Case Pending

by Dell Shannon

  Mendoza said, “All right, Marty, that’s all for right now. You just try to stop thinking about it. Go to sleep and don’t worry any more.”

  “He was just wild, find the doll was gone, ’s morning.” The boy lay back tiredly on the pillows, his eyes closing. “I think even Ma was real scared then—so was I—and tonight, well, she’d been telling him all the while I’d—get it back for him—and when I said I couldn’t, he—”

  “Yes, we understand all that. Don’t worry about it now—everything’s over.”

  As they turned to the door Lindstrom said rather desperately, “Please, sir, I got to ask you—will they—will they do anything to—to my boy or me for being to blame about this? I mean, I want to do what’s right, I ain’t trying to get out of anything, but—”

  Mendoza turned back to him. “There’s no legal responsibility involved here really, now the boy’s dead, Mr. Lindstrom. I couldn’t say, it’s an academic question, under other circumstances very likely the D.A. and the grand jury might have decided to call it criminal negligence. As it is, I scarcely think so. Certainly not the boy, a minor couldn’t be assumed responsible… I might add, however, that at any time these seven years you could have taken action, if and when it seemed—indicated. A word to any of a number of agencies—police, county health, doctor, hospital—”

  “She made us promise!” burst out the boy. “She made us promise on the Bible!”

  Mendoza looked at them a minute more, smiled, said good night, and followed Hackett out to the corridor. “Any comment?” he asked, very soft and amused.

  “Nada,” said Hackett heavily. “Just—people. Leave it there. Are we wound up here?”

  “I want to see Morgan.”

  Fifteen

  “The gun,” said Mendoza.

  “Damn lucky—I had it on me,” repeated Morgan. He was all there, himself, sitting up smoking a borrowed cigarette, not much of a bandage to frighten his wife when she came; but he’d had just enough sedation to slow his mind somewhat, at the same time loosen his tongue.

  “I don’t deny it. You’ve saved everybody quite a bit of trouble—including the expense of a trial. It’s only a small point, Mr. Morgan, and maybe you’ll think I’m being unnecessarily careful. But as of the moment, California law says you don’t need a license for firearms unless you’re carrying them on the person or—I needn’t quote the whole thing, that’s the relevant part. License, Mr. Morgan?—and not that it’s any of my business, but how did you come to be carrying a loaded gun on a visit to one of your cases?”

  “It’s all shot to hell now,” muttered Morgan, “all for nothing—and you know, I don’t think—I don’t think I could’ve done it anyway.” He looked at Gunn, at the other side of the bed—Gunn, who’d had to get dressed and come out after all. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “I’ll tell you—didn’t go there to see Mrs. Lindstrom, Mendoza. I went to kill a man. A man named Smith.”

  They heard about Smith in disjointed phrases. Gunn’s round, amiable face got longer and more worried by the second. “Oh, you damn fool, Dick—can’t have been thinking straight—should’ve come to me, gone to the police, he couldn’t—”

  “Oh, couldn’t he! Can’t he! I remember enough law—Extortion? The law doesn’t take your unsupported word, does it?”—turning on Mendoza, who shook his head. “What could I do, what else could I—? Well, there it is—wasn’t intended, I guess—and now we’re right back where we were. God, I don’t know—”

  “Smith,” said Mendoza. “Description?” And when he’d pried that out of Morgan, “Yes, well, he won’t be troubling you for a while. His real name’s Dalton, he’s a small-time hood on the run from parole in New York, and we picked him up tonight in the middle of the other excitement. He’s got two years coming back east.”

  “Oh, God, you don’t mean it—he’s—all this for—”

  “Take it easy, Dick,” said Gunn, sitting down, looking almost sick with relief. “That doesn’t mean you’re out of the woods, but it makes it the hell of a lot easier. If the woman’s so—tractable, the way you say, there shouldn’t be any trouble. Put it through nice and quiet, get her to see a lawyer with you, there shouldn’t be any contest, just a routine thing. Dalton wasn’t after Janny, only the money, he wouldn’t—”

  “You think—no hitch, do it like that? If we—oh, God, I hope so, we’ve both been about crazy—” Morgan sat up and clutched Gunn’s arm. “You said Sue’s coming?—want to tell her—tell her it’s all right, or almost—”

  “Sue’s coming, you lie down. I called Christy, she’s gone over to stay with Janny, and Sue’ll be taking a cab down, on her way right now, probably.”

