Deuces Wild

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

Lieutenant Luis Mendoza is faced with a crime close to home when his four-year-old twins are kidnapped. Not even Mendoza's crystal ball can help him while his colleagues explore every possible theory and lead. Are the twins being held for ransom? Or is the kidnapping a form of revenge? Mendoza has never been more human as a husband and father and more severely taxed as a detective . . . 'A Luis Mendoza story means superlative suspense' Los Angeles Times

Release date: May 21, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

Mendoza was going to be late, and for once he didn’t care. He added cream to a third cup of coffee and lit another cigarette. “Why I don’t resign the
thankless job,” he said bitterly, “I don’t know. All the slogging labor we expend in catching them, and then the Goddamned courts— We’ll never get anybody for Dagostino,
there’s no handle. And that damn judge yesterday—”

“You wouldn’t know what to do with yourself,” said Alison automatically. She was drying the dishes as Mrs. MacTaggart washed them, briskly putting them away; she looked
efficient and boyish with her red hair swathed in a terry turban. “Now where are those two?—honestly, take your eyes off them a minute and—if they’re over the fence
again—” She peered out the window over the sink.

“Ah, it’s a while since they took that notion,” said Mrs. MacTaggart, but she hung away her dish towel and went to open the back door. Three of the cats—Bast, Sheba and
Nefertite—were sunning themselves on the back porch; of El Señor the wicked there was no sign; and the Old English sheepdog Cedric had disinterred a bone and was thoughtfully chewing
it in the middle of the yard. In a moment the twins appeared from behind the garage, arguing vehemently about something.

“And ten to one,” said Mendoza, “something new went down overnight to make us more thankless work. With two men off— ¡Dios! Why did I ever want to be a
cop?”

The twins erupted through the back door. “Mama!” said Terry tearfully. “Look! All dirty! Want a nice clean dress!” She exhibited a minute stain of mud on her white
pinafore.

“Heavens above,” said Alison. “I suppose if one of them had to inherit your fanatic persnickitiness, it’s just as well it should be the girl. Look, Terry, it’ll
brush right off, see?”

“Want an all clean dress!” demanded Terry.

“She’s a silly,” said Johnny. “¡Estúpido!” At nearly four, the twins were developing into definite personalities.

“I am not estúpido! Don’t like to be all dirty! Mama—”

“Now, my lamb,” said Mrs. MacTaggart, “we’ll just sponge it off and it’ll not show at all.”

“I can see where it was,” said Terry.

“Exactly like your father,” said Alison.

“And what else would you expect?” retorted Mendoza, getting up reluctantly and automatically straightening his tie, yanking down his cuffs. As usual he was immaculate in silver-gray
Italian silk, snowy shirt and discreet dark tie, his hairline moustache neatly trimmed. “I feel like taking the day off. Going for a nice long drive up the coast, or—or renting a yacht
or something. I’m tired of reading autopsy reports. I might run over to Vegas and find a hot poker game.”

“For goodness’ sake, go!” said Alison. “Wherever. It’s after nine and Mairí and I want to get at those curtains—now we’re all behind, we’ll
never finish the dining room today—”

“Ah, once we get at it it won’t take long, achara.”

“Shoo,” said Alison firmly. “Go and read autopsy reports, Luis.”

“The happy home,” said Mendoza, but he found his hat and went out the back door. El Señor was stalking a bird at the end of the yard; he wouldn’t catch it—he never
caught anything—so Mendoza didn’t go to the rescue. He backed the Ferrari out to the top of the circular drive, reflecting that it was the wrong time of year to have spring fever: a hot
sunny Friday in August, the air still and stagnant. But, as usual with summer across southern California, the case load at Robbery-Homicide, LAPD, was a little heavier than usual, and Mendoza was
tired of it. He was tired of the monotony of random violence and death, the stupid people, the old round of crime these days more violent and bloody and wanton. He’d been dealing with it for
nearly twenty-five years on the thankless job, and rather often he felt very tired of it.

But they were shorthanded at the office; he’d better go in. He caught the light at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Laurel Canyon, and shoved in the cigarette lighter as he waited,
his mind sliding over the cases they had on hand at the moment.

The Dagostino thing was dead; there was nowhere to go on it. Just an old man beaten and robbed on the street; they didn’t even know how much he’d had on him. It had probably
been—as it all too often was these days—one or more punks looking for loot to support the habit. There were, as usual, unidentified bodies waiting at the morgue. Male teenager dead of
an overdose; female ditto; elderly man dead of a heart attack; and a hit-run victim—the first three run of the mill, but it was a little funny that the hit-run one hadn’t been
identified: an ordinary-looking middle-aged woman, good clothes, forty bucks in a coin purse; she hadn’t been a derelict. To be hoped she’d get identified sometime. There had been a
gang rumble last week, one dead of knife wounds, and six of those punks would be coming up for arraignment next week. There had been, on the Central beat which was Mendoza’s beat, nine
heist-jobs in the last ten days, and they still had victims coming in to look at mug shots and were still pulling in men with the right sort of records to question, without having got anything
definite yet. Then on Wednesday they had a new body—not just the casual body, but an apparent Murder One: female found in MacArthur Park. Palliser had been on that, said it looked like
strangulation; there’d probably be an autopsy report sometime today. And the situation never stayed static: there would doubtless be other business coming along for Robbery-Homicide.

