Detective's Due

Book 0: A Vic Varallo Mystery

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

The brutal and baffling murder of an elderly couple in their quiet suburban home, the kidnapping of two little girls, a bank hold-up, a jewel robbery from a big store - Vic Varallo and the Glendale police force are kept more than usually busy in this complex and exciting drama. 'My favourite American crime-writer' New York Herald Tribune

Release date: July 14, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

“All I can say is,” said Varallo glumly, “I wish you’d get this over with. I’m getting damn tired of being a husband in name only, and
besides—”

“You’re getting tired of it?” said Laura. “Hah!” She looked at herself in the mirror over the bureau and grimaced. “How do you think I feel, going around
looking like the circus fat lady? It must be quadruplets or at least triplets, Vic, the way—”

“God forbid,” said Varallo hastily. “On a detective’s salary? Don’t even say such a thing, cara! And what about this doctor, anyway, is he any good at all?
Saying it was due last week—”

“Well, you can’t be sure to the exact day,” said Laura. She sighed at the mirror. “I’d better hurry up and have it. At least you’re out of uniform,
but you do go out of the office on things, and every female who looks at you—” Resignedly, she looked at her handsome blond cop.

Varallo grinned down at her unself-consciously, running the comb through his tawny crest of hair. “Well, you’ve provoked a few whistles in your time.”

“That,” said Laura, cocking her brown head at him, “sounds like a left-handed compliment if I ever heard one. Look at me. I don’t care whether it’s
triplets or—or sextuplets, I just want it over with! And we just have to wait. Why did I ever get involved in this project, anyway?”

“I have had the same thought,” said Varallo, “myself. Just keep hopeful thoughts that it’ll be soon. I don’t mind so much when I’m on night tour, but this is
my last night. I’m back on days Monday.” He opened the top drawer, and took out the shoulder holster and .38 Police Special. “As you know.”

“Well,” said Laura, and sighed again. “Thirty-four pounds. I couldn’t help it. Dr. Straw said not over twenty-five, but after all— I did try to stay on the diet,
but I was hungry. And will I ever get back to a size fourteen afterward? Why on earth did I ever want a baby?”

“You sound very unmaternal.” Varallo shrugged into his suit jacket.

“Right now that’s just the way I feel,” said Laura gloomily.

Varallo laughed and kissed her. “It’s got to come eventually. Law of nature. And come to think, I’ll be relieved to be off nights right now—you here alone. Now look, if
anything does start happening you call Mrs. Anderson right away.” The Andersons lived next door.

“I’ll be all right. It probably won’t come for weeks.”

“La finisca!” said Varallo. “Don’t sound so discouraged. Eventually—”

“Eventually,” said Laura. “Take care, Vic.”

“Just another boring night. Sit around the office and talk about Tracy. Nothing much exciting ever happens in Glendale. We’ve had our headline homicide for the fiscal year.”
Varallo walked back to the kitchen.

Laura giggled. “Poor Patrolman Tracy.”

“It’s not really funny,” said Varallo, but he grinned too. “We’ll have to do something about it. Don’t forget to lock the door after me.”

“I will, I will. Wait until I get Gideon.” Laura made a dive for Gideon Algernon Cadwallader, who was hopefully under Varallo’s feet with every intention of sliding out into
the inviting darkness when the door opened. Gideon Algernon Cadwallader had a handsome black-on-gray striped coat, an immaculate white front and chartreuse eyes. Laura looked at him in her arms and
said, “It’s about time to have him done. He was three months in September when we got him, that makes him about seven months now. We’d better—”

“Well, I wanted to get that Granada and Lilac Dawn in tomorrow.”

“You and your roses,” said Laura. “So go and loaf around the office, cop.”

Varallo waited until he heard the lock click into place, and walked across the patio to the garage. He detoured a few steps to sniff at Neige Parfum, which was doing well after its slow start,
and then snapped on the spotlight on the garage and backed out his old Chevy. The street was very dark; this Rossmoyne area, one of the better (if older) areas of town, was usually quiet. He drove
down Rossmoyne Avenue to Glenoaks Boulevard and down that to Glendale Avenue. It was Saturday, the fourth of January, and maybe everybody was still recuperating from the holidays, but there was
little traffic and the town felt quieter even than usual. Glendale, the third largest incorporated city in Los Angeles County, was largely residential; it hadn’t much serious crime, though
since the population was going up—a hundred and thirty thousand now, or so—they were getting a little rise there too.

