by Keene, Day
Daly said rather hotly, “I know the law. But tell me this. If they were in on the job, after the truck was robbed why didn’t Mickey keep on running instead of doubling back to the carousel?”
Carter pointed out. “Don’t you see? If he’d run, that would have been prima facie evidence of guilt. All he could do was stay and brazen it out.”
“But isn’t it possible they’re being framed?”
Carter spread his hands. “By whom, Mr. Daly? The two mysterious goons who so fortuitously appeared out of nowhere to work you over? One, or both, of the surviving guards? Both of them with spotless records, and one of them the dead guard’s brother?”
Daly tried another tack. “All right. What about someone at the armored truck company? According to the newspaper report the truck was carrying one hundred and seventy-eight thousand dollars. How do we know there was that much money on the truck when it reached the shopping plaza?”
“I can answer that,” Captain Franks said. He smiled at the young woman sitting in the straight back chair on the far side of his desk. “Miss Lindler, meet Mr. Daly and Mr. DuBoise.”
Daly couldn’t remember when he’d met a less attractive girl. Her nondescript mouse-brown hair was cut much too short for the almost Slavic planes of her face, her chest was as flat as a boy’s and the only makeup she was wearing was lipstick. Her horn-rimmed glasses didn’t do anything for her eyes. The only thing nice about her were her legs. She saw Daly looking at them and covered her knees with the hem of her skirt.
“How do you do.”
Captain Franks added, “You may have seen Mr. Daly before. He has his own show on Channel 15.”
“I watch it from time to time,” the girl said.
“Now will you please tell Mr. Daly where you work.”
“I work for the Ramsdale Armored Truck Company.”
“In what capacity?”
“I’m the garage division cashier and head tally clerk and have been for the past five years.”
“Just what do your duties entail?”
“Well, part of my job is to check the money into the trucks.”
“Did you check the money into the truck that was robbed?”
“I did.”
“Was it an unusually large amount?”
“No. Comparatively small. At times our trucks may carry up to several million dollars, but that particular run was more of a courtesy gesture to the new shopping plaza. Also to stock the bank with change.” Miss Lindler took a slip of paper from her purse and glanced at it to refresh her memory. “The exact figure was one hundred and seventy-eight thousand and eighty-nine. Five thousand, two hundred and forty of it in silver dollars, half dollars, quarters, dimes and nickles. Six hundred dollars in pennies. And the balance in one, five, ten, twenty, fifty and one hundred dollar bills.”
She laid the slip of paper on Captain Frank’s desk. He asked, “And how is this money handled, Miss Lindler? I mean from the vaults to the truck?”
“I take the money from the vault and make up the amounts requested by the individual stores on the route. Then I give it to one or more of the guards who put it into the truck. Then when the truck is ready to roll, the inside guard gets into the money compartment and locks the door before the garage doors are opened.”
“Is this procedure supervised?”
“Very strictly.”
Daly asked, “You say the inside guard gets into the money compartment and locks the door. How does he lock it?”
“With a key.”
“Do all the guards on the truck have keys to the money compartment?”
“No. Just the inside guard.”
“Do you have a key?”
“No, I do not. The only other key is in the master vault and only the garage supervisor has access to it.”
“Thank you, Miss Lindler,” Captain Franks said. “Now, going back to yesterday morning.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Which of the guards carried the money into that particular truck?”
“Frankly, I don’t remember. I checked out twenty trucks yesterday morning. But I imagine it was Mike Kelly. Because of his seniority, he was chief of party.” She thought a moment. “No, I remember now — it was Tim. It had to be. At least he signed my receipt.”
The man from the District Attorney’s office asked, “And how are you protected, Miss Lindler? I mean how is it shown on the books that you have loaded X number of dollars on any particular truck?”
“We have a number of checks. The money I withdraw from the vault has to tally with my truck ledger. Then before I release a shipment, one of the guards has to sign a receipt verifying how much money I turned over to him.”
“Did you get such a receipt yesterday morning?”
“The truck couldn’t roll until I did.”
“Who signed it?”
“I just told you. Tim Kelly.”
The girl removed her glasses and wiped her eyes with a sodden wisp of linen and lace.
“You liked Kelly, didn’t you?” Daly asked.
“Very much,” the girl admitted. “He was the only one of the guards, the only man in the office for that matter, who didn’t treat me as if I was a computer with legs.” Tears rolled down her sallow cheeks faster than she could wipe them away. “He always had a smile for me and something friendly to say. Because I did him little favors, once he brought me a box of candy and another time he gave me some flowers.” She stopped trying to wipe away the tears. “And I hope that pretty spick bitch who gave him that chloral hydrate, and her husband, both go to the lethal chamber.”
Captain Franks looked back at Daly. “So now you know how we know how much money was in the truck.”
“Now I know,” Daly said. “Just one more question and Gene and I will get out of your hair. According to the story in the paper, shortly after he was stricken the dead guard was treated by an unnamed doctor who gave him an injection.”
“That’s right,” Captain Franks said. “A man who gave his name as Dr. Alveredo. He’s the one who sent Quinlan for the stomach pump.”
