Murder with Love

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

'A Luis Mendoza story means superlative suspense' Los Angeles Times An earthquake shakes Southern California and the Los Angeles Police Department. With no air-conditioning and a temperature around 98 degrees the heat is turned up when there's a triple shooting of a highly respected Doctor, his wife and his nurse. Can Lieutenant Luis Mendoza and his team solve the case while chaos reigns around them?

Release date: May 21, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

Mendoza drifted into the Homicide Bureau about three o’clock of a hot Friday afternoon: hotter than they usually got in early August. The air conditioning was not on, and
Sergeant Lake looked stickily uncomfortable at his desk by the switchboard.

“So you finally show up,” he said. “They haven’t got around to us yet.”

“So I see,” said Mendoza. Beyond the anteroom, across the big communal detective office, all but two of the tall windows were missing all their glass. “And I’m entitled
to half a day off for once. Anything new gone down?”

Sergeant Lake opened his mouth and suddenly the building shook a little and swayed. “Damn it, they say we’ll be getting these aftershocks for a month,” said Lake uneasily.
“And I don’t feel just so happy sitting here this high up all day.”

“Well, the building hasn’t fallen down yet, Jimmy.”

“Higgins went out on a new body, but it didn’t sound like much of anything—another heart attack, probably. The autopsy report came in on that bum—you don’t have to
ask what it says. Matt and Jase are out looking for possibles on the heist, and I don’t know where everybody else is.”

Mendoza went into his office, yawning. As he sat down in his desk chair, the building moved slightly again and the desk slithered an inch or so away from him. “Damnation,” he said
mildly.

The men at Central Homicide, LAPD, had been busy at the usual humdrum routine up to last Monday; there hadn’t been anything big or very baffling on hand, just the tedious routine of
clearing up after violent death. They’d had the heist job, a bar over on Fourth, the bartender shot; and the inevitable suicide, and the old wino over on the Row dead in an alley, and they
had just cleaned up a hit-run. They had all gone home on Monday night, and the night watch had gone home by five-fifty Tuesday morning, and like ninety-five percent of the residents of L.A. County,
were asleep in bed when a major earthquake occurred to Southern California. Later scientific estimates placed its epicenter out east of Newhall, but earthquakes are unpredictable in effect, and
downtown L.A. being on a direct north-south line with the epicenter, destruction hit there too. A good many windows in the Police Building had been smashed, a few sidewalks buckled, a number of
streets had been a shambles of broken glass from storefront windows, and over on Skid Row the old Midnight Mission, sheltering its usual collection of derelicts, had collapsed in rubble. Oddly
enough there’d been only one casualty there: everybody had got out but one man when the roof fell in. The autopsy report was on Mendoza’s desk now; he didn’t look at it. He yawned
again and lit a cigarette.

Out in the valley, of course, there had been devastation and disaster, and for forty-eight hours nearly every law man in the county had forgotten his regular job to help out on all that had to
be done, from directing traffic down here to helping evacuate nearly a hundred thousand people from their homes to picking up looters in evacuated areas to ferrying people to the nearest
civil-defense centers. But now things were getting cleaned up. The engineers had drained the reservoir and the dam was under repair, so all the evacuees had gone back home yesterday. The searchers
had found the last of the bodies in the rubble of the two hospitals which had collapsed, and it was going to be a good long time before those freeways were in use again, where the overpasses had
fallen down. Things were getting back to normal. Only, as usual after a major quake, they were getting the aftershocks, some of them registering respectably on the Richter scale, and the experts
said they might go on for weeks.

Mendoza, finding himself tossed unceremoniously out of bed in Tuesday’s pre-dawn, and hearing Alison’s exclamation as she picked herself up from the other side of the bed, had been
much occupied since; with things getting cleared up, he had taken most of today off. In fact, this was the first time he’d been to the office since Monday night—all hands had been
needed in the disaster areas. Fortunately Hollywood was not in line with the quake’s epicenter, and the house on Rayo Grande Avenue had only lost a few dishes and glassware.

Hackett came in looking hot and tired. “Jimmy said you’d finally shown up. Well, I don’t blame you for taking some time off. They haven’t got round to our windows yet, I
see.” Men had come on Wednesday and carefully cleared away the shards of glass still in the frames, but they were probably replacing the windows one floor at a time; and this was a big
building. “And do you know what I just saw in the Herald? Talk about insult to injury—the specialists are now saying that because this one was on the San Gabriel fault,
there’s still pressure building on the San Andreas and we could have another big one any time. My God.”

“Yes, I saw that—encouraging,” said Mendoza absently.

