Streets of Death llm-28

by Dell Shannon

  "Yes, sir."

  "Do you think you could recognize the house where he took you? Did you notice any street names when you ran away?"

  She shook her head. "It was dark. Oh, I remember one, Flower Street, just before I came to the library."

  Palliser rubbed his nose. That wasn’t much help; by what she said, she could have walked three dozen blocks before that. What was in his mind was that city dwellers tend to be curiously insular, stick to their own little corners: and when Steve Smith attempted to get rid of the body in that derelict building, a hundred to one he lived somewhere nearby, or had lived there. A house. Well, there were enough old streets with ramshackle old houses along them, both sides of San Pedro and other main drags down there.

  "Do you think you could recognize him, Stephanie?" asked Wanda. "If you saw his photograph?"

  Stephanie nodded doubtfully. "I think so. I tried to make Sandra come with me, I just knew something awful’d happen if we stayed there, but you never could get Sandra to do things. She got you to do things. Only-when Mama told me what happened to her-I mean, I knew Sandra all my life." But this time, in spite of everything, Stephanie was rather enjoying herself, all of them listening to every word and Wanda taking notes.

  "Wel1, I’ll tell you," said Palliser, looking at his watch, "suppose Miss Larsen takes you to lunch, Stephanie, and then we’ll take a ride around and see if you recognize any buildings, and then you can look at some pictures."

  She agreed almost enjoyably. When Wanda had led her out, Palliser looked at Glasser and said, "Terrifying, no? Kids."

  "She was lucky," agreed Glasser sleepily. "Does Harry sound like the kind to have a whole house of his own? Even a ramshackle one?"

  "Pay your money, take your choice. Could be his sister’s and the fami1y’s away visiting Aunt Mary. Could be his wife’s just left him. What I’m thinking about right now, he did take some steps to get rid of the body." Palliser picked up the phone and called S.I.D. "That D.O.A. yesterday-you pick up anything else at the scene?"

  "Didn’t anybody call you? Well, we would have," said Horder. "It’s busy down here. You’l1 get a report. Yeah, no latents anywhere on the body-you thought it’d been dropped there-but out back of that building we picked up a new-looking suitcase with some female clothes in it about the right size for the corpse, and an overnight bag ditto. We’ve just been over those, and there were some pretty good prints on the suitcase."

  "Send the bags up if you’re finished with them, will you? Thanks." Palliser relayed that to Glasser. "There you are. He dumped both her and the luggage there, maybe overlooking the plane case. The damn funny thing is, Henry, if he hadn’t tried to set fire to the corpse she might not have been found until the powers that be finally came to demolish that building, which could be years."

  "Fate," said Glasser. "That’s so. Let’s go have some 1unch."

  When Wanda brought Stephanie back she identified the suitcase immediately, and Sandra’s overnight bag. Palliser took her prints to compare to those S.I.D. had collected from the suitcase, and they wasted an hour or so cruising around in the Rambler in the vicinity of that building on San Pedro. Stephanie was vague; it had been dark when Steve brought them to the house and dark when she ran away: she didn’t recognize anything but the public library. So he brought her back, down to the Records office, and introduced her to Phil Landers.

  "Mrs. Landers will give you some photographs to look at, Stephanie. If you recognize him, you tell her-or if you see any picture that might be him."

  "Yes, sir, I’ll look good. You’re pretty sure it was him killed Sandra, aren’t you?"

  "Pretty sure." He left her to it, under Phil’s eye.

  ***

  "Why, yes, sir, I knew Dick Buford, very nice guy. Beg pardon? Oh, my name’s Cutler. I couldn’t believe it, I heard he got killed by a robber, right next door, and we never heard a thing!" Cutler was pleased at finding Landers and Grace on his doorstep, to talk about it. "Last person in the world you’d think-nice quiet fellow, him and his wife just devoted like they say till she passed on-" He rambled on, giving them nothing. He said he was a widower himself, that he’d been at the movies Tuesday night, when Buford had probably been killed.

  At the house on the other side of Buford’s they met a Mrs. Skinner who told them they’d just moved in, and if they’d realized it was the kind of neighborhood where murders happened they’d never have rented the house. She and Mr. Skinner had been at her sister’s in Huntington Park on Tuesday night, got home late.

