Streets of Death llm-28

by Dell Shannon

He got out of the car, climbed the stairs and rang Marta’s bell. It buzzed emptily at him. She wasn’t home.

  After a moment he turned and pushed the bell across the hall.

  The door was opened by a little perky-looking gray-haired woman. He had read all the statements, and somehow he had pictured Mrs. Del Sardo as buxom and dark. He showed her the badge.

  "Oh," she said, "cops again. That really is a funny thing, isn’t it? I’ve got a theory about it." He saw that her slate-colored eyes were shallow and foolish. "I think he was a fake, not a cripple at all. They were going to sue somebody, he was just pretending to be paralyzed."

  Galeano stared at her. "I’m afraid that wasn’t-"

  "You can’t trust doctors, they’ll say anything," she told him. "And if you ask me Mrs. Fleming is a real sly one. Look at the way she made sure I saw them together that morning, her saying good-bye and him in the chair there-"

  "You usually leave the same time?" asked Galeano. "It wasn’t the first morning you’d seen her leave when you came out too?"

  "Well, no, but now I think about it- And then all the fuss and excitement that afternoon- And it wasn’t till later I found out from one of the cops, she said she came home at five that day, and it was earlier, and the more I think about it I think there was some kind of plan that maybe went wrong, to cheat an insurance company or something. I thought-"

  Galeano fastened on the one thing she’d said. "What do you mean, it wasn’t five when she came home?"

  "Well, it wasn’t. I came home early that day, I know the day because of all the fuss and the cops. I was coming down with a cold, I felt terrible, and the boss said take the afternoon off. So I did, and this place isn’t exactly the Rock of Gibraltar"-she laughed-"you can hear neighbors. That Offerdahl! He was never so bad as this before. Anyway, she-Mrs. Fleming-she came home just after I did. I heard her running up the stairs like she always does. Call it two-thirty. And a minute after, down she goes again. So I guess he was all right then, or she was pretending he was. If you ask me he always was all right, prob’ly he’s just lying low somewheres. Like I say-"

  And what the hell was this? Galeano’s mind felt numb. And she added suddenly, "Oh, you got to excuse me, I want to make the eleven o’clock Mass-" She rushed around in her living room (scarcely as neat and clean as Marta’s counterpart across the hall) gathering up purse, coat, prayer book; she rushed out past him.

  He stood there thinking about what she’d said. Marta had come home at two-thirty that day. The rest of it was silly, but- He turned to go down the stairs and faced a nice-looking fresh-faced high-school-aged kid just coming up. The kid passed him and rang the bell of Marta’s apartment.

  SIX

  "Mrs. Fleming’s not home," said Galeano.

  The boy turned. "Oh. Maybe she just went to church. You-you don’t want to buy the car, do you? Because she gave me first option on it. That’s what I came to tell her, I got the money to pay for it now."

  "That’s good," said Galeano. "I know she wants to sell it."

  "It’s a real good deal," said the kid. "A sixty-three Dodge, only sixty thousand on it, for four-fifty. The tires are good too, and it handles O.K.-I’ve drove it some already. If we can sort of clinch the deal right away, I'd like to."

  Galeano said it sounded fine. "Anyway," said the kid, "even if we can’t, I want to borrow it again this afternoon to take Mom to Aunt Madge’s. Mrs. Fleming let me borrow it before, take her to the doctor’s. You a friend of hers? She’s a nice lady, isn’t she?"

  "Oh, yes," said Galeano.

  "You suppose she’ll be home pretty soon?"

  "I don’t know."

  "Well-uh-my name’s Newton. Jim Newton."

  "Galeano." They shook hands solemnly.

  "There she is," said Jim a moment later as the front door shut below. "I bet she was just out to church." And remembering Mrs. Del Sardo’s revelation, Galeano heard the light footsteps running up the stairs with a leaden heart. She stopped short on the landing, startled to see them.

  She wore the hooded coat again, and her tawny hair was spangled with a few drops of rain; just since he’d been here, it must have started again. She had a little purse in one hand, a bunch of keys in the other.

