No Villain Need Be

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 Famous LAPD husband and wife sleuths Sergeant Ivor and Detective Sue Maddox return again, this time juggling half a dozen investigations at once. Balancing solving the cases of an enterprising team of daytime burglars, a scandalous sex ring and suspicious-seeming fatal accidents, they are stretched to the limit when a grandmother and her two-year-old granddaughter are discovered murdered . . .

Release date: November 21, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

Maddox came into the kitchen knotting his tie; they were late, and he’d only have time for coffee. Sue, still in her robe, was pouring it. “I must say,” she
observed, getting half-and-half from the refrigerator, “it’d be more convenient if we had the same day off. As it is, if I do find a possible house, you’ll have to go look at it
too—”

“It’d be even more convenient,” said Maddox caustically, “if we knew what size house we wanted.”

“Oh, well, I suppose we do,” said Sue. “We’ll never argue Mother around, Ivor.”

“Want to bet?”

“I know, you’re her fair-haired boy, but I don’t think you can persuade her now. Our timing was all wrong. We had the bright idea of all of us living together just after
she’d been talking about finding a part-time job because of the dividends being down and inflation, and she got the notion we were offering charity or something—”

“And I never thought I’d see the day I was annoyed at your mother. It’s really the only answer, after all.”

“Try to tell her.”

“Oh, I haven’t given up yet.” Maddox swallowed coffee hastily. “You go look at some four-bedroom places. Damn, I’ll be late.” He got up and bent to kiss her.
“Good luck.”

“Have fun chasing the burglars,” said Sue.

Heading uptown in the little blue Maserati, Maddox reflected that they were spending a good part of their time on burglars these days, and with very little result. In the nature of things, there
was seldom any good solid lead to the burglars; they spent a lot of time on legwork which didn’t often pay off, and nine times out of ten when they did nail some X for a job, the court
accepted a plea bargain and let him off with nine months in the slammer, or even probation.

Of course there were other things on hand than the burglars, though they’d like to catch up to the team of daylight burglars who had been cleaning out whole households while everybody was
at work. There was nine-year-old Harold Frost, abducted, sexually attacked and strangled last month; and now there was ten-year-old Freddy Noonan, reported missing last Friday afternoon and found
in the street on Saturday morning, strangled. That looked like the same X, and one they’d like to drop on right quick. There was also the heister, by the description the same one, who had
held up a pharmacy, an all-night dairy store and a bar in the last two weeks. None of the witnesses had picked a mug shot, and there weren’t any leads on that; but witnesses weren’t
always reliable, and it was back to legwork, chasing down men with likely pedigrees and checking alibis. And the thankless job being what it was, doubtless new cases would go down today and
tomorrow, and on and on.

He caught the light at Wilcox and Fountain and glanced across the street at his destination rather fondly. The Hollywood precinct had had a present from the city fathers a couple of months ago:
a brand-new precinct station. They had known it was in the works, but the city had taken its own time finishing it; the move had finally been made a couple of months ago, in October. They
hadn’t had to move so much as a typewriter; everything in the building was new—the old Social Services Building, given a new face and completely remodeled inside. It occupied the whole
block on Fountain Avenue, between Wilcox and Cole, a long one-story building painted creamy beige, with a flat roof. There were two strips of well-kept green lawn in front, and red brick planters
against the building filled with bright yellow daisies, and a handsome pair of double doors up two low steps. It had given them nearly double the space they’d had at the old Wilcox Street
precinct house, and had boosted morale considerably; sometimes cops felt that the city fathers consistently overlooked them. In the early morning sun of this crisp January day, the building was
handsome and gleaming, with the bold black lettering above the double front doors: Los Angeles Police Department, 6501 Fountain Avenue.

The new building didn’t have a jail; that had been left behind at Wilcox Street.

He turned left on Cole and into the big parking lot behind the station. Heading for the back door, he caught up with Rodriguez just going in.

“Any bets on what went down overnight?” asked Rodriguez.

“More heists. All the burglars seem to operate in daylight now. What I’m interested in seeing,” said Maddox, “is the autopsy on the Noonan boy. If he was sodomized, you
know it was the same joker who killed the Frost kid.”

