Blood Count

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

The weather in LA hasn't been living up to its sunny reputation - the murder of an unwanted newborn and the assault of a twelve-year-old girl don't make things pretty for the family-man cop, especially with a new baby at home. The most puzzling crime of all is the murder of a respectable middle-aged woman from Indianapolis. A string of hit-and-runs involving a Model A Ford, and a bizarre mugger with a penchant for footwear all add up to another high-voltage month in the city of the stars for Lieutenant Luis Mendoza. 'A Luis Mendoza mystery means superlative suspense' Los Angeles Times

Release date: November 21, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

“I JUST FIGURED you’d want to know how it happened I was there,” said Bill Cassidy. “Like I say, I run that station out on Pico.
My night man, Ted Smith, he comes on at six, only last night he was late. It was the dog, see.” Cassidy was about forty-five, with an earnest bulldog face and scanty sandy hair.
“It’s a cute little dog, Sergeant Hackett.”

“Yes, yes,” said Hackett. Witnesses were either too taciturn or too voluble.

“See, he was just about to leave when the dog got hold of something poisonous and got awful sick, and they had to rush him to the vet. Ted and his wife, they’re just crazy about that
dog. So Ted called me from the vet’s, said he didn’t know when he’d get to work. But they pumped out the dog’s stomach or something and he’s goin’ to be okay,
but Ted didn’t get to the station until eight o’clock, so that’s how come I was just on my way home. At that intersection there, Olympic and Alvarado. It was about eight-thirty.
My God, that was a terrible thing to see happen—just terrible. That poor little girl.”

“Yes,” said Hackett again, patiently. Luis Mendoza was half-sitting on a corner of the desk, smoking and listening in silence. “Could you tell us—”

“I saw the whole thing,” said Cassidy. “My God. There wasn’t much traffic that time of night, or many people in the street.”

At that hour on a Friday night—last night—there wouldn’t have been. At about eight-thirty Mrs. Marion Crane and her eight-year-old daughter Alice had been on their way home
from the library on Olympic Boulevard, which they visited every Friday night; both of them had a small bag of borrowed books. As they crossed the intersection with the light, to wait at the corner
for the bus to take them home to Benton Way, a car had run the light and plowed into them squarely, and without braking had vanished down Alvarado at a high rate of speed. The little girl had been
killed instantly, and Mrs. Crane was in the hospital with a fractured pelvis and various other injuries, still unconscious with concussion.

“They were the only ones crossing the street,” said Cassidy. “Like I told you, I was sittin’ in my car right across, headed up Alvarado, and I saw the whole thing. This
damn car never slowed up at all, just ran the light—goin’ maybe forty-five, fifty—and I think maybe the driver was drunk, it was weavin’ all over between lanes before that.
And I can tell you what it was—it sounds crazy, but it was an old Model A Ford.”

“You don’t say,” said Hackett. “I’ll be damned.”

Cassidy nodded vigorously. “That’s what it was. Once in a while you do see ’em, still running pretty good. My God, fifty-five, fifty-six years old—but I understand it was
a pretty damn reliable car, and some guys make it like a hobby, sort of, these vintage cars like they call them. And it was a sedan, not a coupe—a four-door. And I’ll tell you something
else, it was fresh painted.”

“Shiny,” suggested Hackett.

“Right under the arc lights,” said Cassidy. “Sure. Like it had just had a coat of paint. You know all those old jobs were painted black—well, so was this one, but it was
new paint. All glossy and shiny.”

“I’ll be damned,” said Hackett again. “Well, we’d like you to sign a statement about this, Mr. Cassidy. It’ll just take a minute to type it up.”

“Sure.”

Jason Grace was talking to the other witness at his desk across the big communal office at Robbery-Homicide. When Bob Schenke of the night watch had covered this last night, he had talked to
only one other witness, and what he had said now backed up Cassidy. He was a teenage boy, and he had told Schenke, “Gee, that car—all I can say is, it was a real oldie, it looked sort
of like those cars the gangsters used to drive, in the old movies, you know.”

