Exploit of Death - Dell Shannon (17 page)

"Shoes," said Palliser blankly. "Why?"

Duke laughed. "Just don't forget it. We all have
our professional secrets, Palliser."

On Thursday afternoon, the tedious checking into
backgrounds of all the employees at the hospital turned up something
interesting, and Grace and Galeano brought it to Mendoza rather with
the air of two well-trained retrievers fetching in a bird that had
been lost in the underbrush.

"
¡Vaya por Dios!
"
said Mendoza, looking at the record. One Alfredo Diaz, employed as a
chef in the hospital kitchen, had turned out to be a former mental
patient at the Norwalk State Hospital. He had been released after a
couple of years there, three years ago. One of the doctors on the
hospital board had got him the job. "We just talked to that
one," said Grace, "and he nearly bit our heads off."

"Time is money, Jase. We interrupted his
schedule," said Galeano. "All these people are growing a
prejudice for the damn suspicious fuzz, Lieutenant. They were excited
over the murder, but when we came nosing around suspecting
that somebody at the hospital did it—"

"Medical people," said Grace, "are all
temperamental. Supposed to be all efficient and scientific but
they're so used to being in charge of everything they're apt to have
a tantrum when they're not—if you take me." Grace might know.
His father was the chief of the Gynecology Department at the General
Hospital.

"Well, mental patients come all kinds like other
people," said Mendoza. "One of the chefs—"

"I know," said Galeano. "That's the
little stumbling block. He says he was in the basement kitchen fixing
the dinners with everybody else. He never goes up to the wards—wasn't
interested in the patients, and there seems to have been about forty
other people there, but that cancels itself out in a way. If he was
gone for fifteen minutes—said he was back in the john—would
anybody have noticed?"

"What in hell is one like that doing on a
hospital staff?"

"The doctor we riled—a Dr. Ackerwood—told us
he'd got him the job as a favor for a friend of his, one of the
psychiatrists at Norwalk—a Dr. Silverman."

"I'm not," said Mendoza, "constitutionally
disposed to believe automatically anything a psychiatrist says, boys.
I think at least half of them are a little bit touched themselves.
But I suppose it wouldn't do any harm to hear what Silverman has to
say about Diaz."

He saw Silverman on Friday morning at his private
office out on Chapman Avenue in Fullerton, and was, grudgingly,
favorably impressed. Silverman was fat, bald, friendly and not given
to the six=dollar words.

"Well, the man has a
low-normal I.Q., Lieutenant. He's a mildly schizoid personality, but
I never detected any tendency to violence in the three years I was
treating him. He had a great lack of self-confidence—understandable
with his mentality, but it took the effect of suicidal impulses
rather than outward aggression. As I had rather expected, when we
found him a job he could perform satisfactorily, a mechanical job he
could do by routine, he responded quite well. He's made a good
adjustment." Silverman was academically interested in the
homicide. "I don't know anything about it, Lieutenant, except
what you've just told me, but from my experience with aberrations, I
might hazard a guess that you should look for someone with a fixation
about death—perhaps," he reflected, "a much-indulged son
who had lost a beloved mother. I find it interesting, you know, that
it is an Italian family. I presume Catholic. Yes. The er—symbolism.
But I really think you needn't suspect Diaz. I never detected any
violence there—any incipient aggression."

* * *

AND MENDOZA felt a little foolish about it—a little
self-conscious. But he told the morgue to send Juliette up to Forest
Lawn. God knew he could afford to pay for a simple funeral, but he
wasn't sure why he felt obligated, and he thought vaguely as he had
thought about another corpse a year or so ago, She fell among
thieves. He wondered if Juliette had been Catholic; it was probable.
He talked to Father Damian at St. Patrick's in Burbank, and the
priest was sensible and practical. He held a brief graveside service.
Alison attended that

"I know it's just a ceremony, but somehow I felt
I ought to go"—and Mairi was there. Mairi was a very orthodox,
traditional Catholic of the old school and for some reason she felt
sentimental about Juliette. She said darkly, "‘Dying as a
stranger in a strange land—and if you ask me, even if we don't know
the ins and outs of it, that grandfather of hers must be a wicked old
rogue."
 

