Felony File (8 page)

Down here they ran two-man cars.

"Queer isn't a word for it," said Mendoza.
"We'll want a lab truck." They arranged for that; he and
Galeano went up the front walk and into the house. Patrolman Wiener
was just inside the door, which led directly into a living room. He
said, "The girl went into the bedroom. Wanted to get the kid
away from the body."

"
Understandable," said Galeano. This was a
pleasant, homey room, with a worn American-Oriental rug on the floor,
old-fashioned upholstered furniture in shades of green and beige, a
real brick hearth. It was clean and neat, except for the body; and at
first glance you might have thought Leta Reynolds was merely asleep.

She was a nice-looking young woman, chocolate brown,
with neat regular features and a slim figure. She was wearing a
dull-orange sheath dress and black patent-leather pumps. There was a
gold bracelet on one arm, a gold wrist watch on the other. She was
lying back on the couch, looking quite comfortable. There was a dark
stain on her left breast—not a very big stain.

"
She said she heard three or four shots—didn't
realize what they were," said Wiener. "I'd guess a small
caliber, twenty-two or something." He went into the hall. "Miss
Corey, the detectives are here. They'd like to talk to you."

She came to the door of the living room. Wiener
introduced them formally and she nodded. "I'm Melinda Corey."
She looked about twenty; she was more handsome than pretty, with
rather sharp features, a great knot of hair coiled on top of her
head; she wore a smart dark-green pantsuit. "Please—we don't
have to stay here?  I mean—" she glanced at the body,
gulped and turned away.

"
We'd rather not," said Mendoza. "There'll
be some technicians here in a while."

"
The kitchen," she said. "There's
Lily—" She opened a door and looked into a bedroom. "You
just stay there awhile, honey. Don't be scared at any noises—there's
just some people coming to—to help Mommy."

"
Will she be all right?" The little girl
looked about six; she had big black eyes and neat pigtails tied with
red ribbons.

"
I think so," said Melinda. "I'll be
back after a while."

She shut the door and led them down the hall to a
square kitchen big enough for a table and four chairs. There was a
little stack of dishes in the sink. She sat down at the table and
they sat with her. There was a big ceramic ashtray on the table, and
Mendoza offered her a cigarette. She bent to his lighter.

"
I don't believe any of this has happened,"
she said. "Half an hour ago—Leta saying she'd do the breakfast
dishes—and then the doorbell rang—"

"
We have to take it in order. We don't know much
about it, suppose you tell it from the beginning. First, she was your
sister?"

She nodded once. "Leta Reynolds. I suppose you
want—some background. Whatever you call it. She was twenty-seven.
She was divorced. This was—I mean, she and Len started to buy this
house and she got it as a settlement and went on paying on it."

"
Did she have a job?" asked Mendoza.

Melinda put a hand to her eyes. "If she'd just
been at work! Any other day she would have been! But if she had been,
maybe I'd have got shot. It doesn't make any sense. Yes. Yes, she
worked at the Armstrong Photo Salon, she's a retoucher. Usually,
she'd have gone to work at nine o'clock, but she'd put in some
overtime on those rush wedding pictures last week, and Mr. Armstrong
told her to take this morning off."

"What about you?" asked Galeano. His tone
was warm and friendly; she relaxed a little.

"
I'm going to L.A.C.C., my second year. I came
to live with Leta because it's closer for me—Mother and Dad live in
Inglewood. I'm an education major. I've got a part-time job at the
campus bookstore. Please, I'd like to call Mother. This will about
kill them, there were just the two of us left, my brother was killed
in an accident two years—-"

"In a while," said Mendoza. "We'd like
to hear just what happened, Miss Corey."

