Crime By Chance

Book 0: An Ivor Maddox Mystery

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

With a brief note to her employer, Dorrie Mayo left her job - and another note taped to a neighbour's door claimed she was taking her baby to live with her in-laws on the other side of the U.S. A natural enough thing for a young widow with a fifteen-month-old daughter to do. Only why didn't Dorrie tell any of her friends where she was going? And why were her notes typewritten when Dorrie didn't own a typewriter? For Maddox and his colleagues of the Wilcox Street precinct, this is a conundrum that will take all their skill and resources to solve.

Release date: October 14, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

Sue had forgotten to set the alarm, and they’d overslept. She was rummaging frantically after clean stockings; Maddox, shaving hurriedly, had just inflicted a savage nick
on his lower left jaw. “If you’d use an electric—” said Sue to his profane comment.

“Contrary to all the TV commercials, you can’t get a close shave with those things, not with a beard like mine.”

Sue flew out to the kitchen to find that the electric coffeemaker had done its job: coffee was ready, too hot to drink. She poured two cups and went back to the bedroom for her dress.
“Eggs?”

“No time,” said Maddox, buttoning his shirt and reaching for a tie. “I’ll try for an early lunch. And I still think,” he added, looking at her hands as she combed
her hair, “I should have traded the Maserati on something with lower payments and got you an—”

“Are you back to that again? Don’t be silly,” said Sue. “I don’t need an engagement ring. I’m quite happy with the other one, darling.” She slipped into
low-heeled navy pumps and trotted out to the kitchen again. The coffee was just possible to drink.

Maddox swallowed three quarters of a cup and finished tying his tie. “My God, the time. I’m off. See you.” He kissed her hastily and was gone.

Sue put the cups in the sink and went back to the bedroom to put on makeup and small gold stud earrings. Five minutes after he’d left, she followed him, working-size handbag over her arm,
and locked the front door of the little house set behind the Clintons’ larger house on Gregory Avenue. Maddox could leave his car in the street, but there wasn’t room for Sue’s
Chrysler; they rented a garage from old Mrs. Patterson two doors down the street. As Sue hurried down the drive, she might have been any slim young woman in her mid-twenties, neat in a plain dress,
heading for any mundane office job. Only, of course, she wasn’t.

Ten minutes later she pulled the Chrysler up behind the little blue Maserati, in the bay in the street across from the Wilcox Street precinct station. César Rodriguez’s old Chevy
was there, and Daisy Hoffman’s Buick, and Sergeant Ellis’s Ford. She trotted across to the old tan brick building and lifted a hand to Sergeant Johnny O’Neill on the desk as she
made for the locker room. There she changed quickly into her neat navy uniform; as she came out and started up the stairs, a couple of civilians were ahead of her, evidently just started up by
O’Neill. They paused on the landing and Sue said, “Can I help you?”

“That sergeant said to come up and see Sergeant Hoffman,” said the man doubtfully. “It’s about our daughter. She’s run away.” They were ordinary-looking
people in rather shabby clothes; the woman had been crying.

“Yes, sir. Right here,” said Sue, steering them into the office she shared with Daisy. “Mr.—”

“Rodney. I’m John Rodney.”

“Sit down, won’t you?” said Daisy with a smile; brisk blond Daisy didn’t look like a grandmother but was. “I’m Sergeant Hoffman. This is Policewoman
Maddox.” At least after six months she didn’t start to say Carstairs any more.

Sue got out her notebook, resigned to listen to the old familiar tale: daughter in with a bad crowd, rebellious, dropping out, possibly on dope.

“Your daughter—” she prompted.

“She didn’t have to run away!” wailed Mrs. Rodney. “There’s been arguments and all, but she didn’t have to. She must’ve left way after midnight last
night, both her suitcases gone and this note—”

“Arguments,” said Daisy. “About school, or her friends?”

“Well, I guess you’d say,” said Rodney. “You see, we want her to go to college and she don’t want to.”

Sue put down her notebook. “How old is your daughter, Mr. Rodney?”

“Ella’s twenty.”

Sue looked at Daisy.

