by Dell Shannon
"Lieutenant," said Lake down the hall, "the D.A.'s office wants to talk to you."
"Oh, hell," said Mendoza. It was, of course, one of the deputy D.A.'s wanting to talk about Harriet Cooper. He swiveled around in his desk chair so he would have a nice view, and lit a cigarette, and disposed himself to listen.
* * *
Higgins got some information from the southern lawmen, but not much. Rogers was from Texas originally. It wasn't known whether any of them had relations in California, but it was possible they may have some pals here: they had all spent time in federal prisons. The helpful lawmen said they'd do some phoning and asking around, and get back to L.A. with anything they picked up. And about that time, which was three-thirty, a new call came in and the address was Wesley Avenue so Grace went out with him on it. That was a solid black area down there.
The patrolman from the squad was black too, a rookie by the name of Turner, and he was somewhat helplessly trying to comfort the brown young woman sitting on the front porch sobbing. It was a short street of modest old houses, for the most part neatly kept up; this one was a small white frame place with a minute strip of lawn in front.
"She was just starting to tell me about it when she broke down," said Turner. "I guess she's got reason—she said that's her mother in there. Dead some time, I'd say." He swallowed; as a rookie he hadn't yet seen many dead bodies. "Look, miss—I'm sorry, but the detectives'll have to have some information."
She tried to control herself; she choked back the sobs and wiped her eyes. She was a nice-looking young woman in rather smart clothes. "I know—try," she gulped. "Mother—Mrs. Edna Patterson—we've been away—and—her old f-friend called to say she wasn't—at Wednesday prayer meeting—Mrs. Altura Fielding—and was she sick, because she c-c-couldn't get her on the phone—and I—c-couldn't either so I—came—"
There weren't any neighbors out on either side, but it was a working-class neighborhood and there might be nobody at home.
"Can we have your name?" said Grace in his soft voice.
She peered at him over the wadded-up handkerchief. "I'm—Linda Gilman. Mrs. I'm sorry, I tried to keep my head, called the police, and then—seeing her -like that—and the house— Oh, I've got to call Dave, I've got to call Dave—"
"Have you got a car, Mrs. Gilman?" There wasn't one parked on the street nearby.
"C-came on the bus—"
"Well, now, if you'll just wait a few minutes and answer a few questions, we'll have Patrolman Turner here drive you home, and you can get hold of your husband. Is that all right?"
She gulped and nodded. "But it's not—it's not—only Mother! That's bad enough—it's terrible, it's terrible—but where are all her things? All the furniture—we were all b-brought up here, it's home—thirty years—and all the things we saved up for, nice things-and the last thing Dad made her, that cedar chest in her room—mantel clock—the platform rocker Dad always—"
Grace patted her shoulder. "You wait just a couple of minutes."
The front door was open. They went in, and looked. The house was larger than it seemed from outside; there were three bedrooms, a separate dining area oif the kitchen. From the kitchen window was a view of a pleasant back yard. The body of the woman was in the largest bedroom. She was a chocolate-brown woman probably around sixty, small and thin, and she was wearing a pink nightgown and—a blue corduroy bathrobe. It looked as if she'd been strangled, and as Turner said, she'd been dead for some time.
And the house was empty. There wasn't any furniture in it at all, any carpets, even any pictures on the walls. They couldn't open drawers or cupboards until the lab had been through here, but those might be empty too.
The only thing left in the whole house except the telephone was in the middle of the kitchen floor: a pair of scuffed, worn tapestry bedroom slippers.
"My sweet Christ," said Grace, awed.
"We'd better get the lab on it quick," said Higgins stolidly, turning away.
It was a funny thing, he'd been a cop for over twenty years, and a detective for fourteen, and in that time he'd seen a lot of bloody messes and human misery and sordid little tragedies and irrational suffering. But, ridiculously, he felt tears burn his eyes, and he knew it would be a while before he forgot that—two limp, worn, comfortable bedroom slippers in the middle of a kitchen floor. Marking a place where home had become unsafe, and a humdrum life, death.
