Exploit of Death - Dell Shannon (20 page)

When they came to sort it
out, she had killed four people and injured eleven seriously and
severely damaged three cars. The Dodge was totaled. And Mendoza said
exasperatedly, "Iet the D.A. worry about what to call it.
People!"

* * *

IT WAS IN THE MIDDLE of Monday afternoon, with a
vague idea of clearing up a muddle before he left tomorrow, that he
went up to Outpost Drive and talked to Joseph Alisio.

"We'll probably never know," he told
Alisio. "With so many people there, it's been very difficult to
check on who was where, when. It's all up in the air."

Alisio heaved a sigh. "I can appreciate that,
Lieutenant. One lunatic among all those people. My God. Poor Carl. We
knew he was on the way out, the first of us to go, and I don't
suppose it makes any difference whether it was now or six mouths from
now. But it's a terrible thing he had to go like that. We've all been
shook up about it, but poor Randy—I never saw anybody so broken up.
He's all to pieces and Mary says he's been drinking some. Well, he
was Carl's favorite and I guess it's been a little worry to him, he'd
been managing Carl's affairs for him since the cancer got diagnosed
last year and Carl was so sick. It was the obvious thing to do, Carl
had left him everything anyway, but it's probably made a little extra
work for him." He passed a hand over his bald head. "I
appreciate your coming, Lieutenant. No, I suppose we'll never know
what happened. The lunatic getting into the hospital some way."

A small cold finger inched up Mendoza's spine. The
other boys laughed about his hunches. Mendoza's crystal ball. But
Luis Rodolfo Vicente Mendoza had been a detective a long time and he
knew enough to respect his hunches.

He stood at the curb on Outpost Drive and looked at
the haze of smog over the city below him. He said to himself,
"
Ridículo
."
His imagination working overtime. He got into the Ferrari and drove
over to Glendale to that new high-rise office building.

Randy Nicolletti was at his desk in the big office,
but he looked gray and ill. He had dropped some weight. Mendoza
stopped beside his desk and Nicolletti looked up at him after a
moment, his expression dull and vague.

"You did it, didn't you?" asked Mendoza.
"I'd like to know why."

And Randy Nicolletti said in an expressionless tone,
"How did you know?"
 

EIGHT

HE DIDN'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT, and what he said
after some prodding was, "It was all my fault. I know that.
Uncle Carl, I was his favorite, but he was always careful about
money. The only times he ever got mad at me was about the gambling. I
guess that's just in my nature. And he was dying up to a month
ago—the doctor said he could go any time—and since he'd been so
sick six months ago, he'd signed me onto his checking account, his
savings account, so I could pay all the expenses—and it was all
left to me anyway—it didn't matter. I got in pretty deep with a
couple of fellows at a poker place in Gardena, it was over ten
thousand and I was damned worried about it—one of them's kind of a
tough customer. I thought it didn't matter, I paid up by cashing in
one of the T-bills on his account. He hadn't been up to looking at
the statements in months. And then I dropped a couple of thousand
more and I paid that—and all of a sudden he got better—the doctor
said, in remission and it might be three, four, six months."

He was staring dully at the floor of the little
interrogation room at the jail. "He was sitting up and taking
notice of things again, and just a couple of days before he'd asked
me to bring in all the bank statements—and the first thing he
said—that Sunday when I got there—had I brought them, and I had
to say I forgot about it, but I knew he'd keep on about it, and he
was always at me about the gambling. He'd raise all hell when he
found out. He'd call me a damn thief. The rest of the family, they
don't like the gambling either and it would be one goddamn king-size
mess, and I just didn't know what to do. I'd thought by then it'd be
all over and the will in probate." He passed a shaking hand over
his face. "And that day, when I went back for my cigarettes, the
last thing he said to me—don't forget to bring those statements the
next time you come, boy. And I—and I—" He put his face in
his hands.

Mendoza said to Higgins when they came out of the
interrogation room, "And God knows I was the hottest poker
player in town before the domesticities ruined my game, but the
compulsive gambler I never was. More fatal than the drink, that. And
in the end he's made even more of a king-size mess for himself than
he had already."

"You and your
hunches," said Higgins. "All the damned legwork we did on
that, and all for nothing."
 
"He
was ready to break, George. If I hadn't had the hunch, he'd have come
in to confess within a matter of time."

* * *

THE DOCTORS were saying that Dubois would make it,
but it would be a long convalescence for him. Most of the men at the
Robbery-Homicide office were on that. They still had a long list of
names of pickup-truck owners to process and nobody was taking any
time off. Hackett had got deflected temporarily to arrange that
lineup, but the witness couldn't definitely identify the suspect and
they had to let him go.

On Tuesday morning, the computers in R. and I. turned
up their first lead. The owner of a Ford pickup truck showed up in
the records with a pedigree of armed robbery—Alfonso Barrios, last
known address the same as the current registration, Maxson Place in
El Monte. Landers and Galeano were alone in the office when the word
came up and Galeano said, "If he's our boy, what the hell was he
doing so far from home base? Don't say it, I know—freeways. And he
won't have lived in El Monte all his life. Let's see if we can find
him." The lab had told them yesterday that the slugs out of
Dubois had been fired from a .45 Colt.

Barrios' wife told them that he worked at a garage on
Rosemead Boulevard and they picked him up there, brought him in.
Higgins was back in the office by then and they stood over him and
asked him questions. He was a wiry dark small man in the thirties,
and he snarled back at them. "I'm clean since I got out last
time, I done nothing. Just because a guy got a little record, the
fuzz come down on him alla time—"

Higgins said, "All right, where were you on
Saturday night?"