“You’ve questioned him, of course, and checked his findings against the autopsy report?”
“No. As a matter of fact we haven’t. He disappeared from the lot before the first police car reached the scene. And while we are looking for him, there is no M.D. by that name listed in the L.A. phone book.”
“Then you don’t mind if Gene and I try to find him. Just to keep the record straight.”
“Not at all.”
“Good,” Daly said. “Now I’ve kept my part of the bargain I made with Charlie Schaeffer in Vegas. You keep yours. I want to talk to Mickey and Paquita Laredo.”
Chapter Ten
WHEN THE detective who accompanied Laredo and the matron who escorted the girl to the interrogation room were gone and the door closed, Daly gave the youngsters time to kiss and cling to each other for a moment. They didn’t look like killers to him. All they looked was pathetically young.
The police had permitted Laredo to remove his makeup and change from his clown costume but the girl was still wearing the tight black capri pants and bare midriff bolero type blouse in which she’d dispensed pink lemonade.
Daly made his position clear. “I’m going to ask you kids some questions. If your answers satisfy me, I may go all out for you. The best lawyer in town. The whole bit. But if I find out that you’ve lied to me, I’ll make it so hot for you that you’ll wish you were doing twenty years on the Isle of Pines. Is that clear?”
Paquita bobbed her head.
“Perfectly clear,” Laredo said bitterly. “And thanks for asking to see us, Mr. Daly. But you’re just wasting your time.”
“Then you were in on the caper?”
“No. I’m just facing facts. This frame is so tight I can practically smell the cyanide fumes.”
DuBoise offered them cigarettes. “All right. You say you weren’t in on the job. For the time being, at least, we’ll assume you are telling the truth. Then who
did loot the truck?”
Laredo made a gesture of despair. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Do you think it was engineered by former members of the invasion brigade?”
“I doubt it. I doubt it very much.”
Daly lit Paquita’s cigarette. “Let’s start with the dead guard, Mickey. As I understand it, you had trouble with Kelly before.”
“That’s right.”
“What sort of trouble?”
Paquita put her crossed hands on her shoulders and embraced herself, then turned her face quickly to avoid an imaginary kiss.
“Kelly tried to kiss you?”
The girl bobbed her head, then after pointing to her husband, she drew back one dainty fist as if about to punch an imaginary molester.
DuBoise was enchanted. “And Mickey punched him?”
The girl shook her head and DuBoise tried again.
“Mickey threatened to punch him.”
Paquita nodded.
Daly thought a moment. “Okay. You had trouble with the dead guard but it hadn’t come to a showdown. All there was to it was words.”
“That’s all,” Laredo said. He continued to be bitter. “But if they give me a lie detector test and ask me if I hated the guy, I’m sunk. I hated him so much I got my revolver from the catchall box and was ready to shoot him if he bothered Paquita again.”
“But you didn’t feed him chloral hydrate?”
“No.”
“Then how did he get it?”
“I haven’t any idea.” Laredo added, “But, being the kind of a man he was, there must have been a lot of people who would have liked to see him dead.”
“But Paquita did give him a cup of lemonade?”
“That was part of my contract with the shopping center. For X number of dollars, I agreed to furnish X number of gallons of free lemonade. All anyone had to do was ask for it.”
Daly looked back at the girl. “Did you put anything in his drink, Paquita?”
She shook her head, then drew an imaginary paper cup of lemonade from an imaginary container and drank it.
“You drank out of the same container?”
“In front of me,” Laredo answered for her. “When I saw Kelly go down, I walked over to the stand and asked her the same thing and Paquita was as puzzled as I was.”
Daly changed the subject. “Why didn’t you tell me what happened to your parents when you were on my show Friday night, Mickey?”
The younger man shrugged. “Probably because I still go to pieces when I think of it.” He added quickly, “But I’m not bitter or foolish enough to hold up an armored truck to get money for the cause.”
DuBoise suggested, “Realizing how much can be at stake for you and Mrs. Laredo, and that the District Attorney’s office intends to charge you with murder in the first degree, suppose you tell us exactly what happened from the time you arrived at the shopping plaza up to and including the arrival of the armored truck.”
Laredo sat on the edge of the table in the room. “There isn’t much to tell, Mr. DuBoise. Paquita and I got to the plaza a few minutes after eight o’clock. While she made up the juice I put on some coveralls and fixed one of the pipes on the carousel organ. That took me about an hour. Then I started for the Ferris wheel to see if I could do anything about a set of faulty main bearings and I met Jocko who told me he had worked most of the night replacing them with bearings he’d gotten from a junked wheel. That made me feel good. I felt fine. You know, like I might make it after all. Then I worked on the throttle of the locomotive of the miniature train.”
“What was the matter with the throttle?”
“A worn bushing made it stick.”
“Do you usually run the train yourself?”
“No. Usually I clown around to drum up trade. I pay a punk named Tommy Banks to run the train. But when he hadn’t shown up by twenty minutes of ten, I decided he’d quit. So I walked over to the men’s room in the service station and put on my makeup and clown costume, intending to run the train myself and save the twenty bucks I would have had to pay Banks.”
