Murder Most Strange (6 page)

"But—" said Grace.

"I know. Kelly? Inoffensive little pensioner, no
family, few friends, no money, no apparent vices. Or enemies."

"Well, whatever, there's just nothing to follow
up. It's a dead end."

"Oh, you don't have
to tell me that," said Palliser.

* * *

Mendoza was on the phone to the lab, after talking to
Dr. Bainbridge's office about expediting the autopsy, and Hackett
idly listening in, when a new call went down at three o'c1ock.
Sergeant Farrell, sitting on the switchboard on Lake's day off,
buzzed Glasser and said, "New homicide call. Barrett just called
in. It's Cortez Street."

“
No rest for the wicked." Glasser took down
the address. Wanda was already on her feet; she was bucking for
detective rank and ever eager for more street experience. Following
her down to the elevator, Glasser rather sadly admired her sleek
blond hair and trim figure in the navy uniform; a little waste, he
thought, but try to argue with a determined female. In the parking
lot she slid into the Gremlin beside him and found the County Guide
on the dashboard shelf.

"It's down toward Temple, off Glendale
Boulevard—"

"Such a helpful girl. I know where it is,"
said Glasser. It was an old, old part of town. Everything had been
there a long time, and hadn't seen much in the way of repair or
remodeling. The black-and-white was sitting outside a ramshackle
three-storey frame house once painted white. There was a sign in a
front window, Rooms by week or month. On the narrow front porch,
Patrolman Barrett was waiting for them with a woman. He looked at
them with undisguised relief, a little warm admiration for Wanda in
his eyes which annoyed Glasser. "This is Mrs. Hopkins." And
welcome to her, said his tone.

She was a lean little black-haired, black-eyed woman,
ageless, with a hard mouth and a rasping voice, and she was in a
repressed fury. "Fifteen dollars they owed me, and now where's
it coming from? Nowhere, that's where! I know the police and their
ways—take every scrap that's there and nobody'll ever see it again,
and I can whistle for my money—and all that bloody mess for
somebody to clean up, adding insult to injury—"

"Let's look at what we've got, shall we?"
said Glasser. "We can talk about it later."

She shut her teeth with an actual click. "Left
end room on the top floor," she said acidly. "Cheapest I've
got, five bucks a day. I saw the color of his money before I let 'em
in, and he paid for two weeks and then quit. One suitcase between
'em, and I'd be surprised if they was really married."

"All right, all right, later," said
Glasser. He and Wanda went in. The house had probably originally been
a big family place with double parlors downstairs; now partitions had
been put up to create many small rooms out of big ones. On the second
floor, judging by the number of doors, the rooms were somewhat larger
than closets; on the third, they looked like mere niches. The end
door on the left was open, and they looked in.

The room might be seven by nine. It held a single
iron bed, an ancient three-drawer chest, and a straight chair with
one leg broken. There was a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling; the
floor was stained bare pine, minus any carpet. Beside the bed was an
open battered suitcase with a few clothes in it. At first glance
there were a half dozen bottles scattered around, all empty except an
upright fifth of vodka on the chest, a quarter full. Two dime-store
tumblers lay on their sides in front of the suitcase.

The bodies were half on the bed, half on the floor.
The girl had slid into a surprisingly graceful position, propped
against the bed with her head thrown back; she had been a beautiful
girl, with magnolia skin, long lustrous black hair, a model's figure.
She was wearing a long white nylon nightgown, and the ugly dark stain
on the left breast looked like an excrescence. The man was stretched
out across the bed, legs sprawled down beside the girl: a
good-looking man even in death, with plentiful curly gray hair, a
square handsome face; he stared blindly up at the stained ceiling,
and his right hand flung out on the dirty sheet was still clasped
around the gun. He was fully dressed in slacks and sport shirt.

"Um," said Glasser, and stepped delicately
closer. "Old S. and W. thirty-eight. Not much reason for any
elaborate lab work—let's see what shows." He looked through
the suitcase: nothing but female underclothes. He heard Wanda opening
drawers.

