Felony File Page 4

  "Oh, now, Art, you've been a detective long enough to know better than that. Take another look."

  After another look Hackett said, "Oh. Yes, I see what you mean, Luis. Funny place for her."

  The patrolman, Erickson, and the flustered-looking man beside him just watched them. Mendoza squatted over the body, not touching it.

  Lafayette Park was a quiet little piece of empty greenery between Sixth and Wilshire, close in downtown. It wasn't much used as a park; it had few benches and no other amenities. The only building in it was the Felipe de Neve branch library. It was a peculiar place to find a body, and this was a peculiar body to be there.

  It was the body of a woman, and not a young woman. She was lying on her back half under an untidy patch of shrubbery, just into the park from Sixth Street; she stared at the cold gray sky horridly, mouth half open. She was at least middle-aged and possibly older, by the wrinkled throat, the enlarged veins on the one hand visible. She had kept a middling good figure, neither fat nor scrawny. The cold morning light was merciless on the make-up grotesque now on the dead face: too white powder, green eye-shadow, pink lipstick; but in life she'd have looked just well preserved, carefully groomed. Her hair, unkempt now, had obviously been professionally waved and tinted a discreet beige-blonde. The nails on the hand were a very faint pink, and on the ring finger was a solitaire diamond set in yellow gold. Mendoza peered at that more closely and said, "Somewhere around a half carat. Worth something? She was wearing a full-length navy wool coat with a fur collar colored white and gray. It had fallen open to reveal the dress beneath, a tailored navy knit sheath. It was pulled up slightly over her knees; she had on sheer nylon stockings and medium-heeled navy pumps. Her left arm was under the thrown-back coat; delicately Mendoza moved that, and said, "Asi." On her left ring Enger was a rather wide gold wedding band.

  "At least she ought to be easy to identify," said Hackett, following his thought. "She's no derelict."

  "Anything but." Mendoza stood up and automatically brushed down his trousers. "All those clothes are good quality. Not the most expensive, nothing flashy, but good. That coat's nearly new. So are the shoes. She doesn't belong anywhere down here—how the hell did she get here?"

  "Wait for the I.D.," said Hackett. He looked at the other two men. "You're the one who found her?" he asked the civilian.

  "That's right." He was a rather weedy man about thirty-five, with a nervous Adam's apple; he had a silver-gray raincoat belted tightly about him. "My name's Jurgen, Karl Jurgen. Yes, I found her and called the police, but I never saw her before, I don't know anything about it. I'm on my way to work—I'll be late but of course it can't be helped—"

  "How did you happen to be in the park?" asked Hackett.

  "I cut across here every day, it's a shortcut. I get the bus up Sixth. I'm the desk clerk at the Sheraton West," and he gestured.

  "Oh," said Hackett. Just as all the civic buildings had ended up in the heart of the inner city, a few other more-than-respectable edifices rubbed shoulders down here with the dingy old residential streets and business blocks; and that old and respected—and very respectable—hotel, the Sheraton West, was one of them.

  "I knew I had to call the police—was she murdered?"

  He looked horrified and fascinated at once. "The library isn't open, I had to go back to Sixth to find a phone. But I never saw the woman before, I don't know anything about 1t."

  "Al1 right, Mr. Jurgen," said Hackett. "Just give us your address and you can go on to work." He gave it readily, Kenmore Street in Hollywood, and departed half reluctantly.

  "I think," said Mendoza, "I'd like a doctor to see her in situ." He got through to the coroner's office on the radio in the squad, talked to Bainbridge himself. "Just to confirm a few deductions," he said to Hackett.

  Bainbridge came out in person, curious. He was rounder and tubbier than ever, accompanied by the inevitable black cigar.

  "You do come across them, Luis," he said, looking at the corpse. "No I.D. on her?"

  "Not unless she's lying on her handbag."

  Very gently, Bainbridge lifted the corpse by the middle. It came all in one piece, stiff as a board. "No handbag," said Bainbridge, and felt the jawline. "Oh, yes. Rigor fully established and just starting to pass off. But it was a sudden death, and that's apt to hasten rigor. I don't think she died here."

