A Choice of Crimes

Book 0: A Vic Varallo Mystery

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

'My favourite American crime-writer' New York Herald Tribune The Glendale P.D. have their hands full again. What with an epidemic of motel hold-ups, a rapist with a fixation on hospital nurses, a teenager's suicide, an art gallery theft and a killing that leads to a zoo, there is no time for respite for Vic Varallo and co. Delia Riordan is troubled by a very unusual mystery indeed, that of an old lady who dies suddenly of a most unexpected heart attack. Or does she? Riordan makes this her own special case, pursuing it beyond the call of duty and coming up with a most surprising answer.

Release date: July 28, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

In the last six weeks, there had been three motels held up in the downtown area of Glendale. The MO showed a pattern; it was probably the same pair on all the jobs. The latest
one had been last night, and the night desk clerk had just been in to make a statement. Varallo and their female detective Delia Riordan had listened to him, and Delia typed the statement, and he
had signed it and left three minutes ago.

Now Varallo laid it down on his desk and said, “The same pair all right. Mexican, Cuban, broken English, early twenties, one about five-ten, one shorter, the tall one with a moustache.
Nobody tells us what the gun might be—just, a gun.” He sighed. It was the kind of random thing they so often got, and few places to look. “I suppose the first thing we do is hunt
up Raimondo Reynaldo and ask for an alibi.”

Delia was silent, staring at her typewriter. The first place to look, of course, had been in Records, for any names which attached to similar descriptions and charges; and Reynaldo had shown up
right away. He was twenty-six, he matched one of the vague descriptions, and he had spent eighteen months in Susanville for armed robbery. Aside from that there was no evidence on him at all.
“You daydreaming?” said Varallo. “I said, Reynaldo.”

“I heard you,” said Delia. “Yes, obviously. And probably a waste of time.” She sat up and lit a cigarette.

The big communal detective office on the second floor of Glendale Police Headquarters was empty except for themselves and John Poor typing a report at his desk across the room. It was Friday, so
Katz was off. O’Connor and Forbes were out talking to a rape victim; where Burt and Thomsen were Varallo didn’t know. Probably out processing the latest burglary scene; and the latest
additions to the strength, Leo Boswell and Jim Harvey, were out somewhere on that hit-run felony from Wednesday night. The crime rate was up in Glendale, as the population rose, and the chief had
argued some money out of the city fathers; eventually the department was supposed to get at least three more plain-clothesmen and twenty or thirty uniformed men, but just when was something else.
Boswell and Harvey were just out of uniform and somewhat younger than the rest of the detectives, but they both seemed to be fairly intelligent and congenial, and would shake down all right with
time and experience.

“I suppose,” said Delia, “we ought to hear what he has to say.” Neither of them made an immediate move to get up. Whatever Reynaldo said, nothing was going to come of
it.

Varallo regarded her lazily, his mind only ticking over halfway. It was the middle of May, and as usual they were having a little heat wave: it was close to ninety on the street. In here the
air-conditioning was on, thankfully. O’Connor had been annoyed at having to take on a female detective, of all things, but she had been with them for eight months now and he had to admit that
she was a good girl. Nearly six years a Los Angeles Police Department policewoman, and a very good record, and about the highest score possible to get on the detective exam: a smart girl. And, it
appeared just recently, fluent in Spanish, which was always helpful to a cop in California. And no arts and graces about Delia: she looked like a plain Jane at first glance, but she was quite
good-looking at a second, fine small features, a straight little nose, blue eyes, and dark brown hair in a short severe cut. But she didn’t do anything about the looks: a very minimum of
makeup, plain dark dresses or pantsuits, no jewelry but a plain seal ring.

And they knew more about her now: her father something of a legend in the LAPD, and Delia his one ewe lamb—that was why she was in this job, had bucked for rank so young. Rather a funny
ambition for a girl, but not unprecedented. And she was good.

He glanced through the statement again and said, “Nothing much in this at all. We can guess what Reynaldo will say. Hell. More legwork for nothing, but I suppose we’d better get on
it.” He stood up, and the phone shrilled on his desk; he picked it up. “Varallo . . . oh, hell. What is it? Well, give me the address. . . . So we get sidetracked.”

“On what?”

