Felony File

by Dell Shannon

  "It's a very easy way to kill somebody," said Mendoza.

  "Now I know," said Newton bitterly. "Jesus, there I was with both of them, and one thing I did know— there'd be a crew of cleaning people around. I stood there just sweating, and all of a sudden I looked at her and thought what a good-looking chick she was—and the whole idea came to me right then. If the cops thought some nut was after her and Dick just got in the way, you wouldn't go looking for a reason on Dick. I thought it was worth a try. I got her clothes off, and made it look—" He shrugged and fell silent.

  "But she wasn't raped," said Mendoza. "Which made us think twice. You shouldn't underestimate us, you know." He laughed. "Especially our scientific lab boys."

  Higgins stood up. "Come on, Mr. Newton. We'll get you booked in before lunch." Newton got up, looking surly, and preceded him out without another word.

  "At least," said Mendoza to Grace, "we can stop hunting up the rapists to question. Shortsighted fellow, Mr. Newton. An accident—so it may have been, with Sanford. But I hope the D.A.'ll decide to land him on a Murder One for the girl."

  "I'll take a bet," said Grace promptly. "He said that was an accident too."

  "Go away and hunt heisters."

  "There's one we don't need to. You haven't looked at the night report. And Bob left a note."

  Mendoza grinned over the blonde. But with this latest little puzzle out of the way, his mind inevitably slid back to others. Why the hell the Stromberg car hadn't been picked up— Well, the only answer was that it was hidden somewhere. Why? Then he sat up. It could also have been driven across a state line by the day after the murder. They hadn't identified her for three days. That would be one very good reason that a six-county A.P.B. hadn't turned it up. And what the hell had happened to the woman? That colorless, conventional woman living the sterile quiet existence, not many interests, not much personality—on a rainy night, making a phone call from the Brown Derby, vanishing—getting stashed in Lafayette Park, dead, two hours later. Barely two hours later. After she'd had two more drinks. Where? And just then Scarne called and told him the kickback from the Feds was in, on the prints from the Jackman house. They didn't have them. Nobody had them. They'd gone to NCIC too.

  "¡Diez millénes de demonios desde el infiemo!" said Mendoza. The hell of that was, it didn't say that somebody somewhere didn't have them. The National Crime Information Center had been a good idea, and computers were very useful for shortcuts and storing information; but even NCIC didn't have enough computers to keep everything stored forever. As soon as a misdemeanor or felony was cleared up, anywhere in the nation, the information on it sent to NCIC by the local force was wiped out of the record.

  The irrational one, the violent kook who had killed the Jackmans might be known somewhere as violent, as dangerous. He might even have killed before. And one thing Mendoza knew from long experience of dealing with crime: one like that would have given the warning rattle.

  He got up and went out to the big office. Glasser and Wanda were talking, Glasser sitting on the corner of her desk; Grace was typing a report, and Galeano apparently daydreaming out the window. His black eye had faded.

  "Goofing off," said Mendoza. "Where are John and Tom?"

  Galeano jumped and looked around. "Down at the D.A.'s office talking about Contreras. They're in a little tizzy about the girl down there. Of course it's six of one, half dozen of the other. You can call her an accomplice because she could have walked out and come to us, but looking at it from her viewpoint—"

  Mendoza wasn't interested in that right now. He said, "We're back where we started on the Jackmans. And I've had another idea. This joker didn't start out a criminal career stabbing an elderly couple over a hundred times. He's been in little trouble, and more trouble and possibly big trouble, before. It's going to be the hell of a job, but we're going to look through all the Traffic calls in that general neighborhood for the last three months."

  "Oh, ow, please," said Glasser. "Say it isn't so."

  "I know, I know. But I still say it's got to be that immediate neighborhood—he's somewhere around there. And if we come across the persistent prowler, the Peeping Tom—clothesline thefts—dog poisonings—it might point in some direction."

  "You can think up more damned things to do," said Galeano.

  "I'll put in a call to Traffic. Let them do the photocopying for us," said Mendoza abruptly.

