Exploit of Death - Dell Shannon

Exploit of Death

Dell Shannon
1983

ONE

THE MENDOZAS were on the way home. They had had an
enjoyable, if tiring, five weeks' vacation, touring England and
Scotland after a week in London. They had visited Bateman's, Rudyard
Kipling's old home, and seen Pook's Hill. They had dutifully visited
all the tourist attractions and they had called on Mairi MacTaggart's
cousin Jennie in Inverness. They were both tired and it would be good
to be home. Louis had needed a vacation, reflected Alison sleepily.
But half the fun of going away somewhere was coming home. It seemed
years since they had been home—since they had seen the twins,
Johnny and Terry, and tomorrow was the twins' sixth birthday—and
the baby Luisa would be a year old in a few weeks—and the cats and
Cedric, the Old English sheepdog, and of course Mairi, the surrogate
grandmother, and the Kearneys, and even the Five Graces, the sheep
Ken Kearney had recommended for eating down the underbrush. It would
be nice to get home to the big Spanish hacienda in the hills above
Burbank, La Casa de la Gente Feliz, the house of happy people.

They had flown from New York this morning and had a
two-hour wait at O'Hare Airport in Chicago for a flight to Los
Angeles; when the flight was announced, there was quite a crowd of
passengers flocking down the tunnel to board. The Mendozas were in
the middle of the little crowd as the stewardess ushered them down
the aisle of the big jet. The seats were in tiers of three across
each side of the aisle, and there was a girl sitting in the window
seat of the three the stewardess indicated.

Alison sat down in the middle seat next to her and
Mendoza took the seat next to the aisle. The girl gave them a shy,
tentative smile. She was a very pretty girl in the mid-twenties with
a neat cap of smooth, dark hair, a pert triangular kitten face with a
tip-tilted nose, and a wide, friendly mouth. Alison had noticed her
before on the flight from New York, sitting several rows ahead of
them. She was unobtrusively dressed in a smart navy-blue suit and a
white tailored blouse. When the jet began to roar and presently
trundle down the runway and lifted off, the girl gave a little
exclamation and said apologetically, "It is the first time I
have flown, I am nervous," and laughed. "But it is exciting
to see America for the first time."

"Oh, of course, it must be," said Alison
politely.

"You see, my mother was American, but never have
I been out of France."

"Oh," said Alison. She was feeling. very
sleepy and suppressed a yawn. "You are going to see relatives
then, Miss—'?"

"Martin," said the girl. "I am
Juliette Martin." She gave it the French pronunciation. She
spoke nearly unaccented English. "My grandfather, yes." She
hesitated, considered Alison's friendly, encouraging expression and
went on, "It is a funny little story perhaps. You see, my mother
was studying to be a teacher of languages and she came to France with
a scholarship for postgraduate work, and met my papa. And her father
was quite furious that she wished to marry a foreigner, a Frenchman,
and said he would have nothing more to do with her. My mother wrote
to him when I was born, five years later, but never heard from him.
But when my parents were both killed in the auto accident, that is
six months ago, I thought he should know if he is still alive, and so
I wrote, and he wrote back. We have corresponded, and he is most
anxious to meet me. He is very remorseful now about how he treated my
mother." She smiled at Alison. "I think he is very old and
lonely and sentimental as old people become. I am sorry for him."

"Of course," said Alison conventionally,
suppressing another yawn. Mendoza had leaned back and shut his eyes.

"That's very interesting. Are you going to stay
long?"

"Not long. I have three weeks' holiday due to me
because last spring I could not get away when we were busy in the
office? She smiled slightly. "M. Trennard is not so easy an
employer as his uncle, but he had to admit that I was owed a
holiday."

"I hope you'll enjoy it," said Alison
sleepily.

"Oh, yes. At first Paul did not want me to go.
That is my fiancé, we are to be married in January. But he came to
understand there is the family feeling. Grandfather is the only
family I have, except for my two uncles. But you are having a
holiday, also?" That was polite, conventional.

"No," said Alison through a large yawn.
"We're on the way home," and how sweet it was to be going
home. The vacation had been her idea, but she felt now that she
didn't want to leave home again for a long, long time. She felt her
eyelids drooping, but the girl had been friendly, perhaps was feeling
lonely this far from home. Alison swallowed another yawn. "Do
you live in Paris?" she asked at random. But the drowsiness was
increasing. She thought the girl mentioned a rue de something and
then her eyes closed and her red head fell back on the seat.

An unspecified time later she was jerked awake when
the stewardess came round taking orders for a meal. When the trays
were served, Miss Martin said, "You are tired. I should
apologize for bothering you."

"Oh, not at all,"
said Alison. "It's just, I'll be so glad to get home." She
had never been so tired in all her life. Perhaps the girl was tired
too. After that she slept a little and they exchanged only a little
desultory conversation in the last half hour before the plane landed
at International Airport in Los Angeles. The last Alison saw of her,
she gave Alison a shy, fleeting smile as she stood back for the
Mendozas to precede her up the aisle.

* * *

AND IT WAS blessedly good to be home again, even in
the midst of the twins' clamor, to find everything just as usual. The
house was running like clockwork under Mairi's capable management.
There was a boisterous birthday party for the twins. Everyone had to
hear all about the vacation. And after Alison had slept the clock
around, she felt a good deal better.

"And you don't have to go into the office right
away," she said to Mendoza.

"Change of pace,"
he said. He'd been fidgeting around the living room most of the
evening, unable to settle with a book. "It's time I got back to
work,
mi vida
."
He hadn't been away from the thankless job so long in twenty-six
years. These days, the thankless job at the Robbery-Homicide office
at L.A.P.D. Headquarters.