They were three men short. Detectives Shogart and Henry Glasser were off on vacation, though Glasser would be back on Monday; when Detective Tom Landers might be back was debatable. Landers and
his policewoman, Phil O’Neill, had got engaged in June; ten days ago, with the support of several colleagues as witnesses, they had got themselves officially married and taken off on a
honeymoon. Both of them having some legitimate leave saved up, they might be gone some time.

When Mendoza came into the office he found both his senior sergeants there, chatting with Sergeant Lake who was manning the switchboard. “You’ve both got spring fever too?” he
said. “I nearly didn’t come in. Don’t tell me something new’s gone down.”

“When doesn’t it?” said Higgins reasonably. “Another heist on the street last night—Conway left a report. Couple of girls who work for title phone company, on their
way home—held up in the parking lot and knocked around a little. I’d deduce, a couple of punks with the habit. No descriptions, of course. I just got back from the hospital.”

“I see,” said Hackett, sounding resigned, “that you wasted your time in court yesterday.” They both followed Mendoza into his office.

“¡Mil rayos!” said Mendoza, flinging himself down in his desk chair and reaching for the lighter. “Don’t mention the punks to me, Arturo! That
Gebhart—mainlining H and ending up killing a man, and that Goddamned judge takes a reduced plea of manslaughter and hands him a one to three! Will you take a bet he doesn’t kill
somebody else before the dope gets him? Or that his lawyer gets him out on parole after he’s served three months?”

“I will not,” said Hackett with a grimace. “You haven’t seen the paper this morning, I take it.” He and Higgins together dwarfed Mendoza’s office; Mendoza
looked up from one to the other suspiciously.

“¿Qué? Now what?”

“Maybe they were a little short of news,” said Hackett. “Anyway, they covered the Gebhart hearing, er, lavishly—”

“That stepmother of his used to be a star on Broadway,” said Higgins through a yawn.

“And?” Mendoza took the Times from Hackett and ran his eye down the lefthand column, under the headline Reduced Pleas For Accused Killer. “Oh, for God’s
sake. Well, it’s no secret. But— ¿Y eso qué importa?” He shrugged, but reread the paragraph. As he said, no secret, but as it happened this was the first
time it had got into the papers.

“Testifying for the prosecution, veteran officer Lieutenant Luis Mendoza was reprimanded twice by Judge Ernest Becker as he crossed verbal swords with defense attorney Gilman. Lieutenant
Mendoza, ‘the Millionaire Cop,’ expensively tailored and obviously annoyed at the lesser charge finally accepted by the court, exchanged angry words with Mr. Gilman during the hearing.
Rumor has it—”

“¡Disparate!” said Mendoza. “Rumor! I stay on the job, despite all my ill-gained gold, because I like to persecute these poor oppressed victims of society! If
you want my opinion, Art, Gilman envies my tailoring. He’d like to be called dapper too, but he has a deplorable taste in ties.” He pushed the paper aside. “I knew there’d
be an autopsy report. That female—”

“We may have her identified,” said Higgins. “Woman came in half an hour ago—John took her down to the morgue. Art and I just left a couple down in R. and I. looking at
mug shots, I suppose we’d better check back on them.”

“And they won’t recognize any,” said Mendoza. But his eyes strayed back to the Times and he frowned.

“I hope Matt remembered to cover that arraignment,” said Hackett suddenly. “Webley.”

“I reminded him.” Higgins yawned again.

“That’s a funny one, you know, George? I thought when we heard it, one of the queerest damned things we’ve ever had. Makes you believe in predestination. I went to this
literary tea once—”

“¡Maravilloso!” muttered Mendoza, and Higgins laughed.

“No, but it just came back to me,” pursued Hackett seriously. “Angel took me. This woman who writes mysteries, and Angel likes her stuff, she gave a talk—and one thing
stuck in my mind, because it shows how different books are from real life. She said in fiction you can’t have anything happen by coincidence. Well, my God, we’re always running into
coincidences on the job. But this Webley, now that’s a case where it seems to me coincidence was more like fate. Here he’s covered all his tracks, got a new identity and job and
background, not one damn thing anywhere to tie him to that murdered wife back in New Jersey—and it just happens that her best friend takes a trip to California and sits at the next table to
him at the Brown Derby. Talk about fate—”

“I just hope Matt covered it,” said Mendoza. He started to read the autopsy report. As Hackett and Higgins started out, Sergeant John Palliser came in.

