Streets of Death llm-28

by Dell Shannon

  The driver had a look at the Corvair’s innards, slammed the hood and said, "She’ll have to go in, mister. She’s about had it. Good little car, but a car’s only good for so many miles, you know. You need practically everything new. Oh, sure, a garage can fix her up, but it’ll only be a question of time before she goes out again."

  Landers said a few more things. "Well, tow it in to the agency," he said. "I’ll talk to them about it."

  He called a cab and got back to the office in the middle of the afternoon.

  ***

  Hackett had just got back to the office at five o’clock, after getting the formal statement from Nygard and starting the machinery on the warrant. It was pouring rain outside, and he was wet. He found Landers blowing off steam about his car to Glasser, who said they’d all been telling him to trade that thing in for a year.

  "Phil thinks it’s so funny," said Landers. "Saying I’ll have to break down and buy a new one, and my God, it isn’t that I’m stingy, but the payments-"

  "Get a Gremlin," said Glasser. "You’ll get damn good mileage."

  "I know, I know, I’ve driven Phil’s."

  "Oh, Sergeant Hackett! Listen, I gotta make you believe me this time, they’re-"

  "Oh, for the love of God!" said Hackett disgustedly. Mr. Yeager had plunged through the doorway with Sergeant Lake in pursuit.

  "You’ve gotta listen, they’re gonna do it tonight, they’re gonna murder that woman! I heard ’em planning just how to do it, they’re gonna hit her on the head and put her in the bathtub and make it look like an accident, like she slipped and fell, and-"

  "Now, Mr. Yeager," said Hackett. "If you’re going to tell me you were in the hall again and the door was open, don’t. Why don’t you just try to forget about it-"

  "-And the girl’s going off after she’s helped him, see, nobody knows he’s got a girl, his ma, Mis’ Lampert, she’s kind of jealous of him-and then he’l1 pretend to find her and act all sorry and cry and carry on-"

  "Now listen, Mr. Yeager. Just calm down. Try to explain to me just how you heard all this. You know you can’t. You’re just imagining-"

  Yeager took a step back, licking his lips and looking in despair between Hackett and Lake. Then he said sullenly, "Oh, hell. Well-well, if you gotta know, I-I got the place bugged."

  "What?" said Hackett. Landers laughed.

  "I-well, hell, I don’t have much to do, nights," said Yeager weakly. "I took a course in electronics once. I-I did it first, we had a couple sets of newlyweds in the place-" Lake and Glasser began to laugh helplessly. "And it was kind of interesting, and-well-well," said Yeager half defensively, "it was, you know, kind of like picking a channel on TV-"

  "What the hell’s going on here?" asked Mendoza, coming across the hall to find all his available staff convulsed with merriment and Yeager standing in the middle looking miserable.

  Hackett pulled himself together and told him, and Mendoza began to laugh too. "It’s not so funny!" said Yeager. "It was-you coulda knocked me over, I heard ’em talk about it the first time-and damn it, I tried to get you to believe me, so you’d stop ’em, but you wouldn’t pay no attention! And I knew I hadda do something, so I-I got all the rest of it down on tape. The other times they talked." He reached into his pocket and produced three cheap sixty-minute tape cassettes. "Now you gotta believe it!"

  "Well, I will be Goddamned!" said Hackett. "If this isn’t one for the books-you mean that innocent-looking fellow is really-Damnation, and we’ll have to do something about it." He looked at his watch. "I’d better call Angel. Luis?"

  "I wouldn’t miss hearing those tapes for a million bucks," Mendoza said, grinning.

  ***

  The tapes would make excellent evidence; this would be one trial that wouldn’t cost much time or money. They went out with Piggott and Schenke to surprise the quarry, and they did. Mendoza had laughed over Mr. Yeager’s homemade entertainment; and in the course of twenty-six years at this sordid job, he had seen violence and blood, tragedy and death, brutality and mayhem of all sorts, but he wouldn’t soon forget the look on Mrs. Lampert’s face as she listened to what they knew, how they knew it. Looking from them to her son-a little too good-looking, Edward Lampert, with a weak chin and pale eyes-she aged twenty years in a moment. Expectably, he blustered and was sullen in turns, but finally parted with the girl’s name, Diane Ashley, and her address. Hackett went to add her to the party, and collected some fingernail scratches to match Piggott’s.

