personnel resident there or having business there could
patronize the PX too. Hackett I began to feel less enthusiastic about
that little clue.

Altogether, Saturday was
an unproductive day.

* * *

Saturday night was always busy for Traffic, sometimes
for the night watch at Robbery-Homicide; it varied. Tonight they
didn’t get a call for some time, and Shogart amused himself by
listening to the Traffic calls--drunk drivers, drunks on the street,
speeders, accidents, one high-speed pursuit.

"Makes you feel kind of safe here, out of all
that mayhem," said Schenke, and the desk buzzed them. There was
a body reported by Traffic.

Piggott went out on it with Shogart. It was an
all-night restaurant on Alvarado, a chain place with a good
reputation. The black and white was at the curb, and inside they
found Patrolman Bill Moss and some excited, bewildered people. It was
just nine-thirty, the place wasn’t crowded, but the short-order
cook and two busboys had come out to add to the crowd.

"But, my God, he’s just a young guy! It
could’ve been a heart attack, anybody can have one, but my God--"

"The night manager, Fred Mallow," said
Moss. "He can identify him."

"Identify him!" Mallow was tall and thin,
flapping his arms all around. "His name’s Donald Ames, he’s
only twenty-three, twenty-four, he works at the tow service down the
street, always comes in here middle of the evening for a sandwich. A
nice young guy, quiet, I just can’t get over this! I can’t
believe it! Sitting there in a booth, like always, waiting for
Beatrice to bring his sandwich, and all of a sudden he falls on the
floor, and I rush over, and he’s dead! Dead! I can’t believe
it--"

Shogart was squatting over the body, which lay
stretched out awkwardly between the rows of booths. Ames was a
good-looking young man, dark hair cut short; he had on a white
jumpsuit with red stitching over the breast pocket: Dick’s Tow
Service. Shogart stood up and sniffed, getting out his handkerchief;
a minute red stain came off his fingers. "He was stabbed,’°
he said. "Thin blade, right in the heart I’d say. Hardly any
blood."

Moss looked surprised; Mallow was incredulous.
"Stabbed?" he said. "Why, that’s impossible! That’s
just ridiculous! Nobody came near him! It’s early, we’re not
crowded--you can see, only one couple in a booth, six-seven people at
the counter--and he walked in here perfectly O.K., looked just the
same as usual, he says to Beatrice, fix me the usual--which is a
Reuben sandwich with coleslaw on the side--and he goes into the rest
room and comes out again and sits in the booth and lights a
cigarette. There wasn’t anybody in ten feet of him! Nobody could
have stabbed him!"

"I can’t help that," said Shogart. "He
was knifed." He looked around at the little crowd. "Were
you all here when he came in? Then we’d better take all your names
and addresses, please."

It took a while; there were ten men and four women,
including the restaurant staff. Five people definitely confirmed that
not a soul had approached Ames as he sat in the booth, so there
wasn’t much point in calling out S.I.D. to process the place. It
was just another offbeat thing.

Piggott searched the body and came up with I.D.--an
address in Hollywood. Let the day watch break the news and try to
figure out what had happened to him.

They got back to the office at eleven-thirty, and
Schenke told them what they’d missed. Roger Perryman, seventy-nine,
on the way from the movies to his rented room on Elden Place--his
weekly night out. Jumped and beaten up by the thugs. They’d got a
dollar and eighty-four cents, left out of his Social Security. Mr.
Perryman had been lucky; they hadn’t roughed him up much when a
squad car came round the corner and they ran off. There were three of
them, he said, one with long blond hair and real sporty clothes, he
remembered a plaid jacket.

"My God, those
punks," said Shogart.

* * *

On Sunday morning, Galeano went to early Mass for the
first time in years. He hardly knew why he did; he’d got out of the
habit, since moving out here away from the family. He went to the
nearest church downtown, the old Mission Church, and was surprised
and oddly embarrassed to spot Mendoza there, in one of the back pews.
He slipped hurriedly out afterward.

