Cold Trail

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

The body of a woman from respectable, conservative Glendale is found stashed under a ramshackle house in the middle of the inner city. Detective Luis Mendoza marks the rising heat by the crime and violence raging through the sun-baked streets of Los Angeles - and it's going to be a hot one . . . A thug is shot to death. A mysterious string of robberies continues unabated . . . all without a clue. But the family-man cop knows that where there's heat there's fire - and a cold trail to nowhere promises to turn into a red-hot path leading straight to the damned. 'A Luis Mendoza mystery means superlative suspense' Los Angeles Times

Release date: December 14, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

“THAT,” said Alison, coming back to the kitchen from the telephone in the hall, “was the fence man. It’s going to cost ten
thousand dollars.”

Mendoza set his coffee cup down rather sharply. “¡Socorro!”

“Well, after all it’s nearly four and a half acres,” said Alison. “And we might as well do everything right to start with. While money’s still worth
anything.”

“They do say,” observed Máiri MacTaggart, straightening from loading the dishwasher, “that it’s more costly to rebuild an old house than build a new
one.”

“But look what we’ll have,” said Alison. “Nobody builds houses like that these days.”

Mendoza got up and yanked down his cuffs. “I’ll just remind you, cara, that it isn’t necessary to do everything at once. You shouldn’t be running around in this
heat.”

“Oh, I’m fine. I suppose the air conditioning will be the last thing in. Anyway, if I get any bigger I won’t be able to get behind the steering wheel, to go running around.
Thank heaven there’s only two months to go.” The new baby, either James or Luisa, was due at the end of July.

Mendoza picked up his hat. “Well, I’m off. Just don’t try to do too much at once, amada.”

“No, no,” said Alison. Mrs. MacTaggart pushed levers and started the dishwasher. The twins, of course, had departed on the bus for their private nursery school half an hour ago. The
cats were all out, and Cedric, the Old English sheepdog. The Ferrari slid past the window down the drive, and Alison and Máiri looked at each other.

“It’s an awful lot of money, that is.” Máiri shook her tight silver curls.

“I know—but it’s going to be a house,” said Alison. “It’s just, there’s so much to be done.” Ever since she’d discovered her
hundred-year-old estancia, the old winery in the hills above Burbank, she’d been finding out just how much it was going to cost to remodel and modernize it: it was one thing after
another. The escrow had closed out a month ago, and after consulting the construction company, plumbers, electricians, and now the fence man, Alison was rather appalled at what she’d got
into; but it was indeed going to be a house—a separate suite for Máiri, a playroom for the children, a studio to encourage her to paint again—and there was also the old
winery building, tentatively scheduled to become a stable for two ponies.

“Och, well,” said Máiri, “at least you’re making work for a crew of men. I wonder if any you’ve been talking to could fix yon swing.”

“Oh, I expect any handyman can do that.” The double swing in the backyard had withstood a year of vigorous use by the twins, and yesterday two of its iron hooks had parted from the
frame. Mendoza was far from being a handyman. “There’s bound to be one in the classified ads,” said Alison, still thinking about the fence. “And I’ve got to see that
plumber at nine-thirty, I’d better get dressed.”

“Just as the man says, all this gadding about. Time and enough after the bairn’s here.”

“But I want to get things started. It’s going to take ages anyway,” said Alison, untying her robe.

MENDOZA WASN’T THINKING about Alison’s estancia as he drove downtown; he could count on Máiri to keep her from running around
too fast, or so he hoped. There wasn’t much on hand of real interest at the office, the usual never-ending greed and mayhem; his chief concern at the moment was that rapist-killer. They knew
who he was and there was an A.P.B. out; Mendoza wondered if it had turned him up overnight.

It hadn’t. When he came into the office Sergeant Lake told him that and added that the night watch had left them a new heist job.

“Surprise, surprise,” said Mendoza. It was Monday, so John Palliser was off. In the detective office, Hackett and Henry Glasser were talking desultorily, nobody else there.

“Morning, Luis,” said Hackett. His bulk was slouched in his desk chair. “I suppose Jimmy told you about the heist. Tom and Jase are out on that, and George just went to look at
a new body. Nick’s down in R. and I. with that pharmacist looking at mug-shots.” The pharmacist had got robbed on Saturday night, knocked around a little when he put up a fight.

