No Evil Angel

Book 0: An Ivor Maddox Mystery

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

'My favourite American crime-writer' New York Herald Tribune Jewel, a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl, has disappeared from her home in a squalid suburb of Los Angeles. A popular young salesman, Steven Wray, is found slumped over the wheel of his car, dead from an overdose. A respectable old lady left her sister's some weeks ago, but to the alarm of her daughter has still not arrived home. A petrol station is held up and its unresisting attendant needlessly shot dead. This all leads us in the end to Steve Wray's very curious secret; to an atrocious discovery in a walled-up bathroom; and, at last, to Jewel herself . . .

Release date: July 14, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

Susan Carstairs had just stepped out of her uniform skirt, in the women’s locker room, when Sergeant Daisy Hoffman looked in and said tersely,
“Don’t.”

Poised on one leg, Susan looked over her shoulder and said crossly, “Damn.”

Sergeant Hoffman, who was a still trim and good-looking blonde at forty-five and a recent grandmother, grinned at her amiably and said, “Undamn. Maddox wants some help.”

“Oh,” said Susan. She stepped back into her skirt, tucked in her blouse and closed the zipper. She wondered if it really was all that obvious. To everybody, she thought rather
drearily, but Sergeant Ivor Maddox. Damn the man and damn Sergeant Hoffman and above all damn the starry-eyed twenty-one-year-old Susan, six years ago, for being such a lunatic as to think
about joining the L.A.P.D.’s female branch. “What with?” she asked, trying to sound still cross. She straightened her blouse collar and rummaged for lipstick in her bag.

“No idea. Said he’d meet you—whoever—at the garage entrance.”

“Oh. All right.” Susan snapped the bag shut. And her mother was going out tonight, and she’d meant to take herself to dinner at that rather expensive but how atmospheric little
French place—which probably wouldn’t have a table left after she’d finished helping out Sergeant Maddox. There was, of course, no chance whatever that Maddox, on the conclusion of
business, would casually ask her to have dinner with him. Oh, no, thought Susan bitterly. Nice reliable Carstairs, in her neat navy coat and skirt: Policewoman Carstairs—who wanted to date a
policewoman, for heaven’s sake? Only men like that obnoxious Randy Sills, who was studying interior decorating. Men like that. Of course. Well, she’d been crazy, that was all. Plain
crazy. She’d been thinking so, at intervals, ever since. In fact, she still was crazy, to let herself go on this way about Maddox. That Maddox.

She climbed the stairs to the ground floor and went down to the side entrance of the precinct house, on Wilcox Place. There were as usual a lot of black-and-white squad cars parked in a kind of
bay across the narrow street, and a couple of uniformed men stood talking idly just inside the garage entrance. Something like a pall of silence hung over the big shabby building; it was, after
all, nearly six o’clock on a hot August day. A hot, smoggy August day: Sue blinked suddenly smarting eyes.

And there he was, standing at the curb beside that ridiculous red Frazer Nash sports car—latest in a succession of exotic cars. And just exactly what there was about Ivor Maddox
she didn’t know; she wondered if possibly some terribly sophisticated demimondaine (if that was the word she meant)—Parisian for choice—might be able to explain it. Because it
wasn’t just Susan Carstairs, it was about every female who laid eyes on him—as Detective Rodriguez inelegantly put it, they chased the hell out of him. Well, that at least she
wouldn’t do: she had some pride left.

She walked down toward him, wondering all over again why. He wasn’t at all handsome, by any stretch of imagination. Just a thin, very dark, youngish man, clean-shaven, with a straight nose
and a disproportionately long jaw and blue eyes. He always looked as if he needed a shave, and he’d just got by the minimum-height requirements at five nine and a half. Really a very ordinary
man, and it was perfectly ridiculous to—

“I understand you want some help,” she said crisply. “I was just going off, of course.”

Maddox turned and smiled down at her, looking genuinely pleased to see her, and she knew exactly what he was thinking. Good old Carstairs, always so reliable. “Well, hi,” he said.
“Nice you were available. Don’t quite know what it is yet. Some woman wants some help about her daughter, all Carter could make out—she called in about ten minutes ago. Maybe the
daughter’s got hooked or something like that. Over on Berendo. Something to check, anyway.”

“Um,” said Sue. The female branch was mostly used for the juvenile stuff; that could get awfully depressing. But at least it was more interesting than being a Traffic Maid, riding
around on three-wheeled cycles all day tagging overparked cars. Some of the things you ran into— And while a lot of cases began with the juvenile getting picked up and the fond parent
yelling, My boy wouldn’t do nothing like that, sometimes you also got the worried, helpless parent calling for help, I never suspected, what shall I do. Sue slid into the passenger seat of
the Frazer Nash. “I heard you and D’Arcy picked up that peddler you’d been hunting.”