  "Hello, Mrs. Fleming. I come by to tell you I can get the car. I already saved up two hundred and my dad says he’ll go the rest if I take Mom places in it and pay the gas. Could I maybe take it now? I got the money, if you’ll take Dad’s check. Oh, Mr. Galeano wants to see you too, but I guess I got here first."

  "I have no doubt," said Marta. She came between them and unlocked the door. "It is all right that you buy the car, Jimmy, but now I do not know about the-the legalities, it is registered to my husband."

  "If you’ve got the pink slip," said Galeano, "you can just hand it over, and Jim can re-register it to himself."

  "I see. You would know," she said. They had both followed her into the neat little living room.

  "You haven’t been driving it much, have you, Mrs. F1eming?"

  "I have not been driving it at all," she said.

  "Oh, I know you had it out a couple of weeks ago, because I came to ask to borrow it and it wasn’t here. I just wondered."

  Marta turned to stare at him. "I have not driven the car since we moved here. That can’t be, Jimmy."

  "No, it was gone-honest. It was two weeks ago Friday, I wanted it to take Mom to the doctor’s. Gee, Mrs. Fleming, you seen it since, haven’t you? I mean, nobody’s stole it?" He was suddenly anxious.

  "Just a minute," said Galeano. "I’d like to hear more about this, Jim. Two weeks ago Friday? You came to borrow the car, and it wasn’t in the garage? How’d you know?"

  "Well, gee-" He looked from her to Galeano uneasily. "Because I looked. Acourse I knew you’d be at work, Mrs. Fleming, but Mr. Fleming had keys to it. It was raining so hard, Mom said to see could I borrow it because the buses are so bad, so I-but there wasn’t any answer to the bell so I thought maybe Mr. Fleming had to go to the doctor or something and you’d took him, so I looked in the garage and the Dodge wasn’t there."

  Marta was standing very still in the middle of the room. "I do not know anything about this," she said. "It must be a mistake."

  "What time was this?" asked Galeano. "You know, Jim?"

  "Sure. It was about one o’clock, Mom’s appointment was for two-thirty, and I took off from school because of helping her on and off the bus with the cast still on her ankle, see. Say, listen, Mrs. Fleming, you sure it hasn’t been stolen, if you didn’t know-"

  "Let’s all go down and look at it," said Galeano.

  "This is all very silly," said Marta.

  "Come on," said Galeano. They all went downstairs together and down the driveway. It was drizzling very slightly. "You’ve driven the Dodge, have you, Jim? Trying it out? I suppose, you interested in buying it, you noticed the mileage."

  "Sure," said Jim. "The last time I brought it back, it was sixty thousand and forty-one miles. Sure I’m sure of that. I got a good head for figures."

  "I wouldn’t be surprised," said Galeano. "The key to the garage, Mrs. Fleming?" Silently she singled it out on her ring of keys and gave it to him. He unlocked the padlock and swung open one leaf of the old-fashioned double doors. The old Dodge sat inside. "Let’s see what the mileage is." He opened the driver’s door.

  "Well, there," said Jim Newton, "you can see it’s been out since. Sixty thousand and seventy-two miles and four tenths."

  "What about it, Mrs. Fleming? Suppose you give Jim the keys, so he can drive his mother-he can come back and make the deal with you later. That O.K., Jim?"

  "Sure, sir." Jim’s eyes were puzzled on them. Marta gave him the keys. "I hope Mr. F1eming’s O.K., Mrs. Fleming."

  "That’s fine," said Galeano meaninglessly, took her arm and walked her back up the drive. "I’ve just heard from Mrs. Del Sardo that you came home about two-thirty that Friday, Mrs. Fleming. Not five o’clock as you said. And went out again right away. Why didn’t you te
ll us about that?"

  "No," she said. They stopped just inside the front door, in the square little lobby. "No, that is not so. I have told you all the truth."

  "And now this comes to light about the car. Kids like Newton know their cars pretty well, and he’s sure of what he says. The car was out that Friday, and driven thirty-odd miles. Where, Mrs. F1eming'?"

  "No. I do not know. It is impossible."

  "Do you have a driver’s license?"

  "Yes, but I have not driven it since we came here. Only to run the engine because of the battery, a few moments."

  "Who had keys to it? How many sets?"

