Case Pending

by Dell Shannon

  It was a new department, this little corps of investigators—the husband-chasers, inevitably they were called; and if Gunn couldn’t claim their job was as important as the one he’d done for forty years in and out of uniform, at least the Scot in him took pride in reckoning how much they saved the taxpayers. He’d set up the organization himself, and it served as a model for those some other counties were building, here and in other states. He and his crew had tracked down over two thousand runaway husbands so far, to pry minimum child-support funds out of them anyway. Authorities in other states had cooperated, of course, but it came out even: they’d picked up deserters for other D.A.’s offices from Maine to Oregon, too. Gunn had the exact figure whenever Kelleher wanted it; to date it was upward of half a million dollars this office had saved the county in support of deserted wives and children. There’d been a time a man could walk out and it was nobody’s job to locate him, make him provide for a deserted family. These days, no. He couldn’t go across the Arizona or Nevada line and thumb his nose at the California taxpayers.

  Gunn himself hadn’t had any idea what a staggering sum casual desertions cost the state, until he saw the figures last year. And he could have doubled the amount saved by now if he could have another dozen men, another dozen office clerks. This was the hell of a big town, and it attracted the hell of a lot of indigents and transients, as well as the usual shiftless ones any city had.

  But he wasn’t thinking about that as he looked after Dick Morgan. He stood there passing a hand over his jaw in a habitual gesture, a big hefty man with a round, amiable face and thinning hair, and for a minute he worried about Morgan. Dick had had some rough breaks: just out of college when the war came along,7 and he was married and had a child by the time it was over so he never did go back to finish his law course, but like so many others went into a big-company job. Then they lost the child, one of those unnecessary accidents, a drunk in a car, turning down their street just at random. That had nearly finished Sue, because she couldn’t have another… Sure, they put the drunk in jail for manslaughter, but what good did that do a six-year-old girl, or Sue and Dick?

  Dick’s father had been alive then and living with them, and Gunn used to drop in there. Hadn’t done old Rob Morgan any good either, losing his only grandchild like that. After a while they’d put their names down with a couple of adoption agencies, but those places were so damn finicky; they’d waited almost five years before they got Janny—but Janny was worth it. And just about then had come one of those squeeze-plays, a company merger, a few new hatchet men from the front office, and Dick was out—at thirty-seven, with nowhere to go, a mortgaged house, and less than a thousand in the bank.

  Gunn wouldn’t have blamed him for feeling bitter. At the same time, being Gunn, he wouldn’t have had Dick Morgan on his staff—old Rob, sympathy, or no—if he hadn’t known Dick could handle the job the right way. It wasn’t a job that paid anything like what Dick had been earning before, but it was a job and Dick had seemed grateful and certainly competent and reasonably contented with it.

  To anyone who didn’t know him, Dick’s manner just now might suggest a touch of indigestion, or a spat with his wife at breakfast, or an unlucky bet on the ponies. But Gunn knew Morgan for a man of abnormally equable temper, and that little nervousness and bad color meant a lot more than it would with another man. Besides, Dick and Sue never had spats; Sue wasn’t that sort. And Dick didn’t bet—or drink, either. Not since eight years ago.

  Gunn hoped the boy wasn’t in for another piece of rough luck somehow. Janny, maybe—some illness? Some people walked all their lives with bad luck at their shoulders.

  No good worrying about it now.

  His phone rang and he stepped back into his office to answer it. The voice at the other end was the heavy bass of Captain Bill Andrews. “Say, Ken, among your little brood of wives you wouldn’t have one Sylvia Dalton, would you?”

  “Don’t think so. Why?” Gunn riffled through the current file before him.

  “Well, it was just a thought. Maybe you noticed by the papers that New York sort of misplaced Ray Dalton the other day. He was up on a three-to-five and got himself paroled, but he never did report in to his officer. New York thinks now—the usual information received—he lit out west, specifically to these parts, and’ll be obliged if we can return the goods undamaged. Thing is, the party that said he headed west also said it was to see his wife. I came up with the bright thought that wives of crooks don’t usually like to work very regular, and maybe this one was accepting our hospitality.”