* * *
Hackett walked into Mendoza's office at nine o'clock on Saturday morning and found him sitting with his eyes shut and the County Guide open on his desk. "Are you practicing going into trance or what? I always said you ought to try a crystal ball."
Mendoza opened his eyes, sat up and got out a cigarette.
"Mas vale tarde que nunca. Better late than never. Like the lost horse and the idiot boy, I was just trying to think where I might have dropped off Eileen's body if I was Rudy Bartovic.”
"You come to any conclusion?"
"Maybe," said Mendoza. "He finished with Eileen—whatever he did to her, and we can guess—and he left her in the trunk of the car, wrapped in a blanket or something, while he went to that porno movie house—I'll lay a bet it was porn. Sometime that night he could have been down at the beach—he landed at Doreen's place that next noon. It's just possible, Arturo, that he dropped her off the end of the pier."
Hackett nodded slowly. "I can see it. If so, she'll turn up soon. Tides—and it's nice weather, a lot of people flocking to the beaches."
"I don't know anything about tides. I just think I'll call Harbor—and the Santa Monica boys—and ask to be told about any new bodies they come across."
"Damn it, there should have been evidence in his car."
"Paciencia. Even the smart lab boys can't pick it up where it isn't."
Sergeant Farrell looked in. "Oh, there you are. Call for you, Art."
Hackett went back to his desk, and picked up the phone. "Sergeant Hackett."
"Oh," said a bright female voice, "I didn't—Well, the manageress said it was someone asking about Alice and I should call this number. I'm Angela Bickerstaff, and Alice—"
"Oh, yes, Mrs. Bickerstaff. Is Miss McLennan at home yet?"
"Oh, no. I didn't quite understand—"
"Well, I'd like to talk to you, if I could see you now?"
"I suppose so," she said, sounding bewildered.
And he didn't know what he was wasting the time for, but he drove over to Baxter Avenue and found Mrs. Bickerstaff in the apartment across the hall from Alice McLennan's. She was a little brown bird of a woman, possibly fifty, with a kitten face, bright brown eyes. She looked at the badge and said, "My goodness, police. What's it about? It isn't—is. Alice all right?"
"Quite all right as far as I know. We're rather anxious to talk to her," explained Hackett. "It's about her former employer, Mr. Parmenter. He's just, well, died, and the circumstances—"
"Oh," she said. "He has? Isn't that strange, and Alice'll be very interested. I wonder—" but she didn't say what.
"I understand you and Miss McLennan are quite good friends. I just wondered if you knew why she quit her job with Mr. Parmenter. She'd worked for him quite a while, hadn't she?"
"Four years," said Mrs. Bickerstaff promptly. "It didn't pay much, but she has a little family money from a trust too. I don't know, Mr. Hackett, but we probably will when Alice comes back. She was very upset about it, about quitting her job. That was on March nineteenth, and I didn't happen to see her until the next Monday, the twenty-first, and I knew she was upset and worried about something. But Alice is pretty closemouthed, she's one to sort of mull things over until she makes up her mind about something. All she said to me then was that she had a good reason to quit the job. And you see, I'd been worried because the baby was sick, my daughter's baby, little Sue—and it was that next Saturday, Lisa—my daughter—called to ask could I come and help. So I packed a bag, it was about ten in the morning, and when I left I went across the hall to tell Alice where I'd be—and she wa
s just coming out her door with a suitcase. And Mickey."
"Yes," said Hackett patiently.
"We1l, she said she was going up to Big Bear or somewhere, she just felt she needed to get away for a while. I think she'd have told me more about it if we hadn't both been in a hurry, you see how it was, she said she'd been going to tape a note on my door, tell me where she'd gone. And she said"—Mrs. Bickerstaff cocked her brown head at him—"she'd tell me all about it when she got back, she couldn't bear to talk about it now, but she said the reason she'd quit her job, she'd found out something about Mr. Parmenter that was so terrible it just didn't bear thinking about, and he was the wickedest man in the world. And she grabbed up Mickey's leash and started downstairs."
Hackett stared at her. “Now what in—"
"Well, it was funny," she said thoughtfully. "I suppose we'll find out when Alice comes back. At least, thank goodness, the baby's fine now."
