Exploit of Death - Dell Shannon

by Dell Shannon

  "They were just the typical young louts you see around. Long hair, jeans, sweatshirts— I think they both had dark hair, but that's really all I can say. Was that ambulance attendant right—that she was dead? The patrolman thought so."

  "Yes, I'm afraid she was," said Galeano.

  They had talked to the uniformed man, who had one piece of information for them. The woman's handbag had been gone, of course, but she'd been wearing an identification bracelet with a name and address stamped on it and he had noted it down. Phillips, an address on Morton Avenue. They went to look there, to notify any relatives. It was a small apartment building, not new, but well maintained with a strip of lawn in front. There wasn't a manager, and they tried the first right front apartment downstairs. A woman about thirty said they'd just moved there, didn't know any of the other tenants. Nobody else was home downstairs. They climbed stairs, tried the first right-hand door there. The woman who opened it said, "Phillips?" She was stout and henna—haired. "She lives right across the hall." She was shocked to hear what had happened. "Well, I don't know about any relatives. There was some woman came to see her nearly every day, I'd meet her in the hall sometimes, I don't know who she is. Of course you want to find out. I wonder if the door's locked. She hardly ever went out, I don't think." She stepped across the hall and tried the door, and it was unlocked. "There. I expect there'll be something inside to tell you about any family," she said brightly.

  Landers shut the door on her with thanks and they looked around. It was a typical place for its age and for the area. The neutral upholstered furniture, everything orderly, the kitchen clean. The phone was on one of the end tables by the couch and taped just above the dial was a neat card with firm printing on it: GREGSON and a phone number—NURSE and another number. Landers sat down on the couch and tried the first number. On the sound ring a masculine voice answered. "Mr. Gregson? This is the police. I believe you know a Mrs. Phillips on Morton Avenue. I'm sorry to have to tell you she's met with an accident—Yes, sir, I'm afraid she's dead. We're at the apartment, sir, yes. If you could tell us about any relatives-"

  He said, "Yes, I can tell you. I'll come as soon as I can get there."

  He came half an hour later. He was a tall elderly man, once very handsome and still good-looking, with a thick crop of gray hair and steady blue eyes. He was wearing neat sports clothes. He sat down on the couch and listened to Landers' account and said heavily, "Oh, my God. What a terrible way for her to die. I hope it was quick for her—that she hadn't time to be frightened. I'm so very sorry."

  "You're a relative, sir?" asked Galeano. "There has to be an autopsy. You'll be notified when you can claim the body."

  "Yes, there'll have to be a funeral. I'll see to it. No, not a relative." He lit a cigarette and sat back with a little sigh.

  "No, but I've known her for a long time. She was eighty-five. It had been nearly fifty years. I was—responsible for her, you could say. It's queer the way things happen. You don't know who she was. Neither of you is old enough to recognize the name. Isabel Page. She was a big star in the twenties, the thirties, up to the war. She was a beautiful woman. She made a lot of big money and she spent it. Those days the income tax wasn't so high. The house in Beverly Hills, the cars, the parties. I was her butler." He laughed ruefully. "Life's a queer proposition. I'd started out to try to make it in show business too, but we found it was a hell of a lot steadier work to take the servants' jobs. I was her butler and my wife was her housekeeper. She was a good woman—a silly woman some ways—sentimental, but very generous and warmhearted. Too much so. She was married four times and all four of them took her for a bundle, but it was the last one, Phillips, who cleaned her out. That was twenty-five years ago. We'd been with her for seventeen years." He was smoking quietly, his eyes vacant on the past. "Such a childlike person she was. How often she'd get in some muddle and then it'd be, But you'll fix it for me, Gregson—and I usually could—until the very last."

  "What happened?" asked Galeano.

