Streets of Death - Dell Shannon (25 page)

"Which are they?"

"A BankAmericard and the gas company card. She
was careful about charging, but it was convenient, she always said."

Her husband broke in diffidently. "We’d like
to know when we can, you know, fix up for the funeral."

"The coroner’s office will let you know,"
said Grace. "Is there any other family, Mrs. Joiner?" asked
Hackett, the kind of random question to put witnesses at ease.

Her husband said, "I suppose we got to tell
Isabel, Carla," and she just shrugged.

"I’ve got a sister, that’s all."

"Nothing else is missing from the house that you
noticed?" asked Grace.

"I don’t think so, except her silver teapot.
An old lady she used to work for gave it to her, and she treasured it
a lot. I don’t know what it’d be worth," she said miserably.

"Have you contacted the credit-card companies to
let them know the cards are stolen?"

"Why, no--we never thought--we don’t have any
ourselves--"

"We can do that." Grace smiled at them, and
had his mouth open to ask another question when Sergeant Farrell
looked in the door.

"Traffic just picked up Benoy and Allesandro.
It’s a mess, sounds like--there was a high-speed pursuit down
Victory and they rammed the squad--one Burbank man in serious
condition, the squad wrecked, and wouldn’t you know the two punks
didn’t get a scratch. Burbank’s sending them in."

Hackett and Higgins got up in a hurry and went out,
and the Joiners looked questioningly at Grace. "They’re pretty
hot suspects for your mother," Grace explained.

"We’ve been looking for them for another
homicide, but we think it’s possible they killed your mother too.
One of them is definitely tied to the murder of those Freemans, more
or less in the same neighborhood."

"Oh," said Carla. "I saw about that in
the paper. It was awful. But I don’t see how--I mean, Mother was
always careful about locking doors and like that." They had both
relaxed slightly, alone with Grace in the office. She looked at her
husband. "It said in the paper you--the police--wanted to
question some man about that murder, something about what it called
an all points--"

"Bulletin," supplied Grace. "That’s
him. It’s just turned him up."

"But," said Carla, "it said he’s a
white man. I forget all the description, how tall and so on, but he’s
white."

"Well?" said Grace.

Carla bent a solemn look on him. "Mr. Grace,"
she said, "Mother wasn’t a fearful woman or one to borrow
trouble as they say, but I’ve got to tell you, she’d never in
this world have let a white man in her house after dark, the way it
must’ve been. She’d never. Whatever they said as an excuse. A
white man she didn’t know. I just don’t see how that could be,
Mr. Grace."

Grace suppressed a laugh,
looking at their earnest faces. "Well, it was just an idea,"
he said. "We’ll see what they have to say for themselves."

* * *

What Benoy and Allesandro had to say was chiefly
obscene. Hackett and Higgins questioned them at the jail, and it
didn’t matter much what they heard in regard to the Freeman
homicide because Benoy at least was tied to that, but they asked some
questions about Mrs. Hopper.

"I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about."
Benoy was a big fat young man, gross and unshaven. "We never did
nothing here. I don’t know no Freemans or anybody named Hopper."

"Let’s not go the long way round," said
Higgins wearily. "We know you killed the Freemans, you left a
nice set of prints on that phone book." Benoy began to swear,
and his partner looked at him in sudden alarm.

"You said be careful about prints, Neal! You
said to--I didn’t leave any, did I?" he asked Higgins
anxiously. He was a loose-limbed young fellow with straggly yellow
hair. Hackett and Higgins didn’t burst into laughter because they’d
met a lot like him over the years.

"Not that I know of. Now let’s talk about Mrs.
Hopper, last Tuesday night." They were just guessing that that
was when she’d been killed; the autopsy report should be in
sometime today.

The two began arguing about where they’d been last
Tuesday. They’d been living at an old hotel over in Glendale, but
they didn’t know the terrain out here and got confused about
directions and distances. They agreed they’d spent last Tuesday
night in a bar someplace, but couldn’t say where.