"Nothing even put away," she said. "Henry—"

“
What?"

"Nothing. Just, it's such a dreary place to die,
isn't it?"

Glasser grunted. He gave a tentative heave to the
man's body and it lifted slightly, supine and limp. They were both
long cold. Rigor would develop in about twelve hours and pass oil a
little faster; he would have a guess they'd been dead about
twenty-four hours.

There was a billfold in the hip pocket. He opened it,
and Wanda came to look over his shoulder. There wasn't much in it.
Two single-dollar bills. An out-of-date driver's license for Gerald
Bussard, an address in Bakersfield. A Social Security card in the
same name.

"Well, that's him all right," said Glasser
with a glance at the corpse. "Five-eleven, a hundred and
seventy, gray and blue, forty-six—that was six years back. See if
there's any family in Bakersfield to pay for a funeral."

"And I wonder—why?" said Wanda. "How
did they come to it—and here?"

"You want to delve into human nature and all the
ramifications of it," said Glasser, "you turn into a lady
novelist and exercise the imagination. All we deal in are facts."

They went downstairs and asked questions. Mrs.
Hopkins couldn't tell them much they wanted to know. "Paid up
until Wednesday, and I tackled him when he come back that night
—didn't like the looks of 'em to start with. He said he had a job,
short-order cook at a greasy spoon over on Temple—no, they didn't
have a car, showed up out of the blue two weeks ago Wednesday—I
don't take people in out of charity, you know, and we all got to
live—said he'd pay me next day, but he never, I never laid eyes on
'em that day, and I was watching—them laying low— And he musta
done it yesterday afternoon when I was up there askin' about
him—everybody else in the house at work, so nobody heard the
shots—and they told me he got fired for bein' drunk on the
job—stick me with all this mess, and I'll never see that fifteen
dollars—"

"I'll toss you for who writes the report,"
said Glasser in the car. The lab truck had just pulled up; the morgue
wagon would be coming.

"I don't mind,"
said Wanda. She sounded subdued. "You know, I think you're
wrong, Henry. It's us who deal in the human nature. Ramifications
of."

* * *

There wasn't much point in it, since Barth had
queried the computers on it so recently, but Mendoza had sent the
routine request to R. and I. on Dapper Dan's M.O. Nobody expected
anything to turn up on that.

The lab, of course, always took its own sweet time;
give the devil his due, they were always busy. But when Mendoza
finally talked to Scarne about five o'clock, he got a little
information, if unofficial.

"Well, we're not quite as rushed as usual,
Lieutenant. You'll get a report sometime. We haven't gotten around to
measuring quantities yet, just done the analysis—but off the record
I can make a guess on what the autopsy'll say on the Cooper woman."

"
¿Qué?
”

"Phenobarb—either all by itself or combined
with booze. Both the glass and that bottle of scotch were laced
pretty heavy. We'll get around to actual amounts for you, and the
exact. prescription."

“
And thank you so much," said Mendoza. He
passed that on to Hackett.

"So what does it say, Luis? The kid was there.
She'd have heard if anybody had come back with the woman—if there'd
been an argument, a fight. And if you're still thinking about the
casual pickup, it's ridiculous to say anybody like that would—"

"What I'm thinking about," said Mendoza,
brooding over his long hands steepled together, "is salaries."

"Come again."

"The salaries the city pays its bus drivers,
chico
. It can't be a
very magnificent sum. The alimony and child support would cut into
it. Maybe pretty deep."

"But there's not a thing to say—"

"Not yet," said
Mendoza.

* * *

Saturday night in inner-city L.A. can get a little
hairy, but most of the problem belongs to the patrolmen riding the
squads: the brawls, traffic accidents, drunks, family fights. The
night watch at Robbery-Homicide came on to wait for the calls. Matt
Piggott and Bob Schenke had been sitting on night watch for quite a
while and were used to it, but Rich Conway was still griping about
getting transferred. For one thing, Conway was a man who liked the
girls, and they liked him, and it cut into his dating time. Schenke
was a settled bachelor and Piggott the earnest fundamentalist was
married, but night watch was discommoding Conway.