When Maddox got to the detective office upstairs, Joe Feinman was typing a report and Rowan was looking at a flyer. “D’Arcy and César just went out on a new
call,” said Rowan. “Couple of bodies.”

“Homicide, that’s all we need,” said Maddox. “Anything in from Sacramento yet?”

“Nope. But the photostats of those drivers’ licenses ought to give us something, all right.”

“No bets,” said Maddox. “How much does the photo on yours look like you?” But it would be a little something, at least: somewhere else to go on this bunch of kite flyers.
The first batch of forged checks had showed up a month back, and they hadn’t developed a lead yet. A pattern showed, but that was nearly always the case. The checks purported to be issued by
big companies anyone around here would recognize instantly: Lockheed Aircraft, The May Company, J. W. Robinson’s, The Broadway, and several chains of service stations, Shell, Gulf, Standard.
They weren’t even very good forgeries, or so said Questioned Documents downtown at Central Headquarters; not imitations of real checks from those companies, just neatly printed checks with
those company names. They had been cashed by liquor stores, chain markets, drugstores; such places didn’t like to refuse checks and took in hundreds every day as a convenience to customers.
They asked for some identification, of course, and in every case the identification offered had been a driver’s license and a student I.D. card from Los Angeles City College, and a lot of
help that had been to the detectives.

L.A.C.C. had at present no students named Patricia Gall, Joseph Ruzicka, Eleanor Wayne, Robert Gunderson, Coralee Lambert, or Richard Goslin. The registrar had no idea where or how anyone could
have obtained the I.D. cards.

“I always said it’s idiotic,” said Maddox now. “The first piece of I.D. anybody asks you for, when you’re cashing a check, is your driver’s license, and
it’s no I.D. at all. Anybody can walk into any D.M.V. office and get a license in any name he picks at random.”

“And do you take any bets we don’t get another batch passed over the weekend?” said Feinman. All the checks had been cashed on weekends. None of them had been for over fifty
dollars, most for sums in the thirties and forties. And just what the photostats of the licenses would give them, if and when Sacramento got around to sending them down, was debatable. The various
clerks and managers who had taken the checks gave very vague descriptions: all the passers were young, they said, and young people nowadays—well, kind of alike. The girls with the long
straight hair, not much makeup, casual clothes. It did emerge that of the three males none had overlong hair, but that was about all.

They were waiting for a kickback from the FBI on the prints of the hit-run victim found along Hollywood Boulevard on Wednesday night. They had just wrapped up a murder-three for the D.A., and
Lieutenant Eden was probably downtown with all the paper on that. The last couple of weeks had been quiet except for the check passers, but as usual in March they were having a little heat wave,
which might make more business for cops.

“I hope this pair isn’t heading for our beat,” said Rowan, looking up from the flyer. “We got a hail from N.C.I.C. overnight on ’em, and I looked up the Feds’
report. They got out of Leavenworth couple of months ago, that break when seven–eight cons got loose. N.C.I.C. thinks they’re heading west. Identified as the heisters at a bank in
Dubuque and a liquor store in Denver. They’ve been a team awhile—Roy Connors and Ralph Fielding, pedigrees from here to there.”

“Nice,” agreed Maddox. He was rereading the reports, interviews with the people who’d taken the checks. A handful of nothing. Now if they had a hope in hell of getting
photostats of those student I.D. cards—The phone rang on his desk and he picked it up. “Something, Johnny?”

“Something,” said O’Neill. “Pair on the way up. A Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Easterfield, from Cincinnati. I think you’ll be talking to P.R. on this one. We can’t
have the tourists spreading nasty lies about the old reliable L.A.P.D.”

“Oh?” said Maddox. “O.K., thanks, Johnny.” He put the phone down and stood up as a couple stopped in the doorway. “Mr. and Mrs. Easterfield? I’m Sergeant
Maddox. You’ve got some complaint on the department?”

They came over to his desk rather warily; Rowan put down the flyer to listen. The man was about fifty, big and ruddy, nearly bald, well-dressed in a conservative gray suit. The woman was
younger, blond by request but also conservative in a rather dowdy black dress, a little jewelry that might be real. “I told you, Harry,” she said. “They weren’t. That man in
uniform downstairs—it wasn’t quite the same.”

