Consequence of Crime

Book 0: An Ivor Maddox Mystery

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

Glamorous TV star Jan Warden is found gruesomely murdered in her bed. In her climb to fame, she has made plenty of enemies and the police are not short of suspects. It has fallen to Ivor and Sue Maddox and their LAPD colleagues to solve the murder, which they must do under intense media pressure. Crime never sleeps in LA though, and alongside this high-profile case they must investigate a rapist attacking solitary women, two girls kidnapped into prostitution and a knife fight at a wedding reception. 'My favourite American crime-writer' New York Herald Tribune

Release date: November 21, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

Maddox was a few minutes late this morning, and as he caught the light at Cahuenga and Fountain he glanced across the street a block ahead and said one unnecessary,
“Damn.” The new Hollywood precinct station, a present to the LAPD last year, occupied the whole block between Wilcox and Cole on Fountain, handsomely modern and pristine. Normally a
hundred feet of curb space in front, red-painted, would be empty; now, of course, there were twelve cars there, nine of them nondescript unmarked sedans, three black-and-white squads.

He swung the Maserati left onto Wilcox and turned into the parking lot behind the station. D’Arcy’s old tan Dodge was already there, Feinman’s Chevy, Rodriguez’ Ford,
Sergeant Daisy Hoffman’s Pontiac. It was Wednesday, Sue’s day off; he had left her at home swearing at the sewing machine. They had just moved into the house in Glendale two weeks ago
and he wasn’t used to allowing the twenty extra minutes for the longer drive.

He came in the back door to the long hall, and into the big communal detective office. D’Arcy’s lank length was bent over his typewriter; Rodriguez was reading a report; Feinman was
staring into space over a cup of coffee, and Dabney, Rowan, Daisy, and George Ellis were in a little crowd of Metro men gathered around Ellis’s desk.

“Traffic?” said Rodriguez uninterestedly.

Maddox sat down at his desk. “The extra ten miles—I’ll get used to it eventually.”

Rodriguez handed over the report, which was scrawled in Brougham’s big hand: the night-watch report, short and sweet. “The ape man struck again. Laundromat on Melrose.”

“Bloody hell!” said Maddox. He glanced over the page rapidly. Brougham and Donaldson, on night watch, had both gone out on it. At least this time the woman hadn’t apparently
been badly injured. A Linda Thorpe, address on Romaine, the hospital said to be released after treatment: forcible rape after assault, and by the little they had heard from her, it sounded like the
ape man all right. “Damnation,” said Maddox.

“Temper, temper,” said Rodriguez, brushing his neat narrow mustache with one finger. “Sooner or later we’ll have the place to ourselves again. Preserve patience,
Ivor.”

Maddox cast an annoyed glance at the crowd down the office. “Cockroaches,” he said.

“Come again?”

“Like exterminators. Damn it, you can see the reason, but the day after they’re gone, the cockroaches coming out of the woodwork again. I’ve got a date at the Fraud office
downtown at eleven, and somebody’ll have to see this woman.”

“You and Daisy. I’m waiting for the witnesses to that pharmacy heist, and I think everybody else has got reports to write.”

Maddox glanced at the report again and looked at his watch; it was eight-thirty. He looked up the number and dialed the hospital, the emergency wing at Hollywood Receiving; Mrs. Thorpe had been
released after examination and treatment at midnight last night. “And what the hell women are thinking about,” muttered Maddox, “to go wandering around alone at that time of night
in this jungle—” He went down to the crowd and said, “Daisy, you can come help me talk to a victim.”

The Metro men all seemed to be large and bulky and loud-voiced. Somebody had just told a joke and they were all laughing. At second count there were only five here so far; this afternoon
there’d be more, and by change of shift the town would be crawling with them. And of course they were also LAPD men, and there was a good reason for them to be here, but their presence grated
slightly on the Hollywood detectives.

Slim blond Daisy Hoffman, who was a grandmother but certainly didn’t look it, came to join him. “The rape,” she said. “You don’t suppose well get anything new, do
you?”

“Go through the motions,” said Maddox. She gathered up her handbag and followed him out to the Maserati.

“I hope she’ll be out of bed.”

“Damn it, it’s hardly the only case we’ve got to work.”

Daisy said soothingly, “Don’t let it get you down, Ivor. Just part of the job. Sue was saying she might finish those curtains today.”

