Exploit of Death - Dell Shannon

by Dell Shannon

  There wasn't much in the autopsy report. She'd been beaten to death and, from the lab report, apparently by the hammer left beside her. There was blood, hair, and brain tissue on that. There hadn't been any readable prints on the hammer, but they had picked up quite a few around the little apartment. Most of them were hers. There were nine others belonging to three different people, probably, unknown to Records—very likely the rest of the Coffey family. And somebody ought to get their prints for comparison. There had also been two good prints identified as those of Toby Wells—record appended. Palliser sat up in surprise, but when he had read the attached Xerox copy, his interest faded a little. It wasn't much of a pedigree—an arrest for theft from an expensive men's clothing store a couple of years back. Disposition, goods paid for and the court ordered a year's probation. The only reason he'd been printed and got into Records was that it was a technical felony, theft of goods valued at more than a hundred dollars. It was natural enough that his prints should be there. He was Verna Coffey's grandson. They had been picked up from the side of the washbowl in the bathroom, and the family had all been there the Sunday before the murder. They could easily have stayed there for six days without getting smudged. But they'd talk to him and find out where he'd been that Friday night.

  The phone rang and he picked it up, still looking at the report.

  "Robbery—Homicide, Sergeant Palliser."

  "Say," said Duke at the lab. "Did you get that report yet? Good. I meant to put a note in with it. We've been kind of busy and it slipped my mind. I'll tell you what, Palliser, if you ever pick up a good solid suspect on this Coffey homicide, you bring all his shoes along to us. We'll maybe give you some beautiful scientific evidence."

  "Shoes," said Palliser blankly. "Why?"

  Duke laughed. "Just don't forget it. We all have our professional secrets, Palliser."

  On Thursday afternoon, the tedious checking into backgrounds of all the employees at the hospital turned up something interesting, and Grace and Galeano brought it to Mendoza rather with the air of two well-trained retrievers fetching in a bird that had been lost in the underbrush.

  "¡Vaya por Dios!" said Mendoza, looking at the record. One Alfredo Diaz, employed as a chef in the hospital kitchen, had turned out to be a former mental patient at the Norwalk State Hospital. He had been released after a couple of years there, three years ago. One of the doctors on the hospital board had got him the job. "We just talked to that one," said Grace, "and he nearly bit our heads off."

  "Time is money, Jase. We interrupted his schedule," said Galeano. "All these people are growing a prejudice for the damn suspicious fuzz, Lieutenant. They were excited over the murder, but when we came nosing around suspecting

  that somebody at the hospital did it—"

  "Medical people," said Grace, "are all temperamental. Supposed to be all efficient and scientific but they're so used to being in charge of everything they're apt to have a tantrum when they're not—if you take me." Grace might know. His father was the chief of the Gynecology Department at the General Hospital.

  "Well, mental patients come all kinds like other people," said Mendoza. "One of the chefs—"

  "I know," said Galeano. "That's the little stumbling block. He says he was in the basement kitchen fixing the dinners with everybody else. He never goes up to the wards—wasn't interested in the patients, and there seems to have been about forty other people there, but that cancels itself out in a way. If he was gone for fifteen minutes—said he was back in the john—would anybody have noticed?"

  "What in hell is one like that doing on a hospital staff?"

  "The doctor we riled—a Dr. Ackerwood—told us he'd got him the job as a favor for a friend of his, one of the psychiatrists at Norwalk—a Dr. Silverman."

  "I'm not," said Mendoza, "constitutionally disposed to believe automatically anything a psychiatrist says, boys. I think at least half of them are a little bit touched themselves. But I suppose it wouldn't do any harm to hear what Silverman has to say about Diaz."

  He saw Silverman on Friday morning at his private office out on Chapman Avenue in Fullerton, and was, grudgingly, favorably impressed. Silverman was fat, bald, friendly and not given to the six=dollar words.