“That poor little girl. These damn fool drunks,” said Cassidy. Hackett typed up a brief statement and he signed it. “I sure hope you catch up to him. But even if you do, and
put him in jail, it won’t help the little girl or her mama. Oh, I’m just glad I could tell you something, just hope it’ll help you catch him.” He went out, following on the
heels of the other witness, and Jason Grace came to perch a hip on the corner of Hackett’s desk.

“Anything useful from that one?” asked Mendoza.

“Mr. Neil Cushing,” said Grace. “Something definite anyway.” His chocolate-brown face wore a thoughtful expression; he brushed his narrow moustache absently.
“Retired widower waiting for a bus on his way home. He’d been out to dinner and went to see an old western at one of the rerun houses. They took his driver’s license away last
year—he’s eighty-two—but he’s driven all his life and knows cars. He says, of all things, the car was an old Model A Ford, a sedan.”

“Definite,” said Mendoza. “We’ve just heard the same thing. But, as Cassidy says, you do see them occasionally. Still perking along after all this time.” He grinned
mirthlessly. “Which is probably more than you can expect of anything getting manufactured these days. As the saying goes, they don’t build them the way they used to.”

“Well, it gives us a place to look,” said Grace. “Ask Sacramento about all of those on file.”

None of them made any immediate move to do that. The office was quiet, empty except for themselves; it was Galeano’s day off and everybody else was out on something. In this second week of
November, Robbery-Homicide, headquarters, was not quite as busy as usual: a couple of still-unidentified bodies, the normal number of heists to work, a couple of suicides with the paperwork getting
cleared away.

Pat Calhoun came drifting in, sat down at his desk, and lit a cigarette. “So what’s the new corpse look like?” asked Mendoza.

Calhoun sat back and shut his eyes. He was the latest addition to the team, one of the bright boys making rank early, a big handsome wide-shouldered fellow barely thirty, but he had put in four
years as a detective at the Seventy-Seventh Street station and knew his job. “Nothing very interesting, and nowhere much to go on it.” The latest corpse had been spotted by a patrolman
just after midnight last night, on the sidewalk outside a bar on Temple Street. “You saw Conway’s report. He asked at the bar but nobody claimed to recognize him, and it’s the
kind of place where they get a lot of transient trade. Also a fairly noisy place, and it’s entirely possible that the man was shot right there and nobody inside heard the shot. Anyway, he was
shot—in the head, looked like a fairly big gun, the lab will tell us. I went over to the coroner’s office and had a look at him, at the clothes. Nothing very distinctive about
him—about forty-five, medium size, shabby old suit needing cleaning, ditto old shirt and underclothes. There was some I.D. on him, a lapsed driver’s license and Social Security card. He
was one Joseph Naysmith, and the address on the license was up in Hollywood. It’s a rundown apartment building on Berendo, no manager on the premises, and nobody there remembered him—I
chased down all the tenants who weren’t home, but the license was four years out of date.”

“So, dead end,” said Mendoza. “Unless he’s in our records and we get a handle there.”

Calhoun agreed amiably. “There’s just one thing that did strike me. Funny little thing.”

“Oh?”

“His hands. A beautiful manicure job—might be professional. Nails buffed to a gloss, white pencil run under them, cuticle all neatly trimmed.”

Mendoza sat up. “Funny isn’t the word,” he said interestedly. “Otherwise looking like a run-of-the-mill down and out? Not quite a skid row bum, but definitely not in the
money.” His nose twitched; Mendoza was always intrigued by anything slightly offbeat.

“That’s right. Tell you one thing,” said Calhoun thoughtfully. “He’d never used those hands at anything like manual labor. Nice soft, white, ladylike
hands.”

“Extraño,” said Mendoza. “I take it you passed his prints on to R. and I.?”

“Naturally. We ought to hear something from them any time.”

