Death by Inches

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

It's January in Los Angeles, and the city is experiencing a heatwave. Lieutenant Luis Mendoza's homicide squad is depleted by the murder of one its members, and the crime-rate is rising as high as the temperature . . . 'Intelligent, humane, well written and continuously absorbing' Sunday Times

Release date: May 21, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

“Why do I get myself involved in these things, anyway?” asked Alison mournfully.

Mendoza finished his coffee and shoved over his cup for a refill. “Because you can’t bring yourself to be a little rude to people and say ‘No.’ ”

Alison poured coffee. “I know that. But what a dreary business it—”

“All you have to do, I gather,” said Mendoza, “is look at all the amateurs’ paintings and say which is the best, in your opinion as a professional.”

“Oh, there’s more to it than that,” said Alison gloomily. “They’ve got hold of Sally Mawson and Tony Lawlor, too— I expect they approached some of the really
top local talent and got snubbed, so they were reduced to people like us, who qualify as professionals because we’ve sold a few pictures. I have a dark suspicion it was Sally steered them
onto me . . . No, they’ve managed to get a room in the Arts and Crafts Building up in Barnsdall Park for a week. Today there’s going to be a sort of ceremony of hanging all the entries,
and then we’re supposed to take a week to judge them— I do ask you, Luis! I can just imagine what horrible daubs— And then next Saturday there’s another little
ceremony of announcing the winners. They call themselves,” she added even more gloomily, “the Hollywood Hobbyists and Amateur Artists. Artists.”

Mendoza laughed. “Cheer up, cara—you’ll just be bored a little. I’m off, it’s nearly eight.” He shoved his chair back and hit Nefertiti, who complained
loudly. Bending to pick her up and apologize, he stepped back onto Sheba’s tail. Sheba wailed, and Alison got up hurriedly.

“I’ll come with you— Señor and Bast are out, and the twins, too.”

“Very maternal afterthought,” said Mendoza. He put Nefertiti down; they slid hastily through the back door before either she or Sheba could slip out. There was no sign of El
Señor or Bast, but Master John Luis and Miss Teresa Ann were chasing each other round the wide patio while Mrs. MacTaggart wandered about snipping off dead leaves and keeping an eye on the
twins.

Mendoza kissed Alison and put on his hat. Mrs. MacTaggart hurried to corral the twins temporarily. “What we need around here,” he said, “is a set of automatic signals, maybe at
each end of the drive. Cats out, twins out, extreme caution, or vice versa. Have fun with your art-lovers, querida.”

“So sympathetic,” said Alison. “I know, I got myself into it. But I can just imagine— Oh, well.”

Mendoza started to back the Ferrari out very slowly while Alison paced down the drive beside it watching for cats. Mrs. MacTaggart and the twins waved; he stopped to wave back, reached the
street safely, waved at Alison, shoved the Drive button, and then slammed on the brakes as El Señor and Bast shot across the street ahead of him. Alison shooed them up the drive and
waved again, the sun bright on her red hair.

“Hostages to fortune!” said Mendoza. “¡Vaya por Dios!” He took his foot off the brake and stepped on the accelerator.

It was Saturday, January ninth, and as usual sometime in January, L.A. and environs were experiencing a mild heat wave.

When Mendoza got to the Homicide office of the big Central Headquarters building downtown, he found Lieutenant Goldberg chatting with Sergeant Lake at the desk. “Morning, Saul.
What’re you doing down here?” Lieutenant Goldberg belonged up in Robbery.

“Some business for you, Luis.”

“Oh? Come on in.” Mendoza went into the inner office. Hackett was leaning on the desk reading a report, a Hackett still burly but considerably trimmer in figure after his hospital
siege and only two months back on the job. He glanced up and nodded at Goldberg.

“Teletype in from this one-horse burg in Indiana somewhere, Luis. They think a boy they want might be here.”

“Nice,” said Mendoza. “As if we haven’t enough to keep us busy. Anything new on the Ambler thing?”

“Yeah, but before I forget, has Alison got anything on for next Saturday? I will never,” said Hackett, shaking his sandy head, “understand females. But never. We don’t go
to church from one year’s end to the next, but here Angel’s insisting the baby’s got to be officially christened, for God’s sake. She’s got it set up for next
Saturday, the Episcopal church near us. She knows you won’t come, but—”

“Well, she’d better check with Alison. I don’t know what time the art lovers are going to meet. And I’m not asking how the baby is—just set you off rhapsodizing
again. Why the hell any sensible man gets himself embroiled in all these domesticities— What’s new on the Ambler job?”

