Streets of Death - Dell Shannon (7 page)

"Yes, sir, I’ll look good. You’re pretty
sure it was him killed Sandra, aren’t you?"

"Pretty sure."
He left her to it, under Phil’s eye.

* * *

"Why, yes, sir, I knew Dick Buford, very nice
guy. Beg pardon? Oh, my name’s Cutler. I couldn’t believe it, I
heard he got killed by a robber, right next door, and we never heard
a thing!" Cutler was pleased at finding Landers and Grace on his
doorstep, to talk about it. "Last person in the world you’d
think--nice quiet fellow, him and his wife just devoted like they say
till she passed on--" He rambled on, giving them nothing. He
said he was a widower himself, that he’d been at the movies Tuesday
night, when Buford had probably been killed.

At the house on the other side of Buford’s they met
a Mrs. Skinner who told them they’d just moved in, and if they’d
realized it was the kind of neighborhood where murders happened
they’d never have rented the house. She and Mr. Skinner had been at
her sister’s in Huntington Park on Tuesday night, got home late.

"All very helpful," said Grace, brushing
his dapper mustache. "But the brother said he sometimes went up
to a local bar for a few beers. Maybe he did that night."

"So what?" said Landers. "He was
attacked at home."

"Well, we have to go through the motions."

Up on Virgil Street, in the two blocks each side,
were three small bars. It wasn’t quite noon, and only one was open.
They went in and asked the lone bartender if he knew Buford. It was a
little place, licensed for beer and wine only. He didn’t react to
the name or description. Pending the opening of the other two, they
went to have some lunch, and Grace said over coffee, "A handful
of nothing. It could’ve been any thug in L.A. picking a house at
random to go after loot. The brother’s supposed to look and see if
anything’s missing. Up in the air, like those damned funny rapes."

"I said we’d be in for another spate of the
funny ones," agreed Landers. "And of course, if that kid is
as young as those women say, he won’t be in Records, that is to
have prints and a mug-shot. Unless one of them happens to spot him on
the street, there’s no way to look. That is one for the books all
right."

At one-thirty they went back to that block and tried
Ben’s Bar and Grill on the corner of Virgil. It was just open, no
customers in. A fat bald fellow with a white apron round his middle
was polishing the bar; it was just a small place, but looked clean
and comfortable, with tables covered in red-checked cloths. "Do
for you, gents?" asked the bartender genially.

Landers flashed the badge. "Is a Mr. Buford one
of your regular customers here? Dick Buford?" He added a
description. "Maybe he didn’t come in often, just sometimes?"

The bartender’s geniality vanished. "Oh,"
he said in a subdued tone, "yeah, that’s so. Yeah, I knew that
guy. I heard something happened to him--some guy down the street said
he got killed. That’s a shame, seemed like a nice guy. No, I didn’t
know him good, just a customer, not very often like you said.”

"Was he here on Tuesday night?" asked Grace
in his soft voice.

The bartender passed a fat hand across his mouth and
said unwillingly, "I guess maybe he was. I guess it was Tuesday.
He never stayed long--two, three beers, and he’d go out."

"Did he get talking to anybody else here that
night'?"

"I don’t remember. We were kind of busy, I
didn’t take any notice. He never stayed long, like I said, in and
out. I don’t remember what time it was."

"Remember any other regular customers here at
the same time?" asked Landers.

"No. I couldn’t tell you a thing. I’m not
even sure now it was Tuesday," said the bartender. A couple of
men came in and he turned his back on police.

"Well, do tell," said Grace outside.
"That’s a little funny, Tom. What’s he feeling nervous
about?"

"
Just doesn’t want
to be mixed in--you know the citizens, Jase. This is a waste of time.
The only way we’ll find out what happened to Buford is if the lab
picked up some good evidence at the scene."

* * *

Higgins had had some paperwork to clean up on a
suicide from last week, and was the only one in when a call came from
Traffic about a new body. It was a rooming house over on Beaudry, and
the landlady had walked in to confiscate anything there until the
rent was paid up, and found the tenant dead in bed. Higgins went to
look at it.

