Hal and I indeed. But I had work to do. “Okay. Stay back, though, honey. This isn’t too pretty.”
Olga gave her grin. I was always forgetting that, as part of her training, she had put in time as an attendant at the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. She had seen plenty.
Walter was blowing clouds of alcohol that would have showed up brown on Ernen’s charts. There was a dome-light in the ambulance, and Jakens and the blue-coated driver both held their flashlights on the girl’s face. I said: “Take a careful look, Walter.”
He was shaking. “What do you want of me? Why me?”
“Looks like a high school girl. I need to know her name.” I was using one of my professional tricks: a low soothing voice. Walter Adams was about to blow up on me. It was smart of Olga, after all, to bring Hal Levy along; I could check Walter with the doctor, and get about my own duties.
Out where the light stopped, there were a number of citizens milling about. Walter rubbed his forehead and bent forward.
“She’s –” Walter gulped, started again. “I think – Nora Patterson,” he said. “Senior, business course.”
I looked at the driver and at Ernen’s man to tell them to pull the blanket up again; and in the moment I had my eye off Walter Adams, the high school principal gave way; he grabbed my arm and started to go down.
He didn’t hit the paving; I got my arm around him. Then Hal Levy was there. “Let him go, Andy. Get him down to where we can raise his body over his head. He’s just fainted.”
“The doc’s gone,” Sergeant Ernen said. “The medical examiner.”
“This is one of our local doctors, Harold Levy.”
Down at my feet, Walter Adams was losing a couple of dollars’ worth of liquor into the township’s gutter. Hal Levy was dextrous in holding him so the vomit didn’t get on the clothes of either the patient or the doctor. I said: “Olga, bringing Dr. Levy was the smartest thing you ever did.”
“Oh, I’m a help to you,” she said, “I’ve had Walter spotted as a very unstable personality for a long, long time.”
Dr. Hal Levy looked up at me. “If you don’t need Adams any more, I’d like to get him home and under some blankets. He could go into real shock, between the liquor and all.”
“But we’ll need him to go through the high school records,” I said. “I’ve got to find out who the girl’s family is, and so on.”
The doctor straightened up and gave me the wise, tolerant look a kindergarten teacher gives a pupil who has just failed crayoning. “Isn’t there a key to the high school at the police station? I’m sure the school keeps its records alphabetically.”
“You’re the doctor. Take the man away.”
Olga’s eyes snapped at me; that was no way to talk to her friend, and to a professional man, too. The M.D. after Hal Levy’s name demanded more respect from a peasant type.
She and Levy took Walter Adams away, back towards the doctor’s car. Of course, I could have used Walt; I wanted to know who Nora Patterson’s friends were, what boys she was seen with. But Walt would not have been in condition to help me much, anyway. He was probably about to pass out from the liquor that had gotten into his bloodstream before he threw up.
“The lady a doctor, too?” Sergeant Ernen asked.
“A psychologist,” I said. “My wife.”
“That I could tell from the way she looked at you.” He laughed a little. “I’ll get rolling. The other car’ll drop the girl at County. If you’re up our way, drop in and see me. Don Ernen.”
“My first name’s Andy.”
He climbed into the front seat of the lab rig, and drove off behind the ambulance.
I told McRaine to tell Captain Davis I’d be at the high school, and went back towards my car.
Chapter Four
Beyond the police line made by Leatherwood and Karinsky and half a dozen off-duty cops called out for the emergency, it looked as though all of Naranjo Vista had gotten out of their two and three bedroom homes to form a crowd.
For this, I had to thank the gun-hipped deputies and their sirens. McRaine came out in the street with me; I looked around, and saw that none of our men were wearing chevrons, so I told him to take charge of the traffic detail. Drew Lasley, by now, would have called all our off-duty men in. Until I broke the case, nobody in our department would get much sleep. . . .
Drew was at the station, the scientifically designed half of the building we shared with the fire department. Mr. Bartlett had told me once that his architect had studied police departments all over the world before drawing the plans for ours. The building was, officially, a security control centre.