  “Not unless she’s doing it under another name. It’s a thought, all right.”

  “Yeah. You might just check for initials. I can give you a make on her.”

  “I’ve got nothing else to do but your work,” said Gunn. “I don’t know every one of our customers personally, you know. Sure, somebody sees ’em all, but I’ve got eleven men on duty. Yes, sure, I’ll check with them. Send over the make. Don’t I remember Dalton? It rings a bell—”

  “It ought to. The Carney job, five-six years back. Cameron and Healey were on it—liquor store knocked over and two men shot, proprietor and a clerk. We couldn’t tie Dalton to it tight enough, but he was in on it. I guess at that we made him nervous enough to run back east, and New York put the arm on him for another job.”

  “I remember,” said Gunn. He leaned back in his chair and regarded the ceiling. For a minute, with the familiar shoptalk, he almost had the illusion he was back at headquarters in a real job, not this makeweight piddling business, and under Kelleher too…but, damn, a job worth doing. “It’s worth a try,” he said. “Any kids?”

  “One, a boy about twelve-thirteen.”

  “O.K.,” said Gunn. “I’ll have a look, might come up with something.”

  * * *

  Morgan drove slowly down Main Street, not cursing at the traffic; he handled the car automatically, stopping for pedestrians, for red lights.

  Mrs. Williams lived on a run-down street among those that twisted and came to dreary dead ends the other side of Main. He would surprise Mr. and Mrs. Williams together and deliver a little lecture on the dangers of conspiracy to defraud. Maybe it wasn’t so stupid of them to pull the shabby little trick, the commonest one in the list, with scarcely any attempt at secrecy; until the formation of this new department, God knew how many people had got away with it for years.

  The problem created, Morgan thought as he had before, went beyond the Williamses or any individual—or the amount of public money. In essence, a social problem, and not a new one. If it wasn’t money from this county office, it’d be money from another: people like the Williamses didn’t give a damn. Williams, letting himself be branded a wife- and child-deserter, getting a job and a cheap room somewhere out of town, sneaking back for week-ends with his family, all to cheat sixty-three-fifty a month out of the county—on top of the three hundred or more he could earn as a skilled workman.

  At a bar last night with his wife until midnight. Last thing they’d worry about was leaving the kids alone: four kids, the oldest eleven. It was a shabby, cheap neighborhood, almost a slum, though there were worse streets. People like the Williamses didn’t care where or how they lived: often they had more money than others who lived better, but their money went on ephemeral things—on flashy cars and clothes and liquor.

  Morgan was driving a six-year-old Ford. He wouldn’t be surprised to find that Williams’ car was a new model, and something more expensive.

  But all that was on the surface of his mind; he couldn’t, for once, be less concerned. Deeper inside a voice was screaming at him soundlessly, What the hell are you going to do? Ten thousand bucks. Ten thousand… All right, so he knew what he ought to do: Richard Alden Morgan, law-abiding citizen, who’d always accepted responsibilities and stood on his own two feet, and where had it got him? So it was just the breaks: everybody had bad luck. But, God damn it, so much bad… A
nd a damn funny thing to think maybe, but if he could blame himself (or anybody), some concrete way, reason he’d just brought it on himself, he wouldn’t feel so bitter. Nothing like that with Dick Morgan, he thought in savage sarcasm: respectable, righteous Morgan who paid his bills and lived within his income, Morgan the faithful, considerate husband and father—how did the old song go, everything he should do and nothing that he oughtn’t-O8—and got kicked in the teeth all the same. You could say “the breaks,” but it damn well wasn’t fair that Sue should be dragged under with him—Sue hadn’t done anything, neither of them had done anything to deserve—

  Janny hadn’t done anything. Except get born.

