Crime File

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

'A Luis Mendoza story means superlative suspense' Los Angeles Times Lieutenant Luis Mendoza is beset by two insistent puzzlers: how does his team nail the pair who are staging hold-ups at the best restaurants in town? And who was responsible for the brutal murder of an elderly widow? Will Mendoza's famous hunches point him to the answers?

Release date: May 21, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

“I DIDN’T MEAN TO HURT HER NONE,” SAID THE stocky bald fellow, blinking up at them. He was slumped over the little table in the interrogation room, frightened
and sullen in turn, and also still surprised. “Don’t seem possible I coulda. I didn’t hit her hard, and I never hit her before, ever, she could tell you
that—”

“Only she’s dead, Mr. Parsons,” said Hackett. He exchanged a look with Mendoza.

“I know. Don’t seem possible.” Parsons shook his head. “I never meant to hurt her—I wouldn’t hurt Myra. It was just, I had enough o’ her
complainin’. Squawking about not enough money alla time. I supported myself ever since I was twelve years old. I’m a good worker, I don’t sit around takin’ the welfare like
a bum. I haven’t got much learning, so what’s that say? On what a trucker earns, she’s gonna starve? But she’s got to have a new color TV, got to have— But I
didn’t go to hurt her. I’m sorry—I’m sorry.” His head sank to the table.

Hackett sighed and followed Mendoza out to the anteroom of Robbery-Homicide, where Sergeant Lake sat at the switchboard reading a paperback. The office was quiet; only the subdued busy click of
Policewoman Wanda Larsen’s typewriter sounded as she typed up somebody’s report. The men at Robbery-Homicide were still feeling appreciative about their unexpected secretary.

“And they make TV shows about the glamorous, exciting job of being a cop,” said Hackett.

“Occasionally it can be exciting,” said Mendoza. “Just occasionally. There’s nothing to that but a report. The D.A.’ll call it manslaughter and he’ll get
one-to-three.”

“And serve half of it,” said Hackett. “The way these damn judges are letting them loose these days—”

“Don’t raise my blood pressure,” said Mendoza. He lit a cigarette; as usual he was dapper in silver-gray Italian silk, snowy shirt, discreet tie. “Anything new down,
Jimmy?”

Lake looked up. “Dead body reported over on Stanford Avenue. George and John went out on it. Jase and Tom are out talking to witnesses on that heist, and Matt just came back. I don’t
know what he got—”

“Nada absolutamente,” said Mendoza, “probably. A very anonymous thing, a take of forty-two bucks, no M.O. to speak of. It’ll go into Pending tomorrow. I do get
tired, Arturo.”

“You can always resign. You don’t have to work for a living.”

“Comes the crash, I might. Take him over to jail and give the gist to Wanda for a report.”

“Oh, you’ve got a memo from the D.A.’s office,” said Lake. “On your desk. Something about those floozies last April.”

“¿Qué?” Mendoza went into his office, noting Wanda typing at her desk in the sergeants’ office, and Matt Piggott on the phone looking earnest, and found
the memo. A minute later Lake heard him swearing comprehensively in Spanish. “More equal than others, isn’t it the truth. Dios, does he think we can make bricks without
straw?” But the D.A.’s note was apologetic; the D.A. was being pressured—read hounded, thought Mendoza—by some civil-rights group: why hadn’t the police found and
arrested the foul racist dog who had murdered those innocent black girls two months ago?

On that one there’d simply been no leads at all, and it had been filed in Pending at the first of this month. Innocent was an ambivalent word: they hadn’t deserved to be murdered
maybe, but they’d all had long rap-sheets as casual prostitutes. It had been a queer one, and without much doubt the X on that was a nut, poisoning the floozies with cyanide in their liquor,
but after the fourth one there hadn’t been another, and all the men at Robbery-Homicide were inclined to think he’d left town. Mendoza had passed on the relevant facts to NCIC; if X
showed up anywhere else murdering Negro prostitutes they could guess it was the same boy. That was about all they could do, with the dearth of physical evidence.

Resignedly Mendoza picked up his phone and told Lake to get him the D.A.’s office. If the D.A. wanted a nice apologetic letter to show the civil-righters, that was about all Mendoza could
do for him. While he waited for the D.A.’s secretary to locate him, he looked out the window to the clear line of the Hollywood hills in the distance. They hadn’t yet had their usual
first heat wave in June; the weather was for once being reasonable in southern California—warmish, with a breeze most of the day, blue skies and sun.