  "Neither do I," said Mendoza. "Any guess as to how she died, Doctor?" There weren't any visible marks on the body.

  "Not till I have a closer look—" Bainbridge was inspecting the skull, feeling with his fingers. "Um. Well, there you are, I think. See what shows when I open her up, but it feels like a depressed fracture—" His thumb was just behind her right temple. "She could have fallen down on the sidewalk and done that."

  "And then picked herself up and wandered in here to die?"

  "You are so quick," said Bainbridge. "I don't think she did much moving after she sustained that, no. And the fact that she is here, after all—"

  "Allá va," said Mendoza. "How long has she been here?"

  "You're supposed to be the detective," said Bainbridge, "but I got caught without a coat yesterday too."

  "Exactamente," said Mendoza pleasedly. "It stopped raining about ten last night. And if she got here—was put here—before that, it wasn't long before. If she'd been lying here even half an hour in that downpour, her clothes would have been soaked, and they're only damp. I'd say she got here between nine-forty and ten."

  Bainbridge grunted. "I'd say the same thing, and furthermore I'd say that was roundabout the time she died. And it's going to start raining again any minute. Do you want to wait for photographs?"

  "I'd rather have her clothes intact. Take her in."

  Mendoza bent over the body again and carefully felt in the coat pockets. The left one yielded a crumpled handkerchief and a dime, the other one nothing. "Damnation. Art, just to be thorough we'd better have a hunt for the handbag all around here. If X tossed it out further away, adios, it'll be long gone, but—"

  "Tossed it out of a car," said Hackett.

  "Proceed from A to B to C," said Mendoza. "By her clothes, her age, her grooming, she wasn't alone in the street down here—"

  "Unless she was staying at the Sheraton West," said Hackett.

  Mendoza smote his forehead. "¡Mea culpa! We'll ask. But barring that—and even if so—she wouldn't be on foot here at that hour of night. She was in a car. And a woman of her age never goes out without a handbag. The sweet young girls, yes—the billfold in the jeans—but not this woman. We'd better call out some help."

  They called in, but Farrell was alone in the office except for Wanda. She came over amiably, another pair of eyes, and in the next hour they covered every foot of the park like bloodhounds, pushing under bushes; but no handbag turned up.

  "Hell," said Mendoza. "But—there's something else. Art, you go over to the Sheraton West and ask, just in case. But the wedding ring—the manicure—the professional coiffure—she came out of a comfortable home, she wasn't a nobody. Quite possibly somebody's already called Missing Persons to say that Mother didn't come home last night. I'd better go and ask."

  Hackett and Wanda went over to the hotel, but there wasn't a guest registered who matched the description.

  And at Missing Persons, Lieutenant Carey said immediately they hadn't anybody like that reported.

  "Yes," said Mendoza to himself. "There was that pretty little woman in the phone booth, not missed at once because she lived alone. That's probably it." He took himself out to a solitary lunch. Later, he phoned the lab to send a man to the morgue for her prints.

  * * *

  At five-thirty he was swiveled around in the desk chair watching the gray rain blotting out the Hollywood hills in the distance, when Scarne came in with a manila envelope.

  "Higgins was deviling us this morning for what we got in that Portia Street place. Here's the report. Damn all. Plenty of prints, but they all belong to the dead man or the brother."

&nbs
p; "What can't be cured," said Mendoza.

  "Anyway, there's the report. Oh, and I got the prints off your latest body. Thank God for computers. They're not on file with us. I sent 'em to the Feds."

  "Probably a waste of time." But of course the F.B.I. had the prints on file of a good many perfectly respectable people.

  As Scarne went out, Conway, Palliser and Grace came trooping in; Mendoza went out to the communal office. "You look as if you'd done a day's work."

  Conway snarled. "Do you have any idea how many employees Bullock's has? And we're looking for the ones who quit or got fired up to six months ago too. I said, it'll take a month of Sundays, and it won't give us a damned thing."

  "And if you mention routine—" said Palliser. There was a smear of ink on his handsome straight nose, and his eyes look strained.