  They ended up at the jail at eleven o’clock, booking them in.

  "But you know, Mr. Yeager," Hackett had said before that, "you’ll really have to remove all the bugs. Apart from anything else, it’s invasion of privacy."

  "I guess so," said Yeager. He sighed deeply. "I’m sorry it had to come to that, I hadda tell you, get you to believe me. But I guess I better. But you just got no idea, Sergeant Hackett-it was interesting as hell!"

  ***

  About two o’clock that morning Patrolmen Zimmerman and O’Neill were handed a call to a disturbance on Alvarado. When they got to it, they found an interested little crowd, mostly black, around a couple outside an all-night restaurant, beside a car at the curb.

  "You take him in and lock him up!" the woman shouted at them as they got out of the car. "He tried to kill me! Tried to strangle me!" She was a young woman, not bad-looking and decently dressed. They calmed her down and she gave them a name, Ruby Blake. "I just stopped in that place, have a bite to eat before I go home after work-I work at a rest home, night shift. He got talking, acted all nice and polite, and offered me a ride home. And then when I got in his car, he started fooling around and tried to strangle me!" She was crying then, and she opened her coat to show them a couple of darkening bruises.

  They couldn’t get anything out of the man at all. He was light-skinned, clean-shaven, about thirty: looked ordinary. He just looked at them sullenly and wouldn’t answer questions. They looked in the car and it didn’t have any registration, so they called in the plate-number. It had been reported stolen in Beverly Hills that afternoon.

  "Would you make a statement charging him, Miss Blake?" asked Zimmerman.

  "I surely would! You just tell me where to do it. Treat a decent girl like that-"

  "It’ll be assault with intent," said O’Neill. "Robbery-Homicide."

  "The night watch has gone by now. Leave a report with the main desk," said Zimmerman, "and stash him in jail." They called the garage to tow the car in and put him in cuffs and drove down to the Alameda facility. He never said a word all the way.

  ***

  The day watch had hardly come in, on Thursday morning, when there was a heist reported at a drugstore on Spring Street. Galeano went out on it, and the pharmacist gave him a good description. He was so mad, he said he’d come over right now and look at mug-shots. He did, and within tive minutes of the time Phil Landers had settled him down with a book, he picked one. "That’s him!" he told Galeano positively. "I’d know him anywhere, that ugly mug! He didn’t even have a hat on, I’d know him in the dark!"

  It was a picture of one Adam O’Hara, and he had the right record for the job: two counts of armed robbery and a few other things. There was a fairly recent address, and Galeano went looking for him. It was a small apartment on Sunset Avenue, and he got no answer to his ring, but the door across the hall opened and a nice-looking little gray-haired woman asked, "Are you looking for the O’Haras?"

  "That’s right," said Galeano. "Do you know where Mr. O’Hara is?"

  "Why, yes. He’ll still be at the hospital. He said he’d let me know, but it’s a first baby and I expect she’ll be some time. What? Oh, it’s the French Hospital. He was so worried, poor boy, I had to call the doctor for him."

  Galeano went over to the French Hospital and discovered Adam O’Hara in beaming transports over a fine boy, nine pounds three ounces, born twenty minutes before. A whole staff of nurses, nurses’ aides and other prospective fathers could say that O’Hara had been there sinc
e two o’clock that morning.

  Galeano was annoyed, and for some reason he also felt queerly desolate. Even as Mendoza said about the citizens, They have eyes and see not. It was likely that the pharmacist, angry and excited, had mistaken O’Hara’s mugshot for somebody who looked like him-he wasn’t an unusual type-but Galeano hadn’t any immediate impulse to browse through the books looking.

  It was raining now in a halfhearted sort of way. He went to have lunch at the Globe Grill, and Marta wasn’t there. He sat where she would have waited on him, but the buxom dark girl came up instead. He waited till she brought his order and asked, "Isn’t Mrs. Fleming here?"

