Exploit of Death - Dell Shannon (18 page)

"By God, Art, you're a prophet," said
Mendoza. "Don't tell me we're going to get a break. Where and
who?"

"She's a waitress at this coffee shop just up
the block. Faye's Café. I drop in there for lunch sometimes. She's
about twenty-five, size twelve, she's got red hair. Yes, I'm sure
it's her. I'd swear to it."

They picked her up at the café. Her name was Sally
Pitman and at first she wouldn't tell them anything, just kept
denying she'd done it. But Higgins came and loomed at her and she
didn't like him at all, or the big businesslike detective office.
Finally she said weakly, "I didn't really do anything, did I? I
just thought if I could use that card to get some things—well, it'd
be easy. I didn't know there was anything wrong with it. Somebody
just lost it."

"Where did you get it?" asked Higgins for
the third time.

"I found it. I told you. I just found it on the
sidewalk."

They went on pounding at her about that and finally
in exasperation they left her alone for five minutes and turned Wanda
Larsen on to her.

"You know, Lieutenant," said Wanda sweetly,
"there's an old saying that you catch more flies with honey. Why
did you try to scare the poor kid? All she needed were a few
sympathetic words. I think she'll talk to you now."

"Thank you so much," said Mendoza.

Sally Pitman was still sullen but ready to talk
straighter. "Oh, for God's sake," she said wearily. "I
found the damn card in my boyfriend's pocket. We were just sitting
around the other night and I was out of cigarettes and I looked to
see if he had any in his jacket."

"Boyfriend's name?" asked Hackett briskly.

"Ray Siemens. He doesn't know anything about it
either."

"Did you ask him about it?"

"He found it. He just found it in the street. He
said he forgot he'd picked it up and I better throw it away, it was
no good. But I just thought—but he doesn't know anything about all
this. He told me to throw it away."
 
Ray
Siemens worked at a gas station on Western. They brought him in to
talk to and he laughed at them. He was a big husky dark-haired fellow
about twenty-five, and he didn't appreciate being grilled by the
fuzz, but they couldn't shake his story. He'd found the card on the
sidewalk right outside the station. Didn't know why he bothered to
pick it up. He'd forgotten he had. He told Sally to thrown it away,
it was no good to anybody. He went on saying that over again and of
course there was no evidence on him at all. He could have found it
where the X on Edna Holzer had dropped it. The car had been clean. He
had a little pedigree with them—one count of assault with intent.
He had served a year in the men's colony at San Luis Obispo. Both
Mendoza and Hackett liked that, but without any definite evidence
they'd never tie him in.

Siemens lived alone in a little apartment over the
garage at the rear of a single house on Berendo Avenue, and the
owners lived in the front house, a Mr. and Mrs. Dearborn. They said
he was a quiet tenant, out a lot, always paid the rent on time.
Mendoza got a search warrant for the place and they looked at it,
Higgins trailing along. It was a shabby bare little apartment, not
much furniture, but he had a nice wardrobe of clothes. In one corner
of the living room stood one of the newly popular reproductions of an
old Franklin stove—economical heating. Mendoza opened the door and
looked in and said, "Why has he had a fire in this,
compadres
?
In ninety-degree weather‘?" The stove was half full of ashes,
partly burned lumps of unidentifiable burned matter.

"So that's what he did with the handbag,"
said Higgins, a hand to his jaw.

"I rather think so," said Mendoza. "Let's
turn the lab loose on it." .

"Impossible," said Hackett. "Nobody
could say what that stuff once was."

"Well, see what they make of it."

A lab crew went out next morning. They talked to
Siemens again that afternoon and he was openly contemptuous.

"I don't know what the hell you're trying to tie
me into, but you might as well stop wasting your goddamn time, gents,
I'm clean and you'll never prove I'm not." His cocky attitude
just reinforced their conviction. He said he'd been with the girl
that Saturdays night and she backed him up, but nobody believed her.
Then Hackett went to talk to the owner of the gas station again. All
he had to say was that Siemens was a damn good mechanic and he'd
always liked him fine.