  "All very helpful," said Grace, brushing his dapper mustache. "But the brother said he sometimes went up to a local bar for a few beers. Maybe he did that night."

  "So what?" said Landers. "He was attacked at home."

  "Well, we have to go through the motions."

  Up on Virgil Street, in the two blocks each side, were three small bars. It wasn’t quite noon, and only one was open. They went in and asked the lone bartender if he knew Buford. It was a little place, licensed for beer and wine only. He didn’t react to the name or description. Pending the opening of the other two, they went to have some lunch, and Grace said over coffee, "A handful of nothing. It could’ve been any thug in L.A. picking a house at random to go after loot. The brother’s supposed to look and see if anything’s missing. Up in the air, like those damned funny rapes."

  "I said we’d be in for another spate of the funny ones," agreed Landers. "And of course, if that kid is as young as those women say, he won’t be in Records, that is to have prints and a mug-shot. Unless one of them happens to spot him on the street, there’s no way to look. That is one for the books all right."

  At one-thirty they went back to that block and tried Ben’s Bar and Grill on the corner of Virgil. It was just open, no customers in. A fat bald fellow with a white apron round his middle was polishing the bar; it was just a small place, but looked clean and comfortable, with tables covered in red-checked cloths. "Do for you, gents?" asked the bartender genially.

  Landers flashed the badge. "Is a Mr. Buford one of your regular customers here? Dick Buford?" He added a description. "Maybe he didn’t come in often, just sometimes?"

  The bartender’s geniality vanished. "Oh," he said in a subdued tone, "yeah, that’s so. Yeah, I knew that guy. I heard something happened to him-some guy down the street said he got killed. That’s a shame, seemed like a nice guy. No, I didn’t know him good, just a customer, not very often like you said.”

  "Was he here on Tuesday night?" asked Grace in his soft voice.

  The bartender passed a fat hand across his mouth and said unwillingly, "I guess maybe he was. I guess it was Tuesday. He never stayed long-two, three beers, and he’d go out."

  "Did he get talking to anybody else here that night'?"

  "I don’t remember. We were kind of busy, I didn’t take any notice. He never stayed long, like I said, in and out. I don’t remember what time it was."

  "Remember any other regular customers here at the same time?" asked Landers.

  "No. I couldn’t tell you a thing. I’m not even sure now it was Tuesday," said the bartender. A couple of men came in and he turned his back on police.

  "Well, do tell," said Grace outside. "That’s a little funny, Tom. What’s he feeling nervous about?"

  "Just doesn’t want to be mixed in-you know the citizens, Jase. This is a waste of time. The only way we’ll find out what happened to Buford is if the lab picked up some good evidence at the scene."

  ***

  Higgins had had some paperwork to clean up on a suicide from last week, and was the only one in when a call came from Traffic about a new body. It was a rooming house over on Beaudry, and the landlady had walked in to confiscate anything there until the rent was paid up, and found the tenant dead in bed. Higgins went to look at it.

  Anywhere there was always the narco bit, the addicts and the pushers; these days something new had been added. Time was the heaviest traffic in the hard stuff was in heroin; a while back the H had started to b
e old hat, and the thing now was cocaine. It was just as lethal but it took a little longer to kill its victims. But the younger generation had added a refinement, and increasingly now they were picking up the kids half high on dope of one sort or another and half high on gin or vodka.

  Higgins couldn’t say exactly what might have taken off the fellow in the little bare rented room; the autopsy would tell them. But he didn’t look over twenty-five, and there were needle-marks on both arms, not a dime in the place, a few old clothes, an empty vodka bottle beside the bed. No I.D. in the clothes, but the corpse was wearing a tattoo on one upper arm that said Jacob Altmeyer in a wreath of flowers. Higgins called up the morgue wagon and went back to Parker Center, down to Records.

  "And how’s Tom treating you these days?" he asked a cute flaxen-haired Phil Landers as she came up. Phil smiled at him.

  "So-so. I think his Italian blood’s showing, he’s getting stingy with a buck."

  "God knows aren’t we all these days."

