Chain of Violence

Book 0: A Vic Varallo Mystery

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

The Glendale Police Department are as busy as usual; crime, unlike the weather, is not seasonal. Detective Delia Riordan has moved into a new apartment with her parrot Harry after her father's death, but her colleagues feel it is time she found a new man. She won't have much time for romance, though, with a killer on the run who shot an LAPD cop and is heading for Glendale, and a crazed AWOL soldier who has also arrived with the announced intention of killing a girlfriend who has now married someone else. 'My favourite American crime-writer' New York Herald Tribune

Release date: July 28, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

Varallo got back to Glendale headquarters at four-thirty on Saturday afternoon. He dropped off some evidence at the lab, without much hope that they’d be able to make
much of it, and went up to the communal detective office. He found O’Connor fuming to the other detectives in, shaking a copy of a local sheet, the News-Press, at them.
“Libel!” O’Connor was saying. “Well, for God’s sake, not exactly libel but of all the ridiculous— Of all the outrageous—” He thrust the paper at
Varallo. “You haven’t seen this damn thing—” The News-Press was on the street at around four in the afternoon. “My good God, this is the silliest— I
swear to God, if I’d thought that damfool female would turn out a story like this—”

“Oh, now, Charles,” said Jeff Forbes peaceably. “It’s very nice of the little lady to say such sweet things about us.” O’Connor uttered an explosive snort.
“Sure, a little bit unrealistic, but what do civilians know?”

“Unrealistic!” said O’Connor.

Varallo contemplated the headline. One of the editors at the News-Press had conceived the idea of running feature articles on various aspects of community services, and for the past
week all the men at headquarters had been plagued by questions from a diminutive brown-eyed blonde interfering with routine and taking up time. This was the result, in Saturday’s paper.
GLENDALE’S FINEST, ALL DEDICATED MEN OF HONOR, said the headline. He scanned the column, grinning. “Don’t fuss, Charles.
Unrealistic all right, but what are the odds?”

“My God,” said O’Connor, “making us look like a bunch of knights in shining armor— It’s ridiculous!” As usual at this time of day, he needed a shave,
his bulldog jaw blue, and his tie was crooked and his shirt rumpled.

It was Joe Katz’s day off, and everybody else was out on something except for Leo Boswell and their female detective, Delia Riordan. Forbes slid farther down in his desk chair, stretching
out his lank long legs, and said, “The bit I like is at the end—the quote from Charles.”

“Oh, yes, very nice,” said Varallo, and laughed. The byline was Mary Beth Hannaford, and she had certainly gone all out to give the local police force a superlative public relations
job. “Lieutenant Charles O’Connor says, ‘This is a noble choice of career for any citizen dedicated to public service, a rewarding and interesting professional job.’
”

“I never said such a thing!” said O’Connor violently. “Would any peace officer in his right mind say such a thing? Making us out to be a bunch of saints—” He
uttered a loud snort, running a hand through his curly black hair. “Noble career!”

“Ha,” said Jeff Forbes sleepily. “I can think of other words.”

“I liked the part,” said Delia Riordan, “at the end. About how grateful the citizens should be—”

Varallo had just gotten there. “Oh, yes, very nice,” he said, grinning. “All our citizens should be grateful to have such a dedicated body of honorable police officers to
combat the terrible evil of crime in our modern society.” He sat back and lit a cigarette. “The civilians. Well, regardless, it’s nice to have the pretty things said about us.
Don’t carp, Charles.”

“Evil!” said O’Connor. He had one hip perched on Katz’s desk. “Evil! My God. Yeah, for God’s sake, the civilians— They don’t know the realities.
It isn’t once in a blue moon we get a whiff of the pure brimstone. What the hell are we coping with day by day? Human nature!” By his tone he might have uttered a fearful obscenity.
“The foolishness, the stupidity, and the mindless violence, the lack of any common sense— This piece of sentimental twaddle— My God!” He stabbed out his cigarette
violently.

Varallo laughed. “Don’t fuss, Charles. If it reassures the citizens that our hearts are in the right place, all well and good.”

“It just annoys me,” said O’Connor, “making out that everything’s black or white. Human nature— It doesn’t always add up that way.” He lit a new
cigarette. “And what was the new one you’ve been out on?”

Varallo passed a hand over his tawny blond crest of hair. “The minister again,” he said. “And of course no suggestive lead. This time he knocked the woman down, she’s got
a broken arm. We’ll have to get a statement from her tomorrow, I’d just got the bare facts when the ambulance came. He got about seventy bucks and some jewelry. He left the usual
religious tracts, I dropped them off at the lab. A Mrs. Abbott, up on Olmstead. But we seem to be getting an M.O.: she’d just got home from the market.”