“N.G.,” he reported briefly. “She didn’t know her. I didn’t think she would—her daughter’s been on the missing list over a year and Carey thinks she
just took off with a bunch of drifters. Might be in a commune back in Massachusetts, or anywhere. So this one’s still Jane Doe.” He lit a cigarette. “No snapshots,
George?”

Higgins grinned amiably. These days he’d got used to having his firsthand family, Margaret Emily being eleven months old now. “You’re the one ought to be passing snapshots
around.”

“I never could work a camera,” said Palliser, who had just turned into a father last March. “And having suffered through all the snapshots from you and Jase this last
year—”

“Where is Jase, by the way?” asked Hackett. “I haven’t laid eyes on him this morning.”

“Oh, there was a call came in just after you went downstairs,” said Palliser casually. “New body, somewhere on the Hollywood freeway.”

“¿Qué es esto?” said Mendoza. “And they say women’s work—” The autopsy report wasn’t much help on Jane Doe. An ordinary-sized
Caucasian female between twenty and twenty-five, blonde, had borne at least one child: dental chart enclosed; death caused by manual strangulation probably after midnight last Tuesday night; no
evidence of sexual molestation.

Hackett and Higgins wandered out, and Sergeant Lake came in with a telex sheet. “NCIC,” he said briefly. “A hell of a thing, but what they expect us to do with this I
don’t know.”

Mendoza abandoned the autopsy report and took the telex. “¡Porvida!” he said after glancing at it, and handed it to Palliser. “Just what the hell Merced thinks
we can do about it—”

Merced was three hundred and some miles upstate, in the inland valley: not a big town, probably a quiet town as a rule; but it had just had a spectacular multiple murder. An entire family of
six, parents, two teenage girls, two younger children, shot and stabbed and stuffed into closets, the house ransacked. By the medical report, last Sunday or Monday night, the bodies only found on
Tuesday when relatives got worried enough to investigate. From various witnesses the Merced police had now heard that the teenage girls had recently made some new friends at a local kids’
hangout, and the parents had objected to them. The new friends were not local: by what witnesses could say, two couples of drifters—the expectable appurtenances, backpacks, scruffy clothes,
the long hair, one of the males sporting a beard; they had a beat-up old jalopy, and had boasted of making rock-festivals all across the country. Merced thought L.A. would like to know about them
because two witnesses had stated that the license-plate frame on the old jalopy bore the legend Bob Hauger Ford Los Angeles. The car might be a Ford about ten years old, white or blue, a
sedan.

“Go and ask,” said Palliser, riffling through the yellow pages. “Bob Hauger Ford, here it is, out on La Cienega. I seem to recall it’s been there some time, hardly a new
agency. But there’ll be a used lot, and how many cars with the same plate frame around? We can ask, but it’s an empty gesture.” He drifted out.

Five minutes later Jason Grace came in. “So you finally decided to come to work.”

“Vaya el diablo,” said Mendoza amiably. “I heard there’s a new body.”

Grace sat down and brought out a cigarette. If his light gray suit wasn’t personally tailored, he was as dapper as Mendoza, his clipped moustache as neat; his chocolate brown face wore a
meditative look.

“Something a little offbeat. What am I saying, damned offbeat. We’ve got five witnesses coming in. People in a car pool—they were right behind this heap, it’s either a
Ford or a Chevy about six years old, either black or dark blue, no make on the plate, of course—”

“They have eyes and see not.”

“—And they all say it was doing about thirty-five in the right lane of the Hollywood freeway when this girl was shoved out of the front seat. Their car just missed ramming the Ford
or Chevy or whatever when it stopped—driver hit the brake hard. He started to get out—the only thing they agree on is it was a he—and then changed his mind and took off like a
scared jackrabbit—I quote one of the witnesses. And when they looked, the girl had gone over the guardrail down onto the Pasadena freeway. A hundred and fifty feet at a
guess—”

“And isn’t that offbeat indeed,” said Mendoza. “D.O.A.?”

“But very,” said Grace. “No I.D. If you want an educated guess, she was one of these kids hitchhiking around the country. Pick up with anybody, ones like her or anybody offered
a ride. Her backpack went over with her. I fetched it in. The usual assortment—a few clothes, a little costume jewelry, cheap camera, deck of Tarot cards—nada
más.”

“God give me patience,” said Mendoza the longtime agnostic. “Another Jane Doe. These stupid kids doing their own thing—no morals or manners or common sense in a
carload!”

Grace said philosophically, “They’re still the minority. But it does seem these days they’re the ones giving us a lot of work, all right. I suppose, if you want to be
fatalistic about it—”

“Fate!” said Mendoza. “Art and his coincidences—my God, why I didn’t quit this job when the old man died and all the loot showed up—”

“Oh, yes,” said Grace amusedly, “I saw you made the Times this morning.”

Sergeant Lake came in with another telex from the National Crime Information Center. It was of academic interest only. There had been a job pulled in Sacramento last week, the newest switch on
the bank-heist, bank manager’s wife held hostage . . .