by Dell Shannon
Case Pending
( Lieutenant Luis Mendoza - 2 )
Dell Shannon
Case Pending
Dell Shannon
ONE
When Gunn came down the hall to his office at half-past eight, he found Curtis waiting. Curtis was holding up the wall beside the door; he opened his eyes at Gunn's step. He looked tired and rather dirty. "And a good, good morning to you too, chief," he said. Gunn didn't like to be called chief.
"What'd you draw?" Gunn unlocked the door.
"Just what we expected. I won't come in-I'm going home to bed-I can give it to you in ten words. Williams showed up about eight, you'll get that on Henry's report. Went in, about twenty minutes later came out with our Williams, and they went down to the Redbird bar on Third. Ten-forty, shifted to the Palace. Henry called me from there and I took over at midnight. They drifted home about half an hour later and stayed. His car's still outside."
"Well, now," said Gunn, pleased. "Fancy that."
"And for your further information," said Curtis, "I damn near froze to death sitting it out in my car. Next time I'll take along another blanket and a portable radio."
Gunn grinned benignly and told him to go home. He went on through the stenos' room to the center of three partitioned-off rooms at the rear, hung up his hat and coat, and sat at the desk. Henry's report was neatly centered, waiting for him there; Henry never missed getting in a written report immediately, however late his duty. Williams in 7.57, it announced laconically, and the rest of what Curtis had said. Very nice, thought Gunn.
So now they knew that Mr. John Williams hadn't deserted his wife and four children. The county had been passing over sixty-three dollars and fifty cents per month to Mrs. John Williams for four months, on her claim of desertion and failure to provide. The kids had to be fed, had to be sheltered and clothed-after a fashion-by somebody. It appeared that once again the county had been rooked. Williams was a skiffed carpenter, probably making good money on an out-of-town job.
Gunn made a notation on the report, Morgan to see, and sighed. Naughty, naughty, Mr. and Mrs. Williams, collusion to defraud the state-and maybe next time they'd think up something slicker. He got out his file of current investigations, wrote a brief summary of the conclusions in the Williams case, and set the file page aside for refiling among cases completed. He flicked over the rest. He heard the girl stenos begin to drift into the outer office.
Rossiter. Brankin. Peabody. Prinn. Fraty. Kling. A new one, Lindstrom. There were follow-up reports to be typed in on six or seven of them; he took those out to the stenos. "Morning, girls." Morgan and Stack came in together.
"I want to see you about that Mrs. Gold," said Stack.
"What about her?"
Stack followed him back into his office. "I told you I finally caught up to the guy-the Reno D.A."s office found him, he's working in some joint there as a waiter. I had it all set up to crack down on him, see. Reno says he ought to be good for seventy-five a month, and I went round to give the glad news to the misses. And then the rabbi puts the kibosh on it."
"What rabbi?"
"Mrs. Gold's rabbi. He was there. He says please will we just drop the whole thing and leave it to him-I guess he figures it'll be less of a disgrace or something if he can handle it-"
"Oh," said Gunn. "Well, he might have something there. If he can get it without any fuss, so much the better. Man'd feel better about it if he's persuaded instead of forced, the money'll come easier-less chance we'd have more trouble. It works out with ministers sometimes, but we can't let 'em stall forever. You tell him we'll give him a couple of weeks to try it his way before we crack down." Gunn went out with Stack and looked into the room next his own; Morgan was sitting there at one of four desks, looking at some papers. "Oh, Dick."
Morgan looked up. "Yes, sir?" he responded dully.
"Little job. Henry and Curtis have tied up the Williams case. Another collusion, way you figured. Williams is weekending-they were at a bar until midnight and it's a good chance you'll catch him still in bed with her if you make it snappy. Here's the report."
Morgan got up. "All right. Williams-yes."
Gunn looked at him more closely. "You look a bit off-color."
"I'm all right," said Morgan. He did not look it. As he took his topcoat from the peg behind the door, Gunn saw his hand shaking. He was the thin, sandy type that doesn't change much between boyhood and old age, doesn't look much different sick or well. But there were lines around his mouth now that Gunn hadn't seen before, and his eyes looked tired, as if he hadn't slept. He had a little trouble folding the paper Gunn handed him, putting it away in his pocket.