  He coasted gently to the curb two doors from the apartment house where the Williamses lived, and sat for a minute, getting out the watchers’ report, rereading it but not really taking it in. Parked smack in front of the apartment was a year-old Buick, a two-tone hardtop. That’d be Williams, sure; Henry had taken down the license.

  All right, so he knew what he ought to do. Go to the police, tell the story. Honest citizen. Sure. The police would take care of the man with the pock-marked face and dirty nails and cold gray eyes and the rasping voice that said Ten thousand bucks, see. And would that be the end of it? Like hell it would. The juvenile court would have something to say then, miles of red tape to unwind, and in the end they’d lose Janny anyway—he knew how those things went, how judges figured, how the cumbersome, impersonal law read. It was all the fault of the damned pompous law to start with: the silly God-damned inhumanly logical rules of the accredited agencies.

  Suddenly his control broke one moment, and he pounded his fist on the steering wheel in blind, impotent fury. Not fair, after everything else—the panic in Sue’s eyes, the panic he heard in his own voice telling her—ten thousand—what the hell could he do? The police. The money. No choice for him even here, it had to be the police; he couldn’t raise money like that.

  You had to be logical about it. Juvenile hall, a state foster home, an orphanage, still better than anywhere with that pock-marked hood, the kind of woman he’d—

  Ten thousand. The car wouldn’t bring five hundred. They still owed four thousand on the house, a second mortgage wouldn’t—Sue’s engagement ring, the little odds and ends of jewelry they had, maybe another five hundred if they were lucky.

  He’d sat still to be kicked in the teeth for the last time. If he could get from under this by forgetting every righteous standard he had—But it wasn’t so easy, it never was. So, go and rob a bank, hold up a liquor store, sure, get the ten thousand. It wouldn’t cancel out: the threat would be just as potent, and in a month, six months, a year, there’d be another demand.

  He straightened up after a while and took a couple of long breaths. It wasn’t any good agonizing round and round in the same circle, they’d gone over all this a hundred times last night. He’d just have to play it by ear. Meanwhile he had a day’s work to do—conscientious, methodical Morgan, he thought tiredly.

  He got out of the car, slipping the ignition key in his pocket. See the Williamses and try to put the fear of God into them. The county wouldn’t prosecute this time, on a first offense involving a relatively small amount: the courts were working overtime as it was. Morgan looked up Commerce Street to the corner of Humboldt,9 where something seemed to be going on—he could see the tail end of a black-and-white police car, its roof light flashing, and the fat Italian grocer had come out of his corner shop with a few early customers. Whatever it was, a drunk or a fight or an accident, it was round the corner on Humboldt.

  He started up the worn steps of the apartment. After he’d dealt with the Williamses he might as well drop in on Mrs. Kling, and that new one was somewhere around here too, if he remembered the address—he got out his case-notebook to look. Yes, Mrs. Marion Lindstrom, 273 Graham Court.

  4 The Palace Theatre, at 630 South Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, was built in 1911. It was originally known as the “Orpheum” and housed the Orpheum Vaudeville Circuit, but it was renamed the Palace Theatre in 1926, switching to showing films. The theater remains in operation in 2019.

  5 About $706 in household purchasing power in 2019. Samuel H. Williamson, “Purchasing Power Today of a US Dollar Transaction in the Past,” MeasuringWorth, 2019, https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/uscompare/. The maximum Mrs. Williams and her family could get in Los Angeles under the CalWORKS program in 2019 is $1,242, considerably more than in 1960. “CalWORKS Maximum Grant Levels,” World Institute on Disability, 2019, https://ca.db101.org/glossary_item.aspx?item-id=6521.

  6 An improvised, usually homemade firearm.

  7 This is the only clue to the year of the story: Dick was “just out of college when the war came along” (in 1941), when he was probably twenty-two years old. At thirty-seven (likely in 1956), Morgan lost his job, and he was hired by Gunn shortly after that. He doesn’t seem to have been on the job long, so the year is likely 1957 or, at the latest, 1958.