  "You see, we could never forget her kindness to Enid. My wife. She contracted polio, and you know back then they didn't know much about it, couldn't do much. And nobody had medical insurance then. Isabel Page paid for everything. Enid was in the hospital for weeks, and there were specialists, the private nurses. You might say that it was nothing to her, she had the money. But it wasn't just a gesture—she was a very warmhearted woman—genuinely concerned. We both feel it was all the expensive attention and care that pulled Enid through—though it left her with a slight limp. And then, Miss Page let us keep our little girl at the house. A good many people wealthy enough to have live-in servants won't be bothered with children, but she didn't mind. She was always so kind to Doreen too, Christmas and birthday presents. We were with her up to the end. Phillips cleaned her out, he'd tried to manage the money she had left and lost all of it. She never had any judgement about people, of course. All there was left after he took off with some floozy was the house in Beverly Hills. I sold that for her— got a hundred and fifty thousand. God, it'd go for a million now. And I put it into some solid stock, she could live on the income in a modest way. I had another job with one of the big producers up to when I retired five years ago. But the last ten years, all this damned inflation—" He put out his cigarette. "Well, I'd saved and made some sound investments, rental property, and Enid and I are O.K. I couldn't afford to keep her in luxury, but I could pay the I rent here. Only just lately it's been worrying, the way she was going. She'd been failing the last couple of years—up to then she could look after herself fairly well. One of these visiting nurses came in every day, saw she had a bath and a hot meal. But I was afraid she'd have to go into a nursing home, just lately she'd taken to getting out and wandering all over—the reason I got that I.D. bracelet for her. She wanted to go home, you see—to the house in Beverly Hills. She was trying to get home. Well, it's finished. A terrible way for her to go. I hope she hadn't time to be frightened."

  "You'll be notified about the body," said Landers. "It was very good of you to look after her like that, Mr. Gregson."

  He had stood up. He looked at Landers with a little surprise. "I don't see it quite like that," he said. "We have to pay our debts, you know."

  * * *

  MENDOZA GOT Home on Wednesday afternoon. When the cab let him off at the door of the big Spanish house, he handed over the exorbitant fare and a tip and carried his bag into the house, into the blessed air-conditioning. It wasn't as hot as when he had left, but the air conditioning was still welcome. He found Alison in the living room, curled up in an armchair reading, and she scrambled up in surprise, scattering cats. "Luis, we didn't know when to expect you."

  When she emerged from his embrace she added, "You look tired to death, querido."

  "Jet lag," said Mendoza. "I want a shower and shave and there's time to get down to the office—"

  "Time to go nowhere," said Alison. "You're going to lie down for the rest of the afternoon and get some sleep. You're not as young as you were, and you know you're exhausted. I suppose you went to the Folies Bergere every night to whistle at all the lovelies." He followed her meekly up the stairs, yawning his head off. He wasn't sorry to be overruled.

  So it wasn't until Thursday morning that he sat at his desk with Higgins, Hackett, Palliser gathered around him, Hackett missing another day off, and said, "So, Paul Goulart, the fiancé, got himself murdered too. And it could have been a coincidence—the crime rate's up in Paris too—but I don't think so and neither does Rambeau. Goulart was on a late shift at the hospital and would get home at his apartment about midnight. It looked as if he'd surprised a burglar. The place was ransacked and he was stabbed. The door had apparently been jimmied opened with a chisel or something, but the lock wasn't broken. There was a good solid deadbolt. What the detective on the case thought, and what I think, was that somebody was waiting for him. Went in with him on some excuse and set up the burglary. He wasn't known to have any, in the melodramatic word, enemies. No trouble
with anyone recently. But Goulart!" said Mendoza. "Of all the people who knew her, Goulart would never have rested until he located Juliette. He wouldn't have been fobbed off with any polite excuses from the French police or us. And there was no address book in that apartment, and that's an item the burglar seldom bothers with ¡Como no! And he must have known Grandfather's address. He's the one who would have had it, damn it."

