Murder Most Strange

by Dell Shannon

  "How do we know?" asked Hackett. "The nothing they got from NCIC doesn't say a damned thing." It didn't, of course, because the National Crime Information Center's computers only numbered current crimes unsolved; when a case was cleared it was removed from the computers' memory. "Or have you got a hunch he's first time out?"

  "No hunch—it could be, it doesn't have to be. The only thing I will say is that if we don't land on him, sooner or later he'l1 end up killing another girl. I wonder," said Mendoza, "why he's switched beats."

  "We don't know that he has," said Hackett dampeningly.

  "He may just have spotted the Hamilton girl somewhere and it was chance she lives where she does."

  "¿Como?" Mendoza pulled the folder onto the desk blotter and opened it, began to leaf through the reports. Five minutes later he said, "I don't think so, Art. Look at what a tight little circle it is—extrario—Fountain Avenue, Berendo, Kenmore, Harvard, Delongpre—and the homicide on Fountain again. All the addresses above Santa Monica, in old Hollywood—between Vermont and Western." After twenty-six years on this force, Mendoza knew his city by heart. "And now all of a sudden he's come all the way down here."

  "If you feel like deducing from A to B," said Hackett, "I'll point out that an area like that—old uptown Hollywood —is the kind of place a lot of young women might live who're working for fairly small salaries. Cheaper rents, more convenient to public transportation if they don't drive. You aren't suggesting he picks victims by their addresses, are you?"

  "I don't know, damn it. I just say it's a little odd." Mendoza shut the folder, leaned back and shut his eyes. "Wait for the lab report. Somebody had better type up a statement for the Hamilton girl to sign."

  "Meaning me," said Hackett. "But right now I'm going home."

  Mendoza picked up his hat and followed him out. In the corridor Higgins was talking to Sergeant Lake at the switchboard. He said to Mendoza, "Well, Willy finally came apart and gave us a statement. Just one more of the younger generation who doesn't believe in free-enterprise capitalism."

  "Oh?" said Hackett. "Which way?"

  "The supplier expected to get paid for the H—he was interested in profits all right. Willy was mad because he wouldn't extend credit."

  "Go home," said Mendoza. "You're not supposed to be here at all."

  "I know, I know." Thursday was normally Higgins' day off. "But the damn painters are at the house. and one of them keeps a transistor radio going. I hope to God they'll be finished tomorrow." He stretched and resettled his tie, which was under one ear as usual. "John took Willy down to book him." He drifted out.

  In the communal office, their policewoman Wanda Larsen was arguing about something with a sleepy-looking Henry Glasser. There hadn't been any sign of Jason Grace since late this morning; he was probably out hunting possible heisters; but Galeano had come back from somewhere and was just sitting at his desk staring into space. Hackett went over and prodded him.

  "Hey, paisano, it's end of shift." Galeano jumped and looked up. Hackett grinned at him. "Bridegroom daydreaming. Only three more days, Nick."

  Galeano laughed. "As a matter of fact," he said, "I was wondering if we're so smart to go to Yosemite for a honeymoon, after those couple of earthquakes up there last month."

  "I've always said marriage is dangerous," said Glasser deadpan. Wanda made a grimace at him and got up, rummaging in her bag for keys.

  * * *

  By the time Higgins got home to the big old house in Eagle Rock, the painters had mercifully left for the day; they only had the back wall to finish and should complete the job tomorrow. Mary said she'd spent most of the day at the public library or she'd have gone mad. The house was quiet enough now, with Laura Dwyer busy over homework and Steve, expectably, in the new darkroom built onto the garage a couple of months ago. The little Scotty Brucie bounced underfoot.

  Strangely enough, these days Higgins felt a little like a bridegroom himself, even if he and Mary had been married over three years. It wasn't that he had felt like an interloper in the house on Silver Lake Boulevard, but it was the house that Bert Dwyer had bought sixteen years back when he and Mary were expecting their first baby, and there were memories of Bert in it—Bert who had died on the marble floor of the bank with the heister's slugs in him.