“I’d take a bet.” They went into the big rectangular detective office. D’Arcy was already there, lounging at his desk, talking on the phone. Feinman was typing a report;
Sergeant George Ellis was reading one. At the end of the room Sergeant Daisy Hoffman was just uncovering her typewriter, and Joe Rowan came in just after Maddox and Rodriguez.

Ellis, the senior sergeant, was concentrating on the counterfeiters who’d been scattering phony twenties all over town for the last month; he was talking more to Secret Service men than
his own men lately. The night-watch report had been left on Maddox’s desk, and he sat down, loosened his tie, lit a cigarette and scanned it rapidly.

There had been a fatal accident off Mulholland Drive just as the night watch had come on: a Mrs. Louise Sexton. Donaldson had clipped a note to the initial report: “Dick and I both think
something funny about this one—can’t put a finger on it, but see what you think.” Maddox skimmed the report: three-year-old Chrysler apparently out of control, over the
embankment, totaled at the bottom of the hill, the woman thrown out with apparent fatal injuries. The car would be hauled in for examination; eventually there’d be an autopsy report. The
husband, Herbert Sexton, address on Pyramid Drive, would be in sometime this afternoon to make a statement.

There had also been a heist at a pharmacy on Fairfax. No description: the heister had been wearing a ski mask. There had also been a brawl in a bar on Santa Monica Boulevard that had left a man
dead of a knifing. The knife wielder had got away but the bartender knew him, Manfred Guttierez; he lived on Poinsettia. Brougham and Donaldson had gone to look, but the apartment was empty.
They’d got a make on his car from the computers and put out an A.P.B.

Under the night-watch report on his desk was another one, evidently sent up after change of shift last night. He slid it out of the manila envelope, and it was the autopsy report on Freddy
Noonan. “What did I say?” said Maddox to Rodriguez. “Here it is—the Noonan boy was sodomized and manually strangled. That’s the same joker, César, it’s
got to be, and it’s an educated guess he’s just hit town from somewhere else. We haven’t had that kind of homicide in a while.”

“What does that say?” countered Rodriguez, taking the report. “Any of the little nuts can graduate into big nuts overnight. He might have been right here for years, started out
as a flasher, gone on to bribing kids with candy to get his nasty little kicks and just now gone in for the bigger kick.”

“True,” said Maddox, rubbing his chin, “but two within—what is it?—twenty days—I don’t know, César.”

D’Arcy came over and perched one hip on Maddox’s desk. “You’ll be happy to know,” he said, “that the D.A.’s office has decided to charge Hogan with
involuntary manslaughter instead of Murder Two.”

Both Maddox and Rodriguez uttered various rude words. “For God’s sake,” said Rodriguez, “how unrealistic can those legal eagles get? But it’s par for the course,
all right.” Alfred Hogan, last month, with nearly a fifth of whiskey inside, had beaten his wife to death. On the lesser charge, he would be back on the streets in a year or less, and quite
likely to kill somebody else the next time he got drunk.

Maddox handed D’Arcy the report on Guttierez. “Suppose you go see if he’s come home yet. Ken doesn’t seem to have checked for him in Records—we might ask if
he’s there. I suppose we’ll see some photographs of this accident sometime—I wonder if they’ve brought the car in yet, a hell of a job—and somebody’ll have to
talk to the husband. I wonder what struck Ken funny about it.” The phone buzzed on his desk and he picked it up, looking at the autopsy report again. “Sergeant Maddox.”

“I’ve got a new one for you,” said Patrolman Gonzales. “Homicide. It looks a little offbeat.”

“Where?” asked Maddox resignedly.

“Kingsley Drive. You’d better bring one of the girls. I’ve got a kid here pretty shook up, little girl.”

“It’s my wife’s day off. O.K., we’ll be along.” Maddox went over to get Daisy, hunched over her typewriter. He called the lab and passed on the address.
D’Arcy and Rodriguez went out to look for Guttierez; that was a simple thing, a matter of picking him up, and then they could get back to the legwork on the heisters. Maddox and Daisy went
out to the parking lot and started for the new homicide in Maddox’s car. Trim blonde Daisy Hoffman didn’t look like the grandmother she was; she’d be useful at soothing any
shaken-up youngster.