  "I'm following you," said Hackett cautiously. "But-"

  Mendoza impatiently lit a cigarette from the stub of his old one. "Iook at it. Just look at the probabilities. What would happen when Juliette didn't come home from America? The Ducasse girl is all wrapped up in a new marriage, and living in another town. I doubt that she'd have Grandfather's address. Juliette was only going to be gone for three weeks, a month. The Ducasse girl would expect to hear from her, she'd be surprised when she didn't. She'd write to the Paris address. Eventually, she might contact the Boyer woman, and she'd have been surprised and worried at not hearing too. But what would they do? How soon? By December the lease would be up on that apartment, but the rent would have been overdue before then, and sooner or later the managers would go in, find personal possessions, assume she'd decamped. Theirs not to reason why. I doubt if they'd take the trouble to look at her accumulated mail. Take Goulart's father. He liked the girl very much, but when she didn't contact him when she was supposed to be back, what would he think? Put her down as a heartless female not worthy of Paul. But Goulart! A young, energetic man with some standing—he'd have been a tiger after her when she didn't come home. He was in love with the girl, he knew where she was going. He'd have moved heaven and earth to find out what had happened to her. Goulart was the key. If Juliette was to vanish quietly away, he had to go. However, he had to be disposed of."

  "I see it," said Higgins. "But, my God, Luis. Talk about a wholesale operation—"

  "Her other friends, and she probably had a lot of them, mostly middle-class working girls like herself, they'd wonder and speculate. They wouldn't do anything. And if in December or January or February Mrs. Boyer did contact the French police and they contacted us, what is there to find? She landed at International that day and—as Mr. Shakespeare puts it, the rest is silence."

  Mendoza laughed and leaned back in his desk chair. "So everybody is at a dead end. She had a visitor's permit, good for six months. Muy bien. Immigration isn't going to send out the troops looking for her. But Goulart, that was a different breed of cat, compadres. They had to get rid of Goulart." He brooded over his cigarette. "He was killed on the Monday night, after Juliette landed here on Saturday. Somebody had been busy. They had to get her keys, possibly her address book if she brought it with her, for Goulart's address. Somebody started for France that Saturday night. They'd know her address from her letters, of course. Somebody cleared that apartment of anything personal—Grandfather's letters, other letters. And if the address book was there—that, and any list of phone numbers. And somebody set up a little ambush for Goulart."

  "And," said Palliser. "Another thing you can deduce. If the Boyer woman or the Ducasse girl had done anything, what would they do? Go to Goulart."

  "Exactamente. He had to go. And that was just the way . it's been at this end—simple and yet—mmh—cunning. Rudimentary, but very damned thorough. And money and lives no object."

  "For God's sake, what could be behind it?" said Higgins.

  "Elias K. Dobbs," said Hackett. "Another common name. We can start out with the phone books and city directories."

  "It would probably have worked out as smooth as cream," said Mendoza, "if I hadn't seen the corpse. Oh, such a nice little plan. And executed so damn smoothly too."

  "Why?" wondered Palliser.

  "And we still don't know," said Mendoza.

  "The phone book," said Hackett.

  There were six phone books covering the county. This one had been a bastard to work all the way. Dobbs wasn't as common a name as Smith or Brown, but common enough. And there were a hundred or more in each of the books, even just looking for the initials. And of course the number might be unlisted. They started to work on it, on four books. That was at eleven o'clock, and at noon a bank job went down at a Bank of America on Beverly. Everybody else was out hunting heisters and there'd be dozen of witnesses to question. They all went out on that, and what with talking to the witnesses and taking statements, it occupied the rest of the day.

  * * *

  THE NIGHT WATCH had only one call, but it was a homicide. And it would likely give the day boys some more legwork to do. Conway went out to look at it. The uniformed man was waiting for him with a civilian in front of a little old single-frame house on San Marino Street. The civilian was a middle-aged man, sitting on the front steps with his head in his hands. His name was Richard Scoggins. He said to Conway numbly, "We were worried when she didn't answer the phone. My mother. She's nearly eighty and pretty frail. We usually phoned to check on her every day. We didn't like her living alone down here but of course she owned the house. My wife couldn't get her all day. I thought I'd better check. Of course I've got a key to the house—and when I saw—" He put his head in his hands again. The old lady was lying on the floor of the bedroom. It looked as if she'd been strangled. There were a few drawers pulled out, an old jewelry box on the dressing table was empty with its lid open. Conway sent the patrolman back on tour after he'd called the lab and while he waited looked I through the rest of the house. He told Scoggins that later they'd want him to look and see what was missing here, and Scoggins just nodded silently. It didn't look to Conway as if the back or front doors had been forced, or any of the windows. But that was the lab's business. Let them get on with it. He went back to the office to write the initial report.