A few reporters were already there; Drew Lasley was handling them. In plainclothes, I didn’t stand out so they let me get back to my office. From there I phoned the patrolman on the front desk, and he got me the key to the high school. I told him to tell Lieutenant Lasley where I was.
Speed was now necessary. I wanted to tell Nora Patterson’s parents what had happened to her before they heard it on the radio, or from a neighbour.
The high school was as scientific as the station: low, sprawling, with a maximum of sun and a minimum of distracting view in each classroom. I switched on the lights in the front corridor, and followed a sign of the offices. The third filing case I tried had the alphabetical files of students: Nora Patterson was not where the should be, and then I noticed that the files were broken up by classes; I had been looking at the freshman Ps.
She was there, all right. Nora Diana Patterson, aged nineteen, born in Michigan – who was born in California? – business course. College of Intention (huh?) University of California at Berkeley. Parents: Norman, electronics designer at Thermolog, Inc., mother, Darlene, check clerk at the Safeway grocery. . . .
“What are you doing here?”
I’d never heard her come in. She was a tall brown-haired woman, about thirty, in a camel’s hair coat. Rather stupidly, I asked her who she was.
“Miss Crowther. I’m assistant principal. You’re not supposed to be here; I saw the lights and came in. How did you get in here?”
“Police,” I said. “Lieutenant Bastian, Naranjo Vista Police Department.”
She said: “Oh,” and pushed her hair back from her forehead. “Yes, I think I’ve seen you around. Didn’t you make a speech to our assembly last month?”
“That was Lieutenant Lasley.” Drew and I didn’t look at all alike, except we were both big men. I went back to my file folder. The Pattersons lived on Columbia Circle. A three-minute drive.
Miss Crowther said: “Police or not, you have no right in our folders. Our students are all juveniles, their records are privileged from the courts. . . .”
A lawyer yet. I said: “Stow it, Miss Crowther.”
She gasped. “Really! – could I see your badge and your I.D.?”
“Yeah.” I started to get them out. When she saw my shoulder holster, she gasped again. What did she expect, a joke book? I laid badge case and card on the desk, and said: “Just to fill out your legal background, Miss Crowther, some crimes are not privileged by age. For murder, for criminal assault, juveniles can be tried as adults, and sent to the gas chamber if guilty.”
She had forgotten to look at my I.D. I said: “I’m being deliberately brutal; I had to be to see if you could take it. You can. I’m in a hurry. A girl named Nora Patterson was criminally assaulted over near Descanso Drive a little while ago. I’ve got to go tell her parents about it. Want to come along? I could use a woman, in case Mrs. Patterson breaks down.”
She added briskly. “Nora is a student clerk in the office here. Do you need that folder, or can I put it back?”
I handed it to her, and she snapped it back into the steel file, and closed the drawer while a restowed my badge case and my I.D. card. She took a brisk look around the office, snapped off the lights, and we walked down the hall in step.
Then she snapped off the hall lights, and we were outside. I locked the door and she tried the lock; a very
efficient gal. As she straightened up, her hair passed near my nose; she didn’t use perfume.
She said: “I’ll take my car and follow you. We might need them both.”
“Okay. Or if you’d rather, ride with me, and I’ll get a police car to take care of you when you want to leave.”
She nodded again, and started towards my car. But when we were both in and I had put the car into gear, she said: “It won’t be a question of when I want to leave, will it? It’ll be when you can spare me.”
“As soon as possible, Miss Crowther. It must be crowding midnight, and you’re going to have a rough day tomorrow.”
The closest route to Columbia Circle would have been past Descanso and Walnut, but I detoured; it would be quicker if we didn’t have to thread our way through the mob that was probably still gawking at the vacant lot.
“It is nearly midnight,” she said. “I was at a movie up in the city . . . Yes, the kids will really be in an uproar tomorrow.” She laughed a little. “We may have to call on you for a riot squad.”