  When Higgins got back from booking Newton in and applying for the warrant, they were sitting around waiting for those records. They would wait awhile. Talk about tedious jobs—that, Landers was going to say, would take a month of Sundays. The Traffic records weren't kept long, like the current information at NCIC. They'd have filled Parker Center to the roof long ago. But they were filed for three months before destruction. Those were the records they'd be looking through, of the ongoing daily calls round the clock that had come across the central desk in that time. The citizens called in on a thousand and one things, little and big things, serious complaints and silly ones. When a squad car was sent out to investigate a prowler the driver never knew if he'd be meeting a drunk with a gun, a nervous burglar, or a bunch of cats knocking off garbage-can lids. Mendoza said, looking at the relevant pages in the County Guide, "Say an arbitrary area—between North Broadway and Alvarado, between Sixth and Beverly. Anything inside that, and you know the kind of thing we're looking for."

  They weren't so sure of that. But Mendoza usually knew what he was doing: if a higher curve than usual showed, of a prowler right around that area, it might carry some significance. And just occasionally the complaining citizen had some idea who was bothering him. If they could turn up one small lead ....

  But the very idea of the job was mind-boggling. When the stack of Xerox copies came up from down-stairs, they felt tired just looking at it.

  * * *

  Hackett spent his day off helping Angel sort out accumulated possessions; there was no sense paying the movers to transfer things that would be thrown away or given away. It was a nice day, and at least they were finished with the hot weather for a while. Mark was in school most of the day and Sheila was very good on the whole, but it was an exhausting job, and when Angel went out to start dinner he subsided thankfully into a chair with a Scotch-and-water.

  "Calories," said Angel.

  "Calories be damned, I need this," said Hackett. He felt more tired than he'd ever been at the end of a working day. He wondered what had been going on. He'd find out tomorrow.

  * * *

  On Thursday afternoon at one o'clock there occurred the sort of meaningful coincidence that happens oftener than fiction-writers would ever admit.

  A very ordinary-looking middle-aged woman trudged into a bank in Beverly Hills and quite by chance stood in line at the teller's window presided over by Mrs. Thelma Wright. When, five minutes later, she laid a check on the counter Mrs. Wright looked at it with great, if immediately concealed, interest. The check had originally been made out and signed by Lorene Taylor, who happened to be a close personal friend of Mrs. Wright, and it was a check she knew all about. It had been made out to Bullock's Department Store on November fifth; Mrs. Wright even knew what it had been for—a new camera for Mrs. Taylor's husband's birthday. The check was in the amount of seventy-seven-twenty. It had Bullock's official stamp on the back.

  They had had a little discussion about it after the robbery at Bullock's. Mrs. Wright had said she didn't think the bandits would bother with checks, but Mrs. Taylor had decided to stop payment on it just to be sure. Mrs. Wright looked at the woman presenting it; she had never seen her before. She was about forty, dowdy in a brown hat and brown coat; she had a homely non descript face; she wore unbecoming glasses, and had a slight cast in one eye.

  She said, "I've got plenty of identification? She was laying it out on the counter: driver's license, Social Security card, Master Charge card.

  The check was endorsed, below the rubber stamp on the back, in what appeared to be a man's writing, "John E. W
illiamson for Bullock's." Under that it was endorsed

  by Grace Eberhart.

  Mrs. Wright thought swiftly. The adrenaline coursed briskly through her veins, and her mind raced. She said as if just noticing it, "Oh, this is endorsed twice. I'll have to get the head teller to O.K. it before I cash it for you. I'll be right back." Gripping the evidence firmly, she walked over to the New Accounts desk and bent over to speak to Mrs. Hess there. In a breathless whisper she told her to get Denny at once to come and collar the woman.

