Murder Most Strange

by Dell Shannon

  "My good God," said Mendoza, "what you do get us into—ta1k about one thing leading to another!"

  * * *

  On Sunday morning Higgins thought it was worth an hour's time to take Mendoza's advice. He was curious about Mr. Gillespie. He had put a police seal on the door of the room, in case they wanted to take another look, and he got there about nine o'clock and first went through all the drawers in the chest. The room was only about nine by twelve, and held the bed, the chest, a nightstand and a small armchair. The bathroom was down the hall. There wasn't anything in the drawers but clean underwear, shirts, ties, socks, handkerchiefs: fair middle-priced quality. There was one extra suit hanging in the closet, three pairs of slacks, with two pairs of shoes, black and brown, on the floor. There were about a dozen library books, between a cheap pair of bookends, on the chest, and some magazines in the drawer of the night-stand. And a funny mixture those were: Car Life, Coinage, Fate, Country Life and American Astrology. The library books were even queerer: historical fiction, psychic research, classic crimes and a book on the history of winemaking. There was no rhyme or reason to be gotten out of that. There were three suitcases in the closet, and they all looked empty, but he felt carefully at sides and bottoms, and in the third one discovered that the bottom lining was loose, fastened down with Scotch tape. He pulled the tape off, lifted the lining, and looked at a respectable amount of nice green cash.

  "I'll be damned," he muttered, and took it out to count it. It was all in tens and twenties, and it amounted to a little over nine hundred dollars. He decided it wasn't enough for a ransom payment or part of a bank heist, and too much for an ordinary heist or a burglary. He put it aside, felt again in all the suitcase pockets, and was rewarded with a small stiff card tucked in one of the side pockets. He looked at it. It was old and shredded at the corners, and the date on it was June 1974. It was a library card, made out in Gillespie's name, for the library in Stamford, Connecticut.

  And that was all there was.

  He took the cash back to the office to stash away as evidence, and Mendoza was interested.

  "I wonder if it'd be worthwhile to ask the Stamford force if they know him," said Higgins.

  "Explore every avenue," said Mendoza. "There's a new one down, by the way—Art and Tom went out on it."

  * * *

  The new homicide was a very messy one. It was a house on Mott Street, an old frame place with no grass or bushes in front, and needing paint. The squad-car man was Gomez, and he looked sick when he told them what to expect. "The visiting nurse found them and called in."

  The house had a combination living—dining room, two bed-rooms with a bathroom between, a square kitchen. It was in a shambles. Every drawer had been pulled out and dumped, clothes yanked down from closet poles, pictures torn off the walls. In the middle of the wreckage were the two bodies and quite a lot of blood.

  The bodies were those of two very aged black people, and the first thought in Hackett's and Landers' minds was that there hadn't been any necessity to kill them; they couldn't have put up any tight at all. The old man had been stabbed as he sat in a wheelchair; he couldn't have weighed ninety pounds. The old woman was even thinner and frailer; she lay face down against one wall, and had probably been stabbed too. They could conclude that right away, for the knife had been left—an ordinary kitchen knife, bloody, in the middle of the living-room floor.

  "Christ," said Landers.

  They couldn't do anything until the lab had gotten at it. They called for a mobile unit, and went out and sat in the squad. The visiting nurse was shaken and pale, and nurses didn't react that way often. She was a competent-looking middle-aged woman with frosted blond hair, and she was voluble, if she couldn't tell them much that might be relevant to the murder.

  "Mr. and Mrs. Eggers," she said. "William and Clara. Oh, my God, to see them like that—and the worst of it is, they weren't going to be here much longer. They weren't fit to be alone, and we'd arranged for them to go into a rest home."

  She pressed a handkerchief to her mouth. "He was ninety-four and she was nearly ninety. They'd both been schoolteachers, he was a principal once, they were so proud of that, of getting an education, it wasn't so easy all those years ago—they were always telling how their parents just missed being born into slavery. But they'd been retired nearly thirty years, and back then teachers didn't get paid much, they just got along on Social Security, they didn't have anything—never had any children. He was nearly helpless, and she wasn't much better. They had the meals-on-wheels service, and I came three times a week to give them baths—"

  "When were you here last?" asked Hackett.

