Exploit of Death - Dell Shannon

by Dell Shannon

  "They," said Mendoza.

  "Well, yes," said Hackett. "Only one of the victims was alone, an elderly widower. He's still in the hospital. The rest were couples having a night on the town. They all say it was three, four, five young louts. Moved in fast and didn't care how much damage they did. I know, Luis, but it smells to me like gang action. Fairly smart gang action. Picking those spots. It's funny when you come to think, these—um—fashionable places being right downtown in what used to be the real slums."

  "Mmh," said Mendoza. He'd grown up in those slums before the fashionable places got built, or got to be fashionable.

  "I talked to Slade over in Juvenile about it. He says there are four or five gangs who could be responsible, but no way to pin it down. Whichever, they know a fence. None of the jewelry showed up."

  "And gangs down here," said Mendoza sardonically, "would know every fence operating."

  "Well, it's just a thought," said Hackett. He sighed again and stood up. "And I would have a bet with you that it's a waste of time. That Bagby, Baby Face's latest victim, offered to come in and look at mug shots. Somehow I don't think Baby Face is anywhere in Records."

  "You never know," said Mendoza. "Buena suerte." The phone buzzed at him as Hackett went out and he picked it up.

  "Mendoza."

  "I got your love note about your latest overdose," said Captain Goldberg. "What the hell do you suppose we can do about it? You haven't even had an autopsy report yet."

  "I just thought you'd like the information for your statistics, Saul. No, I don't know what kind of an O.D. it was yet. But we all know the probabilities."

  Goldberg sneezed and said, "Damn allergies. For a bet the Quaaludes—and/or liquor or PCP. Anybody can buy the stuff on any street corner, and when the kids are such goddamn fools to get hooked—well, let me see the autopsy report when you get it, just to pass the time. How was the vacation abroad?"

  Mendoza told him and finished going over the reports he hadn't caught up on. He was just going down the hall to the coffee machine when Sergeant Lake on the switchboard beckoned to him urgently.

  Mendoza halted. "What's gone down now?"

  Lake proffered him the phone. He was smiling broadly.

  "It's Jase, Lieutenant, they've got one."

  "¡No me diga!" Mendoza took the phone. "Congratulations, Jase."

  Grace was in the middle of a sentence. "—and I've got to admit to you, we could've got one a year ago if we hadn't been particular. Us black folk get priority now, you know, and then too there are always plenty of black babies, but Virginia wasn't about to take just any baby and neither was I. Jimmy, you there?"

  "It's me," said Mendoza.

  "Oh, Lieutenant. That's good, you can tell everybody. We just got the confirmation an hour ago. Only heard about the possibility last night. We haven't even seen him yet, but he sounds just what we want. No, it wasn't the adoption agency, it was Virginia's doctor. He knows the family, very respectable family, good people, but the daughter got in trouble. He's only three days old, but the doctor's going to arrange everything—well, we don't know when we can see him, but we've already decided on Adam John and Virginia's crazy to go out shopping for baby clothes—"

  Mendoza was laughing. "Good news, Jase, congratulations, just what you wanted." The Graces already had one adopted baby, little Celia Ann, and had been hunting another for a couple of years.

  "You pass the word on, Lieutenant—tell you more tomorrow."

  Mendoza grinned at Lake. "A1l of these pregnancies must've rubbed off on Jase."

  Lake grinned back. "Just what he wanted. It's grand; I suppose he'll be raving about this one and taking all the pictures to show, the way he did with the first one. Well, kids, they can be a lot of trouble, but a lot of fun too."

  Mendoza looked into the big communal detective office. Galeano and Landers were in and he passed on the news. They were pleased for Grace; he had felt a little resentful of all those pregnancies.

  "At least," said Landers, "they already have a house. When I think of the payments on that old shack—·"

  Hackett and Higgins were apparently still down in Records with the witnesses. They hadn't shown up when the rest of them went out to lunch, leaving Wanda Larsen taking a belated statement from one of the witnesses to the bank robbery, and they had just landed back at the office at one-forty-five when a new heist went down, with a first report of a D.O.A. victim.