"I don't know why the cops are picking on him,"
he said now. "What the hell you think he's done, anyways? When's
he supposed to have done something?"

"Two weeks ago Saturday night," said
Hackett absently.

"Well, there you are," said the owner.
"Cops picking on him. I don't know any of his pals or what he
does at night, but I just happen to remember that one. He told me his
sister just had a baby and he was going to see her in the hospital."

"The French Hospital downtown?" asked
Hackett mildly.

"How do I know what hospital?"

The sister's name was Marcia Field and she had been
in the French Hospital.

"He's our X on Holzer. He's guilty as hell,"
said Higgins, "and goddamn it, we'll never prove it on him. All
the evidence there ever was is long gone. Connections, but nebulous."
He hunched his brawny shoulders angrily. "He wasn't the only one
at that hospital that night. That Visa card could have been dropped
by somebody else. There's damn all to show a judge." And that
kind of thing happened too, and it was always frustrating.

But on the following Tuesday morning, Scarne showed
up in the Robbery-Homicide office with a manila envelope. He was
looking pleased. He said to Mendoza, "I think we've got
something interesting for you, Lieutenant. It was one hell of a job.
We had to use the ultraviolet and infrared film, but it came up
better than I thought it would." He slid an enlarged glossy
photograph out of the envelope and laid it tenderly on Mendoza's
desk. "All we could salvage out of all that burned material in
the Franklin stove, but maybe it's enough. There was what was left of
a billfold, just the corners and a spine, and what looks like the
handle of a woman's handbag, which says you're right about Siemens.
The plastic slots from the billfold were completely gone, of course.
Any I.D. was past recall. But this thing—" He cocked his head
at it. "It was about three by five originally, and we can deduce
that it was in the middle of a bunch of other papers—other
snapshots possibly—in an inside pocket of the billfold. It was
protected enough that all of it didn't burn, and we brought up about
half of it."

It had been a snapshot, probably in color. The
delicate lab processing wouldn't restore that, and the picture was
gray and fuzzy from the rate of enlargement. It showed the upper half
of a little girl smiling at the camera. She was wearing a
polka-dotted dress and a big hair bow.

"
Muy lindo
,
" said Mendoza. "You bring about the miracles these days,
don't you? Thank you so much."

"It was one hell of a job. But it might,"
said Scarne, "be almost as good as a driver's license."

Mendoza and Hackett took the enlargement up to
Hollywood, where Frances Holzer worked at the Fidelity Federal
Savings and Loan, and she took one look at it and said in surprise,
"Why, it's that snapshot of Monica. My niece—Mona's little
girl. Mona just sent it down about three weeks ago. Yes, Mother had
it in her billfold with some other snapshots of the family, and of
course Mona has a print of it too. Where on earth did you get it? And
what happened to it?"

"Jackpot," said Hackett in immense
satisfaction. .

"
Mejor tarde que nunca
,"
said Mendoza. "Better late than never. Let's go pick him up and
get the warrant." But they never got Siemens to open his mouth.
Even when they spelled out the evidence to him, he stayed cocky and
silent. They had to speculate on exactly what had happened to Edna
Holzer. Had he been in the parking lot at the same time, grabbed her
on impulse for what she had in her billfold, or intending rape, and
then, finding he had put the quietus on her permanently, stashed the
car with her in it to give himself time? Had he abstracted the Visa
card, intending to use it, and then changed his mind? They didn't
know, and Siemens wasn't talking. But there had been only two prints
of that snapshot and the other one was up in Bakersfield.

Siemens had thought he'd
got rid of all the evidence. What he hadn't reckoned on was the
simple yen on Sally's part for a couple of free dresses, and the
little miracles the lab could perform.

