Exploit of Death - Dell Shannon (14 page)

PALLISER WAS OFF on Monday, but they got Henry
Glasser back. When Mendoza came in, Grace had already corralled him
and was showing all the pictures, and sandy middle-sized Glasser was
grinning amiably at them.

"Welcome home, Henry," said Mendoza. "Good
vacation?"

"I went up to Big Bear," said Glasser. "But
even up there it was too damned hot." He was looking over at
Wanda Larsen at her desk in the corner and she was smiling back at
him. There'd been a little speculation about those two, nobody knew
if they were dating or not. ‘ `

"I want to see the night report, and you'd all
better hear what we've got on this so far." They were all in by
then, Hackett and Higgins, Galeano, Grace, Landers. They dragged
chairs into his office and heard about the new one from Higgins while
Mendoza read Conway's report.

"So, there's legwork to do," said Mendoza,
passing it on to Hackett. "This Alisio had a big family and he'd
been in the hospital nearly a month. The nurses knew them casually.
He had eight or nine visitors yesterday, between about one and
four-thirty or a little before four-thirty. They didn't all stay in
his room all the time, there wouldn't be room for them, they went in
and out. Sat in a little lounge down the hall. The hospital just had
one brother's name as the responsible relative—Joseph Alisio—an
address in Hollywood. He'll give us the names of the rest of the
family."

"You don't think it was one of the family?"
asked Galeano.

"Who knows? No, I don't. From what the nurses
say it's a big loving family, concerned and attentive. But on a
Sunday there were a lot of visitors coming and going, and they can
probably give us a better idea than the nurses who was there, the
nurses were busy. They'd all been visiting the hospital quite a bit
and may have got acquainted with some other visitors."

"Reaching," said Higgins. "And one of
them suddenly had the urge to smother a patient—any patient?"

"You know, Luis," said Hackett, " just
off the top of my mind, there are always a lot of people wandering
around a big hospital, and nurse's aides, orderlies, even
nurses—they're just people—come all sorts. You know what I'm
thinking about?—that case in Santa Monica last year, where that
male nurse was giving the senile old patients the over-doses of
morphine. Just out of kindness, they were better dead."

"Yes," said Mendoza. "It's possible it
could be something like that, and we want to question these nurses
again in depth, and damnation, none of them is on until three PM.
Though the ones there now can tell us something about the visitors
starting at one o'clock. However you slice it, we've got a lot of
people to talk to so—
¡Sigan adelante!
"
He stabbed out his cigarette and stood up.

But as he followed the twin looming bulks of Hackett
and Higgins down the hall, Lieutenant Carey of Missing Persons came
past the switchboard and said, "I'll take twenty minutes of your
time, Mendoza."

"What the hell do you want? Don't tell me you've
turned up a body for us."

"No, but we just might," said Carey
seriously.

Slightly annoyed, Mendoza took him back to his
office, gave him a cigarette and asked, "What have you got?"

"It's what we haven't got," said Carey. His
snub-nosed bulldog face looked rather solemn. "It just shapes up
as a probable abduction. Possible rape, possible homicide, after this
long a time. I just thought I'd brief you about it in case the body
shows up, because it's got to be the Central beat. The woman's been
missing for thirty-six hours, and a rapist doesn't usually hold them
that long. It's possible she's I dead."

"Why, how, and who?"

"Well, this Edna Holzer. I didn't see the report
until an hour ago. I've just been talking to the girl—Frances
Holzer. Edna Holzer's the mother. We've got a description I won't
bother you with, but she sounds like an attractive woman. She left
home, which is Del Mar Avenue in Hollywood, at about seven on
Saturday night to visit a friend in the French Hospital. She didn't
intend to stay long—should've been home by eight—thirty, but she
wasn't. The daughter called Hollywood about eleven-thirty. They
called Traffic and a squad looked around, but no show. She was
driving a two-year-old Chrysler Newport, we've got the plate number
and there's an A.P.B. out." Carey emitted a stream of blue
smoke, put out his cigarette, and asked, "You know the French
Hospital?"

