Streets of Death - Dell Shannon (5 page)

"He had a key to the house, went in and found
him and called us," said the Traffic man, sounding tired.
Piggott and Schenke went up the narrow front walk. The front door was
open, past a neatly mended screen door. The body was in the middle of
the living room, a small square room crowded with old-fashioned
furniture, a big TV console in one corner. A straight chair was
overturned, the carpet rucked up in folds, a clock and vase from an
overturned table lying around the corpse; there’d been some sort of
scuffle here. The TV was on, volume turned low.

The body was lying face up in the middle of the room,
a big fleshy middle-aged man with a Roman nose and a mop of gray
hair. They looked at him and Schenke said, "He was in a fight
all right, probably right here. Could be he hit his head on
something, or the other guy hit him deliberately to kill. We can ask
the brother what’s missing. We better get S.I.D. out for pictures
and so on."

They called up the lab boys and talked to Robert
Buford while they waited. He said his brother Dick was kind of a
loner, didn’t have too many friends; trouble was he and Mary, his
wife, had been awful close, didn’t seem to want anybody else, and
when she died-- Since then, when Dick wasn’t working, he mostly
stayed home, watched TV. He didn’t have any worries about money,
they owned the house; Dick was kind of close with money.

When the lab men had taken pictures and printed the
body, they went over him. In one pocket there was seventeen cents, a
handkerchief, what looked like car keys, and an empty wallet. There
was an old Chevy in the garage, Buford’s car, undisturbed. They
asked Robert about what cash Dick might have carried, and he said
helplessly, "Jesus, I don’t know what to say, I don’t know
how much he might have had--could be he’d just run out and was
figuring to go to the bank tomorrow, or he coulda had a bundle and
been robbed--I don’t know." He peered sorrowfully at the dead
man. "You don’t figure he coulda just had a heart attack or
something? He was fifty-nine. No, I suppose it wasn’t."

The autopsy would tell
them, but they’d both seen enough bodies to have an educated guess
about this. It would give the day watch something else to work.

* * *

Hackett was off on Thursdays. "Thank heaven,"
said Angel, getting out her car keys, "there’s one day I can
go to the market without the kids. But I’m going to see Alison
first. Poor darling, she’s feeling awful with this one so far-- I
think it was a mistake myself--"

"I’m taking bets it’ll be a redhead,"
said Hackett.

"And, Art--if you touch a crumb of that cream
pie I’ll kill you. You’re ten pounds up again."

"All right, all right." But after she’d
backed out, he listened to Mark prattle about school--Mark would be
starting kindergarten next month, which seemed impossible--and
thought, It was probably something like that. Whatever that Yeager
had overheard, or thought he had. People said things, I’ll kill
you, It was murder--and also made jokes. What they didn’t do, at
least people like these Lamperts, from what he’d gathered about
them, was casually plan a real killing with the apartment door open
and people wandering around.

He called in after a
while, keeping an eye on his darling Sheila trotting busily around,
to hear if anything new had gone down. Lake told him that that priest
had died, about the dead teenager, and the new one last night. So
that unholy trio had done a murder now; Hackett wished there was some
way to get a lead to them.

* * *

The first thing Mendoza did on Thursday morning was
to get on to S.I.D. as to what, if anything, they’d got on that
Pontiac.

"We’ve been busy," said Duke. "I was
just getting out a report. Nothing. The priest’s prints were in it,
and that other priest’s, he used it sometimes--but that’s all. If
he was jumped around there, it was before he got into the car. No, we
didn’t turn up any keys anywhere."

"Thanks so much for nothing." But there was
a little something there, Mendoza thought, and said so to Higgins who
had just come in, looming as bulkily as Hackett.

"What?" asked Higgins. "I don’t see
anything, Luis."