Higgins and Palliser came in together. It was coming up to the end of the day shift. They were both looking tired. “Do any good on anything?” asked Hackett.

Higgins just grunted, settling his bulk into the desk chair and lighting a cigarette. “Don’t ask,” said Palliser. “The heisters are a dime a dozen, all over the place.
Half the time only a vague general description, and even if the victim picks a picture out of the books, we know what eyewitnesses are worth. The only thing we can say definitely—the one on
the liquor store Wednesday night is probably the same one who hit that market last week, by the description. Big and husky, but not young. Dirty sports clothes, a big gun, tattoo of some kind on
his left arm. Which is helpful. Tom didn’t come up with anything on that other heist. We just ran into him downstairs, he looked beat and said he was taking off early.” That one was
even vaguer, the holdup of an independent pharmacy last Tuesday night; Tom Landers and Nick Galeano had been working it, but the description they had from the pharmacist was a handful of
nothing—“Just a young fellow, thin, dark, sort of a pale face—no, I didn’t see a gun, he had the gun in his pocket—” And after poring over the mug shots he
hadn’t made any.

Wanda Larsen came in and said, “I won’t even sit down, I’m going home and thank goodness tomorrow’s my day off.” A fairly pretty blonde, she was now looking tired
and subdued. “We’ve just about got this juvenile thing cleared away, just some more paperwork to do.” The only reason Robbery-Homicide had gotten involved was that the
juveniles—a pair of teenage boys high on angel dust—had killed an adult in the process of robbing him, an inoffensive pawnbroker who had just refused to take a tape recorder from them,
suspecting it was stolen, which it had been.

Mendoza yawned and stood up. “Saturday night—there’ll probably be some new business coming up. Maybe I’ll take off early too.”

“Business a little slow?” The voice from the door was cheerful and brisk. They all looked around and Hackett uttered a little groan.

“And what the hell are you doing here?”

“Got something to hand over to you. Could be a kind of funny thing.” Jeff MacDonald came in, pulled up the chair from Landers’ desk, and sat down. He plunked down a
woman’s handbag on the desk and pulled a Manila envelope from his breast pocket. MacDonald was one of the investigators for the coroner’s office, a stocky, dark, youngish fellow with a
luxuriant handlebar moustache.

“So what now?” asked Mendoza resignedly.

“Well, it didn’t look like anything for you, to start with.” MacDonald was filling an old brier pipe. “Accident, pure and simple. Or an O.D. of some kind. Patrolman came
across the car about twelve-thirty A.M. this morning, on Fourteenth just off Sepulveda. The car was rammed into a light pole at the curb, and a woman
dead behind the wheel. Not a mark on her, and the car wasn’t damaged much. It’s a rented car, by the way—Hertz. Two-door Ford. She could have had a heart attack, whatever, lost
control of the car. Anyway, the patrolman didn’t think it was anything for the detectives, and called us. One of our night watch went out, took some pictures, brought the body in. The
car’s in your garage. Nothing looked unusual until Dr. Cox did an autopsy this afternoon.”

“So what did the lady die of?” asked Hackett. “Any I.D.?”

“Oh, sure, there’s this and that in her handbag. Well, I was sitting in on the autopsy, and when Cox got into it, it looked like something more than an accident. Of whatever kind.
You’ll get the full autopsy report sometime tomorrow, probably, but to go on with—she wasn’t drunk or high on anything else. What killed her was a depressed skull fracture—a
pretty bad one—right here,” and MacDonald illustrated on his own head. “Right behind the left ear. Skin not broken, no external bleeding. In fact, our old friend the blunt
instrument, as the old mystery writers used to say.”

“So she didn’t hit anything in the car,” said Mendoza.

“Pretty obviously not. Not much in the car could have caused that kind of blow—the dashboard, the top of a door—but if that was the case, somebody moved her afterward, put her
right behind the wheel. Cox says she was unconscious from the time she was hit, couldn’t have moved. And there she was draped over the wheel as if she’d been driving, rammed the car
into the pole herself.”

