Malicious Mischief

Book 0: A Vic Varallo Mystery

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

'My favourite American crime-writer' New York Herald Tribune Charles O'Connor of the Glendale police and Vic Varallo are having dinner with their wives when they are interrupted by a call informing them of murder. The victim is an old, nearly blind woman, killed in her daughter's flat. This is the first of a spate of crimes including a serial dog thief, the hit-and-run killing of a young mother and her two children, a knife fight and a row of flower pots - growing marijuana. All in a day's work for the Glendale P. D.

Release date: October 14, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

Lieutenant Charles O’Connor accepted the highball Varallo handed him, sat back, sipped, and said, “Ah . . . I’ve always wanted one, you know, but living
alone—not fair to the dog. But now I’ve got Katy—” And he wasn’t, probably, quite believing that yet, thought Varallo, even this while later. O’Connor, the
wide-shouldered, blue-jawed tough, top marksman among California peace officers, looked still a little fatuously and tenderly sentimental at his Katy.

Who said to the Varallos, “Luckily there’s a fenced yard.” Behind the substantial older house O’Connor was buying on Virginia Avenue. “He did bring it up just after
we were married, but then—”

“But then indeed,” said Varallo. “Brother. Oh, well, all’s well that ends well. But for a while there—” He slid a little further down in his chair, rattling
ice cubes in his glass; he and O’Connor wore grim expressions for a minute, looking back over eight months.

This was January, and as usual Southern California was having a mild heat wave, which wouldn’t last a week. Miss Ginevra Varallo, one year old today but not yet conscious of birthday
parties, was peacefully asleep in the house; it was still warm enough at eight thirty that the Varallos and the O’Connors were relaxing in the patio of the house on Hillcroft Road. The
O’Connors had been married six months to the day; but the grimness wasn’t occasioned by any memory of those days when Katharine, shot by O’Connor’s would-be assassin, lay in
the hospital on the critical list. Shortly after that, the Glendale Police Department had suffered a traumatic shock, which it was just recovering from now.

In June the Chief had had a heart-attack and retired a couple of years early. As it happened, the only ranking officer on the force who had any yen for the job was Captain Jensen of Traffic; he
was the only man on the force who took the Civil Service examination. There were other contenders: a lieutenant from the Pasadena force, Sergeant Walter Albrecht of the L.A.P.D., the deputy chief
of the Burbank force. It could be guessed that the City Council chose the L.A.P.D. man because of that force’s very hot reputation. But even the L.A.P.D. can harbor a bastard occasionally, as
the Glendale cops discovered.

Albrecht had stuck for years in sergeant’s rank, they could all surmise, because of his cross-cut personality. He was a bad-tempered, bitter, arrogant fellow in his fifties, with a lust
for power: a rather ugly stoop-shouldered man looking older than he was. He rapidly alienated every man on the force: had an early run-in with O’Connor, and, furious at failing to provoke
O’Connor into resigning, made a few inept tries at railroading both O’Connor and Sergeant Wayne off the force on trumped-up accusations.

The reasonless and often detrimental new rules he set up, solely to use the power he had, irritated the patrolmen and plain-clothes men alike. In attempting to set up his own Internal Affairs
bureau—with Albrecht doing all the accusing and questioning and issuing demerits and threats of demotion if a man talked back to him—he succeeded in provoking some resignations from
uniformed men; and the force was undermanned as it was. The entire force had suffered through an unhappy and uneasy six months under its new Chief.

But Albrecht went too far when he tried to accuse O’Connor of accepting a bribe; that pair had, of course, clashed head-on at once, and that was the culmination. The entire plain-clothes
division, in a body, told Albrecht just what they thought of him; and O’Connor went to the Civil Service Commission. It had looked for a while as if Albrecht would put up a fight, but in the
end he was persuaded to offer a surly resignation. The Council hastily named Jensen to the Chief’s desk, and their nightmare was over. Jensen had been on this force for twenty-three years,
and was a quiet shrewd man of great common sense. He would do a good job, and he was an easy man to get on with.

“All’s well that ends well,” said Varallo again a little sleepily, sipping Scotch and water. “I had visions for a while of starting in all over again on some other force,
God forbid. At my age.” He’d resigned as Captain from a small-town force upstate, started over again here in Glendale only a couple of years ago, and just about made Detective before
the baby came.

“And more fool you,” said Laura severely. “Walking into the nearest police station, please can I be a cop again—the thankless dirty job.”

“Yes, cara.” He smiled at her, cool and slim opposite there, the soft patio light making copper highlights in her brandy-brown hair. “Which I suppose Katharine
would—”

“Oh, yes,” said Katharine. “Yes, indeed, Vic. But can you imagine him in any other job?”