“Do you wear a distinctive clown costume?” Daly asked. “I mean, did it originate with you?”
“No,” Laredo said, “I use a more or less classical Pierrot. The only variations are that I paint on a sad mouth and put a few tears on my cheeks.”
“Go on. What happened after you changed into costume?”
“I started back toward the rides with the usual tail of kids following me. Then I hear a car horn beep behind me and when I turned to shoo the kids out of the way, I turned too quickly and fell. And it wasn’t a car that had beeped. It was the armored truck and Kelly was laughing at me.”
“It was Kelly who’d beeped the horn?”
“So Quinlan, the driver, said.”
“And then?”
“Kelly told him to drive on and made some crack about now that the one-legged clown was out of his way he wanted to cop another feel from the pretty dumb little Spanish broad and get a couple of glasses of lemonade before he made his deliveries.”
“What did you do then?”
“I gave the kids some passes to get rid of them and I limped after the truck and got my gun from the catchall box.”
“What did you intend to do with it?”
“Kill Kelly if he bothered Paquita.”
“Did he?”
“No. He was just needling me. While I stood there, holding the gun like a fool, he stopped at the stand but all he did was ask for a cup of lemonade.”
Daly looked at Paquita. She nodded.
Laredo continued, “So I put the gun back in the box and started for the train and I heard a woman scream and when I looked back Kelly was clutching at the collar of his shirt and having trouble staying on his feet. And while I watched him he dropped to the pavement and Quinlan carried the money sacks back to the truck and got Mike Kelly and he hurried over to where his brother was and asked if there was a doctor in the crowd. And a man with a little hairline mustache said he was a doctor and went to work on Kelly.”
“Go on.”
“Then, like I said before, I walked over to the stand and asked Paquita if she had given him anything and she said she hadn’t. And about then I heard the train whistle and I looked over at the station and I almost blew my stack.”
“Why?”
“The train was in motion with a white-faced joie at the throttle, wearing a clown costume just like mine.” He went on to describe the other clown, the one who had thrown money around; the killing of Jocko; and the accidental shooting of the young mother.
Laredo paused briefly, continued. “Then Paquita came running over from the stand and picked up the baby and asked me how badly Jocko was hurt and I remember I told her I didn’t think he was going to make it. And he didn’t.”
Paquita pretended to beat on her husband’s head with an imaginary weapon.
“That’s right,” Laredo said. “Then Mike Kelly came running over and started beating on my head with his gun barrel and yelling something about Paquita having poisoned his brother and what did I do with the money.”
Daly asked, “And that’s all you and Paquita had to do with it?”
“That’s all.”
“You didn’t get any of the money?”
“No.”
“And you didn’t plot with anyone to rob the truck?”
“No.”
“Now tell us this. Was it the same clown who threw the money out of the truck who shot the old roustabout?”
Laredo thought for a moment. “I can’t be sure, but I think it was. Yes, I’d said it was the same one.”
“How many clowns were there, Mickey?”
“There,” Laredo said, “you have me. They let me read a newspaper down in the detention cell and according to the story I read there were six or more clowns. But I didn’t see any more than two at any time. That is, beside myself. The clown who threw the money out of the truck and the clown who started the train.”
Daly snuffed the cigarette he was smoking. “That doesn’t give us much to go on. The only thing we’re certain of so far is that three people are dead and you and Paquita are going to be charged with their murders. Think carefully, Mickey. Did either you or your wife notice anything about the two clowns you saw that might help us establish their identity?”
Laredo shook his head. “N-no. I can’t remember a thing. Wearing identical makeup and costumes, all joies look more or less alike.” He realized Paquita was trying to tell him something. “You saw something, sweetheart?” he asked her.
The girl pointed her finger at the wall and cocked her thumb, fired an imaginary pistol, reversed her position, staggered as if she’d been shot, then clapped one hand to her chest as she described a square in the air with the other.
“Thanks, honey,” Laredo smiled. He kissed his wife lightly, then turned back to Daly and DuBoise. “So much has happened, I forgot. There was one thing. Just before Jocko died and Mike Kelly started beating on me, I asked the old man if there was anything he could tell me that might help the police pick up the guy who’d shot him. And he said, ‘Yeah. Sure, boss. I thought he looked familiar. I make him now. It was the young clem.’”
“Who or what is a clem?” DuBoise asked.
“That one I know,” Daly said. “A clem is the term applied by circus and carnival people to a farmer or a towner. Or as Paquita described it — a square. But that in itself doesn’t tell us anything. Have you any idea whom the old man could have been referring to, Mickey?”
“Only one person. The punk who didn’t show up. The one who was supposed to have run the train.”
“And you say his name is Banks, Tommy Banks.”
“That’s the name he gave me for my records.”
“Have you his address?”
“Yes. He lives on Franklin Avenue, in North Hollywood.”
“Describe him.”
“Eighteen or nineteen. About my size. Light complexioned. Blond hair and wears it long. Thinks he’s hell with the high school girls and judging from the shadows under his eyes, he doesn’t do too badly.”