by Dell Shannon
"Look," he said, slapping his manila envelope down on Galeano’s desk and shrugging massively at Galeano and Rich Conway. "I can’t prove it’s a homicide, but that’s what it’s got to add up to. It’s a very funny one, boys. And I’ve done all I can on it, and the man’s got to be dead, so I bring it to you and let you go all round the mulberry bush on it. I mean, one way it’s open and shut, but nobody’ll ever prove anything-I don’t think."
"Why not?" asked Conway, his gray eyes interested. "What’s the case?"
"I’ll give it to you short and sweet," said Carey.
"Here’s this Edwin Fleming. Twenty-nine, raised in Visalia, dropout from high school but no record. No relations-he was an only child; his father died when he was just a kid and his mother two years ago. He did a hitch in the Army and got sent to Germany, where he married this girl-her name is Marta, she’s a reasonably good-looking blonde, twenty-six. This was four years ago. He gets out of the service, they come here, and he has trouble finding a job, finally gets one in construction-he’d done that before-only it’s a small-time operation, kind of boss-and-one-helper thing, I gather. I’m just giving you the background. His wife has a baby about a year ago, and just after that he has an accident on the job-fa1ls off a scaffold or something and ends up paralyzed. He was in and out of hospitals, but there wasn’t anything the doctors could do-he was paralyzed from the waist down, and he’d never get better. The boss had insurance that paid for the hospitalization, but that was a1l-on account of technicalities here and there, Fleming wasn’t eligible for any benefits from anybody, the government on down. So there he was, a useless hulk as you might put it, couldn’t earn, had to be tended like a baby-oh, his mind was 0. K., he could even get around some in a wheelchair, but he needed a good deal of attention."
"When does this tale get to be business for us?" asked Conway.
"Ten days ago," said Carey. "Eleven, now. A week ago last Friday, when his wife reported him missing. A man in a wheelchair! It was damned fishy from the start, you can see that. They didn’t have anything but what she could earn, she’s working as a waitress at a restaurant on Wilshire, the Globe Grill. They had an old car, but they’d moved to this place on Westlake so she could walk to work, and they were trying to sell the car, she says she couldn’t afford to run it. It’s a six-family apartment and everybody else there is out at work all day except an old wino named Offerdahl who doesn’t know anything and was probably too drunk to see anything there was to see. The Flemings lived on the second floor and he couldn’t get the wheelchair downstairs by himself, obviously."
Galeano yawned again. "Where’d she leave the baby while she was at work?"
"Oh, they lost the baby about six months ago-it was a girl, I think, it got pneumonia or something and died. Anyway, she calls for cops-this was about six P.M. that Friday-and tells this tale, and of course it got passed on to me. I ask you!" said Carey, and sat back looking contemptuous. "She has the gall to tell me, all innocent and wide-eyed, that she comes home to find her husband gone-a man in a wheelchair-and the wheelchair’s there, but he’s missing. Vanished-whoosh-like that! He couldn’t have crawled three feet by himself. She’s afraid, she says, he’s committed suicide, he’d been very despondent about his condition lately. I do ask you! If-"
"The wheelchair’s still there?" repeated Galeano, suddenly fascinated. "That’s like a magic trick." He had a brief ridiculous vision 'of angels snatching Fleming up to heaven, out of the wheelchair. Or little green men out of a UFO.
"The wheelchair’s still there, and even if it wasn’t, where could he go in it?" asked Carey reasonably. "Even if he’d managed to get downstairs with it, which he couldn’t have? There isn’t an elevator. Wheel himself over to MacArthur Park and crawl into the lake?-even if he had thought of suicide, and there’s not an iota of evidence he ever did. The people in that apartment didn’t know them very well-they’d only been there a little over two months-but I’ve talked to people where they used to live, the few casual friends they have, and everybody says Fleming had adjusted pretty well to being a cripple, he’d talked about taking courses in handcrafts, maybe earning something that way."
"Have you dragged the lake in MacArthur?" asked Conway.