“And we’ll never get anybody for that heist job. No special M.O., it might have been any pro hood in town.”

“Also encouraging.” But the only homicides occurring since Tuesday morning had been natural deaths—heart attacks, and one heat prostration.

At least they had Nick Galeano back with them, just this week, from his little siege in the hospital after he’d been shot up by a kid high on the acid.

Higgins wandered in and said, “Welcome back. Not that I blame you for taking some time off, Luis.” He pulled his tie loose, got out a cigarette; he and Hackett together made the
office suddenly smaller. “The new one’s just more paper work—another coronary, looks like, and probably brought on by fright at these damn aftershocks. And do you know what those
damn-fool experts are saying now? In the Herald—”

“We saw it,” said Hackett. “Spreading alarm and despondency, if you ask me. Not, for God’s sake, that anybody in my family is worried— Mark got quite a kick out of
it, first one for him, and Angel just says, Fate. What is to be will be. Well, I suppose she’s right at that.”

“And Mary says the same thing,” said Higgins gloomily. “Steve and Laura got a charge out of it too—their first one. And we didn’t get any damage, but—”
He massaged his prominent jaw. Mendoza and Hackett regarded him with idle amusement. Higgins the longtime bachelor, falling for Bert Dwyer’s widow, had now some hostages to fortune to worry
about: Bert’s good kids, and the new baby due in October.

“God,” said Hackett, “I wish it’d either cool off or our windows would get put back.” It was obviously useless to pipe refrigerated air conditioning to offices
minus windows. “We don’t usually get it quite so bad in August—”

“I’ll tell you something funny, Art,” said Higgins. “It’s always hot when we get a quake. Hotter than usual. I wonder if there’s any connection.”

“Well, one of the experts up at the planetarium—on TV last night—seems to think it’s a matter of the sun and moon being in direct alignment. There was an eclipse on
Monday night, you know—”

Matt Piggott and Jason Grace came in and Grace said, “Have a nice morning off? Not that I blame you. We might as well throw that heist job in Pending, we’ll never land on anybody
with enough evidence.” His chocolate-brown face, moustache as neatly narrow as Mendoza’s, wore a pensive look.

“I said so,” said Hackett.

“And aside from the paper work on the other bodies, business slow,” said Piggott. “Everybody so scared by the quake they’re sitting quiet at home, maybe.”

“Waiting for the next one,” agreed Grace. He lit a cigarette and strolled over to the windows, and Hackett told him nervously to stay away from there.

“One of these aftershocks could send you right out. I wish to God there was some legwork to do, I’d just as soon be on the street as up this high—”

“Fate,” said Mendoza. “Trust your guardian angel, Art.”

“And you can laugh,” said Piggott, “but there are, you know. The guardian angels. Look at Higgins—and Tom, come to that.” They thought about that; maybe there were.
Higgins getting away from those three escaped cons, back in April, without a scratch; and Tom Landers’ strange ordeal last June, when he’d got mistakenly identified as a pro hood. But
Landers’ guardian angel, you could say, had been pretty, trim, smart (in both senses) Policewoman O’Neill down in R. and I.

“How’s Tom doing with that cute blonde?” wondered Hackett. “Anybody heard lately?” It was Landers’ day off today.

“He’s not,” said Grace sadly. “His mind’s made up all right, but she’s a very sensible sort of girl, that one. Says they haven’t known each other long
enough to be sure. But she’s still dating him, so maybe he’ll get her to marry him eventually.”

The inside phone rang and Mendoza picked it up. “Yes, Jimmy?”

“Things starting to move again,” said Lake. “Shooting at a travel agency over on Spring.”

“Right.” Mendoza passed that on. “You can toss for it.”

“I’ll go,” said Hackett at once. “I feel safer on terra firma.” He got up.

Grace grinned. “In earthquake country—like the old joke says—there are times when the terra just isn’t so firma.”

“That does it,” said Higgins. “I’ll go too, with the third-rate vaudeville jokes floating around. And I don’t like these damn windows any more than you,
Art.”

They left Mendoza yawning again. “And the elevators,” said Hackett as he punched the button. “They can get jammed—”

It was the Acme Travel Agency, We Send You Better, and a little crowd had collected in the street outside, where the black-and-white was parked at the curb. Hackett and Higgins
shouldered through the crowd to find another small gathering inside the building. Off to one side, one uniformed man was riding herd on half a dozen people and his partner was standing over two
people sitting in a couple of the chairs lined at one side of the long counter—a sullen-faced dark young man and a sobbing blonde. There was a body on the floor on this side of the counter,
with the colorful travel posters above it.

