Coffin Corner

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

To a man, the members of the LAPD homicide department were yawning with unaccustomed inactivity. Then everything happened at once - a cop killed by a hit-and-run driver; the questionable suicide of a young girl; and the victim (apparently) of a heart attack found in the clutter of her 'second-hand' shop. It was the last that led Lieutenant Luis Mendoza to the Celtic Hotel, where events moved swiftly and with about as much clarity as the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. But, in this case, the tea party was lethal. 'A Luis Mendoza mystery means superlative suspense' Los Angeles Times

Release date: November 21, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

“I don’t know which is worse,” said Hackett through a yawn: “the times everything happens at once or the times nothing happens at all.”

“Knock on wood,” said Higgins. “You start complaining and right off you get some real toughie dropped into your lap.”

Hackett yawned again. “I don’t know that I’d mind, George. I’m bored.”

A couple of desks away in the big communal sergeants’ room at Headquarters Homicide, Detective Jason Grace had pulled up to his typewriter and was tapping out a report with his usual
efficiency. He looked up and said with a grin, “You’re just inviting trouble, you know.”

“Oh, don’t be superstitious,” said Hackett.

“Who dat you say dat to, white man?” said Detective Grace, his teeth widely white against his coffee-colored skin.

Hackett picked out the last cigarette, balled up the empty pack and threw it at him. Grace fielded deftly. “So you had to leave college before you got your M.A.,” said Hackett.
“God, when I think what a narrow escape the American public had.” He lit the cigarette. “If you didn’t happen to be on the side of the angels, Jase, what a hell of a con man
you’d have made.”

It was, oddly enough, all too true. There was just something about Jason Grace: in spite of his rather terrifying efficiency, everybody liked him on sight, and Mendoza was known to have said
that Grace could persuade the truth out of Ananias if he had the chance.

“Let’s be thankful for a little boredom, Sergeant,” Jason said philosophically. “The rat race’ll get under way again soon enough. Always does.” He went back
to his report: the suicide turned up yesterday in the Seventh Street hotel.

Hackett smothered another yawn. It was the third of March, a nice spring day, and things were going slow in the office, an unusual state of affairs for Headquarters Homicide of L.A. Possibly the
weather had something to do with it: sunny but not too warm. People felt happier, tempers weren’t so easily stirred up or accidents likely to happen to harried citizens. The result was a
spell of the very-much-routine, the boring routine which always constituted so much of police work anyway: there’d been the suicide, a couple of traffic accidents, a couple of muggings.
Landers was doing some legwork on the latter. Grace’s report would close out the suicide. Glasser and Piggott had gone out a while ago to clean up another traffic fatality. Sergeant
Palliser’s mother had died suddenly a couple of days ago and he was taking some time off to cope with all that had to be done in consequence.

“What are you cogitating about, George?” Hackett asked lazily.

“Ohh,” said Higgins a little guiltily, “a summer camp for Stevie, maybe.” He didn’t need to expand on that; and maybe he wouldn’t have said it at all, if
anybody else had been there.

“Mmm,” said Hackett. He felt academically sorry for Higgins, who had several counts against him in his humble pursuit of Bert Dwyer’s widow. It wasn’t very likely that
Mary Dwyer, having had one cop husband killed, would want to acquire a second cop husband. But Higgins liked her kids; he built up little schemes to give them things without Mary’s
knowing.

“I thought maybe I could tell her,” he said now, “that I know one of the managers of the place, or there’s a plan to let kids without fathers in at half price—you
know, something like that, Art. You think she’d suspect anything? I mean, he does want to go, and she can’t afford it, and I just thought—”

Hackett started to say he thought it’d have to be more subtle than that, when Lieutenant Mendoza came in.

“All you hard-working detectives,” he said, surveying them. He looked sharp as usual, the narrow mustache trimmed, newish charcoal Dacron suit, discreet tie and the new gold cuff
links Alison had given him for his birthday four days ago. “You finished that Wells report, Art?”

“Couple of hours ago. What are we supposed to be working at? Nothing new in so far as I know. I’m damn bored.”

“I keep warning him,” said Grace. “Just inviting trouble.” He ripped the triplicate report from the typewriter and neatly aligned all the edges. “So that’s
that. Poor little girl.” He shook his head over the suicide, now just a few typed records to gather dust in the files. “When are we going to get some sensible narcotics laws on the
books? If she couldn’t have got hold of the stuff so easy—”

“I could argue that one,” said Mendoza seriously, hoisting one hip onto the corner of Hackett’s desk. “Like the weapon-possessions bit. Doesn’t matter what stiff
laws you’ve got, anybody wants anything enough can always get it.”