"
I'll tell you everything I know," she
said, "but it just doesn't make sense. Leta kept Lily home this
morning, she had a temperature and it was so wet out—she's in first
grade—she was, I mean Leta, going to take her over to the Sanfords'
when she went to work. That's where Lily always goes after school,
her best friend is Barbara Sanford and Mrs. Sanford keeps her till
Leta gets home at five-thirty. I didn't have a class till one
o'clock. We had a late breakfast, and Leta got dressed to go to
work—she wanted to get the tank filled on the way—and I was in
the bathroom, washing out some pantyhose and things. When the bell
rang."

"Take your time. Did you see the woman at all?"
asked Mendoza.

"
About—two seconds," she said. "Just
crazy. I heard Leta open the door and I heard them talking—just a
couple of sentences—and I couldn't tell who it was, I thought it
might be my girl friend Edna, sometimes she hitches a ride to
campus—so I came down the hall to see. This woman was standing by
the couch—a perfectly strange woman—and Leta was saying she
hadn't much time to look but she liked Avon things. So I knew it was
an Avon saleswoman, and I went back to finish my washing?

"
Was she white or colored?" asked Galeano.

"
Oh, colored."

"
Could you tell us anything about her at all?"

She shook her head dumbly. "I've tried to think.
It wasn't two seconds. I thought she'd probably pushed her way in,
Leta sounded annoyed, and I thought she'd get rid of her easier
alone. I think she was taller than either of us, bigger. Not exactly
fat, but—bosomy. That's just the impression I remember. She was—I
don't know. I didn't really look at her. She had on a blue raincoat.
And she had a bag—a sort of briefcase kind of thing. It just
crossed my mind, her samples in that." She paused.

"
Well, it couldn't have been twenty seconds
later—I mean that—I'd just got back to the bathroom and started
washing again, when I heard some—some little pops. It wasn't like a
gun—I never knew a gun could sound like that. Not loud bangs, just
pops. It startled me—I thought maybe Lily had upset something—and
I went down the hall, and that woman was just going out the door. I
only saw about half of her back—and the door shut, and I said
Leta's name and then I saw her—on the couch—I thought she'd
fainted, and then I saw the blood—and I just rushed to the door
after that woman— but just as I got it open I saw a car pull out
from the curb in front. It must have been her—just time for her to
get to it. And I can't even tell you what make it was! The rain, and
she pulled out fast. It was a white car, medium size."

"
That," said Mendoza, "is a very funny
little story. Did you discover your sister was dead then?"

"
Well, I went right back to her, and I've had
some first aid, but I couldn't feel a pulse at all, and I was
terrified—I thought she'd been stabbed—I never thought 
about those pops. But I saw she was— So I called the police. It was
the first officer said she'd been shot." She shook her head. "I
didn't believe it."

"
So we come to some basic questions," said
Galeano. "Did she have—"

"
Any enemies?" she took him up. "That's
crazy too. Of course not. We hardly ever went out except to see
Mother and Dad. We were both busy. She wasn't dating anybody—she'd
sort of got her fill of men with Len, she wasn't interested."

"
What about Reynolds? Was he bitter about the
divorce?"

She shook her head. "It was five years ago. They
just drifted apart. They were pretty young when they got married, and
Leta was always one for improving herself and learning new things,
and he wasn't. He never finished high, couldn't get such good jobs,
and then he got to drinking. I don't think he cared when she divorced
him, and he never came around to see Lily. We don't even know where
he is."

And that was all.

Marx and Horder were busy in the living room. "She
wasn't here long," said Galeano, "by that story. But she
could have touched the coffee table—the girl says she was near the
couch."

"
But apparently not sitting down," said
Mendoza.

"
The Avon lady. A gun instead of samples.
Extraño
."

"
And I'll add one thing you already know,"
said Galeano. "This is a working-class neighborhood, there
probably aren't many people at home at this time of day. And nobody
who is home, a dreary rainy day, is gawking out the front windows.
Nobody else heard the shots, with all the doors and windows shut.
Nobody but Melinda saw the woman or the white car."

"
She seems like a nice girl," said Mendoza,
rocking heel to toe meditatively.