"What the hell does
it matter?" said Higgins to Hackett. "We’ve got them for
the Freemans anyway. These days, a heavier charge means nothing."

* * *

That Saturday night was a busy one for the night
watch, three heists and a market clerk shot dead in one of them.
There were three witnesses to that, and Piggott, Schenke and Shogart
were busy until the end of shift. The witnesses came in on Sunday
morning to look at mug--shots, and annoyed Galeano and Phil Landers.
As witnesses sometimes were, they were confused by the very number of
photographs to look at.

"I just couldn’t say," said Akiko Tomito.
"It all happened so fast--that looks like him, but so does this
one, some--no, I guess this one here’s more like, only his face was
fatter--"

"Oh, dear me, I wouldn’t like to say
definitely," said Mrs. Marilyn Vail brightly. "If he’d
had dark hair instead of light, he’d look a lot like this man--but
then he didn’t, so I guess it wasn’t. On the other hand--"

"Nobody could say, just look at a picture,"
said Gus Severson with a growl. "Some pictures look like the
people and some don’t. I told you what he looked like. Couldn’t
say just from a picture."

Galeano suppressed any retort and thanked them for
trying. "Description!" he said to Phil when they’d
trooped out. "What the hell did they give the night watch? Six
feet, five-ten, five-nine, medium, light, sandy, brown, sort of thin,
kind of stocky, blue pants, black slacks, tan coat, white coat. I ask
you."

Phil laughed. "The civilians aren’t trained to
notice things."

They’d be reduced to doing that the hard way,
looking for men with the right pedigrees who lit the general
description. And before they got down to it, they had a new
homicide--a middle-aged man, Harry Schultz, a bookkeeper at a
brokerage, stabbed to death as he walked up the drive to his own back
door from the garage, just after dark. It was cold and misty,
threatening to rain again, and nobody had been looking out windows or
had doors open; even though it was a crowded neighborhood, houses on
forty-foot lots, there were no witnesses and no leads. His wife said
he might have had fifteen or twenty dollars on him.

"Round and round the mulberry bush," said
Piggott, typing the initial report. "Just like ancient Rome, E.
M. The weakened moral fiber, relaxation of standards, all the easy
welfare, bread and circuses--and the pornography and you get all the
senseless violence, the killings done for peanuts, the killers given
a slap on the wrist and let go to do it again. Makes you wonder where
it’ll all end, doesn’t it?" He got no reply and looked up
from the typewriter. Shogart had his feet propped up in Landers’
desk chair and his head had fallen forward at an angle. He emitted a
small snore. Shogart, up for retirement next year, had ceased a long
time ago to get involved with the crime he was paid to look at.

Piggott sighed and went
back to the report. "Sodom and Gomorrah," he muttered to
himself. Talk about making bricks without straw--

* * *

On Monday morning, in a threatening gray mist,
Palliser tried all the book’s suggestions on Trina again, without
much noticeable success. When it started to rain he came in, and
Trina shook her wet self all over Roberta’s clean kitchen floor.
"You know, John," said Roberta, "I’ve had a look at
that book too, and it says a few minutes every day, morning and
afternoon. You can’t expect to try once a week and get anywhere."

"Damn it, I’m busy all day and tired when I
get home," said Palliser. "Even if I could get her to one
of these c1asses--"

"Well, you’re not accomplishing anything this
way. I wonder how much it might cost to have a professional trainer
do it?"

"Too much, if I know anything about prices these
days. Yes, she’s a very nice dog," said Palliser, sitting down
and looking at the scratches on his shoes where Trina had been
pretending to be a teething puppy again, "but why in hell did it
have to be me who went out on that freeway accident? Just because I
rescued Madge Borman’s champion hound, so she has to give us one of
his pups in a burst of gratitude--"

"Who I’m very glad to have around, she’s a
good watchdog. I’m home most of the day, you let me have a try at
it."

"All I can do is wish
you luck, Robin."