“Won’t you sit down?” said Maddox, offering chairs. They sat down. “What’s it all about, sir?”

“Well, I was mad,” said Easterfield. “Then. But the more we talked it over—well, I thought Los Angeles was supposed to have a good police force. Dragnet, you
know. Honest, I mean.”

“We like to think so.”

“So the more Alice says they were fakes, the more I wondered about it. Anyway, it won’t do any harm, tell you about it. See, this isn’t the first time we’ve been in
California. Our daughter and her husband live here—Santa Monica—but it’s the first time we drove out. Little vacation. I’ve got my own hardware store back home. Well, cut a
long story short, yesterday afternoon we’re here in town—Hollywood, I mean—on Sunset Boulevard, we’d just had lunch at Michael’s up on Los Feliz, and we were heading
back for the beach, and I made a left turn onto Western. And right off there’s a car come up alongside and I see there’s two cops in it. In uniform. And the one on the passenger’s
side leans out and says for me to pull over. So I did. I didn’t know what I’d done wrong, but as I say I’ve never driven in California before and maybe I don’t know all your
traffic rules. So I pulled over, first empty space along the curb, and they stopped ahead of me and got out and came back and said they’d have to give me a ticket for an illegal left
turn.”

“And it wasn’t,” said his wife. “Dick told us about the left-turn rule you got here, we don’t have that in Ohio, and he didn’t want—”

“Excuse me, was the car a police car?” asked Maddox.

Easterfield shook his head. “Just a car. A green Dodge about four years old. But you hear about unmarked police cars—”

“Did either of the men show you a badge?”

They nodded. “The first one did. It was a damn nuisance. He said it was a moving violation and I’d have to go to a court hearing and all, and we’ve only got three weeks. I was
annoyed and said so, and it was then he said I could get out of going to court if I paid the fine right then, ten bucks, and he’d give me a receipt and that’d be that.”

Maddox sat up. “So you did.”

“I did. I didn’t want to waste a couple of days in court. He gave me a receipt—here it is,” and he took it out of his wallet and laid it on the desk.

It was just a slip taken from an ordinary receipt book that any business might use; scrawled across it was the notation “Rcvd. in payment fine traffic violation” and the nearly
illegible signature “R. O. Dillon.” Maddox looked at it and laid it down and fetched out his badge in its leather case from his breast pocket. “Did the badge look like
this?”

They studied it, and Mrs. Easterfield shook her head. “It didn’t have any tower on it like that.”

“That’s the City Hall,” said Maddox absently.

“It said POLICE around the bottom,” said Easterfield, “and it was gold like that, but I seem to recall it had a star in the middle.”

“Mmh,” said Maddox. “What about the uniforms? Navy blue?”

They both nodded. “But they weren’t wearing guns,” said Mrs. Easterfield. “And I don’t think it was just the same uniform as that man downstairs had on.”

Maddox said, “Mmh,” again. “I’m afraid you’ve been conned, Mr. Easterfield. They weren’t L.A.P.D. men, that’s sure. But this sounds like a new racket
around here, and we’re glad to know about it. And what a racket, come to think about it.”

“How d’you mean?” asked Easterfield.

“Well, at any time of year there are apt to be a few out-of-state cars around L.A. Wearing out-of-state plates to identify them. Yes indeedy, that’s quite a bright thought this pair
had. Rent a couple of police uniforms at any costumers’ in the county, spot the out-of-state cars and pull ’em over. I’d bet that a hundred percent of those drivers would pay that
quote-unquote fine on the spot—it’s not that much money—and whether they thought it was how the rules read in California or that the cops were on the take, would any of them
bother to report it to us? Why should they? But we’re very glad you did. Sorry you’re out the ten bucks, but we’ll try to put a stop to it now we know about it.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Easterfield. “See what you mean. They could cruise around all day, stop as many cars as they spotted. Well, I’m glad we decided to come
in.”