SEVEN

ON SATURDAY, Palliser finally got around to looking
up Toby Wells. The rest of the Coffey family had come in to have
their prints taken and these had checked out with the other prints
the lab had picked up. Wells worked at a Thrifty drugstore on
Hollywood Boulevard, and he was an ordinary-looking young black
fellow, round-faced, slow-spoken, and he was frank on answering
questions. "You were in a little trouble a couple of years ago,"
said Palliser.

Wells said a little nervously, "Well, yeah, that
was kind of a damn' fool thing to do—steal those clothes—but I
like nice clothes, and I had a new girl then and I guess I wanted to
show off to her. My grandma paid up for me and I never been in any
trouble since. Oh yeah, it's an awful thing about Grandma." He
shied a little when Palliser asked him about that Friday night, but
answered readily, —"I was out with my girl, Mae Weaver. We
went to a disco down on Jefferson Boulevard. I guess it was about
midnight when I got home, we both had to go to work the next day, a
course." He lived with a couple of other young fellows at an
apartment on Virgil Avenue. It wasn't worth writing a further report
on. Half of them were now doing the legwork on that heister, the rest
winding down the investigation at the hospital. That had been a
bastard of a thing to work. They must have chased down over a hundred
people, trying to identify all the visitors, looking into personal
backgrounds, and all for nothing. There was no way to find out who
might have done that queer killing—why or when. It was another case
that would wind up in the Pending file.

On Sunday morning, the lab report came up on the
Holzer car and there was nothing in it at all. The steering wheel had
evidently been wiped clean and the only other prints in the car
belonged to Edna Holzer and the girl, Frances. The
autopsy
report came in that afternoon too and she hadn't been raped, just
knocked around and strangled manually. The lab hadn't picked up
anything significant from her clothes.

Mendoza took the reports out to the communal office
to pass on and said to Hackett, "Just damn all on everything we'
re working—nothing."

"Well, that's the way it goes sometimes, and
then all of a sudden we'll get some breaks."

"Don't philosophize at me," said Mendoza
irritably. He sat down at Higgins' desk and added abruptly, "And
we're never going to hear anything from France, you know. I've got a
strong hunch on that."

"I don't see that, Luis. The girl must've had
friends. There's the fiancé."

"
Es cierto, sé
.
But that's my hunch." He was silent for a moment and then said,
"The only way we'll get anything from France is for somebody to
go over there and look."

Hackett took his glasses off to stare at him. "You're
not serious."

"I might be, Art. At least I've got a passport
in order."

"You don't know where to start looking,"
said Hackett.

"But the trail starts there, damn it
¡Condenación!
Grandfather.
If there was just some little lead¡"

"You don't even know whether the Martin girl
lived in Paris—anywhere in France—"

"The probability is Paris, I think. Such a
simple, artful little setup. By God, I'll find out what was behind
that if it takes a year," said Mendoza violently. "And I
think we can let that hospital staff go about its business. We're
never going to turn up any evidence on that damn thing." Hackett
agreed thoughtfully. The autopsy on Alisio had said exactly what they
expected it to say.

By now, four possible suspects on that heist had been
found and questioned, but there was nothing to tie in any of them
definitely. Two more heists had gone down last night with no clear
descriptions. The heat wave was still with them.

Hackett said, "We get these spells sometimes.
Stymied on everything. Then all of a sudden we'll start to get the
breaks."

"Pollyanna," said Mendoza.

What broke on Monday afternoon was another homicide,
at a junior high school down on Vernon Avenue. One of the teachers,
Mrs. Vera Robertson, was found by another teacher, knifed to death in
her own classroom. Mendoza and Higgins went out to have a first look
and talked to a shaken and angry principal, Lee Olliphant.