“And there’s the bit about free will,” said Grace thoughtfully. “I guess. I think I’m catching spring fever from the rest of you—I won’t
argue.” He slipped the report into a manila envelope and lit a cigarette.

There hadn’t been anything at all except the deadly routine since they’d finally cleared up that Fearing business about ten days ago. A funny one, in a mild way: in spite of all the
motives and all the suspects in the killing, it had turned out to be the casual break-in after all. Of course, Homicide seldom got a real mystery to solve: police work is mostly deadly routine. But
on the average they got something a little more interesting than they’d had lately—something that made them feel a bit more like the upstanding protectors of law and order instead of a
bunch of glorified clerks.

For a space there was silence. These first warm days of spring, no denying, were enervating. Mendoza lit a cigarette and stared at the calendar on the wall. Hackett yawned again. Higgins frowned
over his problem of how to get Stevie Dwyer to summer camp without letting Mary know he was paying for it. Jason Grace ruminated somewhat sleepily on what to get his wife for her birthday.

They were just four men who knew each other very well and felt comfortable together, in spite of the fact that Jason Grace had been with them only a few months. It might have been any kind of
office at all, the big, rather bare efficiently laid out room with its desks and swivel chairs and typewriters.

The next minute Sergeant Farrell, who was minding the desk while Sergeant Lake recuperated from an emergency appendectomy, burst into the room. And quite suddenly there were four alert police
officers looking at him expectantly.

“D.O.A. at Seventh and Broadway,” he announced tersely. “Squad car just called in. A hit-and-run. Probably a lot of witnesses, thank God.”

Hackett and Higgins got up resignedly. And Mendoza said without moving, “Not usually so emotional, Rory. Who got it?” His voice was soft.

Farrell looked at him. “You really have got a crystal ball, haven’t you, Lieutenant? It’s the patrolman on that corner—the traffic man. Harry Cohen. And it looks, by what
the squad-car man said, as if it was—done on purpose.”

“Oh my God,” said Hackett. “Come on, George.”

The phone rang shrilly in the anteroom and Farrell plunged to answer it. “Headquarters Homicide, Sergeant Farrell.”

“You coming, Luis?” Hackett snatched his hat.

“I don’t—”

“Lieutenant!” Farrell was back. “Another one, ’Nother squad-car man. D.O.A. in a store of some kind over on Los Angeles. A woman.”

“¡Paso!” said Mendoza sardonically. “Did somebody say something about nothing happening? All right, Jase and I’ll take that.” He stood up.

Hackett and Higgins went out in a hurry. Mendoza took his hat off the rack, the usual wide-brimmed dark Homburg, and Grace opened the door to the corridor, neatly tucking away the slip of paper
with the address scribbled on it in his breast pocket. Piggott and Glasser were just outside, with a woman between them. She was a nice-looking middle-aged woman, well dressed in a neat tan
gabardine suit, crisp white blouse; her well-bred little felt hat was just a trifle crooked and her white-gloved hands, clasped together, were shaking, but otherwise she was quite tidy and
ordinary. Except that she was talking rapidly, compulsively, breathlessly.

“He stepped right off the curb in front of me, I couldn’t have stopped in time, I tried, I did, but right in front of me as if he came out of nowhere—I’ve never
had even a parking ticket in my life and I’ve been driving for twenty years—stepped right off the curb in front of me and I couldn’t—”

“Yes, we know, Mrs. Madden,” said Piggot gently, and to Mendoza, “Accident pure and simple. Damn fool was drunk . . . Rory, call up one of our females, hah? Get this poor woman
calmed down to make a statement . . . You just come and sit down quiet, ma’am, we understand how it happened.”

Mendoza went out after Grace. “You get the address?”

“Over in the one hundred block on Los Angeles,” said Detective Grace. “Secondhand store. Doesn’t sound like anything much. Heart attack or something. Just more
routine.”

They were all to remember that little remark later as something of an understatement.

When Hackett and Higgins got to Seventh and Broadway they found a kind of organized chaos awaiting them. That is normally a very busy intersection in the middle of downtown
L.A. anyway, and a sudden and shocking traffic fatality had glued the passing crowds to the pavement on both sides of the street. The chaos, in that rather narrow (for modern traffic) street, was
not helped along by the fact that a few alert squad-car men had roped off a large section in the middle of the intersection (for the lab technicians’ examination) and a couple of other
uniformed men were directing impatient traffic around it one car at a time. The ambulance had gone. Hackett parked the Barracuda alongside a red-painted section of curb and he and Higgins walked
out to where several men in uniform stood about the intersection center. “Which of you called in?” asked Hackett.