  These days, the Higginses were even more a solid family. It just slid vaguely through Higgins' mind as he bent to pick up their own baby, solid little Margaret Emily who was unbelievably two years old now, and just as pretty and smart as her mother.

  * * *

  Hackett was getting used to the longer drive these four months since they'd moved to the new house high in Altadena; on the freeway it didn't take that much longer, unless there was a jam. But they weren't on daylight saving yet, and it was dark when he got home.

  He kissed Angel; the children were for once playing quietly, Mark with a coloring book and Sheila with her beloved stuffed cats. It was good to be home, after a boring day. He sat down to look at the Herald before dinner, and he wasn't thinking at all about the offbeat rapist or the other things they were working on.

  * * *

  As Mendoza approached the tall iron gates, high on the hill above Burbank—the wrought—iron gates leading to Alison's new country estate—he squinted up at them in the last rays of the dying sun and reflected that his red-haired Scots-Irish girl had been right again. These days she had one resigned phrase for any new problems arising: it all went to show, she said, how one thing led to another.

  Certainly her love affair with the ancient Spanish hacienda had led her to spend a lot of money on updating it; and the chain-link fence enclosing four and a half acres had only been the beginning. There had been the construction of an apartment in what had been the old winery for Ken and Kate Kearney, the latest additions to the household. Kearney, a retired rancher, would of course know all about the ponies for the twins, she had said, and so of course he did; and plump little Kate Kearney would be such a help to Mairi in the house. The ponies had materialized; that had meant creating a stable out of one of the outbuildings. The ponies, a Welsh pair of dark bays named Star and Diamond for their white face markings, were a great success with the twins, but they had further necessitated the construction of a riding ring and corral along-side the stable. And it was too dark to spot them now, but somewhere on the hill would be the Five Graces, the sheep recommended by Kearney to keep the wild undergrowth eaten down.

  Mendoza climbed out of the Ferrari, opened the gates, drove through and got out to close them. The gates bore the name of the house in intricate letters at the top: La Casa de la

  Genre Feliz, the house of happy people.

  There were some California live oaks on the four and a half acres, but Alison had said leave most of it wild, just some landscaping around the house. In the last couple of months she had been spending quite a lot more money, and the landscaping had gone in—fairly mature Italian cypress trees, hibiscus bushes against the house, modest sweeps of lawn at front and sides, a few avocado and orange trees on either side of the curving driveway, more hibiscus flanking the triple garage. At the moment she had decided that the Kearneys' car deserved a garage too, and that was half built as an addition to the apartment, with a hundred yards of new drive to be added later.

  And what was passing through Mendoza's mind now was one thing leading to another—that it was damned inconvenient to have to stop and open and shut those gates, going and coming. There would probably be some way to install an automatic opener, something on the principle of those garage door openers, he thought.

  In fact, only one of the potential problems attendant on the move had astonishingly resolved itself. Everybody had been nervous about the juxtaposition of the redoubtable half-Siamese El Senor and the Kearneys' large black cat Nicodemus. But it appeared that territorial rights established a truce. The Kearneys had moved into their apartment a month before the Mendozas and Mairi MacTaggart had moved into the house; and by the time the four Mendoza cats had gone out explo
ring their new domain, Nicodemus had occupied by right the entire area around the old winery, the stable, corral and riding ring, and the grove of live oaks on that side of the hill. After a few bristly encounters with a good deal of hissing and spitting, El Senor—who only pretended to be a great warrior in any case—had tacitly reserved for his own domain the other half of the property, and a peaceable truce was in effect.

  The other potential problem had been solved by the discovery of an excellent parochial school only a mile away down the hill. It even boasted a small kindergarten; but time sliding by as alarmingly as it did, next September the twins, Johnny and Teresa, would be starting first grade.

  However, that gate . . . It was nearly full dark when he slid the Ferrari into the garage beside Alison's Facel-Vega and pulled down the door. There were lights in the house, welcoming. As if to add further welcome, from somewhere out there in the dark a couple of the Five Graces uttered loud bass baas.

  Halfway up the new cement path from garage to back door, he was pounced on playfully by the Old English sheepdog Cedric, and being taken unawares and off balance, fell flat on his face. "¡Vaya por Dios! Down—bastante! No, I don't want to play—down, damn it!" Fuming, he marched in the back door.

