Case Pending

by Dell Shannon

  62 The Spanish is so much more colorful: “Not worth a cumin seed!”

  Fourteen

  Morgan stepped inside the dark, smelly front hallway of the apartment building and shut the door after him. This was it, here and now. And it was the damnedest thing, he’d expected it to feel like going into action, but instead—a little ludicrously—he felt exactly the way he had when he’d been in that senior play in high school. Walking out on the stage, all the lights, painfully conscious of every breath he drew, every slightest gesture, and yet somehow divorced from himself so that he moved with a stranger’s body, spoke with a stranger’s voice.

  This was it, this was it. Start now. Remember—and as he went up the first half-dozen steps, sudden sharp panic stabbing at the back of his mind (the way it had been that time on the high-school auditorium stage, oh, God, suppose I forget—) that he’d forget just the one detail of his plan that would bring the whole thing down like a house of cards on top of him.

  Think about what you’re doing. You’ll be all right, you’re getting keyed up to it now, you know what you’ve got to do, you’ve decided, and now time’s run out, you’re on—move!

  Quick, because you’ve been watched in, every second counts now, the timing is the important factor here. You’ll be all right, you can do it.

  He went fast up the stairs. There were sixteen steps, and a tiny square landing, uncarpeted, and then you turned up six more steps to the left, to the second-floor hall. The door to the Lindstroms’ apartment was just across there, and the next flight right around from the top of those stairs, left again. He got to the landing, and his breath was coming too short—God, he’d never do it, out of condition, another flight and he wouldn’t have strength to aim the damn gun—But he had to hurry, he had to—

  A woman screamed ten feet away in the dark hall. And screamed. And the third scream shut off sharp and final, cut off as with a knife.

  After that it was mostly reflex action for Morgan. The only conscious complete thought he remembered having was, Not destiny I should kill Smith: every time something happens to stop it. That in his mind while the screaming sounded, and then he was across the landing and plunging up the six additional steps, and in the hallway—behind that door there, no noise now, no screams, and then other sounds, and a boy’s frantic voice, “No, don’t, Eddy, don’t, please—”

  He expected the door to be locked, he pounded on it to let them know someone was here, coming. Afterward he remembered it wasn’t until then he realized it was the Lindstroms’ door—and now, no voices inside but a queer grunting, thrashing-around noise that raised the hair on his neck, and he put his shoulder to the door, shouting warning.

  It was not locked, it swung in under him, almost threw him head foremost. Feet on the stairs below: a voice calling something.

  He didn’t see the woman, not then. Only one lamp on in the dingy room, a body on the floor, a big dark figure crouched over it, with hands reaching—

  “What’s going on here, what—” He was halfway across the room; he stopped, seeing the woman then, twisted limp figure sprawled across the threshold of the bedroom; he looked away from her, dry-throated, saw the big figure had straightened to come at him, lumbering. In the full light then, coming with guttural mouthings, and Morgan saw what it was, saw—

  Blind, instinctive, he clawed for the gun in his pocket. The butt caught in the pocket lining; hands took hold of him and slammed him back against the wall and he thought all the breath was knocked out of him, he couldn’t—Animal gruntings, a fetid breath hot on his face. He tugged desperately at the gun and it came free, the pocket tearing loose, as he went down full length on his back, and hands lifting, holding, smashed his head down against a chair leg.

  Dark exploded inside his head, he was blind, he was done, but the gun in his hand, and he jammed it into what was on top of him, just at random, and pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  Johnny Branahan had been riding patrol cars for nearly twenty years; he was growing a spare tire around his diaphragm and he wasn’t quite as quick on his feet as he’d been when he was a rookie. He wasn’t a particularly ambitious man, or the brainiest man in uniform, but he was a good cop, within certain limits: he did the job he was supposed to do the way it was supposed to be done, and he wasn’t one of those did just as little as he could get away with, either. He was conscientious about studying the lists of hot cars and wanted men.