Carey uttered a rude word. "You can if you want. He’d have floated by now. I don’t like having my intelligence insulted, is all. This dumb blonde bats her eyes at me and says he talked about suicide, he must’ve done it, she doesn’t know how but he’s gone, he must have killed himself. And a child of two could see there’s no way! If he really wanted to commit suicide, he could have got out of a window-it’s all cement sidewalk below-or cut his wrists or something, right there."
"Where was the blonde all day? Alibied? Anybody see him, and when and where?" asked Conway.
Carey snorted. "She was at work, like a good girl. Eight to two, and she was supposed to be back for the evening shift, seven to nine. Sure, a neighbor saw him-woman lives across the hall, a Mrs. Del Sardo, she left for work at the same time as the blonde and heard her say goodbye to Fleming, saw him in the wheelchair in the living room. If you ask me, the blonde timed it to have an alibi. And then she says, she had some shopping to do, she didn’t come home till five o’clock and he was gone. Just gone."
"Leaving the wheelchair," said Galeano. The wheelchair had taken possession of his mind; the thing was like a conjuring trick.
"Look, it’s kind of like one of those locked-room puzzles," said Carey, "and then again it’s not. I mean, there’s people all around-apartments, busy streets. Only nobody saw anything. And you remember it was raining like hell all that day. On the other hand, why would anybody see anything? That apartment house-everybody out at work except Fleming and old Offerdahl dead drunk down the hall."
"Yes, I see," said Conway. "Fleming almost completely helpless, on the second floor. And there’s no smell of him anywhere?"
"Not a trace. And he’d be easy to trace, you can see.
If you’re feeling that energetic," said Carey, "you can have all the pipes examined, but I doubt that the blonde had time to murder and dismember him that thoroughly and feed him down the bathtub, say, before she called us. She’s not a very big blonde, she wouldn’t have had the strength to carry him anywhere, dead or alive-he was six feet, a hundred and eighty. You can see there’s just one answer, it hits you in the eye."
"The boyfriend," said Galeano. "Yeah."
"I haven’t turned one up, damn it. Good luck on it. All I see is that Fleming has got to be dead. I don’t pretend to understand females," said Carey gloomily, "but however she may have felt about him once, here he was, a dead drag on her. He’s no good to her as a husband, she’s got to support him and take care of him, and he could live to be eighty. He didn’t have any life insurance, he hadn’t converted it when he got out of the service-that could explain why they didn’t try to fake a suicide or accident. She d like to be rid of him, don’t tell me she wouldn’t. She-"
"And don’t anybody say, she could walk out or divorce him," said Conway cynically. "The people we deal with aren’t so logical. I suppose there’s got to be a boyfriend."
"Go and look," said Carey. "They don’t seem to have had many friends. They used to live over on Berendo in Hollywood, but I couldn’t locate anybody who knew them. All I’ll say is, the thing is obvious. There’s got to be a boyfriend. She gave him a key, or he knocked on the door and Fleming let him in. He knocked him over the head-there’s not a trace of blood in the place-and there’s a driveway down the side to garages at back, he could’ve driven his car back there and lugged Fleming down to it in five minutes. Ten feet from the back door. Your guess is as good as mine what he might have done with him-maybe he’s got a boat and dropped him out at sea, or buried him in his backyard-all I say is, Fleming’s got to be dead, so it’s your baby."
"The logic I fol1ow," said Conway, "but what a bastard to work. But if there is a boyfriend, somebody’s bound to know. The other girls she works with?"
"Four of ’em. The
y all say she’s a loner, doesn’t confide all girlish."
"What about her family?" asked Galeano.
"I said, she’s German-married him over there. Oh, I guess she could have some family in Germany. I don’t know."
"If she does, it could be she’d mentioned something in letters, but how to get at it-"
"No bets," said Carey. "I’ll wish you good luck on it."
He got up.
"Thanks so much," said Conway. "You know it’ll end up in Pending-your files and ours."
"Well, I kind of hope you nail her," said Carey. "I don’t like having my common sense insulted. Vanished, she says, batting her eyes at me-this blonde. A man in a wheelchair, a cripple!"
