Exploit of Death - Dell Shannon (19 page)

"So you can go and look around somewhere else."

"You'd like us to find out who killed your
grandmother, wouldn't you?" asked Palliser.

"Oh, sure, sure, I sure hope you do. But I told
you where I was that night, you asked Mae and she told you, we were
out at that disco all the time."

"Yes, we know you were."

"Then why are you bothering me? Go stealing my
shoes! Cops! When do I get them back?"

"When we're finished with them," said
Galeano. They went back to the parking lot and sat in the car and
Palliser switched on the engine for the air-conditioning. "In a
sort of way," said Galeano, "I see what you mean, John.
Another Baby Face. A little too innocent to be true, but on the other
hand—"

"Oh, I know, I know," said Palliser. "He's
got no remote history of violence—only that one little count on
him, and it's an honest upright family."

"What the hell is all this business about
shoes?"

"I've got no idea," said Palliser. "It
was Duke suggested it. He must have something in mind. Something they
spotted in that apartment. But there wasn't any mention in the lab
report."

"Well, I suppose they'll tell us sometime. My
God, why does anybody stay in this climate?—and the way the smog's
hanging on it'll likely be the middle of October before we get any
relief."

"You like to start building seniority all over
again, some place where it never gets over seventy degrees."

"Is there such a
place this side of heaven?" wondered Galeano.

* * *

THAT SATURDAY NIGHT turned out to be a busy one for
the night watch. It was still ninety-four at eight o'clock. September
was the worst month for heat in Southern California. There was a bar
on Third Street held up by two men at about nine o'clock and Conway
wrote the report on that. There'd be eight witnesses to come in and
keep the day watch busy making statements. They got a call to a
mugging before he finished the report and Schenke went out on that.
The victim had managed to get to a public phone and call in, but by
the time Schenke got there he was looking green and couldn't stand
up, so Schenke called an ambulance. He was a man in the sixties,
Clarence Anderson, and all Schenke got was that he'd been working
late in his office on Wilshire, been jumped when he came back to his
car in a public lot. His home address, by the I.D. on him, was West
Hollywood. He passed out as the ambulance arrived, but Schenke didn't
think he was too bad. Probably a mild concussion.

However, they were supposedly there to serve the
citizens, so when he came back to the office to find it empty, he
called Anderson's wife and broke the news to her. Piggott and Conway
came back at eleven-thirty. There'd been another affluent-looking
couple jumped and manhandled and robbed in the parking lot of the
Shubert Theatre. "Why wasn't there a crowd if the show was just
over?" asked Schenke.

"They were about the last people to come back to
the lot. They'd stopped for a drink at the Sushi bar on the way. The
punks got about another fifty and some more jewelry."

"Hell," said Schenke. "I wish there
was just some handle to it, some way to chase them down."

"Wel1, there isn't," said Conway. "And
they seem to be fairly rough and ready with the M.O. One of these
nights they're going to tackle somebody with a weak heart and leave a
corpse for us."

"And still no way to chase them down," said
Piggott dryly. The phone rang and he picked it up.
"Robbery-Homicide." In the next thirty seconds his mouth
went tight and the usually mild-mannered, easygoing Piggott was an
angry man when he put the phone down and stood up.

"We'd all better ride on this one. It's a
shooting and it's one of the uniformed men." .

"Christ," said Conway.

"The squad man said he didn't look too good.
It's the corner of Hoover and Eleventh." They went downstairs in
a hurry and piled into Conway's car.

Down there, a normally busy secondary main drag, at
that time of night the streets were empty of traffic and the traffic
lights had stopped working. There were three squads parked in a row
at the curb in front of half a block of store buildings. One of the
squads had the driver's door hanging open. The uniformed men were
Bill Moss and Dave Turner and they were looking grim and shaken. "It
was at the appliance store," said Moss. "A break-in."
There had been a dim security light left on above the door. By the
streetlight at the corner they could read the sign—PURDUE'S T.V.
AND APPLIANCES. "All we've heard on it is, two men, and Dubois
walked into it. He looked bad, Conway—a couple of slugs in the
chest. The ambulance just left. A woman across the street in the
apartment at the corner of Eleventh saw it and called in, and Dubois
got chased over. She called again when she heard the shooting, but
they were long gone when Dave and I got here."

Turner's hand was shaking as he raised the cigarette
to his mouth. "We were in the same class at the Academy,"
he said.

"We haven't called the owner yet. The woman's in
apartment Twelve-B."

"O.K." said Conway. "You get the
emergency number off the door and contact the owner. We'll go talk to
her."

She was waiting for them. Her name was Alice
Rabinovich and she was still excited and scared but she had kept her
head. She was around forty, dark with a scrawny figure in an old
cotton bathrobe over a nightgown, and scuffed bedroom slippers. The
apartment was at the side of the building, looking down on Hoover
Street.

She said, "I couldn't sleep, it's so hot. I was
tired, we had a busy day at the store, but I couldn't sleep. I went
to bed, but it was no use, and I got up and sat by the window, the
fan helped some. I was sitting in the dark and you can see—"
she was gesturing the men into the bedroom. There was an electric fan
going on a table by the open window, and a chair, and the window
looked down directly to those store buildings on Hoover. The door of
the appliance store would be about a hundred feet away, seen at a
slightly oblique angle.

