Extra Kill - Dell Shannon (3 page)

TWO

 
He happened to have a date that night with his
redhead, Alison Weir. It was a little different thing, with Alison—he
hadn't troubled to figure why—just, maybe, because she was Alison:
he could be more himself with her than with any other woman. So over
dinner he told her they'd take a little ride out toward Long
Beach—something he wanted to look at—and without much prodding
added the whole funny little story. "This boy," said Alison
thoughtfully, “he's not just trying to build up something, get into
the limelight?"

"I don't read him that way," said Mendoza.
"And these days rookies aren't always as young as that—he's
twenty-five, twenty-six, old enough to have some judgment. No, I
don't know that there's anything in it, and to tell you the truth
I've got no idea where to start looking to find out."

"But— Well, say for a minute it's so, Luis,
though it sounds perfectly fantastic—if it was someone who wanted
to kill this Bartlett specifically, surely something would show up in
his private life, if you looked?"

Mendoza lit cigarettes for both of them and looked
consideringly at his coffee. "Not necessarily. You take a
policeman, now—he gets around, and in a lot of places and among a
lot of people the ordinary person doesn't. You might say, if you're
looking for motives for murder, a cop has a little better chance of
creating one than most people. The difficulty is—" He broke
off, took a drag on his cigarette, laid it down, drank coffee, and
stared at the sugar bowl intently.

"
Siga adelante!
"
said Alison encouragingly.

"Well, the difficulty is that if it was anything
like that—something he'd heard or seen on his job—big enough to
constitute a reason for killing him, he'd have known about it himself
and made some report on it. And if it was something that had happened
just on that tour of duty—which, if we accept the whole fantasy, I
think it may have been—young Walsh would know about it too.
Because, although some people still cling to the idea that most cops
aren't overburdened with brains, we are trained to notice things, you
know. And while I've never met a motive for murder that was what you
might call really adequate, still
nobody
would think it necessary to kill the man because he'd seen or heard
something so—apparently—meaningless to him that he hadn't
mentioned it to anybody. But this is theorizing without data .... "

An hour later he pulled up on the shoulder of that
stretch of San Dominguez, just up from Cameron. He switched off the
engine and the headlights, switched on the parking lights, and gave
her a cigarette, lit one himself.

"And what do you expect to find out here?"

"I don't expect anything. I don't know what
there is to find out. You've got to start a cast somewhere."

"Like fox hunting. You just turn the hounds
loose where you think there might be a fox? I thought crime detection
was a lot more scientific than that these days."

"
Segun y como
,
sometimes yes, sometimes no." He was a motionless shadow, only
the little red spark of his cigarette end moving there; he stared out
at the thinnish passing traffic. "I'll tell you something funny,
chica
, with all the
laboratories and the chemical tests and the gadgets we've got to help
us—Prints and Ballistics and the rest of it—like everything else
in life it always comes back to individual people. To people's
feelings and what the feelings make them do or not do. Quite often
the gadgets can give you an idea where to look, but once in a while
you've got to find out about the people first—then the gadgets can
help you prove it." He went on staring out the window.

Alison slid down comfortably against his shoulder and
said, "Oh, I well, at least there's a heater to keep my feet
warm. Pity I don't knit, I could be accomplishing something .... I
have a theory about policemen. Just like musicians, they come in two
types—the ones who learn the hard way, by lessons and practice, and
the ones who do it by ear, just naturally. You play it by ear. You do
it in jumps, a flash of inspiration here, a lucky guess there. What
you're doing now is waiting for your muse to visit you,
no
es verdad
?"

He laughed. "You know too much about me. A
ranking headquarters officer, he's supposed to work by sober routine
and cold scientific fact, not by ear."

"Never mind, I'll keep the dark secret,"
she said sleepily. "Then when your hunches pay off and everybody
says, ‘The man's a genius,' you can look modest and say, ‘Just
routine, just routine'."