And Robbery-Homicide had been busier; on the downtown Central beat, LAPD, there was always enough business, but they weren’t feeling harried. They had four separate heist jobs, with no
leads on any of them. There was still some paper work to clean up on a suicide, there were two unidentified bodies in the morgue, one dead of knife wounds, one of an overdose. There had been a bank
heist last week, but the Feds were definitely sure who that pair was—ex-cons from the Midwest, one wanted for P.A. violation; the A.P.B.s were out and maybe one of their pigeons would
finger them.

The phone hummed emptily at him, and through the two open doors he heard Wanda’s practiced typing and Piggott’s voice. Piggott was saying something about dishpans and screens, and
Mendoza was still wondering about the combination when the D.A. came on the line.

“Listen, damn it,” he said, “look, Lieutenant, I know you worked that into the ground, there just wasn’t anything to get. But these damned—”

“Racists in reverse,” supplied Mendoza. “Yes, I know. Shall I write a nice letter of apology?”

“Not that it’ll satisfy ’em, we both will,” said the D.A.

“I’ll get some screening at the hardware store on my way home,” said Piggott into the phone. He sounded resigned too. It was now three months since he’d
been bitten by the unlikely fascination for the pretty little tropical fish. But, he was reflecting now, it was Mammon which had prompted him to try the breeding, when that female
head-and-taillight tetra proved to be full of eggs. Mr. Duff at the Scales ’n’ Fins shop saying he’d pay twenty cents for every one they raised to three months. Piggott and
Prudence had spent the last seven weeks frantically rescuing the smaller tetras from their bigger siblings, and at the moment had seven dishpans standing about full of baby tetras, carefully graded
as to size. There had been over three hundred to start with, but the ranks had been considerably thinned.

“Well, if you would,” said Prudence. She sounded distracted. “The bigger ones jump so—I’ve caught six of them getting clear out this afternoon. You’d better
pick up another dishpan, Matt. It’s funny how they grow at such different rates—and if we’d known they were cannibals—”

“Only until they grow up, Duff says. All right,” said Piggott. He reflected gloomily that he should have known better than to succumb to greed: the love of money . . . By the time
the baby tetras were three months old, he’d be lucky to break even on the deal. Just last Sunday the sermon had been about covetousness.

He hadn’t any report for Wanda to type. All of these heists were likely going to stay anonymous. He wandered out to the anteroom and asked Lake if anything new had gone down.

“Body over on Stanford. George and John went out on it.”

Wanda came out of the sergeants’ office with a page in her hand and said briskly, “This just came over the telex—we’ll be putting it out countywide.”

Lake looked at it and buzzed the lieutenant’s office. “A.P.B. from Folsom. A mean one. He went over the wall last night and they think he’ll probably head
here—”

Mendoza scanned the teletype rapidly. One Terry Conover, twenty-four, Caucasian, six one, a hundred and ninety, black and blue, no marks, a long pedigree of much violence, in on a five-to-ten
for murder two. He had a mother and a girl and pals in L.A., and probably would be heading here: addresses were appended for the mother and girl friend. Folsom wasn’t so far away; if
he’d got hold of a car, he could be here by now.

“Well, we’ll have to look,” said Mendoza. Jason Grace and Tom Landers came in, and he added, “Por fortuna, just as we need you. Do any good?”

“Are you kidding?” said Landers. “Nobody could give us a description, him in that ski mask. Not even an approximate height and weight—you know people. It might have been
any hood in L.A., we’ll never drop on him. I guess Rich is still out asking futile questions.” He and Rich Conway, inherited from the old Robbery office when the two had been merged,
had taken to each other at once; and they’d both just come off night watch a month ago.

“So, we’ve got a new one?” asked Grace. He read the teletype interestedly, brushing his neat moustache in unconscious imitation of Mendoza, and his chocolate-brown face wore a
sardonic grin. “Yeah, in case Terry has made for home and mother, we’d better go and ask—more than one of us. Consider armed and dangerous. I wonder if he had help in getting over
the wall—if he did, there was probably transportation waiting, and more than likely a gun. With his pedigree of armed robbery.”