  "I understand," said Phil gravely, "that the baby’s walking at last."

  Higgins grinned unwillingly; he’d taken some kidding about that. Well, since he’d belatedly acquired a family, his lovely Mary and Bert Dwyer’s kids Steve and Laura, and then their own Margaret Emily, he found he worried about them. And he’d never known any babies before, but by what everybody said they ought to start walking at about a year, and she hadn’t, and he had worried. She’d been a year old in September. Mary said don’t be silly, George, she’s a big baby, she’ll walk in her own good time. But he’d fussed about it, in case anything was wrong. And then suddenly, a couple of weeks ago, she’d got up and started walking just fine, and he’d been damned relieved. Probably bored everybody in the office about it.

  "That’s so," he said. "She’s just fine. Have we got a Jacob Altmeyer on file anywhere?"

  Phil said she’d look, and while she was gone Higgins thought about what Luis had said about the pretty boys.

  When that had begun to show a pattern, not just the one-time thing, they had asked the computer about known threesomes at muggings, but that had come to nothing. Anyway, nothing said these three had been together very long. And even if Luis was right, and they didn’t belong to this beat, there was no way to go looking for them. Phil came back with a small package on Altmeyer. He had a rap-sheet of B. and E., possession, assault. Just another dopie, whatever he was on, supporting a habit which had finally removed him from his misery. There was an address for his mother in Glendale. Higgins went back to the office and got her on the phone to break the news. After two days of threat, it had finally begun to rain again.

  ***

  "Well, I don’t know what to say," said the manager of the Globe Grill. "I suppose-my office isn’t very big-you could use the dining room, we don’t open that until four." He was a rather handsome sharp-faced man with friendly eyes and a quiet voice; his name was Rappaport, He eyed Mendoza, Conway and Galeano worriedly. "Police coming-you’re a new bunch-but Marta’s a good girl, and of course I’ve heard something about it. The damnedest thing-I don’t understand it. We’ve got to cooperate with you, and I don’t like to ask you, don’t keep her-but it’s working hours and we get kept busy here. If you want to go in the dining room, I’ll get her."

  Rappaport, and this whole place, was a little surprise. Galeano had taken it for granted, from Carey’s report, that the blonde worked in a greasy spoon somewhere for peanuts. The Globe Grill, while down this side of Wilshire and not in the gourmet class of the better-known places out on La Cienega, was a quietly good restaurant. It was divided into a coffee shop on one side and a large dining room on the other, it was shining bright with cleanliness and polished chrome and sleek modern lighting, and was larger and busier than they had expected.

  "Very nice," said Mendoza as they went past a red velvet curtain into a large dining hall with crystal chandeliers, red vinyl upholstery, a vaguely Mediterranean decor. The tables were octagonal, with low heavy chairs; he pulled out a chair, sat down and lit a cigarette.

  "Maybe a little classier than we thought," agreed Conway. Galeano sat down too, and accepted a light from Conway.

  The curtains parted. "Again, you want to ask questions? Oh, you are different police."

  Carey’s blonde was blonde only in the sense that she wasn’t dark. Her thick hair was tawny russet to dark gold, obviously as nature made it, and she wasn’t conventionally pretty; she had high wide cheekbones, a face slanted to a slender chin, a wide mouth, uptilted brows and grave dark eyes. She was only about five-three, and had a neatly rounded figure in her yellow and white uniform. She came farther into the room and all the men stood up formally.

  "Mrs. Fleming? Lieutenant Mendoza-Detective Conway, Detective Galeano. Sit down, won’t you?" Mendoza offered her a cigarette.

  "Thank you, I do not smoke. You want to ask all the questions again?"

  "Well, you see, Lieutenant Carey has passed the case on to my department." Mendoza was watching her. "Robbery-Homicide."

  Her eyes didn’t change expression; she looked down at her folded hands and said, "You think Edwin is dead. So do I." She had the faintest of accents; her speech betrayed her more by its formal grammar. "I thought that from the first."

  "We’ve heard all the-mmh-circumstances from Carey," said Mendoza, emitting a long stream of smoke, "and you must admit it all looks very odd, doesn’t it?"