“Oh,” said Delia. “Same as the first two. Funny in a way, Vic.” The first two robberies had occurred in the last ten days, and the victims had told the same stories: the
polite solicitor at the door making a pitch for a missionary society, and when the screen door was opened, the brochures offered, he had marched in and pulled a knife, threatened the victim, and
gotten away with cash and jewelry.

“Funny isn’t the word,” said Varallo. “She gives us the same description, by the little I heard, well dressed, a clerical collar, a little dark Vandyke beard. And he just
waved the knife around, didn’t really offer any violence, just threats. She tried to go for the phone, and he knocked her down against a table, rifled her handbag, and went. I got there just
as the ambulance came, the Traffic man saw she was hurt. This time he left a brochure about the Salesian Missions.”

“And of course,” said Forbes, “no hope of prints off that sheet of paper.”

“Well, probably no.” The first victim had been given a pamphlet about a missionary society of the Faith Baptist Church, the second a pamphlet about a Methodist missionary society.
Both of those had been dead ends; neither society sent out door-to-door solicitors, and both brochures had been posted in the lobbies of local churches for the taking. “Get a statement from
her tomorrow,” said Varallo, “not that there’ll be anything in it.” The thankless job of coping with the day-to-day crime could be discouraging.

John Poor came in and sat down at his desk; he looked disgruntled. “So, more paperwork,” he said sourly, “and it’ll never come to anything. Though I think it’s
another one in the series—all the earmarks, place in a fancy residential area, some heavy stuff taken—TV, stereo, couple of fur coats, small appliances, cameras . . . They probably have
a pickup to move the big stuff, it was an outsized color TV, and that makes six already. If you could say an M.O., looks like the same ones—very slick, very pro. The householders were at an
anniversary party, didn’t get home till 2 A.M., didn’t discover the burglary until this morning. Burt’s been up there hunting for prints, and of course
there’s nothing. But I kind of think it could be the same ones who pulled these six or seven jobs the last couple of months. Not that that’s any help.” He yawned. “I think
I’m getting spring fever. The hell with everything.”

“And I,” said Delia, “have just decided I’m going to take tomorrow off. I was going to wait until Tuesday, but I’m so sick and tired of being in this mess,
I’ll take tomorrow off and finish it.”

“You might just as well,” said Varallo. And Mr. Beal appeared in the doorway of the big detective office.

“I’m a little early,” he said, “but it’s Saturday and we’re going out for dinner. Come on, Rosie.”

Rosie, the little woolly black mongrel, was curled up beside Boswell’s desk. She got up obediently and went to the door. Up until last year, Rosie had been owned by the chief of police of
a little town way north in the state; when he died and his daughter brought her down to Glendale, Rosie had lost no time in finding the police station. She seemed to have the idea that she belonged
in a police station, and after she’d run away several times a compromise had been reached; Mr. Beal, her owner’s husband, dropped her off every morning and picked her up in the
afternoon. Rosie was content to stay at home nights as long as she could spend her days at the police station. She trotted out amiably with Mr. Beal.

It was getting on toward the end of shift, and it had been a slow day with nothing much accomplished. There were the usual ongoing things to work, the perennial heisters, the dope dealers, one
unidentified body found in the street on Thursday night, and possibly they’d never find out anything about that one: an elderly man with nothing on him but a little small change and a
half-full bottle of sherry, probably just another wino dead of natural causes. There was a little spate, a good deal more than usual, of angel dust floating around school playgrounds and elsewhere;
possibly somebody was manufacturing it locally, but if so there weren’t any suggestive leads. Among the various heists, it seemed to be the same pair who had pulled off several in the past
couple of weeks, but so far there weren’t any useful leads to those either.

At least tomorrow they’d have Katz back, and Gil Gonzales. And on Saturday night, it was on the cards that some new business would show up for the detectives.

Delia stood up. “I think I’ll take off early. See you on Monday.”

She went down to the ladies’ room and renewed her lipstick, powdered her nose; she reflected impersonally that the latest beauty operator had done a good job on that casual cut and
permanent; she didn’t quite look the thirty-three she had turned just a couple of weeks before. Not that she could lay claim to any beauty, she thought, neither plain nor beautiful, ordinary
dark hair and fair complexion, ordinary blue eyes, a very ordinary-looking girl— Well, she thought ruefully, perhaps not quite a girl anymore. She started down the stairs and thought to
herself vaguely that there were stopping and starting places in life, as she had thought before; right now she was at a new starting place, and on a new course that would probably go on for most of
the rest of her life.

