Felony Report

Book 0: An Ivor Maddox Mystery

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

In the Hollywood Division of the L.A.P.D., chief of detectives Ivor Maddox and his team have their hands full. There are the routine cases, including the TV actress who overdoses on drugs and alcohol. There are the more complex cases, such as armed robber Dapper Dan, who always says thank you as he takes the cash. And then there are the really bizarre ones: the body that turns up in pieces all over Hollywood; the midget burglar who keeps getting in through seemingly impossible spaces; and the poisoning of hamburger meat in a chain of supermarkets, which leads to a series of random deaths. 'My favourite American crime-writer' New York Herald Tribune

Release date: October 14, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

Maddox had just finished talking to one witness to last night’s heist, and watched the man go out to the corridor glumly. He hadn’t given them anything useful; it
was a run-of-the-mill heist, nothing to tie it up to the several heist jobs over the last three months or so which were the work of the heister they had nicknamed Dapper Dan, or any of the other
anonymous holdups they had on hand to work. This one, at a twenty-four-hour convenience store, was just another anonymous heist, a vague description of the man with the gun, the take fairly modest,
and nowhere to look on it.

D’Arcy was still talking to the second witness; he probably wasn’t getting anything more useful. Pool what they got, thought Maddox, and toss a coin for who should write the report.
It was getting on for ten o’clock on this Tuesday morning of early March. He wondered if it was too early to call the coroner’s office. They had asked for priority on those autopsies;
six bodies at once was something unusual. Central beat downtown might be used to that sort of thing, but Hollywood division—as wild and woolly as Hollywood could sometimes
get—wasn’t. Maddox contemplated the meager notes he’d taken on this latest anonymous heist, and thought about those six bodies—the Babcocks and the Hogans.

George Ellis came into the communal detective office from his office down the hall, looked around, and asked, “Where is everybody? Have we heard anything from the coroner’s office
yet?”

“I was just about to call and ask,” said Maddox. “Joe went out on a new burglary, and Rodriguez is out looking at a body—I don’t know where everybody else is.
There’s no lead at all on this heist, just damn all. They don’t give any kind of description, just a man with a gun.”

Ellis hunched his beefy shoulders. “Bricks without straw. It’s a thankless job.”

D’Arcy’s witness got up and ambled out to the corridor, and D’Arcy came over to Maddox’s desk and said, “Nothing. No useful description, just a fellow maybe
twenty-five with a big gun. Nothing to go anywhere on.”

Neither Maddox nor Ellis said anything; there wasn’t anything to say. Maddox sat back and lit a cigarette and said, “I suppose Bergner’d bite my head off if I called him. They
always take their time.”

“Well, I suppose all the scientific analyses take time,” said Ellis vaguely. And then he said under his breath, “Oh, my God, I’d forgotten about those damn Germans, and
here they are. Damn.”

Maddox followed his glance to the door of the big communal detective office. He’d forgotten the Germans too; they’d been briefed about them from the chief’s office last week. A
group of West German journalists on a tour of a lot of Western nations doing research on police techniques and methods; they had evidently visited most European nations and were now visiting a good
many American cities before heading for the Far East. The little crowd of people at the door of the big office could be nothing else than the Germans, shepherded by a tall, dark, urbane man who
herded them over to Ellis and made introductions. “Lieutenant Ellis—” And he mentioned names, Miller, Keller, Erickson—there were four men and a woman, a buxom fortyish
blonde, Mrs. Grunsky.

“Sergeant Maddox,” responded Ellis politely, “Detective D’Arcy.” It was necessary to be polite. The man with them was a Captain Devereaux from the chief’s
office at Headquarters. The Germans were polite in turn, looking around the office, at thin dark Maddox, lanky D’Arcy, bulky-shouldered Ellis. They had already had a look at the
Communications room. “Perhaps you’d like to see our laboratory,” said Ellis. “Of course any detailed analytical work is sent down to the main laboratory at Central
Headquarters, but we’re equipped to process fingerprints and so on—”

The buxom blonde gave them a toothy smile. “It is all so very interesting,” she said earnestly, in excellent if guttural English, “learning of all these so excellent new
scientific methods for combating evil.” She trailed obediently after the others as Ellis led them out toward the lab.