  * * *

  MENDOZA SWORE over the night report. It was Galeano's day off. They were still taking statements from the witnesses on the bank job and now they had this damned homicide to work. And all the damned phone books— He got Jason Grace to get back on that with him. The first thing they had checked on had been unlisted numbers and no Elias K. Dobbs or any E. Dobbs in the county had one. There wasn't an Elias Dobbs listed in any of the six books, but there were at least a hundred and fifty E. Dobbses.

  "There's an easier way to do it, you know," said Grace reasonably.

  Mendoza said savagely, "Hands off the phone, Jase! Grandfather's part of this damn thing and I don't want to set off the alarm on him. ¡Dios! We'll have to take a personal look at every one of these damned Dobbses, and whoever pulled this off may be damned canny and crafty but I'll take a bet that when we find Grandfather and let him know that we've connected him with Juliette he'll be surprised enough to show it."

  "Yes, I see what you mean," said Grace. They set to work to compile a list of possible Grandfathers. And adding insult to injury, they were all over the damn county. There'd be mileage piled up on all their cars, and the only consolation was that the heat wave seemed to be dying a natural death.

  Then Lake buzzed him and said there were a couple of Feds to see him, and Mendoza snarled. "And what the hell do you want?" he asked the two big men who came in.

  "Well, this bank job yesterday—"

  "If it's any of your business," said Mendoza. Time was the bank jobs had belonged exclusively to the Feds, but these days they were left up to the locals.

  "Now don't be so goddamned touchy, Mendoza. We're just offering some friendly help," said the other Fed mildly. "We got the word from a snitch up in Hollywood. Norm and I have been on a big Narco case, there's some bunch bringing the stuff in from Mexico pretty damn wholesale. We've been sniffing around on it for a couple of months, and the snitch, who's a former pusher just out on P.A., is evidently carrying a grudge. He tells us that job was pulled by Angelo Morales and Tony Montez because they needed the bread to make a payment on a new shipment."

  "Por Dios," said Mendoza. "There were two men—both Latins by the witnesses."

  "Well, there you are," said the Fed. "By what the pusher said, he got i
t on the grapevine that Morales dumped a bundle at draw somewhere, and it was the stake for the shipment."

  "Es que ya me canso de las estupideces. I do get so damn tired of all these stupidities. All right. Thank you both so much. We'll look into it."

  "We're just trying to be helpful," said the first one plaintively. When they had left, Mendoza went out to see who was in. Landers had just come back and Mendoza passed the information on.

  "You'd better check with Records— I assume they've both got pedigrees—and see what comes of it."

  "Oh, hell," said Landers. "More legwork."

  After lunch Mendoza and Grace started out separately to look at Dobbses, but with all the driving, they only got to four between them that afternoon and none of them was Grandfather.

  But Mendoza had spent awhile poring over the County Guide before he left the office, and on Sunday morning as he left the house on the hill he didn't turn left to hit the east on-ramp of the Golden State Freeway, the other way for the west on-ramp. Nine o'clock found him on a narrow black-top road some little way north of the town of San Fernando, and heading north. Behind him was the teeming, crowded San Fernando Valley, one big city sprawl these last twenty-five years. But up here it was all empty land. Gentle bare little hills burned brown by the sun, a few scrub-oak trees. He drove slowly around the various windings of Lopez Canyon Road and nearly missed the little sign off to the right that said INDIAN CANYON ROAD. That was even narrower and led him northeast past more bare land. About half a mile up on the right was a house with a FOR SALE sign on it. A quarter mile farther on the left was another house, or, he amended, to himself, what had been one. Nobody had lived in it for a long time. It had been a square frame house but the roof had fallen in and the front porch was broken. There was a post which had held a mailbox in front and the remains of the mailbox lying alongside it. The post office hadn't delivered any mail here for years. Mendoza parked the Ferrari on the shoulder, went back and looked at the mailbox. There was no lettering visible on the uppermost side, but when he turned it over with one foot, just decipherable were the remains of a few once-white-painted letters. E-D-BS.