Patrolman Tracy, thought Varallo. Well, it wasn’t really funny, but—

He went down Glendale to Wilson and turned right, and three blocks down turned left and immediately into the big parking lot behind the very handsome new Police Headquarters building on the
corner of Howard and Wilson.

“My God!” he said, and involuntarily hit the brakes. The bare expanse of parking lot had suddenly ceased to be bare. Suddenly it was a grove of—what? Pots with tall stakes and
vines growing up them—a jungle of vines. He blinked. Cautiously, he parked the car. Cautiously, he started toward the jungle.

Another car door slammed. “Vic?”

“Jeff.” Forbes was the other plain-clothes man on night tour. “What the hell—”

Forbes’s lanky tall figure ambled up in the glare of the overhead fluorescent lights. “Twenty of ’em,” he said, deadpan. “Katz got such a kick out of it he called
me at home. The truck driver wouldn’t take ’em back, and the lieutenant didn’t know what the hell else to do with them until we can send them back.”

“You don’t mean—”

“ ’S right. Twenty ten-foot climbing roses, all ready for planting. C.O.D., of course,” said Forbes solemnly. Then he began to laugh. So did Varallo. “I could almost hear
the lieutenant from where I was.”

“Oh my God!” said Varallo. “But we’ve got to do something about it, do you know, Jeff? Charles was going to write all the companies—”

“Well, Joe said between them they got three-four letters written and then Wayne came in with those hoods who heisted the liquor store last night, so they got sidetracked. Besides, Joe said
the lieutenant had a date with that schoolteacher and took off early.”

“Um,” said Varallo. They walked up to the broad shallow steps and in the front door. Sergeant Copeland was on the desk.

“Hi. How d’you like Tracy’s jungle out there?” he asked, and burst out laughing.

“It’s not really funny—” Varallo burst out laughing.

“It’s the most interesting thing that’s happened since I’ve been on the force,” said Forbes. “I like it.”

Grinning, they climbed the stairs to the Detective Bureau. The Detective Bureau consisted of one large room well-lighted by continuous strip fixtures, with a lot of desks back to back and
Lieutenant Charles O’Connor’s desk off by itself. Nobody else was there. The day men were gone, of course. Glendale was a quiet town. It wasn’t too often that the plain-clothes
men on night tour got haled out of the office. Oh, once in a while a heist job, like that one last night: once in a while a break-in. Not often.

Varallo sat down at his desk and Forbes sat down at his. “No, but seriously, what do you think about it?” asked Varallo. “I mean, Tracy seems like a very nice guy. I admit, he
hasn’t got much sense of humor, but—”

“Would you have, about now?” asked Forbes. They both started to laugh again.

Patrolman Neil Tracy’s strange ordeal had begun on December second, a little over a month ago. Although Patrolman Tracy had a perfectly good home on Doran Street, where he lived with his
wife Margaret and his two-year-old daughter Diana, he suddenly began receiving mail at Headquarters. Mail, of a sort, you could call it, though some of it arrived by express too. The first parcel
had contained twelve dozen tennis balls with his initials on them. Patrolman Tracy did not play tennis. The tennis balls had been sent C.O.D. and the postman had been persistent; finally
O’Connor had had to pay for them. Called in and asked for an explanation, Tracy had none; he certainly had not ordered any initialed tennis balls. Nor had he ordered the twelve boxes of fine
Havana cigars which arrived the next day, C.O.D., nor the hand-carved walnut humidor ($39.95 plus customs duty) from Israel, nor the case of fresh grapefruit from Florida. All of which arrived
within the next week.

Patrolman Tracy was annoyed. He refused to accept the C.O.D. parcels. The post office and the railway-express messengers refused to take them back; the address was right, wasn’t
it?—he was Mr. N. Tracy, wasn’t he?

Lieutenant Jensen of Traffic was annoyed. He was annoyed by the dozen specially aged prime steaks which arrived soon after the grapefruit, but he got good and annoyed about the dozen live
tropical fish. “Listen, Tracy,” he said, “this has got to stop. My God, fish yet! Live fish! Listen, Tracy—”

“I didn’t order any damn tropical fish!” said Tracy. “Why, for God’s sake, should I order—”

“Listen, write to these people,” said Jensen. “Call the express and get the damn fish out of here!”