They looked at O’Connor and couldn’t. He was sitting back in his chair, and he filled it, stocky and broad. His bulldog jaw was blue with his heavy beard; and he’d taken off
his jacket, so the shoulder holster with the favorite S. and W. .357 Magnum was in full view. In the last year or so, on definite representations from Katharine, he had made a valiant effort to
stop swearing every time he opened his mouth, and these days didn’t come out with the more colorful cussing they had once heard from him; but he would never look anything but what he was: a
very tough and experienced and shrewd cop.

“Damn the job,” he said now amiably. “It’s after hours. . . . I don’t know what kind. I don’t know much about dogs. Just, I always wanted one.”

“Fortunately I do,” said Katharine. “We usually had one, before—” Before her parents were killed in the accident a few years ago. “Dad liked Scotties, we had
a brindle—”

“Not,” said O’Connor, “a little dog that yaps, Katy. A real dog.”

“But you can’t keep a big dog in the city, Charles. Anything that can bark is a good burglar alarm. Only not a poodle. Nothing that’s ever been terribly popular, because you
know,” said Katharine to Laura, “how that ruins a breed. With everybody and his brother at the amateur breeding. Scotties are nice dogs, really, Charles—you’d like
one.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said O’Connor, finishing his drink. “I don’t know much about the different brands.” He set his glass down on the low table beside
him, and Gideon Algernon Cadwallader appeared from nowhere, his tiger stripes shining and white shirt front immaculate, to fish for ice cubes with one white socked paw. Laura leaped at the same
moment as Katharine, but too late; the glass tilted, the ice cubes slithered out, and Gideon batted one off the table to play with.

“Honestly, that cat,” said Laura. “No, it’s not broken.” She straightened and added mildly, “Damnation.” The phone rang again. “Just like doctors,
I swear—do you take any bets that’s not the office?”

“No bets,” said Katharine. Varallo went to answer it.

“Dr. Goulding swears by police dogs,” said O’Connor. “Smart as they come, he—”

“German shepherds,” said Laura and Katharine simultaneously, and Katharine added, “Entirely too big for the city. Needing all that exercise, and costing a fortune to feed. I
wonder if there are any Scottie breeders around here. Or just possibly, a Sealyham or a—”

Varallo came back to the kitchen door, looking very tall above them there, the light behind turning his crest of blond hair flaxen. “We’ve got a new homicide, Charles. Ray thought
we’d like to hear. Over on Pioneer. You want to go look at it? Ray was just taking off with Hunter.”

“Oh hell,” said O’Connor. That quiet town Glendale hadn’t, up to a year or so ago, got many homicides; but these days, with all the varieties of dope floating around
freely, and the new morality (which used to be called sin) rampant, the rate was up for homicide and assorted other crimes as well anywhere. O’Connor hoisted himself to his feet and reached
for his jacket. “I suppose we’d better.”

“Take my car,” said Varallo, shrugging into his jacket.

“That bug. If he doesn’t kill me in that thing,” said O’Connor to Katharine, “I’ll be back to fetch you sometime, Katy.”

“It’s just envy of the mileage I get,” said Varallo. “See you, cara.”

“—Or maybe,” said Katharine as the men started for the garage, “one of those Welsh Corgis, I’ve heard they’re nice dogs.”

“It’s just as well,” said Laura thoughtfully, “we had Gideon wished on us. Vic had some idea about a dog too, but then he got enamored of all the roses, and what a dog
would do to all his beds—I’d better check on Ginevra.”

“I’ll come too. She is a darling.”

The assassin of last April had ended that affair by hopping Varallo’s old Chevy and driving it to a flaming crash down the hole dug for the new freeway. The Chevy’s
blue-book value was about six hundred bucks; but luckily Varallo’s second Police Positive had been in the car and he got the insurance on that too. With that in hand as a down payment, he had
after rumination started for the used lot of the Rambler dealer in Glendale. In order to get to it he had to walk through the showroom, and there he had suddenly—said Laura, when he came home
and told her about it—gone insane. He had never, in fact, got to the used lot at all, but within half an hour found himself signing the papers and handing over the down payment, on the new
little Gremlin.

O’Connor surveyed it now before climbing in. “Poor man’s imitation of a racer,” he said dourly. The Gremlin was long-nosed, square-backed, jaunty and trim: it was painted
white with red and blue stripes along each side, and its rear window lifted up like a door. “How do you fit into it?”

“Plenty of room,” said Varallo, easing his six-one behind the wheel. “Nice little girl, Charles. Five hundred miles to a tankful of gas. Oil change every six thousand.”
He started the motor. “Ray said, looked like a B. and E., the householder there. A woman.”

