by Dell Shannon
Streets of Death
Dell Shannon
1976
Our Playwright may show
In some fifth act what this wild drama means
---The Play, Alfred, Lord Tennyson
ONE
MENDOZA CAME INT0 THE KITCHEN, hat in hand, and asked, "Feeling better, cara?" Mrs. MacTaggart was just starting on the breakfast dishes. Alison was hunched over a cup of coffee at the kitchen table, her red hair slightly tousled, still in her robe. She gave him a glance of burning resentment.
"Ah, she’ll be fine," said Mrs. MacTaggart.
"If I had ever," said Alison, "dreamed--hic--after I felt so fine all the time I was carrying the twins, that--hic--this time I’d develop morning sickness, I’d never have--damn--" She leaped up and fled precipitately for the bathroom at the end of the hall.
"Poor lamb," said Mrs. MacTaggart. "But she’s near three months along now, it should clear away in a bit."
"I certainly hope so," said Mendoza. "I’m beginning to feel like an outcast around here, Máiri." Mrs. MacTaggart laughed as he went out the back door.
The four cats were sensibly indoors this chill January morning, but the twins, now officially four, were tearing around the backyard with Cedric the Old English sheepdog galumphing after them. They both hung on to his collar helpfully as Mendoza went out the gate, and then hung over the fence to watch him back out the Ferrari. He waved back at them, thanking God absently for Máiri MacTaggart; Terry and Johnny were a lively pair these days, none the worse for their accidental kidnapping last August, and in her present state Alison wasn’t up to coping with them. He wasn’t worried about Alison; the doctor said she’d be fine once she got past the morning sickness. He hoped he wasn’t beginning to feel his age, with a forty-sixth birthday coming up, but he felt a little stale and tired as he slid down the winding road toward Hollywood Boulevard, thinking of the various business on hand at the Robbery-Homicide office of LAPD headquarters. The perennial violence, death, blood and guilt which had to be looked at and reduced to reports and filed away. Always more of it coming along, seemingly faster and more furious than ever. Of all the cases on hand right now, still being looked at or eventually to be filed in Pending, only two really interested him, and there didn’t seem to be much chance that either would be tidily cleared up soon. There was no handle at all on those queer rape-assaults, and as for the pretty boys--
Mendoza’s mouth tightened, thinking of the pretty boys. Those three he’d like to catch up to, but there wasn’t any handle there either.
For once he was early; it was five to eight when he walked into the office, and found Sergeant Lake talking to an agitated-looking citizen in the anteroom. In the communal sergeants’ office Hackett, Landers and Palliser were in; Wednesday was Higgins’ day off and the others would be drifting in. He went on into his office and found the report from the night watch centered on his desk. Lake followed him.
"Look, this guy was waiting when I got here," he said. "I don’t think it’s anything, but I suppose somebody’s got to listen to him."
"About what?"
"He says, about a murder going to be committed. I think he’s just got an imagination," said Lake.
"Shove him off on Art. You’d better check with the hospital and see if that Beaver woman can talk to us."
Mendoza picked up the report in one hand and his new cigarette lighter with the other, and Lake took a step back, eyeing it nervously.
"Shove who off on me?" Hackett came in, looming bulkily as usual, and added, "If you don’t set fire to the building with that flame-thrower you’ll at least singe your mustache off some day. Where Alison found that thing--"
Mendoza regarded it rather fondly; he liked gadgets. It had been a Christmas present from Alison; it was an oversize revolver with a gleaming pearl handle and a fearsome-looking attachment on the barrel which emitted a flame like an acetylene torch when the trigger was pulled. He pulled it now, the flame belched, and he lit a cigarette.
"Jimmy has a nut-case," he said. "But we have to listen to the citizens." Galeano and Conway came down the hall talking. Lake went back to the switchboard. Mendoza was glancing at the night report, and suddenly sat up and exclaimed, "¡Mil rayos. ;Es el colmo!"
"What’s up?"
