Streets of Death - Dell Shannon

by Dell Shannon

  "What’s that about?" asked Mendoza.

  "Nothing," said Hackett. "Makes you wonder about Freud. He said he didn’t like these people, and I suppose a confirmed Freudian would say he just wants to get them in trouble. These Lamperts. I went and looked around a little, but there’s nothing to it. Well, one like that Roy Titus might go discussing a projected murder with the door open, but this Lampert doesn’t seem to be working regular but seems to be on perfectly good terms with his mother-- looks like a weak sister to me. I just can’t see--I hope Yeager isn’t going to be a nuisance."

  Mendoza went on into his office. Hackett collected Higgins when he came in and they went up to the jail to follow up on Titus. Palliser roped Conway in with Landers to get back at the legwork on Sandra. Galeano, Grace and Glasser were still there when Scarne came in with some S.I.D. reports, and the autopsies came up from Bainbridge’s office at the same time.

  "So let’s see what we’ve got, boys," said Mendoza. He glanced over the autopsies first. "There you are, the girl was raped and strangled. Short and sweet. Not, obviously, where she was found." He handed the report to Palliser, who’d just been leaving when Scarne came in. "What did the lab get on her clothes and so on? ¡Condenación! Those prints on the suitcase belong to Stephanie Peacock. Very helpful. And that is that. Nada absolutamente .... Buford. Well, that gives us a little, not much. He died of a skull fracture. The lab found blood and hair on the leg of a chair in the house, hair his, blood his type. Inference, there was a scuffle with somebody and he was knocked down and cracked his skull."

  "The door wasn’t forced," said Grace. "He must have let the somebody in."

  "So it was somebody he knew."

  "Somebody he’d just had a run-in with at that bar, and the bartender knew it, but why the hell shouldn’t he tell us? Unless--" Grace paused, looking thoughtful. "Well, I’d like to know more about him, that’s all."

  "Not even any surprises about the time of death. Both Tuesday night. Sandra between seven and ten, Buford between ten and midnight." Mendoza slapped the reports down. "Are you sure enough about that Rank to ask for a search warrant on the house, John?"

  "No," said Palliser. "It’s fifty-fifty. He could be X, but we’d never pin it down. If that plane case was there, it isn’t now. But I get the impression--just the impression--that his mother’s an honest woman, and she says he doesn’t have a key to the house. It’s a double deadbolt. We can’t really rely on Stephanie’s identification, anyway. I think we do it from scratch, look at men with the right records and weed ’em out by the general description. The right one might fall apart."

  Mendoza shrugged. "There’s not much routine to do on Buford, when the lab didn’t turn anything else. And nothing says it had anything to do with that bar, Jase."

  "No," admitted Grace. "But I’d like to talk to some of the people there that night, hang around and meet some of the regulars there. Only of course the owner knows me as a cop. It’s a pity Tom was with me--he could wander in all innocent, nobody ever takes him for a cop."

  "Well--¡vamos!" said Mendoza. "I’ve got a little idea myself. Oh, that Chard--the anonymous call. I don’t suppose there’s anything in it, but somebody might ask his wife if he’d had any trouble with anyone lately. He was no loss, however he got taken off."

  He sat there for a minute when the men had gone, his mind wandering over Fleming, over the rapes, over the pretty boys. Fleming--there wasn’t anything routine could do there. Carey had done it. There’d been a search for a block around, not that there’d be many places in that bare city block where a man could be hidden away, and Fleming couldn’t have crawled much farther. Where the hell was the man'?

  The rapes. Very queer. It would do no harm to ask if somebody at Juvenile had any ideas.

  The pretty boys-- He roused himself, told Farrell to get him the Mission Church, and found the younger priest there. There would be a requiem Mass for Father O’Brien on Monday morning at ten o’clock.

  He got up and said to Farrell, "I’ll be over in Juvenile if anybody wants me."

  * * *

  Roy Titus, aggrieved and surprised at having been dropped on so quick, parted with the names of his two pals without much persuasion--Floyd Sporler and Bob Bovers. They were both in Records and Sporler was also still on parole, which made the whole caper all the more stupid. Hackett and Higgins tried Sporler's address first, and found both of them there, trying to get Titus on the phone. They were just as surprised as he’d been, and asked how the cops had found out it was them.