  She was shaking her head slowly, blindly, back and forth. "No. Edwin had keys, I have keys. Edwin’s keys are still here, in the apartment. This is all nonsense, it cannot be."

  "I don’t think so, Mrs. Fleming. Where were you that afternoon?"

  "Ach, Gott!" she exclaimed suddenly, violently, and put her hands to her head. "But it is all too much-too much!" She turned and plunged up the stairs, and before he could move to follow her he heard the door bang shut up there. Galeano stood looking after her, his heart strangely heavy, and all he could think was, they were right. The damned cynics. They had been right about her all along.

  ***

  He drifted unhappily into Mendoza’s office to tell him about that, and found Hackett there, one hip on a corner of Mendoza’s desk. They both listened to what he had to say, and Hackett commented interestedly, "The same thought, about his faking the paralysis, crossed my mind, but of course there’s nothing in it, they hadn’t anything to gain and more than one doctor said it was genuine. But this bit about the car, what in hell does it mean? That just makes it funnier, Luis. So she could have driven him somewhere-where and why?"

  " No lo niego," said Mendoza. "Funny is the word. But she didn’t drive him anywhere, if the Dodge was out of the garage at one o’clock. She didn’t get off work until two."

  "That’d skipped my mind," said Galeano. "But she could have given the keys to somebody."

  "Or he could," said Mendoza thoughtfully. "It’s a tangle-I don’t see through it at all. And talk about things being up in the air-" He had been turning a cigarette round in his fingers and now reached for his new cigarette lighter and pressed the trigger, bent to the flame.

  "This Faber thing," said Hackett. "I’ve been telling him, sometimes S.I.D. hands us the answer right off, but this time all they’ve done is make more work for us. My God, you should see the list of names we got from Pendleton! Hundreds-and that’s only military personnel, there’d be no way to check on all the civilians wandering around, wives and so on. George is feeling pessimistic. He said ten to one that cigarette pack was already there when X came in, but I don’t think so. I talked to Weinstein again and he said she was a persnickety old lady, never would have let a thing like that lie around her clean floor. And there was something in what Scarne said-the autopsy will say definitely but they thought she’d been killed just before she was found, and that early in the morning he could have been staying or living right around there. What we’re doing now is checking with Pendleton for original home addresses. It’s the hell of a bore, but if we do find some airman who hailed from two blocks west of Faber’s Market and was on leave to see his sick mother-"

  " De veras. The routine paying off again." Galeano had wandered out, and Mendoza added ruminatively, "Human nature is a queer thing, Art."

  "A profound remark."

  " Vaya el diablo. That Marta Fleming’s a nice-looking girl, nothing spectacular, but to see Nick fall for her-I’ll be damned if I can even guess what might have happened there, but if she was mixed up in some piece of collusion to get rid of her husband, I’d be sorry to see Nick knocked out over it. Last man in the world, you’d think."

  "I seem to remember you once said that to me," said Hackett dryly, and Mendoza laughed.

  "Hard to guess what people see in each other, fortunately for the continued existence of the human race."

  ***

  One of the annoyances to police work was that something new was always coming along to interrupt other routine. With the continued hunt for Sandra’s killer reduced to the dogged routine, Palliser was now handed this new one by the night watch, Don Ames. It looked from the report as if there’d be a good many people to see, so he roped Conway in on it too.

  "I think," he said as Conway digested Piggott’s report, "I’d like to see what a doctor had to say about this first. On the face of it, it’s another impossibility-by this, he was sitting alone in a booth, nobody near him."

  "Let’s," agreed Conway. "Though I remember a case, when I was still riding a squad car-"

  They found Dr. Bainbridge in his office, conscientious or with nowhere else to go on a rainy Sunday. He said he hadn’t seen the body, snorted interestedly over the report, and said, "Humph. I can tell you better after I’ve had him open, but let’s take a look anyway." He led the way down to the cold room and located the right tray; in a morgue the size of L.A.’s bodies tended to pile up. The corpse looked oddly young and defenseless, naked there; and Bainbridge poked at the minute brown line on his left breast, scarcely an inch long.

