Streets of Death - Dell Shannon (16 page)

"I don’t know where," said Sergeant Lake.
"The autopsies are in on that bum on the Row and somebody named
Altmeyer. And we just had a new one go down--you can take it."

"Oh, hell," said Galeano. But the habit of
routine was strong in him, after fifteen years on this force, and he
took down the address and went.

It was an apartment over on Commonwealth, and there
was a red truck outside: the paramedics from the Fire Department.
They were both leaning on the truck, one smoking, waiting for him.
"She was D.O.A. when we got here," said one of them, "but
we went through the gestures. O.D. of some kind, just at a guess
sleeping tablets--the mother had some, and says the bottle was nearly
full. She left a suicide note, the girl." He spat aside. "Makes
you wonder, only twenty. Life can be trouble and worry and work, but
never a bore, hah?"

"You’ve got a point," said Galeano.
"Where is it?"

"Upstairs, right."

It was a nice apartment, old but good furniture,
everything neat except in the bedroom where the body was. There, the
paramedics had created disorder, getting her off the bed to work on
her. Galeano was gentle with the silent gray-haired little woman who
said stiffly she was Mrs. Olson, it was her daughter Nella.

He looked at the body and like the paramedic he
wondered. Nella Olson had been twenty, and pretty: a true blonde,
neat small features, a nice figure. She’d put on a fancy pink nylon
nightgown to die in. There was the suicide note, in a finicky small
handwriting in green ink.

Dear Mama, please don’t think I am not
aware of what I’m doing. It’s just that when I know how much more
beautiful it is over on the other side, I would rather be there than
here. Daddy and I, and Grandma and all of them will eagerly await
your coming. Your loving Nella.

Galeano said, "I’ll have to take this for the
inquest, Mrs. Olson. Do you know what she meant by this? About the
other side, and--"

Mrs. Olson said fiercely, "It’s all them
wicked books she was always reading! There oughta be a law against
people writing such awful books! Always bringin’ home another one
from the public liberry, and even bought ’em she did, good money
spent on all them wicked books!" She pointed with a trembling
finger. "As the Lord’s my judge, if she hadn’t read all them
awful books, she’d be alive this minute. They oughta put all them
writers in jail."

Galeano looked. There was a bookcase under the
window, with a good many books in it. Pornography? He bent to look.
Hidden Channels of the Mind, Human Personality
and Its Survival of Bodily Death, Noted Witnesses for Psychic
Occurrences, Life After Death, You Do Survive Death, a lot of
paperbacks, True Experiences with Ghosts, Communications with the
Dead, Telephone Between Worlds, Strange Spirits, Voices From Beyond
.
Galeano didn’t know much about this kind of thing, but he
recognized one name on several books: Rhine. Respected scientist, he
remembered from an article somewhere, not a crackpot.

"All them stories about dead people!" said
Mrs. Olson with a sob.

"You don’t believe in any, er, afterlife?"
asked Galeano, somewhat at a loss.

"Don’t you call me no heathen! Good people get
to heaven and the rest go to the bad place, but if the Lord’d
wanted us to know what heaven was like He’d have put it in the
Bible," she said loudly. "Al1 that about dead people
talking and it don’t make any difference what church you go to and
all--it’s--it’s unsettling, that’s what, and if she’d never
read all them books--"

Galeano might have found
it funny, some other day; as it was, he got down names and facts for
a formal report, and went back to base to type it up.

* * *

Mendoza attended the requiem Mass for O’Brien. He
was feeling unaccountably annoyed at Carey, who had foreseen
everything. That idle thought about Rappaport as Marta Fleming’s
hypothetical boyfriend had now been squashed. Looking back through
Carey’s voluminous reports, he had found that Carey had already
thought of it. Rappaport had a good-looking wife he seemed to be
crazy about, and a new house with somewhat astronomical payments. He
hadn’t been straying from home.

And Marta Fleming was really no
femme
fatale
. A boyfriend there very likely was,
but where was he? Mendoza had also looked at Jack Frost, and
discovered that Frost had for six months been working such odd hours
at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital that it was unlikely he had time to
be anybody’s boyfriend.