“Outside Le Conte Junior High.” Maddox switched on the engine. “I just thought,” he added, “about this, whatever it is, maybe the woman’d talk easier to
another female. You know.”

“Um,” said Sue again. Yes, that was what they used the females for, mostly. Once in a long while you had the feeling that you might have helped somebody just a little—got the
runaway from Indiana safe on a bus for home and reconciled to leaving the Glamour Capital: got the mixed-up teenager a little bit straightened out, that sort of thing. Mostly, it was just
depressing: jobs that had to be done by somebody.

“Maybe,” said Maddox, braking for the light at Wilcox Place and Melrose, “Mama’s just found the kid’s in with a bad crowd or something. Carter wasn’t too
clear.”

Yes, thought Sue, glancing at his profile and feeling annoyed all over again. At Maddox and at herself. Anybody was crazy to want to join any police force. Talk about thankless
jobs. Probably Maddox had been just about to knock off for the day too. And what they’d find, over there on Berendo Street, was something they’d both run into many times
before—Maddox more than Sue, because he’d been a cop four years longer. A frightened, bewildered, mean-well mother: She must have got into bad company, I never knew, I tried to raise
her right.

Maddox said absently, shifting down as the light caught him at Wilton, “This thing needs a lube job. I don’t know, I was looking at that little Facel-Véga F.V.S. the other
day—nice deal, a fifty-nine and looked like a steal at twenty-nine-fifty. I might get better mileage on that.” He shifted up again, slowed and turned. “It’s eleven
something— I put it down,” and he groped for his notebook.

The address, when they found it, was one of those tired-looking apartment buildings, old when the depression hit: repainted when the landlords could afford it, paint flaking off. It was the kind
of block, the kind of apartment house, that might surprise an outlander to find in Hollywood, that synonym for the glamorous, the wicked, the zany. But Hollywood is just another town in more ways
than it is, so to speak, Hollywood: there are a lot of streets like that, a lot of those apartment houses and a lot of ordinary people whose only connection with The Business is an occasional stop
at a box office and the unpaid-for TV in the corner of the living room.

This apartment house had been repainted tan some years ago, and was now a pale milk-chocolate color with leprous spots where the paint had flaked. It was four stories high, with a good deal of
pseudo-Gothic decoration up its front, and steep steps to its front door. There were two camphorwood trees in the parking, and their roots had lifted and cracked the cement of the sidewalk. The
street, the sidewalk, the building, all looked faintly dusty. Except for half a dozen kids roller-skating down the block, the street was very quiet. It was still very hot. The great new influx of
population, the consequent wholesale new building and the desperate attempt of more and more householders to keep lawns green in summer, in semidesert, had all conspired to play God in Southern
California: the climate had changed. These summers, you got a replica of the wet, muggy Midwest heat, and it didn’t cool off much after dark.

“Hot,” said Maddox.

“Isn’t it,” said Sue. They walked up a cracked cement walk and into the apartment. The narrow foyer was dim and smelled dusty.

“Mrs. Beal—Mrs. Dorothea Beal,” said Maddox, and looked at the locked mail boxes. “Wouldn’t you know, third floor—apartment twenty.” They started up the
stairs to the right; there wasn’t an elevator. The stairs were carpeted, but the carpeting was wearing very thin.

Mrs. Beal, thought Sue, would be a divorcée, and she had to work because her no-good husband couldn’t pay support, so the daughter had got in with a bad crowd— Or she might
just as easily be the ultrarespectable meek little housewife—

They walked down a dim corridor. Maddox found the right door and pushed the bell beside it. They were both feeling bored with this predictable little job; Sue stopped thinking about Mrs. Beal
and thought irritably again about Maddox.

The apartment door opened. “Yuh?” said the woman in the doorway.

“Mrs. Beal? You called in to the precinct a little while ago, something about your daughter?” Maddox had a nice deep voice; he was polite, anxious to help the citizenry.
“I’m Sergeant Maddox and this is Miss Carstairs. We thought maybe you’d prefer to talk to a woman officer.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Mrs. Beal. She yawned. “Come in. Hafta excuse the place bein’ in a mess. God, I got a head on me. Isn’t this heat somethin’ awful?”