“No bets he’ll pick one.” Mendoza went on into his office and sat down at the desk, picked up the report centered on the blotter. It was an autopsy report on a Jane Doe, found
last Thursday afternoon in Pershing Square, D.O.A. He glanced at it, grunted and passed it to Hackett. “As expected, an O.D. These damn fool kids. She looked about seventeen.” She
wasn’t on any missing list; her prints had been sent to the FBI and NCIC, but it was a long chance she’d ever been printed.

Hackett squinted at the report, held it farther away and finally at arm’s length; Mendoza watched him sardonically and said, “When are you going to give in, Arturo?”

“Damn it, I suppose you’re right, but it came on so sudden—there’s never been anything wrong with my eyes—” For the last six weeks Hackett had been squinting
at reports, holding them at various distances and complaining about smudged typing and illegible writing.

“The years of paperwork catching up to you,” said Mendoza. “Admit it, and go see an eye doctor.”

“I suppose I’ll have to, damn it. Damn it,” said Hackett, “I’m due in court this morning—the Holt arraignment—and I don’t like it, Luis. Something
about it smells a little, but I can’t put my finger on it.”

“The evidence looked straight enough.”

“Such as it was,” said Hackett. “But I don’t like it. And where in hell did that .32 casing come from? Fulger was shot with a .22.”

“That is a little funny, but seven witnesses pointed out Holt—”

“And I still don’t like it,” said Hackett. “Not that there’s much I can do about it.”

The phone on the desk buzzed, Lake putting through a call; Mendoza shoved the right button. “Robbery-Homicide, Mendoza.”

“This is Patrolman Montez, sir. We just got a call down here on Sixty-second Place, and it’s a body.”

“What’s the address?” Mendoza took it down. “Have you called an ambulance? What’s it look like?”

“Oh, we won’t need an ambulance,” said Montez, sounding rather grimly amused. “It looks like it’s been a body a long, long time, Lieutenant, and I’d say
you’ll be lucky to find out who it was.”

“You don’t say. Well, somebody’ll be coming—just preserve the scene. Something new,” said Mendoza, putting down the phone. “You’ll be heading for
court—” He went out to get Glasser, and found the communal office empty. Lake said the pharmacist had picked a mug-shot in five minutes and Galeano had taken Glasser off hunting.
“Well, once in a while we do get a fluke. Call the lab and tell somebody to meet me at this address. Talk about women’s work.” Mendoza went out to the elevators, down to the
parking lot, and headed the Ferrari up Temple to hit Broadway.

A good way down Broadway, to Sixty-second Street, he turned to find the little cul-de-sac labeled Sixty-second Place. The black and white was parked near the end of the short street, and next to
it loomed a big truck; four men in tan jump suits were talking to the two uniformed patrolmen. Mendoza slid the Ferrari into a red-painted zone behind the truck and got out.

This was all, now, a black area, most of it old and run-down. Los Angeles was a city in flux these days; the real inner city, the oldest part of it, once the shabbiest of all, had been
face-lifted with glittering new civic buildings, and where some of the oldest drab department stores had been, new underground malls had been constructed to attract back the suburban shoppers. But
fanning out from the inner city were still hundreds of drab old streets, dirty and tired and lined with ancient buildings, business or residential; here and there a new apartment had appeared, but
for the most part these streets hadn’t changed much since Mendoza was first riding a squad car twenty-five years ago.

Pocketing his keys, he went up to the little group of men. “Where’s the body?”

“Gah!” said the biggest civilian, and made a face. He was a bulldog-faced middle-aged man, looking tough, but he shuddered. “I don’t never want to see a thing like that
again. Oh, Jesus. Go out on an ordinary job, nice summer day, and right away run into a thing like that! You boys can have it!”

“It’s under the house,” said Montez with a jerk of his thumb. “The place has been condemned, and when Mr. Simpson here turned up with his crew to knock it down, they came
across the body.”

“Never had such a shock in my life,” said one of the crew plaintively. “You have to see what shape a building’s in, foundations and so on, see how to take it down. Not
but what this place looks like I could knock it down with a hammer, but I went in under the porch there to have a look, and first off I thought it was a drunk crawled in there and then when I got
my flashlight on it—my God. Just like Bill says, thing like that shakes you. A corpse yet.”

