Felony File (5 page)

"
The routine does pay off. A good detective,
John, leaves no stone unlifted—"

"
Teach your grandmother? said Palliser
resignedly. "All right, all right. I suppose we'd better get on
with it."

As they stood up, Farrell poked his head in the door.
"New body. The squad just called. Under some bushes in Lafayette
Park."

"
¿Qué es esto?
"
said Mendoza. He followed the others out; Hackett was just ripping a
triplicate form from his typewriter. "So come on, Art—no rest
for the wicked."

* * *

Higgins had done what there was to be done on Whalen.
He typed up a statement from the answers they'd heard from Daniel,
and took it up to the house on Portia Street. Daniel Whalen signed
it, and gave him a more detailed description of the missing items.

"
It wouldn't be any use your getting me to look
at photographs," he said baldly to Higgins' suggestion. "I
only saw them for a flash. We always keep the kitchen door closed,
and I had no idea anything had happened—after Dave went out
there—until I heard them run down the hall. I was here in the
living room—I can't maneuver this thing very fast—and by the time
I got to the hall door, they were just coming out of Dave's bedroom.
All I can say is, they were both Negro, and pretty black, and young."

"
I see." Higgins ruminated. There weren't
many areas now where some Negroes didn't live, if there were still
the solid black areas very much in existence. He didn't think,
however, that there were many, if any, right around here. He asked
Daniel.

"
You forget, I don't get out and around,
Sergeant," said Daniel bitterly. "But no, I don't think
there are any right around here, for eight or ten blocks anyway. Dave
and I had discussed moving—the crime rate up—but that's all over,
and we'd never had any trouble, this is a quiet street. This was our
old home, Father bought this house in nineteen thirty-nine when I was
still in high school. We were comfortable, it was home. The
bastards!" he cried suddenly, slamming one hand down on the arm
of the wheelchair. "The bastards!" The cat Merlin jumped in
his basket, startled at the sudden loud voice, and then sat up
pretending not to have noticed, and yawned pinkly.

Higgins muttered awkward sympathy. There wasn't much
anyone could say to him. He wondered how Daniel could manage about
the funeral. The invalid sank back in renewed apathy after the little
outburst, shutting his eyes. After a moment he said, "No—we've
had quite a few Orientals moving in around here, but they seem to be
mostly quiet, decent people."

"
Yes," said Higgins, and suddenly for no
particular reason thought of the Cambodian family who had handed
Palliser the one link that had uncovered Larry Hoffman as Walt
Robsen's killer, last August. Larry Hoffman's final court hearing was
coming up on Tuesday; they'd have to cover it. None of them would
much enjoy seeing Cathy Robsen, or Sergeant Bill Hoffman and his wife
Muriel, again.

"
Mrs. Meeker's been very kind," said
Daniel, "bringing in food. But I must see about getting in touch
with that service—meals on wheels, isn't it? I can't depend on—"

There probably wasn't a chance that a rumor of the
Whalens having hidden cash in the house had called down the attack,
when the killers hadn't come from the immediate neighborhood. And
that crude a break-in was too common to be dignified with the name of
modus operandi
. But
the routine sometimes rang bells. He went back to headquarters and
spent some time down in R. and I., where these days they had
computers. He turned up three names, with addresses attached, which
were not too near the Portia Street house but not miles away either:
names of Negro males with records of the crude break-ins. Darren
Scott, Rosemont Avenue: two years ago he'd broken in the back door of
a house in Hollywood and offered violence to the widow who lived
there, while stealing cash and jewelry. He'd been eighteen then, and
had been handed six months' probation. Randolph Wiggett, Park Street:
eighteen months ago he'd been caught by a hefty householder,
ransacking an apartment after breaking in the back door. It had been
his third felony arrest as an adult, and at one time that could have
earned him a life sentence; these days, what he'd drawn was a
one-to-three. He might be still inside. Dwight Early, Normal Avenue:
six months ago he'd broken in a window in a house in Atwater, and
been caught up to when a pawnbroker recognized stolen goods; it was
his first arrest and he'd been given six months' probation.