* * *

Hackett, Galeano and Higgins had gone out on the
anonymous Schultz thing. Glasser and Conway were looking for
possibles on the heist jobs, and Wanda was typing a report across the
hall, when Jason Grace wandered into Mendoza’s office on Monday
just as Sergeant Lake put through a call.

"What’s on your mind, Jase? Just a minute.
Robbery-Homicide, Lieutenant Mendoza."

"Sergeant Richards up here in Santa Barbara,"
said a heavy male voice. "You’ve got an A.P.B. out on a Mr.
and Mrs. King, sixty-three Ford sedan, plate
AGN-740. We just picked them up."

"Thank you so much," said Mendoza. "We
think they may be connected to a homicide here."

"Well, you’ll have ’em on possession
anyway," said Richards. "There was about a pound of
marijuana in the car. Which is wrecked, by the way, they tried to run
when the squad spotted them and King had a little load on and piled
it up in a ditch. Do you want somebody to ferry ’em down there'?"

"Well, we are a little busy," said Mendoza.
"It’d be a nice gesture, thanks."

"Glad to oblige. I don’t mind a little drive
down the coast. Be with you sometime this afternoon," said
Richards, and hung up.

Mendoza passed that on to Grace. He’d been sitting
here practicing stacking the deck, and looked, as Grace told him,
like an old-style riverboat cardsharp, hair over one eye where he’d
run fingers through it, cigarette in mouth corner. "I’ve been
brooding over Fleming, Jase. What have you got?"

"Just a little idea." Grace sat down and
lit a cigarette. "This Mrs. Hopper. As George said, really not
much M.O. about it, and Benoy and Allesandro denied it. The daughter
told us her credit cards were gone, so I got on to the companies.
Daughter also told me"--he grinned at Mendoza--"and don’t
say there’s nothing to this race business, she’d never have come
out with it to Art or you or George--that she’s got a sister. Very
unsatisfactory sister--they’re all ashamed of her--lived around
with this man and that, couple of illegitimate kids, on the welfare.
Carla said Isabel had stolen things from Mother before, and it could
be she’d helped herself to the cards, it mightn’t have been the
murderer."

"
Interesante
."

"I thought so. When I talked to the
BankAmericard people--I didn’t get any satisfaction on Saturday, of
course--I just now heard that Mrs. Hopper had reported it herself,
last Tuesday, and put a stop on any charges. Which looked possibly
suggestive. I talked to Carla again and she told me her mother had
put up with a lot from Isabel. Every time, Isabel all remorseful,
never do it again, but she always did. And Mother wasn’t playing
any more."

"Are you heading where I think you are?"

"That’s just where. Just for fun I looked in
Records, and there’s Isabel Hopper big as life. Soliciting,
prostitution, possession, petty theft, and she’s been tied up with
a couple of mean characters. Maybe she still is, or could find one
when she needed one."

"Probably," said Mendoza, his eyes on the
cards. "And if Mother phoned her and said she knew who’d
snitched her credit cards and this time she was going to
prosecute--
Dios
, Jase,
I have had it too, with these brainless brutes who hit first and
think later! But that hangs together. Have you located her yet?"

"She’s not where she was the last time she was
picked up, but the welfare board will know where she is. I’m just
waiting for somebody to come in to go with me, in case she’s got
one of the mean characters sharing quarters with her. I don’t want
to end up as a statistic in our files.”

Mendoza laughed. "I
won’t volunteer. It’s started to rain again. She’s all yours,
Jase."

* * *

Hackett had come in by the time Richards got there
with the Kings. He shook hands around, said, "Glad to oblige.
You’ve got quite a place here, haven’t you?" He eyed Hackett
interestedly, one big man to another. "If you don’t want this
pair, we do."

"Maybe you’d better hang around until we find
out."

Mendoza looked at the Kings, who were huddled
together on the bench beside the switchboard. "Tom in, Art? He’s
the one decided we were interested." Hackett went to see, and
came back with Landers. They shepherded the Kings down the hall to an
interrogation room while Mendoza offered to show Richards around.