The second uniformed man came forward. “Very glad to see you, sir. Quite a little party here, by what we gather. It was the owner called us—Mr. Haskell—” He nodded at a
scared-looking middle-aged man over there with three women, another man. “Seems this guy just walked in and started shooting. Here’s his gun.” He handed Higgins a big revolver. It
was a Colt .45, empty now.

Hackett bent over the body. Another young man, a good-looking man, fair, well-dressed in a light-gray suit, white shirt, dark tie. He’d been hit in the body, at least a couple of slugs,
maybe more, and he’d bled a good deal onto the patterned vinyl flooring.

“He just—he just walked in and started shooting—” The middle-aged man came forward hesitantly. “You more police? He—that one—” he nodded at the
corpse, “he’d just come in, with the lady, his name was Gorton, he said they wanted plane reservations for Rome, and I was just— When this other one came in and just started
shooting—no reason at all—and Ruby screamed, that’s Ruby, she works here of course, I ought to say I own the business, it’s my own business, my wife and I—only Marge
went to the bank, thank God she wasn’t here when— And he just started shooting, and—”

“All right,” said Hackett, and stood up.

“There’s an ambulance on the way, sir,” said the other uniformed man. “All these people say they witnessed it, so we held ’em for you.”

“So who’s the marksman?” asked Higgins genially. The sullen young man didn’t look up at him.

“Goddamn little bitch,” he said. “It was her I ought to’ve shot. Her too. Just bad luck I didn’t get her too.” He was also a fairly good-looking fellow, dark
and tall, with a pugnacious jaw, and well dressed. “Damn little bitch—and my partner—my good old friend and partner! Rome, yet. With my wife—on
his vacation! For God’s sake, I ought to’ve—”

“So, what’s your name?” asked Higgins.

“Oh, for God’s sake. William J. Campden. He’s Dick Gorton. For God’s sake—Campden and Gorton, such buddy-buddy partners—for God’s sake, in college
together, and—”

The blonde emerged from her handkerchief, where she sat sobbing, and she was a very pretty blonde even with her eye makeup smeared over one cheek and her eyes red. She was, in fact, quite a dish
for any male who appreciated the obvious. She had big brown eyes and a nice slim rounded figure, and her long flaxen hair waved shimmering past her bare shoulders, and she was wearing a very
abbreviated white sundress and spike-heeled white sandals; her toenails were painted blood-red. She sobbed and hiccuped and said, “You big bastard! Killing Dicky! You weren’t ever going
to know anything about it—it didn’t matter—you were supposed to think I was visiting Mother in Colorado Springs just like I told you! You wouldn’t have known
anything about—and you didn’t need to kill him! You didn’t—”

“So it’s Fate,” said Campden bitterly. “I just happen to leave the office early and stroll up to Benny’s bar for a drink. Just in time to see my dear little
girl-wife and my buddy-buddy partner—who I thought was up at Tahoe, where he said he was going—all cozily going into a travel agency arm in arm. Rome yet, the man says. My God.
I wouldn’t have known— Oh, you are a prize, Sandra. You really are.”

“Well, you wouldn’t have! And you didn’t need to—”

“Mr. Campden, if you’d just—”

“Oh, hell,” said Campden. He looked up at Hackett and Higgins. “It was just damn bad luck I had the gun on me. Or Fate. We keep it at the office, I was taking it home to oil
it. And I’ve got a temper that goes off—as you could maybe guess.” He sighed a long deep sigh. “So—he’s dead. She’s the one I should have— Little
bitch Sandra. And me the innocent husband, never suspecting a thing.”

“We weren’t g-going till next month, he said Rome in September was w-wonderful—but I was so scared about the earthquake so he asked for his vacation early—and you had to
see us, just an accident really— Oh, Dicky!”

“All right, Mr. Campden, up,” said Hackett. “I have to explain all your rights to you,” and he started to go through that ritual. Higgins was calling up more cars, to
ferry the witnesses in to make statements.

The Central beat was getting back to normal after the earthquake: the irrational, the wanton, the senseless crime and violence.

By the time they got all the witnesses back to the office, Palliser had come in, so he and Grace and Piggott shared the job of getting the statements down with Hackett and
Higgins. It turned out that Campden was a lawyer; he and Gorton had shared offices on Spring Street. Now it would be up to the D.A. what he wanted to call this, manslaughter or murder second or
whatever.

They were still busy on that when Lake put through a call from Wilcox Street.

“Mendoza?” Sergeant Barth of that station in the middle of Hollywood. “We’ve got a thing here we want you on from the start. Whether you’re busy down there or
not.”

“Not very, for once. What’s up?”

