Streets of Death - Dell Shannon (2 page)

Unexpectedly the man in the bed opened his eyes and
stared up at them, moving his head slightly. A frown of pain creased
his forehead and the nurse moved instinctively to quiet him.

"Can you hear me, Father? Can you tell me
anything about who attacked you?"

The faded blue eyes fixed on Mendoza’s face.
"I--know you," the old priest whispered faintly. "Of
course. I was--just about--get in the car. Who--who? Young--thugs.
Three, I think--the one blond--and a loud plaid jacket--"

Mendoza sighed. "All right, that’s enough for
now, Father."

One veined hand crept up to his chest, and the priest
went on, "My crucifix. All they got--no money--it was dark--but
there were three of them. Tore my crucifix off--" His eyes shut
again and he relaxed limply.

"Poor old man," said the nurse.

That was about all they’d get, thought Mendoza, but
so far as it went it showed the pattern. Only what had O’Brien been
doing down there at that time of night? Not that it mattered. There
was a little pattern to this. The other seven all lived in the
general area; most of them had been on their way home, at reasonably
early hours--seven, eight, the latest attack had been at nine-thirty.
By the little they got from the victims, it looked like the random
thing--the pretty boys were jumping any senior citizen they came
across when the urge hit them: the old, lame, frail senior citizens
who wouldn’t fight back.

The rest of them had been in that area unavoidably,
as residents; how had the priest happened to be there? Mendoza was
aware that the priests who served the little church, nearly the
oldest building in the city, no longer had quarters there. In any
case, somebody ought to be told about O’Brien.

He drove down to the old Plaza, found the church
open, and went in. The little place was dim as a cavern, only the
flickering light at the altar moving, and the statues along the walls
seemed to loom taller than usual. A man was speaking somewhere;
following the voice, Mendoza came to a tiny robing room past the
confessional box, and unexpectedly into a very small square room
furnished as an office, with desk and swivel chair. A tall thin young
man in clerical dress was talking on the phone, looked at Mendoza in
surprise, and at the offered badge with consternation.

"I’m afraid I have some bad news for you."
Mendoza had seen him once or twice, the assistant priest here.

"About Father O’Brien--we knew something had
happened, I was just calling the police again. When he didn’t come
home last night--" He listened to what Mendoza had to tell him,
obviously distressed, and said, "I must go to him. If he’s as
bad as you say--" But he answered questions as they went up to
the church door. He and O’Brien both had living quarters in the
residence attached to the much larger Church of the Blessed Sacrament
in Hollywood. O’Brien sometimes stayed on down here, in his little
office, to write letters, as apparently he had last night. He would
have been driving one of the cars belonging to the church, a
ten-year-old Pontiac. The car, in fact, was here--"I looked for
it right away, we were afraid he’d had another heart attack when we
realized he hadn’t come home, and I came down at once--it’s right
where he always parked, behind the church."

"Yes, he said he was on his way to it,"
said Mendoza. No keys on him; the S.l.D. boys could have a look, but
it was a long chance anything useful would show up. "Evidently
he hadn’t any money on him; the only thing they got was his
crucifix."

The priest stopped and stared at him, one hand on the
church door. "His crucifix--but that might give you some kind of
clue, Lieutenant--that is, if it turned up in a pawnshop or
somewhere. It’s a very valuable antique--sterling silver set with a
piece of Connemara marble. It was a gift from his old parish priest
when he entered the seminary, and I believe it’s several hundred
years old. Any of us could identify it at once, if it should turn up
anywhere."

Mendoza thanked him and watched him hurry up the
street to a newish Ford. Let the S.I.D. boys come and go over the
Pontiac for possible physical evidence, in case O’Brien had been
jumped in or near it: a very small chance there’d be anything. Put
out a description of the crucifix to the pawnshops, just in case.

He got into the big black Ferrari and lit a
cigarette, thrusting the key into the ignition; his eyes were cold.
Hackett was quite right: the pretty boys had got under Mendoza’s
skin. It was reasonless, in a way: it was only that much more of the
sordid, wanton violence that stalked any big city in this year of
grace, which any cop learned to live with. It wasn’t a dramatic,
important piece of crime, the kind that would get written up in the
case-history books. The victims weren’t good-looking or very
interesting or important people. The louts, when they caught  up
to them--as by God they would, if the luck ran their way--probably
would turn out to be two-bit thugs, not very interesting or important
either, just thugs with low I.Q.’s.