Anywhere there was always the narco bit, the addicts
and the pushers; these days something new had been added. Time was
the heaviest traffic in the hard stuff was in heroin; a while back
the H had started to be old hat, and the thing now was cocaine. It
was just as lethal but it took a little longer to kill its victims.
But the younger generation had added a refinement, and increasingly
now they were picking up the kids half high on dope of one sort or
another and half high on gin or vodka.

Higgins couldn’t say exactly what might have taken
off the fellow in the little bare rented room; the autopsy would tell
them. But he didn’t look over twenty-five, and there were
needle-marks on both arms, not a dime in the place, a few old
clothes, an empty vodka bottle beside the bed. No I.D. in the
clothes, but the corpse was wearing a tattoo on one upper arm that
said Jacob Altmeyer in a wreath of flowers. Higgins called up the
morgue wagon and went back to Parker Center, down to Records.

"And how’s Tom treating you these days?"
he asked a cute flaxen-haired Phil Landers as she came up. Phil
smiled at him.

"So-so. I think his Italian blood’s showing,
he’s getting stingy with a buck."

"God knows aren’t we all these days."

"I understand," said Phil gravely, "that
the baby’s walking at last."

Higgins grinned unwillingly; he’d taken some
kidding about that. Well, since he’d belatedly acquired a family,
his lovely Mary and Bert Dwyer’s kids Steve and Laura, and then
their own Margaret Emily, he found he worried about them. And he’d
never known any babies before, but by what everybody said they ought
to start walking at about a year, and she hadn’t, and he had
worried. She’d been a year old in September. Mary said don’t be
silly, George, she’s a big baby, she’ll walk in her own good
time. But he’d fussed about it, in case anything was wrong. And
then suddenly, a couple of weeks ago, she’d got up and started
walking just fine, and he’d been damned relieved. Probably bored
everybody in the office about it.

"That’s so," he said. "She’s just
fine. Have we got a Jacob Altmeyer on file anywhere?"

Phil said she’d look, and while she was gone
Higgins thought about what Luis had said about the pretty boys.

When that had begun to
show a pattern, not just the one-time thing, they had asked the
computer about known threesomes at muggings, but that had come to
nothing. Anyway, nothing said these three had been together very
long. And even if Luis was right, and they didn’t belong to this
beat, there was no way to go looking for them. Phil came back with a
small package on Altmeyer. He had a rap-sheet of B. and E.,
possession, assault. Just another dopie, whatever he was on,
supporting a habit which had finally removed him from his misery.
There was an address for his mother in Glendale. Higgins went back to
the office and got her on the phone to break the news. After two days
of threat, it had finally begun to rain again.

* * *

"Well, I don’t know what to say," said
the manager of the Globe Grill. "I suppose--my office isn’t
very big--you could use the dining room, we don’t open that until
four." He was a rather handsome sharp-faced man with friendly
eyes and a quiet voice; his name was Rappaport, He eyed Mendoza,
Conway and Galeano worriedly. "Police coming--you’re a new
bunch--but Marta’s a good girl, and of course I’ve heard
something about it. The damnedest thing--I don’t understand it.
We’ve got to cooperate with you, and I don’t like to ask you,
don’t keep her--but it’s working hours and we get kept busy here.
If you want to go in the dining room, I’ll get her."

Rappaport, and this whole place, was a little
surprise. Galeano had taken it for granted, from Carey’s report,
that the blonde worked in a greasy spoon somewhere for peanuts. The
Globe Grill, while down this side of Wilshire and not in the gourmet
class of the better-known places out on La Cienega, was a quietly
good restaurant. It was divided into a coffee shop on one side and a
large dining room on the other, it was shining bright with
cleanliness and polished chrome and sleek modern lighting, and was
larger and busier than they had expected.

"Very nice," said Mendoza as they went past
a red velvet curtain into a large dining hall with crystal
chandeliers, red vinyl upholstery, a vaguely Mediterranean décor.
The tables were octagonal, with low heavy chairs; he pulled out a
chair, sat down and lit a cigarette.