Maddox laughed, thrusting the key in the ignition. “No bets. You know how she hates sewing.” But at least, he reflected as he backed out of the slot, that project—the
acquisition of a house before prices went up any more—had turned out a good deal better than he’d thought it would. Sue and her mother had fallen in love with that house last January,
and at his first look he’d thought it was the most god-awful old barracks in existence; but women did seem to know about these things, and now, this much later, it was going to be a
comfortable, roomy family place. And the guardian angels on the job, minus a mortgage. After Margaret Carstairs had nearly been killed by the burglar in January, she’d been persuaded to live
with them, and had sold the Hollywood house for sixty thousand; and the poor little old house on Alexandria, which poor little old Mrs. Eady had left to Sue, had been snapped up by a contractor,
only for the land, for forty thousand. They’d got the house in Verdugo Woodlands in Glendale for ninety-three-five, so there had even been some cash in hand, and Maddox had put his foot down
and insisted that it go to the necessary refurbishing.

“Have the pair of you killing yourselves at all the painting, and take the next six months to do it, which is damn silly when we can hire it done.” Sue had argued but of course
he’d had Margaret on his side, and in the end the house had got professionally painted inside and out before they moved in. The wilderness of growth in the big back yard had been cleaned up,
and he had to agree that female instinct had been right: it was a gracious, old-fashioned, homey sort of house, if still rather bare of furniture.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, switching on the right turn indicator, “they were going out later to look at some dogs, so the curtains—” His tone was
absent-minded; he’d had a few stray thoughts about dogs lately, but hadn’t said anything yet.

The address on Romaine was a middle-aged apartment building: no pool, balconies, or outside patio, just an apartment building of dirty tan brick. Linda Thorpe lived on the second floor at the
back.

She was up: the door opened a crack and they saw it was on a chain. Maddox produced the badge and said, “Sergeant Maddox, Mrs. Thorpe. We’d like to talk to you about what happened
last night.”

“Oh.” The chain was unhooked and she let them in. Maddox introduced Daisy. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a chance of catching him,” said Linda Thorpe.
“But any way I can help you.” She was a thin blonde about thirty-five, not a raving beauty but middling good-looking; she clutched a blue nylon housecoat around her as if she was cold,
this warm May morning. “I was just having some coffee, offer you some?”

They sat at the little table in the eating area at one end of the kitchen; she was drinking her coffee black but got out sugar and dairy creamer to put on the table. She had the start of a
puffed black eye, bruises on one cheek, a cut lip, which she kept feeling tenderly. “My God,” she said, “I always used to think that any woman who got herself raped probably asked
for it some way, but now— That big ape just landing on me like that, I didn’t have a chance—”

“Well, you were alone in the laundromat, as I understand it,” said Maddox. “What time was it, rather late—”

“And smack on a main drag,” said Linda Thorpe, “with the place lit up like a Christmas tree. It was about ten o’clock. Look, Sergeant. I work five days a
week—I’m in Better Dresses at the Broadway—and so do a lot of other people. Saturdays and Sundays any laundromat in town is jammed, I usually have two loads at least and it takes
a couple of hours even if I get a machine right away, which you never do on weekends. So I do it on a week night, and by the time I get home and fix dinner and clean up the kitchen, I’m lucky
if I get there by eight o’clock. I was just taking the second load out of the dryer when that wild man came in and jumped me—” She felt her face and shuddered.

“You live alone, Mrs. Thorpe?” asked Daisy.

She nodded glumly. “Things happen, don’t they? Bill and I both figured, that’s it forever and ever, when we got married. It would’ve been. But he got rammed by a drunk
driver two years back, and of course I couldn’t afford the house payments. I was lucky to get this job.”

“Maybe you can tell us a few more details than you gave the detectives last night. Of course you were shocked and upset. Can you add anything to your description?”

She shrugged and sighed. “I don’t know—you can say that again, I don’t remember exactly what I did tell them. Just, he was a wild man—like a big gorilla—a lot
of hair, not a beard but long hair, and hairy arms, and he must’ve been six-two or three, a great big gorilla with a barrel chest. His eyes were sort of glazed—I think he could’ve
been doped up on something—I couldn’t smell any liquor on him, but his eyes were just wild, all huge and staring, kind of glassy, you know, and he never said a word—he just came
in the door in a rush and fell on me, I didn’t even have a chance to scream, he started punching me in the face and knocked me down in front of the line of dryers and started tearing at my
clothes—” She lifted her cup in a trembling hand.

“What color was his hair?” asked Daisy. “Do you remember anything about his features? Clothes? Any scars or tattoos?”

Linda Thorpe shook her head. “He had dark brown hair—all greasy and stringy. He just looked like a wild man—I couldn’t tell you if he had a crooked nose or what color his
eyes were, just his size and— It was so fast. I didn’t have a chance, even try to fight back—I guess I was lucky, if that doesn’t sound crazy, because he knocked me right
out, you know, and I don’t actually remember him—raping me. Except when I came to, he’d torn my clothes off and—” She felt her mouth. “I couldn’t find a
dime for the phone—had an awful argument with the operator—” She poured more coffee.

