Exploit of Death - Dell Shannon (21 page)

"I think,"said Delahaye after deliberation,
"M. L'lnspecteur Rambeau will like to speak with you," and
he used the phone on the desk, spoke rapid French. He took Mendoza up
in a creaking elevator to the second floor, down a long gloomy hall.
At the end of it he opened a door and bowed Mendoza in. "The
American police officer, Inspecteur."

The man at the desk in the large plain office stood
up. There was a little wooden plaque upright on the front of the desk
with lettering: INSPECTEUR LAURENT RAMBEAU.

"Ah," he said. "A pleasure to meet a
colleague." He offered a firm hand. "Once I have visited
your country, but not so far as California." His English was
very good. He was about Mendoza's age and size and he had a thick
crop of wiry curly black hair and a flourishing black Gallic
mustache, inquisitive bright brown eyes. "Sit down and tell me
how we can help you."

Feeling warmed and welcomed, Mendoza took the chair
beside the desk and began to tell the story. Rambeau listened
absorbedly, chin planted on hands and elbows on desk, and at the end
he sat up, reached to the package of cigarettes on the desk, offered
it politely, and said, "So, do we not all know how it goes. Day
by day there is nothing but the little stupid violences, and then all
of a sudden, once in ten years, arrives something complicated and
strange. This is very interesting. I like it. I like it as a mystery.
But the poor little Juliette." Mendoza had handed over the
envelope of photographs and he shook his head over them. "A
beautiful girl. One feels for the poor fiancé."

"The Sureté gave us nothing at all. They don't
know her fingerprints and I can't give you any more information on
her."

"Ah," said Rambeau. "The Sûreté.
These big important men of affairs, sometimes they can be a trifle
arrogant."

"Yes, we have the same trouble with the FBI at
times."

Rambeau laughed. "You and I, we are the same
kind of policemen, I feel. I can see things to do here. We both
understand the value of the spadework. There is the telephone
directory, first of all. It is a pity it is such a common
name—Martin—there will be thousands in greater Paris. Ours is a
bigger city than yours, Mendoza. In Paris and its environs there are
more than nine million people. But," he went on briskly, "there
are things to do about this. We are always busy, but I feel as you do
about the little Juliette, I want to know why she is dead. Now, the
telephone. We will set four or five men to check all the Martins and
that will be a long job. The fiancé's surname we do not know, and
Paul is a common name, too. But there is this M. Trechard—Trouchard,
some such name."

"Neither my wife nor I can remember exactly."

"Yes, you were tired. Why should you pay
attention? But that is not so common a name, and we will look for him
also. Her employer—and she said he was not so easy to work for as
his uncle. The impression you had, Juliette was a superior type—An
office, she said? Not perhaps only a typist?" `

"I don't know your types," said Mendoza.
"She was an educated, intelligent girl."

"Yes, and the telephone directory," said
Rambeau, "it is not infallible. The current ones are nearly a
year old, but we will try. If the Sûreté have not got her
fingerprints, then neither do we. That is no good. But you know that
her passport was issued in Paris and that means that she lived `
here. In one of a million places. But," he lit another cigarette
and beamed at Mendoza, "but, my friend, I believe we will find
out about the little Juliette, and I will tell you why. You yourself
said it. If you had not been the one to go to look at that corpse, no
one would have suspected it was not the so nonexistent Ruth Hoffman.
It is a very pretty little comedy, this. Here there is a Hoffman—with
all the plausible identification. An end and no beginning. And there
we have Juliette—a beginning and no end. If the beginning is hidden
from us. But it was not by chance that you should see the corpse.
There are many men under you in your office?"

Mendoza said wryly, "Never enough."

Rambeau laughed. "Here too. But I believe the
universe is ordered and men are not governed by chance. Me, I am a
good Catholic, which also you should be by your name—"

"Sporadically," said Mendoza with a grin.