“Me, sir—Steiner. I got here first—my partner’s got the fellow who called, guy named Smith—and we called up reinforcements soon as we saw what it was—my God,
I knew Harry Cohen since I’ve been on the force! Nicest guy you’d want to meet—” Steiner was shaken. “And, my God, you’ll have to sort out the witnesses, about a
hundred people all rushed up and wanted to say what they saw, you know how it’d be—crowded streets and—”

“Any I.D. on the car at all?” asked Higgins.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Steiner. “For God’s sake. Do I need to tell you? Just by what I’ve heard from about twenty people I’ve talked
to—and the rest of the boys are trying to round up everybody who saw anything at all—it could’ve been anything from a Rolls-Royce to a VW. You know how people are.”

Neither Hackett nor Higgins said anything. They knew how people were.

“In general, what most of ’em do say is that this car all of a sudden just speeded up and went straight for him: he was standing right here in the middle, naturally, directing
traffic both ways.” Steiner gestured. The streets were not all that narrow: plenty of safe margin for the experienced traffic officer in his navy uniform and white gloves to stand there,
whistle in hand, expediting the heavy downtown traffic. “My God—Harry. A nice guy. I can’t believe it, but that’s what everybody says. Car went straight at
him—deliberate. Could’ve been out of control some way—that’s easiest to think—maybe a drunk—but, anyway, it knocked him flat and went right over him and
screeched around onto Seventh and—my God!” said Steiner. He wore a sick expression; he was a youngish man. “Somebody’d already called an ambulance before I radioed in, but
we got here before. Thank God he was dead then—even I knew he was dead. His face—right over his— My God, I’ve seen my share of accidents, but—” He passed a hand
across his mouth. “Harry,” he said. “Not maybe the ambitious type, you know, Sergeant? But the hell of a good guy. Been on the force twenty years or so.”

“Well, the lab boys are coming,” said Hackett. “Any tire marks, you think?”

“I don’t know—it’s hard to say. All these streets need repaving, mostly—the surface—”

“Could be some on his clothes, Art,” said Higgins.

“Um. Lab boys’ll look there too. I suppose we’d better start to talk to people,” said Hackett.

Four men in uniform were riding herd, over there on the sidewalk, on a bunch of people between two illegally-parked squad cars. They were looking a little desperate, and all the people were
talking at the tops of their voices, not listening to each other. Hackett and Higgins moved resignedly toward them.

“I saw it, I got a good look at it, ’twas an old black car like maybe a Dodge or a Buick and about ten years old—”

“Run right over the p’liceman, it did, I couldn’t, look, just awful—”

“It was a Mercury, I know cars and it was a—”

“Dark green it was, Officer, I’d know it in a minute if I saw it again—”

“I got the license number! I got the license—”

The citizenry. Well, often they could be a big help. As well as a headache. Hackett made for the horn-rimmed young man who was waving a slip of paper in the air and insisting he had the license
number. Maybe he had and they could clean this one up in a hurry.

Which would be nice. The men at Headquarters Homicide didn’t like death any better than the next man, but most of all they disliked the death—the death by violence—of a
cop.

Los Angeles Street was, along here, a shabby and depressed city thoroughfare. The buildings lining it were old and grimy, long in need of paint. The address Mendoza and Grace
wanted was in the middle of the block, a two-story frame building which comprised nearly the whole block. There were shop-fronts on the ground floor, and here a pair of narrow display windows, long
unwashed, dimly revealed a heterogeneous collection of old-fashioned lamps, end tables, framed pictures, and stacks of chipped chinaware. A nearly illegible legend on both windows read
Furniture and Household Goods. Down from the shop door to the right was another door, which apparently led to the upper regions of the building.

An ambulance was parked in front, and a small knot of curious pedestrians had gathered. A man in uniform was at the door, the squad car parked in a loading zone nearby.

“The interns say it looks like maybe a heart attack,” the uniformed man said when Mendoza introduced himself. “Customer went in and found her, called in.”

But of course they had to look at it and make a report. They went in.