  The call came over at six minutes past seven, and they were quite a way off, so even with the siren going they were the fourth car to get there. An assault, it was, by the code number, and must be a three-star business, some sort, with four cars called in. The ambulance was already there, and quite a crowd—honest to God, you’d think they grew up out of the ground, let anything happen—

  Wilkinson and Petty, Slaney and Gomez, handling the crowd: he spotted them as he braked the car, and Gomez caught his eye and called to him as he and his partner got out. “Upstairs, Johnny—second floor, the lieutenant’s up there.”

  “Right,” said Branahan. He was puffing a little when he got to the top of the stairs; it was the apartment right there, door open, and he could see the white-coated interns inside, just lifting a stretcher.

  “This one’s a D.O.A. too,” said one of them. “We’ll come back for those—O.K., boy, let’s get the show on the road.” Goldstein and Costello were handling the smaller crowd up here, tenants, trying to get in to see the blood, see the corpses, honest to God you wondered what got into people—

  “All right, folks, let the doctors through, now—”

  As the interns came out with the first stretcher, the crowd parting reluctantly, he caught a glimpse of another man in there, one of the downtown men, Lieutenant Mendoza from Homicide. Quick work, he thought, and moved back himself to give room to the interns at the top of the stairs.

  That put him at the foot of the stairs to the next floor, and out of the corner of his eye he saw a man crouched halfway down those stairs, and got a flicker of movement as the man retreated a little way, farther into the dark up there.

  It wasn’t brains made Branahan go up after him, any conscious process of reasoning. It was just that as an experienced cop he knew there must be something funny about anybody who didn’t come rushing up to join the crowd when anything like this was going on.

  He started up the stairs, and above him heard sudden movement, and then the fellow began to run—light and fast—up toward the next floor; so then of course Branahan ran too, and caught up with him at a door the man was fumbling at, and swung him around. It was damn dark up there, and he had his flash out ready; he shot it in the man’s face and said, “Hold it, brother, let’s see what you look like.”

  The man swore and swung on him, so Branahan belted him one on the side of the head with the flash, and the man staggered back against the wall. Branahan took a second look and was pleased; he’d had reason to remember this name and face on the wanted lists again, because he’d picked this hood up once before, five-six years back.

  “Well, if it isn’t Ray Dalton,” he said. “Up on your feet, boy. Hey, Andy, up here! I got a deal for us! It’s just a damn shame, Ray, you so homesick for California you couldn’t wait to head west—but New York’s kind of mad at you on account you spurned their hospitality. You oughta learn better manners, Ray—No, you don’t, me bucko, just hold it now,” and the bracelets clicked home as Andy came pounding up the stairs.

  * * *

  By nine o’clock the excitement was about all over; they were tying up loose ends there at the General Hospital. If you could say anything like this really ended, or ended satisfactorily, maybe this had. The woman was dead, and the murderer was dead; the boy wasn’t badly hurt; Morgan had a slight concussion and could go home tomorrow, they said.

  The reporters had come and gone, after the usual backchat with the nurses about flash-shots and noise. This would make the
front page tomorrow morning, just once, and not as a lead story; people would talk of it a little and then soon forget it.

  “Also,” said Mendoza to Hackett, lighting a fresh cigarette, “we can’t claim to have done much about winding this up, can we? Just the way the deal ran—sometimes you get a hand you can’t do a damn thing with.”

  “That’s the way it goes sometimes. But I don’t know, Luis—you’d linked this up, in the process of time—”

  “I think so, yes. It only needed somebody with official excuse to get into that apartment for any length of time, you know—sooner or later such an outsider would have heard or seen something to rouse suspicion, and then the lid would have blown—with what we had already.”

  “One hell of a thing, who’d have—And damn lucky in a way it ended like this, nothing worse. I’ve got no sympathy for that woman, that I’ll say—she got what she asked for. But when you think what it must have been like for that kid, for the husband, all these years—” Seven years, the husband said, since they’d come west away from home where everybody knew.