“Our department doesn’t run to such luxuries.” We were nearly to where we were going. I wasn’t happy; what was about to happen was one of the worst duties a cop could draw. I should have sent a sergeant or a patrolman, but I don’t interpret my oath that way. I said: “Miss Crowther –”
She answered me, or she didn’t – I didn’t notice. Because just then some men stepped off the kerbs, both of them, and waved flashlights at me, and my headlights picked up a car, without lights, rolling out of a driveway to make a barrier. I stalled the car, killed the lights, set the brake and jumped out, all in one motion, going for my gun.
They pinned me with their lights, and I could see they carried rifles. I was too badly blinded to see if they had hip-guns, too. I pretended to stumble, went to one knee, lunged forward and got the closest of them. I grabbed his rifle and dropped the butt on his toe, and when he went forward, I got him in a half-nelson with my left arm pull against me, and my pistol stuck into his right side. “All right,” I said, “this is the police. Drop those guns and put your hands on your heads.”
They stood there, wavering. “Guns down,” I said again. “Hands up.”
One of them bawled: “By God, it is a cop. I’ve seen him around.”
“Don’t shoot, we’re fellow officers,” one of them said.
“Then put those guns down.” Over my shoulder I barked; “Lights on, back there.” I didn’t want to tell them I had only a woman with me. But Miss Crowther got the word; the lights came on.
They had on badges all right – the big, jewel-studded ones of the Sheriff’s posse. They were laying their rifles – and one of them had a shotgun – on the pavement with the respect a man gives something he’s invested too much money in. They each had a belt gun on, too, big pearl-handle .38s, standard with the damned posse.
“Over by that car,” I said. “Put your hands on the roof, your feet well back. Weight on your hands.”
A thin, short man with bow legs drawled: “Now, officer, you know us. You’ve seen our badges. There’s no need for all these dramatics.”
I said: “You are all lucky I didn’t shoot first and count badges later. I want to see who you are. So far, I’m acting on the assumption you couldn’t be responsible citizens; not and act like twelve-year-old hoodlums.”
They marched to the car; they lined up. Of course, I should have sent for help. It’s not good practice to frisk four men singlehanded. But I was convinced they were exactly what they said they were. I was just putting on a show.
I took their hip-guns, added them to the weapons already stacked. Then I let them unbrace, and hand me their I.D. cards one by one. I made a big show of comparing faces with photographs.
“All right,” I said. “Now, any of you sober enough to explain this?”
The thin man was named Joseph Harg. He said: “We’ve none of us been drinking. We were just running a night patrol, keeping the peace here in Naranjo Vista. There’s been a lot of crime.”
A lulu occurred to me; they don’t often. “To get a thief, set a thief. You figured to catch a bunch of teenagers by acting like them?”
Harg looked uneasy. “We’re not sure that kids did those break-ins,” he said. “Anyway, we’re a disciplined outfit. We’re acting under orders from our sergeant. Bailey Spratt.”
The other three nodded.
I said: “Okay. I’ve got your names. If my chief wants to charge you with interfering with a police officer, he’ll do it. In the meantime, pick up your armour, and get off the street.”
They looked relieved. Joseph Harg said: “Thank you, officer.”
“Lieutenant Bastian.”
“Thank you, lieutenant.”
I went back and sat behind the wheel of my car. As they drove off, Miss Crowther said: “For a big man, you certainly moved fast.”
“I’m awfully well-trained,” I said. “I’ve been at this since I was seventeen.” I started the car, and went into gear. The tail-light of the posse car was going around a corner at a nice legal speed. “What were we talking about?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “You had just said: ‘Miss Crowther,’ in an inquiring sort of voice. My first name is Eleanor.”
I said: “Eleanor, I’d like you to put your mind on Nora Patterson. What boys she went with, and so on. Her parents will be pretty good sources that way, but parents don’t always know everything there is to know about a kid. I imagine nothing much happens around the high school you don’t notice.”