"We've never had anything as bad as this,"
he said. "There's always the dope problem. You can't do anything
with some of these damn kids, they come to school stoned on the dope,
on the liquor, or both. About all we can do is try to see they don't
disturb the kids who are teachable. Mrs. Robertson had complained to
me of several boys in her class, the first week of school. It was her
first semester with us, you know. She'd been transferred from a
junior high school in Hollywood." He was a big pear-shaped man
in a baggy wrinkled suit and he eyed Mendoza's fastidious dapperness
with faint disapproval. The knifing had apparently happened during
the lunch hour. She had been found at twelve-thirty by the other
teacher, Wilma Fox.

She said, "Vera just hated it here. Heaven knows
the kids anywhere are bad enough nowadays, but down here it's worse
than other places, more of the kids on dope and some of the rest
impossible to teach for other reasons, and I'm sorry if I sound
prejudiced, but that is the plain truth. But this—I'm going to be
scared to come to work and I've got to earn a living—"

Olliphant said heavily, "My God, I'm thankful
I'm due to retire next year. It's not unusual for the boys here to
carry knives, there's a lot of gang activity and the decent kids get
intimidated for the lunch money and so on." He sighed. "Not
an easy job. Yes, I can give you the names of the boys she complained
about—showing up high on dope, resisting discipline—but that
doesn't say it was one of them who did it. We have a lot of difficult
youngsters."

Half of the names were Latin—Ortiz, Gonzales,
Lopez. The rest of the boys were black. Classes were out by then, the
lab men busy in the classroom, but they wouldn't turn up anything
useful. They couldn't print juveniles, and with all the kids milling
around at the lunch hour nobody would have noticed any disturbance in
that classroom, and nobody would tell the fuzz if they had. Her
handbag was missing. She had kept it in a drawer in her desk. She had
been thirty-five, had a husband and two young daughters. The husband
was a bookkeeper at a savings-and-loan company in Hollywood, and he
told them that she never carried more than a few dollars to school.
She had had her wallet rifled the first day she was there and there
wasn't a lock on any of her drawers. "These goddamn punk kids.
Not a white kid in that damn place. All the spicks and dinges. And
you want to arrest me for being prejudiced, go ahead. I told her for
God's sake not to turn her back on any of them. All of those goddamn
kids carrying knives or worse. Damn it, if we hadn't needed her
salary, she wouldn't have been there—"

It was a waste of time to talk to the kids. The
biggest one of those she'd complained about was Rudy Ortiz, a hulking
fourteen-year-old. He didn't like the fuzz worth a damn but he knew
they couldn't do anything to him. He said sullenly what the other
ones had said, as if it were the same record being played. "She
just hated anybody with a Latin name—like she hated all the black
kids. All the kids knew that. Nobody liked old lady Robertson, but I
don't know nothing about what happened."

Her handbag turned up the next day, in a trash
container behind the school cafeteria. Her wallet was in it, empty of
the few dollars it had held. This was another one that would go into
Pending after a couple of follow-up reports. But on the following
Thursday, the unexpected happened. The Security Pacific Bank which
had issued Edna Holzer's Visa card called headquarters to report, as
requested, that an attempt had been made to use that account. The
routine check had showed up the hold on it. The card had been
presented at the Broadway Department Store at Hollywood and Vine in
the women's dress section.

Mendoza and Hackett went up there in a hurry and
talked to the clerk who had checked the card. She was an amiable
middle-aged woman who'd worked there for years, and she said, "It's
funny how you get feelings, sort of a sixth sense, when somebody's
trying to pull something, a shoplifter or something like this. I kind
of had a feeling about that girl as soon as I saw her. It was funny."

"Can you describe her?" asked Mendoza.

"Oh, sure, I think I can do better than that for
you. Of course, she didn't get away with the merchandise, she'd
picked out a couple of dresses and a blouse, and these credit cards
get stopped for a lot of reasons—I couldn't know she'd stolen it, I
just let her walk out. But I'd seen her before, you know, and when
the department head said the police were interested, I did some
thinking on it, and I can tell you where to find her."