  "Thursday. Thursday afternoon. And when I came today the front door all broken in—to think of them ending like that, when they'd been good honest hardworking people all their 1ives—I've gotten more and more nervous of coming into neighborhoods like this, I expect when they bought the house it was a decent street, but— They bought the house in nineteen-twenty, that's before I was born . . .

  Hackett, looking at the street, reflected that L.A. had changed in that piece of time: sixty-odd years, God, what had the street looked like then? A pleasant little house among others similar, on a narrow quiet street in downtown L.A., long before the city had amassed a million population. Now, the ancient houses were ready to fall down, the street was neglected and full of potholes, and a mongrel dog with its ribs showing was nosing along the gutter. There wasn't anybody out to stare at the police vehicles, exhibit curiosity; the people down here didn't like cops, or were afraid of them.

  "It's just too pitiful," she said.

  But of course it was the kind of street where the kind of people lived who might do a thing like this.

  "My God," said Landers, "but anybody should have known they wouldn't have any money, anything valuable. You'd think."

  "Things relative," said Hackett. "Maybe they had a little more than some along here, Tom."

  It had been a very crude, hasty job; the lab might give them something right away.

  The morgue wagon drew up to the curb silently, behind the lab truck.

  * * *

  At a little past two o'clock on Sunday, a squad called in an attempted rape, and Mendoza and Higgins went out on it in a hurry. It was an apartment house up on Glendale Avenue, an old red-brick place looking solid and comfortable, and the apartment was at the front downstairs.

  "I thought I'd better call even if I wasn't hurt," said Eleanor Golinsky cheerfully, "because that guy is obviously a nut and ought to be tucked away before he hurts somebody. And I never had such a surprise in my life—me, not exactly the green girl from the country, and I like to think I've got some judgment of people!" She grinned at them, but she was still a little shaken. She was a big girl, at least five eight and sturdily built, with brown hair in a short no-nonsense cut, a plain round face, bright brown eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses.

  "Whoosh!" she said, appraising them, dismissing Mendoza as a fop, admiring Higgins' muscles. "I'll never trust my own judgment again. But he was plausible—God, he was so plausible and polite, anybody would have believed him! But he didn't know I know some judo."

  "You're very lucky to have gotten away from him, Miss Golinsky," said Higgins. There wasn't any immediate point in telling her that he'd already hurt quite a few girls. "We can guess what he told you, but let's hear it from the beginning."

  "Sure," she said. "I was getting ready to go to work—sheesh, I'm nearly an hour late and I never called Mr. Boggs, he'll have gone up in a sheet of flame—I'm a checker at a Safeway on Silver Lake—going to night school to make up enough credits to get my phys-ed teacher's certificate. Keeps me busy. Anyway, I was just dressed when he rang the bell—and talk about gentlemanly! Nobody would have suspected him of anything, and as for being afraid of him, hah, it is to laugh. Nice-looking fella, tall, dark, and dressed up to the nines." She flicked a glance at Mendoza's dapper tailoring, as if in comparison. "He said . . ." It was the same tale, of course, the mispla
ced sister, the letter brought out as if to check the address, the apologetic bewilderment, the request to call a taxi. "Never so surprised in my 1ife," she said, "when he pulled that knife and reached for me. Well, I'm not going to tell you I wasn't scared, I saw what he had in mind, and I was scared to death, but I tried to keep my head—and like I say I know some judo. I also remembered what Mother always said and the first thing I did was to aim a good hard kick at him—bad luck I landed too low, but I don't think he liked it. You can see I'm pretty big and strong, and I got him in a judo hold once but he had enough height on me to get away—he dropped the knife and I kicked it under the couch and grabbed up a vase from the end table, nearest thing to hand, and cracked him over the head—darn it, I liked that vase too, but what the heck if it saved my virtue—and the first time I'd gotten hold of him I'd torn his jacket, and I think by then he just wanted to get away—"

  "With some reason," said Mendoza, amused.