Rambeau shook his head in
smiling disapproval. "No, it was not by chance it was you. If
the devil is always active on one side, there is the good God to
combat him, and God is the Stronger. Perhaps one of the good saints
intercedes here for the little Juliette, to see she is avenged."
He looked at his watch. "Courage—we begin the spadework. I
will set men at the telephone directory, and you and I will go to
luncheon at a small place where they know how to prepare the
omelette, and then you amuse yourself and go to look at Paris while
we try to solve your mystery." He stood up and gave Mendoza a
joyous smile. "And then we will find who is this mysterious
Grandpére
, and why
Juliette must be murdered. My men are the good trained bloodhounds.
We will find out."

* * *

ON WEDNESDAY, Records matched up another of the
pickup owners with a pedigree, César Montano. The pedigree said
armed robbery, assault with intent, burglary. He'd been arrested and
charged the last time four years ago.

Hackett called Welfare and Rehab to find out if he
was loose, and Montano had been on parole for six months. The address
on the registration was Harris Street in City Terrace. Hackett and
Glasser went to see if he was at home or at work; his P.A. officer
had got him a job with a janitorial service. They found him watching
television in the dirty, untidy living room of a cheap apartment, and
brought him downtown. They couldn't get the time of day out of him.
He just called them a string of dirty names and after that shut up.
He was a big hulk of a man about thirty with a pock-marked face and
quick-shifting eyes. Dealing with the stupid louts was tedious and
only from long experience did they keep their tempers and use
patience. They tried for an hour to get something out of him and then
they left him in jail and Higgins sent out for a search warrant.

They had another heist to work now and there were
indictments scheduled for next week, Myra Arvin, Toby Wells, Randy
Nicolletti. Somebody would have to be in court to cover those.

When the search warrant came in, Higgins was out
looking for the owner of a Ford pickup who had a record of assault,
so Hackett and Glasser went to look at Montano's apartment. It should
have been Hackett's day off but they were anxious to get this one
cleared up if they could. The apartment was scantily furnished, a
cheap, shabby place. There was a little stock of food in the kitchen,
a wardrobe full of nondescript old clothes, nothing but underwear and
socks in the dresser drawers.

"Of course whoever did the shooting," said
Glasser, "may have got shut of that gun, if he's halfway smart."

"But they so seldom are, Henry," said
Hackett. He went back to the bedroom, leaving Glasser staring around
the squalid living room, and was busy looking through the pockets of
the clothes in the wardrobe when Glasser burst out laughing. "My
God in heaven! Come and look at this, Art." Hackett went back to
the living room. "I just happened to see it reflected in the
windowpane."

The T.V. in one corner of the living room still had a
tag on it, suspended from the back of the set: the manufacturer's
tag, but neatly stuck across. it was a little strip of gummed paper
with printing on it. PURDUE'S T.V. AND APPLIANCES. Hackett burst out
laughing too. "They are so seldom smart enough to add two plus
two. My God, what a stupid damn thing."

They took the T.V. in as evidence, and went to talk
to Montano again. He was hardly the biggest brain in the world, but
even he saw that the T.V. tied him to that job and he started to talk
fast. "For Jesus' sake, you're not goin' to pin that on me,
shooting that damn cop- I like to had a fit when Joe shot the cop—
I didn't know he had a gun on him even. You don't pin that on me, it
was Joe, I don't take no rap for him. I don't even know him so good,
I just saw him around, and he needed some eating money, he says, how
about we hit that place and I—it was Joe shot that cop. I tell you
where to drop on him, it's Joe Vasquez, he got a pad on Fourteenth.
No, for God's sake, acourse he ain't got a job, why the hell you
think we was knocking off that place? "

With a feeling of warm satisfaction, Higgins and
Hackett went out to collect Vasquez, and he wasn't at home, but a
helpful neighbor said he spent a lot of time hanging around the pool
hall a couple of blocks up and they found him there. He didn't have
the gun on him but they got a search warrant and in going through his
apartment found a .45 Colt, a nearly new gun, in a box on the closet
shelf. They handed it over to the lab. The lab would, of course, tell
them that it was the gun that had fired the slugs into Dubois. And
Dubois was conscious and sitting up. Somebody would go to see him and
tell him about Montano and Vasquez.