SIX
Grace and Higgins were down on Wesley Street talking to neighbors of Edna Patterson's. The lab men had done some work here yesterday, and were back again today, now busy dusting the whole place for possible prints.
The neighbors on one side were Albert and Maria Jimson, and they were ordinary honest people; he drove a truck for a laundry, and they were both in their forties, with children grown and away. They were shocked and grieved about Mrs. Patterson, a fine woman, they said. Neighborly, and it was a nice family, two sons and a daughter, all doing well. Mrs. Jimson worked too, selling on commission for a local furniture store, and neither of them had seen Mrs. Patterson since Monday when she'd been putting her refuse can out as usual for the weekly pickup on Tuesday morning. They hadn't heard any disturbance, any night; and they'd been home Monday and Tuesday nights, watching TV until around eleven. It looked as if she had been killed either Monday or Tuesday, but then what the people on the other side had to say changed that—which they'd eventually have seen for themselves. Mr. and Mrs. Fred Leaman, who hadn't seen her to speak to since Sunday, when they saw her leaving for church, had noticed that her refuse can, emptied, had been taken back to the garage sometime on Tuesday. That, of course, left Tuesday night still, but narrowed the time a little. They were another upright pair of citizens: he worked for the Parks and Recreation Department. None of them had heard any unusual sounds from Mrs. Patterson's house, noticed anyone going in there. The Leamans had been out on Tuesday night, visiting friends, but home on Monday. Watching TV. Grace met Higgins briefly in mid-block, and Higgins hadn't heard anything helpful either. "Just what a nice woman she was. What a nice family. The husband died of a heart attack last year, only sixty-three, he worked for a construction company. She probably didn't have much—his little pension, and she'd just applied for Social Security, and probably the children helped her out. Nobody heard or saw anything, and both nights most people were home, watching TV."
"I'm beginning to think," said Grace, “that TV is the curse of the twentieth century." They split up again; he crossed the street. And of course you got a cross section of people in any big-city neighborhood, people of all sorts, but after the upstanding respectability of the Jimsons and Leamans, the house directly across the street provided a violent contrast. The door was opened by a gangling, very black fellow in dirty jeans and a torn sweat shirt, smelling of beer and sweat; in the living room behind him a TV was blaring sports news.
Somewhere a baby yelled. He told Grace they didn't pay any notice to neighbors, and was annoyed when Grace insisted on seeing his wife. She was a superficially pretty slattern, with a yelling baby on one shoulder. She said eagerly, "Did she really get murdered? Honest to God! She was an old bitch, so damn uppity and look down her nose, goin' to church alla time." They hadn't seen or heard a thing.
Next door to that place he found the Wisters, a young couple in a nice clean neat house, who couldn't tell him anything. Wister was a waiter at a very top class restaurant in Beverly Hills, and didn't get home until midnight. Mrs. Wister and her mother had been making new curtains for the kitchen and bedroom every night this week; they hadn't seen or heard anything out of the ordinary. They were shocked and frightened by the murder; Wister said, "The crime rate's just awful. This is a pretty quiet neighborhood, but I guess it can happen anywhere."
Nobody, of those who had been at home those two nights, had heard or seen anything unusual; and most of the people seemed to be honest citizens. "Damn it, Jase," said Higgins, looking up and down the shabby little street, "that must have been a hell of a lot of time and work, to clean out the whole house. When we moved, it took five men half a day to get everything 1oaded."
"Yes, and that's another thing," said Grace.
They'd come down in Higgins' Pontiac; they abandoned the unhelpful neighbors and drove up to Hollywood, to the Gilmans' apartment.
Linda Gilman's husband was there; he owned his own printing shop; and her two brothers, both older, settled family men. Roland Patterson was a dental technician, Ben Patterson manager of a Safeway supermarket. They had been trying to draw up a list of the contents of the house. Higgins and Grace looked at it, and Grace said, "Nobody moved all that in a single night alone. There must have been at least four or five men." There had been three double beds, the refrigerator, gas stove, washer and dryer, kitchen table and chairs, a big couch, four upholstered chairs from the living room, mirrors—they knew now, the only things left in the house were her clothes in the closet, linens, dishes in the kitchen. They wouldn't have gotten anything for those.