Mendoza regarded the house somewhat balefully; he had on a new suit. The little street had three ramshackle apartment houses on one side, two four-family places on the other, and in between,
three single houses. All the buildings were ancient, neglected, but the small single house standing alone at the dead end, facing the street, was obviously the oldest: a small frame house hardly
larger than a garage, long unpainted, all of its visible windows broken, a derelict of a house sitting on a niggardly lot about thirty feet wide.

Montez offered Mendoza his flashlight. “It’s only about six feet in from the porch.”

“Thank you so much,” said Mendoza, handing him his hat, and went up the raggedly broken cement walk to the house. There was a tiny square porch, a gaping hole under two sides of it
where boards had been torn out. He had to lie flat to crawl in; the house was raised barely three feet off the ground. It wasn’t as dark as he’d expected, but he switched on the flash.
The place had been built on the sketchiest foundation, and there was only bare earth here. Somewhere above, the floor was broken, letting in light. He circled the flashlight, found what he was
looking for, and held the beam steady, conscious of the faint, pervasive odor of dry rot and dusty earth. The first of the summer heat had arrived early, and it was very hot and close in that
little space. Dim light from the broken flooring above slanted down to help the flashlight.

It looked at first glance quite like a drunk sleeping it off. A huddled dark figure, head lolling to one shoulder. But the beam of light was merciless on what showed of the face: a
brittle-looking, grinning, shrunken mummified face. It was difficult to tell much about the clothes: what looked like a dark coat, something colored under it. The flash moved: thin legs with
tatters of cloth or flesh: one high-heeled shoe. The corpse had been female.

He crawled out backwards, stood up and began brushing himself down. The lab truck was just pulling up to the curb. “You can see what I mean,” said Montez.

“In all my years on this force,” said Mendoza, handing him back the flashlight, “I can only remember one other corpse under a house. I found that one myself, and as I recall it
gave us the hell of a lot of trouble. Besides getting Art Hackett involved in matrimony. But that one was a lot fresher than this.”

Marx and Horder came up and after a look demanded what in hell he expected them to do with that. “Just look for anything,” said Mendoza. “You’re the trained lab
men.” He watched them crawl back into the hole with camera and strobe lights and lab-bag, and turned to Simpson. “I suppose you know who owns the house?”

“The city, I guess,” said Simpson. “I do wrecking work for the city and county mostly. It was the city gave us this job—Planning Commission office. That’s all I
know. Except by the look of the signs on the place, it’s been condemned a hell of a long time. I’ve known places to stand for years before the city gets round to having ’em
down.”

Which was helpful; but there’d be records somewhere. If that turned out to be relevant. Mendoza lit a cigarette, staring absently at the hole under the porch. “And so what
now?” asked Simpson. “I don’t guess you guys’ll want us to go ahead and knock it down? I better call the city and tell them.”

Mendoza didn’t say that he doubted there’d be any useful clues to the corpse lying around that house. You never knew. As he finished the cigarette, Horder came slithering out of the
hole and stood up. He had a plastic evidence bag in one hand. “There’s no use poking around there much, Lieutenant. We’ll get some photos and that’s about all. But we might
have a break right off.” He held up the bag. “About all you can tell, it was a woman—and there was a handbag right beside her. What’s left of one.”

“Así, just fancy that. Think you can get anything from it?”

Horder shrugged. “Have a try. I’d have a rough guess that body’s years old, and it and the handbag didn’t have much protection in there from rain or heat
either—that whole space’d be flooded in a heavy rain, and like an oven in summer. God knows what might be left in the bag. I’ll say right off, forget about getting any prints,
probably. I’ll call the morgue-wagon, they might as well come get it.”

Mendoza looked around the dirty, narrow little street. Many of the residents here would be at work, but he could see a dozen or so dark faces at windows in those apartments. Probably a good many
of the people here weren’t too fond of cops. He could see this corpse getting shoved into Pending right away; but they had to go through the motions. He left Marx and Horder to deal with the
body, told Simpson the Planning Commission would let him know about the job, and drove back to Parker Center.