  Alison and Mairi were both in the big kitchen beyond the generous service-porch-pantry, Alison making a salad at the sink and pink-cheeked silver-haired Mairi peering into the

  oven. "Now I will tell you," began Mendoza, "that damned dog—"

  "Oh, you're home, darling, I didn't hear the car." The twins, however, had, and came running. "Daddy, Daddy, we been ridin' all afternoon—an' Uncle Ken let us gallop a lot—Johnny was almost afraid—"

  "I wasn't neither, an' Diamond galloped faster than Star—Uncle Ken says I'm better 'n Terry because my legs are longer—but, Daddy—"

  "Yes, yes, ninos. You're both very good indeed. I will tell you, querida," said Mendoza, "we've got to put a light on that path from the garage. This damned dog you saddled us with—I might have broken my neck. And another thing—" Sheba landed on his shoulder from behind without warning. "Cats!" he said. "Dogs! And I'll tell you something else—"

  "Now calm down, chico," said Alison.

  "The man needs a dram or two before dinner," said Mairi.

  "We galloped lots and Star can gallop just as fast as Diamond, an' I only had to hang on a little bit—"

  "Uncle Ken says we both gonna be good riders—only it'd be more fun outside the fence. Daddy, can't we ride outside the fence?"

  As if by magic, hearing a reference to strong drink, El Senor arrived, floated up to the counter under the cupboard where the liquor was kept, and uttered a raucous demand. “¡Santa Maria! How did I ever get into all this?" demanded Mendoza violently.

  "Now, now," said Mairi. "Take the man away and settle him down before dinner, achara. It will be half an hour and a bit. He's doubtless had a bothersome day. I'll see to the salad."

  Alison poured El Senor his half ounce of rye, put a shot glass, the bottle of rye and a glass of sherry on a tray and shepherded Mendoza down to the huge square living room, Cedric bouncily preceding them and the twins in hot pursuit. The other two cats, Bast and Nefertite, were sound asleep on the oversize couch at right angles to the fieldstone hearth. The new one was slumbering peacefully on a blanket in the middle of the floor; the new one, Luisa Mary, not so new now at nearly eight months old, was astonishingly mobile when awake and by now had a full head of hair as outrageously red as Alison's. She was also definitely, as Mairi had predicted, going to be left-handed.

  "Now sit down and relax," said Alison.

  He swallowed rye and began to feel slightly better. "A post or something with a floodlight," he said. "Or a floodlight on that side of the garage. And another thought I had—that gate—it is one big damned nuisance, having to open and shut it. If there was an electric eye or something—"

  "Yes, I know," said Alison, sipping sherry. "I'd had the same thought, but we've spent so much money already—"

  "Damn it, might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb," said Mendoza.

  "Yes. Well—that's another thing," said Alison. "Those sheep. They ought to be sheared, Ken says. They were a year old in February, and sheep ought to be sheared once a year."

  "I suppose he can locate somebody to do it."

  "I hope so. About the gate, I'll look in the yellow pages and get an estimate on the electric eye. You know, Luis, it is very funny, isn't it, how one thing keeps leading to another."

  "Daddy, you didn't listen about the galloping—"

  "And about ridin' outside the fence. Please, Daddy—"

  The new one woke up and began to bellow. Alison swooped to pick her up.

  Mendoza resignedly poured himself another shot of rye.

  * * *

  Friday was Nick Galeano's day off, but he wouldn't be getting together with his bride-to-be; according to what they'd heard she was a very proper convent-bred girl, and quite thick with Galeano's mother. It was likely all the women—he had several sisters—were busy over clothes and protocol for the wedding.

  The night watch had, expectably, left them a couple of new ones. A lab report had gotten sent up after everybody left last night, and Mendoza looked at that before reading Piggott's report.

