Felony File

by Dell Shannon

  "Oh, yes, she's O.K. I got a cleaning service to—deal with the house," said Jackman. "We'll put it up for sale, of course. No reason to keep a place down there."

  "I never talked to her. I'd like her address."

  "Oh, surely."

  It was Mrs. Helen Burley, an address in Burbank. Somebody had said her husband was manager of a chain market. He found the place, tucked away at the end of a dead-end street; it was a good-sized Spanish house behind a good deal of shrubbery.

  She was tall like her brother, but had once been pretty and was still nice-looking; she had kept a good figure and there was little gray in her brown hair. She asked him in, and asked, "Have you—found out anything?"

  He didn't tell her there was nowhere to look. "I wanted to ask you, Mrs. Burley—you see, you saw your parents later than any of the rest of the family, didn't you?"

  "That's right. It was two weeks ago today. Oh, dear. We were all busy getting ready to go over to the wedding, you know. Oh, they'd have loved to go—their youngest great-granddaughter—but of course the trip would have been too much for them. They were looking forward to hearing all about it." She blinked. "I'd just run down to take Mother a pan of leftover gelatin salad, we'd be gone a week, no sense wasting it."

  "Do you remember what they talked about? Did they mention any little worry, any disturbance, anything at all unusual? However unusual?" This was, of course, a waste of time; there'd have been nothing; they'd had no warning.

  "There wasn't anything wrong, no," she said in mild surprise. "That's a sort of backwater, that street, pretty quiet. But crime these days—" She cast her mind back. "We just talked about ordinary things, the wedding mostly, and the awful prices—whether they might get a new TV set, the old one was about on its last legs. And Mother was saying how the neighborhood had changed, so many of the people they knew moved away or died—we'd got talking about old times when Bill and I were growing up down there. Oh, she told me the house next door had finally got rented and the people just moved in—they seemed nice enough, they'd come asking to use the phone, theirs not in yet."

  "Yes," said Mendoza. Nothing, of course.

  "She said she thought their son might be retarded, he looked a little odd. Poor souls. I can't think of a worse cross—thank God mine were all just fine," said Mrs. Burley placidly.

  * * *

  "You think there's anything in this?" said Hackett.

  "Mrs. Burley didn't realize that the Burroughs aren't young people, or she might have done some thinking and worrying about it," said Mendoza. He braked the Ferrari and they got out. The old Jackman house looked already deserted, though you couldn't tell from outside that it was empty. The house beside it was just another pleasant old California bungalow, one of the porch steps cracked, its paint a little dingy. They went up to the porch and Mendoza shoved the bell.

  When Mrs. Burroughs opened the door he said to her, "We'd like to see your son, Mrs. Burroughs. May we come in? You never mentioned that you have a son-of course there wasn't any reason to, was there?"

  She backed away and put one hand across her mouth. In the house for the first time, they saw it held the usual shabby nondescript furniture of a rented place. Harry Burroughs was there, relaxed in old clothes and slippers, reading a newspaper. He got up and came over. "Did he do it?" she whispered. "Was it him, was it Tommy? When I heard, I was afraid—I was afraid, because you never know what he'll take into his head to do. But he's never done anything—anything as bad as that. I looked the best I could—he doesn't like anybody touching his things—I told you, Harry, I looked, but I couldn't see anything with blood on it—and—he's never done anything as bad as that." She was trembling all over.

  "They told us he'd be better at home," said Burroughs tightly. "My God, my God, if I thought he'd done that—" He was a tired man, defeated by life. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "He's got medicine he's supposed to take, some kind of tranquillizers. He's what they call schizophrenic. The doctors told us that ten years ago when he was eleven, when he started to act—queer. He was up at Camarillo two years after that, and then they said he'd be better in a home atmosphere, as long as he takes the medicine. He'd be home awhile, and then he'd throw a tantrum and—do things—"

  "He wouldn't know what he was doing," she said.