  "Well, the man has a low-normal I.Q., Lieutenant. He's a mildly schizoid personality, but I never detected any tendency to violence in the three years I was treating him. He had a great lack of self-confidence—understandable with his mentality, but it took the effect of suicidal impulses rather than outward aggression. As I had rather expected, when we found him a job he could perform satisfactorily, a mechanical job he could do by routine, he responded quite well. He's made a good adjustment." Silverman was academically interested in the homicide. "I don't know anything about it, Lieutenant, except what you've just told me, but from my experience with aberrations, I might hazard a guess that you should look for someone with a fixation about death—perhaps," he reflected, "a much-indulged son who had lost a beloved mother. I find it interesting, you know, that it is an Italian family. I presume Catholic. Yes. The er—symbolism. But I really think you needn't suspect Diaz. I never detected any violence there—any incipient aggression."

  * * *

  AND MENDOZA felt a little foolish about it—a little self-conscious. But he told the morgue to send Juliette up to Forest Lawn. God knew he could afford to pay for a simple funeral, but he wasn't sure why he felt obligated, and he thought vaguely as he had thought about another corpse a year or so ago, She fell among thieves. He wondered if Juliette had been Catholic; it was probable. He talked to Father Damian at St. Patrick's in Burbank, and the priest was sensible and practical. He held a brief graveside service. Alison attended that

  "I know it's just a ceremony, but somehow I felt I ought to go"—and Mairi was there. Mairi was a very orthodox, traditional Catholic of the old school and for some reason she felt sentimental about Juliette. She said darkly, "‘Dying as a stranger in a strange land—and if you ask me, even if we don't know the ins and outs of it, that grandfather of hers must be a wicked old rogue."

  SEVEN

  ON SATURDAY, Palliser finally got around to looking up Toby Wells. The rest of the Coffey family had come in to have their prints taken and these had checked out with the other prints the lab had picked up. Wells worked at a Thrifty drugstore on Hollywood Boulevard, and he was an ordinary-looking young black fellow, round-faced, slow-spoken, and he was frank on answering questions. "You were in a little trouble a couple of years ago," said Palliser.

  Wells said a little nervously, "Well, yeah, that was kind of a damn' fool thing to do—steal those clothes—but I like nice clothes, and I had a new girl then and I guess I wanted to show off to her. My grandma paid up for me and I never been in any trouble since. Oh yeah, it's an awful thing about Grandma." He shied a little when Palliser asked him about that Friday night, but answered readily, —"I was out with my girl, Mae Weaver. We went to a disco down on Jefferson Boulevard. I guess it was about midnight when I got home, we both had to go to work the next day, a course." He lived with a couple of other young fellows at an apartment on Virgil Avenue. It wasn't worth writing a further report on. Half of them were now doing the legwork on that heister, the rest winding down the investigation at the hospital. That had been a bastard of a thing to work. They must have chased down over a hundred people, trying to identify all the visitors, looking into personal backgrounds, and all for nothing. There was no way to find out who might have done that queer killing—why or when. It was another case that would wind up in the Pending file.

  On Sunday morning, the lab report came up on the Holzer car and there was nothing in it at all. The steering wheel had evidently been wiped clean and the only other prints in the car belonged to Edna Holzer and the girl, Frances. The

  autopsy report came in that afternoon too and she hadn't been raped, just knocked around and strangled manually. The lab hadn't picked up anything significant from her clothes.

  Mendoza took the reports out to the c
ommunal office to pass on and said to Hackett, "Just damn all on everything we' re working—nothing."

  "Well, that's the way it goes sometimes, and then all of a sudden we'll get some breaks."

  "Don't philosophize at me," said Mendoza irritably. He sat down at Higgins' desk and added abruptly, "And we're never going to hear anything from France, you know. I've got a strong hunch on that."

  "I don't see that, Luis. The girl must've had friends. There's the fiancé."

  "Es cierto, sé. But that's my hunch." He was silent for a moment and then said, "The only way we'll get anything from France is for somebody to go over there and look."

  Hackett took his glasses off to stare at him. "You're not serious."

  "I might be, Art. At least I've got a passport in order."

  "You don't know where to start looking," said Hackett.