"Maybe a little classier than we thought,"
agreed Conway. Galeano sat down too, and accepted a light from
Conway.

The curtains parted. "Again, you want to ask
questions? Oh, you are different police."

Carey’s blonde was blonde only in the sense that
she wasn’t dark. Her thick hair was tawny russet to dark gold,
obviously as nature made it, and she wasn’t conventionally pretty;
she had high wide cheekbones, a face slanted to a slender chin, a
wide mouth, uptilted brows and grave dark eyes. She was only about
five-three, and had a neatly rounded figure in her yellow and white
uniform. She came farther into the room and all the men stood up
formally.

"Mrs. Fleming? Lieutenant Mendoza--Detective
Conway, Detective Galeano. Sit down, won’t you?" Mendoza
offered her a cigarette.

"Thank you, I do not smoke. You want to ask all
the questions again?"

"Well, you see, Lieutenant Carey has passed the
case on to my department." Mendoza was watching her.
"Robbery-Homicide."

Her eyes didn’t change expression; she looked down
at her folded hands and said, "You think Edwin is dead. So do
I." She had the faintest of accents; her speech betrayed her
more by its formal grammar. "I thought that from the first."

"We’ve heard all the--mmh--circumstances from
Carey," said Mendoza, emitting a long stream of smoke, "and
you must admit it all looks very odd, doesn’t it?"

"It is a mystery, yes," she said. "I
have thought and thought, and I cannot decide what has happened."
She was watching them too, looking from one to the other. "I am
sure he has killed himself, but I do not understand how."

"Mmh, yes, it seems rather an impossibility."
Mendoza’s tone was only faintly sardonic. "When he was
confined to a wheelchair, he couldn’t even get downstairs by
himself. And couldn’t, of course, drive--though you have a car."

"We were going to sell it. A young man down the
street wishes to buy it. It is too expensive to operate an auto now.
No, he could not have driven."

"You told Carey your husband had threatened
suicide?"

She said carefully, "He has been very--very
despondent about life, since the baby died." Her mouth twisted a
little. "He was fond of little
K
ä
tzchen
.
Before, he had been--a little optimistic, that perhaps in time the
doctors could make him walk again. But lately, it was as if--he said,
there was nothing, no reason to go on living, he was only a worry and
a burden to me, and it was not right."

"And how did you feel about it? The same way?"
asked Mendoza.

She looked surprised. "I? It was--a thing life
had brought to us. How should I feel? I was sorry."

"Mmh, yes," said Mendoza. "You work
long hours here? Walk to work and home again?"

"Yes. I am here mornings and evenings, six days
a week." She looked at him impassively and then said, not
raising her voice, "You do not believe me either. That other
policeman, that Carey, he asked questions over and over again, who
are our friends, do I have a special friend, perhaps a special man
friend, what did I do that day, where did I go, were there any
telephone calls--and the other girls here, Betty and Angela who work
with me, he asked them questions about me. It is almost a little
funny." But she was looking angry. "Do you all think I have
murdered my husband? That is very funny indeed, how could I do that?
Even if I were so wicked?"

"Did you?" asked Mendoza.

"Please do not be so foolish. I beg your
pardon," she said tiredly. "I know the police always have
to deal with criminals, wicked people, and perhaps you come to
suspect everyone is so. You have to find out, ask questions, to know.
But all I can do is tell you the truth. I do not know what has
happened to Edwin."

Mendoza had stubbed out his cigarette, now lit
another. "You came home that day, nearly two weeks ago--two
weeks ago tomorrow--at about five o’clock? You got oif here at two,
and went shopping, you said. It was raining very heavily that day."

Her eyes fell before his. "Yes," she said.
"Yes. I am--you forget--European, I am used to the rain."

For no reason Galeano’s heart missed a beat. There
was a curious purity of outline to her wide forehead, and that mass
of tawny hair--she looked like a Saxon madonna. But this story--this
impossible tale--and there, just one second, she had flinched over
something.