At the address on Kingsley, which was an old frame duplex on a quiet block of older homes, Gonzales was leaning against the hood of the black-and-white waiting for them. They could see somebody
else, somebody small, in the back seat. There weren’t any curious neighbors out at all; this would be a neighborhood of working people, most of them away all day. Gonzales came forward as
Maddox and Daisy got out of the car.

“The kid’s aunt is on the way,” he said. “From La Crescenta. I don’t know what to make of this one. It was the kid called in. When she woke up, she says, Mama
wasn’t there. She thought maybe she’d gone next door—the other side of the duplex—but the door was locked and nobody answered. So she called her aunt, and the aunt told her
to call us. When I got here I checked the back, and it was open, so I went in—” An ambulance siren came screaming nearer. “One of them is still alive— That’s for her.
I—”

“Damn paramedics trampling all over evidence,” said Maddox, annoyed. “Which side?” Gonzales indicated the left side of the duplex, and Maddox went around to the back.
There was a screen door, a solid wooden door half open. He used his pen to hook the screen open, shoved the door wider, went in. The kitchen, small and square, was very neat and clean, no dishes
visible; the refrigerator hummed. At one end a door led into a living room, long and narrow, furnished with a pleasant miscellany of old pieces; it too was neat except for one of the end tables
beside the couch, which had been knocked over and spilled a milk-glass lamp, an ashtray, a vase. A scatter rug in the doorway at the end of that room was a crumpled heap. Maddox edged through that
door to a narrow little hall; through a door opposite was the front bedroom.

They were both in there: two women looking to be in the mid-thirties, one dark and one blonde. The blonde was dead, obviously beaten and possibly raped; she was naked, and clothes were scattered
around the room, a brassiere torn in half, a pair of ripped panties, a navy-blue dress, slip. The other woman was dressed in a housecoat and bedroom slippers; she was unconscious, breathing
hoarsely, lying half across the double bed, half on the floor.

The ambulance attendants came in and Maddox said automatically, “Don’t touch anything.” They got her on a stretcher and he followed them out.

There was another car behind the Maserati, an old Ford with one front door open and Daisy standing beside it. He went up there.

“What’s happened?” The woman in the car, who held the little girl tightly on her lap, looked frightened and bewildered. “I can’t imagine where Ruth would
be—she’d never leave Emily alone— Doesn’t Lisa know anything? I just can’t— I got here as soon as I could—”

“Just a minute.” Maddox raised an arm at the ambulance attendants. “Would you take a look and see if you know this woman, Mrs.—”

“Carradine. Rose Carradine.” She relinquished the child to Daisy and hurried after Maddox; the attendants were waiting by the open doors of the ambulance.. “Oh, my God,
it’s Ruth! What happened to her? I can’t imagine what— Where was she?”

“Your sister?” Maddox nodded at the attendants and steered her back toward the car. “What’s her name?”

“Ruth Butler. But what—where—”

“I know you want to find out how she is, Mrs. Carradine, but we don’t know what happened here and we’ll have some questions for you. There’s another woman in there,
dead.”

“Oh, my God—not Lisa?” she asked, horrified.

“I don’t know. Lisa who?”

“Lisa Martin. She owns this place.”

“Is she blonde, around thirty-five, thin?”

“Yes— Oh, it is Lisa— My God, what happened?”

The mobile lab truck pulled up, turned into the drive, and Rowan and Dabney got out of it. There wasn’t any need to tell them what do do; Maddox waved them in and looked at Mrs. Carradine
speculatively. She was probably a little older than her sister, dark hair going gray, a little too plump, motherly-looking, dressed in a neat cotton dress and cardigan; she was upset and shocked,
but under control. He looked at the little girl beside her. Maybe about ten? He didn’t know much about children. She was a thin, leggy child with a good deal of curly blonde hair and big blue
eyes. She looked shaken up all right, but like her aunt, in control of herself and not crying.

“Did either your sister or Mrs. Martin have a car?”

“Yes, of course. Ruth has an old Chevy, but it’s in the garage for a new transmission, she was worried about the bill. Lisa’s got a Datsun.”

“Um.” Maddox went up the drive; there was a single garage at the rear, detached, and the door wasn’t locked. He looked in. The Datsun was sitting there. He went back down the
drive. “Look,” he said gently, “I’ll have some questions for both of you, if Emily feels up to it.” Emily inclined her head stiffly.