  "No, she’s off sick." She hardly looked at him, didn’t seem to recognize him as one of the cops who had been here.

  Galeano ate his macaroni and cheese, not thinking much. Come down to it, Carey and the rest of those damned cynics had done all the thinking on it. All from the old viewpoint, drilled into any cop as any lawyer, what was the crime, who profited, how was it done, by whom. Damn it, he felt sorry for her: and maybe he was being stupid. He could follow the way Mendoza and Carey thought, logically-and there were questions to be answered about Marta Fleming. But he found that sometime just in the last couple of hours he had come back to simple feeling, and what the feeling said was, that’s an honest girl, telling the truth. And if that was simple in another sense, the hell with being too smart.

  He paid the bill, put on his coat, went out and drove down to Westlake Avenue. He had to turn to park on the legal side. The place was quiet except for a faint hint of singing in a whiskeyish voice, from the top floor. He pushed the bell; pushed it again. After a while the door was pulled back and she stood there. She had a navy wool robe belted tightly around her, and her russet-blonde-tawny hair was uncombed, her nose red.

  "Mrs. Fleming-"

  "You!" she said. "Police again! Am I never any more to have peace?"

  "Now listen," said Galeano. "I-"

  "Gott im Himmel! Go away!" she said furiously. "I do not wish to talk to you-is that for you enough plain language?"

  Galeano began to feel slightly irritated. All the various things the people he’d talked to had said about her slid past his mind. "If you’d just 1isten-"

  "I will not listen to you, stupid pig of a policeman! Go away!" she said arrogantly.

  Galeano, that mild and even-tempered man, quite suddenly lost his temper. He reached out and took her by the shoulders and shook her hard, back and forth. "Who’s stupid, you damned silly woman? It’s no wonder you haven’t made any friends here, keeping your damned stiff-necked pride, never meeting people halfway! All I wanted to tell you, damn it, is that I believe your damned silly story-I think you’re honest-and God forgive me for maybe being a fool! Now if you want to go on being a Goddamned martyr, it’s perfectly all right with me, but all I can say is, I think you’re a bigger Goddamned fool!"

  He shook her again and let her go and stepped back.

  "Oh!" she said, and for a minute he thought she was going to hit him, and then she crumpled against the door-frame and began to cry in great gulping sobs. "But I am not a martyr-all my fault-because I was weak-and nobody, nobody, nobody to talk- sehr einsam, niemand-Ach, die kleine Keitzchen, die kleine Katzchen, aber -all my fault- ach, so richt, I cannot talk with people, tell how-" She fell forward, sobbing, and Galeano caught her in his arms.

  NINE

  He was alarmed. She was sobbing so hard her whole body shook, and she made strangling noises in her throat. He half carried her over to the couch, and she lay huddled over one arm uttering great gulping sobs. He didn’t know what to do; he’d never seen anything like it.

  "Hey," he said uneasily, "are you all right? Marta?"

  Gradually the sobs lessened in intensity; she shook with several long shudders, half straightened up, put her face in her hands, and then after a long moment she ' sniffed, groped in her pocket for a handkerchief, and blew her nose. She was still shaking a little, and she said in a muffled voice, "I am ashamed. I am sorry-to lose control so-"

  "Don’t you feel better?" asked Galeano.

  She blew her nose again. "Yes, I do," she said, sounding surprised. "It-it is not easy that I-"

  "Everybody needs to let off steam once in a while," said Galeano. "You just kept it all bottled up too long."

  And surprisingly, Marta suddenly laughed-a wobbly and half tearful laugh. "You are so very right," she said. "It has been-what’s the phrase-one damned thing after another."

  Galeano was so relieved he laughed too, uproariously.

  "You’d better tell me all about it. Maybe I’d understand better. You know, what you need right now is a good stiff drink. It won’t do your cold any harm, either."

  "Yes, I have caught a cold. There is a bottle of brandy, I was going to mix it with some lemon-"

  "The hell with the lemon." Galeano went out to the kitchen, found the brandy, poured her a stiff four fingers and gave himself a smaller one. "You get outside that, and if you talk some you’ll feel better yet."