Devereaux sat down at Rodriguez’ desk next to Maddox’s and offered him a cigarette. “Evil,” he said thoughtfully, lighting his own. “Not quite the word for it, is
it? It’s a while since I’ve been out on the street, but it’s not quite the word.”

D’Arcy thrust out his long lanky legs, slumping in his desk chair, and said, “When you come to think of it, real evil is damn rare, you know.”

“That’s right,” said Maddox. “The thankless job isn’t dealing with evil—that’s too big a word. What we’re seeing and coping with, for our sins, is
the foolishness—you could say the foolishness of fallible man.”

“Nice phrase,” said Devereaux.

“It’s the stupidity—the laziness and greed and mindless violence and the egotism and the impulse. The goddamned foolishness. It gets tiresome.”

“I believe you,” said Devereaux. “I’m thankful to be in administration these days. You boys can cope with the louts on the street.”

“And the victims,” said Maddox tiredly.

The little party of journalists came back from the lab and Devereaux stabbed out his cigarette and got up. “They had a tour of Headquarters yesterday—we’re visiting all the
divisions today. Captain Flagg at Hollenbeck is taking us all out to lunch—at the chief’s expense.”

He had just shepherded the group out when Rodriguez came in, looking disgruntled, and said, “Just more paperwork. An old wino dead on a bus-stop bench out on Sunset. No ID. See if anybody
has got his prints, but the city will have to bury him. Looks like natural causes, he was probably in his seventies and not a mark on him.” He sat down at his desk, brushing his neat
moustache, and didn’t immediately start to type a report.

Ellis came back and asked, “Have we got anything from the coroner’s office yet on those bodies?”

“I was just about to call,” said Maddox. He took a last drag on his cigarette and thought idly, in addition to all the stupidity, the foolishness—the real evil, a thing they
didn’t see once in a blue moon—there was also the occasional lunacy, and that wasn’t the individual’s fault either. He reached for the phone, and it shrilled at him.

“Sergeant Maddox.”

“Well, we got this and that for you,” said Dr. Bergner at the coroner’s office.

“I was just going to call you.”

“It was meperidine,” said Bergner. “An OD of meperidine, all six bodies.”

“I’ll be damned,” said Maddox mildly. “Well, it looked like an OD of some kind. How did they get it?”

“That’s your business,” said Bergner. “But it looks fairly offbeat, Maddox. It wasn’t injected—there’s not a mark on any of them—so it was orally
ingested. There are a number of prescription tablets and capsules on the market, might have been any one of them—we’re still completing analyses and we’ll pin it down for you
eventually. All I can say is, I can’t think of any of those that come any stronger than about fifty milligrams—it’s a narcotic analgesic similar to morphine—and the usual
dose is one to two every four hours. All of these people had a massive overdose, call it something like twelve to fifteen tablets or capsules. As I say, we’re still working on it, probably be
able to tell you more later, but to go on with, the four Babcocks died anywhere between ten and midnight on Saturday night, the Hogans about the same time. They’d all had a meal sometime
about six o’clock. The damn thing is, if they’d been found and treated, they could all have been saved, you know—pump the stomachs, administer an antidote, and they’d have
lived.”

“Yes,” said Maddox. “You can’t say how they got it?”

“Just, it was ingested orally,” said Bergner irritably. “I’m not going out on a limb—I don’t know. I will say that judging by the times—the time it
would have taken them to die of the OD—they probably ingested it about the time they had the meal. Call it five to six P.M.”

“Symptoms?” asked Maddox.