* * *

AND NOTHING CAME IN from the French police. "I
said so," said Mendoza to Hackett on Friday. He had just got
back from a session on Siemens at the D.A.'s office. He perched one
hip on the corner of Hackett's desk. "It's a dead end. There and
here. Why? Why the hell hasn't someone missed her by now? By all
logic, somebody should have."

"You'd think so. But you had the hunch."

"By God," said Mendoza savagely. "I'm
tempted to go over there and try to pick up the trail myself."

Hackett took his glasses off. "How would you
know where to start looking, for God's sake?"

"There must be a record of her somewhere, damn
it. There's got to be. From this distance there's not a hope in hell
of locating it—of placing her. But on her home ground—" He
smoked in silence for a moment and said, "What are you brooding
about, John?"

Palliser at the next desk had stopped typing and was
sitting staring into space.

"There's probably nothing to it. But damn it,"
said Palliser, "I keep thinking about that Toby Wells. On the
Coffey case. His prints were there, but so were the rest of the
family's. I saw his girlfriend and she confirmed that they were at
that disco on Jefferson that night. I talked to his roommates, and
they'd both gone to bed before he came in. It's nothing. He's got no
record of violence at all. But with the lab turning that evidence for
you on Siemens— Well, Duke said something to me about shoes. If we
ever got a hot suspect."

"Do no harm to have a closer look at him,"
said Hackett.

"By God, I am thinking about it," said
Mendoza. "I'd surely to God like to know who set up that little
farce, and why, and how."

Palliser abandoned his report and went out. It was
Galeano's day off and everybody else was out hunting heisters or
hospital visitors. They had descriptions on two more heisters now.
There weren't, for once, any indictments or arraignments coming up to
waste time in court. There wasn't anything to be done about the
Robertson homicide. Higgins had talked to somebody in Juvenile and
none of those kids she had complained about had any record with them.
It wouldn't say much if they had.

There had been another teenager found dead by his
mother in his own bed. It was another O.D. of the 'ludes, combined
with liquor.

Mendoza wandered down to
his own office and Hackett was alone when Grace came in with a
possible suspect on one of the heists, so he sat in on that. It was
all inconclusive. The man didn't have an alibi, but there was nothing
else but his description to connect him to the heist. They decided to
hold him overnight and arrange for a lineup in the morning to see
whether the witnesses would pick him
out.

* * *

PALLISER THOUGHT this was probably a waste of time,
but he applied for a search warrant for Toby Wells' apartment. It
came through on Saturday morning, and he and Galeano went out to
execute it. There wasn't anybody at home in the apartment, but they
showed the warrant to the manager and he agreed to let them in. He
said the three young dudes who lived there seemed to be nice quiet
boys. They all had jobs and paid regular.

They looked around the place. It was just a place for
sleeping. No sign in the kitchen that much cooking was done there.
There were two bedrooms, and the largest one contained twin beds, had
a walk-in closet. In the other one there was a framed photograph of
Mae Weaver on the dresser, so this was Toby Wells' bedroom. It just
had a wardrobe with sliding doors. On the floor of that were five
pairs of shoes—a pair of brown moccasins, a newer pair of black
oxfords, another pair of moccasins—black—and some sneakers.
Palliser had a look at them but couldn't see anything suggestive. He
stashed them all in a plastic evidence bag and they drove back
downtown to drop them off at the lab. Then they went up to that
Thrifty in Hollywood to talk to Wells. He wasn't as amiable as
before, when Palliser asked questions over again. "What the hell
you want with my shoes, anyway? I didn't know cops could go right in
a person's pad and just steal stuff."

"You'll get them back," said Galeano
easily. "We may want to borrow the ones you're wearing too. Are
all those I the only shoes you've got?"

"For Gossakes, what am I supposed to do till
then? I don't know why you guys are bothering me, I never had
anything to do with that—you know what I mean. I haven't done
anything at all."

"So you've got nothing to worry about,"
said Galeano in a friendly tone. "We can't prove you did
anything. We're just looking around, Wells."