  She drank a third of it at once, took a long breath, shuddered and sat back, closing her eyes. "I am," she said dreamily, "very tired. I think you are a kind person. You see, I cannot help but feel it was all my fault-all my fault." She drank more brandy. Between that and the sudden flood of expended emotion all her reticences were down, overrun. "Because I never should have married him. I never loved him as a wife should. It was wrong. We learn too late."

  "Why did you?" asked Galeano.

  She looked at the brandy, her dark eyes brooding.

  "My father-he owned a small manufacturing business in Lingen, our home. It was prosperous, we had thought there was money-there was always money, we were not very rich but my sister and I were not raised to work at jobs, at the convent you don’t learn shorthand, typing. Then Papa died, and it seemed there had been speculation, he left my mother nothing. Oh, the building was worth something, the land-that is all. I had to find work-Elisa was too young then." She finished the brandy. "There was an American unit stationed near, the girls go out with them, and a girl I knew introduced me to Edwin. He asked me to marry him. I did not love him, I liked him well enough is all. My mother said it is the best chance I will ever have, in America there is always opportunity and he is a good honest man. She is very old-fashioned," said Marta, smiling a little, "and she said love is not everything in marriage. I saw all that for myself-and so I married him."

  "And it didn’t work out?" asked Galeano.

  She gave a short laugh. "Oh! Yes, it worked out, as you say-the way such marriages do! He was not an educated man, but he was good and kind-he was clever with his hands, and a hard worker, he might have made much of himself, gone places as they say. After I had the baby, I felt reconciled- meine kleine Katzchen. But she died-so soon, she died. The doctor said, a thing wrong in her heart, she would never have lived long, but- And then Edwin was hurt in the accident, and those doctors said he would always be so, an invalid, helpless, in the wheelchair. It was like a nightmare beginning, and it does not end. There was no money, no compensation for him-I do not understand all that, but we had a lawyer-that cost a great deal of money too, I still owe the lawyer money, and it all came to nothing. He needed a great deal of care. It was then I began to think, all my fault, for I should not have married him, feeling no love for him. I try to be a good Catholic, I knew my duty, to look after him as a wife should. He was of no faith, we were not married in the Church, but one takes vows nevertheless. But it was hard. Oh, for him too! I realize-but it was difficult."

  "And then-what did happen that day?" asked Galeano. "Three weeks ago tomorrow?"

  She opened her eyes and put one hand to her temple, slowly. "Mother of God, have I not asked myself?" she said quietly. "We had come here, because the rent is much cheaper and I can walk to work. In that way, it was better, but not all ways. He had been very despairing, ever since the baby died, and he had said to me many times, he would be better dead, such a burden on me and no good to anyone. I
had been afraid he would kill himself. It would not be a sin to him perhaps, but to me-I had come home, several times since we are here, to find him drunk. That terrible old man upstairs-he would come, pretending sympathy, and bring him whiskey. I tried to talk to him, ask him not to do so, but it was no use-no use. And then-there was that day." She was silent, and unobtrusively Galeano tipped the rest of his drink into her glass. She finished it absently. "It was such a very usual day to begin with. I left for the restaurant. I had got him dressed and into his chair, given him breakfast. The woman across the hall was leaving also. And then, when I was at work, I remembered my letter. The last evening I had written a letter to my sister Elisa, I meant to take it to post, and I had forgotten it. I was going shopping, to buy her a birthday present, but I wanted to post the letter."

  "So you came home to get it," said Galeano, and let out his breath in a long sigh.

  "Yes. I was in a great hurry-it has been easy to blame myself for that too-I had to catch the bus up to town, there would not be much time to look in the shops before they closed, and I must be home to get dinner for Edwin before I went back to the restaurant. I did not even look to see where Edwin was-when he was not in the living room I thought perhaps he was lying down, he could get to the bed from the chair-and I did not even look. I took up my letter from the table there, put it in an envelope and left again, for the bus. And I went to the post office-we cannot afford the air mail, it is expensive enough to send by sea-and when I had shopped for the present I came home. And I told you how it was. He was gone. His chair was here, and he was gone."