"Like the dog that didn’t bark in the night,
George. O’Brien dropped the keys when they jumped him, but they
didn’t take the car. I know we’ve got
nada
absolutamente
on these louts, as far as court
evidence goes, but a picture builds in my mind." Jason Grace had
wandered in, Landers and Conway behind him, and Galeano; they
listened to the boss having a hunch. "The fancy clothes,"
said Mendoza, picking up the flame-thrower lighter and pointing it
absently at Higgins, who shied back. "And one of the victims--a
woman--said that one of them, she thinks the tall blond one, called
her a dirty peasant. Which is not the kind of--mmh--invective you
hear around Temple Street, boys. And they couldn’t be bothered to
steal a ten-year-old Pontiac. I get the feeling they’re not native
to our beat."

"Then what the hell are they doing down here,
jumping the senior citizens?" said Higgins. "For kicks?"

"
Es posible
,"
said Mendoza. He pressed the trigger, the flame shot out and he lit
his cigarette. "They haven’t made any kind of haul. Any
halfway smart four-year-old around here would know that the average
senior citizen in this area isn’t exactly loaded, or he wouldn’t
still be living in the area. It’s possible our pretty boys in their
fancy clothes--from somewhere a little way up the social scale--are
prowling around here just for the kicks, beating up the senior
citizens for fun. Mmh.
Cómo no
--maybe
with the idea that cops wouldn’t go to much trouble over these
particular senior citizens."

"That’s a little far out," said Higgins,
"or is it?"

"He smells these things," said Grace
seriously. "I’ll add, what you might call a mixed population
down here. One of these here racists, Loo-tenant suh?"

Mendoza laughed. "I don’t know if I smell
anything or not, Jase. Just off the top of my mind, if I remember
right, two of the victims were Mexican, three black, the rest just
people--and O’Brien. They must have seen his priest’s collar--but
it was dark. But--¡
vaya historia!
--that
'dirty peasant’ sticks in my mind. Not Temple Street. More like
U.C.L.A."

"Which may be a thought, but it doesn’t take
us anywhere to look," said Conway. "Have you had a chance
to look at the offbeat thing Carey handed us? I like it, as a story,
but it’s going to be a lot of work for nothing. I want to see that
blonde."

Mendoza picked up the night report, didn’t start
reading it. "You’ll tell me about it. A blonde?"

"I’m bound to say," said Galeano, "it’s
the wheelchair that sort of caught my imagination--the empty
wheelchair. You can see what Carey means--it’s a locked-room puzzle
in a sort of way."

"An empty wheelchair," said Mendoza,
cigarette suspended. "So, I’ll hear about it."

Sergeant Lake looked in. "There’s a Mrs. Chard
here and some other people. A Mrs. Moseley and a Mr. and Mrs. Peacock
asking for Palliser."

"So the night watch
got hold of the Chard woman," said Galeano. "I’d better
talk to her, Jimmy. John hasn’t showed up yet. You can tell the
boss about the wheelchair, Rich."

* * *

Mrs. Cecelia Chard identified the body with loud sobs
and groans. She was a thin dark hard-faced woman with shrewish black
eyes, and Galeano didn’t take to her at all. She was supported by
her mother, Mrs. Wilma Dixon, and her brother Elmer, both generally
resembling her.

"Poor Bob," she lamented, drying her eyes
with a Coty-scented handkerchief when they’d got back from the
morgue and Galeano had settled them down in the office to make a
statement. "Like I said, Mr. Galeano, I never reported him
missing because I thought he was off on a bender, like he did every
now ’n’ then, and goodness knows--Mother and Elmer can bear me
out. I’m not about to say he was the best husband in the world, Mr.
Galeano, but I wouldn’t have wished him a terrible death like
that--he must’ve got into a fight with somebody when he was drunk.
I got to say, he used to get fighting mad with any liquor in him, it
takes some like that, you know."

"A regular mean man in drink he was, all right,"
said Elmer, and giggled.

"He certainly was," said Mrs. Dixon with a
long sigh.

"It’s a sorry thing he should’ve come to
such a bad end, but running around with riifraif the way he did, in
all them bars, no wonder. I’m sorry to say it, Mr. Galeano, but I
guess my girl’s rid of a bad bargain."