  “Mother love,” said Mendoza, and laughed. They had quite a lot from the husband about that, by now: incoherent, poured out in sporadic bursts jumbled together with self-apology. I knew it was awful wrong of me, but I got to a place where I just couldn’t stand no more. An’ I thought, if I wasn’t there, it’d be bound to come out—they’d make her put him away somewheres—account it was getting where she couldn’t handle him herself, all I could do to manage him, times, he was so big, you know. They were silent awhile, thinking about it.

  Mother love, maybe: also pride, shame, ignorant conviction of guilt. An obsession: if he was to be put away, questions, forms, people knowing; and also habit, also familiarity, saying the doctor back home was wrong, no danger, poor Eddy just like a little kid, he’d never—A little kid twenty years old, six-feet-four and stronger than most men.

  Ashamed of him, but refusing to send him away. And quite possibly aggravating the whole mental state by the unnatural secret life she forced on him in consequence—on all of them. Moving in or out of places by night, watching, waiting, so that none would see. Keeping him in by day, close-watched: if she had to go out, the husband home from work, the boy home from school, to keep watch. Taking him out like a dog for exercise after dark, keeping to unlighted side streets. Training him like a dog, no noise inside the apartment. Building three lives around the one unproductive life, everything else subordinate to looking after Eddy and keeping Eddy a secret from everyone else.

  I figured she’d have to give it up, if I wasn’t there. He got into, well, like rages they was, times—any little thing’d set him off, wanted to smash things, you know, an’ she couldn’t handle—Same time, he knew lots o’ things you wouldn’t expect, an’ it was like that doctor said, when he got to be fourteen, fifteen, you know, getting to be a man, like, he—It got harder, he kept wanting get out, away, by himself, an’ then when you’d bring him back, say no, he got just terrible mad, couldn’t see why—

  Of course Lindstrom had argued with her. Not the kind of man to be very articulate. Not the kind of woman to listen, reason, understand clearly what she was doing and why.

  And I never did think he’d ever turn on any of us—on his own Ma! Didn’t seem possible, if I’d thought that I’d never in this world gone off like I did. I knew it was awful bad for Marty, sleeping same room and all, ’twasn’t fair—but she wouldn’t never listen. I just got to a place where—

  Mendoza dug his cigarette into the tub of sand in the corridor there and repeated, “Mother love.”

  “People,” contributed Hackett rather savagely. The pretty blonde nurse came out and said they could see the boy for just ten minutes, if they wouldn’t let him get too excited, he’d been in shock after all and needed rest and quiet.

  The boy had tight hold on his father’s hand, sitting up in bed looking at them a little uncertain, a little scared still. “We don’t bite,” said Mendoza, smiling down at him. “There’s just a few little questions we want to ask and then we’ll let you go to sleep.”

  “Yes, sir. I—I want to tell you—how it was, it was my fault, I know that—let him get away, when I knew how he was, he’d maybe get in trouble. But I—but I—That first time, it was all account of that doll, it was awful silly but he wanted it so bad, he saw it in the store window, there was a light left on even when it was shut, you know, and times I took him out, nights, we went past a couple times and I couldn’t hardly get him away from it, he—”

  “He took funny notions like that,” said Lindstrom. “Don’t you get excited, Marty, I’m right here to watch out for you now, and all they want to know, I guess, is about—about today.” He looked still a little dazed and shaken, but his voice was reassuringly stolid.

  “But I want to tell—about everything, have it over… Ma, she’ll be awful mad—I made things happen like they did.” He hadn’t been told about his mother yet; there was time. “I—I was scared to tell her, first, that time—over on Tappan—and then I had to, account of knowing what he’d done. Ma said—she told him she’d buy it for him, see—the doll. She’d saved up the money—”

  “Waste, waste,” muttered Lindstrom. “Foolish, but she’d do such, whatever he—”

  “And then I guess she couldn’t, somebody else—And that night, I was out with him, he ran off and I couldn’t catch up—I looked everywhere, I went to that store but they’d taken the doll out of the window a while before, he wasn’t—And when I f-found him, he had it, a great big box and inside—I thought he’d stole it, I shouldn’t’ve let him get away like that—”

  “You take it easy now,” said Hackett, soothing; he glanced at Mendoza. They could both reconstruct that one, Brooks, now. Eddy peering in the shop window, seeing Carol come out with the doll. His doll, that he’d been promised, that she had no right to. Following, working up into anger at her thievery.