"And the empty wheelchair there. I like that," said Galeano. "It’s a nice touch somehow."
"Do have fun with it," said Carey.
***
Jason Grace and Tom Landers had been handed the new rape-assault because they’d been on the one last week, and the one last month, and this being in the same general neighborhood it might add up to the same X. The first two had been funny. "I hope," said Landers now, "we’re not in for a spate of the offbeat ones. If this does match up."
"Oh, I don’t know, relieves the monotony," said Grace. His chocolate-colored face with its dapper little mustache like Mendoza’s was thoughtful as he reread the statement from the second victim. "Has Jimmy talked to the hospital yet?"
"I’ll see."
The first victim, last month, had been a Mrs. Rena Walker over on Twentieth Street. Mrs. Walker was sixty-four, an upright and respectable widow, owned her own modest little house, and devoted much of her time to the Afro-American Methodist Church where she directed the choir. She said she’d just come home from grocery-shopping, about four that afternoon, when her doorbell rang and it was a boy asking about yard work. "I told him I couldn’t afford anybody to cut the grass, my son-in-law does it for me, but he was so polite, seemed like a real nice boy, I was sorry I had to turn him down. So then he says could he trouble me for a drink of water, ma’am, and I naturally said, why, surely, sonny, and let him in, and the next thing I knew he pulled this knife- But he was just a little kid! Just a boy, didn’t look more than twelve years old!" She had given them a description, such as it was: a light-colored Negro boy about that age, maybe five-six, slightly built. Mrs. Walker had definitely been raped, said the doctor, and cut about with a knife. She had been surprised: cops weren’t much, any more.
The second victim, last week, had been Miss Ruth Trimball who lived alone in a rented house two blocks down the street from Mrs. Walker. She was sixty-eight, still worked at a drugstore over on Jefferson, and had just got home from work when a boy rang her doorbell and asked if she wanted anybody to do yard work. She told the same story Mrs. Walker had-such a nice polite boy, she hadn’t thought twice about letting him in, for his drink of water. She’d been raped and cut too, and gave the same description.
Yesterday Mrs. Wilma Lightner had called LAPD and reported finding her mother injured when she went to see her. Mrs. Sylvia Beaver had been raped and knifed, according to the hospital, but would recover. Piggott and Schenke, on night watch, had taken a statement from Mrs. Lightner last night. Her mother was a widow, sixty-two, owned her own home on Twenty-third Street, was living on Social Security.
Landers came back to report that the hospital said Mrs. Beaver could be questioned. "Take your car," he added, "that thing’s acting up on me-I’m going to have to figure on a new one." And what with Phil talking about new furniture-he and Policewoman Phil O’Neill had just got married last August, and Landers was discovering all the fallacies of that one about two living as cheaply as one. The Corvair was of an age to be retired, and with Phil so enthusiastic about her little Gremlin he’d rather like to try one of his own, but the payments- They took Grace’s car, the little blue racing Elva. At the hospital, they found Mrs. Beaver propped up in bed with her daughter in attendance. She was a fat, black, very respectable-looking matron with round steel-rimmed spectacles, and she looked at the detectives indignantly.
"Tell you? I can most certainly tell you all about it!" she said loudly. "I was never so surprised in my life! He was just a little kid-a little boy! Rang the bell and asked to cut my lawn for a dollar. I told him I didn’t need anybody to cut the grass, but he seemed like a nice youngster, so polite and all, and when he asked for a drink of water, I didn’t see any harm in letting him in-"
She gave them the same description. It amounted to assault with intent, like the other ones.
"Offbeat all right," said Grace on the way back to headquarters. And of course there was no lead on it at all. They could look in Records for the description, but it was general.
At the office, Hackett was in talking to Mendoza, and as they came in Lake told Grace and Landers that there was a new body reported by the Fire Department. Glasser and Palliser had gone out on it.
***
"There’s nothing in it," said Hackett. "I gave it an hour or two-just to look-and it’s silly. This Yeager is letting his imagination run wild or something. Overheard a joke and built it up. These Lamperts are ordinary quiet people, the son’s on full disability from a service injury, and by what I heard from the people I talked to in the apartment, they get on just fine together."