All those long years of proving herself as an L.A.P.D. policewoman, the long hours of study, acquiring all the useful skills to make her more efficient, the fluent Spanish, the courses in police
science, and most of the time working the swing shift, so unavoidably she had lost contact with friends— You couldn’t say it had all been for nothing, but of course it had all been for
Alex. It had had to be the thankless police job, for Alex. Alex Riordan, losing his first wife after twenty years of childless marriage, marrying a girl half his age to lose her in childbirth a
year later. Delia didn’t know much about her mother. They had managed, with a succession of housekeepers, until the year he was sixty-five and Delia was thirteen, and he had gone out on his
last call—Captain Alex Riordan, Robbery-Homicide L.A.P.D.—and taken the bank robber’s bullet in the spine. That had been a bad time, until they had found Steve, ex-Sergeant Steve
McAllister, L.A.P.D., just short of twenty-five years’ service when he had lost a leg in an accident: a widower with a married daughter. The three of them had been together for fourteen years
and more; the new leg hadn’t hampered Steve from manipulating Alex’s wheelchair, and Alex had always liked to cook. Of course, of course it had had to be this job for Alex, pretending
to be the son Alex never had.

Neil had seen that from the first, and hadn’t he tried to make her see it—stubborn, blind, foolish Delia resisting him all the way. She and Isabel Fordyce had been best friends all
through school, and Neil not really a superior elder brother to Isabel—a friend, until he was something else. How desperately she had held out against him, blindly committed to the
all-important job for Alex—and how he and Alex had hated each other, of course.

And it hadn’t been until over four years ago that she had, in one devastating moment, realized the truth: that the little victory she had won was meaningless. Neil coming to say
good-bye—and she had known, starkly, that she had nothing at all in return for the sacrifice of resisting him. In the years of hard work on the job, all her friends had drifted away. She
hadn’t even talked on the phone with Isabel for a year before that last time of seeing Neil; and a month after that she’d had the last letter from Isabel, the note telling her
noncommittally that Neil had married a Spanish girl he’d met in Ecuador; he’d been directing an archaeological dig there for the University of Arizona.

So it had come to her that it had all been for nothing. The promise of a meaningful life, a woman’s life, exchanged for nothing but the thankless, sterile job. So all that was left to her
was that job: but it was something, a job she could do well. And Alex was proud of her; Alex and Steve loved her.

And then that had changed, all in a moment, like the patterns in a kaleidoscope. It had been three years that Alex had had the crippling stroke, and had to be in the convalescent home, helpless
and paralyzed. Sometimes he had known her, increasingly he hadn’t. When it became evident that he was never coming home again, Steve had gone back to Denver to live with his daughter. He
wasn’t much of a letter writer, and Delia seldom heard from him.

And then, last December, Alex had slipped away to some other place. One thing the long time of living alone had given Delia was time for reading for pleasure; she had read voraciously, and she
could no longer believe that Alex had been dissolved into nothing. There was too much evidence about that, which had nothing to do with orthodox churches. He had just gone somewhere else, the Alex
she had known—irascible, stubborn, opinionated, and tough—and he was all right. Somewhere.

It was, of course, ridiculous to go on living in the big old two-story house in Hollywood. It had long been clear of any mortgage and was in a good residential area. She had put it on the market
two months before, in February, and it had sold within a month. The escrow had closed two weeks ago, and she had bought the condominium in Glendale— As she’d planned, a bright, new
apartment, closer to the job, easier to housekeep in, more cheerful. She had been moving household goods in bits and pieces for the past four days, and had thought she’d make the final move
on Tuesday, her day off, but she was increasingly sick of the dank, dark old house in Hollywood; better do it and get it over.

Downstairs, she went down the corridor to the lab, at the back of the station. Rex Burt was just straightening from a microscope at the workbench, Gene Thomsen contemplating some negatives just
out of the dryer. “Well, what can we do for you?” asked Burt genially.

“A little favor,” said Delia. “I’m moving.”

“We’d heard about it,” said Burt.

“And there isn’t much to move—I sold all the furniture and got new. But I’d be very much obliged if you could bring the van over sometime tomorrow—there’s
just one thing—”

Burt cocked his sandy head at her. “Don’t tell me, let me guess,” he said. “You’ve still got that idiotic bird. And the cage is too big for a car.”

“Well, yes,” said Delia. “That is, no, it wouldn’t fit. And it’s the last thing to be moved.”

“Listen,” said Burt, “we’re not supposed to use the van except on official business.”

“I know, but just as a favor to a fellow officer—”

“Oh, hell,” said Burt resignedly. “All right, all right. Unless something urgent turns up overnight— I suppose we could come over in the morning. Give me the address
again.”

“Waverly Place,” said Delia meekly. “Thanks very much, Rex.”

It was the end of April, and the weather was warm and pleasant; in a couple of months the summer heat would hit southern California. At least the wild and wet winter was over. And in this new
spring, she had come to a new starting place in life.