  "Well, there you are," he said to Hackett, passing it over. It was the lab report on Cindy Hamilton's apartment. "A great big blank. Latents picked up—not many—all belong to her or these couple of close girl friends—the one who found her, another one. She doesn't have a steady boy friend. The one girl said she'd had a spat with the fellow she'd been going with, and it hadn't been serious anyway. You went out on him before we heard what she had to say, and turned up an alibi—at that party for his mother's birthday, and that's irrelevant now. Now we know it was Dapper Dan."

  "And where the hell to go on it—"

  "Wel1, there isn't anywhere," said Mendoza irritably. "Unless—¡Por Dio! That's woolgathering."

  "What?"

  "He told them all he'd just landed here from back East—no particular place specified. Could that be so, Art? Just maybe? Maybe somewhere back East a Dapper Dan was operating, and the lawmen there gave up on him, and the M.O. got erased out of NCIC's computers."

  "You do have useful ideas," said Hackett. “So we send queries to every force east of the Mississippi asking?"

  Mendoza didn't bother to answer that obvious question; he picked up the night report as Hackett went out to the communal office. They were now working five heist jobs, and on two of them had good descriptions: a pair, by the descriptions, had pulled both jobs last week, and were fairly distinctive—a Mutt-and-Jeff pair, both black, one big, one little, and they sounded like a pair of bunglers. On the first job they had dropped half the loot in getting away, and one witness had passed on a description of the car, an old clunker of a Ford, dirty white. Palliser and Grace were working that; Landers, Glasser and Wanda went out on the others. There was still a statement to get from the second liquor-store clerk on Monday night's heist, and Hackett was waiting for him to show as promised when Mendoza erupted from his office with the night report in his hand.

  "For God's sake, of all the ridiculous things—the jungle getting hairier all the time, and there's got to be a first for everything, but for God's sake . . . Jimmy, you'd better contact these people and ask them to come in to make a statement as soon as possible. I want to hear about this one firsthand."

  "What's up?" asked Higgins, looking up from his typewriter.

  "Dogs!" said Mendoza?

  * * *

  They came in about ten o'clock, a good-looking couple, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Pryor. Pryor was a lawyer; they lived in West Hollywood. They were middle-aged, he lean and dark, she frosted blond and smartly dressed.

  "Listen," said Pryor, "do you think I was about to take a chance? The crime rate up—a lot of people keep these attack-trained dogs now. Would you have chanced it? Well, I didn't."

  His wife shivered. "It certainly looked terribly savag
e."

  They had gone to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, to a concert, last night, and come out to the parking lot rather late—Mrs. Pryor had been kept waiting in the ladies' room. And as they approached their car, with the crowd thinned out and at the far end of the parking lot, they'd been accosted by a man with a dog.

  "It was a great big Doberman," said Pryor, "and I know those damned things are dangerous. I couldn't give you any kind of description of the man, I'm sorry, he was about my size, maybe five ten, he had a hat pulled down over his face. He just said, this is a trained attack dog and I'll set him on you if you don't hand over your wallet."

  "That's a first, all right," said Hackett, intrigued. "And you did?"

  "It looked awfully ferocious," said Mrs. Pryor. "I was scared to death."

  The man with the Doberman had gotten about seventy dollars from Pryor's wallet. But interestingly, he hadn't taken anything but the cash, ignoring the various pieces of jewelry they both were wearing. He'd just walked up the alley out of the lot, and that was that.

  "It was just ravening to be ordered to attack," said Mrs. Pryor. "I've always been terrified of Dobermans anyway."

  "And just where," said Mendoza to Hackett, "do we go on that one?"

  TWO

  There didn't seem to be much to do about the man with the Doberman. As a gesture, Mendoza sent a query to R. and I. about the modus operandi—did anybody have a record anywhere of such a caper? It was a new and novel M.O. to the Central beat, but didn't offer any leads.

  Landers and Glasser brought in a possible suspect on one of the heists; Mendoza sat in on the questioning, but it was inconclusive, up in the air. They let him go while Landers went to check the offered alibi.

  Mendoza and Hackett presently went out to lunch together, at Federico's up on North Broadway, and coming back to the office at one-fifteen met Palliser just coming in with a witness; he introduced them. "Mr. Henry Simms. Mr. Simms," said Palliser, "has a funny little story to tell us."