"This damned--I’ll bet you, here they are again!" said Mendoza angrily, slapping Shogart’s report down on his desk. "Same M.O., same general area, and for God’s sake--I’d better check with the hospital--Jimmy!"
Hackett scanned the report rapidly, and his eyes turned cold. "Our pretty boys all right, a hundred to one."
Over the last two months, the trio had been described, well enough to mark them as the same, by seven senior citizens who had been attacked, mauled and robbed on the street. None of them had had much to be robbed of; the biggest haul the thugs had got had been seven bucks. Two of the victims were still in the hospital. All the attacks had been in a radius of eight blocks, from Temple Street up to Beverly, and from the partial descriptions the men at Robbery-Homicide had pieced together a picture of the same three louts. All young, probably under twenty, one with long blond hair--"real handsome," said three of the victims--tall and thin, and dressed in natty sports clothes: two others, not as tall, one heavier than the other, also dressed in flashy clothes--an oddity for the area. And for whatever reason or lack of reason, they had used the wanton violence on the old people they had jumped: kicking, gouging, and clubbing. To date there had been four women, the youngest seventy, and three men, all over eighty: old people living little quiet lives in the inner city, on pensions, on Social Security, all but one of them living alone in tiny apartments, rented rooms.
And now this report, devoid of description, but Hackett would take a bet it was the eighth victim: found on the street by a Traffic unit at nine-twenty, just up from the Union Station behind the church at the Plaza, an elderly man in clerical clothes, no I.D., apparently beaten. He was in Central Receiving.
Mendoza was on the phone, looking grim. Sergeant Lake came in again and said plaintively, "Look, this guy is about to have kittens."
"All right, all right, I’ll talk to him," said Hackett.
Mendoza put down the phone and stood up abruptly, yanking down his cuffs. As usual he was dapperly dressed, in dark-gray Dacron, snowy shirt, a discreet dark tie. He said, "Well, the hospital’s found out who he is--he came to a while ago. It’s Father O’Brien from the Mission Church."
"I will be damned," said Hackett.
"No, they will be," said Mendoza. "By the good God, Art, I’d like to get this unholy trio. I’m going over to see if he can give us anything."
"They wouldn’t have got much from him either, I wouldn’t think."
"They don’t seem to care. You go talk to the nut. And somebody’ll have to cover that Roundtree inquest." Mendoza took up his hat.
In the corridor, Henry Glasser was talking earnestly to their policewoman Wanda Larsen; Jason Grace had just come in. Palliser was on the phone in the other office, Galeano swearing as he typed a report, Conway and Landers arguing about something. The switchboard was keeping Lake busy. Another day was under way for the Robbery-Homicide office, and it looked as if it was to be the usual kind of day.
Hackett watched Mendoza out, and massaged his jaw, grinning a little to himself, humorlessly. Mendoza was as touchy as the devil about emotions, and nobody in the office made any cracks about his going back to church after many years as the professed agnostic; for some reason the pretty boys had got under Mendoza’s skin anyway, but now that they’d jumped a priest he was really annoyed. It would be nice to get hold of some tangible lead to those boys, but Hackett didn’t really hope for one.
He put the report on
Mendoza’s desk and went out to look at Jimmy’s nut-case. As he came into the anteroom he ran into Lieutenant Carey, who had a manila envelope in one hand and was looking harassed.
"If you’ve got anything for us, go away. We’ve got enough to do already."
"I can’t help it," said Carey. "It’s a hundred percent sure this guy is dead. It’s a homicide if not Murder One, so it’s your business. I’ve got all these statements--"
"Tell it to Galeano or Landers," said Hackett resignedly.
"This is Sergeant Hackett, Mr. Yeager," Lake was saying. "You just tell your story to him."