  So she hadn't seemed to go near Denny, who, mountainous in his blue uniform, was right across the bank. The woman wasn't alarmed, was waiting for her; but Mrs. Wright had just begun to count out the cash when Denny's hamlike hand fastened on the woman's arm. They took her into the manager's office and called the police, and the woman—who really seemed to be Mrs. Grace Eberhart—protested sullenly. "I didn't get the money," she said. "I thought it was worth a try, all you could say was no. I know it wasn't right, but I haven't really stolen anything, you don't have to bring the police in—"

  The Beverly Hills police, of course, called Robbery-Homicide downtown. Hackett and Mendoza, with Palliser trailing along, got there at one-fifty. They found Mrs. Eberhart in tears, and had to hear Mrs. Wright's tale which she had already told twice.

  "All right," said Mendoza, "where did you get the check, Mrs. Eberhart?"

  "It was thrown away," she said. She wiped her eyes and her voice was plaintive. "I just thought I'd try if the bank would cash it. It's hard to get by these days, and my husband's been sick and can't work. I couldn't see just how to work it at first, on account of it being made out to a store, but I thought prob'ly it'd be signed first by somebody high up, one of the store's managers, like it was made over to me for some cleaning job or something. I got my husband to put down a man's name so it'd be different writing."

  They looked at her incredulously. "Mrs. Eberhart," said Hackett, "didn't you know about the robbery at Bullock's?"

  "What robbery? No, I never."

  "Where did you get the check?" asked Mendoza.

  "It was thrown away—it was in a wastebasket. I just thought somebody'd made a mistake. I even thought, people like that might not even miss it, know the money was gone. What do you mean about a robbery?"

  It seemed that Mrs. Eberhart didn't watch television because it bothered her eyes, seldom read a newspaper because she wasn't interested in murders or politicians' doings. Her husband read the sports page but she never recalled his watching news on television. He wasn't interested either. "Except when there's a plane crash or something like that."

  "Where—" asked Mendoza, and she rounded on him a little fiercely.

  "I'm telling you whatever you ask, ain't I? You got me all flustered, think I'd committed a murder, all these cops around."

  It was in a wastebasket in one of the apartments I clean. People can get maid service with the apartments if they want, and people with the kind of money to live there, they mostly do. I'm telling you— acourse I remember which one. It was number twelve on the second floor. The Miramar Gardens, on Loma Vista."

  The LAPD men breathed a collective sigh. "And isn't that nice," said Mendoza. "Just by a fluke."

  "Fluke be damned," said Palliser. "I don't care how we caught up, just that we did."

  "Don't be premature, John."

  But as they came down the heavily carpeted hall of that very plush new apartment building, the Beverly Hills men backing them up, they heard faint voices and laughter past the door of number twelve; it was unlatched. Mendoza regarded the name-slot beside the door pleasedly. Mr. AND Mrs. NEIL WILMOT. He pointed it out silently to Palliser, who grinned and nodded. The ghost had turned up.

  The two inside were taken completely by surprise. They were sitting lovingly close on the couch with a pair of martinis when the police simply walked in, and they hadn't even got up before they were informed they were under arrest. The Beverly Hills men kept an eye on them while the rest of them went through the apartment. There were a lot of expensive new clothes, jewelry, and eighty thousand dollars in cash in a suitcase in the closet.

  "And thanks so much for the backup," said Mendoza to the Beverly Hills men.

  * * *

  They talked to them together in Mendoza's office, with Wanda taking brisk shorthand. Marcia Wilmot was a rather sharp-featured handsome woman who didn't look her age by live years. Neil Wilmot—apparently his real name—was also good-looking, tall and dark with a one-sided lazy smile.

  Marcia did some understandable fuming about Grace Eberhart. "Just on account of a stupid greedy maid! It was foolproof—there was no way the cops could ever get a line—and then just one stupid little slip, and that damned maid!" She had missed just the one check when they dumped all the rest into the apartment incinerator, down the chute in the hall. They'd been cautious there too: afraid the seals on the bags wouldn't burn, they'd cut the bags up and buried them on the beach down at Santa Monica.

  "Well, we had a damn good run," said Neil. "Worth it, baby?"