“Hell!” said Mendoza, barking his shin on some unidentifiable object inside the door. “Aren’t there any lights in the place?” After the bright sunshine outside, it
was very dim in the shop. It was a good-sized place, and as their eyes accommodated to the darkness it appeared to be jam-packed with as motley a collection of dilapidated odds and ends as Mendoza
had ever seen. Ancient furniture, everything from floor lamps to beds to dining tables to chairs to bureaus—and piled on and around the furniture were framed pictures, china, glasses, cheap
vases, toys—a baby carriage minus a wheel, a grandfather clock with no hands, books, musty dusty stacks of old phonograph records: it was a jungle, threaded by two narrow aisles. At the rear
of the store stood a small crowd of people. Two white jackets—the interns. A uniform—the other squad-car man. A couple of other people.

Avoiding the merchandise, Mendoza and Grace joined them.

The center of the little group, and the focal point, was the terrible, still body of the woman. At the rear of the shop, here, was a partition with a doorless opening giving onto, probably, some
sort of private office, at the end of one cleared aisle. The woman had fallen some fifteen feet from the opening, and she lay on her back, one arm upflung over her head, mouth gaping horridly, eyes
half open, legs twisted. She had not been an attractive woman in life, and in death she was obscene.

She was perhaps sixty and too fat. Her gray hair made a kind of wild halo about her head on the dusty floor. She had on a faded blue-and-white cotton house-dress, thick tan stockings and a pair
of Cuban-heeled tan oxfords.

“Reckon it must’ve been a heart attack.” The soft southern accent brought Mendoza’s eyes to the young slim Negro. “You another officer, sir? I’m Lee
Rainey—I come in and found her, poor soul. Just a while ago. Called you people di-reckly.” He smiled. “Nice woman she was, if she could be sort of sharp, times. Me and
Martha’s picked up this ’n’ that here a lot. I just come in lookin’ for a little table to go beside the bed.”

“We’ve got an I.D., then? You know her name, Mr. Rainey?”

“I got it all down, sir,” said the uniformed man. “She was the proprietor here. A Mrs. McCann. Eliza McCann.”

“Nice enough woman, if she could be a bit sharp like,” said Lee Rainey mildly. He looked at Detective Grace with interest.

“What’s it look like?” Mendoza asked the interns. One of them was small and blond, the other hulking and sandy.

That one shrugged. “Suppose you’ll want an autopsy. Could be a lot of things. Stroke, cardiac failure. Looks like heart, most likely—no signs of purging. She’s been dead
somewhere around an hour, I’d say. Can we take her?”

And of course it looked, so far, like the very routine thing. The natural sudden death. Not a young woman. Just another technical homicide, sudden death alone, with the routine investigation to
be made and the reports typed up for filing.

Mendoza said, “Take her. Does anybody know where she lived? Is there any family?”

The portly Semitic-looking man standing beside the patrolman spoke up. “Yes, sir, yes, sir, I do—a terrible thing, to die all alone like that, so sudden—makes you
think, you know. Makes you stop and think. I knew her more than thirty years—beg pardon, my name’s Wolf, Max Wolf, I run the pawnshop down the block—thirty-five years next July
it’s been— Just a terrible thing! Lee, he knows me too and he came up to use my phone—no phone in her store, you know—and I came right back with him to see the poor woman
laying there like that—”

“You know where she lived?”

“Yes, sir, I do. A terrible shock it’ll be to her family—over on Old High Street, sir, just down from North Broadway—I know she had a couple of brothers, and I think
there’s a sister too—it’s a hotel, called the Celtic Hotel, I guess it is—”

All very routine it was. Probably the sudden heart attack, something like that. And one of the little unpleasant jobs police officers had to do was break the bad news.

Which on this occasion would postpone their lunch hour.

“Where the hell is Old High Street?” asked Mendoza. “I thought I knew this town.”

Grace consulted a County Guide. “I never heard of it either. Here—just up from the old plaza, only a couple of blocks long.”

That was, of course, the very oldest part of L.A. When they got there, it was a very narrow, ancient blacktop street with a number of derelict-looking frame buildings along both sides of it and,
interspersed with those, a few ramshackle old houses. None of them, at first glance, had been built after 1900. A couple of them were authentic General Grant in style, complete with gingerbread
eaves and deep front porches, and the Celtic Hotel was one of those.

It was a four-story building whose original tan paint had faded and cracked to uniform grime-color. The word subfusc went through Mendoza’s mind. The sign sagged dispiritedly over
the porch eaves and was barely legible—a much-faded shamrock and turn-of-the-century fancy lettering. There was no sign of life about the building at all.

Immediately next to it stood . . .