"Was this all pretty good stuff?" Higgins asked Linda.
"Well, yes, it is. Not the most expensive, but we always got the best we could afford, and all of this she'd had for years."
"And these days the solid good old stuff goes for quite a price at the secondhand stores," said Higgins. "It could have amounted to quite a nice piece of loot."
He expanded on that to Grace over lunch, and Grace said, "Granted. But just think about it a minute. Records can give us the names and pedigrees of a hundred burglars. But they're usually shy birds. Would types like that commit a murder for a houseful of furniture?"
"Well, when you put it like that—" said Higgins. "I see what you mean."
* * *
Mendoza stared at Hackett. "¡Parece mentira! The wickedest man in the world! Now that's very interesting, Art. I do wonder what she'd found out about him."
"I'll tell you one little notion that occurred to me," said Hackett. "She might have felt like that about Parmenter if she'd found out he'd been peddling the pills to the neighborhood kids. Or even, possibly, supplying a pusher."
"Oh, yes, that I can see. You know, your old recluse without any friends begins to interest me, amigo. Let's go and ask questions around that block."
"I've done some of that, and nobody really knew him."
"Maybe you didn't ask the right questions."
They drove over to the tired old block of businesses on Alvarado, and talked to the other business people. It wasn't a block to attract much foot traffic, only a little way above the Hollywood freeway, residential streets not so immediately joining it; a block or two away, the looming bulk of the old Queen of the Angels hospital.
The young man in the music store, behind his beard, was uninterested. It was a part-time job for him and he didn't know any of the people along here. The two maiden sisters who kept the doughnut shop had thought Mr. Parmenter was a little queer. Unfriendly. Children, or teen-agers, frequenting the pharmacy? They couldn't say they'd specially noticed many going in and out. There weren't many around here as a rule. The languid woman at the dress shop tried mildly to flirt with Mendoza, and didn't know a thing about the pharmacy or Mr. Parmenter.
At the cleaning shop next door to the pharmacy they met Mr. Benjamin Rauschman, who tried to pump them for details of Parmenter's death. "He was a queer one all right," he said, unrepentant when Hackett squelched him with the routine platitude of police policy. And at Mendoza's question about kids, teen-agers, he leaped to the conclusion, eager and hel
pful. "You're thinking he was maybe selling the pills on the side to the kids? I wouldn't know about that." Mr. Rauschman was short and squat, with beautiful dark curling hair, alive dark eyes in a narrow face. "I didn't know the man—he was always polite enough, good morning, nice day, that was as far as it went—but I got the impression he was honest enough. Wasn't he?"
"I'll tell you, Mr. Rauschman," said Mendoza, "we don't know much about him either."
"Is that so?" said Rauschman. He accepted the offered cigarette and let Mendoza light it. "Well, I'll tell you something that probably doesn't mean one damn thing, but it struck me as—funny. Just funny." They waited, and he looked at the cigarette. "It just so happens that we got a married daughter lives up in Hollywood, and she's expecting a baby, and she hasn't been so good. Has to keep lying down a lot. So a good many nights, the last four or live months, the wife and I've been going up there so the wife can help out in the house and so on. And living over on Montana, naturally I take Sunset and go right past this corner, see? Well, old Parmenter, he always closed the store at six and went home. Same as all the rest of us along here, nothing open at night. But I tell you, three out of five nights we go past here, seven, seven-thirty, the pharmacy was lit up. He was there, or somebody was."
"What?" said Hackett. "I'll be damned."
"Maybe he was working on his books, or his income tax," said Rauschman, shrugging. "I wouldn't know."
Mendoza was rocking back and forth, heel to toe. "That's very interesting," he said gently. "I think I'd like a look at that place, Art—have you got the keys?" Rauschman watched them out with lively curiosity in his bright dark eyes.
"There's nothing here," said Hackett, unlocking the door of the Independent Pharmacy. "We've pawed all over everything. And it's all just what you'd expect, just his account books, receipts, ordinary stock. And I wonder what the hell will happen to it, whatever he's got in the bank, the house, when there aren't any relatives. I suppose the state will come in for it."