"How's Sue?" asked Gunn casually. "And Jan?"
"Fine," said Morgan, buttoning his coat carefully. "Just fine, thanks."
"Must get together again soon, Christy was saying just last night she'd like to kidnap that Janny of yours, kind of lonesome with our three grown and off."
"Oh-yes, sure. I guess so. We'll do that, thanks."
Gunn stood in the door of his office, absently jingling the coins in his pocket, and watched the other man out to the corridor. What was wrong with Morgan? He felt some responsibility for Morgan, unreasonably, for it had been his doing that Morgan got this job. Dick Morgan was the son of an old friend of Gunn's, and he'd known the boy most of his life.
Boy, well, Dick was thirty-eight, but it depended where you sat: Kenneth Gunn was sixty-two. And good as held ever been too, once he'd got out of the hospital after that business last year; but the doctors wouldn't pass him for active duty again. Nearly forty years' service, and then a home-made bullet out of a punk's zip-gun retired him. And Bill Andrews got the promotion to head of Homicide instead. Way the cards fell, and Bill was a good man; but Gunn hadn't known what to do with himself that six months. He'd jumped at this minor post in the D.A."s office; and he could say now, a year later, he'd given Kelleher something to talk about at the next election, by God.
It was a new department, this little corps of investigators-the husband-chasers, inevitably they were called; and if Gunn couldn't claim their job was as important as the one he'd done for forty years in and out of uniform, at least the Scot in him took pride in reckoning how much they saved the taxpayers. He's set up the organization himself, and it served as a model for those some other counties were building, here and in other states. He and his crew had tracked down over two thousand runaway husbands so far, to pry minimum child-support funds out of them anyway. Authorities in other states had cooperated, of course, but it came out even: they'd picked up deserters for other D.A."s offices from Maine to Oregon, too. Gunn had the exact figure whenever Kelleher wanted it; to date it was upward of half a million dollars this office had saved the county in support of deserted wives and children. There'd been a time a man could walk out and it was nobody's job to locate him, make him provide for a deserted family. These days, no. He couldn't go across the Arizona or Nevada line and thumb his nose at the California taxpayers.
Gunn himself hadn't had any idea what a staggering sum casual desertions cost the state, until he saw the figures last year. And he could have doubled the amount saved by now if he could have another dozen men, another dozen office clerks. This was the hell of a big town, and it attracted the hell of a lot of indigents and transients, as well as the usual shiftless ones any city had.
But he wasn't thinking about that as he looked after Dick Morgan. He stood there passing a hand over his jaw in a habitual gesture, a big hefty man with a round, amiable face and thinning hair, and for a minute he worried about Morgan. Dick had had some rough breaks: just out of college when the war came along, and he was married and had a child by the time it was over so he never did go back to finish his law course, but like so ma
ny others went into a big-company job. Then they lost the child, one of those unnecessary accidents, a drunk in a car, turning down their street just at random. That had nearly finished Sue, because she couldn't have another… Sure, they put the drunk in jail for manslaughter, but what good did that do a six-year-old girl, or Sue and Dick?
Dick's father had been alive then and living with them, and Gunn used to drop in there. Hadn't done old Rob Morgan any good either, losing his only grandchild like that. After a while they'd put their names down with a couple of adoption agencies, but those places were so damn finicky; they'd waited almost five years before they got Janny-but Janny was worth it. And just about then had come one of those squeeze-plays, a company merger, a few new hatchet men from the front office, and Dick was out-at thirty-seven, with nowhere to go, a mortgaged house, and less than a thousand in the bank.
Gunn wouldn't have blamed him for feeling bitter. At the same time, being Gunn, he wouldn't have had Dick Morgan on his staff-old Rob, sympathy, or no-If he hadn't known Dick could handle the job the right way. It wasn't a job that paid anything like what Dick had been earning before, but it was a job and Dick had seemed grateful and certainly competent and reasonably contented with it.