Higgins went up to the office and found it deserted.
He called Welfare and Rehabilitation on Wiggett and learned without
surprise that he'd been paroled after six months in. He called the
lab and asked if they'd got anything from the Portia Street place. He
was reminded that they had other things on hand but eventually would
get to processing what prints had been lifted. He smoked a cigarette,
staring into space, and got up reluctantly. There was half a day's
legwork ahead of him and it would have been nice to have some company
on it.

"
Where's the boss?" he asked Farrell.

"
Oh, he and Art went out to look at a body,"
said Farrell, hardly looking up from his Herald.

Higgins went out and
discovered that it was starting to rain again.

* * *

Mendoza stopped two feet away from the new body and
said, "
¡Oye!
Now
just where did this come from?"

"Probably just another O.D.—or D.T.'s,"
said Hackett after a cursory glance; he was thinking about the house
in Highland Park. Seventy thousand was all very well, but well under
the inflated value. That place in the next block had gone for
eighty-five, he knew. Still, a bird in the hand—

"
Oh, now, Art, you've been a detective long
enough to know better than that. Take another look."

After another look Hackett said, "Oh. Yes, I see
what you mean, Luis. Funny place for her."

The patrolman, Erickson, and the flustered-looking
man beside him just watched them. Mendoza squatted over the body, not
touching it.

Lafayette Park was a quiet little piece of empty
greenery between Sixth and Wilshire, close in downtown. It wasn't
much used as a park; it had few benches and no other amenities. The
only building in it was the Felipe de Neve branch library. It was a
peculiar place to find a body, and this was a peculiar body to be
there.

It was the body of a woman, and not a young woman.
She was lying on her back half under an untidy patch of shrubbery,
just into the park from Sixth Street; she stared at the cold gray sky
horridly, mouth half open. She was at least middle-aged and possibly
older, by the wrinkled throat, the enlarged veins on the one hand
visible. She had kept a middling good figure, neither fat nor
scrawny. The cold morning light was merciless on the make-up
grotesque now on the dead face: too white powder, green eye-shadow,
pink lipstick; but in life she'd have looked just well preserved,
carefully groomed. Her hair, unkempt now, had obviously been
professionally waved and tinted a discreet beige-blonde. The nails on
the hand were a very faint pink, and on the ring finger was a
solitaire diamond set in yellow gold. Mendoza peered at that more
closely and said, "Somewhere around a half carat. Worth
something? She was wearing a full-length navy wool coat with a fur
collar colored white and gray. It had fallen open to reveal the dress
beneath, a tailored navy knit sheath. It was pulled up slightly over
her knees; she had on sheer nylon stockings and medium-heeled navy
pumps. Her left arm was under the thrown-back coat; delicately
Mendoza moved that, and said, "Asi." On her left ring Enger
was a rather wide gold wedding band.

"
At least she ought to be easy to identify,"
said Hackett, following his thought. "She's no derelict."

"
Anything but." Mendoza stood up and
automatically brushed down his trousers. "All those clothes are
good quality. Not the most expensive, nothing flashy, but good. That
coat's nearly new. So are the shoes. She doesn't belong anywhere down
here—how the hell did she get here?"

"
Wait for the I.D.," said Hackett. He
looked at the other two men. "You're the one who found her?"
he asked the civilian.

"
That's right." He was a rather weedy man
about thirty-five, with a nervous Adam's apple; he had a silver-gray
raincoat belted tightly about him. "My name's Jurgen, Karl
Jurgen. Yes, I found her and called the police, but I never saw her
before, I don't know anything about it. I'm on my way to work—I'll
be late but of course it can't be helped—"

"
How did you happen to be in the park?"
asked Hackett.

"
I cut across here every day, it's a shortcut. I
get the bus up Sixth. I'm the desk clerk at the Sheraton West,"
and he gestured.