"Yes," said Mendoza inattentively, and pulled the trigger on his flame-thrower.
"That damned thing," said Hackett. "Set the place afire if you’re not careful."
"Don’t be silly, Arturo." The phone buzzed on his desk and he picked it up. "Robbery-Homicide, Mendoza."
Without preamble, Dr. Bainbridge said crisply in his ear, "Traffic sent in a body on Monday night, said to be a hit-run victim. What it looked like. It isn’t. Man about thirty, a heavy drinker, and he was beaten to death with a club or something similar. I thought you’d like to know."
"Hell and damnation!" said Mendoza.
TWO
Palliser went our with Glasser on the new call, and condescended to fold his six feet into the little Gremlin Glasser had so luckily won in a drawing last year. As Glasser backed out of the slot Palliser massaged his handsome straight nose in a habitual gesture and said, "You know, I’ll have to do something about that dog, damn it."
"What dog? Oh, the pup that woman gave you?"
"That one," said Palliser. "She’s a very nice dog, Trina, but she’s big, and going to be bigger. A German shepherd after all. She ought to have obedience training, but damn it, how can I take her? Robin can’t, with the baby. I’ve been on the phone to this local club, and the nearest class to us is Saturday afternoons, and I’m only off on Monday. This fellow said I could get a book and try training her myself, just a few minutes a day, but I don’t know."
Glasser hadn’t any useful suggestions.
The new call turned out to be an old building out on San Pedro, plastered with CONDEMNED signs and looking ready to fall down, all four stories of it. The fire truck was still there, and the battalion chief waiting for them. "Not much of a fire," he told them, "but when we’d knocked it down we found the body. Somebody likely thought he’d get rid of it by lighting a match, but he bungled the job, this damp weather."
"Arson?" said Glasser. "Definitely?"
"You better believe. A trail of kerosene to the body, but it fizzled out-you notice it’s a derelict building, part of the roof’s gone and there was a mist this morning. It’s back here." Even on this gray morning threatening rain, a little crowd had gathered to watch the activity, and the uniformed men from the black and white were keeping them back. The chief led Glasser and Palliser into what might have started life as a small hotel fifty years ago, and ended up as an apartment house. The place had been a shambles even before the fire; there were clusters of broken bricks and heaps of plaster dust, gaping empty doorways, and most of it was open to the sky. "The quake in seventy-one finished it off, but they just haven’t got round to taking the rest of it down. There you are." The chief pointed unnecessarily.
Near wh
at had been the rear door of the building, between the empty doorway and another pile of rubbled brick, the body sprawled almost casually. Palliser and Glasser didn’t need the chief’s interpretation to read what had likely happened here. It was a little, slender body, and somebody had tried to set fire to it, but the fire had gone out without doing much damage.
"A lot of smoke," said the chief. "Fellow at the tailor shop down the block called in the alarm." There was a cluster of miscellaneous little shops down the block, in other ramshackle buildings not yet condemned-the cluster of citizens outside had probably come from there.
Palliser squatted over the body. "Make any educated guesses, Henry?"
"One," said Glasser sadly. "She was raped-assaulted at least-and probably strangled."
Palliser grunted. "You’d better call up S.I.D. Go through the motions, photographs and so on." Glasser went out to use the radio in the black and white.
The body was that of a young girl: very young, Palliser thought. Dark blonde, thin, hard to say if she’d been pretty or not, the face discolored with death or the effects of strangulation, the body already stiff: dead awhile. She was naked from the waist down, and there was dark dried blood on the inside of her thin little-girl thighs. Still on the upper half of the body was a pale-green knit turtleneck sweater, pulled up to show part of a dirty white brassiere; by the slight small swell of one breast, she’d hardly needed that. On her feet were what looked like new sneakers, blue and white, fairly clean, and white ankle socks. One arm was flung out from the body, and Palliser had just made a couple of discoveries when Glasser came back.
"The mobile lab’s on the way."
"Good. Look at this," said Palliser. "Makes it not quite so anonymous, at least. We may get her identified right off."