  "There you are," he said. "I can guess what I’ll find inside. It was a very thin blade, he probably didn’t bleed at all immediately. The witnesses said he’d been sitting p alone there about five minutes before he suddenly fell down dead? Typical. He could have been stabbed fifteen, twenty minutes before and not realized it himself."

  "I saw a case something like it once," said Conway, nodding.

  "It’s possible he never felt the knife, didn’t know he’d been stabbed. Depending how it happened, he’d have felt a blow on the chest, thought nothing of it."

  "That might put it before he got into the restaurant," said Palliser.

  "I don’t say it was that long, I don’t know," said Bainbridge. "I just said it could be."

  "Well, thanks anyway." And that was at ten o’clock; Palliser had already been to Ames’ address in Hollywood, where he’d lived with his parents, and been through that harrowing scene.

  They started out at Dick’s Tow Service where he’d worked, and found out from the owner that-as usual, he said-a couple of employees hadn’t shown up for the night shift, and he’d been there alone with Ames since five o’clock. They hadn’t had a call in an hour before Don went off on his break, and nothing unusual had happened; they’d just been sitting there talking. He couldn’t make out what had happened to Don-"I thought a lot of him, hard worker, nice fellow, and he didn’t go around picking lights, even getting into arguments. I just can’t make it out."

  He was a straightforward type, so that seemed to put it right back to the restaurant again, and they looked up Fred Mallow, who was annoyed at being waked up, and heard a firsthand account. "He came in, gave his order and went into the rest room? How long was he there?" asked Palliser.

  "Oh, three, five, six minutes-I wasn’t watching the clock. Not long. And like I said, he came out and sat down in the booth perfectly O.K., and then five minutes later--"

  "All right. Was anybody else in the men’s room at the same time?"

  "My God, I don’t know. I was counting the receipts, I’d just taken over from Powell. I suppose there could’ve been, but I couldn’t say."

  "Well, suppose you take a look at this list and tell us which are employees there and if you know any of the witnesses."

  By this time fully awake, Mallow accepted a cigarette and looked at the list of names and addresses. "Sanchez and De Carlos are the busboys. The cook’s Bob Smith. Lessee, well, a lot of our regulars I just know by their faces, but I know some of these names. Javorsky, he has the tape and record shop up the block, usually stops in after he closes up. Kravits, he’s from the twenty-four-hour pharmacy up the other way, a pharmacist I think. I think I heard this name Cobbler too, if I place him he works somewhere around, comes in pretty regular. This Edna girl, I didn’t know her name was Willis, she’s from that pharmacy too, been in wi
th other girls, I heard them call her Edna. But she was with a guy last night, I don’t know his name, must be one of these others. I’m not saying I don’t know these guys, I just don’t recognize the names. Michael Jarvis, Joseph Toombs, Tom Sawyer-say, that’s kind of familiar at that, wasn’t it a movie'?"

  "Also a book." But they were both common names, thought Palliser. It seemed easier to start out knowing something about the witnesses; and it was going to be a tedious job to get all their stories and fit them together. And if none of them had seen or heard anything significant, where to go on it then? Obviously, none of them-if they were all honest witnesses-had seen anything they thought was important, or they’d have come out with it last night.

  "I know we’ve got to do the routine," said Conway, "but it looks like a waste of time to me. Are we operating on the premise that he got the knife between Dick’s and the restaurant booth? On the street or in the rest room?"

  "It looks as if that’s the only possibility."

  "And just as Bainbridge said, never realized he’d been stabbed, or he’d have raised a fuss, hung on to the guy.

  He could have run into a drunk in the street, or- But why? There was hardly time for him to’ve had a fight with anybody, even an argument. Dick said he left about nine-twenty, and Mallow said he was sitting in the booth by about nine thirty-five."

  "Well, let’s see if we can come up with some answers," said Palliser. They went out separately to find people and ask the questions, and it was a small bonus that it was a rainy Sunday when most people would be home.

  ***

  Grace had asked Galeano to drop in at that bar and grill sometime, have a look around, get talking to the owner if he was there. He had a bee in his bonnet about that Reinke. Galeano didn’t see what good that was going to do, but he wasn’t feeling much like going out on a piece of tedious routine, and after a lunch he didn’t especially want, he drove up Virgil to Ben’s Bar and Grill, parked and went in.