“You were lucky, Mrs. Thorpe,” said Daisy soberly. She exchanged a look with Maddox. This was the fourth woman who had given them that same description. All four of them had been
assaulted and forcibly raped when they were alone in laundromats in the late evening. All of them had been beaten and mauled, the others injured worse than Linda Thorpe, and one of
them—Cecelia Ritter—was still in the hospital ten days later, with a ruptured spleen and a broken jaw, a few other injuries. They’d all told the detectives the same thing: a big
hairy wild man, probably high on something, he never said a word but just started beating them, tearing clothes off. And the description wasn’t much use. The other two women, Nancy Unger and
Ruth Sawyer, had done some poring over the mug shots downtown without picking any. But as they all said, it had been so fast—he could be there, they just might not be certain.

“We’d like you to look at some photographs,” said Maddox. “See if you can spot him. Would you do that?”

“Mug shots,” said Linda Thorpe. “Sure, I’ll do that. Only when? I called in and told Mrs. Bessemer, she said take a few days off if I want. But naturally I’d get
docked, I don’t want to stay off too long.”

“If you feel up to it, Sergeant Hoffman can take you downtown this morning.”

“All right,” she agreed drearily. “I’ll get dressed.”

“I’ll come back for you in half an hour, how’s that?” asked Daisy briskly. They left her rehooking the chain, and as they went down the thinly carpeted stairs Daisy
added, “I don’t suppose she’ll make any either. Even when they only got a fast look at him, you’d think they’d spot one like that if he was on file.”

“Or just maybe,” said Maddox sardonically, “if he ever had his picture taken for us his hair was cut and he wasn’t glassy-eyed on the foolish powder.”

“Also a thought.”

He dropped her in the parking lot to pick up her own car and went back into the office. The Metro men were still there; Rodriguez was talking to a middle-aged couple and taking notes;
D’Arcy was on the phone; Feinman and Ellis had disappeared with Rowan and Dabney. As Maddox sat down at his desk D’Arcy put down the phone and said, “There’s a new body just
turned up. In a car on Yucca Street. And a little rumble going on at Hollywood High, teacher attacked.”

Dick Brougham, of course, hadn’t typed up an initial report on Linda Thorpe. Maddox sorted out forms and carbon and knocked one out in twenty minutes. That left him barely enough time to
get downtown to headquarters. When he came up to the little blue Maserati in the parking lot, one of the Metro men was looking it over curiously and asked questions about mileage and performance;
Maddox was abrupt, and slammed the door on his injured expression.

Well, there was a reason for the Metro Squad cluttering up Hollywood; but they were a damned nuisance. They’d been around for nearly three weeks now, and what they were
accomplishing— Maddox had been working out of the Hollywood precinct ever since he’d made Detective, and that was seven years: and in that time, about every eighteen months the
complaints stepped up, the citizens began to yell, the chief downtown got annoyed, and the Metro Squad was turned loose here to make waves.

The problem, of course, had got worse: had got bigger, in the same seven years. And any cop knew the realities of the problem. If every police officer working out of this station, in uniform and
plain clothes, should forget every other case coming up to be worked and go all out just after the prostitutes and pimps, the problem would still be there. The prostitutes and pimps would still be
there. Cockroaches coming out of the woodwork. But periodically something had to be done.

The chosen area, where they swarmed thickest, was Hollywood and Sunset boulevards, along the middle of town. Along the area there were still some classy shops and department stores, and up to
last month the precinct had had over a hundred complaints from respectable females accosted as they were shopping in daylight hours: from store managers and personnel solicited on their jobs. The
manager of the Egyptian Theater had shown up one late afternoon full of wrathful indignation and summed it up. “I know times have changed, damn it,” he’d told Ellis, “but
it’s still supposed to be a more or less civilized country, Sergeant. When I step out for a coffee break and find this pair of—of savages making out right in front of the entrance
twenty feet from all the people walking down the street, that is the end. I should think the police could do something—”

They were doing something. As before, the Metro Squad had been thrown in and was making waves in the cluttered community of prostitutes and pimps. The Metro Squad was the corps of men always on
call when, for one reason or another, one of the precincts needed more manpower. As they had done before, they’d come out in force and were patrolling the indicated beats all afternoon, all
night, keeping an eye out and swooping down whenever they got eyewitness evidence to make a charge: and so flagrant was that crew in picking up johns for the immediate exchange in a car or even up
the nearest alley, they were hauling in dozens of them every day. Of course it was, legally, an exercise in futility: even if the charge stuck, it carried no more than thirty days in the county
jail: but it was a big nuisance to the trade, for it meant making bail and time lost, and at least some of them were no sooner back on the street than they were picked up again. It was the kind of
job only the Metro Squad could do: the regular detail of precinct men hadn’t the time or the numbers.