Patrolman Tracy wrote letters explaining that he hadn’t ordered the merchandise and was therefore returning it. Before he finished writing letters there were delivered to him at
Headquarters ten pounds of the best Florida shrimp packed in dry ice, a handsome set of tooled luggage from Mexico with a somewhat astronomical bill (including customs duty) attached, and the deed
to a lot in Alaska. The messengers (from the post office and railway express) who were conferring all this largesse on him clamored for payment. Patrolman Tracy said he hadn’t ordered—
Yes, the address was correct, yes, he was N. Tracy, but—

Patrolman Tracy wrote more letters of explanation. By this time the answers to his first letters were coming in, and one and all the merchants were annoyed: why was he refusing perfectly good
merchandise which he had ordered? Undoubtedly had ordered: they had the order blanks to prove it, please send to N. Tracy, C.O.D. Tracy started to write letters all over again, and while he spent
his time off hunched over the secondhand portable he’d got to practice on (because he hoped someday to get out of uniform), there arrived at Headquarters, duly addressed to N. Tracy, an
expensive three-speed record player, a crate of fresh river trout packed in dry ice and a cute little three-month-old silver poodle from a kennel in Oregon. All the delivery men clamored louder for
money.

Detective John Poor, who was sentimental, said they couldn’t send that poor little pup all the way back to Oregon. Might die on the way, he said. Besides, his wife had been talking about
getting a poodle, and the C.O.D. was only fifty bucks, and he could manage that, he guessed. So that C.O.D. got paid, but the rest didn’t, and everybody was writing Tracy sternly demanding
payment, and Tracy got to feeling a little desperate.

By now he was spending all his off time writing letters. And while he toiled away at the typewriter, the lobby at Headquarters accumulated a tape recorder, seventy-five pounds of aged
cheese from an outfit in Wisconsin, a notice sent from Paris, France, that his request had been received for a year’s subscription to a certain Parisian girlie magazine, and he would start
getting it as soon as they were paid, a case of Johnny Walker Black Label and a three-foot high stuffed toy tiger. All, of course, C.O.D.

“Listen, Tracy,” said Jensen. “Listen—”

“It’s not my fault, Lieutenant!” said Tracy desperately. “What the hell am I gonna do about all this? All these different companies— I don’t know
what the hell’s going on, they all say they got orders from me, but I never— And the damn post office won’t—”

“All you have to do is write Refused on the stuff, the way you do with junk mail.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not so easy with C.O.D.s, and the express people— What the hell is all this, anyway? Some joker—”

“Some practical joker,” said Jensen, “and it’s even unfunnier than most practical jokes.”

“But what can I do—”

Patrolman Tracy continued to write letters, in the time he was not out riding a patrol car keeping the honest citizens of Glendale protected. Before he had caught up on the latest batch of firms
which had trustingly sent him merchandise C.O.D., he became the unwilling recipient of an authentic kilt, size 42, from R. G. McIlheny, Ltd., in Edinburgh. The kilt was priced at $49.95, plus
customs duty, and a note enclosed explained that the tartan was the Hunting MacDonald, the Tracys having been a sept to that clan.

The whole affair was providing a good deal of entertainment to all Tracy’s colleagues, of course, and they got a lot of mileage out of that kilt. “Hey, Neil, you can wear it to mow
the lawn, maybe, give the neighbors a treat?” they said. “Maybe the next time we hold a parade—”

Tracy snarled.

“Listen,” said Jensen to O’Connor, “we’ve got to do something about all this, damn it! You’re supposed to be a detective.”

But as Forbes had just said, O’Connor had got sidetracked today; and so now there were all those climbing roses, ready for planting, sitting out in the parking lot. Patrolman Tracy, if he
wasn’t on night tour, was sitting at home writing letters.

“The damnedest thing,” said Forbes. “The only thing I can figure, it’s somebody who’s got a grudge against him, wants to annoy him, you know?”

“But he says he can’t think of anybody like that,” said Varallo. “And he seems like a very easygoing fellow, Jeff—not the kind to put anybody’s back up. He
ought to know whether anybody’s mad enough at him to—”

“Well, you might think so.” Forbes rubbed his lantern jaw thoughtfully. “But there are some guys, Vic, can get riled up over some damn-fool little thing nobody else’d
think twice about. You know as well as me. Could be somebody like that. And Tracy never realized—you know—that the guy was riled.”