She was about thirty-five, Sue thought, looking older. She was a plumpish short woman who had probably started life with mouse-brown hair: it had been bleached too often, amateurishly, and hung
lank and dry about her round face in a vague attempt at the latest “casual” coiffure. She’d slapped on lipstick, no other make-up, and her skin looked flabby, with the beginning
suggestion of jowls. She had china-blue eyes and bad teeth. She had on a pink slip with torn lace across its front, and clutched casually around her a rather dirty nylon peignoir, pale pink, with
yards of cheap lace round bottom, top and sleeves: and a pair of fake-fur, pink-dyed scuffs.

“Sit down, wontcha,” she said, subsiding heavily onto the couch. It was an apartment typical of its vintage. The thin aged carpet was flowered, the furniture third-rate Grand Rapids,
circa 1920: round-armed overstuffed couch and matching chair, a couple of straight chairs hard-seated, a pottery lamp, a dime-store gilt-framed seascape on the long wall. No other pictures. Not
much personal added to the standard furniture that would come with the apartment. There was a tear in one panel of the sheer glass curtains. Glimpse into an untidy kitchenette; glimpse into a
bedroom with an unmade bed, a girdle and stockings draped over the footboard. The living room was also in disorder: several ashtrays overflowing, magazines in a heap on one end of the couch, a pair
of white high-heeled pumps kicked off in the middle of the room, a dirty glass on the coffee table. A small electric fan was making a brave effort to move the still, hot air. You could smell all
the dust that had ever been trapped in this place in the last forty years, and a vague effluvium of all the people who’d ever called this place home.

About sixty-five a month, thought Sue.

“Something about your daughter, Mrs. Beal?” Maddox was prompting.

“Yeah,” said the woman. “I just figured I ought to—you know, do somethin’ about it. I don’t suppose there’s anything real wrong. She’s
gone off a couple times before, see, and come back O.K. Only when Jimmy brought me home ’s morning, well, no, take that back, it wasn’t right then I got to figuring, it
wasn’t until I got up a couple hours ago. I got to thinking, an’ this is Friday, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” said Maddox. He was looking at her interestedly.

“I figured. My day off this week. And like I say, Jewel’s took off a time or two before, but never for so long as that, you know? And I just got kinda wondering, in case she’d
got in a accident or somethin’, and you’d know. See? Reason I called.”

And Sue was looking at her interestedly then too. “Your daughter’s missing from home?” she asked. She heard her voice slightly louder than usual, as if that was necessary to
penetrate Mrs. Dorothea Beal’s pseudo-blond head.

“Well, I guess you’d call it that. Only I don’t suppose anything’s, you know, happened to her. Jewel can look after herself O.K., and like I say she’s took off like
this before. Only, way I figure, lookin’ back, it’s been since about last Friday, an’ that’s longer ’n she ever stayed away before. I just thought, in case anything
had— That Hernandez kid drives kind of wild, I mean. Like that. Only Jimmy said I’d have heard, anything like that.”

Sue didn’t look at Maddox. “Mrs. Beal, how old is your d— is Jewel?”

“Thirteen goin’ on fourteen. Excuse me, can I offer you a drink? So hot and all— You sure? Well, if you’ll excuse me, guess I’ll have another myself.” She
picked up the dirty glass and padded out to the kitchen; they heard a cupboard slam, chink of bottle on glass, hiss of soda siphon. She came back with the glass brownly full and sat down again. She
said, “Lessee, be fourteen next month, tenth, eleventh, around there.”

“She’s been gone since last Friday?” asked Sue loudly, and Maddox waggled a finger at her unobtrusively.

“Lookin’ back, I figure then,” said Mrs. Beal, sipping. “No school now, you know, she’s out most o’ the day, just playin’ around like. With her own
friends. I figured, Friday night, she’d stayed over with somebody like Linda Coates or that other kid, what’s her name, Marian something. And I hadda work overtime Saturday night,
an’ I couldn’t just say I remembered how many eggs there was left, could be she’d just got up before I come home and fixed herself breakfast and gone out. You know? On account
Jimmy and me went out to a kind of party after work that night, and I dint get home till next morning really. You know? But then on Monday I did figure she’d took off, on account I found the
note she left, see? It was on the coffee table only I hadn’t noticed it before. There wasn’t no date on it or nothing, but I guess now that’d have been on Friday.”

“We’d like to see the note, please, Mrs. Beal,” said Maddox.

“Oh, would you? O.K., I’ll see can I find it.” She heaved herself up. “Lessee, what’d I do with it, anyways? Would it be in the—” She padded into the
bedroom.

Sue looked at Maddox. He shrugged, but his wide mouth looked a little grim.

“I don’t seem to recall what I did with it, sorry,” said the woman, coming back. “But there wasn’t nothing in it really. Just wrote she was going off on a little
vacation with Linda and a couple other kids, like that.”

