Streets of Death - Dell Shannon (6 page)

The Peacocks said that, of course, they’d been
frantic, their only daughter missing, and then she’d phoned them
last night. She was in a big railroad station in L.A. with no
money--scared and sorry and wanting to come home. "We told her
just to stay there, we’d come as soon as we could," said Mrs.
Peacock. "And we called Anita--"

"If you’d called us," said Wanda, "we’d
have taken care of her until you got here, Mrs. Peacock."

"Well, we don’t know anything about the
police. Naturally. We just wanted to get here and find her. And thank
God she’s all right--when I think what could have happened--that
wild headstrong girl--I’m sorry, Anita, but you know she was, you
tried but you know yourself--"

Mrs. Moseley sobbed once, convulsively, and Wanda
brought her a glass of water.

"Well, now, Stephanie," said Palliser,
wishing he knew more about teenagers, "suppose you tell us what
you know about this."

She was a thin, gawky girl, not terribly pretty and
looking even younger than she was, with long brown stringy hair and
mild brown eyes; right now she was scared. "I--I--I didn’t
really want to--it was all Sandra! I was scared all the time, but
Sandra--"

"My poor darling!" said her mother.

Peacock had better sense. "Now listen here,
young lady," he said roughly. "If you were scared it was
your own damn fault for being such a little fool. You speak up and
tell whatever you know right now!"

"Y-yes, Daddy. I’m sorry. I w-will,"
gulped Stephanie unsteadily.
 

THREE

"I DIDN'T WANT to, it was Sandra," began
Stephanie nervously. "She said--she said her mother was so
strict and old-fashioned and she’d--she’d treated her father
awful bad, she didn’t want to, you know, stay with her any more
and--" She stopped and looked uneasily at Mrs. Moseley, her
parents, and stuck there. Mrs. Peacock cast a somewhat unloving look
at Mrs. Moseley, and Wanda intervened smoothly.

It might be better, she suggested, if they just left
Stephanie to her and Sergeant Palliser; it was likely to be a long
business taking a statement, and she’d be right with Stephanie all
the time, they might be asking her to look at some photographs.
Peacock said that was a good idea, they’d heard enough of it that
he didn’t want to hear it all again, and he wasn’t going to face
that drive again until tomorrow. Mrs. Moseley said faintly she’d
just like to go back to the motel and lie down. Peacock exchanged a
look with Palliser and urged his wife, protesting, to the  door.
"I guess we can leave it to you. We’re at the Holiday Inn off
the Hollywood freeway."

"What would we do without you, lady?" said
Palliser to Wanda, and meant it.

"All part of the job .... Now, Stephanie, you
can say whatever you want to us, you know, we won’t mind," she
said comfortably. "We want to know anything you can tell us that
might help to find out what happened to Sandra."

"You’re a policewoman, aren’t you? I guess
that must be kind of an interesting job. Well, I know that. It’s
all just so awful--Sandra dead and all--but I want to tell how it
was, only Mama and Daddy carried on so, and I didn’t like to say in
front of Sandra’s mother---"

"That’s all right now, you just tell it the
way it happened."

"She said awful things about her mother,"
said Sandra miserably, "but maybe they were so, I don’t know.
She said we could go to L.A., Hollywood, and get jobs, school was
stupid and all the teachers squares and silly. She wanted to be a
model, she said maybe we could get jobs like that right away, or
there are schools where you can learn. I--well, I didn’t want to, I
like school all right, but Sandra--she could always make me go along,
sort of. She’d done it other times too. And her mother works, since
the divorce, and my mother had a club meeting--last Saturday, I mean,
so that’s when we did it. I packed a lot of clothes and things in
Mama’s biggest suitcase, and Sandra had an overnight bag and a
plane case, and we just took the bus out the state highway. It was
crowded and nobody paid any notice, and at the end of the line
we--uh--got out and, you know, started to hitch." She took a
breath. "I was scared right from the first, that’s a thing
you’re never supposed to do, get in strange cars, but Sandra wasn’t
afraid of anything ever. She had fifteen dollars she’d saved from
her allowance and I had nearly eight."