“They’d have come on fairly rapidly, with that much of an OD. Light-headedness, dizziness, weakness—in medical terms respiratory depression, depression of the central nervous
system, eventual coma—the first symptoms would have come on within thirty to forty-five minutes. If any of them had been able to call for help—but apparently they weren’t.
It’s a damned queer thing, Maddox. Was there any connection between them?”

“Not that we know. Queer isn’t the word for it. That’s all you can tell us so far?”

“We’ll have an analysis of stomach contents for you by tomorrow, if that’s going to say anything. And we’ll be able to pin down just what prescription brand it was, but
as I say, there are several on the market—some of them prescribed as tranquilizers too.”

“Well, thanks very much,” said Maddox. “Whatever else you can tell us we’ll appreciate.”

“I’ll get back to you when we’ve got anything else,” said Bergner.

Maddox relayed that to D’Arcy and Rodriguez.

“But that doesn’t make much sense,” said Rodriguez. “All six of them? They didn’t know each other, by what we’ve heard. A suicide pact is just damn
ridiculous—the Babcocks a nice, normal, happy family, and the Hogans—I haven’t seen any lab reports, but damn it, Ivor, we were on the Babcocks and there wasn’t any
prescription medication in the place. My God, and the two little kids—it doesn’t make sense.”

“Not much,” agreed Maddox. “We want to talk to the Durands again and the Bryant woman. Bergner isn’t committing himself, but it sounds to me as if they could all have
gotten it with the meal they’d had, about five to six, he said. The times seem to be right.”

“That’s crazy,” said D’Arcy. “Somebody sneaking in and spiking the soup? Two ordinary, quiet, humdrum families? Why and how?”

“God knows,” said Maddox. “We’ll have to go around on it, that’s all, and hope to get some more detail from Bergner eventually. D’Arcy, you see if you can get
hold of the Bryant woman.” He looked up the number in his notebook and reached for the phone to call Mrs. Durand.

She was at home and said yes, of course they’d tell the police whatever they could, it still didn’t seem possible and they couldn’t understand it. Yes, she’d call her
husband and they’d be expecting him.

Maddox went out to the corridor and met Sue and Daisy Hoffman just coming back to their little office across from the communal detective office. Sue said, “I can’t say I’ll be
sorry to get out of this rat race for a while.”

“And I’ll be just as happy to have you sitting quiet at home,” said Maddox. “Minding the baby.” The baby was due at the end of July; Sue would be starting maternity
leave in six weeks, and could take six months off the job without losing seniority. “You all right?”

“Just a little fed up,” said Sue. “We’ve wasted a couple of hours.”

“What do you expect of people?” asked Daisy robustly. Slim, blond Daisy didn’t look at all like a grandmother, but she was. “Kids.”

“What was it?” asked Maddox.

“Probably attempted molestation, but we’ll never know unless we catch up to him another time. Little girl playing in her own front yard tells mama a funny-looking man tried to get
her to go somewhere in his car. She can’t give us a description of him or the car, just says he was funny-looking and she was scared of him. What can you expect? She’s only
six.”

“And the next thing we’ll hear,” said Sue, “is that the same character succeeded in coaxing another little girl into his car.”

“Take it as it comes,” said Daisy. “Something new down?”

“Just the autopsy findings on those bodies,” said Maddox. “OD of meperidine, probably Demerol, and there’s something damned funny about it. At the moment it just
doesn’t seem to make much sense.”

As he went out to the parking lot for the Maserati—and one of these days he was going to have to think about another car, the old girl was probably on her last legs, needing various new
parts—he was thinking about what Bergner had said, and trying to fit the few things they knew into the picture. He and Rodriguez had gone out on the Babcocks, D’Arcy on the Hogans, but
the two pictures were oddly similar.