  "You ever read detective stories, George?" asked Hackett as they came out of the jail.

  "Seldom."

  "Fairy tales," said Hackett. "The cunning intellectual criminals. I’ve never run across one yet."

  They stopped for lunch at Federico’s and went back to the office. Wanda Larsen was on her way out. She eyed Hackett’s notebook and said firmly she was busy, it was her week to qualify at the range. "I’m supposed to be a police officer, not just your secretary, boys."

  "So I’ll toss you for who types the report," said Higgins to Hackett, and won the throw. But as Hackett stripped off his jacket and sat down, Duke came in with a fat manila envelope.

  "Oh, good, I caught you. Understand you were out on this. We’re still looking at some of the stuff there, blood types and so on, but I thought you’d like to see this." He opened the manila envelope and spread out a sheaf of glossy black and white 8 by 10’s.

  Hackett and Higgins looked at them without comment, the mercilessly clear pictures of the carnage worked on the old lady, her place in life. The twisted frail old body was frozen by the camera, its grotesquely smashed-in face, the blood, the bruises, the torn clothes. The little grocery store had been ransacked, cans and packages thrown down from shelves, the cash register opened, but the havoc there was nothing compared to that in the apartment upstairs. They’d seen all this yesterday, after the lab men had been through it; they looked at it again, in the photographs which were somehow worse to look at--a curious effect of timeless photography. The tiny living room with its ancient flowered rug, fat old furniture: the smaller bedroom with its sagging double bed, skimpy carpet, high chest of drawers and chair in golden oak--it had all been ruthlessly torn apart, drawers flung out, upholstered furniture slashed to ribbons, rugs pulled up, the mattress crisscrossed with knife-cuts and off the bed.

  "Hunting for the loot, we said at the time," said Higgins. "And it’s a toss-up whether it was somebody who knew her reputation--if that was generally known--for keeping cash around, or just somebody picking her at random. And no way to guess what he got or didn’t."

  "No," said Duke, "but there are points. For one thing, you didn’t see the body near to--being good little boys, keeping clear not to spoil evidence for us eagle-eyed scientific types. It was pretty clear she hadn’t been dead long when Weinstein found her. The blood was hardly dry. I think she’d just come down to open the store--he said she was usually open by seven-thirty--she was dressed, you notice. And a customer walked in early. Sorry, we didn’t pick up any useful latents--the ones on the register too smudged to be any good. But that says to me, when it happened at that time, the odds are it was somebody who’d been living or staying right around that neighborhood, recently. And in the midst of all that mess, there was this."

  His blunt forefinger came down on one photograph, of the front part of the store. Just beside the front door, a small crumpled object lay on the floor. He removed that photograph and substituted a close-up. The object now showed as a crumpled empty package that had once held cigarettes--Camels.

  "Big deal," said Hackett.

  "Oh, but you haven’t seen this," said Duke. He pulled out another close-up. This one looked as if it had been made under a microscope: the finest details of the little package showed up clear and clean. They could see where it had been torn open from one end across the top, and the blue seal or part of it left, and another seal superimposed.

  "By God!" said Higgins. "By God--eagle-eyed
, you’re damn right."

  The little seal, torn across, still showed part of a stamp with black letters. PDL TN px.

  "That’s beautiful, Duke," said Hackett. "Pendleton Air Force Base PX. It can’t be anything else."

  "Narrows it down to whatever personnel has access to the post exchange and wasn’t there yesterday morning," said Higgins. "Or come to think, was this thing here when he walked in? What says he dropped it?"

  "Don’t nitpick, George," said Hackett. "I like it. It’s a damned good lead if you ask me. And it makes a picture-- him tearing the place to pieces hunting for the loot, after he’d killed her, and then--whatever he got or didn’t get--just as he walked out, lighting the last cigarette in the package. That’s nice work, Duke."

  "I thought you’d like it," said Duke complacently.