To anyone who didn't know him, Dick's manner just now might suggest a touch of indigestion, or a spat with his wife at breakfast, or an unlucky bet on the ponies. But Gunn knew Morgan for a man of abnormally equable temper, and that little nervousness and bad color meant a lot more than it would with another man. Besides, Dick and Sue never had spats; Sue wasn't that sort. And Dick didn't better drink, either. Not since eight years ago. Gunn hoped the boy wasn't in for another piece of rough luck somehow. Janny, maybe-some unless? Some people walked all their lives with bad luck at their shoulders.
No good worrying about it now.
His phone rang and he stepped back into his office to answer it. The voice at the other end was the heavy bass of Captain Bill Andrews.
"Say, Ken, among your little brood of wives you wouldn't have one Sylvia Dalton, would you?"
"Don't think so. Why?" Gunn riffled through the current file before him.
"Well, it was just a thought. Maybe you noticed by the papers that New York sort of misplaced Ray Dalton the other day. He was up on a three-to-five and got himself paroled, but he never did report in to his officer. New York thinks now-the usual information received-he lit out west, specifically to these parts, and'll be obliged if we can return the goods undamaged. Thing is, the party that said he headed west also said it was to see his wife. I came up with the bright thought that wives of crooks don't usually like to work very regular, and maybe this one was accepting our hospitality."
"Not unless she's doing it under another name. It's a thought, all right."
"Yeah. You might just check for initials. I can give you a make on her."
"I've got nothing else to do but your work," said Gunn. "I don't know every one of our customers personally, you know. Sure somebody sees 'em all, but I've got eleven men on duty. Yes, sure, I'll check with them. Send over the make. Don't I remember Dalton? It rings a bell'
"It ought to. The Carney job, five-six years back. Cameron and Healey were on it-liquor store knocked over and two men shot, proprietor and a clerk. We couldn't tie Dalton to it tight enough, but he was in on it. I guess at that we made him nervous enough to run back east, and New York put the arm on him for another job."
"I remember," said Gunn. He leaned back in his chair and regarded the ceiling. For a minute, with the familiar shoptalk, he almost had the vision he was back at headquarters in a real job, not this make-weight piddling business, and under Kelleher too… but, damn, a job worth doing. "It's worth a try," he said. Any kids?"
"One, a boy about twelve-thirteen."
"O.K.," said Gunn. "I'll have a look, might come up with something."
***
Morgan drove slowly down Main Street, not cursing at the traffic; he handled the car automatically, stopping for pedestrians, for red lights. Mrs. Williams lived on a run-down street among those that twisted and came to dreary dead ends the other side of Main. He would surprise Mr. and Mrs. Williams together and deliver a little lecture on the dangers of conspiracy to defraud. Maybe it wasn't so stupid of them to pull the shabby little trick, the commonest one in the list, with scarcely any attempt at secrecy; until the formation of this new department, God knew how many people had got away with it for years.
The problem created, Morgan thought as he had before, went beyond the Williamses or any individual-or the amount of public money. In essence, a social problem, and not a new one. If it wasn't money from this county office, it'd be money from another: people like the Williamses didn't give a damn. Williams, letting himself be branded a wife- and child-deserter, getting a job and a cheap room somewhere out of town, sneaking back for week-ends with his family, all to cheat sixty-three-fifty a month out of the county top of the three hundred or more he could earn as a skilled workman.
At a bar last night with his wife until midnight. Last thing they'd worry about was leaving the kids alone: four kids, the oldest eleven. It was a shabby, cheap neighborhood, almost a slum, though there were worse streets. People like the Williamses didn't care where or how they lived: often they had more money than others who lived better, but their money went on ephemeral thing n flashy cars and clothes and liquor.
Morgan was driving a six-year-old Ford. He wouldn't be surprised to find that Williams' car was a new model, and something more expensive. But all that was on the surface of his mind; he couldn't, for once, be less concerned. Deeper inside a voice was screaming at him soundlessly, What the hell are you going to do? Ten thousand bucks. Ten thousand.