She stopped at a restaurant in Atwater for early dinner, and got to the old house in Hollywood after dark. As she went in and switched on lights, she shivered; it was cold and dank. Well, it
held memories; it had been home to her all her life; but now it was just a bare, empty old house.

“Hello, Henry,” she said.

As usual he came back at her readily. “Hello, Delia dear, you’re a very pretty girl, dear! Give us a little kiss!” But Henry sounded rather subdued, and no wonder, she thought,
looking around the empty rooms. All that was left in the big old house was the four-poster bed that the new owners had bought with the house—and Henry. Henry was a large blue and yellow
macaw, brilliantly colored and decorated. His former owner had been a homicide victim last December, and her heirs had repudiated Henry with loathing; Henry had, in fact, been left without any
family at all. Just, Delia had thought, like herself. “I say,” said Henry somewhat morosely, “let’s all have a little drink.”

“Never mind, boy,” said Delia. “Tomorrow we’re going to a nice new place, you’ll like it.”

“Awk,” said Henry glumly. She filled his dish with sunflower seeds and peeled an orange for him. There wasn’t any food in the house except Henry’s seeds and fruit;
she’d been having all her meals out for two days, all the kitchen contents ferried over to the condo. She scratched Henry’s bright head, and he teetered on his perch and ruffled his
bright blue wings at her.

All three of them were on night watch on Saturday night—Bob Rhys, Dick Hunter, and Jim Harvey. Saturday nights could bring cops a little spate of work, but most of it
would be for Traffic: the accidents and bar brawls and drunks. They sat around until after nine, when they got a call to a heist at a pharmacy out on Glenoaks Boulevard. Rhys and Hunter went out on
it.

The pharmacist had been alone in the place, just about to close up. He was a thin, middle-aged man named Abel, and he was shaken and scared but had kept his head. “I know the crime
rate’s up, but I’ve never been held up before— I’ll have to check the stock to tell you what they got away with, they took a lot of amphetamines and some other stuff as well
as what was in the register. There were two of them, just young punks, maybe seventeen, eighteen—”

“Could you describe them, Mr. Abel?” asked Rhys.

“Well, I can give you some idea— One was bigger than the other, he was maybe six feet, thin, dark hair— They weren’t in here very long and I was shook up— He had a
gun, I’ve got no idea what kind except it was pretty big— The other one had a knife. It was the bigger one did all the talking, and he kind of ordered the other one around, told him to
go in the back and get all the pills— No, I can’t say I’d recognize a photograph, there wasn’t anything distinctive about either of them, just a couple of young punks. There
might have been seventy or eighty bucks in the register.”

“What about the other one?” asked Hunter.

“Well, as I said, just a couple of punks. He wasn’t as big, he didn’t say anything, just held this big knife. I guess they both had dark hair— Yeah, they were
white— Just old clothes, jeans and sweatshirts. Oh, and one other thing, I don’t know if it was them, but just after they went out, I heard a motorcycle take off out on the
street.”

“Did either of them touch anything here, the counter or the register?” asked Rhys.

“No, the big one got me to open the register and hand over the cash, and the other one just collected all the bottles and packages from the back. He had a big paper bag, he put everything
in that.”

So there wasn’t, probably, much point in calling a lab man to dust for prints. If the punks were that young, they probably wouldn’t show in Records. Rhys asked Abel to come in and
make a formal statement, which was about all they could do. In the car, he said to Hunter, “That pair again. And no damn place to go on it.”

This was the fourth time in six weeks detectives had heard about the pair of heisters, young punks in their teens, one with a gun, one with a knife. It was possible they had pulled more heists,
but in the other four jobs the victims had reported a motorcycle taking off just afterward. They had hit two other pharmacies, a twenty-four-hour convenience store, and a fast-food place at closing
time, and so far had gotten away with a sizable haul, quite aside from all the drugs, which would be eminently salable on the street. And there wasn’t one thing for the detectives to do about
it but write the reports. The computers downtown at L.A.P.D. headquarters didn’t know anything about such a pair; it was on the cards they were too young to show in Records.

They went back to the station and Rhys typed the report. For a Saturday night, it was a quiet shift. In a couple of months, as the summer heat built up, shortening tempers, business would step
up. Tonight, though Traffic was busy with the accidents and drunks, they had only one more call, to a mugging on South Central. The victim had been beaten rather drastically, and the paramedics had
taken him away before Hunter and Harvey got there, but there was a witness and an identification. The victim was one Thomas Berger, and he owned the small bar at the corner of Magnolia and Central,
acted as his own bartender. The witness was Bernie Curran, and he’d had a few beers but was perfectl. . .