But the pretty boys had
touched Mendoza on the raw--Mendoza who had been looking at the blood
and violence and death for nearly twenty-six years--because in a
sense they were a stark symbol for all of it: all the incredibly
brutal bloody happenstance of crime in the city. He’d like to catch
up to them. He tossed the cigarette out the window, laughed, and said
to himself, "
¿Pues qué?
"
Catch up to them, and then see one of the softheaded judges hand them
a six-month sentence with time off for good behavior. He often
wondered why he stayed on at this job.

* * *

Nick Galeano listened to what Carey had to say a
little sleepily. He’d been on night watch for over two years, and
his metabolism or something wasn’t yet used to the different hours
and sleeping at night. He was night-people anyway and wasn’t
operating on all cylinders until past noon. In a way he was glad of
the change; there was usually more action on day watch, and more men
to work with. He’d only met Lieutenant Carey of Missing Persons a
few times before. Carey was a serious, snub-nosed, stocky fellow who
wore a perennially morose expression: possibly the result these days
of all the myriad missing juveniles he had to look for, thought
Galeano, yawning. But what he’d brought to Robbery-Homicide sounded
more interesting and definitely offbeat.

"Look," he said, slapping his manila
envelope down on Galeano’s desk and shrugging massively at Galeano
and Rich Conway. "I can’t prove it’s a homicide, but that’s
what it’s got to add up to. It’s a very funny one, boys. And I’ve
done all I can on it, and the man’s got to be dead, so I bring it
to you and let you go all round the mulberry bush on it. I mean, one
way it’s open and shut, but nobody’ll ever prove anything--I
don’t think."

"Why not?" asked Conway, his gray eyes
interested. "What’s the case?"

"I’ll give it to you short and sweet,"
said Carey.

"Here’s this Edwin Fleming. Twenty-nine,
raised in Visalia, dropout from high school but no record. No
relations--he was an only child; his father died when he was just a
kid and his mother two years ago. He did a hitch in the Army and got
sent to Germany, where he married this girl--her name is Marta, she’s
a reasonably good-looking blonde, twenty-six. This was four years
ago. He gets out of the service, they come here, and he has trouble
finding a job, finally gets one in construction--he’d done that
before--only it’s a small-time operation, kind of
boss-and-one-helper thing, I gather. I’m just giving you the
background. His wife has a baby about a year ago, and just after that
he has an accident on the job--fa1ls off a scaffold or something and
ends up paralyzed. He was in and out of hospitals, but there wasn’t
anything the doctors could do--he was paralyzed from the waist down,
and he’d never get better. The boss had insurance that paid for the
hospitalization, but that was a1l--on account of technicalities here
and there, Fleming wasn’t eligible for any benefits from anybody,
the government on down. So there he was, a useless hulk as you might
put it, couldn’t earn, had to be tended like a baby--oh, his mind
was 0.K., he could even get around some in a wheelchair, but he
needed a good deal of attention."

"When does this tale get to be business for us?"
asked Conway.

"Ten days ago," said Carey. "Eleven,
now. A week ago last Friday, when his wife reported him missing. A
man in a wheelchair! It was damned fishy from the start, you can see
that. They didn’t have anything but what she could earn, she’s
working as a waitress at a restaurant on Wilshire, the Globe Grill.
They had an old car, but they’d moved to this place on Westlake so
she could walk to work, and they were trying to sell the car, she
says she couldn’t afford to run it. It’s a six-family apartment
and everybody else there is out at work all day except an old wino
named Offerdahl who doesn’t know anything and was probably too
drunk to see anything there was to see. The Flemings lived on the
second floor and he couldn’t get the wheelchair downstairs by
himself, obviously."

Galeano yawned again. "Where’d she leave the
baby while she was at work?"