“Duff wasn’t too clear. The squad called in a child abandonment, but there seem to be ramifications.”

Delia grimaced, getting up and reaching for her handbag. “People.”

“What we have to deal with. We’d better take your car.” He drove one of the compacts, a Gremlin, no use for transporting witnesses.

Delia’s ancient Mercedes had been totaled at the end of that case last March; she was driving a new Chevy sedan. Outside, the bright sun was glaringly reflected from the cement of the
parking lot; the heat struck them like a physical blow as they came out of the air-conditioning. It was par for the course in southern California; June usually brought a little respite before the
summer really started with at least three months of the relentless heat. Climbing in beside her, Varallo gave her the address as she switched on the air-conditioning and the engine
simultaneously.

It was one of the oldest streets south in the city. The city had grown north toward the foothills, and if it possessed anything like a slum area it was south of Chevy Chase, east of Glendale
Avenue. This street was shabby and narrow, lined with a mixture of old single houses, duplexes, and a couple of four-unit apartments. There were two squads sitting outside one of those, with
patrolmen Tracy and Harper standing on the sidewalk talking with a civilian. An ambulance was parked ahead of the squad cars. The two uniformed men looked up as Varallo and Delia joined them.
“So what have we got?” asked Varallo.

Tracy just said, “Christ.” He looked at Delia. “No sight for a female.”

“Or anybody,” said Harper.

The civilian was a thin man about forty, conventionally dressed in a gray suit; he looked pale and shaken. “All I can tell you, their name is Contreras. They were always late with the
rent, and we’d just got an eviction notice—as I was telling these other officers—that’s why I’m here—and they’re gone. I just went in to see the state
they’d left the place—oh, my God—” He put a hand to his mouth, looking sick.

“It’s the right-hand upstairs apartment,” said Harper.

Varallo and Delia went in. There was a tiny square entrance hall, a door to either side: the name-slot beside the left one was empty, the other bore a smeared handwritten slip that said
Gonzales. The stair was precipitous and uncarpeted. This place would be about sixty years old, and over the years various tenants had used it hard, a minimum of maintenance been given to
it. The walls were stained, the stairs shook under Varallo’s weight. At the top there was a tiny square landing and two more doors; the one to the right was open. Past it they came into a
square living room completely bare of furniture and very dirty. The two white-clad ambulance attendants were standing there smoking.

“They said there’d be some front-office boys coming,” said the bigger one. They looked at Delia curiously. “I don’t know what for. Jesus, what a thing. Jesus.
I’ve seen this and that on this damned job, but never nothing like that. I suppose we got to take it somewhere, but you tell us where.”

“In there,” said the other one, nodding at an inner door. “The guy who came with the eviction paper found it. God.”

Varallo pushed that door farther open; they went in and looked. Delia made a strangled sound, and involuntarily he said, “Dio!”

The creature lying in the doorway of a narrow slot of a closet across the little bare room was at first unidentifiable as human, or sexed; it was just a grotesque malformation, something that
shouldn’t be. About the size of a small child, it had a huge misshapen head, arms that ended in stumps, malformed legs bent crookedly inward. It was making a low bleating noise and moving
feebly. It was filthy with its own excrement and long ingrained dirt.

They looked at it for one minute that was too long, and Varallo steered Delia downstairs again. After the stale and newer smells in that room, the hot dusty street was welcome.

“Yeah,” said the first ambulance attendant, eyeing them. “What a thing. I looked long enough to say it’s female. And no wonder somebody wanted to be rid of it. But what
do we do with it?”

Abandoned children, of course, were automatically sent to Juvenile Hall; Varallo decided to pass the buck to the logical place. He used the radio in the squad to call in to the desk; Sergeant
Duff consulted with Juvenile Hall and came back with the expectable direction to dispatch it to the General Hospital. Somewhat reluctantly the ambulance attendants carried a stretcher upstairs.

The civilian was Rodney Marsh, one of the partners in the realty company which owned the building. “All I can tell you,” he repeated, “is the name. Contreras. Alfredo
Contreras. They’d rented the place for five months. Always late with the rent. These low-rent places are a damned headache the last few years, we’re going to unload them. Used to be
good bread-and-butter income, but since we’ve had this influx of Cubans from the East, and the blacks drifting in from L.A.—hell’s fire, I’m not prejudiced against anybody
on account of their names or color, it’s the kind of people they are, damn it, and God knows a lot of white riff-raff coming in too. And you can’t screen people now, they yell prejudice
and equal rights—I don’t know anything about these people, and I don’t think Bob does—my partner.”

