Streets of Death - Dell Shannon

by Dell Shannon

  Mendoza was slightly taken aback. Cigarette halfway to his mouth, he said, "Why do you say that?"

  "Oh, well--she’s quiet like I said, but once we took a break together, and I forget what brought it up, somebody’s birthday I think, but she got to talking about Germany, and her family--someplace they’d gone on a picnic for her sister’s birthday, in the country, and she was all different, sort of gay and laughing hard. She’d never talked about her family to me before. I don’t know what you’re thinking about her, but honestly she’s so straitlaced, I wouldn’t think--"

  "Cops don’t tell what they think," said Mendoza absently. The other two waitresses here worked different hours, didn’t know Marta as well even as these two had, and Carey hadn’t got anything out of them. Mendoza didn’t ask to talk to Marta; yesterday, with Carey’s report in his mind, he’d thought he had read her, and been amused at Nick Galeano. Now he took the Ferrari up Vermont Avenue to the office of Dr. Sylvester Toussaint, and used the badge to pull rank again.

  Dr. Toussaint, annoyed at having routine interrupted, answered questions briefly. "I hadn’t seen Fleming in sometime, there was nothing I could do for him after all. Nothing anybody could do, poor devil. He was referred to me by the specialist in therapy at the General--he hadn’t had a regular physician, and it was just to keep an eye on him generally. Apart from the paralysis--the spine was almost completely severed--he seems to have made a good adjustment--ah, that is, physically. Quite a healthy specimen. Did I understand you to say he’s disappeared? I don’t see how--"

  "Neither do we. He could manipulate the wheelchair by himself?"

  "Oh, yes. The couple of times his wife brought him in here--as is often the case, he was developing extra strength in his arms. But," said the doctor, "but how on earth--"

  "His wife thinks he’s committed suicide. You said, the couple of times he was in. Not regularly? Not in how long?"

  "I’d have to look at his file. Not for four or five months, I’d say. I told them there was nothing to be done, and there seemed to be some financial difficulty--there was no insurance. I told her there was no necessity for me to see him on a regular basis."

  "You’re an honest man, Doctor," said Mendoza dryly. "What did you think of her, by the way?"

  Toussaint took off his glasses and polished them with his handkerchief. "Mrs. Fleming? She seems like a nice young woman--not much to say for herself. She took good care of him, I will say--he was clean and neat."

  "Did he ever seem suicidal to you?"

  Toussaint put his glasses back on. He was looking very interested now. "That’s a difficult thing to say about anybody, Lieutenant. But the last time I saw him--well, he felt resentful, which I suppose we can both understand. A man his age, a hopeless invalid. He said to me, he could live to be eighty, and it wasn’t fair to his wife. He’d be better off to cut his throat and save everybody the trouble, he said."

  Mendoza cocked his head at him. "He said it just like that--cut his throat? I see. Interesante."

  "But evidently he didn’t," said the doctor. "How could he have disappeared?"

  Mendoza got up and yanked down his cuffs. "Simpler if he had cut his throat. And if he thought of suicide in those terms, and really wanted to--but if I’ve learned one thing at this job, Doctor, it’s that you never can tell what people will do. As I suppose you have, too. Thanks so . much." He left the doctor looking very curious, and ambled slowly back downtown in traffic a little heavier than usual, in the gray mist.

  Before he got off the freeway it began to rain again in a hesitant way, short of storm but getting everything very wet. The little side street down from Wilshire was empty, only an occasional car parked along the one side where parking was legal. He was on the wrong side, and had to back and fill around four times to turn the Ferrari’s length. He walked across the street and down the drive of the apartment house. All the garages but one were open and empty; the exception was the one at the left end, and he went around to peer into the little window. Inside was a middle-aged tan Dodge sedan, and by Carey’s report that would be the car owned by Edwin Fleming, the car too expensive to run, which they’d been going to sell. There’d be some red tape to that now, without his signature.

  He wondered suddenly if she had a driver’s license. How had she got him to the doctor’s office?

  He went back up the drive and into the building. It was as silent as it had been yesterday, everybody out at work. Anything could have gone on here, damn it, and nobody been the wiser. The Archangel Gabriel could have swooped down and carried Fleming off, with no witnesses. More realistically, how easy it would have been for the boyfriend--Rappaport or somebody else--to have walked in, got into the apartment by the simple expedient of ringing the bell, and knocked Fleming out.