  "At least I haven't been endangering my eyesight," said Grace cheerfully. "I've finished checking the guards, and we can forget about them. The outfit they work for is one of the biggest around, very high reputation, and they screen their men to hell and back. Also, all of the security men at Bullock's have been there for a good long time—seven, six, five years—Masters is the newest and he's been there two and a half years."

  "It'll end up getting stashed in the dead files," said Conway wearily.

  Mendoza slid a long hand up his long jaw. "Same as in Philly and Pittsburgh. I'd like to think not. Because I had a little feeling—"

  "Hunch?" asked Grace.

  "No sé. Just a little premonition that these slick operators—"

  "Oh, you too?" said Palliser. "Another hit?"

  "I just wonder," said Mendoza. "Philly in March, Pittsburgh in April. Maybe it's taken them this long to get rid of the estimated four hundred grand."

  * * *

  Sometimes Saturday night could get a little hairy in this part of L.A., but that night the rain seemed to slow them down, keeping people inside. Piggott and Schenke, sitting on night watch, didn't get a call until ten-thirty. They both went out on it.

  It was a dairy store on Virgil, and Patrolman Bill Moss was soothing the victim, a pretty blonde who had been crying. She looked about twenty, and her name was Sonia Murphy. She said to Piggott and Schenke, still tearful, "I'm sorry, but it is, I wish to heaven they'd called me Sally or Betty or something because it sounds funny, but I can't help it if Mother's Polish, I've got kidded all my life. But that woman! I just can't believe it! Didn't, I mean. I don't like working at night, but I'm not usually alone, usually Mr. Knight's here, he's the manager, because he doesn't like the girls being alone at night either. I take three nights a week and Marge takes three, and usually I'm not here Saturday at all—but Mr. Knight's wife is sick, it's some kind of emergency operation, she just went into the hospital today and he called me to ask if I'd come in because Saturday's usually a good day—"

  "Now, now," said Moss benevolently. "They just want to hear what happened. Like the old TV show, you know. Facts."

  She looked at him blankly and they realized that she was too young to remember Dragnet. Not even reruns?

  "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to— But to think! To think I was relieved. I was almost going to close early, there hadn't been many people in on account of the rain I suppose, and I was just going to lock up and call Bob—that's my boy friend, Bob Boyd—to come get me and take me home, when she came in—and I was so relieved to see it was a woman! I was! And then she said, you all alone here, honey, and I said yes—and she got a great big gun out of her purse and pointed it at me and said she wanted all the money in the register! I thought I'd die! Honestly!" Sonia gulped. "And poor Mr. Knight losing all that money—of course I had to give it to her—"

  "Calm down," said Moss. "Can you tell the detectives what she looked like?"

  "Oh, yes. She was—" Sonia hesitated and finally chose, "flashy. She had on a red pantsuit and black ankle boots and a big white plastic rain hat with a brim. It had y-yellow flowers on it. And her hair was a real brassy blonde, pretty long, down to her shoulders anyway, and she had a sort of—wel1, a lot of figure, if you know what I mean—"

  "Stacked?" said Schenke dead-pan.

  "I guess you'd say so."

  "Any idea how much was in the register?"

  "I'm not sure. The tab'll say. At least a hundred dollars."

  "Well," said Piggott, "she's not doing so bad, Bob. That figures to about five hundred for two nights' work."

  "Do you know her? Know who she is?"

  "I only wish we did," said Piggott.

  Surprisingly, that was the only call they had on Saturday night.

  * * *

  Nothing much was accomplished on Sunday. Mendoza came in very late; he wasn't supposed to be in on Sunday at all but he generally was, if not for a full day, and nobody would dream of mentioning Sunday Mass to him—he was a little touchy about getting back into the fold after a good many years outside it.

  Yesterday Galeano had spent the whole day chasing down the heist man, who had turned out to be one Randy Becket, still on parole after a term for armed robbery. He felt he deserved a quiet Sunday.

  When Mendoza finally came in, Higgins was waiting to bring him up to date on Whalen.

  "It's damn all, Luis, and we might as well forget the whole thing now. We'll never drop on them, to make a legal case." He told Mendoza what he'd got from records, the very thin leads.

  "I struck out on Scott, he's moved and nobody knows where. I found Wiggett. He just got beat up by somebody's husband and he's wearing a cast on a broken ankle. I also found Early. He could be, couldn't be—we'd never prove it. Says he was at the movies Friday afternoon."