The patrolmen went back on tour, and Marsh drove thankfully away; the ambulance departed. Varallo and Delia went back upstairs to the filthy apartment and looked for anything of significance the
Contrerases might have left behind, but there wasn’t anything except a few pieces of moldy cheese and a quart of sour milk in the dirty, ancient refrigerator. They tried the door across the
landing, and a middle-aged woman opened it a crack and said, “No Inglees,” to the badge. Like so many of her kind, she could probably get around in English adequately, but it was a
convenient plea to avoid talking to cops. Delia switched to her fluent Spanish and was scowled at. They got a reluctant name, Rosario. She knew nothing about the Contrerases, not so much as how
many there were. People came and went, one did not pay notice. Children, she knew nothing of any children. They were gone; well, she had not seen them go. She had never spoken to them.

Downstairs, they got no answer at one door; at the other, a fat Mrs. Gonzales was amiable but entirely unhelpful. Both she and her husband worked all day, the only reason she was at home today
was that she had to see the dentist, and he had made such torture for her she stayed home with his little pills. She did not know the upstairs people at all, perhaps she had seen them come and go a
few times, that was all. A man and his wife, perhaps one or two children, big.

“Big?” asked Delia.

“Oh, grown almost—fifteen, sixteen, like that.” And that was all.

They sat in the Chevy’s air-conditioning and lit cigarettes.

“Ordinarily, just a misdemeanor,” said Varallo. “But here, I’d say child abuse too. See if he paid the realty firm by check. And it’s twelve-thirty, do you feel
like lunch before writing the report?”

“Not much,” said Delia. “I’ll pick up a sandwich later on.” She dropped him in the parking lot at headquarters to pick up his own car, and went upstairs, stopping
for a cup of coffee from the machine down the hall.

O’Connor was sitting back in his desk chair talking with Jeff Forbes, who had one hip perched on a corner of O’Connor’s desk. There was a 510 form rolled into the typewriter
but O’Connor wasn’t doing anything about it yet. As usual he looked the complete tough, his curly black hair tousled, jaw stained with a blue shadow; he had hung his jacket on the
chair, and the shoulder holster bulged under his left armpit with the weight of the .357 magnum. “And just what the hell,” he was saying bitterly to Forbes, “are we expected to do
with that? It was so dark she never really saw him, to see what he looked like—no idea what clothes he had on—oh, she couldn’t say what size he was, just awfully strong—she
didn’t see where he came from, just all of a sudden he was there, just as she got to the car— Women!”

“Well, after all, Charles,” said Forbes reasonably, “she was pretty shocked and upset—she’d just got raped. She’s only about twenty-three, and the doctor said
she’d been knocked around some.”

“I’ll say amen to that,” said Delia dryly, sitting down at her desk. “This is the nurse at the Memorial Hospital? Even nurses aren’t so tough to take a rape all so
calmly, Lieutenant.”

“All right, I expect too much,” said O’Connor resignedly. “All she does give us is that he speaks broken English. The little he said to her when he jumped her.”

“Last night?” asked Delia.

“She’s on the three-to-eleven shift. She was late leaving for some reason. And that staff parking lot behind the hospital must be damned dark, and there are bushes along one side. He
could have been lying in wait there for a while—”

“Or just walking up the side street when he happened to notice her come out and got the urge,” said Forbes. He hoisted his lank length off O’Connor’s desk. “Are you
going to write a report on it at all?”

“I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it,” said O’Connor, who hated the typewriter. “It’s time for lunch, damn it. What were you out on?” he asked
Delia.

She told him, and he just hunched a big shoulder in comment. Leaving the virgin form in the typewriter, he got up and put his jacket on, resettled his tie that was crooked as usual, and was on
his way out when Leo Boswell came in with a big black fellow. Boswell was looking pleased; he was a stocky, sandy young fellow with a perpetually cheerful expression which rather annoyed
O’Connor. “Something accomplished, something done,” he said. “This is Pete Henderson, Lieutenant. You like to sit in and hear what he has to say?”