For once it started out as a quiet Saturday night,
and then within five minutes, just before ten o'clock, they got three
calls at once, to three separate heists.

The one Piggott took was routine, and it was the
Mutt-and-Jeff comic team again; this time one of them had dropped his
gun on the way out. It was a drugstore down on Third; they hadn't
gotten much.

The one Schenke took was a bar on First, and there
was a good description from a lot of witnesses: a big fat Negro with
a big gun.

The one Conway went out on was probably going to be
more important. It was an all-night pharmacy on Sixth Street, and
there had been a clerk and a pharmacist on duty.

"I never saw him come in," said the
pharmacist shakily. His name was Clyde Burroughs. "All of a
sudden he was there—with the gun—he said to Ken, don't you make a
move, back against the wall—and he said to me, I want all your
pills, man, all the uppers and downers you got, and the cash from the
register—and Ken—he just stepped back against that shelf of
vitamins, the way the guy told him, he wouldn't have tried
anything—but he made a noise, and it was just like a damn snake
striking, the guy fired at him point-blank. Well, I don't know
exactly, you'll have to look at the tab from the register—but
Ken—we weren't putting up any fight—"

Ken Price, the clerk, had taken a bullet in the lung
and by now would be in Intensive Care at Cedars-Sinai. It might turn
into a homicide.

"And he had a southern accent," said
Burroughs. "Some kind of southern accent. He said you-all."
 

THREE

The Landerses both had Saturday off, which was
convenient, but sometimes it created hell on Sunday mornings. When
the alarm went off, they both erupted out of bed half awake and
rushed around in the usual frenzy. Phillippa Rosemary—whose parents
had naturally not known when they christened her so fancily that
she'd grow up to be a staid policewoman—said crossly, rummaging for
clean stockings, "It starts to look more attractive all the
time, staying home and starting a family. Nothing but a glorified
office job, showing the mug shots to the citizens—at least you get
out on the street." She had been down in Records and Information
since graduating from the academy.

"That's what I've been telling you," said
Landers. They left separately, and at that Landers was the first man
into the office. Mendoza was always late on Sunday if he came in,
which he usually did just to see what was going on, though it was
supposedly his day off. Landers was looking at the report the night
watch had left when everybody else came drifting in, Hackett and
Higgins, Grace, Glasser, Palliser. He passed it over to Higgins, who
said, "Hell. A hair-trigger heister—all we need."

Hackett called the hospital; the clerk, Ken Price,
was still alive but in Intensive Care. The pharmacist, Clyde
Burroughs, was coming in to look at mug shots.

"And that Hamilton girl was supposed to come in
to look at pictures when she's out of the hospital," said
Higgins.

"Dapper Dan," said Hackett. "None of
the other girls made him, but we can always hope." He called the
hospital again; Cindy Hamilton was due to be discharged tomorrow.
"And another couple of new heists to work. Mutt and Jeff again,
well, we're pretty sure they're not in our records, nobody's made
them either, but there are pretty good descriptions on these other
two. Some lead may show."

Burroughs came in a few minutes later, and most of
them trooped down to R. and I. with him. Landers introduced him to
Phil, who settled him down in a cubicle with a couple of big books of
mug shots. The relevant information they had was fed into the
computers, and presently Palliser and Grace were handed half a dozen
records which might belong to the big fat Negro heister: all men with
likely backgrounds. There were only a couple of recent addresses, but
you had to start from where you were. They went out on the hunt for
those, and five minutes later Glasser and Higgins received four
possibles on the other one, the hair-trigger heister, just by the
description. There wasn't any mention of a southern accent but the
records didn't include hometowns; it gave them places to look.