"Oh, they lost the baby about six months ago--it
was a girl, I think, it got pneumonia or something and died. Anyway,
she calls for cops--this was about six P.M. that Friday--and tells
this tale, and of course it got passed on to me. I ask you!"
said Carey, and sat back looking contemptuous. "She has the gall
to tell me, all innocent and wide-eyed, that she comes home to find
her husband gone--a man in a wheelchair--and the wheelchair’s
there, but he’s missing. Vanished--whoosh--like that! He couldn’t
have crawled three feet by himself. She’s afraid, she says, he’s
committed suicide, he’d been very despondent about his condition
lately. I do ask you! If--"

"The wheelchair’s still there?" repeated
Galeano, suddenly fascinated. "That’s like a magic trick."
He had a brief ridiculous vision 'of angels snatching Fleming up to
heaven, out of the wheelchair. Or little green men out of a UFO.

"The wheelchair’s still there, and even if it
wasn’t, where could he go in it?" asked Carey reasonably.
"Even if he’d managed to get downstairs with it, which he
couldn’t have? There isn’t an elevator. Wheel himself over to
MacArthur Park and crawl into the lake?--even if he had thought of
suicide, and there’s not an iota of evidence he ever did. The
people in that apartment didn’t know them very well--they’d only
been there a little over two months--but I’ve talked to people
where they used to live, the few casual friends they have, and
everybody says Fleming had adjusted pretty well to being a cripple,
he’d talked about taking courses in handcrafts, maybe earning
something that way."

"Have you dragged the lake in MacArthur?"
asked Conway.

Carey uttered a rude word. "You can if you want.
He’d have floated by now. I don’t like having my intelligence
insulted, is all. This dumb blonde bats her eyes at me and says he
talked about suicide, he must’ve done it, she doesn’t know how
but he’s gone, he must have killed himself. And a child of two
could see there’s no way! If he really wanted to commit suicide, he
could have got out of a window--it’s all cement sidewalk below--or
cut his wrists or something, right there."

"Where was the blonde all day? Alibied? Anybody
see him, and when and where?" asked Conway.

Carey snorted. "She was at work, like a good
girl. Eight to two, and she was supposed to be back for the evening
shift, seven to nine. Sure, a neighbor saw him--woman lives across
the hall, a Mrs. Del Sardo, she left for work at the same time as the
blonde and heard her say goodbye to Fleming, saw him in the
wheelchair in the living room. If you ask me, the blonde timed it to
have an alibi. And then she says, she had some shopping to do, she
didn’t come home till five o’clock and he was gone. Just gone."

"Leaving the wheelchair," said Galeano. The
wheelchair had taken possession of his mind; the thing was like
a conjuring trick.

"Look, it’s kind of like one of those
locked-room puzzles," said Carey, "and then again it’s
not. I mean, there’s people all around--apartments, busy streets.
Only nobody saw anything. And you remember it was raining like hell
all that day. On the other hand, why would anybody see anything? That
apartment house-everybody out at work except Fleming and old
Offerdahl dead drunk down the hall."

"Yes, I see," said Conway. "Fleming
almost completely helpless, on the second floor. And there’s no
smell of him anywhere?"

"Not a trace. And he’d be easy to trace, you
can see.

If you’re feeling that energetic," said Carey,
"you can have all the pipes examined, but I doubt that the
blonde had time to murder and dismember him that thoroughly and feed
him down the bathtub, say, before she called us. She’s not a very
big blonde, she wouldn’t have had the strength to carry him
anywhere, dead or alive--he was six feet, a hundred and eighty. You
can see there’s just one answer, it hits you in the eye."

"The boyfriend," said Galeano. "Yeah."

"I haven’t turned one up, damn it. Good luck
on it. All I see is that Fleming has got to be dead. I don’t
pretend to understand females," said Carey gloomily, "but
however she may have felt about him once, here he was, a dead drag on
her. He’s no good to her as a husband, she’s got to support him
and take care of him, and he could live to be eighty. He didn’t
have any life insurance, he hadn’t converted it when he got out of
the service--that could explain why they didn’t try to fake a
suicide or accident. She d like to be rid of him, don’t tell me she
wouldn’t. She--"