  8 Originally from a ballad sung no later than the nineteenth century, W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan adapted the lyric into the 1884 operetta Princess Ida; or, Castle Adamant, in which a character sings, “You’re everything you ought to be / And nothing that you oughtn’t, O!”

  9 Humboldt Street is just northeast of downtown Los Angeles and east of Elysian Park and Chavez Ravine (later the home of Dodger Stadium—the stadium opened in 1962); except as noted, the other streets mentioned in the novel are fictional.

  Two

  There were worse streets than Commerce, but it wasn’t a neighborhood where anyone would choose to live, except those who didn’t think or care much about their surroundings, or those who couldn’t afford anything better. Ironically, only a few blocks away rose the clean modern forest of civic buildings, shining with glass and newness and surrounded by neat squares of asphalt-paved parking lots. Like many cities, this one sprouted its civic and business center in its oldest section, inevitably bordered with slums. It might look easy to change matters with the power of condemnation, the expenditure of public money, but it wouldn’t work out that way if the city fathers tried it. There’d grow up other such streets elsewhere if not here; there were always the people who did not care, the landlords who wouldn’t spend on repairs. Every city always has its Commerce Streets.

  Commerce started ten or twelve blocks up, at the big freight yards, and dead-ended two blocks down from Humboldt. It was a dreary length of ancient macadam lined mostly with single houses—narrow, one-storey, ramshackle clapboard houses as old as the century or older, and never lovingly cared for: here and there was one with a fresh coat of paint, or a greener strip of grass in front, or cleaner-looking curtains showing, but most were a uniform dun color with old paint cracked, brown devil grass high around the front steps. About halfway down its length, the street grew some bigger houses of two stories, square frame houses not much younger and no neater: most of those were rooming houses by the signs over their porches. Interspersed with these were a few dingy apartment buildings, a gas station or two, neighborhood stores—a delicatessen, a family grocery; and in windows along nearly every block were little signs—SEWING DONE CHEAP, CANARIES FOR SALE, FIX-IT SHOP, HAND-TAILORING.

  Agnes Browne lived behind one of the signs, that said primly, SEAMSTRESS, in the ground-floor right window of the house at the corner of Commerce and Wade, two blocks up from Humboldt. She worked as a waitress at a dime-store lunch counter; the sewing added to her wages some, and anyway she liked to sew and figured she might as well get paid for it. She didn’t care much for going out and around; it still made her kind of nervous. She couldn’t help but be afraid people were looking at her and thinking, Huh, kind of dark even for Spanish, wonder if—When the landlady said Browne didn’t sound very Spanish, Agnes had told her it was her married name and she was a widow. But she was kind of sorry she’d ever started it now; it was like what the minister said for sure, about the guilty fleeing where no m
an pursueth. It hadn’t been the money, she could earn as much anyway, maybe even more, at a dozen jobs colored girls got hired for; but there were other things besides money. Only she felt guilty at making friends under false pretenses, and as for Joe, well, she just couldn’t. Joe was a nice boy, he had a good job at a garage, he was ambitious; he’d asked her for a date half a dozen times, but it wouldn’t be right she should take up with him. Not without telling him. A lot of girls would have, but Agnes didn’t figure it’d be fair. All the same, she liked Joe and it was hard.

  She was thinking about it this morning as she started for work; seemed like she couldn’t think of anything else these days. She was a little late, it was ten past eight already, and she hurried; she could walk to work, it was only two blocks down to Main and four more to the store.

  As usual she cut across the empty lot at the corner of Humboldt. There’d been a house on the lot once, but it had been so badly damaged by fire a few years back that what was left of it was pulled down. Now there was just the outline of the foundation left, all overgrown with weeds—devil grass and wild mustard. Agnes had tripped over the hidden ledge of the concrete foundation before, and skirted it automatically now; but in the middle of the lot she tripped over something else.