  "It is a mystery, yes," she said. "I have thought and thought, and I cannot decide what has happened." She was watching them too, looking from one to the other. "I am sure he has killed himself, but I do not understand how."

  "Mmh, yes, it seems rather an impossibility." Mendoza’s tone was only faintly sardonic. "When he was confined to a wheelchair, he couldn’t even get downstairs by himself. And couldn’t, of course, drive-though you have a car."

  "We were going to sell it. A young man down the street wishes to buy it. It is too expensive to operate an auto now. No, he could not have driven."

  "You told Carey your husband had threatened suicide?"

  She said carefully, "He has been very-very despondent about life, since the baby died." Her mouth twisted a little. "He was fond of little Katzchen. Before, he had been-a little optimistic, that perhaps in time the doctors could make him walk again. But lately, it was as if-he said, there was nothing, no reason to go on living, he was only a worry and a burden to me, and it was not right."

  "And how did you feel about it? The same way?" asked Mendoza.

  She looked surprised. "I? It was-a thing life had brought to us. How should I feel? I was sorry."

  "Mmh, yes," said Mendoza. "You work long hours here? Walk to work and home again?"

  "Yes. I am here mornings and evenings, six days a week." She looked at him impassively and then said, not raising her voice, "You do not believe me either. That other policeman, that Carey, he asked questions over and over again, who are our friends, do I have a special friend, perhaps a special man friend, what did I do that day, where did I go, were there any telephone calls-and the other girls here, Betty and Angela who work with me, he asked them questions about me. It is almost a little funny." But she was looking angry. "Do you all think I have murdered my husband? That is very funny indeed, how could I do that? Even if I were so wicked?"

  "Did you?" asked Mendoza.

  "Please do not be so foolish. I beg your pardon," she said tiredly. "I know the police always have to deal with criminals, wicked people, and perhaps you come to suspect everyone is so. You have to find out, ask questions, to know. But all I can do is tell you the truth. I do not know what has happened to Edwin."

  Mendoza had stubbed out his cigarette, now lit another. "You came home that day, nearly two weeks ago-two weeks ago tomorrow-at about five o’clock? You got oif here at two, and went shopping, you said. It was raining very heavily that day."

  Her eyes fell before his. "Yes," she said. "Yes. I am-you forget-European, I am used to the rain."

  For no reason Galeano’s heart missed a be
at. There was a curious purity of outline to her wide forehead, and that mass of tawny hair-she looked like a Saxon madonna. But this story-this impossible tale-and there, just one second, she had flinched over something.

  "And found your husband gone? Missing from his wheelchair. Did you look for a suicide note?"

  "Yes, yes, yes. I would have thought he would leave such a note, if he meant to kill himself. There was nothing. I looked all about the apartment building, I thought if he had jumped out a window-"

  "But he couldn’t have jumped," said Conway.

  "No, no, a figure of speech. I have said all this before, it must be in reports. There was no one else in the house except the old man, Offerdahl. He was drunk, he could not say anything. I said, since we are living there, just a few times when I came home Edwin had been drinking, and it is this Offerdahl who has done it, brought him drink. I did not--"

  "Did it make him less despondent'?" asked Conway deadpan.

  "No, it did not! It was very bad for him. All this, it is all I can tell you. When I had looked, I called the police and told them. Then this Carey came, and his men, and asked questions and looked at the apartment, and they did not believe me. Do you want to look at my apartment also?"

  "Why, I think we would," said Mendoza cheerfully.

  "Thanks so much, Mrs. Fleming."

  She stood up abruptly. "I will get you the key."

  They watched her stalk past the curtain. "Now that is some blonde," said Conway. "Different type than I expected. And a very, very nice act. She’s smart not to try to ham it up with my God what’s happened to poor darling Edwin, I don’t think she’s that good an actress."

  "You could be right," said Mendoza meditatively, and Galeano exploded at them.

  "My good God in heaven, a child in arms could see that girl’s as innocent and honest as-as a nun!" he said furiously. "Of course she’s not acting, she wouldn’t know how-I know what the story sounds like, but I’ll be Goddamned if I don’t believe it, that girl is as transparently honest as-as-"