  Mendoza went out on that with Galeano. It was a big chain pharmacy and on Olympic, and the D.O.A. was the head pharmacist, Dave Bryan. Everybody else around was in a state of shock. There were two other pharmacists, five women clerks, and seven or eight customers. Most of the heisters were shy birds, wary of operating in front of a crowd, but like everyone else they came all sorts. The two patrolmen had done their best to preserve the scene, but there had been some milling around. It probably wouldn't make any difference here.

  "But it was so fast—" The older of the two pharmacists kept repeating that in a dazed voice. "So fast—in and out, and they both had guns—I don't know which of them killed Mr. Bryan—one of them asked for all the uppers and downers, and the other opened the register. I don't think anybody but us saw what was going on until they fired at Mr. Bryan—"

  "And it was just a mistake," said the other one fiercely. "A damn stupid mistake! He didn't pay any attention because he didn't hear the bastards. He was getting deafer all the time and the hearing aid didn't help him much. He just turned away, he thought I was waiting on them, and I guess they thought he was going to call the cops and they—" The man lying face down at one end of the counter looked to be in his late seventies, with a scanty tonsure of gray hair and a spare figure in the white smock. He had been shot once in the head and there was no exit wound.

  "There was just one shot?" They seemed to think so. Stocky, dark Galeano stood looking at the corpse thoughtfully. "No powder burns," he pointed out. "The shot was fired from at least three feet off and got him square in the back of the head—either it was a fluke or the shooter's a pretty good marksman. Fairly small caliber, too. It looks like a very slick pro job."

  Mendoza agreed, and talking to all of these people, getting all of the formal statements, was going to take up quite a lot of time. Go through the motions, he thought, with a vengeance—and likely come up with nothing useful. On the other hand, if this had been pulled by a pair of experienced pros, it was possible that one or both of them were in Records, and some of the witnesses might pick a picture. Even the experienced pros were quite often stupid, and it was also possible, given the stupidity of this caper—walking into a store full of people to pull a heist in the middle of the day—that they had both been high on something.

  They started to ask for names, get the people sorted out. One of the patrolmen had called the lab; Scarne and Horder came out in a mobile truck and took some photographs, dusted the counter and cash register for any latent prints. Presently the morgue wagon came for the body. The other pharmacists said that Bryan had been a widower but had a married daughter in Pasadena. So they'd have to break more bad news.

  * * *

  ALTOGETHER, THERE WERE fifteen people to question, get the formal statements from, and it was going to go on a good part of tomorrow. Wednesday was Hackett's day off. By the end of shift on Tuesday afternoon, Mendoza and Galeano had taken four statements and set up appointments for the other witnesses to come in tomorrow.

  On Wednesday morning Mendoza had just finished getting a statement from one of the clerks and had seen her out when Lake buzzed him from the switchboard. "You've got a new corpse," he said tersely. "Fourth Street."

  "Oh, hell," said Mendoza. That was another thing about this job. It was like women's work, always more of it coming along. He looked into the big office. Grace, Galeano, Palliser, and Landers were all talking to witnesses, and Higgins had taken a couple more down to Records to look at pictures. Somebody had to tidy up the corpses as they came. He collected his gray Homburg and got the address from Lake.


  It was a little way out on Fourth, in a very shabby block of old buildings. Most of the others along here were empty and boarded up and very probably the whole block was ready to be torn down to make way for the new high rises. The address he wanted was a desiccated-looking old six-story apartment house. The squad was parked in a red zone in front. In the little lobby, Patrolman Hunter and three other people were waiting. Hunter stepped forward. "I kept him from going back into the room, sir. Not that I suppose it's important. Looks like a straight suicide." He added in a louder voice. "This is Lieutenant Mendoza. Mr. and Mrs. Daggett, they're the managers here, Mrs. Garvey," Daggett was a thin, medium-tall man in the fifties, with a lantern jaw and a prominent Adam's apple. He looked anxious and shaken. His wife was plump and maternal-looking, right now a little pale. The other woman was tall and thin with too much makeup and a lot of cheap costume jewelry Daggett burst into speech rapidly.