Galeano didn’t think much of them at all, but there
was the one about birds of a feather. Their estimation of Chard was
probably right. He’d been found about half a block down the side
street from a bar on the corner of Venice Boulevard, and it was very
likely he’d got into a brawl with some other drunks and died of it.
It was just more of the sordid violence cops got paid to cope with,
and it made him feel tired.

He got the gist of that down in a statement, and Mrs.
Chard signed it. He told them they’d be notified when the body
could be released, and they thanked him and went away.

And he supposed that
somebody ought to ask a few questions at that bar, try to find out
who the other drunks were--not that it seemed very important.

* * *

Mendoza scanned the night report before he listened
to Conway, and handed the Buford thing to Landers and Grace. It
didn’t look as if there’d be much handle to it, unless S.I.D.
turned up something.

Then he heard all about Carey’s blonde and the
empty wheelchair, and like Galeano he was fascinated. Luis Rodolfo
Vicente Mendoza was not, perhaps, temperamentally suited to be a cop,
who by the nature of the job had to deal with physical evidence,
facts and figures and tangibilities. The men who worked with him were
convinced that his natural calling was that of a cardsharp, that most
innocent of con-men who relied on instinctive knowledge of human
nature.

"I see what Carey means," he said amusedly.
"Masterly gall. Please, sir, he’s gone, I don’t know where.
But the empty wheelchair--which was probably quite inadvertent, if
we’re reading it right--it’s a nice touch.
¡Me
gusta!
"

"So all we do is find the boyfriend," said
Conway.

"I thought Carey’d made kind of heavy weather
of it. In spite of the--er--imaginative touch, it looks open and shut
to me."

Mendoza regarded him sardonically. "Yes and no,
Rich. In this job, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, things are
just exactly what they look like. Just occasionally they aren’t.
But I want a look at Carey’s blonde and the wheelchair. That so
eloquently empty wheelchair!"

"So does Nick. But there’s only one obvious
answer, isn’t there?"

"
Es
posible
," said Mendoza. "Go see if
he’s back from the morgue."

* * *

Palliser had got caught in a jam on the freeway, a
pileup backed up for a mile, and it was nearly nine o’clock when he
came into the office to find four forlorn-looking people waiting to
see him. Mrs. Anita Moseley, Mr. and Mrs. Simon Peacock, and
Stephanie Peacock.

Mr. Peacock offered to go to the morgue to make the
identification. "I knew Sandra all her life, since she and
Stephanie started school together. I wish you’d let me, Anita--save
you the agony--" But Mrs. Moseley said tautly she had to see for
herself and be sure. She was a nice-looking woman, late thirties,
brown hair, good figure, conservatively dressed. They were all nice
people, Palliser could see, in the euphemistic phrase: upright
middle-class people: Peacock an insurance agent, the two women
ladies. At the morgue, Mrs. Moseley looked at the body and said
thinly, "Yes, that’s Sandra. That’s her. Oh, my God, to have
it all end like this--I tried so hard-- To see her like that-- No,
I’m all right. Honestly, I’m all right. But when it was all for
nothing--no reason for her to--"

Back at the office, Palliser got Wanda Larsen in for
support, and she was briskly sympathetic but businesslike, their very
efficient policewoman; Mrs. Moseley talked mostly to her, and Wanda
took unobtrusive notes.

"I have to say, she--Sandra--had been more and
more difficult--since the divorce," she said painfully. "You
see, I divorced her father last year. He--that doesn’t matter, the
reasons, but you see he’d always spoiled her dreadfully, and I’m
afraid--she’s just a child really, she didn’t understand about
the divorce, she always idolized " her father and I didn’t
want to--to destroy any of that--maybe that was a mistake, if I had
told her--but I guess that doesn’t matter now either. I tried to
discipline her--sensibly--God knows I tried. But--"

They listened patiently, asked questions. When Sandra
hadn’t come home, last Saturday, she had called the Peacocks first.
"Because Sandra and Stephanie were always together, best
friends, and I thought--" And Stephanie hadn’t come home
either. By next day it was pretty clear they’d run away together:
some of their clothes were missing. "Oh, I’ve got to say it,"
said Mrs. Moseley, "Sandra would have been the leader, she
always was--" She’d gone to the police then.