Hackett said with dignity he didn’t rhapsodize, that Sheila was just an exceptionally bright and beautiful baby. And Angel hadn’t breathed a word about having Mark christened two
years back and why she’d suddenly— “All right, all right. Galeano got an anonymous tip over the phone. About five A.M.—funny time. Caller said to
take a look at one Joe Tucker, address over on Main, for the Ambler job.” The Ambler job had happened last Tuesday night—Ambler’s liquor store on Hill Street held up and Ambler,
alone in the place, shot dead. The only thing they knew about it, after four days, was what gun the killer had used—a Colt Woodsman .22. Which was not very enlightening. “Galeano left
it for the day crew, but he had Records look for Tucker. He’s there all right, got quite a little pedigree. Heist jobs mostly.”

“Um. Who went out on it?”

“Jase and Palliser, about ten minutes ago. May not find him at home, of course.”

“Jase being on it, they’ll fetch him in,” said Mendoza; both he and Hackett laughed.

“Who’s that, new boy?” asked Goldberg, blowing his nose.

“¡Seguramente que si!” said Mendoza. He grinned, thinking of Detective Jason Grace.

Bert Dwyer had been shot and killed by the bank robber just three months ago. They were shorthanded as it was, with Scarne having transferred to the lab, but it wasn’t until six weeks back
they’d been given a new man to replace Dwyer . . . Besides the official notification, Mendoza had had a call from Lieutenant Whitney out at the Hollenbeck station, Grace’s former
superior.

Mendoza was mildly pleased to have a Negro officer join them. There was a large Negro population in Central’s territory, and the honest citizens among them (always, thank God, the majority
in any population) sometimes felt a little easier with a Negro cop. Nobody at Homicide had any funny prejudices, and in any case, Mendoza knew that on this force any man who’d made
detective first grade would be a reasonably efficient officer.

That, of course, was before they all found out how unreasonably efficient Detective First Grade Jason Grace was.

“You,” Whitney had said, “are more than welcome to him, Mendoza. That guy makes me feel so damn inferior, if I could afford it I’d be seeing a head doctor.”

In the last six weeks the boys at Homicide had been finding out what he meant.

One of the first little jobs Detective Grace had been given was that of going to question the hottest suspect in a supermarket heist job, one Hans Borgmann. When Detective Grace had politely
announced himself and showed his badge, the hulking Borgmann had turned to his wife and told her in casual German that she’d better back up his alibi of being home all that night or
he’d break her neck. Which was a tactical error on Borgmann’s part, but just how was he to have guessed that Detective Jason Grace spoke fluent German as well as Spanish and
Italian?

Likewise, when Detective Grace came unexpectedly (and alone) face to face with Sonny Lee Endler in the doorway of a pool hall on Second Street, Sonny Lee hadn’t been very worried. Sonny
Lee was on the Ten Most Wanted list, he could smell cop at fifty feet with the wind in the wrong direction, and he saw that this particular cop had recognized him, but after all, the cop was alone
and just a medium-sized cop, while Sonny Lee stood six-four in his stockinged feet and weighed two-forty. So he just reached for the cop before the cop could reach his gun, feeling quite
confident— Which was where he made his mistake, but how was Sonny Lee to have known that Detective Jason Grace was a judo expert? He deduced it later on in the prison wing of the General
Hospital.

Similarly, Bucky Randall had no hesitation in marching down Broadway in broad daylight, even though his photograph adorned most post offices in the country. It was an old photograph, and since
then he’d gained forty pounds, dyed his blond hair black and trimmed his eyebrows, and instead of his customary gaudy sports clothes he was wearing a conservative dark suit and white shirt.
Bucky was very surprised when he got neatly collared, but then how could he have known that Detective Jason Grace had trained himself to be a real camera eye, a dick with a long memory for the
faces of pro crooks?

Sergeant Rory Farrell, who was a crossword fan, found Detective Grace an invaluable addition to the office: Detective Grace had apparently memorized the dictionary.

His father was one of the staff physicians at the General, so he had a better than average understanding of medicine.

His wife had once been a legal secretary, so he knew a good deal about torts, and so on.

“It’s just that I figure,” Grace said in his soft voice, “you can’t ever have too much general knowledge. You just never know when a little bit of it’s going
to come in handy.” He admitted Hebrew had thrown him—of course it wasn’t the sort of thing a detective was apt to find a use for anyway; he was currently taking a night course in
the identification of gems and minerals, and in his off time reading anthropology.

Mendoza was still grinning. “Don’t be surprised, Saul, if you drop in here someday and find our new boy sitting at my desk.”

“That’ll be the day,” said Hackett. “Funny, too, Jase’d be insufferable if he wasn’t basically a nice guy. But he’s got no crystal ball like the
boss.”

“So bring out your crystal ball,” said Goldberg. He sneezed, reached for Kleenex, blew his nose, dropped the Kleenex into the wastebasket, and produced a thick sheaf of papers in a
cardboard folder. “I’m very happy to hand this one over, Luis. We’ve been breaking our hearts over it for nine weeks. Since, in fact, Halloween, which was when the first job got
pulled.” He laid the folder on Mendoza’s desk with an air of finality. Hackett came over and picked it up.