  She laughed, looking defiantly at the cops. "I thought it was just terrible at first, when Neil went up for embezzlement at that auto agency, just after we were married. My husband a crook! And then I got to thinking, what the hell, you only live once, and what's the sense in slaving away at some dreary job just so you can say you're honest? What's the point? You might as well take what you can get and enjoy it."

  "You certainly did," murmured Palliser.

  "When Neil got out, I'd had this idea. Foolproof," she said wistfully. "It was super beautiful. Listen, I've worked in department stores all my life, I know how they operate. They mostly do things pretty much the same way. All you have to know is which elevator they use for the collection, where the Accounting office is, how they take it to the bank. And there's not that much difference in the set-up, most department stores. I got a job in that one in Philly, just long enough to get the dope, but I didn't have to, the one in Pittsburgh—I just took the wrong elevator once, landed up in the business office, apologized all over the place, and I had the setup plain as a map."

  "She's a smart girl," said Neil cheerfully.

  "So damn smart I have to miss that one check," she said mournfully.

  "So," said Mendoza, "now the ride on the merry-go-round is over, tell us who the other three men are."

  They looked at each other and laughed. "End of story," said Neil. "Just say they're good pals of mine. They're lucky and we aren't. I'm a believer in the Golden Rule, Lieutenant. You don't get any names from us."

  And they didn't. The Wilmots stood firm; it was one of the few instances of honor among thieves Mendoza ever remembered. When Hackett took Wilmot by the arm and Mendoza held the door for Marcia, to take them over to jail, they looked at each other again and Neil said, "Worth it, baby?"

  "It was lots and lots of fun, darling."

  He bent and kissed her lightly. "We'll be out in three or four years, sweetheart."

  "I'll be seeing you."

  "And you can't win 'em all."

  "But you can't keep a good pair down either." They laughed and went out together.

  Palliser started to call Bill Costello.

  * * *

  Higgins had spent part of his day off with a carpenter, figuring what that darkroom was going to cost. However they tried to cut corners, it wasn't going to be cheap; but he'd promised Steve. Higgins sighed and thought they'd just have to add a bit to the bank loan. If you were doing a thing, might as well do it right. He said that to Mary, who was wasting a lot of paper trying to figure out the cost of paneling. "We don't have to do everything at once, George."

  "Steve's going to have his darkroom," said Higgins.

  Margaret Emily came staggering toward him and he swung her up in his arms. She laughed, patting his face; she had her mother's gray eyes. And a good thing, thought Higgins, that she hadn't taken after him.

  * * *

  The dogged and tedious search through all the Traffic calls was not pay
ing off. Even in the first stacks they had already gone through, no recognizable pattern showed; it was the same routine jumble all of them remembered from their days riding squads, the family disturbances, prowlers, complaints about neighbors, about noisy parties, about barking dogs: the drimks, the trespassers, the petty thefts. There were just the occasional felonies that got passed upstairs: burglaries chiefly.

  So far, nothing was showing on this little piece of research.

  And as it happened, Mendoza's two senior sergeants were fortunate enough to be present that very next morning to see something new happen to Luis Mendoza. For Hackett and Higgins, inured to the necessary amount of paperwork the job entailed, had struck at the stacks of paper from Traffic. "There's nothing in it," said Hackett. "Or if there is it wouldn't tell us anything definite." They were sitting in Mendoza's office talking about the Jackmans when Lake came in and said there was a fellow here who said he knew something about Mrs. Stromberg.

  "¡Vamos!" said Mendoza. "Don't tell me we're going to start to move on that! Shove him in, Jimmy!"

  The man who came in, carefully shutting the door behind him, was a nice-looking gray-haired fellow; he looked about sixty. His dark-gray suit was as beautifully tailored as Mendoza's. He had blue eyes under strong tufts of eyebrows, and a humorous mouth.

  "Morning," he said. "You the officers looking into this?" He had a newspaper in one hand; he showed it turned to the Times story and picture of Marion Stromberg.

  "We are." Mendoza introduced them all. "Sit down, Mr.—"