  Mendoza stood up. “There’ll be an inquest, of course, but purely formal. You needn’t worry about it. Self-defense, justifiable homicide. Which is a very damned lucky outcome for you, Morgan. You don’t know how lucky. If you want the Luger back, you’ll have to apply for a license.”

  “Oh, well, keep it, I don’t want it. I—I feel fine,” said Morgan, and laughed. “Wish Sue’d get here. You can have the damn gun. Glad now—didn’t use it—or the way I planned, anyway—”

  “Just as well.” Mendoza looked down at him, smiling very faintly. “I’d advise you, Morgan, not to get in a situation again where you start thinking about murder. In the first place, it never solves any problems, you know—only creates more. And in the second place, from what you told me of your plans for this one, it wouldn’t take a full-fledged lieutenant of detectives to spot you for X about half an hour after the corpse began to cool. However, as it is we’re all very happy you happened to be in the right place at the right time—and congratulations on the rest of this working out for you.” He nodded to Gunn, still looking amused, and went out.

  After a minute Morgan said, “Damn him—that’s—when I thought I was being so clever, too…but I suppose he’s right, at that. Just—something about him—puts my back up, is all.”

  Gunn sneezed, said, “Oh, hell, it is a cold,” and took out another cigarette. “Well, you know—Luis,” he added soberly, “maybe he’s just what they call overcompensating, for a time he was only another dirty little Mex kid in a slum street. You know? Tell you one thing, Dick, he’s a damned good cop—if a little erratic now and then,” and he grinned. He found a packet of matches, looked at it without lighting the cigarette. “He’s also a very lonely man. Which maybe he’ll find out some day.”

  Morgan moved restlessly. “Give me another one of those, will you? I wish Sue’d come…”

  * * *

  “Philosophizing?” Mendoza came up behind Hackett in the lobby.

  “Yeah, I guess you could say I was,” said Hackett, who’d been standing stock-still, staring vacantly at the wall. “I guess so. You know, this whole thing—it just struck me—what for? What’s it mean?”63

  Mendoza laughed and shrugged. “¿Quién sabe?—¡Sabe Dios!64 Nice to think it means anything.”

  “No, but it makes you wonder. You look at it and you can work up a fine righteous wrath against that damn fool woman, against the ignorance and false pride and plain damned muddle-headedness that’s killed three people—four, if you count him—and all unnecessarily. But was it? The way things dovetail, sometimes—Morgan just happening to be there, and with a gun on him—because if he hadn’t had, you know, I don’t think he could have handled that one alone, I don’t think any two men—Without the gun, maybe Morgan dead too. And maybe it was all for something, Luis—what we don’t know about, never will. To save the boy—maybe he’s got something to do here, part of some plan. You know? Maybe,” and Hackett laughed, “so Agnes Browne could get all straightened out with her Joe. Maybe so the Wades can keep their nice high-class superior-white-Protestant bloodline pure.”

  “Comforting to think,” repeated Mendoza cynically. “That’s why I’m a lieutenant and you’re a sergeant, Arturo—every time I formulate a theory, I
want evidence to say it’s so, or I don’t keep the theory. ¿Comprende? On that, there’s no evidence. If you want to theorize, chico, maybe it all happened so I could meet this pretty redhead! Change, please, if you’ve got it—¡Date prisa, por favor!”65

  Hackett took the quarter and gave him three nickels and a dime. “You watch yourself with that one, boy—I got a hunch you don’t get something for nothing there.”

  “All these years and you don’t know me yet. Wait and see. Hasta luego—eight o’clock sharp, we’ve a lot of routine to clear up.” Mendoza went over to the row of public phone booths.

  When Alison answered the second ring he said, “Luis. Would you like to hear a story of human foibles and follies?…Yes, we’ve got him, it’s all over. But for the routine. I’ll be with you in twenty minutes, you’ll be interested to hear all about it.”