Palliser and Wanda refrained from looking at each
other. Glasser wandered in and pulled up a chair behind Palliser
silently. She hardly noticed him; she was talking to Wanda.

"Well, this man gave us a ride all the way to
L.A. He was a salesman of some kind, he was nice and friendly, he
joked with Sandra--she told him we were both eighteen and I guess he
believed that. She said we were going to see some relatives of hers
here and just to let us out at Hollywood Boulevard, that was the only
name here we knew, and he did. He said, Hollywood and what, and we
didn’t know what to say." Palliser put out one cigarette, lit
p another, and thought, People. "But it was all so queer, sort
of," said Stephanie, still sounding surprised. "Not what l
we thought it’d be--not what we thought Hollywood’d be like! Just
a great big city, and Woolworth’s and Penney’s and drugstores
just like home, only some funnier-looking people--I mean, it wasn’t
glamorous or anything at all! And we had some sandwiches at a place,
but it was Sunday and no place was open, I mean we looked in the
yellow pages for those model agencies like Sandra said, but they
wouldn’t be open till Monday and I said where were we going to
sleep. And then Sandra got talking to this man--"

"Sunday," said Wanda. "The man who
drove you here, that was over Saturday night? Do you know his name?"

"He said to call him Jim, that’s all. Yes,
ma’am, we drove all night, he bought us two sandwiches at a place
on the way. And this other man Sandra got talking to, it was at this
place on Hollywood Boulevard we went in to eat. I mean, I didn’t
like it, but a person doesn’t know what to do," said
Stephanie, blinking back sudden tears.

"My mother doesn’t think black people are very
nice at all and Daddy always says nonsense, you judge people as
individuals, and at school they seem to think they’re better than
us because of slavery and all that and how do you know, anyway-- But
I didn’t like him! He got talking to Sandra and she told him about
going to be a model and get jobs here and he said maybe he could
help. He said did we have any place to stay and Sandra said not yet,
and so he said we could stay at his place, his wife’d be glad to
have us--I didn’t want to go, even when he said that, but Sandra
said not to be silly. And he had a car, he took us to this house."

"Did he tell you his name? What did he look
like?"

"Sure. His name was Steve Smith. I didn’t see
how he might help us get jobs, because, you know, he talked--oh, real
ignorant and bad grammar. But after, Sandra said maybe he was a
servant to somebody real high up in the movies or something like
that. Anyway, he took us to this house, but his wife wasn’t there
and he said she must’ve gone someplace."

"Did you notice the name of the street?"
asked Palliser.

She shook her head. "It wasn’t a very good
neighborhood, I guess--lots of narrow little streets and awful
run-down old houses. There wasn’t much furniture there, just some
chairs and a TV and a couple of beds. And he went and got some
hamburgers and asked would we like a couple of joints, and Sandra
said sure but I knew that was marijuana and I was scared to because
of what the school nurse told us last semester, so I didn’t take
any but Sandra-- Oh, what he looked like. Well, he was kind of tall,
as tall as you anyway," she said, looking at Palliser, "and
not very black, just sort of medium, and he had a mustache and a
funny little beard just at the end of his chin."

"What about the car?" asked Wanda.

"I don’t know the--the brand. It was an old
car, a two-door. Blue, I guess. Anyway, Sandra got to talking real
silly and I was scared then but I didn’t know what to do, I just
went in the bedroom and shut the door. I guess I went to sleep. And
all next day he was gone someplace and we mostly watched TV. There
were Cokes and a lot of stuff to eat there, only by then
I--just--wanted--to--go home!" said Stephanie. "And he came
back that night and said he’d been talking to somebody he knew
about jobs for us, and so Sandra said wait and see. But the next
night when he came, he got to talking sort of, you know, dirty, and
tried to fool around with Sandra and I got more scared and I ran out
the back door without my suitcase or anything, and I just about died
till it got light--only I didn’t know where I was or what to do--I
had my wallet in my pocket, I still had about four dollars and some
change, and pretty soon I found that big public library, I felt sort
of safe there and it was warm, but it closed at six and I just sort
of walked on and I wanted to go home just the worst way, and so when
I found that big railroad station I knew what to do. There were
public phones and I got the operator and said to reverse the charges,
and called home, and Daddy swore at me the minute he heard my voice,
I guess he’d been awful scared about me. But I bet he couldn’t
have been as scared as I was."