Mendoza was sitting back with eyes shut. "West
College Street." Mendoza knew his town, from twenty-six years on
the job.

"That's right. And look, Mendoza. She wasn't
five minutes from the Stack where all the freeways come in. In five
minutes she'd have been on the Hollywood Freeway heading for home.
The girl called the hospital on Sunday—well—so did my office
after she filed a missing report—and Mrs. Holzer had been there,
left about a quarter of height. Well, you can see how it shapes up.
She must've run into trouble between the hospital and the Stack,
within about five blocks."

"Iess," said Mendoza, lighting another
cigarette. "Her nearest route was the Pasadena Freeway down to
the Stack and that's three blocks from the hospital."

"Well, there's no sign of her or the car,"
said Carey. "She's a responsible woman. Legal secretary to a big
firm. You can see it smells of abduction, robbery, possible rape, and
possible homicide."

"
Es cierto
,"
said Mendoza. He was sitting back smoking lazily. "So you think
she's going to turn up as a corpse for us."

"It's a possibility. I thought I'd tell you.
Wherever she does turn up—whenever—it's got to be a hundred
percent sure whatever happened to her, it happened on the Central
beat."
 
 

SIX

BY THE MIDDLE of Monday morning, Hackett and Higgins
were talking to Joseph Alisio and his wife in their home. It was an
old house in a once very fashionable area of Hollywood and still a
good residential area, Outpost Drive. Some of the furniture looked
like valuable antiques. Alisio was in the main executive office of a
big chain of markets. He looked like his brother, a small man with a
big nose and a bald head. His wife was a fat motherly-looking woman.
They had both reacted to the news about Carlo with more incredulity
than grief.

"There's just no sense to it at all," said
Alisio, rubbing his naked bald head. "Of course we were upset
when the hospital called last night. Carl had seemed to be a lot
better the last week or so, but the doctor had told us it was just a
temporary state of remission. But this—it doesn't seem possible.
Anything that could happen in a hospital."

His wife said, "With so many there—"

"Just who had been to see him?" asked
Higgins. "When did everybody leave?"

Alisio said promptly, "We got there about two
o'clock and I think it was just after four we left, wasn't it, Amy?"

She nodded. "We were having some friends in for
dinner. I'd left the roast on but there were still things to do. Ruby
and Arthur came just after we got there. That's my nephew and his
wife, and their daughter and her husband came just a while later.
Then Randy and Rosa and Bill came—"

"That's my sister Rosa, Randy's mother—the
Nicollettis—and then I think about three o'clock my brother Dan and
his wife, Selma, and their two girls dropped by. It's a little drive
for them from Long Beach, but we're a pretty close family—we
thought a lot of Carl." Alisio took off his glasses to polish
them with a handkerchief. "My God. A thing like this. Some
lunatic—and in the hospital—it's just senseless. Dan and Selma
hadn't got up the Sunday before, Carl was so glad to see them—and
Randy. Randy was his favorite nephew. That's our sister Rosa's son.
She's our youngest sister—baby of the family—and later on some
old friends of Carl's came by, Jeanette and Paul De Angelo."

"You were all in and out of his room most of the
afternoon?" asked Hackett.

"Yes, that's right. Just as usual. There wasn't
space for more than three of four visitors at once. We'd go down to
sit in the little lounge and then take turns going in to Carl."

"Did either of the other two patients ever have
any visitors?"

"No, they never seem to. I guess they're so far
gone they wouldn't realize if anyone was there or not. I don't know
if they've got any families."

"But the other patients in the wing had
visitors," said J Higgins.

"Oh, yes. There were people coming and going
most of the time, but of course we didn't know any of them. There
were people we'd seen there before, I suppose seeing patients who'd
been there as long as Carl had, but we wouldn't know their names. But
who in God's name would want to do a thing like that? I can't take it
in. It's just insane. Just insane."