  "Like when he killed that kitten—he didn't know. But when they sent him home again this time, we thought the neighbors in Montebello knew about him, we thought maybe if he could start fresh somewhere where nobody knew—not that he ever goes out much except to the library—"

  "He's always reading," said Burroughs. "He's always quiet, doesn't like to go out of the house. That's why it never crossed our minds it was possible—God, it isn't possible! He's a smart boy—the doctors said the ones like him usually are. Only their brains don't work just the way other people's do—and they get what that one doctor called fixations. Like the way Tommy all of a sudden got so religious, the last time he was in Camarillo. You never know what he'll go off on—"

  "Religious," said Mendoza. "What sort of religion?"

  "Oh, he's always spouting about Satan and hellfire and Armageddon. They always told us, just don't cross him, just let him do what he wants and see he takes the medicine. It keeps Amelia pretty tied down. But—you—coming asking— You don't think—"

  "Where is he?" asked Mendoza.

  "In his room." Her voice was barely audible. "It's where he is all the time. Reading and thinking." She pointed the way down the hall mutely.

  It was the back bedroom of the two, about twelve feet square. There was a single bed, an armchair, a chest of drawers. As they stopped in the doorway, the young man sitting in the armchair by the window looked up sharply. "Tommy," said his mother in a weak voice behind them.

  He was quite a good-looking young man, dark and tall and well built; but there was a wildness about him that was nearly a tangible aura. His eyes moved in nearly constant restlessness. In one lithe movement he was on his feet. "Who are they?" he asked her loudly.

  "Tell them to go away!" He had been reading a Bible.

  "Now, Tommy," said Burroughs, "don't be like that. You ought to—"

  "You're not supposed to tell me what to do! Nobody's supposed to tell me what to do, order me around—Dr. Locke said so! Tell them to go away!"

  Mendoza said, "We just want to look at the knife, Tommy."

  "No."

  "Just for a minute."

  "No. You want to take it away." He gave them a sudden secret smile, and his eyes were terrifying. "I might need it again."

  "Oh, Christ," said Mrs. Burroughs. She turned and reeled down the hall drunkenly.

  The ambulance attendants handled him expertly, but he fought like a cornered beast all the way, until they got him tied down on the stretcher. Burroughs would have seen that before; he just sat waiting for it to be over. He sat on the couch and he said sickly to them,

  "But the doctors ought to know—all you can do is believe what the doctors tell you. Dr. Locke said he'd be all right, no trouble, if he just took the medicine, and we always saw that he did. If—if he could do—that—why did the doctors—keep letting him out?" He put his head in his hands.

  It was, of course, a good question. They called up the lab; by the time Marx and Horder got there the Burroughses had retreated into their bedroom and shut the door.

  At the very back of the walk-in closet in the back bedroom, rolled in a paper bag, they found the bloody shoes and the bloody knife. In the garage they found the can of black spray paint.

  "And let us hope that this time," said Mendoza savagely, "he gets sent to Atascadero." That was the asylum for the criminally insane. "They don't get let out of there quite so easy."

  This was one time he'd like to pull rank and delegate somebody else to break the news to the Jackmans. Only he wasn't built that way.

  * * *

  On Sunday morning they all went up to the new place. Alison and Mairi were busily plotting where furniture should go—some of
the new furniture had already been delivered—and the twins were wild to introduce him to the sheep. They were uninterested in the house entirely, and led him firmly out and down the hill again. The sheep had vanished utterly from where they had been on the hill five minutes ago.

  "They runned away!" said Terry.

  "They're around somewhere, nijos." They located the five sheep just over the crest of the hill, busily munching on the flourishing weeds. At least they seemed to be doing the job expected of them.

  "Five Graces, Mama said." Johnny was pleased with the sound of that and repeated it thoughtfully several times.

  At their voices, two of the sheep headed for them and thrust smooth black heads for patting. They were oddly attractive creatures, thought Mendoza, remembering Alison's experience and keeping well out of the way. They looked very pastoral and peaceful there on the empty hillside, and the only negative thought that crossed his mind was that they had unexpectedly loud bass voices.

  If he could have foreseen the trouble those sheep were to cause .... But the crystal ball was not operating, and he merely regarded them with vague benevolence.