Charles and Linda Durand lived in a small attractive house on Laurel Street in West Hollywood. Linda Durand had been Betty Babcock’s sister, and her husband worked for a large insurance
firm, as had Edward Babcock; the men’s friendship had been cemented through marrying sisters. They had both been transferred to California by the firm a couple of years ago, from Chicago, and
the Babcocks had been buying a house not far from the Durands on Hayworth Street. The Durands had a three-year-old girl; the Babcocks had had an eight-year-old, Steve, and a six-year-old,
Eileen.

Linda Durand had called her husband and he was there; they looked at Maddox and heard what he had to tell them, and Linda said incredulously, “Demerol? But that’s just
impossible—there wasn’t anything like that in the house! None of them was on medication of any kind, and Betty had a sort of thing about not taking medicine of any sort—about the
only thing there’d have been there was aspirin—but we told you that then, on Sunday, when you said it looked like an overdose—Demerol—it just isn’t possible. You
don’t mean you think it was suicide, that they wanted to die—and to kill the children too—that just isn’t possible!”

“We don’t know, Mrs. Durand,” said Maddox. “All we know is that’s what killed them. Do you know if they knew a Mr. and Mrs. Hogan, on Oxford Avenue?”

They looked at him blankly. They were a nice-looking couple, Durand tall and well-built with a blunt-featured face, friendly eyes, she small and blond and pretty. “Hogan?” said
Durand. “No, I’m sure they didn’t. We all knew most of the same people, you know. And that’s right, what Linda says, it’s just impossible that they—that they did
it themselves—and the children—”

She uttered a little sob. “Just not possible they’re gone—we told you how it was on Sunday. It was their tenth wedding anniversary and we were going to have dinner together. I
said I’d make an apple pie, it was Ed’s favorite. We were supposed to be there at one o’clock, and we couldn’t get any answer at the door, and the back door was unlocked and
we went in and found them—all of them dead. And I just don’t understand it. There wasn’t any reason, they were in love with each other and crazy about the kids—” She
broke down crying, and Durand put his arm around her, obviously distressed and upset. He just said miserably, “That’s so. There just wasn’t any reason for it.”

Maddox thought it didn’t make much sense either, but thinking of what Bergner had said, he asked, “Could you tell me about what time they usually had dinner?”

Linda clutched her handkerchief in a little ball. “Dinner? Well, Ed usually got home around six or a little before and Betty always had dinner ready. The way I do. Why? Do you think
somebody murdered them? But how? There’s nobody—everybody liked Betty and Ed! I don’t understand it!”

How indeed, thought Maddox, and why? An ordinary, harmless, well-liked young couple? With a pair of nice, normal kids. It would, in early March, be dark by five or so, but it was hard to imagine
some nameless, motiveless villain sneaking into the little suburban house and adding Demerol to the dinner keeping warm in the oven. And, thinking of what Bergner had said, he thought back to that
scene last Sunday afternoon. The attractive, well-kept little house on a quiet residential street. The Durands standing by stunned and shocked, and the stolid uniformed man who had answered the
first call. Just a few things obvious: that it had been an OD, poisoning of some sort, judging by the bodies; that it had probably happened the previous night. Babcock had been in a big armchair in
the living room, the evening Herald in his lap. The TV had been on, in the tiny den down the hall, and the kids had been there. An eight- and six-year-old, probably their bedtimes would
have been eight, eight-thirty; so they’d been unconscious before that. Betty Babcock had been in the kitchen, and you could deduce that she had realized something was wrong, for she had been
trying to call for help. She had been sprawled on the floor just below the wall phone, and the phone was dangling off the hook. Bergner said, lightheadedness, dizziness, respiratory failure, coma.
Had she called her husband, found him already unconscious, been trying to call the paramedics? And passing out before she could do so, dying quietly on the kitchen floor while the others died
elsewhere?

Dinner. He asked Linda, “Did your sister usually clean up the kitchen as soon as dinner was over?” She had that night, at any rate; the dishwasher had been full of clean dishes, the
kitchen counters polished.