All right, so he knew what he ought to do: Richard Alden Morgan, law-abiding citizen, who'd always accepted responsibilities and stood on his own two feet, and where had it got him? So it was just the breaks: everybody had bad luck. But, God damn it, so much bad… And a damn funny thing to think maybe, but if he could blame himself (or anybody), some concrete way, reason he'd just brought it on himself, he wouldn't feel so bitter. Nothing like that with Dick Morgan, he thought in savage sarcasm: respectable, righteous Morgan who paid his bills and lived within his income, Morgan the faithful, considerate husband and father-how did the old song go, everything he should do and nothing that he oughtn't-and got kicked in the teeth all the same. You could say "the breaks," but it damn well wasn't fair that Sue should be dragged under with him. Sue hadn't done anything, neither of them had done anything to deserve it. Janny hadn't done anything. Except get born.
He coasted gently to the curb two doors from the apartment house where the Williamses lived, and sat for a minute, getting out the watchers' report, rereading it but not really taking it in. Parked smack in front of the apartment was a year-old Buick, a two-tone hardtop. That'd be Williams, sure; Henry had taken down the license.
All right, so he knew what he ought to do. Go to the police, tell the story. Honest citizen. Sure. The police would take care of the man with the pock-marked face and dirty nails and cold gray eyes and the rasping voice that said Ten thousand bucks, see. And would that be the end of it? Like hell it would. The juvenile court would have something to say then, miles of red tape to unwind, and in the end they'd lose Janny anyway-he knew how those things went, how judges figured, how the cumbersome, impersonal law read. It was all the fault of the damned pompous law to start with: the silly God-damned inhumanly logical rules of the accredited agencies.
Suddenly his control broke one moment and he pounded his fist on the steering wheel in blind, impotent fury. Not fair, after everything else-the panic in Sue's eyes, the panic he heard in his own voice telling her-ten thousand-what the hell could he do? The police. The money. No choice for him even here, it had to be the police; he couldn't raise money like that.
You had to be logical about it. Juvenile hall, a state foster home, an orphanage, still better than anywhere with that pock-marked hood, the kind of woman he'd… Ten thousand.
The car wouldn't bring five hundred.
They still owed four thousand on the house, a second mortgage wouldn't-Sue's engagement ring, the little odds and ends of jewelry they had, maybe another five hundred if they were lucky.
He'd sat still to be kicked in the teeth for the last time. If he could get from under this by forgetting every righteous standard he had- But it wasn't so easy, it never was. So, go and rob a bank, hold up a liquor store, sure, get the ten thousand. It wouldn't cancel out: the threat would be just as potent, and in a month, six months, a year, there'd be another demand.
He straightened up after a while and took a couple of long breaths. It wasn't any good agonizing round and round in the same circle, they'd gone over all this a hundred times last night. He'd just have to play it by ear. Meanwhile he had a day's work to do-conscientious, methodical Morgan, he thought tiredly.
He got out of the car, slipping the ignition key in his pocket. See the Williamses and try to put the fear of God into them. The county wouldn't prosecute this time, on a first offense involving a relatively small amount: the courts were working overtime as it was. Morgan looked up Commerce Street to the corner of Humboldt, where something seemed to be going on-he could see the tall end of a black-and white police car, its roof light flashing, and the fat Italian grocer had come out of his corner shop with a few early customers. Whatever it was, a drunk or a fight or an accident, it was round the corner on Humboldt. He started up the worn steps of the apartment. After he'd dealt with the Williamses he might as well drop in on Mrs. Kling, and that new one was somewhere around here too, if he remembered the address-he got out his case-notebook to look. Yes, Mrs. Marion Lindstrom 273 Graham Court.
TWO
There were worse streets than Commerce, but it wasn't a neighborhood where anyone would choose to live, except those who didn't think or care much about their surroundings, or those who couldn't afford anything better. Ironically, only a few blocks away rose the clean modern forest of civic buildings, shining with glass and newness and surrounded by neat squares of asphalt-paved parking lots. Like many cities, this one sprouted its civic and business center in its oldest section, inevitably bordered with slums. It might look easy to change matters with the power of condemnation, the expenditure of public money, but it wouldn't work out that way if the city fathers tried it. There'd grow up other such streets elsewhere if not here; there were always the people who did not care, the landlords who wouldn't spend on repairs. Every city always has its Commerce Streets.