  * * *

  There were three new heists on Saturday night. This week there would be arraignments scheduled for Contreras, the heist woman, and Newton. One of the assistant D.A.'s, unaffectionately known to the LAPD as Nervous Nellie, monopolized Mendoza for an hour on Monday morning, discussing the relative merits of charges on Newton ranging from involuntary manslaughter to murder two.

  That morning the central desk got a routine call for a squad car, and Zimmerman landed at a middle-class frame house on Diana Street and asked the young woman at the door what the complaint was.

  "Well, I don't really think there's anything in it," she said hesitantly. "But Stewart's never been one for telling lies, and I just wondered. It's my little boy Stewart, he's five."

  "Yes, ma'am," said Zimmerman patiently.

  "Well, he and his sister spent yesterday with their grandparents—my mother and father—and when we brought them home Stewart was saying he'd seen a man put a lady in a closet in the house next door and she was dead. He says he went into that yard to get his ball back, and saw it through the glass door. Mom and Dad just laughed and said he was good at making up stories." She was silent, thinking. She was a pretty girl in the mid-twenties. "So did Bob—my husband. But he keeps talking about it. I wondered. The house next to Mom and Dad's is up for sale. It does have a sliding door at the side." She was apologetic. "I know it sounds silly, but I wonder if somebody ought to go and look?"

  Zimmerman thought too. He got the address, but he wasn't going to yell for the front-office boys when it might be just a kid's story; they'd cuss him out from here to there. He drove past the house, got the name of the realty company from the sign, and went there. One of the salesmen drove back with him and let him into the house. They looked, and in the closet of the master bedroom was the body of a woman in a nightgown, nothing else. There wasn't any I.D. anywhere. She'd been shot in the head.

  So then he called the front-office boys.

  Besignedly, Grace and Galeano went out on it. It was the house next to the corner, and first they asked the neighbor in the corner house to see if she knew the woman; she looked, gave a shriek, and said, "My God, it's Cindy Hamlin! Stewart did see something after all! My God, they just moved away two months ago, her husband got transferred to Bakersfield—how did she get here?"

  It was a nice house on Edelle Place; a block away, this would have belonged to the sheriff's department. The husband, Randolph Hamlin, was manager of a chain shoe store, the neighbor told them. Presumably he should be at the store, up in Bakersfield; unaccountably he wasn't. They had turned the lab loose there.

  Also on Monday morning, Hackett finally found Myra Amberson. Her son, Doug Carpenter, had a pedigree of narco selling and assault, so they had his prints; and his prints were plastered all over the wrench that had battered James Amberson to death. Hackett got tired of dealing with the stupid, stupid people. He brought her in to question her; she was a nice-looking black woman, smartly dressed, with coy manners and a brittle laugh.

  "I don't know where Doug is, honestly," she said. "He's twenty-three, he lives his own life." She shook her head archly; she had on dangly earrings and they rattled. "That's just awful, if he did kill James like that, Sergeant. He must have been high on something, to do that. James would have come back to me—he was going to."

  Hackett put out an A.P.B. for Doug Carpenter and came back to the office to find Mendoza fulminating on the phone.

  "Are you telling me that your cretinous uniform branch never checked—? . . . Santa Maria! How do they remember where to bring the squads back at end of shift? Nearly two weeks that A.P.B.'s been out, and nobody—nobody at all—thought to look .... All I know is, if I was watch commander at Hollywood, your God-damned stupid patrol units would shape up or get off the force! Yes, you may tell that to Captain Andrews, from me, with bells on! Your damned excuses for patrolmen have set us back two weeks on a homicide case!"

  He slammed the phone down, noticed Hackett, and said shortly, "Hollywood's just spotted Marion Stromberg's car. Would you have a guess? Probably right there all along. In the visitors' parking lot at the Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital."

  "What?" said Hackett. "Why wasn't it noticed before?"

  "Because it never occurred to any of the idiotic Traffic men working out of that precinct to look in a hospital parking lot, of course. The only reason it got noticed just now was that a woman went into unexpected labor at home alone, and called for a squad. The gallant bone-headed officer duly rushed the lady to the hospital and on his way out did a double-take and checked the plate number. They're towing it in."