Mendoza went on staring at the boulevard. No place
within twenty miles of downtown L.A. was thinly populated, but there
were stretches here and there, and this was one of them, where the
contractors hadn't got round to planting blocks of new little houses
or new big apartments, or rows of shops and office buildings. Half a
mile up, half a mile down, half a mile away to each side were close
communities, blocks of residence and business, and the port of Los
Angeles; here, only an occasional grove of live oaks at the roadside,
and empty weed-grown fields beyond. The arc lights on the boulevard
were high but adequate; the effect of darkness came from the lack of
other lights to supplement them, the neon lights of shop fronts along
built-up sections. And from the shadow of the trees, along here.

He wondered if Walsh and Bartlett had been parked
under these trees.

Five minutes later a black—and—white squad car
came ambling along, hesitated, and drew in ahead of the Facel-Vega.
One of the patrolmen got out and came back to Mendoza's window, and
he rolled it down all the way.

"Not a very good place to park, sir," said
the patrolman tactfully.

"Unless you're having trouble with your car,
I'll ask you to move on."

"It's O.K.," said Mendoza, "not what
your nasty low mind tells you. I can think of at least three better
places to make love than the front seat of a car. I'm more or less on
legitimate business," and he passed over his credentials.

"Oh—excuse me, sir." The man in uniform
shoved back his cap and leaned on the window sill. "Anything we
can do for you?"

"I don't know. This is about where Bartlett got
it, isn't it?"

"Auggh, yes, sir." The voice was grim. "By
what Frank Walsh says. That was the hell of a thing, wasn't it? A
damn good man, Joe was. I'm Gonzales, sir, Farber and I were in on
the arrest, maybe you'll know. There when Walsh come up with Joe. I
tell you, it was all we could do, keep our hands off those goddamned
smart-aleck kids, when we heard .... The hell of a thing."

"Yes, it was. Walsh much shaken up? He hasn't
been in uniform long, has he?"

"No, sir, but he's a good kid. Sure, he was
shook, but he'd kept his head—he acted O.K. I tell you, Lieutenant,
I guess I was the one was shook—and I've been in uniform seven
years this month and that wasn't the first time I'd picked up some
pretty tough customers who happened to be Mexican—but I tell you,
with those kids, it was the first time I ever felt ashamed of my
name."

"Vaya, amigo, we come all shapes and sizes like
other people—good, bad, and indifferent."

"Sure," said Gonzales bitterly, "sure
we do, Lieutenant, but a lot of people don't remember it when the
names get in the paper on a thing like this."

Alison sat up and said that it was a pity, while all
this research was going on about a cure for cancer and the common
cold, that nobody was looking for a cure for stupidity: it was needed
much more. Gonzales grinned and said it sure was, hesitated, and
added, "Excuse me, Lieutenant, but—the inquest was yesterday,
I mean I was wondering if there was anything—"

"More?" said Mendoza. "Like maybe have
I heard a little something from Frank Walsh?"

"Oh, he did see you? I didn't want to stick my
neck out if he'd got cold feet." At which point Farber up ahead
got impatient and came back to see what was going on.

When he heard, he said, "Walsh is O.K., but he's
really reaching on this one, Lieutenant. Overconscientious." He
was an older man than Gonzales, compact and tough-looking in the
brief flare of the match as he lit a cigarette.

"Well, boys," said Mendoza, "they say
better safe than sorry. It won't do any harm to take another look.
But there's no need to—mmh—worry Bill Slaney about it unless it
appears there's something to tell him. I don't want him breathing
fire at me for encouraging one of his rookies in a lot of nonsense,
and I don't want him coming down on Walsh for going over his head.
I'll square him when the time comes, if it's necessary. Meanwhile,
could one of you do me a little favor? You're on night tour, I
see—Walsh is on days right now. Could one of you get a copy from
him of his record book of last Friday night, and bring it to me
tomorrow morning? I'll meet you somewhere near the station, or
anywhere convenient."