  "Iike I was telling the officer here, I just found her. Never thought the poor girl would do such a thing. Take poison or whatever it was. She seemed like a nice girl. Her name's Ruth Hoffman, she rented the apartment last month, said she was from Chicago. See, I explained to her—it says apartment hotel in front but the last ten years we just had permanent tenants—I explained to her I couldn't rent except on a weekly basis, the building's going to be torn down and we might get notice any day, but she said that was O.K. She seemed like a nice quiet girl. l don't think she had a job—she didn't go out regular—"

  "Fred," said his wife, "don't get all upset now. It's nothing to do with us. I'm sorry for the poor girl, but it was her own doing."

  "For love," said Mrs. Garvey unexpectedly in a dramatic tone. "All for love and the world well lost! I'm one of the few remaining tenants here, Lieutenant, and her apartment was just across from mine. I had met her when she asked to borrow some coffee once and the poor darling had confided in me." She sniffed into a handkerchief smelling violently of lavender. "How she had followed her true love here and he had spurned her. My heart went out to her, tru1y."

  "Anyways," said Daggett rather desperately, "her rent was up yesterday and she hadn't come to pay me and I went up about maybe half an hour ago, forty minutes, to see if she was in, and the door was unlocked and, well, there she was, dead. Killed herself, with poison or something. And so I called the cops."

  "All right," said Mendoza. "Which apartment?"

  "It's number twelve—the right front. I don't have to go up again, do I?"

  "Don't upset yourself," said his wife soothingly.

  Hunter followed Mendoza up the uncarpeted stairs.

  "Dilapidated old place," he said. "Just what I could see, it looks like a straight suicide." The apartment door was open. Beyond it there was the expectable cramped living room, the tired old furniture, couch and one upholstered chair, a couple of small end tables. Visible through a doorway was a tiny narrow kitchen with just space for a minute table and two chairs. An old-fashioned wall bed which would fold up into the wall overnight was pulled down. The body lay on that, the face turned to the wall. On the bedside table was a half-full glass of water and a small plastic prescription bottle. Mendoza bent to scrutinize that without touching it.

  Whatever label it had borne had been torn off. It was empty. On the cheap painted bureau were a worn billfold and two sheets of paper. Mendoza flicked through the billfold. Two hundred and twelve dollars in cash, a Social Security card with the name Ruth Hoffman. He took up the first sheet of paper. They were both letters. The first one was a half sheet of cheap stationery, evidently torn from a tablet. It was written in an overlarge, careless script, the writing of someone who did not often use a pen.

  Dear Ruthie, I told you before you better just forget this guy. He is no good for you. You think he's serious, but believe me it isn't so what you tell me he said. You know the boss was kind of put out when you quit so sudden and he would take you back like a shot so you better come back home and forget this guy. You know we've been friends a long time and I'm just thinking of what's best for you. Love, Jean.

  The other letter was typewritten by somebody who wasn't a proficient typist, on a sheet of ordinary typing paper. It began abruptly without salutation.

  Look Ruthie, I'm sorry if I hurt you. But I never was serious like you. I'm not ready to get married and settle down, and anyway, not with you. I'm sorry but you better stop pestering me about it. I like you all right, but nothing serious. You better go back to Chi where you got friends. Jim.

  "Asi," said Mendoza to himself. The straightforward suicide. The silly girl in love. The lover spurning her, and a deliberate overdose. Where had she got it? And kaput. Just more paperwork.

  For the first time he looked at the old-fashioned pulled-down bed where the body lay. He went over to look at the body, and it was the body of the girl who had traveled with them on the flight from Chicago. Juliette Martin. She was unmistakable. The neat cap of dark hair, the tip—tilted nose, the wide mobile mouth. It was Juliette Martin, the girl from France.

  And the identification said, Ruth Hoffman.

  Why?