"
Doesn't she?"

The morgue wagon was just pulling up in front.

They went back down the hall. Melinda had made
herself a cup of coffee, and the little girl was sitting opposite her
with a cookie. She eyed the strange white men solemnly.

"
Miss Corey—"

She looked up wearily. "I haven't got up the
courage to call Mother yet. Now what?"

Lily asked suddenly, "Are you gonna make Mommy
feel better?"

At a loss, Mendoza was silent. It was the bachelor
Galeano who gave her a friendly smile and said, "We'll try,
honey."

"
She fell down. That lady pushed her and she
fell down."

Galeano squatted beside her chair. "Did you see
it happen?"

She nodded. "I wanted to see who came in. But
she went right out after she pushed Mommy."

"
Did she push her with anything? Like a stick?"

"
Please—" said Melinda. "She's only
six."

Lily thought. "Just kind of—with her hand."
She held out one hand, forefinger pointed.

Galeano stood up and looked at Mendoza. Both of them
were thinking, plenty of little guns around, muzzle only a couple of
inches long, the whole hardly bigger than a palm. And at that range
she could hardly have missed.

But where was a handle to this random, reasonless
thing?

They went out to the Ferrari, leaving the lab men
still at work, and Galeano said with a sigh, "All we needed.
Unless it's a homicidal maniac picking victims at random, and there
aren't many of those around, somebody had some kind of reason to walk
in and shoot her. We'll have to talk to everybody she knew—the
employer—find the husband. Neighbors. The parents. Some kind of
lead ought to turn up. And I'm starving. Let's go have lunch."

"
Ought to doesn't say
it will, Nick. This is the queerest one we've had in awhile,"
said Mendoza.

* * *

Landers, Grace and Conway had got to the Personnel
office at Bullock's about nine o'clock. "This is the damndest
job we've had in a while," said Conway plaintively. "I
didn't join the force to shuffle papers all day."

"You were just after a uniform to impress the
girls?" asked Landers. Conway, who was good-looking and as
dapper a dresser as Mendoza, laughed.

"
Anything for a change, I suppose."

The Personnel office had given them a little back
room, a table and some chairs. The stacks of file-folders they hadn't
examined were still high. Landers divided them into three piles,
emptied the ashtray filled at the last session, and they got to work
in silence.

It was tedious work; they had to look in several
places on each employee's work record for the name, date of
employment, type of employment, and termination if any. Bullock's
updated these files only quarterly; at the next updating, the file of
any employee no longer on the strength would be weeded out, but as of
now there should be a few. And Bullock's had a lot of employees. They
broke for lunch early, were back at it by a quarter of one, and it
was nearly an hour later that Conway let out a whoop.

"
Beginners' luck, boys." He shoved a file
at Landers. "If that doesn't ring a bell! There you are, the
initials too—the time, the place, and the loved one all together."

It was the file of one Mary Webster. She had been
hired last April, had worked as a salesclerk in the bedding
department, had quit her job in the middle of September. They looked
at a few more items on the file. Mary Webster was five-five,
Caucasian, had brown hair and brown eyes, weighed a hundred and
fifteen pounds, and was twenty-nine years old. Unmarried. Her address
was on Fountain Avenue in Hollywood.

"
I think you've turned something, Rich,"
said Grace.

"
M. W. And the time—"

"
Nearly six months?" said Landers. "She
wouldn't have had to stay in the job that long to find out the
routine on taking the money in."

"
We'd better take a look anyway," said
Grace. "Not that I think she'll still be at that address. Not if
she's it."

It had stopped raining and was turning very cold. All
three of them went up to Hollywood in Landers' Sportabout. The
address on Fountain was a new garden apartment with a pool at one
side, now drained and covered for the winter; in the cold gray light
the brightly painted doors—scar1et, green, blue—looked garish.
The apartment they wanted was on the second floor at the back; it had
a bright orange door and surprisingly the nameplate said Webster.