“I see,” said Mendoza. “So you dump it in our laps—I suppose that’s her bag, and a dozen of your boys have plastered their prints all over it, and the
car.”

“Now, Lieutenant,” said MacDonald reproachfully, “we know better than that. You may find a couple of mine on the bag—we had to look for I.D., naturally—but we
haven’t started any investigation, that’s your job now. I’ve got the pictures of the scene for you—”

“And since you’ve been through the handbag, I suppose we needn’t delay a look while it’s printed. Hell.”

“It’s all yours,” said MacDonald. “There’s next of kin to notify—we haven’t done anything about that. She’s a Louise Cannaday—evidently
lived in Indianapolis, by the I.D. She was registered at the Sheraton Plaza, by that card in the bag—we haven’t verified that either.”

“Thank you so much,” said Hackett.

“All in a day’s work. Hope you can find out what happened to her.” MacDonald knocked out his pipe in the ashtray on the desk and stood up. “You’ll be getting the
autopsy report. You’ll let us know whatever you find out.”

“If anything.”

They watched him out rather glumly. Grace yawned and said, “That Model A Ford. I’ll get on the wire to Sacramento, and then call it a day.” Wanda was just leaving, Higgins and
Palliser reaching for their coats. Mendoza stabbed out his cigarette in Hackett’s ashtray and said somnolently, “And tomorrow is also a day. See you in the morning, Arturo.” He
went back to his office for hat and coat and went out after Higgins and Palliser. Calhoun, yawning, stood up and started for the door. The phone rang on Hackett’s desk and he picked it
up.

“These prints,” said Horder up in the lab. “Calhoun handed them in this morning. Said they belonged to a Joseph Naysmith. We don’t know them, they’re not on file
with us. I passed them on to the Feds.”

“Okay, thanks,” said Hackett. He beckoned to Calhoun at the door and passed that on. Calhoun flipped a hand at him and went out.

It was ten minutes of six. Hackett eyed the handbag on his desk. Next of kin, he thought. One of the thankless jobs they came in for. It was a handsome, expensive-looking bag, black
pigskin-grained leather, square, with double handles and a single snap catch. Gingerly he opened the catch and upended the bag on his desk.

The wallet was newish-looking too, blue leather with a double coin purse and behind that a range of plastic slots. In the coin purse was a little wad of bills and change, amounting to
thirty-seven dollars and fifty-eight cents. The first plastic slot held a driver’s license for Mrs. Louise Cannaday, an address in Indianapolis. It had been issued less than a year ago and
was valid for four years. He looked at the photograph with some interest. Whoever she had been, Louise Cannaday had been a good-looking woman. Not young—her age was given as
fifty-five—but not looking her age: she must have been something of a beauty as a young woman. It was a triangular face with high cheekbones, a wide generous-looking mouth, her most striking
feature the thick dark hair with a broad streak of white through a heavy wave sweeping up from the forehead. She had intelligent dark eyes, a straight nose, rather sharply arched brows. The
description said Caucasian, five-five, a hundred and thirty, eyes brown, hair black. He leafed through the other slots. A Visa card. Library card. Medical insurance card. A handprinted slip of
paper, notify in case of emergency, Dr. James Cannaday, another address in Indianapolis, a phone number. Hackett sighed and reached for the phone. Get it over with and have it done. It would make
him a few minutes late. He couldn’t remember the time difference between California and Indiana: two hours, three? It didn’t matter.

He got, after an interval, Dr. Cannaday, who sounded fairly young and, on hearing the news, incredulous and shaken. He said, and his voice went high and shocked, “Mother! But I
don’t understand—what happened? You said police—Mother’s dead? Dead—an accident—but I don’t understand, she’s a very good driver—what
happened?”