  * * *

  "It just occurred to me," said Mendoza to Captain Loomis of Juvenile Division, "on these rape cases we’ve got--the description the women gave us, just a kid. About fifteen. He won’t be in any records complete with mug-shot at that age, but if he’s out on this caper that young, it could be he’d given the warning rattle some way before and got into your records."

  "That’s the hell of a thing," said Loomis. "Rape, at that age? Well, it does happen. We get ’em in here at four and five, budding pros at burglary and you name it--but we can’t take pictures either, Mendoza. These days, we’re just a sociological counseling service. Let’s hear that description again. Well, it doesn’t ring a bell with me, but let’s ask Melinda and Betty." He opened the office door and beckoned. "Both damn good officers, and they’ve been here six-seven years, they might have some idea."

  Melinda and Betty, both trim in uniform, were respectively black and white, and efficient. They listened to the description, consulted with each other, and Melinda asked, "If he has been in trouble before, Lieutenant, would you have any idea what kind?"

  "Not a clue. I only thought he might have been in little trouble before he graduated to big."

  "Peter Ricksey?" said Betty to Melinda. "He’d be about fifteen, and he’s baby-faced. The last time we had him in was eighteen months ago, for beating up the other kids for their lunch money. He’d fit the description."

  "He doesn’t sound like the nice polite youngster our victims say he is," Mendoza said with a grin. "Could he act it?"

  Betty laughed. "I wouldn’t think so. He’s completely illiterate, and not very polite by nature. I just can’t think of any boy to fit that description, Lieutenant."

  "It was just an idea. For all we know, he’s never so much as stolen a nickel from Mama’s purse," said Mendoza. "But you can see, there’s no way to look for him, damn it. Well, thanks anyway."

  * * *

  Palliser, Conway and Landers came up with nine men out of Records to hunt for, by a process of weeding out the ones with suggestive records who lived or had lived on the Central beat and looked something like the Harry Stephanie had described. They went out looking for them, without any conspicuous success.

  Hackett got on the phone to Pendleton Air Force Base, and a cooperative sergeant began feeding him long lists of base personnel, military, who had been on leave or otherwise off base yesterday. It was a frighteningly long list. And of course the nonmilitary personnel resident there or having business there could patronize the PX too. Hackett I began to feel less enthusiastic about that little clue.

  Altogether, Saturday was an unproductive day.

  * * *

  Saturday night was always busy for Traffic, sometimes for the night watch at Robbery-Homicide; it varied. Tonight they didn’t get a call for some time, and Shogart amused himself by listening to the Traffic calls--drunk drivers, drunks on the street, speeders, accidents, one high-speed pursuit.

  "Makes you feel kind of safe here, out of all that mayhem," said Schenke, and the desk buzzed them. There was a body reported by Traffic.

  Piggott went out on it with Shogart. It was an all-night restaurant on Alvarado, a chain place with a good reputation. The black and white was at the curb, and inside they found Patrolman Bill Moss and some excited, bewildered people. It was just nine-thirty, the place wasn’t crowded, but the short-order cook and two busboys had come out to add to the crowd.

  "But, my God, he’s just a young guy! It could’ve been a heart attack, anybody can have one, but my God--"

  "The night manager, Fred Mallow," said Moss. "He can identify him."

  "Identify him!" Mallow was tall and thin, flapping his arms all around. "His name’s Donald Ames, he’s only twenty-three, twenty-four, he works at the tow service down the street, always comes in here middle of the evening for a sandwich. A nice young guy, quiet, I just can’t get over this! I can’t believe it! Sitting there in a booth, like always, waiting for Beatrice to bring his sandwich, and all of a sudden he falls on the floor, and I rush over, and he’s dead! Dead! I can’t believe it--"

  Shogart was squatting over the body, which lay stretched out awkwardly between the rows of booths. Ames was a good-looking young man, dark hair cut short; he had on a white jumpsuit with red stitching over the breast pocket: Dick’s Tow Service. Shogart stood up and sniffed, getting out his handkerchief; a minute red stain came off his fingers. "He was stabbed,’° he said. "Thin blade, right in the heart I’d say. Hardly any blood."