“E vero,” said Varallo. “Have to do something about it, anyway. Charles said if we could get the firms to send us the original orders, maybe the handwriting might give
us a lead. If it is somebody Tracy knows.”

“Yeah,” said Forbes, yawning. They fell silent; the office was very quiet. Night tour was usually a bore for the detectives on this force. Forbes said reluctantly he supposed
he’d better get that report typed up, and ambled over to a typewriter. Varallo had brought along one of Laura’s paperback mysteries, and started to read that. Funny, he thought, what
peculiar ideas some people seem to have about cops. After a while he wandered down the hall and got himself a cup of coffee.

It would be a long time until eight A.M.

They were sitting around talking desultorily over more coffee at one A.M.

“I hate night tour,” said Forbes. He yawned, and lit a new cigarette. “I wouldn’t mind it one damn bit if I was on the L.A.P.D. or some place things happen. But
about all we ever do here is sit round and yak to each other, if there aren’t any reports to type. Take over in east L.A.,” he added almost wistfully, “hardly a night goes by
without a knifing or something.”

Varallo grinned at him. “Tanto peggio! Bloodthirsty.”

“Oh well,” said Forbes philosophically, “I draw enough duty with you, I pick up some Italian anyway, and they always give educated guys an edge for promotion.”

“Two birds with one—” said Varallo, and the inside phone rang. He picked it up. “Varallo.”

“Vic, I got a call in from Barker and Harrison, they just got chased out to this address on Cumberland Road—” Sergeant Copeland added the number. “It’s an ADW, what
they say, not much on it yet but I gather it could turn into homicide. Boys asked for an ambulance pronto. You better get up there.”

“On our way,” said Varallo. A little action after all, assault with a deadly weapon. He relayed that to Forbes. They went down to the lot. Patrolman Tracy’s climbing roses,
ready for planting, stood stark under a gibbous moon.

“Crazy,” said Forbes, shaking his head at them.

They took Varallo’s car. They went the quickest way, straight down Wilson to Pacific and straight up Pacific to Cumberland. Cumberland ran through one of the more exclusive residential
areas of Glendale: big newish expensive homes. The one they wanted turned out to be a split-level ranch with a lot of synthetic stone on its front; the porch light was on, a spotlight somewhere in
back was on, the black-and-white patrol car stood at the curb, the front door was open and lights on in the house. At the house to the right, the porch light was on and a couple of curious
neighbors were standing at the open door looking out. A big white Caddy four-door hardtop was crazily parked in front of the house, behind the squad car, with its front wheels canted up over the
curb.

It was fourteen minutes past one. A chilly January night, with a high gusty wind getting up, another high restless wind, they’d been having a lot of that sort lately, blowing down trees
and power lines and breaking windows—knock on wood, we can’t afford any broken windows, thought Varallo, what with the obstetrician’s bill. God, would the baby ever come?
Come on, Laura, deliver!

He smiled at his own poor joke and went into the house with Forbes.

A house that said Money. A newish house, expensive furniture, rich lush carpeting underfoot. A wide entry hall, and to the left a big living room. Beige tone-on-tone carpet, a big walnut console
TV with sliding doors. A long quilted green couch. Synthetic stone hearth. The two patrolmen in uniform standing, one on either side of the man huddled on the couch: they looked up with relief at
Varallo and Forbes.

“Mr. Scott—”

The man looked up slowly. He was about forty-five, a good-looking man, regular features, thick dark hair, a good firm mouth. He looked wild right now. “Oh, God, if I’d been
home,” he said thickly. “If I’d been here. Why did I have to be—”

“Mr. Scott?”

And there was the dwindling wail of an ambulance siren right outside, and the man sprang up to his feet. “What the hell took them so long? We should have— Mother bleeding
so—”

“We did what first aid we could, sir,” said one of the patrolmen gently. “Mr. Scott, I know you’re concerned for your parents, but these men are detectives from
Headquarters, they’d like to ask you some questions.”

“Just a second,” said Varallo. “Let’s get the picture here. Parents both attacked?”

The taller uniformed man straightened from Scott. “Yes, sir. I’m Barker. It’s—” he looked a little sick suddenly—“in the first bedroom.” Harrison
went to hold the front screen for the ambulance boys and their stretchers. Varallo and Forbes went ahead of them into the hall again a. . .