  “I—when I heard—about that girl, and I remembered there was a little spot on his shirt, like blood—I had to tell Ma, but she wouldn’t listen, she wouldn’t believe he’d—She said I’d just forgot, she had so bought the doll, and I was making up bad stories—”

  Mendoza sighed to himself; he had heard that animal mothers too always gave more attention to the runt of a litter, the sickly one… “I’d like to hear something about the skating rink, Marty. This girl, this time.”

  “Yes, sir. That was even more my fault, ’cause I knew how bad he could do, then. I shouldn’t’ve—but Ma’d got kind of sick, she was doctoring at the clinic and couldn’t go out with him any more nights, I had to every night. And sometimes it was kind of hard, things I wanted to do with other fellows, like movies sometimes—you know—I—he got away a couple times more, and once when I found him he was at that place, he’d found a sort of little back door that was open and he was getting in, and I had to go after, I had an awful time getting him to come away—he liked the music, and he liked to watch them going round and round. And—Dad, you know how when he liked anything he’d be good and quiet, just sit there still as could be, hours sometimes—I thought it was all right! I—I went with him a couple of times, and he never moved, just sat there watching and listening, see. So I thought, he’d do like that long as that place was open at night, never bother nobody, nobody knew we was there at all. And, Dad, it wasn’t like cheating to sneak in without paying like that, because we wasn’t using it, I mean didn’t go to skate. I thought I could just, sort of, leave him there and it’d be all right, he’d just sit and never do nothing. And I did, a lot of times, I went off and to a movie or somewheres, not to see it all through but mostly, you know—and came back to get him, and he was fine, right where I’d left him.”

  “And at the rink,” said Mendoza softly, “he saw a girl, a pretty girl who looked like his beautiful doll… How’d I know that? Why, I’m a detective, Marty.”

  “He was—funny—about the doll,” said the
boy with a little gasp. “I mean, I guess he sort of—loved it—but same time, he did things to it—bad things. Yes, sir, it was like that—at that place, he saw this girl, he got terrible excited about it, kept talking about her—I mean, what—what he meant for talk, he couldn’t ever talk real plain, you know. It was really that, sort of, that’d tell you what he was like, because just to look at him, he—”

  Yes; not until you looked twice, saw the eyes, the lumbering walk, or heard the guttural attempts at speech, would you know. Otherwise, to the casual look, just a big young man, maybe a little stupid.

  “Once down on Commerce, when I was with him, I saw her too—he—tried to go up and talk to her, I got him away then. And I guess she was a little scared, remembered me anyways, I mean what I looked like, even if it was dark—because a couple days after, in the daytime, I saw her in the street again, and she made like to say something to me, but she never—Danny was with me, he—”

  “You’re doing fine, but don’t try to tell everything, just take it easy.”

  “He wanted—to skate with her, round and round, to the music,” said the boy faintly. “I shouldn’t never have left him there that night. I got sort of scared about it in the movies, I thought I’d better—and he was gone! I looked everywheres, but it was so dark and I didn’t dare call at him very loud, people—And when I did find him, it was right there, that lot where—I didn’t know then, I didn’t, I never saw her! He had a lady’s handbag, I didn’t see that until we was down the street a ways, and I thought he’d stole it. I just dropped it, like, didn’t know what else—he didn’t mind when I took it, he—”

  So that built up Ramirez for them. He saw the boy she was with taken out, and the girl left alone. So now was his chance to go skating round and round with his pretty doll who’d come alive for him—and that was all, probably, he’d followed her for: to tell her that, ask her. And the girl, confronted there in the dark, alone, in the empty lot, with the animal mouthings, the eager pawings, losing her head, struggling to get away—And that was all it had needed.