He went up to Federico’s for lunch and got back to
the office about one-thirty. "Tom wants to see you," said
Lake. "He just came in."

"About Sandra," said Landers, hearing him
and coming out of the communal office. "I think John’s
woolgathering. We’ve got this perfectly good hot suspect, this
Rank--the Peacock girl picked him, and he’s got the right record.
It’s a waste of time to--"

Lake swung around from the switchboard. "You’ve
got another rape-assault, in the series, it sounds like. Just an
attempt--but what Traffic says, it was the same one."

"
¡Pues
vamonos ya!
" said Mendoza. "Let’s
go! What’s the address, Jimmy?"

* * *

Like all the other women, she was respectable and
matronly: large-bosomed, elderly, slate-colored, indignant. The squad
car was still there but they hadn’t called an ambulance; she wasn’t
really hurt. But the men riding the black and whites were briefed on
this and that the plainclothes divisions were working, and an alert
patrolman had recognized the description.

Her name was Mrs. Alice Drews. "Hurt?" she
said, sitting very erect in an awesomely flowered armchair in her
crowded living room. "I didn’t take no hurt, after forty years
with a man got mean in drink, many’s the time I wiped the floor
with him, let him know who’s boss. I was just a bit surprised, you
might say. This little bitty boy asking to cut my grass, real polite
he acted, and then askin' for a drink, and bringin’ out that
knife--but I just lowered the boom on him, little kid like that, and
he skedaddled. Only I figured, him tryin’ a thing like that, police
ought to hear."

"If you could give us a description--" And
it would be the same one, unproductive.

"
I surely can. It was kind of queer, when I
first laid eyes on him I thought to myself, that looks like the
Perkins boy from down where I useta live on Stanford Street. I moved
here a year or two back, hadn’t seen that kid since, but this one
surely looked like that Perkins boy," said Mrs. Drews. "But
what I recall, he didn’t act like him!" She chuckled richly.
"That Joey Perkins, he was sure-enough a piddlin’ no-account
youngster."
 

SEVEN

"AND WHAT ELSE did I say?" demanded
Mendoza. "Only if by some millionth chance one of the women
spotted him on the street--I will be eternally damned!"

"You didn’t say it was, you said it could be,
Mrs. Drews," said Landers dampeningly. "Stanford Avenue,
that's not very far from here."

"My Lord, you don’t think it was that boy? I
didn’t know the family real good, but they seemed like honest
folks, it don’t seem likely--not but what that wasn’t the first
thing crossed my mind when I saw him--"

She didn’t know the address, only the block.
Mendoza called in to see what help was available, and Grace was
there, said he’d meet them. It was the first lead of any kind
they’d had on this, and while it was a very thin one, Mendoza was
hot to follow it up.

The block on Stanford was a staid and drab
middle-class block, mostly of old single homes reasonably well
maintained, and a long block. Mendoza started at one end, Landers and
Grace at the other; after ringing four doorbells without any
result--two eliciting no response and two a couple of housewives who
didn’t know the Perkinses--Mendoza came out to the sidewalk to see
Grace beckoning down the street. They hurried to join him.

"Here we are," said Grace. "This is
Mrs. Perkins." He was on the doorstep of a big old white frame
place, four doors in from the corner.

"But what do you want?" she asked. "You
said you’re police? We’re ordinary honest folk, never anything to
do with the police--" She looked it: she was a thin yellow-brown
woman, decently clad in a blue cotton dress, thick stockings; the
living room behind her looked clean and neat.

"It’s about your boy Joey, ma’am," said
Grace.

"Joey?" The bewilderment grew in her round
eyes.

"Joey? You’re not trying to tell me Joey’s
in some kind of trouble? Why, I never had the least worry in the
world with Joey--I worried like sin over the others, running around
like they did, Johnny wild as a hawk when he was a kid, and the
girls--but Joey, never any cause to worry over him, quiet and good
like he is. Why, since my husband got killed last year, Joey’s kind
of been man of the family, last one at home--you aren’t telling
me--"

"We don’t know, Mrs. Perkins, we’d like to
talk to him," said Grace gently. "Is he home?"