"I saw the whole thing. It's terrible about the
policeman. There were two men—it was a pickup truck, they parked
right in front of the store—you can see the sign from here—and
one had a flashlight and the other one had a tool of some kind. There
wasn't anything in the street so late—cars or people—and they
broke in the door, I could see them plain, they went in and I was
sure they were burglars. I was just picking up the phone to call the
police, but I was still watching and they came out with a T.V. and
put it in the truck and went back in, and they brought out another
T.V. and went back and it was just as they came out again with
another the police car came up and the policeman got out, and I could
see he had his gun in his hand, and I guess he'd have told them to
put their hands up or something, but he never had the chance. One of
the men just shot him—bang—like that—and he fell down and I
called the police back again and told them what had happened-and the
men put the T.V. in the truck and drove away fast—and about five
minutes later the other two police cars drove up and then the
ambulance came. I hope the poor policeman isn't hurt bad—"

"So do we," said Conway. "That's fine,
Mrs. Rabinovich, you've been a big help. We're lucky you were here.
Could you give any description of the men?"

She said regretfully, "Oh, no, I'm afraid not.
My sight is good, but they weren't that close and it was dark even
with the streetlight. But it was a Ford pickup truck. It wasn't very
far from the streetlight and I saw the letters plain across the
front. It was light-colored—white or light blue—something like
that."

"Are you sure?" asked Conway.

"Yes, I'm sure about that."

They went back across the street. By then the owner
was there and he said there were three T.V.'s missing—nothing else.
They told him as they'd told her to come to headquarters to make a
statement in the morning. Then they went out
to
Cedars-Sinai to ask about Dubois.

That was about an hour and a half after the shooting,
and the doctors weren't saying anything definite. He had lost a lot
of blood before he was brought in.

Dubois wasn't married, but somebody had
called—Turner?—and his mother was there in the waiting room down
the hall in Emergency. She was a tall thin black woman with dignified
regular features and she sat there quietly without crying. She looked
at the Robbery-Homicide men without speaking and Conway said, "You
know everybody's concerned, Mrs. Dubois. It's one of the
possibilities that goes with the job."

"Do you have to tell me that?" she said in
a remote voice. "I've been afraid ever since Don put on that
uniform. But he always wanted to be a police officer—ever since he
was a little boy. A good, honest, honorable police officer—like his
father." She raised her eyes from the floor. "His father
was on the force in Chicago. He got shot by a drunk when Don was
five. We came out here to live with my sister and her family then."

"Mrs. Dubois, we're sorry," said Schenke.
There wasn't anything else to say to her.

"We'll all be praying for him," said
Piggott.

"I did quite a lot of
praying for Don's father—twenty-one years ago," she said
quietly.

* * *

THAT WAS THE MOST IMPORTANT item on the agenda
waiting for the day watch on Sunday morning. Hackett called Mendoza
at home to tell him about it and Mendoza said, "
¡Maria
y José!
I hope he makes it. But we might get
some  leads from the pickup truck."

"George is talking to the DMV right now."

"I'll be in," said Mendoza. "I'm
flying to France on Tuesday, but I'll be in pronto." "

"My God, you are persistent. You'll never find
out a damned thing. You haven't anywhere to start looking and you
know about four words of French."

"By God, I'll have a try at it. I'll be down.
Thank God they've got computers in Sacramento."

 
The computers, of course, would give them some
legwork—a lot of it. The computers would sort out all the Ford
pickup trucks registered in L.A. County a lot more quickly than the
detectives could take the individual looks at the owners, and while
there wouldn't be as many pickup trucks i in an urban area as in a
rural one, there would be plenty. The names and addresses were still
coming in by the middle of the afternoon, and they had other cases to
work, and probably other calls would go down. But there was priority
on this pair, who had attacked one of their own.

Dubois was still holding his own, but still
unconscious. As the names of those owners came in, the first use they
made of them was to run them through the R. and I. Office. It was
possible that one or both of that pair had a prior record. It was
even probable, given the instant unprovoked attack on Dubois. The
break-in artist seldom went armed, and whoever had fired those shots
was quick and handy with a gun.

There were more pickup
trucks in the county than anyone could have predicted. They did some
overtime, but they hadn't finished looking through Records with their
own computers by the middle of Sunday evening.

* * *

THEY ALL LANDED at the office together, a little
early on Monday morning. Palliser had come in even if it was his day
off. Mendoza called the hospital. Dubois had rallied a little. There
was a full day's work ahead and maddeningly, just as they settled
down to it, they had a call. The job was like women's work, never
done, and they were always having to drop one thing and pick up
another.

And this one would just pose a lot of paperwork, and
you could blame it directly on the fact that at eight o'clock that
morning, at the intersection of Grand and Sixth Street in downtown
Los Angeles, the temperature had hit ninety-nine degrees and was
rising.

The patrolman who brought the woman into the office
said, "My God, it's like a battlefield. You never saw such a
hell of a thing. There were five squads out and three ambulances. I
don't know how many people got killed, but I saw three bodies myself.
When we got her out of the car, she looked ready to throw a fit, and
then all of a sudden she calmed down. But maybe you ought to get her
to a doctor."

Her name was Laura Fenn and by her driver's license
she was forty-four and lived in South Pasadena. She told them in a
dead and dull voice that she was a librarian at the main library and
asked someone to call the library and explain that she'd be late.
Then she just sat and looked at the wall and Wanda Larsen tried to
talk to her.

"My goodness, you never saw such a thing,"
said the patrolman. Miss Fenn, driving a nine-year-old Dodge without
air—conditioning, had caught a red light at that corner on her way
to work. A good many other people had caught it too—on both
streets. The lights were stuck, both on red. After about four
minutes, the horns started, tempers began to rise, and cars began to
edge cautiously into any opening. There were also a good many
pedestrians on both streets.

The Dodge, second in line at the light on Grand, had
gone roaring up onto the sidewalk, sideswiped the car first at the
light, charged across the intersection where people on foot were
crossing, and finally plowed into a city bus on Grand. When Wanda
finally got her to say anything, she just said, "It was too
hot—just too hot. I had a headache and  the library's
air-conditioned—and there was such a jam on the freeway—and all
of a sudden it was just too much. "