Dead Aim (The Lt. Hastings Mysteries)

by Collin Wilcox

  I stared at him for a last long, silent moment, then extended my hand. His grip was limp. “Thanks a lot, Mr. Farley. You’ve been a big help. We’ll want to get a statement from you. So be sure and keep yourself available.”

  “Yes. Thank you. I will.” He nodded to both of us, smiled nervously, and began walking away.

  I gestured to Culligan, unobtrusively standing by. “Follow him,” I ordered. “Check him out.”

  “Right.”

  I watched them out of sight: the slim, skittish subject and the tall, gangling detective moving stolidly along the sidewalk.

  “I don’t think Culligan is much of a walker,” Canelli said.

  Shrugging, I turned to my car. “It was him or you, Canelli. Look at it that way. Come on. We’re going to the victim’s house.”

  Three

  “NICE PLACE,” CANELLI COMMENTED as we pulled to the curb in front of June Towers’ house. “Forty, forty-five thousand, at least.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “I don’t live so far from here,” he volunteered. “But not in any forty-thousand-dollar house. Every block you get away from the park, the value goes down.”

  I hesitated, then decided to ask, “How is it you still live with your parents, Canelli?”

  He looked thoughtful for a moment, rubbing his chin. Finally: “I guess it’s because of Gracie. My girl friend. I guess you never met her.” He looked at me. “Have you?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  I waited. I realized that I was playing games with myself, deliberately delaying the moment when I’d have to tell the girl’s parents that their daughter was dead.

  “See,” Canelli was saying, “Gracie and me, we been going together for about six years—ever since I got out of the navy, almost, and joined the force. And it seems like every year we think we’re going to get married, but then we never do. So that’s why.”

  I smiled to myself, thinking of Friedman’s squad-room fun commenting on Canelli’s syntax.

  “That’s why you still live with your folks, you mean.”

  He nodded. Taking his cue from me, he was simply sitting behind the wheel, looking straight ahead. Then I saw him frown slightly. I recognized the expression. He was framing a difficult question.

  “How long has it been since you been, ah, not married, Lieutenant?”

  “Almost ten years,” I answered shortly. “Too long.”

  “Yeah, I see what you mean. That’s a long time, all right.” Again he hesitated before deciding to say, “I bet it must seem kind of, ah, funny, having your family back East. Your kids, I mean.”

  I put my hand on the door handle. “I don’t recommend divorce, Canelli. You’re doing the right thing. Long courtships might be out of fashion, but they’re a hell of a lot better than short marriages.” I swung the door open. “I’ll go talk to the parents. I want you to call in to Lieutenant Friedman. Tell him that I’d like to have him locate that popcorn vendor. And tell him that I’ll fill him in when I know a little more. After you’ve done that, come inside.” I jerked my chin toward the house. “Clear?”

  “Yessir.” He reached for the mike.

  On the first peal of the chimes the door opened. A woman in her late thirties stood in the doorway. Seeing me, her eyes instantly glazed with the disbelief of someone facing certain disaster. Her body was rigid, braced against my first words. She was a glossy blonde, beauty-shop-beautiful.

  Her eyes first searched my face, then fled to the car behind me. “Are you fr—fr—” Momentarily she stuttered. “From the police?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Towers. I’m Lieutenant Hastings.” I took off my hat. “May I come in?”

  Her painfully arched body suddenly went slack. She sagged against the doorframe, her hands clasped knuckle-white at her waist. Her lips began to twitch.

  “What is it?” she whispered. “What’s happened? Is June—” She began to shake her carefully coiffed head in a dull, defeated arc. Finally, with great effort, she looked at me directly, mutely imploring me not to tell her what she knew I’d come to say.

  “I’m afraid June is dead, Mrs. Towers. She—they found her in the park about an hour ago. Just a few blocks from here.”

  She was still shaking her head slowly from side to side. Somehow she reminded me of a dazed, stubborn child refusing to eat her dinner. Her hands were clasped cruelly, pressed tightly into the pale-beige cashmere of her sweater just below her breasts.

  Through stiffened lips she said, “My name isn’t Towers. It’s Grant—Ellen Grant.”

  “Why don’t we go inside, Mrs. Grant? We can sit down. You can…”

  A man stood behind her. His dark, thick hair was finger-combed, his jowls unshaven. In his early forties, broad and beefy, he was glaring at me with the suspicious, belligerent look of a barroom stud who suspects that someone has insulted his wife.

  As the man was about to speak, Ellen Grant suddenly wheeled, blindly striking his shoulder with hers as she blundered past him into the house.