  “Well, yes, but it is rather late—”

  “Night’s still young, chica. Twenty minutes,” he repeated firmly, and hung up on her reluctant laugh.

  Hackett was gone. Mendoza stood on the steps, lighting a cigarette, and the dead man in the freight yards wandered through his mind. The next thing, now. Tomorrow. A couple of rather suggestive little things, there: might yield the ghost of a line to look into… When he came out to the street, somebody in a brash new Buick had sewed him up tight in the parking space; it would take some maneuvering to get the Ferrari out. He swore, getting out his keys; no denying at all that a smaller car—He might just look into it, no harm in looking. Maybe that Mercedes…

  He slid under the wheel and started the engine. Meanwhile, Alison. He smiled to himself; he expected to enjoy Alison…

  63 Compare Sherlock Holmes’s remark, after concluding an ugly case of double murder: “‘What is the meaning of it, Watson? What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.’” Doyle, “The Cardboard Box,” 73.

  64 “Who knows? God knows!”

  65 “Hurry up, please!”

  Reading Group Guide

  1. Does Agnes Browne behave in a realistic manner? Do you know people like her?

  2. Dick Morgan will do whatever he has to do to protect his family. Does he make good choices? What were his alternatives?

  3. How do you think Lt. Mendoza feels about his ethnic heritage? How does he relate to Mexican Americans whom he meets? Does he relate differently than the white police officers?

  4. What do you think about Mendoza’s relationship with Alison Weir? The events of the story take place around 1960—how would their relationship be different in today’s society?

  5. What should Marty Lindstrom have done differently to save his family?

  6. Does the author’s depiction of the families in the neighborhood feel realistic? How might they be different today?

  7. Some of this story is about the relationships among young teenagers. How do you think this differs today from what the author depicts?

  8. Do you think race relations in America have changed materially since the time of this book?

  9. After reading this book, do you want to read other police procedurals? Other books by this author? Why or why not?

  Further Reading

  Additional books by the author:

  Blaisdell, Ann [pseud.]. Nightmare. New York: Harper & Bros., 1961. A standalone, made into the Hammer film Die, Die, My Darling!

  Egan, Lesley [pseud.]. Against the Evidence. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. The first Jesse Falkenstein mystery.

  Linington, Elizabeth. Greenmask! New York: Harper & Row, 1964. The first Sgt. Maddox mystery.

  Shannon, Dell [pseud.]. Knave of Hearts. New York: William Morrow, 1962. Another fine Lt. Mendoza novel.

  For a complete list of Linington’s works under the name Dell Shannon, see:

  Heising, Willetta L. Detecting Women 2. Dearborn, MI: Purple Moon Press, 1996.

  About Linington and her writing:

  Bailey, Frankie Y. “Elizabeth Linington.” In Whodunit?: A Who’s Who in Crime & Mystery, edited by Rosemary Herbert, 119. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

  “Elizabeth Linington.” In Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, edited by Chris Steinbrunner and Otto Penzler, 247. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1976.

  King, Margaret J. “An Interview with Elizabeth Linington,” Armchair Detective 13, no. 4 (Fall 1980): 299–307.

  Police procedurals:

  Dove, George N. The Police Procedural. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1982.

  Wall, Donald C. “Police procedurals.” In The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing, edited by Rosemary Herbert, 342–46. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

  Other noteworthy police procedurals:

  Connelly, Michael. The Black Echo. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1992. The first Harry Bosch mystery.

  McBain, Ed. Cophater. New York: Permabooks, 1956. The first 87th Precinct book.

  Uhnak, Dorothy. The Bait. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968. The author’s first novel, preceded by her nonfiction book, Policewoman: A Young Woman’s Initiation into the Realities of Justice (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964).

  Wambaugh, Joseph. The New Centurions. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970. Wambaugh’s first book about the L.A.P.D.