Mendoza lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair. “So what’s Homicide got to do with a robbery job? And which?”

Goldberg sneezed and said, “Damn. The goddamn allergy specialists still telling me to get a different job. Tension, they talk about. Tension, my God. Among everything else we’ve had
to work at, this joker breaking into thirteen places, and for peanuts, and not one single damn lead as to who he is—” He snorted and produced more Kleenex.

Higgins wandered into the office, pulling the knot of his tie loose. “Morning, Luis. Goldberg. I don’t so much like this suicide you chased me out on, Art. That business over on
Second. Something about it smells just a little funny.” He mopped his forehead. “Why the hell isn’t the air conditioning on? It’s nearly ninety outside.”

“It’s January,” said Hackett dryly. “Who needs air conditioning in January? What about the suicide?”

“Guy cut his throat,” said Higgins, “apparently. Wife says she found him this morning— What time did the call come in, just as the night crew was going off, wasn’t
it? So he’s there on the living room couch with his throat cut, and an old-fashioned straight razor on the floor across the room. So I suppose he could have thrown it there after he
did it, in a spasm or something—see what the doctor says—but something about it—”

“Later, later,” said Mendoza. “One thing at a time. So what’s the story, Saul?”

Goldberg sighed. “So last night our boy pulls Number Thirteen, and it turns out an unlucky number for him all right. This time he kills somebody. So I turn it over to you with my
blessing.”

“From the beginning, por favor,” said Mendoza. He sat up and emptied the ashtray, lined up blotter and desk tray, straightened the desk clock to a precise angle. Hackett and
Higgins exchanged a glance. Higgins had once expressed the private opinion that Mendoza counted the hairs in his neat mustache every morning and trimmed it to come out even, each side matching.

“Sure,” said Goldberg. “Halloween. An old lady, pensioner, living over on Council Street. Ramshackle old house separated into three apartments. One-story. This guy breaks in,
scares the life out of her—about one A.M., it was—knocked her down, ransacked the place, got what was left of her pension money, and vamos. Poor old
lady’s eighty-three, widow without any family. So we start looking, and get nothing. Or almost. He pulled off a screen to get in a window, and we got a couple of prints off the screen which
don’t belong to the landlord or anybody else who might have had occasion to touch it—but they’re not in anybody’s files. So we’re stymied. We ask around all the
stoolies, we get nothing. So then our bird pulls another, November ninth. It’s all in there”—he nodded at the file—“all we didn’t get. Thirteen of ’em. And
last night he hit this woman just a little too hard, cracked her skull. So now it’s your baby, and I wish you joy of it.”

“Same M.O., I gather,” said Hackett.

“What else? We know he must case the jobs, because every time he’s picked”—Goldberg grimaced—“old people. Poor old people. In both senses, if you get
me, because its a cheap neighborhood. That’s another funny thing, which you’d think would tell us something—give us some kind of lead, anyway— but so far it hasn’t.
He’s stuck to just this one area. Roughly bounded by Temple and Beverly, Alvarado and Glendale Boulevard.”

“¿De veras?” said Mendoza. “That’d be about a five-by-ten-block square. Does that say he lives somewhere there?”

“Why should it?” Goldberg shrugged. “He might live in Boyle Heights or Ocean Park, for all we know. Sure, we’ve been through the area. With, you might put it, the
proverbial fine-tooth comb. Four men with pedigrees live in that area. We’ve got nothing on any of ’em. Their prints don’t match the ones we got off the screens. Two other screens
as well as the first one. That’s how he gets in every time—pulls off screens on back windows. You know those streets, Luis—hardly a house less than fifty years old, the kind of
houses the owners haven’t the money to keep up. Broken screens, broken windows, leaky plumbing, low rents. He cases the jobs, that much we can guess. He picks, first, the old
people—living alone, mostly—who won’t or can’t put up any physical fight, and second, the places that are easy to break into. We’re pretty sure we’ve got his
prints, because we’ve found the same ones on three different jobs—always on the screens. So that says he’s not a pro, he’s got no record.”

“Very nice,” said Mendoza wryly. “Should I thank you? Does he use a weapon of any kind?”

Goldberg shook his head, standing up. “Just his fists. It’s all in there, all the statements, and so on. You’ll have fun with it, Luis.”

“I am willing to bet,” said Mendoza. He looked at his cigarette pensively. “Now why that fairly small area? Just that area?”

“Have a look in your crystal ball,” said Goldberg. “I’ve got other things on hand. Let me know if and when you find out anything.” He lifted an amiable hand and
ambled out.