"
Oh," said Hackett. Just as all the civic
buildings had ended up in the heart of the inner city, a few other
more-than-respectable edifices rubbed shoulders down here with the
dingy old residential streets and business blocks; and that old and
respected—and very respectable—hotel, the Sheraton West, was one
of them.

"
I knew I had to call the police—was she
murdered?"

He looked horrified and fascinated at once. "The
library isn't open, I had to go back to Sixth to find a phone. But I
never saw the woman before, I don't know anything about 1t."

"
Al1 right, Mr. Jurgen," said Hackett.
"Just give us your address and you can go on to work." He
gave it readily, Kenmore Street in Hollywood, and departed half
reluctantly.

"
I think," said Mendoza, "I'd like a
doctor to see her in situ." He got through to the coroner's
office on the radio in the squad, talked to Bainbridge himself. "Just
to confirm a few deductions," he said to Hackett.

Bainbridge came out in person, curious. He was
rounder and tubbier than ever, accompanied by the inevitable black
cigar.

"
You do come across them, Luis," he said,
looking at the corpse. "No I.D. on her?"

"
Not unless she's lying on her handbag."

Very gently, Bainbridge lifted the corpse by the
middle. It came all in one piece, stiff as a board. "No
handbag," said Bainbridge, and felt the jawline. "Oh, yes.
Rigor fully established and just starting to pass off. But it was a
sudden death, and that's apt to hasten rigor. I don't think she died
here."

"
Neither do I," said Mendoza. "Any
guess as to how she died, Doctor?" There weren't any visible
marks on the body.

"
Not till I have a closer look—"
Bainbridge was inspecting the skull, feeling with his fingers. "Um.
Well, there you are, I think. See what shows when I open her up, but
it feels like a depressed fracture—" His thumb was just behind
her right temple. "She could have fallen down on the sidewalk
and done that."

"
And then picked herself up and wandered in here
to die?"

"
You are so quick," said Bainbridge. "I
don't think she did much moving after she sustained that, no. And the
fact that she is here, after all—"

"
Allá va
," said
Mendoza. "How long has she been here?"

"
You're supposed to be the detective," said
Bainbridge, "but I got caught without a coat yesterday too."

"
Exactamente
,"
said Mendoza pleasedly. "It stopped raining about ten last
night. And if she got here—was put here—before that, it wasn't
long before. If she'd been lying here even half an hour in that
downpour, her clothes would have been soaked, and they're only damp.
I'd say she got here between nine-forty and ten."

Bainbridge grunted. "I'd say the same thing, and
furthermore I'd say that was roundabout the time she died. And it's
going to start raining again any minute. Do you want to wait for
photographs?"

"
I'd rather have her clothes intact. Take her
in."

Mendoza bent over the body again and carefully felt
in the coat pockets. The left one yielded a crumpled handkerchief and
a dime, the other one nothing. "Damnation. Art, just to be
thorough we'd better have a hunt for the handbag all around here. If
X tossed it out further away, adios, it'll be long gone, but—"

"
Tossed it out of a car," said Hackett.

"
Proceed from A to B to C," said Mendoza.
"By her clothes, her age, her grooming, she wasn't alone in the
street down here—"

"
Unless she was staying at the Sheraton West,"
said Hackett.

Mendoza smote his forehead. "
¡Mea
culpa!
We'll ask. But barring that—and even
if so—she wouldn't be on foot here at that hour of night. She was
in a car. And a woman of her age never goes out without a handbag.
The sweet young girls, yes—the billfold in the jeans—but not this
woman. We'd better call out some help."

They called in, but Farrell was alone in the office
except for Wanda. She came over amiably, another pair of eyes, and in
the next hour they covered every foot of the park like bloodhounds,
pushing under bushes; but no handbag turned up.

"
Hell," said Mendoza. "But—there's
something else. Art, you go over to the Sheraton West and ask, just
in case. But the wedding ring—the manicure—the professional
coiffure—she came out of a comfortable home, she wasn't a nobody.
Quite possibly somebody's already called Missing Persons to say that
Mother didn't come home last night. I'd better go and ask."