There had been nurses going around, naturally, and a
couple of doctors, all the nurses and aides at the station in the
hall. But Alisio was firm that the family were the only ones who had
been in Carlo Alisio's room until they left.

"Who was the last to leave? Do you remember?"
asked Hackett.

He said at once, "I think it would be either
Randy or Rosa and Bill. They were still there when Amy and I left.
Everybody else had gone. But, my God—how such a thing could've
happened—it must've been some lunatic, doing a thing like that, but
in a hospital with so many people around like Amy says—" He
supplied names readily. Randy Nicolletti and his parents. His niece
Ruby and her husband, Arthur Overman. The De Angelos—his brother
Dan and his daughter, Kathy Penner.

"And we'll have to look at all the employees,"
said Higgins back in the car. "What a hell of a job, Art. We'll
have to talk to all the family."

When they got back to the office to parcel out the
names and addresses, Grace and Galeano had gone over to the hospital
to start talking to the staff. This was going to pose some legwork
with a vengeance. They would have to get the names of all the
patients on that floor, try to find out who in their visitors had
been, when they'd been there, and talk to everybody on the hospital
staff with any reason to be in that wing. And this looked like the
irrational thing, but a good many people with some mental quirk were
walking around looking as sane as anybody else. That kind of thing
wasn't always plain to see.

Landers looked at the list of names and addresses and
sighed. "Have to talk to all the family. Somebody may have
noticed something. The last ones to leave." He ran a hand
through his dark hair. "The time seems a little tight. That
doctor thought he'd probably been killed between four and
four-thirty— "

"And just about then," said Higgins, "all
the visitors were leaving and the nurses getting the patients ready
to have dinner in an hour or so. Hell, anybody could've wandered into
that room without being noticed, and it wouldn't have taken two
minutes to kill the old man—"

"Well, you know, George," said Glasser
ruminatively, "hospitals these days—there aren't the same
standards there used to be. They hire a lot of their lower-echelon
people from the immigrants coming in, people who don't know
English—willing to take menial jobs at lower pay. Besides all the
nurses and aides and orderlies, there'll be the cleanup people and
kitchen staff—all sorts of people. I know the immigrants are
supposed to be screened, but who knows what could slip through?"

"Lunatics," said Hackett. "Well, we'll
sort out who saw him last, if they noticed anything. Anybody coming
into the room or just outside when they left."

They divided up the names and started out. Hackett
drew the Nicollettis and went down the hall to the men's room before
he headed for the elevator. When he passed the door to
Robbery-Homicide again, Sergeant Lake called his name and he turned
in. "Iady asking to see you," said Lake.

Alongside the switchboard was a girl about
twenty-two, a very pretty blond girl with a beautiful figure. She was
smartly dressed in a blue sundress and high-heeled white sandals,
with a big white handbag. She said, "I wanted to talk to the
officer who arrested my husband. Is that you? I'm Stella Davies."

"That's right, Mrs. Davies. I'm Sergeant
Hackett." He took her into the office and gave her the chair
beside his desk.

She said drearily, "I wanted to ask you, you'd
know about it, I guess. What Ricky might get."

"Well, it's a first count on him and he's got a
good record. I don't know, but it's probable the D.A. would accept a
plea bargain. He might get sent up for a year and get probation."

"I see," she said. "Thanks for telling
me. Of course he was an awful fool for doing that, but I've got a
sort of feeling it was partly my fault, too. I should've been alot
more careful about expenses. Neither of us had ever had to budget
very tight, if you see what I mean. I'd been giving Mother forty a
week to help pay for groceries, but she owns the house and I wasn't
used to paying rent, and neither was Ricky. And I guess we just
thought we could go out and get whatever we wanted. I didn't have any
idea those credit cards had gone so high, but it's just too easy to
say charge it and give the account number." She accepted a
cigarette I and a light apathetically. "I really didn't have to
pay forty dollars for this dress."