“As if we didn’t have enough to do,” said Hackett, opening the cardboard file. “What a hell of an anonymous thing.”

“Ought to be something to get hold of, out of thirteen jobs,” said Higgins. He passed a hand over his ugly roughhewn face. “God, it’s hot. January, my God,
doesn’t seem fair. It looks to me as if he’s got to be connected to that neighborhood somehow. I mean, how else would he know—when he cases the jobs, he’d be spotted as a
stranger, wouldn’t he?”

“This is a big city, George,” said Mendoza.

“Sure, but even so— Well, a meter reader? A laundry deliveryman? Driver of an ice-cream truck? If he doesn’t live right there in that area? Somebody without a
record.”

“Saul Goldberg,” said Mendoza, “has been a cop a good long time, George, and he’s a good cop. I wouldn’t doubt all those bright ideas occurred to him, too. Well,
all we can do is look. I suppose it’s early to ask for an autopsy report. Who got killed, by the way?”

Hackett answered without looking up from the page in his hand. “Woman. Mrs. Marion Stromberg, eighty-six, widow, no family, on the old age pension.”

“Christ,” said Higgins somberly. “This is a nice guy.”

“So we start looking for him,” said Mendoza. “Needle in a haystack. So what about the suicide, George?”

“I don’t know,” said Higgins, shrugging. “I just don’t like it. I left Piggott and Landers there poking around—probably a waste of time. It looks like
suicide, for sure. Fellow named Gonzales, about forty. Alfredo Gonzales. Lived with his wife and about seven kids, rented house over on Second Street. Not all his kids, he’s the woman’s
second husband. She says—the wife—he came home drunk last night and fell asleep on the living room couch. She gets up this morning, thinks he’s still sleeping it off, gets
breakfast for the kids, and so on, and then she goes into the living room and finds him dead like that, his throat cut. Says he’s threatened to do it before.”

“Any corroboration on that?”

“I don’t know yet. I want to look up any pals he may have been with last night. I just don’t like it,” said Higgins.

And like Hackett, Higgins might look like a big dumb cop, but he wasn’t—not so dumb, that is.

“Well,” said Mendoza. “They do keep us busy, don’t they? Let’s find out things.” He took Goldberg’s file and opened it.

In the anteroom, Detective First Grade Jason Grace’s deceptively mild voice said, “Now, Mr. Tucker, let’s just take it easy. In here, please—we just want to ask you a few
questions.”

Depressingly, it appeared that Joe Tucker wasn’t the boy they wanted for the Ambler job.

He had protested all the way down to headquarters, and he went on protesting as Grace, Sergeant Palliser, Hackett and Mendoza stood around him in the sergeant’s office. Eagerly he answered
questions before they were asked.

“Sure, sure, I got a little pedigree but I’m clean now, I swear, I been clean since I got out last time, I swear. And I can prove I didn’t have nothing to do with that job, I
got a good alibi— You did say it was last Tuesday night, din’t you? Sure, I got—”

“So let’s hear the alibi, Joe,” said Grace mildly. He was a slim man of medium height, and always looked very neat; he favored light gray suits and very plain ties. He had
regular features and a hairline mustache as precise as Mendoza’s own; his skin was the color of well-creamed coffee and he wore his thick straight black hair unparted off his high forehead.
His voice was very soft.

“Tuesday night, sure—and I just bet I know what bastard tried to get me in trouble, too! Prob’ly called you and said look at me for that job—prob’ly thought I
couldn’t prove I never pulled it. Goddamn sorehead. I bet it was Fred, all right. See, I took a little dough off him in a crap game the other night, and he’s the goddamnedest sorest
loser— I just bet— But anyways, I got an alibi, see, you can check. Honest. I was at a stag party Tuesday night, for a guy gonna get hitched next day, see? That’s where I was,
till maybe two, three inna morning, and the other guys’ll say—”

“Where, Joe?” asked Palliser. “What guys?”

Tucker rattled off a dozen names readily; both Grace and Palliser wrote them down.

“Any idea where we might find these fellows right now?” asked Palliser.

“Well, gee, let me think—”

Patiently they took notes. Tucker opening up right away, the alibi would probably check out; but it was a murder count after all, so they held Tucker while they checked. It would, they silently
agreed, be the hell of a lot of legwork and nothing to show for it at the end but another suspect cleared; but that was routine for you.

Palliser and Grace went out to start checking; Mendoza and Hackett went out on the new job Goldberg had just handed them.

“Do you ever wonder why the hell you joined the force?” asked Palliser as they emerged from the elevators downstairs. He yawned; he’d been out on a date with Roberta Silverman
the night before and hadn’t got to bed until 1 A.M.

“No, I can’t say I ever do,” said Grace seriously. “You know something, I never wanted to be anything else but a cop. Couldn’t say why, exactly.” He grinned.
“I gue. . .