"Yeah, yeah, I got to tell somebody, you got to do something about it, I been up half the night worrying and I said to myself, I got to tell the cops, we got to do something, see, and so I came--"
"Just come in here and sit down, Mr. Yeager," said Hackett soothingly. Yeager might be a nut at that. He was a scrawny middle-aged man in a shabby brown suit; he had a prominent Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down as he talked, and bulging pale-blue eyes, and a high reedy voice. Hackett settled him in the chair beside his desk and prepared to listen. There were other things he could be doing. That Beaver woman who’d been assaulted and raped ought to be able to answer questions sometime today; there was that inquest--a straightforward suicide; there’d been other things on the night-watch report, by the length of it, and without much doubt something new would show up today. But cops got paid by taxpayers, and had to listen to them when they came in. "What’s it all about, Mr. Yeager?" he asked.
"Well, it’s about a murder," said Yeager nervously. "I didn’t hardly know what to do, but my God, I got to do something--I been worried to death--I didn’t hardly believe it but I-- Listen, I don’t like the guy, he’s given me a hard time, and his ma too, always complainin’ about the furnace makin’ noise and the faucets drip and like that, but my God, I never thought he’d do a thing like that! A murder!"
"Now slow down and let’s have it from the beginning," said Hackett patiently. "What murder?"
"His own ma, for God’s sake! They live together, see, and I’m the manager of the apartment. This lady, Mis’ Lampert, she’s a widow, no other kids, and he’s a young guy but he don’t work, she does. At a dress shop someplace. And he’s got a girl friend comes to see him afternoons, and I heard ’em talk about killing the old lady to get her money." Yeager paused, breathing hard.
"Heard them? How? Where were they?"
"Uh--in the apartment," said Yeager uneasily. "Uh--the door was kind of open and I was fixing the window in the ha1l."
Hackett sat back and his chair creaked. "Well, now, people do some funny things, Mr. Yeager, but it’s a little hard to believe this pair would go discussing a murder with the door open and other people around. Are you sure you didn’t just misunderstand something they said?"
"No, I didn’t! They was talking about killing her!" said Yeager excitedly. "Listen, you got to do something about it--"
Hackett sighed. Across the room he saw Carey gesticulating at Galeano and Conway, and Palliser was still on the phone. Landers was on the way out, and Jason Grace typing a report. "Now, Mr. Yeager--"
* * *
Mendoza bent over the hospital bed. "He’s only been conscious the once," said the nurse. "It’s a bad concussion, they’d have operated already except for his heart. When we got in touch with his own doctor--"
"Can you hear me, Father? Can you try to tell us who did this?" Three mornings ago, Mendoza had listened to the old priest say Mass at the little church in the old Plaza: a very traditional Mass, nothing new and progressive about Father Joseph Patrick O’Brien. He was probably in his eighties: a stocky, round little man with a broad snub-nosed Irish face, scanty hair and eyebrows. He lay on his back, his breathing slow and irregular, and Mendoza straightened up.
"The doctors don’t think there’s a good chance," said the nurse in a troubled tone. She was slim and black and rather pretty. "It’s just terrible what goes on, a priest, and such an old man--just terrible."
Unexpectedly the man in the bed opened his eyes and stared up at them, moving his head slightly. A frown of pain creased his forehead and the nurse moved instinctively to quiet him.
"Can you hear me, Father? Can you tell me anything about who attacked you?"
The faded blue eyes fixed on Mendoza’s face. "I--know you," the old priest whispered faintly. "Of course. I was--just about--get in the car. Who--who? Young--thugs. Three, I think--the one blond--and a loud plaid jacket--"
Mendoza sighed. "All right, that’s enough for now, Father."
One veined hand crept up to his chest, and the priest went on, "My crucifix. All they got--no money--it was dark--but there were three of them. Tore my crucifix off--" His eyes shut again and he relaxed limply.
"Poor old man," said the nurse.
That was about all they’d get, thought Mendoza, but so far as it went it showed the pattern. Only what had O’Brien been doing down there at that time of night? Not that it mattered. There was a little pattern to this. The other seven all lived in the general area; most of them had been on their way home, at reasonably early hours--seven, eight, the latest attack had been at nine-thirty. By the little they got from the victims, it looked like the random thing--the pretty boys were jumping any senior citizen they came across when the urge hit them: the old, lame, frail senior citizens who wouldn’t fight back.