  "He got the door open and ran, and you know, I darn near started after him—I was good and mad by then—and then reason, as they say, prevailed, and I locked the door and called for cops."

  "Well, we're very glad you weren't hurt, Miss Golinsky."

  Higgins was moving the couch out to retrieve the knife; he slid it into an evidence bag. "He's a dangerous man. We've been chasing him for some time without any luck. All we've got is his description and the M.O.—"

  "Come again."

  "His modus operandi. The gimmick about the sister."

  "Oh," she said. "Well, if it'l1 do you any good, in the general melee he dropped his prop. I suppose when I tore his jacket—I think he'd put it back in that pocket just before I let him in. I found it on the floor just before the Marines arrived," and she smiled at the squad—car man.

  "What? His—"

  "That letter he was waving around, supposed to be from his sister." She picked it up from the coffee table and handed it to Higgins.

  It was a handwritten envelope addressed to Mrs. Cheryl Stack, at an address on Hillside Avenue in Hollywood.

  * * *

  The house was an old bungalow on that old street, on a corner, and reasonably well kept up, with lawn in front. "How exactly do we play this?" asked Higgins as Mendoza shoved the doorbell.

  "By ear."

  The woman who came to the door was middle-aged, plump, with a placid face. She looked at them enquiringly. "Mrs. Stack?" asked Mendoza.

  "That's right."

  He showed her the badge. "Police officers. I wonder if you can tell me how—"

  He had the letter in his hand ready to show her, but at sight of the badge the small puzzlement left her eyes and she said, "Oh, it's about that arson case, I suppose. Well, I should think you'd know better than to try to get hold of Douglas on a work day. But there, excuse me, I expect policemen work regular hours and you wouldn't realize—he's at work, at the fire station, of course. But there again"—she considered—"could be you didn't know where he got transferred?

  "Douglas Stack?" said Higgins tentatively.

  "Well, who else are we talking about? My son Douglas, that's who you want to see, isn't it? He used to be at the station on Third, but last month he got transferred to the one on Jefferson downtown. I don't know why he was always set on being a fireman, the crazy hours they have to work."

  * * *

  "My God," said Higgins, "he was operating in Hollywood's territory and then they sent him downtown and he started prowling around there. Of all the—and a fireman—they have pretty stiff requirements, but—"

  "But not," said Mendoza, "all the psychological testing we run on prospective cops, George. One thing, if he's due on the job sometime soon, he'll still be carrying the marks of Miss Golinsky's battle for her virtue."

  The captain of the fire station on Jefferson was incredulous.

  "Stack? My God, he's been on the department for four years, I had his record when he got transferred, of course, and there's not a mark against him. Very reliable man. A little moody, maybe, but one of the boys—I can't believe this."

  "Well, we want to talk to him at least, there's a definite link," said Mendoza diplomatically. But they didn't have to do much talking: when Douglas Stack showed up to go on duty at four o'clock he was wearing his uniform, but he bore several deep angry gashes on one temple and was limping slightly. "And damn all the rules and regulations," said Mendoza softly as they saw him come in, "that suit will be in his car and we'll have to get a warrant before we can open a door."

  But they took him in, and called Eleanor Golinsky down to take a look at him. "That's him all right," she said, "and I see I marked him. Good.” Tomorrow they would bring in all the other girls, and they would recognize him too.

  He was, as all the girls had said, an attractive man if not exactly handsome: young, tall, well set up, with presence enough and sufficient educational background to put up that good front. He could have attracted the girls easily enough. But a surprising number of the violent rapists were of the same ilk; that was quite irrelevant to what made them tick. They couldn't get him to say anything for quite some time; and then he seemed to get impatient with all the repetitious questions and said, "It was Sally. I never did anything like that until that damn little bitch walked out on me."

  "Sally who'?" asked Mendoza.