“God,” said O’Connor. “And if we do catch up to X, what do you bet he’ll be on parole or have a pedigree from here to there, with the damn judges slapping him on
the wrist and turning him loose. Or giving him ninety days or some such damn fool—”

“Aiuto!” said Varallo. “No bets.”

The address was on Pioneer just off Pacific. There were two squad cars there when Varallo drew up behind the second one and they got out: lights on in the house, the front door open, and
Sergeant Ray Harrison’s middle-aged Dodge parked up ahead. The house, like all the houses on this block, was an elderly frame bungalow, about five rooms. It needed paint, but the yard was
neatly maintained. As Varallo and O’Connor went up the steps to the little porch they heard a woman talking inside, compulsive, agitated, shocked.

“But how could they, why should—She couldn’t possibly have identified anyone, not possibly—And nothing of any value here, for a burglar—why should anyone—my
God, why should—She was very nearly blind, you know, I told you that, she only had about five percent vision in one eye, she couldn’t possibly have identified—I can’t
understand—”

“Just take it easy, Mrs. Shaw.” Harrison’s voice. Varallo pulled open the screen door and they went in.

The front door gave directly onto the living room, the usual arrangement in these old bungalows. A long narrow room across the front of the house, a door at the far end into the kitchen, another
door here to a bedroom. The furniture was old but cared for: a couch needing upholstering, a matching chair, an old American Oriental rug: and wanton violence had swept through here. The drawers of
the old-fashioned built-in sideboard were yanked out, contents strewn where they fell; furniture overturned, mantel ornaments, a clock, swept off to smash on the tile hearth; the upholstered
chair’s seat had been knifed open, the stuffing pulled out. There would be more confusion elsewhere.

Harrison glanced up at them. “The first bedroom,” he said, jerking his head. “Mrs. Shaw—”

She was a nice-looking middle-aged woman, neat gray hair, discreet make-up, nondescript neat clothes. Standing beside her was a pretty dark-haired young woman, a man about the same age.
“But just over to Linda’s for a couple of hours,” said Mrs. Shaw numbly, “sit with the baby while Linda and Jim went out to dinner—not as if it was late and
Mother didn’t mind being alone, she knew the house so well even if she couldn’t—she was listening to the radio when I left, but I can’t understand—nearly blind, she
couldn’t possibly have identified—”

“Mother, don’t,” said the young woman. “It’s no good—please.”

The young man looked at Varallo and O’Connor with interest; he also looked angry. “The wild ones running loose these days,” he said.

A uniformed man came out of the bedroom as Varallo and O’Connor went in. It was a mess, of course. Drawers pulled out and dumped; bedside table overturned; mattress pulled off the bed. And
sprawled half on that and half on the floor, a very elderly woman staring widely at the ceiling with surprised eyes. Marks of bruises on her face.

“Probably beaten,” said Patrolman Stoner, coming in from the rear hall. “What we’ve heard so far, this Mrs. Shaw lives here with the old lady—her mother, Mrs.
Fisher. Both widows. Harriet Fisher. Poor old girl. Mrs. Shaw went to babysit for her daughter, just came home and found this. A mess. Could be the junkies needing to support a habit.”

“It could.” O’Connor looked grim. “A mess, all right. And will we get any usable prints? No damn bets on that either.” He went through the hall to the kitchen. Dick
Hunter, who had just made Detective again after being shoved back into uniform for inadvertently warning the assassin last April, was printing the kitchen door carefully. He looked up.

“It looks as if he, or they, forced the back door, Lieutenant. It’s an old house—screen door there loose—and the usual old lock nearly any key’d open.”

“Yeah. And why,” said O’Connor, “did he or they pick a place down here, Vic? Instead of some place up on Olmsted or Kenneth? Anybody could guess, not much loot to be had
in a neighborhood like this.”

“Is there any reason in the punks, Charles? The punks needing a fix maybe, hitting the first place they come to when it occurs to them to look for loot?”

“Well, damn it, that’s so. Sure.” O’Connor went back and looked at Harriet Fisher again: maybe eighty, a thin little old woman in a flannel nightgown and an old
terry-cloth bathrobe. He passed a hand over his jaw. “And just where the hell to start looking if we don’t get any prints?”

But that was a rhetorical question. They both knew where. They would look in Records for any punks who had pulled similar break-ins, find them, bring them in, and lean on them. Hoping that
eventually they’d find the right X, and that he’d talk. It was in the cards, one like this, that they never would.

“Damn it,” said O’Connor, sounding tired, “just into January, Vic—first homicide of the year. Damn it, the first four years I was on this force we had exactly one.
Murder, I mean. There were the usual suicides and—But damn it—”

“Time’s changing, Charles. We’d better do a little routine.” Varallo felt tired too, looking at Mrs. Fisher.