They had been looking for Henderson ever since his prints had shown up at the scene of a burglary on Glenwood Road last week. “Where’d you come across him?” asked Forbes.

“At his sister’s place in Hollywood. After we put the A.P.B. out on that hit-run car, I just went over to ask her if the family’d heard from him, and there he was having a beer
in front of the TV.”

“So you and Jeff can talk to him,” said O’Connor. “I’m going to have lunch.”

Boswell marched Henderson toward one of the interrogation rooms down the hall, Forbes ambling after. Delia finished her coffee and rolled triplicate forms into the typewriter, began to type the
initial report on the abandonment, call it that for the time being. The job, of course, was anything but glamorous, and there was a surprising amount of paperwork to it.

She had just finished the report and separated the copies, readied them for dispatch to the usual places, when Varallo called in. “Contreras paid the rent with checks on the Bank of
America. I’m just going down there to see if they know anything useful, such as where he works or whatever. Anything new down?”

“No, it’s being a nice quiet day,” said Delia.

“Good. I’ll be in sometime.”

She put the phone down and lit a cigarette. A nice quiet day—for the average police headquarters and the average police detective. Belatedly, she realized that she could welcome a little
lunch too, and got her handbag and went out to the place half a block down Wilson, for a sandwich and another cup of coffee. She wondered if Boswell and Forbes were getting anything out of
Henderson; of course the prints definitely tied him to the burglary, and it was academic whether he talked or not. She wondered if they would ever catch up to the Contreras family: and about that
miserable horror they had left behind. Sometime the hospital had better be contacted.

And it slid into her mind involuntarily—Some vessel of a more ungainly Make: “They sneer at me for leaning all awry: What, did the Hand then of the Potter shake?” She
set her cup down with a little rattle, annoyed at herself. Ever since that night last week when she couldn’t sleep and had picked up a book at random to pass the time, finding it was the
Rubaiyat only after she’d got back into bed, bits and pieces of old Omar had been coming back to her unbidden. Adolescent second-rate stuff—some of it—wasn’t it, or
was it?

She got back to the office at two-thirty and called the General Hospital. That was a big place and she talked to a number of people before she got hold of an intern who knew anything.

“Oh, God,” he said. “Only if there was a God, He wouldn’t let things like that happen, you know. Of course the thing is a mindless vegetable—just a spark of life
there. Something of a miracle it is still alive, I’d say it had been starving and unattended for several days at least. Toss-up if it’ll live. Be a blessing if it doesn’t. If it
does, it’ll have to be institutionalized, of course. What? Well, it’s almost anybody’s guess, but I don’t think it can be over a couple of years old. Somebody’s taken
some care of it, or of course it’d have died soon after birth—that is, up to a few days ago.”

That was, expectably, all the hospital could say. Delia thanked him, and had just put the phone down when O’Connor came back, flung off his jacket, scowled at the form in the typewriter,
sat down and attacked it. There was nobody else in the office. Of course there were three heist jobs to work, apart from the motel heisters, and as usual several burglaries.

Into the big office from the landing came a nice-looking, gray-haired old lady. She hesitated in the doorway, and Delia got up. “Can I help you?”

“Well, I don’t know. Maybe I’m a fool for coming here, but I don’t think so.” She looked doubtfully at O’Connor, who certainly looked the part of the big,
tough cop without many brains; she looked at Delia. “Are you one of the detectives? The sergeant downstairs said I should talk to one of the detectives up here.”

“Yes, that’s right, I’m Detective Riordan. Won’t you sit down? What’s it about, Mrs.—”

“Mrs. Potter. Frances Potter.” She was probably in her seventies; there didn’t seem to be any happy medium, old ladies were either fat or thin, and she was thin—a spare,
rather tall old lady with nicely waved silver-gray hair and bright blue eyes. She had a round, still pretty face. And she sounded like a very forthright, down-to-earth old lady. She was rather
dowdily dressed in a bright blue cotton dress, the usual old-lady oxfords with cuban heels. She sat down in the chair beside Delia’s desk and looked at her appraisingly, clasping her big
white handbag in her lap.

“I’m just as glad to talk to another woman,” she said, “because it’s all kind o. . .