  "¿De veras?" said Mendoza to himself. But why in hell’s name take him away? If that had been the general plan, to fake a suicide, easy enough to slash Edwin’s throat, cut his wrists, leave the knife there with his prints on it, and walk quietly off. There was a good solid suicide, with a reasonable motive behind it, and likely nobody would have asked questions.

  Mendoza was annoyed. Untidiness always annoyed him, and the strange case of Edwin Fleming was very untidy.

  He climbed another flight of stairs and paused outside the right-hand door. Beyond it Mr. Offerdahl was feeling happy. Filtered through whiskey, the sound of singing emerged into the hall; Mr. Offerdahl was forever blowing bubbles.

  * * *

  The new call went down just after Mendoza left the office, and Hackett and Higgins went out to look at it. Over the years, they had gone together to look at a number of things like it, not that that reconciled them to the necessity; but in the last couple of years there seemed to be more and more such things to go and look at.

  "Mr. Weinstein found her and called in," said the uniformed man waiting by the squad car. "It’s a mess. He’s got the pawnshop next door, knew her. Says her name’s Mrs. Ruth Faber. I guess it must have happened last night."

  They went in to look. This was a side street off Olympic, still downtown but the kind of half-and-half neighborhood old sections of big cities sprout. There was an access alley between two rows of old two-story buildings here, the first floors business places, old apartments above. This place was a little grocery store. There was a sign over the door that had been there a long time, FAER'S MARKET. Just one big room inside, a small refrigerator case, three walls of shelves with cans and packages, a wooden counter with an old-fashioned cash register, a Coke machine. In the middle of the uncarpeted pine floor lay the body of an old lady, horridly dead. There was blood all around and on her, and they couldn’t tell what she’d looked like in life because her face had been beaten or kicked in. She was a thin old lady, wearing a cotton housedress, and one black felt slipper had fallen off, lay on a pair of smashed steel spectacles five feet from the body.

  "What a mess," said Higgins. "Stop where you are, Art, or the lab boys’ll chew you out. They’ll have a field day here." There wasn’t anything they could do until the lab men had processed the place for physical evidence, so they called S.I.D. and went to talk to Weinstein, who was waiting at the curb with the Traffic man.

  "Yi," he said, "they hire you plainclothes fellows by the yard?" He looked at the two big men with sorrowful interest. He was a squat, square man with a dark good-humored ugly face and very bright black eyes. "This is just a terrible thing. The things that go on nowadays-- You read about it, it don’t touch you till it happens to somebody you know. What gets me, being in business, it used to be the places got held up, robbed, were places where anybody’d know there’d be loot--jewelry stores, banks, millionaires’ houses--you know? These days, any place. Half these hoods are high on something, don’t know what the hell they’re doing."

  "What can you tell us about this, Mr. Weinstein?" asked Hackett. "You knew her?"

  "Nothing much I can tell. That poor old lady, Mrs. Faber, I knew her since I been in business here, that’s thirty years. She a
nd her husband had that little market there maybe forty years, longer. She always ran it, and it was ridiculous she still did. I told her so. She made nothing on it, if she cleared fifty a month that’d be about it, people have cars now, go to the supermarkets. She didn’t need to, she had her husband’s pension from the railroad--he’s been gone ten, twelve years. You ask me, it was habit--she didn’t know how to stop. She lived in the apartment upstairs, and she must’ve been eighty if she was a day. The place was always open when I came to open up mornings, and I’d look in, say good morning. You could say I kind of kept an eye on her--old like she was, she could have a stroke, heart attack, and she hadn’t any family at all. So, today"--he gestured eloquent1y--"I look in, there she is. My God. The poor old soul, these thugs around. At least, for what it’s worth, they didn’t get much, I hope."

  "How’s that'?" asked Higgins.