  "Well, we come all sorts like other people," said Hackett.

  "Not on this force," said Mendoza. "We're supposed to be smarter." He was slightly mollified a couple of hours later when Marx called up to tell him they'd picked up a couple of good latents from the inside of the passenger's door, and would check them with records. There had been a bright-red handbag on the front seat, with all her identification and forty-three dollars in it.

  * * *

  Grace and Galeano wanted to talk to Randolph Hamlin about his wife's body and they couldn't find him; so on Monday afternoon they put out an A.P.B. for his car. The lab hadn't finished processing the house—the body wasn't going to get autopsied for at least a day or so—when the car was spotted parked up on the Sunset strip, with Hamlin sound asleep inside it. The patrolman brought him in.

  He had the hell of a hangover, and he said to Grace and Galeano, "Bitch, bitch, bitch. She couldn't stand Bakersfield. She didn't like the house. Bitch, bitch. Twenty times a day, she said it over and over, I wish I was back in the old house. So—" he yawned hugely— "I put her there. That's where she wanted to be."

  * * *

  At four o'clock that afternoon, a doctor at the emergency ward of the General called in to say that he had a man there with some knife wounds. Higgins was in the middle of a follow—up report on Amberson, but went out to see what it looked like.

  It wasn't anything for Robbery-Homicide. The man had unwillingly given his name as Charles Chidsey. He was a smallish man about thirty, and he was mad at the doctor for calling in police. "Only I was bleeding so much I didn't know if I could get home without passing out, and my wife won't be home until six." He was a teacher, he wouldn't tell them where. "Damn it, I have to finish out my year's contract, and then I'm getting out. Maybe out of teaching altogether—teaching! Dealing with hop-heads and hoods! Oh, I couldn't be assigned to the nice high school up in Flintridge where I applied—at least the kids there come from homes that have toilets and don't use the halls—oh, no, I'm white, so I have to come down here to balance the racial quota! God, I never had any prejudice before but I'm sure as hell growing some! And no, I'm not going to tell you who the Goddamned louts were who pulled the knives on me—do you think I'm crazy? All a judge would do is put them on probation
, and next time they'd kill me!"

  It wasn't a case for Robbery-Homicide. Yet.

  Marx called at five o'cl0ck on Monday to say that the prints from the Stromberg car weren't in records, had been sent to the Feds.

  For once the F.B.I. was commendably prompt. At ten o'clock on Tuesday morning the kickback came in. The prints belonged to Andrew Clifford; he had spent thirty-five years in the Air Force, retired as sergeant two years ago.

  "¡Paso!" said Mendoza, and brought out the phone book. "And kindly don't tell me there are dozens of Cliffords with whatever initials." He had picked up the Hollywood book, and ran down the C's to all the many Cliffords. "Romaine, Rosewood, Orange Grove, Delong-pre, Outpost-Catalina. Ya lo creo. That's our boy. Go and see if you can pick him up."

  "The crystal ball told you?" asked Higgins.

  "If you'd just do a little elementary thinking, amigos. It was a cold night and he had to get home—he wouldn't leave the Buick far from where he was going, and Catalina's two blocks from that hospital."

  Higgins and Hackett looked at each other and went out.

  They brought Andrew Clifford back with them forty minutes later, and introduced him to Mendoza. Clifford was in the mid or late fifties, an upright stocky man with thinning brown hair and a stubborn jaw; he was casually dressed in sports clothes. He looked at Mendoza appraisingly and Mendoza studied him with equal interest. "Exactly the type I predicted, isn't he?" he said to his senior sergeants. "Outwardly a very respectable citizen. Good manners, good background, clean and neat. She wouldn't have settled for less."

  Cliiford's grim mouth relaxed a trifle. "You think you know all about it?"

  "No, Mr. Clifford, I don't know anything about it. You're going to tell me."

  Clifford had sat down in the chair beside the desk. He looked down at his hands. "I thought I'd cleaned my prints off every place I'd touched in the car. I'm damned sorry you caught up, Lieutenant—but in one way it'll be a relief to have it off my conscience. I like to think I've always been an honest man. You seem to know about May."