  Moss looked surprised; Mallow was incredulous. "Stabbed?" he said. "Why, that’s impossible! That’s just ridiculous! Nobody came near him! It’s early, we’re not crowded--you can see, only one couple in a booth, six-seven people at the counter--and he walked in here perfectly O.K., looked just the same as usual, he says to Beatrice, fix me the usual--which is a Reuben sandwich with coleslaw on the side--and he goes into the rest room and comes out again and sits in the booth and lights a cigarette. There wasn’t anybody in ten feet of him! Nobody could have stabbed him!"

  "I can’t help that," said Shogart. "He was knifed." He looked around at the little crowd. "Were you all here when he came in? Then we’d better take all your names and addresses, please."

  It took a while; there were ten men and four women, including the restaurant staff. Five people definitely confirmed that not a soul had approached Ames as he sat in the booth, so there wasn’t much point in calling out S.I.D. to process the place. It was just another offbeat thing.

  Piggott searched the body and came up with I.D.--an address in Hollywood. Let the day watch break the news and try to figure out what had happened to him.

  They got back to the office at eleven-thirty, and Schenke told them what they’d missed. Roger Perryman, seventy-nine, on the way from the movies to his rented room on Elden Place--his weekly night out. Jumped and beaten up by the thugs. They’d got a dollar and eighty-four cents, left out of his Social Security. Mr. Perryman had been lucky; they hadn’t roughed him up much when a squad car came round the corner and they ran off. There were three of them, he said, one with long blond hair and real sporty clothes, he remembered a plaid jacket.

  "My God, those punks," said Shogart.

  * * *

  On Sunday morning, Galeano went to early Mass for the first time in years. He hardly knew why he did; he’d got out of the habit, since moving out here away from the family. He went to the nearest church downtown, the old Mission Church, and was surprised and oddly embarrassed to spot Mendoza there, in one of the back pews. He slipped hurriedly out afterward.

  And, mulling over Carey’s report in his mind, he hadn’t got any further about Fleming at all. The other tenants in that building--could there be anything there? Carey had seen them all, and to anyone who knew city people, the results were understandable. That, said Carey, was a place to sleep. There was only one couple, the Del Sardos, people in their fifties, both working. Offerdahl. An old maid in one ground-floor unit, out all day at a job. Two men, Lathrop and Harrigan, both bachelors, also out at jobs. And the Flemings. And the Flemings had only been there a couple of months--the others didn’t know much about them, or care. It wasn’t the kind of place, they weren’t the
kind of people, for fraternizing.

  Like Mendoza, Galeano told himself that Carey had looked: there had been a thorough physical search for the man all up and down that block. Carey the cynic, looking for the boyfriend, had looked at the single men Lathrop and Harrigan. Lathrop, he said, was a fag: hung out at a known fag joint uptown. Harrigan had a steady girl friend he was practically living with.

  They said she was homesick. No close friends. She wrote her family all the time. Galeano wondered--he had sisters, but he didn’t know about females--if she’d have written home about a boyfriend; he rather thought not, but you never knew. But there’d be no way to get at those letters.

  Whatever else you could say about Carey, he was a competent man at his job. So far as the physical evidence went.

  Galeano parked in front of the apartment and looked at the terrain. The empty house: Carey’s men had searched the yard, all the yards down the block. The newer apartment on the other side was a bare box of a place. The half block behind, just cleared for a new building, was nothing but raw earth.

  But it wasn’t just a physical problem.

  He got out of the car, climbed the stairs and rang Marta’s bell. It buzzed emptily at him. She wasn’t home.

  After a moment he turned and pushed the bell across the hall.

  The door was opened by a little perky-looking gray-haired woman. He had read all the statements, and somehow he had pictured Mrs. Del Sardo as buxom and dark. He showed her the badge.

  "Oh," she said, "cops again. That really is a funny thing, isn’t it? I’ve got a theory about it." He saw that her slate-colored eyes were shallow and foolish. "I think he was a fake, not a cripple at all. They were going to sue somebody, he was just pretending to be paralyzed."

  Galeano stared at her. "I’m afraid that wasn’t--"

  "You can’t trust doctors, they’ll say anything," she told him. "And if you ask me Mrs. Fleming is a real sly one. Look at the way she made sure I saw them together that morning, her saying good-bye and him in the chair there--"