  "Yi, these old ladies," said Weinstein. "She was old-fashioned, kept her business to herself, which is O.K., but she’d got to know me all this time, that I’m O.K. too, and about six months ago she gives me nearly a heart attack myself. I go in to get a Coke. It was just after that big bank job uptown, and I mentioned it, and she says she never put any trust in banks, keeps her money where she can lay her hands on it. I had a fit, I talked to her like a brother. She was a close old lady, didn’t spend much on herself, and God knows what she mighta had there, saved up fifty years, in a drawer or a closet shelf or somewhere. She finally listened to me and got a lock-box at the bank, I know that, she told me about it."

  "You don’t say," said Hackett, exchanging a glance with Higgins. The mobile lab truck slid to the curb behind the squad car. "Well, we’ll ask you to make a statement later, Mr. Weinstein."

  "Whatever I can do, gents." He turned away to the little pawnshop across the alley from the market. "Maybe the word hadn’t got round," said Higgins, watching Marx and Horder unload equipment from the truck.

  "Or maybe," said Hackett, "it was just what the man said--a hood high on something who didn’t know what he was doing. Bears the general resemblance to our pretty boys, only they’ve been grabbing them off the street. And this kind of violence is not so unusual now." It was to be hoped the hood had left some clues behind for the lab.

  * * *

  Galeano was just as glad it was Rich Conway’s day off. He expected Rich wouldn’t know when to stop kidding him about that blonde. It was like a lot of things in life, he thought: it came back to people, not facts. Maybe people versus facts. Damn it, he thought, when you heard a story like that, you said fishy, you said the gall, but meeting that girl--

  As he rode up in the elevator, it came to him more clearly just why she’d made an impression on him, and it was a funny word to use: dignity. And maybe that was why Carey and Conway and, for God’s sake, Mendoza, had reacted the way they had. If she’d gone all to pieces, nobody would have thought twice about it, just about the mystery . . . though, of course, anything happened to a husband you automatically looked at the wife, and vice versa . . . but, maybe on account of her different upbringing or something, Marta had that dignity, didn’t go parading her feelings in public, and the cynics naturally thought she hadn’t any.

  Damn it, I’1l believe her, thought Galeano. That it happened just that way: she’d come home and he was gone. But how and where? And why? The thing didn’t make any sense.

  Say he had been murdered by somebody else, there was no earthly reason to conceal the body, was there? But ruminating on it, Galeano had come up with a couple of ideas which might open the case wider. Carey had been thinking just about Marta, and the hypothetical boyfriend; but what about Edwin? There he was all day in his wheelchair, nothing to do. Maybe he listened to the radio, watched TV some, but not all day. They’d only moved to that place a couple of months ago. It could be that he’d spent some time on the phone, talking to old friends where they used to live in Hollywood; they had had friends there. Carey hadn’t located all of them to talk to. It could be, thought Galeano vaguely, that somebody who hadn’t heard about this could give them some ideas about Edwin. Anyway, they ought to chase down everybody who knew the Flemings.

  Mendoza had gone out somewhere, and Lake was hunched over one of his eternal books about dieting. Galeano slid into Mendoza’s office and found the manila envelope with Carey’s notes, rummaged through it and took down addresses. People named Frost, Cadby, Prescott, Deal, up in Hollywood: Cahuenga Boulevard, Berendo, Las Palmas.

  He drew a blank at the Cahuenga Boulevard apartment; a neighbor just going out told him that Mr. and Mrs. Cadby both worked. He drove down to Berendo. This was the place the Flemings had been living before his accident: one of the old Hollywood streets getting refurbished these days, old houses torn down to make way for new apartments. It was a new, brightly painted two-story building with balconies on the upper floor units, a small blue pool in a side yard, patio tables. The Prescotts lived upstairs at the back; he rang the bell and waited.

  The girl who opened the door was a slim leggy brunette in slacks and turtleneck sweater. "Yes?" She looked at the badge in his hand with surprise.

  He said economically he’d like to ask a few questions about the Flemings--people who used to live here. "You knew them?"

  "Why, yes. What’s the matter, they’re not in any trouble, are they? Pat, it’s a cop about Marta and Ed. This is Mrs. Frost, er--"

  "Galeano."

  "Mr. Galeano. I’m Marion Prescott. Pat knew them too. But what is the matter? What do you want to know?"