They lent a hand to the night men for an hour or so, getting statements from Mrs. Shaw, from young Mr. and Mrs. Brent. The neighbors on one side were away from home; those on the other side had
been watching a movie on TV and hadn’t heard anything. Of course, of course. They couldn’t expect Mrs. Shaw to take an inventory, tell them all that was missing,
right then. The Brents gave them something on that: a portable TV, a radio, the little jewelry both women had owned. More routine to do tomorrow, which was Sunday; but
Sunday was just another day to cops.

Then they drove back to Hillcroft Road, and O’Connor collected Katharine and they drove home to the house on Virginia Avenue. Katharine said sleepily that that Ginevra was a darling.
“Only of course we’d never have a blonde one.”

“You never know, Katy,” said O’Connor, a little wryly amused. “I couldn’t tell you what my father looked like—don’t remember him.” Of course he
didn’t remember his mother much either: O’Connor had had a sketchy upbringing in a series of foster homes. “It might be a kind of gamble, Katy.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Katharine, sliding down against his shoulder. “Upright respectable cop and ex-schoolteacher?”

“Ex,” said O’Connor, “was so very near damn right.” He still had occasional nightmares about that, his Katy shot in the back by the assassin, that very minute
he’d asked her to marry him.

“Gave me a story to tell anyway. Most unusual proposal a girl ever had,” said Katharine through a yawn.

As he turned into the drive, O’Connor said, “About that dog—”

“A Scottie. Nice dogs. Or a Sealy. The yard isn’t big enough for anything but a small one, Charles.”

“Well,” said O’Connor doubtfully, “all right, if you say so.”

And Katharine, a bride of six months, still halfway under the delusion that what she said went, thought vaguely she’d look in the yellow pages for local breeders of Scottish terriers
tomorrow. She wasn’t worried. Still ahead of them was O’Connor’s outlandish enthrallment to Champion Sek-mes-Arla of Jebel Musa.

Varallo came into the detective bureau, in the front of the second story of the headquarters building, at ten past eight on Sunday morning. Joe Katz was looking at
Harrison’s initial report on Fisher: Rex Burt was reading a paperback, and Sergeant Fred Wayne was on the phone.

“This thing,” said Katz. “God. The louts. More to do on it, I suppose. Get a better idea of what’s gone. They picked up some latents.”

“I think we got about all we’ll get from the woman last night—the daughter. She’d know the house, of course. Charles and I added it to somewhere around five
C’s,” said Varallo. “Little stuff, Joe—what’d a fence offer? The six-year-old black-and-white TV, the thirty-buck radio, two old-fashioned
diamond rings, a garnet bracelet, a cameo brooch.”

“Piddling,” agreed Katz. “By Ray’s report, they picked up quite a few latents, but at first glance probably all the women’s.”

“Optimistic,” said Varallo.

Wayne put down the phone as O’Connor came in. “Some more of the vandalism overnight,” he said, absently flexing all his muscles: Wayne was built like Tarzan. “Just to
keep us busy. Along Doran and Stocker this time. That was Kogan—he got chased out as the irate owners phoned in.”

“My God, more cars?” said Varallo.

“That’s just what.” They had had, in the last month, vandals wandering around all over, having fun shooting out the windows and windshields of cars left on the street at night.
These days, there were more apartment buildings in Glendale than ever before, and with a good many families owning more than one car, the cars got left on the street overnight. To date, over four
hundred of them in Glendale and Montrose and La Crescenta (which the Glendale force also policed) had had windows and windshields destroyed by what they thought was BB shot, from an air rifle or
something like that. And there was, of course, no possible way even to start investigating that. About all they could guess was that it was juveniles. Getting a kick out of destruction.

Rhys came in, yawning. “Understand we’ve got a new homicide.”

O’Connor growled. Katz said, “I don’t suppose we’ll get the autopsy report before tomorrow. Not that there’ll be much in it.”

“Just a little ray of sunshine,” said Varallo. But if there was forever the routine coming along to work, at least it was good these days to be working it in peace, all pulling
together, with that good quiet man Jensen at the Chief’s desk: not as it had been for months, all of them worrying over tenure on the job, with Albrecht’s unpredictable temper a sword
of Damocles over them. Morale had fallen low through the entire force: these days it was as if a breath of fresh air had swept through the office, and if they cussed about the endless routine
coming along, they went at it cheerfully, at the thankless job.

Varallo went out with Katz to talk to Mrs. Lilian Shaw again, and the Brents. A new call came in as they got back just before noon—an attempted suicide at an apartment over on Lexington:
Rhys and Burt went to look at that. O’Connor had gone out with Wayne to look at the vandalized cars; they were probably still listening to the outraged victims. How the News-Press
had arrived at the figure Vara. . .