  TWO

  "WELL, OF COURSE it's the same girl, the girl on the plane," said Alison. The strip fluorescent lighting turned her fiery red hair nearly gold where she looked down unflinchingly at the white face in the cold tray in the morgue. "She was really lovely, a beautiful girl. But what a queer thing, Luis."

  "You're sure. So was I." He steered her out to the corridor. They sat down on the bench along the wall and he lit cigarettes for both of them. "So tell me everything you remember about her. You're the one who talked to her. I was half asleep."

  "We were both dead tired. She seemed like a very nice girl." Alison sounded troubled.

  "Echoing Mr. Daggett," said Mendoza. "Yes, those Daggetts and the Garvey woman— And you know something cariña, it's fate—destiny or g something. If I hadn't gone out on it to recognize her—well, I don't know that I caught all she said to you. Tell me what you remember."

  Alison said dubiously, "Well, it wasn't much. All pretty casual. I was so sleepy, and I got the impression she was a little shy, not a chatty type—a nice girl, educated—well, a lady, I think"— Alison drew on the cigarette and looked at it thoughtfully—"well, that she said as much as she did because she was a little excited, a little nervous. She wasn't the type to come out with private affairs to a stranger—and she said that, that she was nervous. It was the first time she had ever flown. And she was going to visit her grandfather—"

  "No name mentioned?"

  "No. The grandfather had disowned her mother because she wanted to marry a foreigner. The mother had gone to France for some postgraduate study—and she said her mother had written to him when she was born, Juliette, I mean, but never heard from him. But when her parents were killed in an accident of some sort she had written to tell him, and they'd corresponded, and now he was sorry about how he'd treated her mother, and wanted to meet her. And she worked in an office somewhere. She had three weeks' vacation coming that she hadn't taken because they'd been busy—"

  "No mention of what kind of office?"

  "No. And she was engaged to a man named Paul. At first he didn't want her to come here, but she said there was the family feeling. Her grandfather, the only family she had—except for two uncles ."

  "Who might," said Mendoza, "have been either her mother's or her father's brothers."¡Mil rayos!"

  "Wel1, I suppose," said Alison. "And her boss was at Mr. Trenchard, Treuchard, Tenchard, something like that. I don't remember exactly."

  "Helpful," said Mendoza. "It's a damn queer setup altogether. Somebody went to a little trouble."

  "But why?" asked Alison. "She seemed an ordinary sort of girl. Prettier than average, but ordinary."

  "Why indeed. Do you remember anything else?"

  Alison considered. "I was so sleepy- I remember asking her if she lived in Paris and I think she mentioned a street name, a rue de something. But it was about then that I dozed off. I think you were
already asleep."

  "A handful of nothing," said Mendoza. "And the three helpful, innocent witnesses to back up the straightforward suicide—and those letters—¡Dios! Ordinary is the word, so very damned plausible. But I can't see exactly where to go on it except—mmh—yes, those Daggetts and Garvey, but—"

  "Well, I hope you can find out what's behind it, but what a very funny thing, Luis."

  "I could think of other words for it," said Mendoza in a dissatisfied voice. "Take care on the freeway home, cariña."

  He had left the lab men going over the tired old furnished apartment. Now he drove back to headquarters, collected Higgins and Palliser into his office and told them about it. They were intrigued but doubtful.

  "That's a damn queer setup if you're right," said Higgins. "But could you be absolutely certain it is the same girl?"

  "Yes, yes," said Mendoza irritably, "and so was Alison."

  "But that apartment manager, the other woman, telling the tale all straight-faced— She was supposed to have been here at least a month."

  "That's right, and what's to say any different except that it's the same girl who was on the plane with us last Saturday. Juliette Martin. And they say that everybody's got a double, it's just my word and Alison's that it is the same girl, damn it."

  "You're absolutely sure?" asked Higgins.

  "Don't dither at me, George. Yes, I'm sure. Not going senile yet."

  "Well, if we lean on those witnesses, they may come apart."

  "And maybe not." Mendoza brushed his mustache back and forth in habitual irritated gesture. "Somehow I think they're—background. Just there for effect."