They didn't bother to talk
to Vasquez right away. Wait for the ballistics report. When he heard
about that and about Montano snitching on him, he might be mad enough
to come out with a confession. But it wouldn't matter much. There was
the nice obvious evidence on him.

* * *

HIGGINS GOT HOME EARLY. With that case broken, just
the heist to work, and with all the overtime they'd been doing, they
could go slack for a day or two. When he went in the back door, Mary
was just taking a cake out of the oven, the kids just home from
school, Laura and Steve Dwyer, Steve looking more like Bert every
day. But the memory was a little faded now, in Higgins' mind, of Bert
Dwyer dead on the marble floor of the bank with the bank robber's
bullets in him. They were surprised to see him and Higgins said,
yawning, "We cleared up that shooting, so we can all relax
some."

"How did you get them?" asked Steve,
interested. Higgins told him. "Well, that was a pretty stupid
thing for that guy to do."

"They're never very smart, or they wouldn't be
what they are. It didn't take any brains to drop on them, just the
usual routine."

"Yeah, the lab's the most interesting part of
the job. Say, George. The counselor let me switch from Biology One to
general science. I figured that'll be more useful to me later on."

"Fine," said
Higgins. Someday, about ten years from now, unless he changed his
mind, Steve Dwyer was going to be up in the police lab with the other
miracle-working technicians.

* * *

OE COURSE the night watch had heard about Vasquez and
Montano and were pleased about it. "But you know what he'll
likely get," said Piggott. "A one-to-three and parole in a
year. The courts have thrown out the rule, a third-time felony draws
life."

"You never know," said Schenke. "He
might get a realistic judge." But they wouldn't bet on it.

There was a call at nine-fifteen—a dead body. It
had been spotted by a squad, passing in front of an empty building
scheduled for demolition on Second Street. It was just a body of a
man in the twenties—no I.D. or money on him. He'd been stabbed. He
smelled strongly of liquor and there was a broken bottle which had
held bourbon alongside the body.

"Somebody rolling the drunk," said Schenke.
All they could do was send him down to the morgue. Maybe his prints
would say who he'd been—maybe not.

The end of the week was usually quiet, but they had
the weekend coming up. There was always the paperwork and a report
had to be typed on the body. Piggott had finished that and they were
sitting around talking desultorily when the desk called at ten to
eleven. Conway took it and after thirty seconds said, "Jesus,
all right. What's the address?"

He put the phone down. "We've got a triple
homicide. All we needed."

They all rode on it. It was on Thirtieth Place and
Bill Moss was waiting for them at the curb in front of the squad. He
said, "My God, the rate always goes up in summer, but this is
the worst I've seen in a while. I mean, the baby—it just happened
about half an hour or twenty minutes ago, it took me a few minutes to
get here, I was back uptown on Beverly. The woman who called in lives
in the front house, a Mrs. Ballard. The people in the rear house just
moved in there a few days ago. She heard screams and saw a man
running away. It's one goddamned mess, boys."

Before they went to look at it they talked to Mrs.
Ballard. She was an elderly fat black woman and she was shocked and
scared, but she told a straight enough story.

"They were real nice young people, Rawson's
their name, they just moved to California because she had the asthma
and the doctors thought she'd be better here. It was her brother
rented it for them, he just lives down the street a ways. They moved
in on Monday. Yes, sir, I was just getting ready to go to bed when I
heard the screaming, oh, Lordy God, it was awful—coming from the
back house—and I looked out the window and I saw a man come running
out of there. He was a tall, skinny man. No, sir, I don't know if he
was black or white. He run across the yard and up the drive into the
street. And I didn't hear no more screams, but I called the police,
and that policeman out there he says—he says—they're all cut up
and dead—"