The rest of them had been in that area unavoidably, as residents; how had the priest happened to be there? Mendoza was aware that the priests who served the little church, nearly the oldest building in the city, no longer had quarters there. In any case, somebody ought to be told about O’Brien.
He drove down to the old Plaza, found the church open, and went in. The little place was dim as a cavern, only the flickering light at the altar moving, and the statues along the walls seemed to loom taller than usual. A man was speaking somewhere; following the voice, Mendoza came to a tiny robing room past the confessional box, and unexpectedly into a very small square room furnished as an office, with desk and swivel chair. A tall thin young man in clerical dress was talking on the phone, looked at Mendoza in surprise, and at the offered badge with consternation.
"I’m afraid I have some bad news for you." Mendoza had seen him once or twice, the assistant priest here.
"About Father O’Brien--we knew something had happened, I was just calling the police again. When he didn’t come home last night--" He listened to what Mendoza had to tell him, obviously distressed, and said, "I must go to him. If he’s as bad as you say--" But he answered questions as they went up to the church door. He and O’Brien both had living quarters in the residence attached to the much larger Church of the Blessed Sacrament in Hollywood. O’Brien sometimes stayed on down here, in his little office, to write letters, as apparently he had last night. He would have been driving one of the cars belonging to the church, a ten-year-old Pontiac. The car, in fact, was here--"I looked for it right away, we were afraid he’d had another heart attack when we realized he hadn’t come home, and I came down at once--it’s right where he always parked, behind the church."
"Yes, he said he was on his way to it," said Mendoza. No keys on him; the S.l.D. boys could have a look, but it was a long chance anything useful would show up. "Evidently he hadn’t any money on him; the only thing they got was his crucifix."
The priest stopped and stared at him, one hand on the church door. "His crucifix--but that might give you some kind of clue, Lieutenant--that is, if it turned up in a pawnshop or somewhere. It’s a very valuable antique--sterling silver set with a piece of Connemara marble. It was a gift from his old parish priest when he entered the seminary, and I believe it’s several hundred years old. Any of us could identify it at once, if it should turn up anywhere."
Mendoza thanked him and watched him hurry up the street to a newish Ford. Let the S.I.D. boys come and go over the Pontiac for possible physical evidence, in case O’Brien had been jumped in or near it: a very small chance there’d be
anything. Put out a description of the crucifix to the pawnshops, just in case.
He got into the big black Ferrari and lit a cigarette, thrusting the key into the ignition; his eyes were cold. Hackett was quite right: the pretty boys had got under Mendoza’s skin. It was reasonless, in a way: it was only that much more of the sordid, wanton violence that stalked any big city in this year of grace, which any cop learned to live with. It wasn’t a dramatic, important piece of crime, the kind that would get written up in the case-history books. The victims weren’t good-looking or very interesting or important people. The louts, when they caught up to them--as by God they would, if the luck ran their way--probably would turn out to be two-bit thugs, not very interesting or important either, just thugs with low I.Q.’s.
But the pretty boys had touched Mendoza on the raw--Mendoza who had been looking at the blood and violence and death for nearly twenty-six years--because in a sense they were a stark symbol for all of it: all the incredibly brutal bloody happenstance of crime in the city. He’d like to catch up to them. He tossed the cigarette out the window, laughed, and said to himself, "¿Pues qué?" Catch up to them, and then see one of the softheaded judges hand them a six-month sentence with time off for good behavior. He often wondered why he stayed on at this job.
* * *
Nick Galeano listened to what Carey had to say a little sleepily. He’d been on night watch for over two years, and his metabolism or something wasn’t yet used to the different hours and sleeping at night. He was night-people anyway and wasn’t operating on all cylinders until past noon. In a way he was glad of the change; there was usually more action on day watch, and more men to work with. He’d only met Lieutenant Carey of Missing Persons a few times before. Carey was a serious, snub-nosed, stocky fellow who wore a perennially morose expression: possibly the result these days of all the myriad missing juveniles he had to look for, thought Galeano, yawning. But what he’d brought to Robbery-Homicide sounded more interesting and definitely offbeat.