  I introduced myself to Randall Grant and briefly explained what had happened. As I was talking, Canelli joined us, nodding to me, signifying that he’d gotten through to Friedman. Then the three of us silently entered the ornate living room, already touched by the hush of violent death.

  Ellen Grant sat hunched against the arm of a silk-brocaded easy chair. She was sobbing painfully, her body racked with dry, gasping spasms. Her eye make-up had dissolved into dark, grotesque smears, distorting the contours of her face, suggesting a surrealistic caricature of gross, ugly grief. Her hands hung limply across the silken arm of the chair. Some of her mascara-stained tears had fallen on the off-white brocade. Silently Canelli put a handkerchief in her hand, then sat down on a sofa that matched the chair. In his rumpled blue suit, with his misshapen hat beside him on the sofa, Canelli looked as incongruous as ever. His broad face was lightly glazed with perspiration. Whenever Canelli was forced to endure someone else’s grief, he perspired.

  Grant’s expression was still faintly belligerent as he stood before a black onyx fireplace, looking down at his wife. He made no move to touch her; he hadn’t spoken to her directly. He was dressed casually in a knit shirt, wide-striped trousers, and soft leather shoes. Except for his dark, unshaven jowls, he looked as if he were ready for a round of country-club golf. His face was handsome but heavily cast: humorless, stolid, sullen. The muscles of his arms were thick and firm, but his neck was beginning to sag. The knit shirt revealed a bulge at the waist.

  Blowing her nose in Canelli’s handkerchief, the woman choked, then gasped, “I knew it. I knew she’d been killed. It—it’s the only thing it could’ve been. The only thing.” Suddenly she twisted toward her husband. “I told you she wouldn’t stay out all night.”

  Deliberately pitching my voice to a quiet note, I said, “Do you have a picture of your daughter, Mrs. Grant? We’d like to borrow it.”

  The man swung abruptly away from the fireplace. “I’ll get you one.”

  “Don’t take the one on my dresser,” she said petulantly. “Take her yearbook picture.”

  “I know which one to take.” His voice was abrupt, his dark brows gathered in an irritable frown. He was already halfway across the room, plainly anxious to be free from the sight of his sobbing wife. I caught Canelli’s eye, moving my head toward the departing man. Nodding, Canelli rose. He would detain Randall Grant in another part of the house and question him separately.

  I took out my notebook and ballpoint pen, saying, “I realize this is a bad time for you, Mrs. Grant. But there’re some questions I’ve got to ask you, some information that we need. The sooner we get it, the sooner we can find out who killed your daughter. Do you understand?”

  “Y—yes.” She blew her nose again, daubed at her smeared eyes, and drew a long, shaky sigh. “Wh—what d’you want to know?”

  “First, when was the last time you saw her? What time was it, and where did she say she was going?”

&
nbsp; “It—it was about three o’clock yesterday. Sunday. She said she was going for a drive. She said she’d probably be back in a few hours.”

  “What kind of a car was she driving?”

  “It—it’s a Volkswagen. Green.”

  “A bug?”

  She nodded, again drawing a deep, unsteady breath. She was shakily gaining control of herself. It was my chance to get the information I needed, then get out—before a second rush of grief overcame her. For the moment she was partially anesthetized by shock. I could clearly recognize the signs: the slightly unfocused eyes, the short, shallow breathing, the slack, almost listless droop of arms and shoulders.

  “Was the car registered to you, Mrs. Grant?”

  “Yes. But it was really my daughter’s. We—I—gave it to her last summer.”

  “She didn’t mention any specific destination—anything she wanted to do, anyone she wanted to see? She was just going out for a drive?”

  “Y—yes.”

  “Was she upset when she left?”

  At the question, her eyes strayed aside, involuntarily seeking the rear of the house where her husband had gone. Finally, licking at her lips, Ellen Grant said, “She wasn’t upset. Not really. I mean—” She hesitated, again glancing aside. Now her expression was bitter, baleful. “My husband and I, we—” She paused. Suddenly her lips were curling, as if she’d just pronounced an obscenity. “We were fighting. We—we’re just about to get a divorce. We’ve been talking about it for weeks now—months. So yesterday we were fighting, and I told him to—to leave. Just leave. So then June, she—” The woman’s voice suddenly caught. But, doggedly, she continued: “She walked into the living room, from the back of the house. She—she said that she was sick of hearing us fight and that she was going for a drive. Anything, just to get out. And that—” She gulped, suddenly pressing the handkerchief to her nose. “And that’s the—the last I saw of her.”