  About the Author

  Barbara Elizabeth Linington, who wrote fiction under the pen names Anne Blaisdell, Lesley Egan, Egan O’Neill, and Dell Shannon as well as her own name, was born March 11, 1921, in Aurora, Illinois, a small city about forty miles west of Chicago. Her parents moved to Los Angeles when she was seven, and she attended Herbert Hoover High School and Glendale College in the L.A. suburbs. Linington began writing in high school, but her first novel was not published until 1955, when she was thirty-four. It was titled The Proud Man, an historical novel about Shane O’Neill, prince of Ulster in sixteenth-century Ireland. She published two more under her own name and, in 1956, a third, The Anglophile, under the pen name Egan O’Neill. She tried to publish a fifth historical novel, but finding her fiction out of touch with the liberal politics of the day, Linington turned to crime fiction.66

  Her first mystery novel, Case Pending, was published in 1960, under the pseudonym Dell Shannon. According to Linington, when she sold that novel, she was under contract with Doubleday for her last historical novel, The Kingbreaker (1958), and so they wanted her to use a pen name. When she wrote Case for Appeal (1961), about police captain Vic Varallo of the fictional California town of Contera and later the Glendale Police Department, publisher Harper wanted still another pseudonym, to avoid confusion with the Dell Shannon books. Lesley Egan was born. Linington also wrote another series under that name, featuring Jesse Falkenstein, a Jewish lawyer-detective and his future brother-in-law Sgt. Andrew Clock of the Los Angeles Police Department (L.A.P.D.). Under her own name, she wrote about the detective squad at Hollywood’s Wilcox Avenue police station, the lead character being the Welsh cop Sgt. Ivor Maddox, a great fan of mystery fiction himself.

  Linington’s crime fiction is, with one exception—Nightmare (1961), written as Anne Blaisdell—in the subgenre known as “police procedurals.” These typically focus on multiple cases being worked by various officers in a single location. Linington explained in an interview in 1980 that most of the cases she used were real. “I have a stack of back detective magazines,” she said, “Master Detective, True Detective, and so forth. When I’m plotting out a case, I sit down and go through these things. You have to change them around a little bit, you know.” For some of her series, she said:

  I had to do an awful lot of research on the L.A.P.D. when it looked as if I’d be writing police procedurals, and you know learning police techniques… I know all about the precinct stations
and everything. And of course you have to keep up with the newest techniques they have… I found out how they operate and, you know, their salary schedules and police examinations…for plain-clothes detective and sergeant…the kind of things they have to know…criminal slang, and that sort of thing. I’ve got notebooks filled with stuff.67

  Linington wrote so prolifically, averaging three books a year during the 1960s through 1980s, that she amassed eighty-eight titles, and mystery critic Allen Hubin hailed her as the “Queen of Police Procedurals.” Linington credited her output to highly organized writing methods. For many years, she would handwrite out a chapter, then type it up in the morning, revising as she went along. Then she would read over the first five chapters and make herself notes, and after making emendations, would go on to the next five chapters. Later in her life, suffering from back pain, she gave up doing her own typing. She stuck to a strict schedule, however, taking about two-and-a-half months for each of her books: two months of “gestation” followed by two weeks of intensive writing.

  Politically, Linington was a conservative, a longtime member and staunch supporter of the John Birch Society. She viewed the Society as representing a real cross-section of the American public, with members of every creed, color, and economic status. However, she broke with the Society late in her life because she disagreed with its embrace of organized religion, something she vigorously opposed. Linington never married, but she wrote warmly of romance, marriage, family life, and children, making her police characters realistic and likeable. Frankie Y. Bailey, assessing her work, said, “There is a clear opposition of good and evil and a marked sensitivity to the suffering endured by the victims of crime.”68

  Nominated three times for the Edgar Award, bestowed by the Mystery Writers of America (MWA), Linington wasn’t part of the community of American crime writers. “I’m not really in touch with any of them,” she said in 1980.69 She dropped out of the Hollywood chapter of MWA because, in her view, it was mostly TV writers and script writers, with whom she had little in common. In her sixties, Linington had had enough of the big city and moved to Arroyo Grande, about two hundred miles up the California coast from Glendale. She wrote more than twenty books there, dying in 1988. Two more of her mysteries were published, under the Dell Shannon byline, posthumously.