“We don’t know much about it yet, I’m sorry. It happened last night, and apparently it wasn’t an accident, doctor. We’ll be investigating. You understand
we’ll want to know the answers to some questions—she was just visiting here, apparently—” Hackett edged a card from under the wallet with one forefinger. It was a square
pink-toned card, with a line of elegant italic script at its bottom: THE SHERATON PLAZA FLORIST SHOP. At the top was another line of printing, To welcome you, and below a single
written name: Adele.

“Yes—yes—she was flying home tomorrow—and then I had a wire from her last night, she was staying over a couple of days, I don’t know why—she said Tuesday,
she’d be coming home Tuesday—but my God, what could have happened? How could she be—oh, my God, don’t call Sue! My sister—I’ll have to call her—oh, my God,
I’d better come—there’ll be all the arrangements, she’d want to be here with Dad in the family plot—” And now he was nearly crying, incoherent and stunned.
“I’ll have to come—call Sue and tell her—somehow—but I don’t understand what could have happened—it’s nothing that can have happened, Mother
dead—oh, my God, we’d all been so happy about the baby—oh, God, I don’t know how to tell Sue—I’d better come—”

He wasn’t in any state to answer questions. Hackett said, “Will you let us know when you’ll be getting in, please, doctor? Sergeant Hackett, Robbery-Homicide, L.A.P.D.
headquarters.”

“Yes, of course—I’ll have to see—reservations—and call Sue, but she mustn’t come—I’d better talk to Dan first—” He was numb now.
“I’ll come—as soon as I can—but I don’t understand what can have happened—”

Hackett put the phone down. The night watch was coming in—Matt Piggott, Bob Schenke, Rich Conway—all on, on Saturday night when there was usually new business showing up. He
collected his coat and started home, fifteen minutes late, and when he got out to the parking lot found it had begun to rain. It was the second storm they’d had since the start of the season;
maybe they were due for a wet winter for a change. At any rate, it was coming down hard and slowed the tedious drive on the freeway up to Altadena, to the sprawling old house on the dead-end
street. Angel had dinner nearly ready for the table and was firm with the children. “Now, Mark, let your father have a peaceful drink before dinner, he’ll look at your homework later.
He’ll read to you before bed, Sheila, don’t bother him now. Tough day, Art?”

“Not bad,” said Hackett. “Just more of the same.” Generally they all got used to shelving the various cases on hand when they left the office, but there was some faint
curiosity at the back of his mind about this one. What had happened to Louise Cannaday? Staying at the Sheraton Plaza—one of the classier hotels—so, very solvent; and the son sounded
like a nice ordinary fellow. And he thought, damnation, he should have told the lab to have a look at that rented car in the police garage.

MENDOZA WASN’T harboring much curiosity about any of the cases on hand, except very faintly for the corpse with the well-manicured hands. It was
very seldom that any kind of interesting mystery or anything unusual turned up for Robbery-Homicide to work; monotonously, they were dealing most of the time with the results of that old devil
human nature, the crudities and stupidities and violence. It was a slow drive home up the freeway through the solid sheets of rain, and it was nearly seven o’clock when he turned up the hill
above Burbank and the tall wrought-iron gates swung politely open to admit the Ferrari. It was pitch dark below, but there were welcoming lights in the big Spanish house at the top of the hill. He
wondered briefly how the Five Graces were faring in the downpour—the sheep installed to keep the underbrush eaten down—but Ken Kearney, their man of all work, had built a shelter for
them beyond the stable and corral.

He ran the car into the garage beside Alison’s and went in the back door. Their surrogate grandmother Mairí MacTaggart was busy at the stove. “Well, and it’s time you
were getting home.”

“Rain,” said Mendoza. “Everything all serene?”

“As much as you could expect with all these noisy children about. That pair can always think up something new to fret Alison, but what I say is you just have to thole it. Only they come by
the stubbornness just natural, her mother having been a McCann.”

Mendoza laughed, shrugging off the trench coat and dropping the Homburg onto the nearest chair. “If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em, that’s what it comes to.” He
opened the cupboard over the sink, took down the bottle of rye, and before . . .