Farber was silent; Gonzales said, "Sure, I'll do
that, Lieutenant. If you think there's anything to be looked into.
Frank talked to us about it, but it sounds—"

"Crazy, I know. I'm not saying yes or no yet.
Just looking. Where and what time?"

"Corner of Avalon and Cole, say about
ten-thirty?"

"O.K. Thanks very
much. I'll see you then, Gonzales." As the two men walked back
to the squad car, Farber was seen to raise his shoulders in an
expressive shrug. Mendoza murmured, "Overconscientious . . . I
wonder," and switched on the ignition. Then he said, "Better
places, yes, but just to be going on with, as long as we're here—"
and postponed reaching for the hand brake a minute to kiss her.

* * *

At ten forty-five the next morning he sat in his car
at one end of that cruise Walsh and Bartlett had been riding on
Friday night, and read over the terse history of what jobs they had
done between four-thirty and nine. It hadn't been a very exciting
tour up to then. On Friday night, he remembered, it had been raining:
gray and threatening all day, and the rain starting about three, not
a real California storm until later, but one of those dispirited
steady thin drizzles. Californians were like cats about rain, and
that would have been enough to keep a lot of people home that night.

In the four and a half hours Walsh and Bartlett were
on duty, up to the murder of Bartlett, they had responded to four
radio calls and handed out seven tickets. At four-fifty they had been
sent to an accident on Vineyard; evidently it had been quite a mess,
with three cars called in and an ambulance, one D.O.A. and two
injured, and they hadn't got away from there until five thirty-five.
At six-three they'd been sent to another accident, a minor one, and
spent a few minutes getting traffic unsnarled there. At six-forty
they'd rescued a drunk who'd strayed onto the freeway, and taken him
into the station for transferral to the tank downtown overnight. At
seven thirty-five they'd been sent to an apartment on 267th Street, a
drunk-and-disorderly. Apparently the drunks hadn't been very
disorderly, for they were back on their route again by eight o'clock.
At eight-twenty they'd stopped at a coffee shop on Vineyard, and were
on their way again at eight thirty-five.

The tickets had all been for speeding, except two for
illegal left turns. Mendoza started out to follow their route. He
went to the scene of the first accident, and parked, and looked at
it. It said nothing to him at all, of course: just a fairly busy
intersection, with nothing to show that four nights ago it had been a
shambles of death and destruction. He went on to the place of the
second accident, and that said even less, eloquently. Again, of
course . . . What the hell did he think he was doing? Waiting for his
muse, Alison said. Waiting for that cold sure tingle between the
shoulder blades that told him the man across the table was bluffing
hard, or really did hold a full house. Or for that similar, vaguer
sensation that for want of a better word was called a hunch.

Nothing said anything to him. An hour later he had
got as far as the place where they'd subdued the D.-and-D., and had
reached the conclusion that he was wasting time. It wasn't an
apartment building, this, but a one-story court built in U-shape
around a big black-topped parking area. There were four semidetached
apartments on each side, in two buildings, and across the end a fifth
building also with two apartments; at the street side of the first
two buildings were double carports, and a single one at each end of
the fifth. All the buildings were painted bright pink, with white
door-frames and imitation shutters; they looked curiously naked
standing there in the open, not a tree anywhere around, or any grass:
only the blacktop and in the middle of it a large wooden tub in which
was planted some anonymous shrub, which obviously wasn't doing very
well—thin and anemic-looking. Six television aerials stretched
importunate arms heavenward; presumably the other tenants possessed
newer sets of the portable type.

In his exasperation with himself, Mendoza thought
he'd never seen a more depressing place to live. Even a slum tenement
gave out a warmer sense of life than this sterile, cheap modernity.

There was no parking lane along here, and he turned
up onto the blacktop to make a U-turn, start back downtown, and quit
wasting time. As he swung around by the twin front doors of the
building across the end of the court, the left one opened and a woman
bounced out in front of the car; so he had to stop.