And with reason, thought Palliser. Kids! If she was
immature for her age--unlike the other one--still it was a funny age,
a mixture of emotion and ignorance. She’d been lucky to be scared
enough to run. "It was Tuesday night when you left Sandra there,
wherever it was?" That fitted in; the state of the body
yesterday morning, she had probably been killed Tuesday night.

"Yes, sir."

"Do you think you could recognize the house
where he took you? Did you notice any street names when you ran
away?"

She shook her head. "It was dark. Oh, I remember
one, Flower Street, just before I came to the library."

Palliser rubbed his nose. That wasn’t much help; by
what she said, she could have walked three dozen blocks before that.
What was in his mind was that city dwellers tend to be curiously
insular, stick to their own little corners: and when Steve Smith
attempted to get rid of the body in that derelict building, a hundred
to one he lived somewhere nearby, or had lived there. A house. Well,
there were enough old streets with ramshackle old houses along them,
both sides of San Pedro and other main drags down there.

"Do you think you could recognize him,
Stephanie?" asked Wanda. "If you saw his photograph?"

Stephanie nodded doubtfully. "I think so. I
tried to make Sandra come with me, I just knew something awful’d
happen if we stayed there, but you never could get Sandra to do
things. She got you to do things. Only--when Mama told me what
happened to her--I mean, I knew Sandra all my life." But this
time, in spite of everything, Stephanie was rather enjoying herself,
all of them listening to every word and Wanda taking notes.

"Wel1, I’ll tell you," said Palliser,
looking at his watch, "suppose Miss Larsen takes you to lunch,
Stephanie, and then we’ll take a ride around and see if you
recognize any buildings, and then you can look at some pictures."

She agreed almost enjoyably. When Wanda had led her
out, Palliser looked at Glasser and said, "Terrifying, no?
Kids."

"She was lucky," agreed Glasser sleepily.
"Does Harry sound like the kind to have a whole house of his
own? Even a ramshackle one?"

"Pay your money, take your choice. Could be his
sister’s and the fami1y’s away visiting Aunt Mary. Could be his
wife’s just left him. What I’m thinking about right now, he did
take some steps to get rid of the body." Palliser picked up the
phone and called S.I.D. "That D.O.A. yesterday--you pick up
anything else at the scene?"

"Didn’t anybody call you? Well, we would
have," said Horder. "It’s busy down here. You’l1 get a
report. Yeah, no latents anywhere on the body--you thought it’d
been dropped there--but out back of that building we picked up a
new-looking suitcase with some female clothes in it about the right
size for the corpse, and an overnight bag ditto. We’ve just been
over those, and there were some pretty good prints on the suitcase."

"Send the bags up if you’re finished with
them, will you? Thanks." Palliser relayed that to Glasser.
"There you are. He dumped both her and the luggage there, maybe
overlooking the plane case. The damn funny thing is, Henry, if he
hadn’t tried to set fire to the corpse she might not have been
found until the powers that be finally came to demolish that
building, which could be years."

"Fate," said Glasser. "That’s so.
Let’s go have some 1unch."

 
When Wanda brought Stephanie back she
identified the suitcase immediately, and Sandra’s overnight bag.
Palliser took her prints to compare to those S.I.D. had collected
from the suitcase, and they wasted an hour or so cruising around in
the Rambler in the vicinity of that building on San Pedro. Stephanie
was vague; it had been dark when Steve brought them to the house and
dark when she ran away: she didn’t recognize anything but the
public library. So he brought her back, down to the Records office,
and introduced her to Phil Landers.

"Mrs. Landers will give you some photographs to
look at, Stephanie. If you recognize him, you tell her--or if you see
any picture that might be him."