  "Sally Forcell. She was my girl ever since high school. I'd always been good enough before, till she ran into that dude with the foreign car and all the loot. Kicked me in the teeth and took off with him. I guess"—he looked at them from under his brows—"I started to feel all women were like that. I had to get back at Sally."

  It was the opening move in the gambit of trying to claim insanity, of course. It wasn't likely he'd get away with that, when such obvious plotting had gone into achieving the rapes. He would get the psychiatric evaluation, but nobody was going to think this one was crazy. They booked him into jail, and were both late home.

  At nine o'clock Piggott called Mendoza to say that the warrant for his car had come through; it had been towed in, and they had looked. His natty suit and white shirt were there, only the suit wasn't so natty, with a pocket nearly torn off.

  "And isn't that gratifying," said Mendoza. “I must remember to call Barth in the morning. His mistake, of course, was in picking on Miss Golinsky to tackle this time—quite a girl, Miss Golinsky—and you know, that confirms a suspicion in my mind. The only casing he did was looking for female names on the mail slots. If he'd ever laid eyes on Miss Golinsky before he made the attempt on her, he'd never have rung her doorbell."

  Piggott laughed. "She sounds like an Amazon."

  "I also think he must be a frustrated actor," said Mendoza. "Why, he had a beautiful setup without all that elaborate bedtime story, Matt. All he'd have had to do was show up in his uniform and say he was checking for gas leaks or something. What honest citizen would be afraid of the stalwart young firefighter?"

  "Too simple for him. He got some of his kicks out of the approach," said Piggott, who occasionally surprised Mendoza with unexpected imagination.

  * * *

  On Monday morning Higgins and Landers were just leaving the office to hunt more heisters—there hadn't been a lab report on the Eggers house yet, of course, and they had put Fuller in Pending—when Lake beckoned Higgins as they passed the switchboard. "Long distance for you."

  Higgins went back to his desk and picked up the phone.

  "Sergeant Higgins."

  "This is Chief Lombard, Stamford P.D.," said a heavy voice in his ear. "You'll be the LAPD man who sent us some prints and a query about Robert Gillespie? Don't tell me you've got him. What for? They're his prints all right. Have you got him?"

  "Only," said Higgins, "in a manner of speaking. Why?"

  "Because if you've got him we want him. For murder."

  "I'll be damned," said Higgins. "Now we know. He's dead," and he told the chief what had happened to Mr. Gillespie.

  "That is really one for the books," said Lombard. The distinctive New England
accent rang a little strange on Higgins' ear. "We'll never know the whole truth of the matter now, but that winds up one of the queerest cases I've ever had, and I've been on this force for thirty-two years."

  "Who did he kill?"

  "His wife. He had a hardware store here, just another little humdrum medium-successful businessman. Set your clock by him. Careful of money. Opened the store at nine six days a week, closed at five—had a good many friends around town, he was born and brought up here—member of Rotary and the Masons, went to church every Sunday with his wife. She was the same kind—local girl. They never had a family. She played bridge with other women, gave dinner parties, taught a Sunday-school class. Once a year they went to the Cape for a week on vacation. Married nearly thirty years, never any sign of trouble between them. Then one day eight years ago he closed up the store one Saturday night, went home and shot his wife through the head, buried her in the back yard, packed a couple of bags and vanished."

  "I will be goddamned," said Higgins.

  "By the time it came to light and we found her—some of her friends wondering why she hadn't come to church, wouldn't answer the phone—the trail was cold. We traced him to New York, and for all the signs there were he might have gone to Timbuctoo, or just rented a room in the Bowery as John Smith. We had flyers out on him for quite a while, had him listed as wanted with NCIC, but we never had a smell of him. The only thing we did know was that he took a bundle of cash with him. Before he went home that day he visited his bank and closed out his whole savings account—had a hell of an argument with the manager because he asked for cash, but he finally got it. The manager thought he was crazy, and then when the store didn't open on Monday—and the ladies got talking—"

  "How much did he take?"

  "Nearly twenty thousand."

  "My God. He had nine hundred left."