  "But the trail starts there, damn it ¡Condenación! Grandfather. If there was just some little lead¡"

  "You don't even know whether the Martin girl lived in Paris—anywhere in France—"

  "The probability is Paris, I think. Such a simple, artful little setup. By God, I'll find out what was behind that if it takes a year," said Mendoza violently. "And I think we can let that hospital staff go about its business. We're never going to turn up any evidence on that damn thing." Hackett agreed thoughtfully. The autopsy on Alisio had said exactly what they expected it to say.

  By now, four possible suspects on that heist had been found and questioned, but there was nothing to tie in any of them definitely. Two more heists had gone down last night with no clear descriptions. The heat wave was still with them.

  Hackett said, "We get these spells sometimes. Stymied on everything. Then all of a sudden we'll start to get the breaks."

  "Pollyanna," said Mendoza.

  What broke on Monday afternoon was another homicide, at a junior high school down on Vernon Avenue. One of the teachers, Mrs. Vera Robertson, was found by another teacher, knifed to death in her own classroom. Mendoza and Higgins went out to have a first look and talked to a shaken and angry principal, Lee Olliphant.

  "We've never had anything as bad as this," he said. "There's always the dope problem. You can't do anything with some of these damn kids, they come to school stoned on the dope, on the liquor, or both. About all we can do is try to see they don't disturb the kids who are teachable. Mrs. Robertson had complained to me of several boys in her class, the first week of school. It was her first semester with us, you know. She'd been transferred from a junior high school in Hollywood." He was a big pear-shaped man in a baggy wrinkled suit and he eyed Mendoza's fastidious dapperness with faint disapproval. The knifing had apparently happened during the lunch hour. She had been found at twelve-thirty by the other teacher, Wilma Fox.

  She said, "Vera just hated it here. Heaven knows the kids anywhere are bad enough nowadays, but down here it's worse than other places, more of the kids on dope and some of the rest impossible to teach for other reasons, and I'm sorry if I sound prejudiced, but that is the plain truth. But this—I'm going to be scared to come to work and I've got to earn a living—"

  Olliphant said heavily, "My God, I'm thankful I'm due to retire next year. It's not unusual for the boys here to carry knives, there's a lot of gang activity and the decent kids get intimidated for the lunch money and so on." He sighed. "Not an easy job. Yes, I can give you the names of the boys she complained about—showing up high on dope, resisting discipline—but that doesn't say it was one of them who did it. We have a lot of difficult youngsters."

  Half of the names were Latin—Ortiz, Gonzales, Lopez. The rest of the boys were black. Classes were out by then, the lab men busy in the classroom, but they wouldn't turn up anything useful. They couldn't print juveniles, and with all the kids milling around at the lunch hour nobody would have noticed any disturbance in that classroom, and nobody would tell the fuzz if they had. Her handbag was missing. She had kept it in a drawer in her desk. She had been thirty-five, had a husband and two young daughters. The husband was a bookkeeper at a savings-and-loan company in Hollywood, and he told them that she never carried more than a few dollars to school. She had had her wallet rifled the first day she was there and there wasn't a lock on any of her drawers. "These goddamn punk kids. Not a white kid in that damn place. All the spicks and dinges. And you want to arrest me for being prejudiced, go ahead. I told her for God's sake not to turn her back on any of them. All of those goddamn kids carrying knives or worse. Damn it, if we hadn't needed her salary, she wouldn't have been there—"

  It was a waste of time to talk to the kids. The biggest one of those she'd complained about was Rudy Ortiz, a hulking fourteen-year-old. He didn't like the fuzz worth a damn but he knew they couldn't do anything to him. He said sullenly what the other ones had said, as if it were the same record being played. "She just hated anybody with a Latin name—like she hated all the black kids. All the kids knew that. Nobody liked old lady Robertson, but I don't know nothing about what happened."

  Her handbag turned up the next day, in a trash container behind the school cafeteria. Her wallet was in it, empty of the few dollars it had held. This was another one that would go into Pending after a couple of follow-up reports. But on the following Thursday, the unexpected happened. The Security Pacific Bank which had issued Edna Holzer's Visa card called headquarters to report, as requested, that an attempt had been made to use that account. The routine check had showed up the hold on it. The card had been presented at the Broadway Department Store at Hollywood and Vine in the women's dress section.