  The other girl was smaller, blonde, with a rather scraggly figure. Galeano told them that Fleming was missing and inquiries were being made. "Missing!" said Marion Prescott. "How could he be missing? He couldn’t just walk away, a man in a wheelchair. That poor man! It made us all feel guilty, for--"

  "For what?" asked Galeano as she stopped.

  "Oh, heavens, you’d better come in," she said. "It’s cold with the door open. Pat and I were just having some coffee, would you like some? I’ll get you a cup, sit down."

  "I can’t get over it," said Pat Frost with avid interest. "You mean he’s just disappeared? How funny. It’s not as if he had any imagination?

  "How do you mean?" asked Galeano.

  "Oh, you know, like all those stories with ingenious plots, people vanishing and then turning out to be the mail carrier," she said vaguely. Mrs. Prescott came back and handed Galeano a cup of coffee.

  "There’s cream and sugar on the coffee table. Heavens, I suppose we’d better tell you whatever you want to know. Not that we knew them well, and we couldn’t tell you anything about them since they moved away. It was just, we all lived here, and none of us was working--the wives, I mean--we’d have morning coffee and so on. Marta--she’s not an easy person to know, would you say, Pat?"

  "What did you mean about feeling guilty, Mrs. Prescott?"

  "Oh--" She flushed. "You’ll think we’re a lot of snobs. Ed’s a nice fellow, but, well, let’s face it, he hasn’t much education, many interests outside baseball and the corniest shows on TV. I don’t mean the rest of us are intellectuals, for heaven’s sake, but my husband’s a broker and Pat’s is a therapist at the Cedars, and the few times we all got together for a potluck supper by the pool, you could see Ed was out of his depth, he just didn’t have anything to talk about to the men. Now Marta’s very well educated, in that very correct German way, I’d say, and I could see she was embarrassed for him. And then when he had that accident, and was paralyzed--"

  "Didn’t he have some kind of pension or disability pay or something?" asked Pat Frost; her nose twitched with curiosity just the way Mendoza’s did, Galeano noticed. "We wondered, but she never said a word, and then when they moved--he must have had, hadn’t he? I mean, these days everybody--I know there was a fuss, the man he was working for claimed it was Ed’s own fault, but we did hear he had to pay for the hospital--"

  Marta not parading her troubles in public, that just confirmed his convictions. "I’m afraid I couldn’t say about that. Have
any of you been in touch with Fleming since they moved?"

  "Heavens, no," said Marion Prescott. "It was just proximity, you could say. We hadn’t much in common. As I say, Marta’s difficult to know. Maybe the foreign upbringing, but she’s so formal--well, I’ll say one thing, I think she was homesick, she missed her family, she was always writing to them. I don’t think she’d made any close friends here, I gather they’d moved around a good deal since Ed was out of the service."

  "And I’ll tell you something else," said Pat Frost, her eyes bright with interest in gossip. "And that is, Marta wasn’t in love with Ed and never had been. I got the idea she just married him to get here and have more money, a better life. Well, she got disappointed there, Ed ending up in a wheelchair." She laughed.

  Galeano looked at her with dislike, and decided the laugh was malicious. "You can’t say that for certain, Mrs. Frost."

  "Well, girls do know girls, don’t we, Marion?"

  "She was awfully broken up about the baby," said Marion hastily. "A darling little girl, she was named Elisa for Marta’s sister."

  "Have either of you seen her since they moved? Has she contacted either of you?" And why would she, these two, lightminded women, what had they in common? "Neither of your husbands been in touch with Fleming?"

  "I told you, there’d be no reason," said Marion. "We were sorry--when that happened to him--but that’s all there was to it. I don’t even know where they moved."

  "I see,” said Galeano, and stood up.

  "Do the police think Marta had something to do with Ed’s disappearing?" Pat Frost’s eyes were uncomfortably sharp. "He is--was--a lot of care, I suppose. My goodness, Marion! If she did something--my goodness! But I wouldn’t be surprised, is all I can say."

  "That’s slander, Mrs. Frost," said Galeano mildly.

  "Don’t tell me Marta’s corrupted our cops, Mr. Ga1eano," she said sweetly.

  Marion Prescott said, "Yes, your Jack did rather fall for her, didn’t he, dear? Until you hauled him back into line."