“She didn’t mention for how long?” asked Maddox mildly.

“She said a couple days. And when I got to figuring it’d been a week—that was just today—well, I sort of got to wondering where she was. You know?” She
sipped her highball.

“Thirteen—” said Sue. And she knew better: she’d been a female cop for six years. Maddox waggled a finger at her again. But she couldn’t help it. “A
week? And you didn’t—”

“Well, Jewel’s a big smart girl, she knows how to look after herself,” said Mrs. Beal. “You needn’t go thinkin’ I’m a bad mother, young lady. I do my
best for Jewel, pretty clothes and all. She’s hadda learn how to look after herself, see. I don’t really worry about her much, last couple o’ years since she wasn’t a little
kid no more, got some sense. See, I got pretty long hours— I’m a cocktail waitress, the Can-Can Club out on Western, I’m on mostly six to two A.M. when we
close. My husband’s dead, see, when Jewel was only two, round there—truck fell on him up on the Ridge Route, jackknifed, you know? Poor guy. He was a good provider, like they say, but
o’ course we hadn’t much saved up and he didn’t leave me nothing. So I got to work. So Jewel’s used to lookin’ out for herself, fixing her own dinner and like that.
And she’s stayed over, Linda’s or some other kid’s, times before. I didn’t think nothing of it much, till I guess it was Wednesday. I mean, I thought maybe the Coates’
had gone up to Big Bear, they got a cabin up there, and Jewel’d gone along. But then Wednesday Jimmy brought me home like usual, and he stayed around awhile—he’s the bartender
there, see, nice guy, I guess you could sort of call him my boy friend. And he asked about Jewel, and when I told him he acted kind of worried, said I should’ve checked up on her, try find
out where she was. Well, I didn’t really get to figuring on it till today—”

“Mrs. Beal,” said Maddox, “have you a photograph of your daughter?”

“Why, I gotta couple snapshots, I guess—ones Jimmy took down onna beach. Why?”

“We’d like all those you have, please.” Maddox got out his notebook. “Can you give me a description of her? Height, weight, coloring—”

Waste of time, thought Sue. Incredulously and tiredly she thought it. Does this woman know what color Jewel’s eyes are?

Thirteen years old.

Be fourteen next month, tenth, eleventh, sometime around there.

My God.

People.

“Oh, well, I guess—you gonna put it on the radio and like that? Gee, I guess I could— Well, she’s pretty well growed for her age. Almost as tall as I am.” Five
three, Maddox would be putting down— “and she’s, you know, got her growth early like they say, she’s filled out like. She could easy pass for sixteen, say. Well, her
hair’s sort of dark brown. Well, she does it kind of fluffy and pushed out like this new way, you know, teased they call it. Blue eyes, yeah, that’s right. My God, how’d I know
what she’d be wearin’? She’s got a lot of clothes—”

“If you’d just have a look through them, Mrs. Beal, and make a guess as to what she took— She did take some clothes with her?”

“I suppose she would’ve. Oh, yeah, she musta, on account that old suitcase is gone too. Well, kind of a old beat-up thing, brown leather. Gee, I couldn’t be sure, about the
clothes—she’s got a lot and besides, you know how kids do, borrowing each other’s and like that. Listen, mister. Listen. You—you figure somethin’ might’ve
happened to Jewel?”

When they’d asked all the questions and got all the answers they’d get for the time being, they went back to the Wilcox Street precinct house to set up all the
routine on it. It was dark now, and the lights from the garage lit up this side of the building—this old, dirty, tan-brick building. Maddox got out of the Frazer Nash and looked up Wilcox
Place to the brand-spanking-new cement block and glass branch office of the County Health Department a block up.

“Us they can’t even afford a coat of paint for,” he said. He didn’t sound annoyed, merely resigned.

“That woman!” said Sue. “Well, I know, you don’t believe some of what you run into on the job. But that woman! A thirteen-year-old kid missing a week, and just
now she gets around to reporting—”

“Well,” said Maddox, “lay a bet, Jewel’s no very ordinary little innocent junior-high-school kid. She seems to have taken off voluntarily.”

“And with who?” asked Sue vehemently. “A—”

“Whom,” said Maddox.

“—charming elderly degenerate who promised her a real pearl necklace, or maybe some wild kid hopped up on—”

“Routine.” Maddox sighed. “Routine’ll turn her up, sooner or later. Probably. I know, I know. The things you run into— But there the Mrs. Beals are, nothing much to
do about them. Let’s go and set it up. I could eat a medium-sized horse. Do you know it’s eight fifteen? Tell you what, Carstairs—I’. . .