"Iast Saturday night? I was sittin' in a game of
draw with four other guys. We went on late, they can tell you."
He supplied names and addresses and they went to look, stashing him
in jail meanwhile. The poker game, he said, had been in a private
home in El Monte; and none of the other men had any police records.
The wife of the householder said, "Do I know that Barrios? Sure
he was here that night. These damn fool men and their cards, they
went on till two in the morning and nobody got any sleep. That damn
Barrios—he took nineteen bucks off Joe and I'll be short on grocery
money all this week."

You won some, you lost
some. They let Barrios go. It had just been a first cast.

* * *

PALLISER HAD BEEN our looking for one of the heist
suspects up till noon on Tuesday. When he came back to the office
after lunch, Lake said the lab had been calling him.
 
"Well, all right, put them through." He
sat down at his desk and picked up the phone when it rang.

Duke said, "I'd have called you right away but I
know you've been busy."

"We still are."

"You do any good on that shooting yet?"

"Not yet. What do you want?"

"Well, I'd like you to come and look at
something interesting. You can get a warrant and clean one up on it.
Come and see."

Palliser, slightly intrigued, took the elevator up to
the lab. There in that big busy office, the long room with long
tables and glaring strip lighting, the microscopes and Bunsen burners
and cameras in a string of smaller offices, Duke led him to a
microscope at one end of a table and said, "This is from one of
Wells' shoes. The right shoe of a pair of black oxfords."

Palliser peered into the microscope and asked, "So
what is it? You're the technician." He had nearly forgotten Toby
Wells.

Duke said, grinning, "I didn't suppose you'd be
an expert on house plants, but it's another kind of offbeat little
thing like that damn snapshot. Sometimes we do turn them up. It's
Beloperone guttaia. "

"Come again?" said Palliser.

"To you, the common shrimp plant. We spotted it
when we were taking photographs in the Coffey apartment. There was a
big potted plant knocked over and in the little iight the old lady
put up, somebody trampled all over it on the floor. You could see
where branches and leaves had been stepped on. I thought there was an
outside chance that there'd be some trace on the soles of somebody's
shoes, those leaves are pretty tough and springy—and I was right.
There was one whole squashed leaf stuck on the arch of the shoe where
the wet earth from the pot acted like glue. It's not that common a
plant, Palliser. And if you can show that your boy hasn't been near
another one since the murder—"

"By God," said Palliser. "Those will
be his best shoes. He had them on for the date with the girl and he
probably hasn't had them on since. By God, what a damned queer little
thing."

"It's the little things that trip them up,"
said Duke. "Little things most people don't notice."

Palliser and Galeano went to bring Toby Wells in, and
they had to spell it out for him, how they knew, what the definite
scientific evidence was. He didn't take it in at first, said, "How'd
anybody know one little leaf from another'?"

"The men at the laboratory can tell," said
Galeano. "They've got ways. You were there when that plant got
knocked over, you stepped on it and that tells us you were there when
your grandmother was killed." Wells thought that one over for
awhile.

"Why?" asked Palliser. "Why did you go
there that night?" Wells just looked at the floor.

"Your own grandmother," said Galeano.
"She'd been good to you. Gave you a birthday party just the week
before, hadn't she, and got you out of that little trouble a couple
of years ago. Why?"

Wells said, "Oh, for Gossakes. I was out of
money." He didn't look up at them. "It all goes so
quick—and she had money put away. She made good money out of that
business. She never spent nothing on herself. She had that couple
hundred bucks to hand right over—time I took those clothes and got
caught. And she gives me a lousy ten bucks for my birthday. A lousy
ten bucks! I was cleaned out, time I paid the bill at that disco that
night. I went to see her, ask her to loan me some bread, and she let
me in and then when I asked she started to talk real sharp, how I was
young and foolish and ought to be careful, save some out of my
salary—and I got mad. Old people just don't know how it is for
young people these days—and I hit her and she fell against that
plant and I started to look around for any money. I knew she had some
hid away somewheres—but she came after me into the kitchen. She was
yelling and calling me names and that hammer was laying on the
counter and—"

"And did you find any money?" asked
Galeano.

"There was only ninety bucks in her purse in the
closet, I thought there'd be a lot more. I'm sorry. I never meant to
do it. Never meant to hurt her so bad. I just needed some money to
take Mae to that show she wanted to see."

Palliser picked up the
phone to ask for the warrant on him.

* * *

THE JET DECANTED MENDOZA at Orly Airport into a
chilly gray early morning. With the time difference, it was early
morning here and already autumn in northern Europe. He was feeling
tired and stale, though he'd slept on the plane. The travel agent had
got a reservation for him at the Hotel Crillon and he picked up a cab
at the airport entrance. It was a big hotel in the middle of the
city. What he could see of Paris in the cold morning light was just
another old, dirty city. Older than his town and parts of it dirtier,
with the occasional streets of new, shining office buildings,
apartments. Everybody at the hotel seemed to speak English and he was
shepherded to a good-sized room with a private bath on the top floor.
He undressed, went to bed and slept for four hours, and woke feeling
more alert. He took a shower and shaved, got dressed again, and went
downstairs for a cup of coffee at the hotel restaurant. The elegantly
uniformed attendant at the main entrance called him a cab. He had
taken an unreasonable prejudice against the Sûreté and said to the
cab driver, "The Prefecture de Police," as distinctly as
possible."

The cab driver raised a thumb. "O.K., bud,"
he said and let in the clutch with a jerk.

Mendoza had got traveler's checks cashed at the hotel
and let the driver pick what he wanted of the sleazy thin paper.

The building was a square grim old pile looking like
an old-fashioned military barracks, and he found out later that that
was how it had begun life. He started out talking to a uniformed man
at the desk in the lobby, who spoke some heavily accented English and
presently summoned another man in civilian clothes who spoke more
fluently, introduced himself as Delahaye, prefaced with a title
Mendoza didn't catch.