* * *

HE HAD TALKED to Hackett on the phone briefly on
Sunday night, the day after they got home. To the inquiry as to what
was new on hand, Hackett had said merely, "Just the usual. You
can look over the reports when you come in. Nothing very abstruse,
Luis."

There wasn't, as a rule, anything very complicated or
mysterious in the reports. Just more evidence of human nature. But
when Mendoza showed up at the office on Monday morning, dapper as
usual in silver-gray Dacron, only Hackett was in. Robbery-Homicide
was a little busier than usual. At the beginning of September the
worst of the summer heat was on them and the crime rate up in
consequence. There had been, Hackett told him, a new bank heist on
Friday, and these days the FBI left the bank jobs strictly to the
locals. Landers, Galeano, and Grace were out talking again to the
various witnesses but probably would turn up damn all. It had been a
slick pro job. Two men on it, and nothing so far useful in the way of
descriptions. They had the usual run of heists to do the legwork on.
Higgins and Wanda Larsen were out on those. It was, of course,
Palliser's day off. The perennial heisters were anonymous, coming and
going. Only occasionally did they drop on one with sufficient
evidence to pin down a court case.

"Of course," said Hackett, "we've got
this and that on this Baby Face. I've got the latest witness coming
in for a session with the Identikit for whatever it might be worth."

He leaned back and the desk chair creaked under his
wide bulk. "He's hit three times since you've been away. Two
twenty-four-hour convenience stores and a liquor store. Everybody
says he's big, blond, very polite, and sort of apologetic. Says
please and thank you. No sort of description of the gun, what size or
type, just a gun. He sounds like an amateur."

"No leads from Records," concluded Mendoza.

"Not a smell. Couple of descriptions could match
but they both belong to tough pros. He's first time out," said
Hackett with conviction. "Just luck if we ever drop on him.
There's the usual run of corpses, O.D.'s and winos. No mysteries. You
can look over the reports. And I'll bet you're glad to be back in
this hellish climate again after the British Isles."

Mendoza lit a cigarette with a snap of his lighter
and said, "No hot weather, and the people are fine, Art. But I
was inviting high blood pressure driving on the wrong side of the
road. So I'd better look over the reports."

They were shorthanded. Henry Glasser was off on
vacation, wouldn't be back for another week. Hackett's witness
arrived to be taken down to S.I.D. for the session with the
Identikit. Hackett hadn't come back yet when Sergeant Lake buzzed
Mendoza and reported a new body. This time of year was always a busy
one for Robbery-Homicide. Nobody else being in, Mendoza went out on
it. It was, to a veteran officer of Robbery-Homicide and a cynical
cop, an uninteresting body. The body of a kid about sixteen sprawled
alongside a bench at a bus stop on Alvarado.

The patrolman was waiting for him. There were a few
curious bystanders hanging around. "A woman came up to catch a
bus and noticed him," said the patrolman. "He could've been
here for hours, everybody thinking he was passed out. Probably an
overdose."

"Probably," agreed Mendoza, after a look.
The kid was just an anonymous teenager. Long, greasy hair, jeans,
dirty shirt; but there was ID on him, a detention slip from Manual
Arts High School signed by one P. Siglione. The name on it was
Anthony Delucca. After the morgue wagon came and went, Mendoza drove
up to the high school and asked questions.

Siglione was an English teacher, fat and midd1e-aged
and disgusted. "That one," he said. "What the hell are
we supposed to do with these kids, I ask you? Stoned on drugs and/or
the liquor half the time, passing out in class. I don't know if it's
the right answer, but most of us just ignore them. Most of the
parents don't care or can't do anything about it. Sure, Delucca's in
one of my classes. He turned up drunk as a skunk yesterday. I gave
him a detention and sent him to principal's office. I doubt if he
went."

Mendoza asked the principal's office for an address
and got one down on Seventeenth Street. There he broke the news to an
indifferent neighbor, on one side of a dilapidated duplex, who said,
"Mis' Delucca, she's at work. I don't know where. There's nobody
home till about six." Little job for the night watch, reflected
Mendoza, breaking the news. He took himself out to lunch at
Federico's and ran into Galeano and Landers. They had to hear all
about the vacation, and told him this and that about the bank job.
Not that there was much to tell. There weren't any leads on it at
all.

Mendoza asked, "And how are the expectant
ladies?"

The joke around the office these days was that there
was something catching going around. Phil Landers was expecting a
baby in December, Galeano's new bride, Marta, in March. The
Pallisers' second was due in February, as well as the Piggotts'
first.

Landers said lugubriously, "She would rope me
into that house in Azusa, for God's sake. It needs everything done to
it, what else, when we got it for seventy thousand, and I just hope
to God she'll use some sense and not start on the painting herself.
Women."

When they got back to the office Higgins was there
typing a report, and broke off to greet Mendoza and hear all about
the vacation. "It's good to have you back, Luis. We could use a
few hunches on some things that have gone down lately."

"I don't produce them to order, George."

"And sometimes we don't need the hunches,"
said Hackett behind him. "I just shoved that hooker into
Pending. We'll never get anywhere on that."

"I said so the minute I looked at the damn
thing," said Higgins.

"What hooker?" asked Mendoza.

"The reports are somewhere on your desk. No big
deal," said Hackett. "Smal1-time hooker in business for
herself, Mabel Carter. Typical two-room apartment on Portland Street.
Girlfriend walked in and found her dead. Stabbed and cut up, it was a
mess, but no weapon left. Well, for God's sake, it could've been any
john off the street. The hookers lay themselves open to it and she
was on the way down. A lush. She'd pick up any prospect who'd buy a
bottle and pay her the ten bucks. The lab didn't come up with
anything. All the girlfriend could say, she hadn't had any trouble
with anybody she knew of."