Hackett had left for central court; Grace and Landers had brought in a suspect on one of the heist jobs and were questioning him. Mendoza told Lake to get him the Planning Commission, and
anticipating a session with bureaucracy sat back and swiveled around in his desk chair to view the clear outline of the Hollywood hills. As he pulled the trigger of the pearl-handled revolver that
was his latest desk lighter, the phone buzzed at him. “I’ve got somebody in the Planning office,” said Lake, “but they don’t seem too sure which department you ought
to talk to.”

Inevitably, Mendoza took it from there, and got passed around, explaining patiently, until he got a Ronald Lightfoot who apparently knew what he was doing and had access to some pertinent
information. He left Mendoza hanging on while he went to consult maps, again to look up dates, and finally advised him to contact the County Tax Collector’s Office for more facts.

By twelve o’clock, when Hackett came back, Mendoza had a little sheaf of notes and was contemplating them meditatively. “Well, short and sweet,” said Hackett. “Arraigned
for Murder Two. And I don’t like it.”

“There’s nothing you can do about it now,” said Mendoza inattentively. “We’ve got enough continuing cases to work. And this new one—or rather an old
one—what we can do about that I don’t know either. Probably not much. Let’s go have lunch and I’ll tell you about it.”

In the outer office they picked up Grace and Landers, who had just let the suspect go. “Up in the air,” said Grace, brushing his mustache in a habitual gesture. “He might be,
he mightn’t be. Nothing to say. He’s got the right pedigree for it—”

“And how many other punks have too,” said Landers. As they went out to the corridor they met Galeano and Glasser just coming in.

“Wasted morning?” asked Mendoza, eyeing them. “I thought that pharmacist was a little quick on the draw.”

“Oh, so did I,” said Nick Galeano, “but we have to go by the book. He could have been right. That’s him, he says after about three minutes of looking, so we had to check
it out. One Salvatore Rodino, and he’s got a pedigree of armed robbery, and with the pharmacist so positive we might have nailed him for the job. Only he’s got an alibi. He was in the
middle of his whole family, about thirty-five people, celebrating his grandparents’ golden anniversary.”

“It’s a frustrating job,” said Mendoza. “Come and have lunch and hear about the new one. Come to think, Art, you said there was another new body—George not back
yet?”

“Apparently not. I don’t know what, Jimmy just said a body.”

Settled at one of the big tables at Federico’s on North Broadway, they heard about the lady under the house. “Talk about a cold trail,” said Mendoza, bringing out his sheaf of
notes. “I wouldn’t even guess how long it’s been there—let Bainbridge try to pin it down. I’ve got this and that on the house, but what legwork that might give
us—I asked for information going back nine or ten years, to give it leeway. At that time the house was owned by Robert James Leigh, that is he had a loan on it with a local savings-and-loan
and was making payments. Sporadically. The following year he defaulted on the payments, and finally the savings-and-loan company repossessed the property. Then it was sold, on another loan, to a
Manfred Willing. He made four payments and then stopped. Of course they sent him the polite reminders, only he didn’t answer his mail, and finally somebody went to see him and found a family
named Jones living there, who said they paid rent to a Mr. Willis. I got this off the record, by the way, this Lightfoot in the Planning Commission office knows somebody at the savings-and-loan
firm. They finally discovered Willing in jail—as Willis—for burglary. Not long after that the house was transferred into his wife’s name, and she kept up the payments for about
six months and then stopped. Let’s see, that was about five and a half years ago. About then, when they were looking for her, somebody called in a complaint to the Board of Health and an
inspector came out, and after the usual rigmarole the place was condemned. That house and the two apartments on either side are still owned by the savings-and-loan company, and they’ve
delayed doing anything about the house because they’re getting some Federal money—read, yours and mine—for a big new housing project there. Now the loan’s come through, and
that whole block is due to come down. When the place got condemned, the people living there said they’d been paying rent to Mrs. Willis but she hadn’t been around lately, and in fact
neither the savings-and-loan company, the Board of Health or the Planning Commission ever turned her up. They had an address for her, on Seventieth, but she wasn’t there.”

“Aha,” said Hackett. “So maybe she ended up under her own house.”

“I don’t think it’s so simple.” Mendoza drank black coffee and lit a new cigarette. “I rather think that corpse was a white woman. At any rate, they had a lot of
trouble getting the tenants out. A Mr. and Mrs. Rex Jones, and a Buford Talmadge, and Wilma Smith—you gues. . .