“That’s the general idea,” agreed Mendoza. His senior sergeant, bulky and burly Art Hackett, came in from escorting Parsons over to the jail, and Grace handed on the teletype.
“Suppose you and Matt go have a look at his mother’s place, and Art and Tom can look at the girl.”

Hackett reached up to adjust the Police Positive in the shoulder holster and copied down addresses noncommittally. “That should take us to the end of shift just nicely. Come on, Tom. You
getting anywhere with that cute blonde down in R. and I.?” They went out, with Grace and Piggott after them. It was three o’clock.

Mendoza asked Lake, “What was the body?”

“By what the uniformed men said, homicide of some kind.”

“Maybe business is picking up a little.” Mendoza yawned. “I do get tired, Jimmy. Ninety-eight percent of what we see is just—the damned foolishness.”

“As Matt would say, the devil going about,” said Lake.

At a tired-looking old eight-family apartment out on Stanford Avenue, Sergeants Higgins and Palliser were talking to a scrawny, scraggly middle-aged woman in the upper hallway.
The uniformed men had gone back on tour; Scarne and Duke had arrived with a mobile lab unit and were busy in the rear apartment to the left, past the open door behind the two detectives.

“You hadn’t heard anything from Mrs. Moffat’s apartment before that, Mrs. Kiefer?”

“Not a thing.” She kept trying to see into the apartment, what the lab men were doing, past Higgins’ broad shoulders. “Not that I would. I mean I wasn’t listening,
why should I? I’m not anybody’s keeper.” She was sloppily dressed in old jeans and a white T-shirt, and her graying hair was in big fat pink curlers, with no scarf over it.
“Well, I mean, I hope we’re respectable—”

“And Mrs. Moffat wasn’t?” asked Palliser in his pleasant voice. She looked at him with slightly more approval, at his regular lean features and neat tailoring; Higgins, of
course, in his bulk and cragginess, had COP written all over him.

“Well, I—well, she wasn’t a lady, is all I can say. I didn’t know her. Just to know her name, is all. But to think of anybody getting murdered, here! It’s
enough to scare you to death! Like I told you, and believe me it’s all I can tell you, I had a phone call from Miss Callway’s sister—Miss Callway lives in Seven, right
there”—the door across the hall—“and she can’t afford a phone, but she’s a nice woman and I don’t mind taking messages for her—and I come up here to
pass it on, only she’s not home, and there’s Mrs. Moffat’s door open and her laying in there all over blood, and I screamed, but I didn’t go in, no, sir, I went right down
and called police—but to think of it, a murder, even Mrs. Moffat, her getting murdered right here—”

“Well, if that’s all you can tell us,” said Palliser, “we’ll want a statement from you later on, but for now you can go back to your own apartment. Thank you, Mrs.
Kiefer.”

“What are they doing in there, anyways? Aren’t you going to take her away?”

“After a while,” said Higgins. They got rid of her finally and went back into the apartment to watch Duke and Scarne dusting for prints and taking pictures. It was a shabby place,
barely filled with ancient furniture, and whatever else she had been, Mrs. Ida Moffat hadn’t been a very good housekeeper; there was dust everywhere, a pile of dirty dishes in the kitchen,
the windows filmed with dirt. Mrs. Moffat herself didn’t look too clean, flat on her back on the living-room floor: she was wearing a faded pink kimono and it had come open to show her only
underwear, panties and a bra both once white but now grime-gray. She couldn’t have been less than fifty or so but she hadn’t had a bad figure; the blue-mottled veins in her legs, her
worn, uncared-for hands, told her age better.

“You pick up anything?” asked Higgins.

“No idea,” said Duke. “Plenty of latents around, but may be mostly hers.”

“Even Mrs. Moffat,” said Palliser. “What do you suppose she meant by that?”

“Not a lady,” grunted Higgins. “By what else she could tell us, perfectly ordinary woman.”

Palliser scratched his admirably straight nose and said, “I wonder.” All Mrs. Kiefer could tell them about Ida Moffat was that she took jobs housecleaning for people; she had several
regular jobs up in Hollywood, one place twice a week and helping out at parties. She didn’t know if Mr. Moffat was dead or divorced, or about any family. “Well, have a look around when
you boys are finished.”