Maddox thanked them again, saw them out, came back and dialed Central H.Q. and asked for Public Relations. He got a Sergeant Forster, who listened to his tale and said, “Ten minutes before
you called I was talking to a patrolman from University division. Man hailed him on the street and told him much the same story, just now. Said after it happened he thought it over and decided the
men were phonies. I wonder how long they’ve been at it. Most of the marks wouldn’t report it.”

“Just what I concluded,” said Maddox. “Do we suppose there are more than two of them? I thought you’d like to know, anyway.”

“Damn right. Building a bad image, you could say,” said Forster.

D’Arcy and Rodriguez came in, D’Arcy looking morose and Rodriguez as usual faintly cynical.

“I’ll pass it on to the Chief’s office and get something out for the press and TV. If we spread it around that it’s a racket—”

“People on vacation don’t always keep up with the papers or TV.”

“Well, we can but try,” said Forster. “Thanks very much.”

“So what’s the new one look like?” asked Maddox.

D’Arcy folded his lank seventy-six inches into his desk chair and sighed. “A mystery. All we need. . . . I asked Sheila again last night and she said wait and see, maybe. Her father
says she’s flighty. I’d like to settle her down, but—”

“Paciencia,” said Rodriguez. “Look at Sue’s example. She finally caught up to our little Welshman.”

“Or the other way round,” said Maddox with a grin. They’d had all the kidding they’d expected, last September, when they’d got their vacations to coincide and
slipped over to Vegas to get married. “What’s the mystery?”

“The baby,” said Rodriguez. “Woman walking by on the street heard the baby yelling, stopped to look and called in. Couple in a Caddy parked along Sycamore Avenue, both shot in
the head, cold, and the baby still in the woman’s lap, not a mark on it. Ambulance men said it was about six months old, a boy. No I.D. on either body, nothing anywhere—ordinary
cosmetics in the handbag, cigarettes and matches on him, but no money, nothing but this.” He laid a plastic evidence bag on the desk; there was a scrap of paper inside. “Receipt from a
motel in Pasadena. I’m just going to check it.”

“Could’ve been shot by somebody in the back seat,” said D’Arcy, and yawned. “Looked like a thirty-two. I suppose I’d better start the initial report.”
He pulled the typewriter toward him. “They’ll be at the morgue by now. Would any of you feel inclined to go get their prints?”

“I’ll do it,” said Feinman. “Looks as if business is picking up a little.”

“And we’ve got the damndest con game going on,” said Maddox, “God knows how long they’ve been at it,” and he told them about that. Rodriguez smoothed his neat
mustache.

“You know something, Ivor? If this pair—or however many are in it—sort of subtly put over the idea that this so-called fine is an under-the-counter bribe, that’d make it
all the more certain that the marks wouldn’t come crying to the top brass. Corrupt cops on the street, what else at the desk? I do wonder how long they’ve been operating, damn
it.”

“What P.R. said. Hardly a good image,” said Maddox dryly.

“See what the lab gives us on that Caddy,” said D’Arcy. “No registration in it, by the way. We asked N.C.I.C. about the plates. Florida ones.”

“And your answer is just back,” said Sue briskly from the door. “Computers.” Since the National Crime Information Center had been operating, it had proved a godsend to
cops all over the country, with its vast files and its army of computers. Rodriguez looked at the slip she handed him.

“So now we know. The Caddy belongs to one Roderick Cameron of Sarasota. It was stolen three weeks ago from a public parking lot. That tells us a lot.”

“Maybe tells you that the two corpses were on the wrong side of the fence,” said Maddox.

“Which means their prints might be on file somewhere, yes.” D’Arcy’s typewriter started ticking rather slowly, and he yawned again and said he had spring fever.

It was ten o’clock, and Maddox’s stomach was rumbling, but he’d have to type a report on the interview with the Easterfields. Well, there was at least the coffee machine down
the hall. “Anybody want some coffee?”

D’Arcy fished out a dime and handed it over. “With cream. Maybe keep me awake.”

When Maddox got to the coffee machine he found a stranger in a white jumpsuit measuring the wall beside it. “And what are you up to?” he asked.