“Flattery,” she said. “However, it’s true. Old maid schoolteachers live vicariously through the romances of their students. Is this the place? It’s all lit up, so late at night.”
“Waiting for their kid to come home,” I said. I managed to suppress the sigh I wanted to give. My stomach was knotted and my hands were icy. I said: “Listen, I had no right to ask you to do this. I should have phoned the public health nurse; she doubles as matron when the department needs one.”
“Miss Hellman? She’d chatter your ear off.”
“Okay, but this is going to be as bad as anything that’s ever happened to you.”
Miss Eleanor Crowther made a curious remark: “That’s what you think.” I almost didn’t hear it; her back was to me and she was getting out of the car as she said it. I locked the bus and went around to join her.
We walked up a slab of curving cement, through azaleas and pyracantha and past a newly-planted deodar. The lawn smelled as though it had been freshly cut. The Pattersons took pride in their home; I was about to smash that home and their lives, and everything they cared about in the whole world.
It was ridiculous, but I felt guilty, as though by not going into that house I could keep the people in there from being destroyed.
So I shook my head, and took Miss Crowther’s elbow, and went the last few feet to the steps, up three steps to the flagstone terrace, and across the terrace to the push bell, like a little soldier.
Eleanor Crowther said: “This is hurting you, isn’t it?”
“It’s tearing my guts apart.”
“You’re a funny sort of policeman.”
“We come all kinds.” That was enough stalling. I pushed the bell.
The door opened at once; they’d been waiting for a girl to come home again, but never the same as she’d left.
Mr. Patterson, Norman Patterson, looked more like a professional tennis coach than an electronics expert. He was in dark grey flannels and a white shirt, neatly tucked in and rising from a slim waist to firm, broad shoulders. His straight-nosed face was tanned under black hair without a touch of grey. He was about my age, a year or so on either side of forty.
He looked eager, then he saw us, and he looked not so eager. He said: “Yes, what do you want?”
“Lieutenant Bastian, Naranjo Vista Police Department.” I held out my handsome blue and gold badge.
He stared at it as though its gleam were hypnotizing him. “Very nice of you,” he said. “But I tol
d your man all there is to know over the phone. Nora was supposed to baby sit for the Nelsons, but she’s never been there. She –”
“May we come in, please, Norman?” The use of his first name was not an accident; some cop about twenty years ago figured out it had a psychological impact. It impacted Norman Patterson out of the doorway, and we were in. I kept on with the dreary routine. “Your wife home?”
“She’s on the phone.” His hand made a gesture. I pushed Miss Crowther and she went in the direction the hand had indicated. “I guess she didn’t hear the doorbell, or she’d be here. She’s phoning Norma’s friends.”
Miss Crowther disappeared through the wide door to the left. I took a deep breath, and looked beyond Norman Patterson to the rear of the house. French doors back there opened out on a lanai – this was pattern C-3 of the Bartlett Construction Corp. – and the doors were flanked by hip-high alabaster horse’s heads.
Norman Patterson turned to see what I was looking at, and said: “We got those last summer in Mexico. Nora picked them out, so we made her tote them on the back seat of the car with her. They were awful to travel with.”
“Only child?”
He nodded, staring at me warily now. I think he knew what I was going to say; but like me, he wanted to put off the moment of saying.
No money was to be made by putting things off. I said, quickly: “Your daughter is in the County Hospital. She has been assaulted.”
I put out my hand to steady him, but he didn’t want to be touched just then. He stepped back and stared at me with eyes that I had seen before – hating eyes, eyes looking at the bearer of the worst news in the world.
From inside the house a scream started, grew, broke like an overstrained heart. Norman Patterson turned and lurched towards the source of the racket.
So I trotted after him. The living room was light and airy and furnished in the Danish Modern manner. The woman sprawled over the phone, sobbing, had thin shoulders; the knobs of her spine protruded through the thin jersey blouse she was wearing. It was a singularly defenceless back, an almost childish back.
A Nice Girl Like You (Lt. Andy Bastian Mysteries Book 2) Page 3