  Mendoza and Hackett went up there in a hurry and talked to the clerk who had checked the card. She was an amiable middle-aged woman who'd worked there for years, and she said, "It's funny how you get feelings, sort of a sixth sense, when somebody's trying to pull something, a shoplifter or something like this. I kind of had a feeling about that girl as soon as I saw her. It was funny."

  "Can you describe her?" asked Mendoza.

  "Oh, sure, I think I can do better than that for you. Of course, she didn't get away with the merchandise, she'd picked out a couple of dresses and a blouse, and these credit cards get stopped for a lot of reasons—I couldn't know she'd stolen it, I just let her walk out. But I'd seen her before, you know, and when the department head said the police were interested, I did some thinking on it, and I can tell you where to find her."

  "By God, Art, you're a prophet," said Mendoza. "Don't tell me we're going to get a break. Where and who?"

  "She's a waitress at this coffee shop just up the block. Faye's Café. I drop in there for lunch sometimes. She's about twenty-five, size twelve, she's got red hair. Yes, I'm sure it's her. I'd swear to it."

  They picked her up at the café. Her name was Sally Pitman and at first she wouldn't tell them anything, just kept denying she'd done it. But Higgins came and loomed at her and she didn't like him at all, or the big businesslike detective office. Finally she said weakly, "I didn't really do anything, did I? I just thought if I could use that card to get some things—well, it'd be easy. I didn't know there was anything wrong with it. Somebody just lost it."

  "Where did you get it?" asked Higgins for the third time.

  "I found it. I told you. I just found it on the sidewalk."

  They went on pounding at her about that and finally in exasperation they left her alone for five minutes and turned Wanda Larsen on to her.

  "You know, Lieutenant," said Wanda sweetly, "there's an old saying that you catch more flies with honey. Why did you try to scare the poor kid? All she needed were a few sympathetic words. I think she'll talk to you now."

  "Thank you so much," said Mendoza.

  Sally Pitman was still sullen but ready to talk straighter. "Oh, for God's sake," she said wearily. "I found the damn card in my boyfriend's pocket. We were just sitting around the other night and I was out of cigarettes and I looked to see if he had any in his jacket."

  "Boyfriend's name?" asked Hackett briskly.

  "Ray Siemens
. He doesn't know anything about it either."

  "Did you ask him about it?"

  "He found it. He just found it in the street. He said he forgot he'd picked it up and I better throw it away, it was no good. But I just thought—but he doesn't know anything about all this. He told me to throw it away."

  Ray Siemens worked at a gas station on Western. They brought him in to talk to and he laughed at them. He was a big husky dark-haired fellow about twenty-five, and he didn't appreciate being grilled by the fuzz, but they couldn't shake his story. He'd found the card on the sidewalk right outside the station. Didn't know why he bothered to pick it up. He'd forgotten he had. He told Sally to thrown it away, it was no good to anybody. He went on saying that over again and of course there was no evidence on him at all. He could have found it where the X on Edna Holzer had dropped it. The car had been clean. He had a little pedigree with them—one count of assault with intent. He had served a year in the men's colony at San Luis Obispo. Both Mendoza and Hackett liked that, but without any definite evidence they'd never tie him in.

  Siemens lived alone in a little apartment over the garage at the rear of a single house on Berendo Avenue, and the owners lived in the front house, a Mr. and Mrs. Dearborn. They said he was a quiet tenant, out a lot, always paid the rent on time. Mendoza got a search warrant for the place and they looked at it, Higgins trailing along. It was a shabby bare little apartment, not much furniture, but he had a nice wardrobe of clothes. In one corner of the living room stood one of the newly popular reproductions of an old Franklin stove—economical heating. Mendoza opened the door and looked in and said, "Why has he had a fire in this, compadres? In ninety-degree weather‘?" The stove was half full of ashes, partly burned lumps of unidentifiable burned matter.