“Just about,” said Scarne. “You can read it—probably all the action was right here.” She had fallen, or been knocked down, against the fake stucco hearth, where
there was blood, and more blood on top of the electric heater below; she had lived long enough to crawl a few feet toward the door. “Skull fracture for a bet. A fight with
somebody.”

“Over something,” said Palliser.

“Her handbag’s in the bedroom, on the bed. Money still in it. Place hasn’t been ransacked.”

“So, not a burglar. She let him in,” said Higgins, looking at the apartment door. It had a lock minus a deadbolt, an easy lock for a burglar to break in, but it wasn’t broken;
there was a stout chain fastened to door and wall, the catch now neatly reposing in its slot. In this area, it was a good bet that a woman living alone would keep that chain fastened when she was
home, even during the day. “Did you print this, Bill?” Scarne looked at him reproachfully. “All right, all right, just asking.”

When the lab men had gone, they had a look through the apartment. They found a few interesting things. There were nine bottles of cheap muscatel on a kitchen shelf. “How anybody can drink
that sweet stuff is beyond me,” said Higgins. “Think it’d make you sick before you got tight.” Her handbag, a shabby black plastic one, was open on the bed; it contained a
billfold with eighteen dollars in it, some loose change, and a check for thirty-five dollars signed by Winifred Bloomfield of an address in Hollywood; two soiled handkerchieves, three used
lipsticks, half a pack of Camels, a very dirty powder puff, a bunch of keys, and a little plastic book with slots for snapshots. That was full; and the twenty snapshots in it obviously dated from
disparate periods, all showing Ida Moffat at various ages from the twenties on up. All the snapshots showed her with men, all different men.

“My God,” said Higgins mildly. “What a gal.” The men were all different shapes, sizes, and ages; one, smiling at an Ida of perhaps twenty years ago, was in Army uniform,
and another—a hairy-chested fellow with a mop of dark hair—was in swimming trunks, with a plastic tag around his neck that said Life Guard, but aside from that there was no
clue to their identities, no writing on the back of the snapshots.

“Not a lady,” quoted Palliser. “I wonder if we’d get anything in the local bars. She didn’t have a car, that we do know. If she—”

“By that collection, she stayed home to do her drinking,” said Higgins. They began opening drawers, looking for an address book, but there didn’t seem to be one. Beside the
wall telephone in the kitchen was a dime-store tablet hung on a string by a nail, and on several pages were scrawled notes—Call Al at home bef. 9—new no. Bruce CA-1498—Jean
421-4243 . . . They took that to go through at leisure. Without discussing it, they were in tacit agreement that the world was probably not going to miss Ida Moffat, and it was going to be a
tedious little job, probably, to find out who had had a fight with her, knocked her down and killed her, but it was the job they were paid to do and they’d do it to the best of their
ability.

The morgue attendants came for the body.

It was twenty minutes to six. They found the key to the door and locked it after themselves. They’d driven over in Higgins’ Pontiac, and now went back to Parker Center where Palliser
reclaimed his Rambler from the lot. By then, Wanda would be gone; dictate a first report on it to her in the morning, and go on from there. This wasn’t one where they’d be asking Luis
if he had a hunch, thought Higgins. A tiresome routine job.

On the way home, through end-of-workday traffic, his mind switched from the job to his family: even after this while, he wasn’t taking a family for granted, he’d been without one so
long. His darling Mary, and Bert Dwyer’s good kids, Steve and Laura, and now the baby, Margaret Emily, who unbelievably was nearly ten months old—and Mary was just kidding when she said
he and Steve would spoil her rotten. . . .

And on the way home, Palliser thought fondly of Robin and their almost-brand-new David Andrew, not quite three months old; but that made him remember that very minor little thing last January,
that accident on the freeway, and Miss Madge Borman of Tempe, Arizona—and her dog. He frowned. He had hoped at the time that Miss Borman might forget her promise, but he had the uneasy
feeling that Miss Borman was not a woman who forgot promises. Never forget how kind you’ve been, she’d said, don’t know what I’d have done—and when he just happened to
mention Robin talking about a dog after the baby was born, Not another word, Sergeant, you shall have one of Azzie’s pups . . . Damnedest name for a dog he’d ever heard, and it took
Matt to unravel that: Dark Angel of Langlet, Azrael for short. And, I’m breeding Marla to him next month—and that was the biggest German shepherd he’d ever seen, he hadn’t
said a word about it to Robin, and she’d have a fit—nice dogs but too big for the city. And no fence around the backyard, and what it might cost to put one up. He also wondered just how
long it took for dogs . . .