The man turned, revealing a round good-natured face with a snub nose and freckles. “Hi, you one of the officers here? We’re sure glad to get the go-ahead from your headquarters. Fred
and me, he’s my partner, we been tryin’ for it nearly a year. Fin’ly got the word this week. I just put one in at the Wilshire station. Get yours in tomorrow.”

“What?”

“Our machine, see. Our sandwich machine. There’s lotsa places where people got to do overtime, work long hours, and no place near to get a sandwich, a snack. We got some of our
machines out at Lockheed, and a big laundry chain, and now we get the go-ahead to put ’em in your stations and fire stations too.”

“Say, that might be handy,” said Maddox, interested. He could use a sandwich right now. “How do they work?”

“Just great,” said their benefactor proudly. “We picked up a whole mess of ’em at a forced sale—business went broke, see. You gotta choice of four kinds. We get
’em fresh every day, all wrapped up hygienic, you know? You put fifty cents in and pull the handle, it hands you a sandwich. It’ll just fit on this wall. We got three guys already help
us keep ’em all serviced, besides Fred and me.”

“Fine,” said Maddox. He pushed dimes in the coffee machine and the cream lever for D’Arcy’s cup. He wished the sandwich machine was already there.

“Get yours in tomorrow for sure.”

“Fine,” said Maddox again. He went back down the hall and told the other boys about it.

Sue and Daisy had got rid of the Rodneys with a little difficulty. “After all, your daughter’s of age,” Daisy had pointed out. “She’s out of
school, you said.”

“Graduated two years ago,” said Mrs. Rodney mournfully. “Went right to work, learned to be a beautician. And we had it all planned for her to go to college!”

“I got nearly four thousand saved toward it,” said Rodney. “And Ellie said it was foolishness. I couldn’t argue her into it no way.”

“Well, after all—” said Sue.

He shook his head. “Kept sayin’ she had better things to do with her time than listen to a lot of egghead professors without any common sense. I tried to tell her she’d get a
better job, earn more—”

Sue turned a giggle into a cough. “Well, it’s really her own choice, isn’t it, Mr. Rodney? In any case, she’s of age.”

“People, people,” said Daisy when they’d trailed out forlornly, and they both forgot the Rodneys, unaware that the Rodneys marked the beginning of a little spate of offbeat
items.

They got a call from The Broadway, a pair of shoplifters, and both went out on that. The shoplifters turned out to be a mother and teen-age daughter, both of whom had been picked up before; they
were equipped with the fake wrapped packages with a concealed mechanism that quietly picked up any object they were set down on. There wasn’t much the L.A.P.D. could do about shoplifters, pro
or amateur; with the rate of shoplifting astronomically up, it was hardly worth the time in court to prosecute them just to have a judge put them on probation. Perhaps this pair might draw more; a
check with Central showed they’d been picked up four times in the last two years and always went for the real jewelry. Pros, you could say. Daisy spent a while on the phone with the
D.A.’s office while Sue typed a report. They ended up sending them down to the jail, where they’d probably make bail within a few hours.

A Missing Persons report was relayed up from Central, who had it from N.C.I.C.: just another juvenile runaway, but this one a Congressman’s daughter from back east. It didn’t match
any of the bodies L.A. currently had on hand, or anybody in jail downtown. They filed it.

“You mind if I take off for lunch?” asked Daisy. “I’ve got to lose ten pounds, so I skipped breakfast.”

“So did I,” said Sue. “I forgot the alarm.”

“You newlyweds.”

“Hardly, after six months. All right, you go on.”

“We’re going to have a sandwich machine,” said Daisy. “George Ellis was telling me about it this morning. It should be very handy.”

“It certainly should,” said Sue, her stomach rumbling. But she finished the report on the shoplifters ten minutes later and drove up to the Grotto on Santa Monica Boulevard for
lunch. Maddox and Rodriguez made room at their table. Hearing about the new bodies, she said, “What a miracle that baby wasn’t hurt. Poor thing. I wonder if you’ll turn up any
relatives.”

“Our new con game is what worries me,” said Rodriguez. “We try to keep a tight force here, and these jokers are ruining our image.”

So s. . .