  "It'll go in Pending," said Mendoza.

  "Damn it. That poor damned Whalen—maybe it sounds as if he's feeling sorry for himself, but you can see the spot he's in—his whole life destroyed, because the louts didn't care what they did for a little loot. He'll probably have to go to a rest home."

  "And I wonder," said Mendoza, "what will happen to Merlin."

  "M— oh, the cat." Higgins regarded him, amused.

  Mendoza was a cat man. A long time ago there had been a case—when they'd finally identified the corpse, Mendoza had been a lot more concerned about her starving cat than he had been with the killer; and come to think, that was the cat he had wished onto Art and his wife, Angel; they were cat people too.

  Mendoza called the lab; they hadn't had a kickback from the Feds yet, on the lady in Lafayette Park. Of course the Feds had computers too, but as Marx reminded him, they also had, as a rule, a long backlog of requests for information. There'd be something eventually.

  It was just sprinkling on and off today.

  Glasser came in next and told him about Alice Engel. "We ought to get the autopsy report tomorrow. The bartender at Pete's says Fratelli's a regular, in two or three times a week—puts it down pretty heavy. Funnily enough, the place where he works—the Eagle Grill—the owner says he never drinks on the job. Nobody at Pete's remembers noticing him specially on Thursday night, the barkeep says he was there but didn't notice when he left or if he was alone. Nobody named Sam is one of their regulars. Of course, I haven't chased down anybody else who was in the place then—the barkeep parted with five names of regulars who were there."

  "In fact, all up in the air," said Mendoza.

  "So what do you think?"

  "That you'd better wait for the autopsy and lab report."

  Hackett wandered into his office about four o'clock to say that he'd been talking to other forces around the county about the blonde heister. "So far, no bells ringing . . . Luis?"

  "¿Qué pasa, compadre?"

  "Oh, hell," said Hackett. He thrust his bulk out of the chair—he had really been serious about the doctor's diet last month and was down to two hundred—and stood staring out the window at the silver curtain of rain. "The Hoffman hearing. Tuesday. Who do you want to cover it?"

  "¿Nada más?" said Mendoza. "¿Qué puede uno hacer? What can anyone do there, Art? You were on it, me, George
, John. We'd all better show up. You don't know what testimony the judge may ask for. At least it's not a jury trial, with the confession on record. And he's turned eighteen, he's a legal adult."

  "And the judge," said Hackett abruptly, "is Fletcher." "Bastemte. The mills of the gods," said Mendoza sardonically.

  "I just hope to God I don't have to testify. What I couldn't help saying—and Fletcher the bleeding heart looking sideways at that confession and talking about police brutality—"

  "Cross the bridge when we get there," said Mendoza, and stabbed out his cigarette as if it was a personal enemy.

  THREE

  ON MONDAY MORNING, with Palliser off, Mendoza came in rather late and was just glancing at the night-watch report when Bainbridge came bustling in, plunked himself down in the chair beside the desk, and brought out a fresh cigar.

  "Business being a little slow for once, I did the autopsy for you myself." He laid the official report on Mendoza's desk. "Got her identified yet? Well, you probably will. She was somewhere in her middle fifties, and what's called well preserved. She'd lived an easy life, that is, never had to scrub floors or whatever. She'd never borne a child. What you want to know—it was a depressed skull fracture all right. I doubt if there was any weapon involved, what it looks like is that she fell, or was knocked, against some broad flat surface, and kaput. She might have died within five minutes or so. The indications are that she had a little struggle with somebody—there are bruises on both her upper arms, as if somebody had taken hold of her pretty roughly, and there's a fainter bruise on the left side of her jaw."

  "Yes. And?"

  "Well, she hadn't been raped and she hadn't been engaging in sexual intercourse. She'd had a meal about four hours before she died, which was any time between seven and midnight Friday night, but we decided to call it about ten. There was the equivalent of about three drinks in the stomach contents. I don't know what, I haven't done any analyses. If you're bound to know what her last meal consisted of, or whether she drank martinis or Scotch highballs, I can probably find out."