And, mulling over Carey’s report in his mind, he
hadn’t got any further about Fleming at all. The other tenants in
that building--could there be anything there? Carey had seen them
all, and to anyone who knew city people, the results were
understandable. That, said Carey, was a place to sleep. There was
only one couple, the Del Sardos, people in their fifties, both
working. Offerdahl. An old maid in one ground-floor unit, out all day
at a job. Two men, Lathrop and Harrigan, both bachelors, also out at
jobs. And the Flemings. And the Flemings had only been there a couple
of months--the others didn’t know much about them, or care. It
wasn’t the kind of place, they weren’t the kind of people, for
fraternizing.

Like Mendoza, Galeano told himself that Carey had
looked: there had been a thorough physical search for the man all up
and down that block. Carey the cynic, looking for the boyfriend, had
looked at the single men Lathrop and Harrigan. Lathrop, he said, was
a fag: hung out at a known fag joint uptown. Harrigan had a steady
girl friend he was practically living with.

They said she was homesick. No close friends. She
wrote her family all the time. Galeano wondered--he had sisters, but
he didn’t know about females--if she’d have written home about a
boyfriend; he rather thought not, but you never knew. But there’d
be no way to get at those letters.

Whatever else you could say about Carey, he was a
competent man at his job. So far as the physical evidence went.

Galeano parked in front of the apartment and looked
at the terrain. The empty house: Carey’s men had searched the yard,
all the yards down the block. The newer apartment on the other side
was a bare box of a place. The half block behind, just cleared for a
new building, was nothing but raw earth.

But it wasn’t just a physical problem.

He got out of the car, climbed the stairs and rang
Marta’s bell. It buzzed emptily at him. She wasn’t home.

After a moment he turned and pushed the bell across
the hall.

The door was opened by a little perky-looking
gray-haired woman. He had read all the statements, and somehow he had
pictured Mrs. Del Sardo as buxom and dark. He showed her the badge.

"Oh," she said, "cops again. That
really is a funny thing, isn’t it? I’ve got a theory about it."
He saw that her slate-colored eyes were shallow and foolish. "I
think he was a fake, not a cripple at all. They were going to sue
somebody, he was just pretending to be paralyzed."

Galeano stared at her. "I’m afraid that
wasn’t--"

"You can’t trust doctors, they’ll say
anything," she told him. "And if you ask me Mrs. Fleming is
a real sly one. Look at the way she made sure I saw them together
that morning, her saying good-bye and him in the chair there--"

"You usually leave the same time?" asked
Galeano. "It wasn’t the first morning you’d seen her leave
when you came out too?"

"Well, no, but now I think about it-- And then
all the fuss and excitement that afternoon-- And it wasn’t till
later I found out from one of the cops, she said she came home at
five that day, and it was earlier, and the more I think about it I
think there was some kind of plan that maybe went wrong, to cheat an
insurance company or something. I thought--"

Galeano fastened on the one thing she’d said. "What
do you mean, it wasn’t five when she came home?"

"Well, it wasn’t. I came home early that day,
I know the day because of all the fuss and the cops. I was coming
down with a cold, I felt terrible, and the boss said take the
afternoon off. So I did, and this place isn’t exactly the Rock of
Gibraltar"--she laughed--"you can hear neighbors. That
Offerdahl! He was never so bad as this before. Anyway, she--Mrs.
Fleming--she came home just after I did. I heard her running up the
stairs like she always does. Call it two-thirty. And a minute after,
down she goes again. So I guess he was all right then, or she was
pretending he was. If you ask me he always was all right, prob’ly
he’s just lying low somewheres. Like I say--"

And what the hell was this? Galeano’s mind felt
numb. And she added suddenly, "Oh, you got to excuse me, I want
to make the eleven o’clock Mass--" She rushed around in her
living room (scarcely as neat and clean as Marta’s counterpart
across the hall) gathering up purse, coat, prayer book; she rushed
out past him.

He stood there thinking about what she’d said.
Marta had come home at two-thirty that day. The rest of it was silly,
but--

He turned to go down the stairs and faced a
nice-looking fresh-faced high-school-aged kid just coming up. The kid
passed him and rang the bell of Marta’s apartment.
 

SIX

"MRS. FLEMING’S NOT HOME," said Galeano.