  “Mr. Grant isn’t—wasn’t—June’s father.”

  “No.”

  “Is her father in the city?”

  Her voice was sharp as she said, “I don’t know where he is. I married him when I was nineteen, because I had to. Six months later he disappeared. I never saw him again—never heard from him or got a penny from him.”

  “You haven’t seen the girl’s father, or been in contact with him, for approximately sixteen years, then. Is that right?”

  “Th—that’s right. I heard about him a couple of years ago. But that’s all.”

  “What’d you hear about him?”

  “That he was a bum,” she said bitterly. “Which is what he always was, I guess. In his whole life he never did anything but common labor. But—” Her voice was softer as she said, “But I was too young, then, to know the difference. All I knew was that”—she drew a deep, unsteady breath—“that every time he touched me, I liked it. And now he—he won’t even know she’s dead.”

  “Can you give me any idea why she might’ve been killed, Mrs. Grant? Did she have any enemies?”

  She looked as if I’d suddenly slapped her. “Everyone liked June,” she whispered fiercely. “June was a good girl. A good girl.”

  I shook my head gravely. “Did she have any special friends?”

  “She had lots of friends. Lots of them.”

  “Any boyfriends?”

  “Yes. Kent Miller. They go to the same school. He lives just a few blocks from here. On Balboa.”

  “She just has the one boyfriend, you mean. They go steady.”

  “Yes. June didn’t—play around, play off one boy against the other. She wasn’t like that. She was—” Her voice caught. She was daubing at her eyes, sniffling. My time was running out. The shock was wearing off; all her grief and pain and guilty memories were rushing back, suffocating her.

  “For now,” I said, rising to my feet, “I’ve just got one last question. I’d like to know whether your daughter was carrying any money in her purse.”

  “I—I suppose she had some. She always did. But she never got a lot of money. Not like some kids. I—I gave her five dollars a week. Period. For a—a long time June worked. Even though she always had enough money, she worked. Th—that’s the way she was.”

  “So you would say,” I persisted, “that she probably had, say, five dollars in her purse.”

  She nodded mutely.

  I laid my card on the cocktail table. “I’ll be in touch with you, Mrs. Grant. In the meantime, if you need anything from us—or if you have any information for us—call me at this number.”

  She was staring at the black onyx fireplace, oblivious of me. Slowly moving her head from side to side with an uncertain, almost querulous movement, eyes utterly empty and voice pitched to a low, disembodied note, she began to speak. “I waited on tables and hustled drinks to raise her. I even hustled men, when there wasn’t anything else I could do. I finally married a man with money. He was thirty years older than me, and I couldn’t stand to have him touch me. He died, and I did it again—the same thing. It—it gets easier, marrying for money. This is my fourth marriage, and except for that first time—with Towers—there’s never been a minute when I even thought I was in love. I—I forgot how to laugh. And all the time I used to tell myself that it was all for her—for June. But I never really believed it, and neither did she. I—”

  Suddenly she was doubled over, arms across her stomach, sobbing. I stood looking down at her for a moment, then decided to leave. Canelli was waiting for me in the open entryway. Randall Grant stood beside him, looking at his wife indifferently.

  I made arrangements for Grant to identify the girl, then stepped outside, gesturing for Canelli to follow.

  “Did you find out anything?” I asked.

  “Not much. He’s a big fat pain in the neck, if you ask me.”

  “They’re getting divorced. That’s why they seem so strange.”

  He snorted.

  I said, “I want you to go back inside. See if you can get the license number of the car the girl was driving—a green VW. Get it on the air. Make sure they don’t handle it as a routine stolen car, and make sure the lab’ll run a fingerprint check on it if they find it. Then I want you to search through the girl’s effects, thoroughly. The motive was probably robbery, but it’s too early to tell. Find out everything you can about her. Try the neighbors. Everything. When you’ve finished, call for a radio car and take the stepfather to the morgue for identification. Unless there’s something urgent, plan on being at the office at four-thirty or five. By that time the afternoon papers will be out and Markham’ll probably have something from the scene. We might even have her car, if we’re lucky.”

  “Right. What’re you going to do, Lieutenant?”

  “I’m going to interview the girl’s boyfriend, and spend a couple of hours following my nose.”

  I realized that I didn’t have Kent Miller’s address. I debated for a moment returning to the house, but decided against it. Suddenly I was hungry. I’d stop for a drive-in hamburger and get the address from a phone book.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1971 by Collin Wilcox

  Cover design by Michel Vrana

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