"I reckon I heard him come in just a while
ago--"

Reluctantly she turned and called. "What do you
think he did, for the Lord’s sake?"

Grace just shook his head. "Joey!" she
called again. "You come here, boy--some gentlemen want to see
you. I’m sure you’re wrong, sir--Joey’s a good boy, he’s had
a good Christian raising."

They waited. In a moment there was a shuffling light
footstep along the hall, and a boy came up beside her, head down. He
might be fourteen, not a very big fourteen. "Let’s have a look
at you, Joey," said Grace in his soft friendly voice, and slowly
the boy raised his head.

"Why, Joey!" said his mother. "What
you been up to, getting all marked up like that?" He had a big
darkening bruise on one cheek, a cut on the other, a swollen lip.

"What about it, Joey?" asked Grace.

"Wel1, I guess," said Joey in a thin treble
voice, "it’s from where that ole Mis’ Drews hit me. I guess
you know about that, you’re police, ain’t you?"

They looked at each other. "Joey, what you
talking about?" asked his mother. "You done something'?
Mis’ Drews? That lady used to live down the block?"

"Yes, ma’am," said Joey. "I was
supprised see her, I was scared she knew who I was. I guess you know
all about it, don’t you?" And he looked at the men calmly.

They told her they’d have to take him in to
question; she protested, just a little boy, there was some mistake.
In the end she went along too, and at the office they got Wanda to
take charge of her, settle her down with coffee, while they started
out talking to Joey in Mendoza’s office. "That’s good,"
said Joey in his reedy voice. "She’s gonna be awful upset."
He didn’t seem unduly upset himself, or sorry for how she was
feeling. "I kinda wondered if you’d ever find out about it."

"Would you like to tell us about it, Joey? Just
how it happened?" Mendoza had called Loomis of Juvenile; this
was one to handle with kid gloves, on account of his age, if there
was going to be any prosecution at all.

"Oh, sure. I’ll tell you, I’d like to tell
you," he said thoughtfully, looking around the office. "The
ladies, sure. There was one over the next block and Mis’ Walker
down the street and about six other ladies I don’t know their
names, I did the same way, ask about mowing their grass and could I
have a drink. And besides the ladies there was a lot of girls, some
girls I know in school live right around. I guess mostly they didn’t
tell anybody about it. I’d tell ’em things like there was a stray
kitten back of this billboard and they’d come to see."

"Just hold on a minute." Grace raised his
eyebrows at Mendoza. Loomis came in and was briefed. "Now,
aren’t you making up some stories, Joey? The four ladies we know
about. Are you sure--"

"More like nine or ten," said Joey. "I
guess just like the girls they didn’t all tell, some reason. And I
guess I might as well tell you too, I did the burglary at the
drugstore up from us. The one on Venice. And another one at the lunch
stand the next block, and the store next to it too. And I busted into
the school lots of times and broke a lot of stuff. The first day the
new teacher was there I took all the money out of her purse, but
after that she kept it locked in a drawer."

"Now wait just a minute here, Joey. That’s
quite a lot you’re telling us. Aren’t you making some of it up?"

"No, sir. I oughta know what I did."

"
¡Porvida!
"
said Mendoza to Grace. "Maybe we’d better get somebody from
Burglary to listen to this too. What the hell is all this?"

Before the session was over, they did rope in
Burglary, to find that the various break-ins Joey was so readily
talking about were indeed in the files, unsolved. "I tole you,"
said Joey. The only one of the first victims they knew about who was
home was Rena Walker; she came in and identified him right away, as
did Mrs. Drews. They found the knife on Joey, a big eight-inch
snickersnee he said he’d bought at a hardware store. In the
intervals, Mendoza and Grace had a long talk with Mrs. Perkins, who
was more incredulous than anything else.