But it was, all the same, an exercise in futility. It would all happen as it had before. Now, after three weeks of constant harrying, the prostitutes and pimps were going underground: at least
not so visible and insolent to the respectable citizens. Possibly, as had happened before, numbers of them would drift down to Long Beach, Santa Ana, calling forth indignant comments from the
lawmen in those cities. And presently the Metro Squad would go back downtown, and when the word spread that the heat was off, the cockroaches would come sneaking back again to their preferred beat.
Six or eight months from now, they’d be back in full force, the citizens complaining again. It was a hell of a situation, everybody agreed, but there it was. They tried to cope the best way
they could: but at the same time Hollywood, like every other precinct, had other worse things to deal with: homicides, burglaries, heist jobs, assaults, rapes, and all the assorted crime indigent
to the city jungle, and they couldn’t spare squad-car men and plain-clothes detectives to ride perpetual herd on the petty prostitutes and pimps.

The Metro men didn’t normally clutter up the station; they hauled their catches directly to the jail. Still, they were technically working out of the precinct, their cars occupying parking
space, the men patronizing the coffee and sandwich machines.

Maddox got held up in a traffic jam just after he got off the freeway downtown, and was half an hour late at headquarters. It was a joint meeting, over all those forged checks: they had turned
up in Hollywood’s territory, Hollenbeck’s, Central, and West Hollywood—so the sheriff’s boys were on it too. So far, there were just no leads at all on the bouncy checks.
Maddox got to the Fraud office at Parker Center at eleven-thirty wondering what new cases might have gone down by the time he got back to Hollywood.

He was also wondering whether Sue and her mother had gone to look at those dogs, as had been casually suggested.

Linda Thorpe spent nearly three hours looking at pages of mug shots, in the Records and Identification office downtown, but didn’t pick out any. She hesitated over two
pictures and said, “That’s not him, I can say that definitely, but it’s—well, the same general type, if you see what I mean.”

One was a shot of Donald Ray Hopper, who had a pedigree of heists and burglary. He was now twenty-six, male Caucasian, six-three, one-eighty, brown and blue. The other was Richard Dean Curtis,
now twenty-eight, pedigree of burglary, petty theft: male Caucasian, six-two, one-ninety, brown and brown.

That wasn’t much help in locating the rapist, just corroborative of the description. None of the women had seen him leave or enter a car; it was very unlikely that he’d left any
prints anywhere at the laundromats. They all said he had come in fast, jumped them at once. There’d been a lab man out to dust the doors, but no clear latents had showed; Daisy supposed that
Brougham would have got a lab man out last night, and eventually they’d get a report: probably more of the same.

“I’m sorry,” said Linda Thorpe. “I’d sure like to help you catch him, but he’s not anywhere here.”

“Well, you never know until you look,” said Daisy philosophically. “Thanks very much anyway, we appreciate your co-operation.”

D’Arcy and Feinman had gone together to look at the body. Patrolman Percy Everard had come across it, tagging a car parked on Yucca Street. They all looked at it gloomily and D’Arcy
said, “Why the hell did we ever want to make rank, Joe?”

“Ask me something easy,” said Feinman. Everard, of course, would just go back on tour, and at four o’clock he could go home, at the end of Traffic shift. It was the front
office boys who had to deal with the follow-up on the thankless job. Both he and D’Arcy could foresee that this one they’d probably go round and round on and never get anywhere.

The body was the body of a young woman, somewhere in the twenties. She was wearing a sleazy short blue dress, and where she sprawled in the back of the car the dress was pulled up so they could
see she hadn’t any underwear on. She wore an ancient pair of sandals over bare feet. She had dirty blond hair, not much make-up on. It looked as if she’d been shot in the head by a
small caliber. The body was stiff.

“Last night,” said D’Arcy with a sniff.

It almost spelled itself out for them. This location, the girl had probably been a prostitute. She looked the part. There’d have been an argument with her pimp, just possibly somebody
else, but it was usually the pimp. She’d been holding out, or there’d been some other reason, and instead of the usual beating she’d got a bullet. They’d be lucky to get her
identified.

The car was a beat-up old VW, looking to be on its last legs. It did. . .