“Yes, she always did, she didn’t like to leave things. But how could it have happened?”

Maddox wished he knew. He hadn’t seen a lab report yet as to whether there had been any extraneous latent prints in the place. Before he had left the office he had called the lab and told
Baker to get a sample of everything edible at the Laurel Street house for analysis, and eventually that might tell them something. They had, of course, looked through the house, and as Linda said
there was no prescription medication anywhere, only a bottle of aspirin and an antacid remedy.

Marking time, he got the name of the only doctor the Babcocks had gone to here. “Betty didn’t like doctors much, she took Stevie to this one only when he had an ear infection last
year.” A Dr. Bauer on Melrose Avenue, a pediatrician. And a pediatrician wouldn’t have been handing out a prescription for Demerol, and even if Betty Babcock had had a fit of some kind
and decided to do away with herself and her family—or if Ed Babcock had—what had become of the container? Where had the Demerol come from? They had searched all the wastebaskets, the
refuse can in the garage, and nothing had shown up. They hadn’t taken the garbage disposal apart; maybe they’d better do that, just in case. But where could the Hogans fit in a scene
like that?

Maddox sighed and tried to think of any more intelligent questions to ask.

At about the same time, D’Arcy was getting much the same thing from Marlene Bryant. She was a plump, rather pretty woman in her forties; she lived in an old apartment
building on Vermont, with a husband who drove a delivery truck for Sears Roebuck. Their three children were all grown and married. She worked at a dress shop on Western, but told D’Arcy she
just hadn’t felt up to going to work yesterday or today. “After finding Mom and Dad like that, you know. I can’t get over it, it was terrible. Just terrible. And now you’re
telling me they were poisoned some way—Demerol? That’s some kind of medicine, isn’t it? They weren’t taking any medicine regular, either of them—and they were both
just fine. They weren’t young, Mom was seventy-one and Dad seventy-three—but they were just fine! Just like I told you Sunday, I usually went to see them on the weekend, and they
didn’t go out much, just to the market or once in a while to play cards with the neighbors, and when nobody opened the door, well, I had a key, of course, in case of emergency, and I went
in—and found them. Oh! I tried to keep my head, I called my husband and he called an ambulance—but how could they have gotten poisoned? With this medicine? There wasn’t any
medicine around, they’d both been just fine—”

Hogan had worked for the Parks and Recreation Department, been retired for eight years. They had owned the modest little house on Oxford Street and by the daughter’s account had been a
humdrum, harmless, elderly couple with no enemies and not many friends. They had stayed home and watched television. There certainly hadn’t been any prescription medicine in the place.

Thinking of what Bergner had said, D’Arcy asked her what time they had usually had dinner. “Oh, between five and six, I guess. Maybe earlier on Saturday, there were some shows on TV
that night they liked. But how could they have gotten poisoned? Mom was always careful about keeping the refrigerator clean—but you said it was this medicine—”

“Do you know if they knew anyone named Babcock?”

She stared at him bewilderedly. “Why, no—I never heard the name—and I’d know everybody they knew—no, they didn’t.”

D’Arcy couldn’t think what else to ask her. There would be a lab man at the Hogans’ house now, collecting everything from the refrigerator, the medicine chest; probably
whatever they got on this would be from the lab. And they did sometimes get the offbeat ones; but this was the queerest one they had had in a while.

He went back to the office and met Maddox just driving into the parking lot. They compared notes and Maddox said, “It’s so damn shapeless. Why these people? And the two poor
kids?”

“Just ordinary people,” agreed D’Arcy. “No rhyme or reason. Maybe when Bergner gives us something else it’ll begin to make sense, but I don’t see
how.”

“The lab ought to know something about prints by now.” Maddox called and got an irritable-sounding Franks.

“Listen, there are only twenty-four hours in a day, Maddox. With all these heists and burglaries—I’ve bee. . .