“Well, it could be quite a thing—I’d just like the experts on it, Mendoza.” Barth sounded abrupt and worried. “It’s La Presa Drive up above the boulevard.
Bring a lab team, hah? Right now.”

“¿Cómo? Something important?”

“To us, yes,” said Barth. “One of ours. Patrolman on our beat. No, he’s not dead, but his chances don’t look so good.”

“¡Cómo! I’m on my way.” Mendoza reached for his hat and started out. “Jimmy, I want a lab truck to meet me at this address.” He passed it
over. “Pronto. Seems business is picking up.”

It was still very hot on the street, in late afternoon. The Ferrari’s steering wheel was nearly too hot to touch. But at least the freeways downtown hadn’t collapsed, and he made
good time up to Hollywood.

La Presa Drive . . . Luis Mendoza had been a cop on this force for twenty-four years and had ridden a squad car awhile; he knew his city in and out. This was a quiet little backwater with some
of the oldest streets, the oldest houses, in the hills above Hollywood. There were new, smartly fashionable areas up here but this wasn’t one of them. The winding narrow streets off Outpost
Drive had a faded gentility; the houses on them had once, thirty years ago, been substantial upper-class houses, many of them large, but time had run by and the moneyed people, the elite of
Hollywood, had moved to newer fashionable residential areas.

When he found the house, around many curves of the narrow street, there were three cars parked in front, one a black-and-white. As he parked the Ferrari, the big mobile lab truck pulled up
behind him and Scarne and Duke got out of the front seat, with Marx and Horder climbing out the back.

It was a big old frame house, perhaps forty years old. Like most of the houses up here, it didn’t have much yard around it: these were small lots carved from the hillside. It was painted
white, it was two-storied, with a strip of lawn and a front porch. The front door was open and as Mendoza stepped to the porch Sergeant Barth appeared there—stocky, middle-aged,
worried-looking.

“Mendoza, glad to see you. Now we’ve got a very funny thing here indeed. You’ll want to talk to his wife, of course—she’s at the hospital, naturally, went along in
the ambulance—as long as there’s any chance—but it didn’t look too good. Well.” Barth passed a hand across his face. “He’s a good man, Mendoza.
One of our bright young men. Kind to end up downtown as captain—a career man. Patrick Henry Logan.”

“So what happened?” Mendoza glanced around the living room. It was large and rectangular, dim because the house faced north, and rather sparsely furnished: a long Naugahyde-covered
couch, a few chairs, a long coffee table, plain beige drapes and carpet. Another plainclothesman and a uniformed man were bending over chalk marks at the other end of the room. A door there gave a
glimpse into a den or dining room, to the right; to his left here, the square entrance hall had stairs leading up.

“There’s no sense to it,” said Barth angrily. “Look, Mendoza, he’s a good man. He’s got four years’ service with us and he’s passed the detective
exam already. He’d be up for promotion when there was a hole left. He’s twenty-six, married three years—his wife’s name’s Sally, she works part time at a dress shop
down on Sunset. They haven’t any family yet, and there’s house payments, I suppose, car payments— I don’t know. What I do know, I’ve talked to some of the
other men he worked with, and there isn’t anything showing—Logan and his wife get on fine, her father was a cop too, retired captain out of Hollenbeck—and Logan wouldn’t,
for God’s sake, have any enemies—a very easygoing guy, doesn’t get into arguments with people, very clean record with us—an ordinary fellow—well, not ordinary, an
ambitious career man—but you see what I mean. There’s just no reason—”

“All right, I’ve got Logan. What happened to him? And what do you want here, the full treatment?”

“But absolutely,” said Barth. “For a start, this room, the den and the kitchen.” Mendoza nodded at the lab men, who started unpacking their bags silently. “So, his
wife doesn’t work Fridays. He’s on the swing watch, due in for briefing at three-thirty, start the tour at four. Riding a one-man car in central Hollywood. He’d have left home
about three, to get down to the station and change into uniform. His wife said good-bye to him about a quarter of three when she went out to do some marketing. They’ve both got cars, yes. She
came home about three-forty-five and found him. Up there.” The chalk marks on the carpet were at the end of the room, just under a window; also bloodstains—quite a little blood had been
spilled on the carpet, there and over by the door into the den.

“The call went down at three-forty-nine, Sergeant,” said the uniformed man. “And I’ll back that up, my God— Pat’s a very mild guy, easygoing all right, nobody
could have any reason to—”

“She called the ambulance, and us,” said Barth. “Whoever it was, Mendoza, and whatever the hell it was, he’d been all but beaten to death. I don’t know whether any
weap. . .