He’d asked the lieutenant, who would know, and Mendoza had said absently, “Sixty-three days. Don’t tell me you’re going in for dog breeding? Matt and his fish are bad
enough—”

“No, no,” said Palliser hastily. But if that creature had been bred to Marla, presumably one like him, in February, the resultant pups would be about ready to leave home and mother
some time this month. And how he would ever explain it to Robin . . .

He just hoped Miss Borman had forgotten all about it.

Robin had dinner ready when he came in, and the baby—such a good baby, who seldom cried or fussed—was asleep. Palliser kissed her and she asked, “Busy day?”

“The usual,” said Palliser.

Higgins pulled into the drive of the house on Silverlake Boulevard to find Steve Dwyer industriously oiling his bicycle in front of the garage, with the little black Scottie Brucie watching.

“Hi, George! Say, I just developed this last roll of negs and I’ve got some great shots—wait till you see! They’re almost dry now . . .” Steve, going in heavily for
the art-composition black-and-white photography, these days was processing it all himself, proudly, in the little darkroom Higgins had put up in the garage, with the help of Henry Glasser on the
electric lines.

Higgins went obediently to look at the roll of negatives before he went into the house. Steve thought it was lucky that Higgins had been there, to take care of them all, when Bert got shot by
that bank robber. Higgins reckoned he’d been pretty lucky too.

“You’d better believe I’d call you quick enough if I’d heard from Terry!” She looked from Grace to Piggott, troubled. She was a little woman, slim
and good-looking, dark and vivacious. This was a modest but well-maintained single house in Hollywood, on Berendo; the name on the mailbox was Fitzpatrick. She had asked them into a neat, nicely
furnished living room, and a boy about ten and a girl a little older had looked at them curiously and obediently vanished at her quick word.

“Do you think he might try to contact you, ma’am?” asked Grace.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so, but—” She bit her lip. “Nobody could know, with Terry.” She ran a hand through her thick short hair, distractedly.
“I was a fool—well, I was sixteen. I guess that says it all. He was a wild one, Jim Conover. I was crazy in love with him, and we ran away to Vegas to get married and my mother about
had a fit—and of course it wasn’t three months later I knew what a fool I’d been. Jim knocking me around when he felt like it—and I guess I was lucky at that, you
know—him getting killed in that accident just before Terry was born. But Terry’s just like him—a wild one, and nobody could do anything with him. He got into
trouble—stealing—when he was only seven. I tried, but having to work—”

“Well, if he does contact you,” said Piggott, “we’d like to know.”

She nodded. “Before he got sent up this last time, he used to come once in a while when he was broke. Asking for money. The last time, he threatened to—to hurt the children if we
didn’t—but I’m really lucky now.” She smiled at them. “My husband’s a good man, and he—got it across to Terry all right. He knocked him down and threw him
out, told him just what he’d get if he tried anything. I don’t think Terry’d come here—anymore. But I’ve got to say I don’t know. But believe me, if he does
we’ll call you right away.”

“We have information that he has a girl here,” said Grace. “A Betty Suttner—they lived together a while, a few years back.”

“Oh,” she said. “I wouldn’t know. You mean he might try to contact her?” She laughed. “He might or he might not—when it comes to girls, it’s out
of sight out of mind with Terry. I suppose it’s possible.”

“Well, thanks very much,” said Piggott.

“People, people,” said Grace, sliding under the wheel of the little blue racing Elva. “It’s getting on for end of shift. I’ll take you back to your car.”

“No snapshots today.” Piggott yawned.

Grace grinned. “I guess we’re getting used to having a family, after six months.” And his father (who should know, chief of gynecology at the General Hospital) still saying
probably now after adopting little Celia Ann, they’d be producing one of their own. . . .

Piggott stopped at a hardware store on the way home and bought four feet of screening and a dishpan. In the apartment, his russet-haired Prudence was fishing for medium-sized baby tetras to
transfer to a dishpan of their own. Even as he came in, one of the larger babies neatly swallowed a smaller sibling an inch from her little net, and Prudence said crossly, “Oh, damn!
I don’t care, Matt, I know I shouldn’t swear, but it’s perfectly maddening! There must have been over three hun. . .