“That’s Mama in the ambulance, wasn’t it? Is she going to be all right?”

“We certainly hope so. Now if you wouldn’t mind, Mrs. Carradine, Mrs. Hoffman will ride back with you, show you where to come, and we’ll talk at the office. Then you can check
with the hospital and see how your sister is.”

“Yes. All right. But I just can’t imagine—” She got into the car obediently.

On the way back to the station, Maddox reflected that one annoying thing about this job, to which you had to adjust the best you could, was that you were continually forced to quit one case in
the middle and transfer attention to another. Now he wanted to get back to Freddy Noonan’s parents again, to the legwork on that; there was also the heister, and the daylight burglars. But
crime was no respecter of detectives’ routines; crime was always very untidy.

He led them into the parking lot and took them in the back way, settled them in two chairs beside Daisy’s desk, perched on the edge of the desk and smiled at Emily. “Can you tell us
about the beginning of this? From what Patrolman Gonzales said, you’re the one called the police.”

She nodded again. “Aunt Rose said to. He was very nice. I never met a policeman before, but Mama says they’re mostly nice. He said he’s got a little girl just my size too. But
I don’t know what happened to Mama— I don’t know your name.”

“Sergeant Maddox. When did you first find your mother was gone?”

“When I woke up. The alarm didn’t go off so I didn’t wake up till way late. We always get up at seven so I can be ready for school and Mama can do the dishes and make the beds
before she goes to work—”

“She works at the Bank of America,” said Mrs. Carradine. “So does Lisa—it’s how they got to know each other—Lisa owns the house, and they took to each other,
and the other side was vacant— Ruth’s lived there nearly five years—”

“And it was nearly eight o’clock and Mama wasn’t anywhere, and her bed was all made up. I went next door to see if she was at Aunt Lisa’s, but the door was locked, and I
didn’t know what to do, so I called Aunt Rose on the phone.”

“You kept your head just fine, dear,” said Mrs. Carradine. “But for the life of me I can’t imagine—”

“When did you see your mother last, Emily?” asked Daisy.

“Oh, last night when I went to bed. At eight-thirty. She came into my room like always and heard my prayers and kissed me good night and turned off the light. And I guess I went to sleep
pretty soon.”

“Did you hear anything in the night? Screams or loud noises?”

Emily shook her head. “I don’t think so. I could’ve, and maybe just thought it was dreams.”

“She’s a heavy sleeper,” said Mrs. Carradine. “I’ve never known Ruth to leave her alone at night—” Suddenly she said sharply, “Oh! Oh, but I just
thought—that could be it! It could be!”

“What?” asked Maddox.

“Why, if some robber broke in on Lisa’s side! You see, two women alone—Lisa was divorced, and Ruth lost Emily’s father six years ago, he was killed in an
accident—and you know how the crime rate’s up, terrible things going on all over, and they were both nervous. They never went out much, both sort of homebodies, you could say, and that
was one reason. Lisa had the best kind of locks in that place, but things can happen— They both kept all the doors locked tight all the time—but just in case, they had a code, you
see.”

“A code?”

“Yes—in case either of them needed help. They’d knock three times on the wall between. And I just suddenly thought, if somebody broke in on Lisa’s side and she knocked
for Ruth to come—”

“Um,” said Maddox. Nobody had broken in the front door, but the lab men might turn up something at the back. “It’s an idea.” But if there’d been a fight in
there, it was funny the little girl hadn’t heard any screams or thuds. Had the neighbors? City people tended to be curiously apathetic about things like that: the
don’t-want-to-get-involved syndrome. They would be asked. “Has your sister any men friends? Or did Mrs. Martin?”

Mrs. Carradine shook her head decisively. “It was a terrible blow to her, losing Bob. And it takes all her time, working and looking after Emily—she wouldn’t be interested in
another man. Lisa wasn’t either, she was studying hard for a promotion at the bank.” She groped for a handkerchief and blew her nose. “Oh, dear, I can’t take it in—she
was such a nice woman, they were such good friends—the awful things that go on, to think of Lisa getting murdered! Please, I would like to find out about Ruth, if—and I’ll take
Emily home with me, of course.”

“That’s fine. Just leave us your . . .