Practice to Deceive

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 Sergeant Ivor Maddox of the Wilcox Street precinct has more crime on his hands than even he is accustomed to: murders, con-men, a dismembered corpse, runaway teenagers and a multiple rapist. To catch the rapist, whose victims are always attractive and respectable women, Maddox persuades his true love, policewoman Sue Carstairs, to bait the trap . . .

Release date: July 14, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

“And I’ll take no bets,” said Rodriguez, “that he won’t end up killing one of them. The Corbett woman took quite a little beating last
night.” He rolled the triplicate report forms into his typewriter. “And, just as on Reede and Hauser, no make at all except for his general size.”

“It’s a bastard all right,” said Feinman. Last night’s rape of Norma Corbett made the third this week. Rodriguez had just been to the hospital to question her for the
first time, this hot Sunday morning. “Did—” He looked up as Maddox and D’Arcy came in. “So what else have we got new?” They’d been out on the first call of
the day.

“A burglar,” said Maddox resignedly. “Just another burglar. My God, the crime rate up as high as it is, it isn’t even safe to get quietly drunk at home in private.”
He shook his head and Feinman laughed.

“Pair of middle-aged sophisticates,” appended D’Arcy to that. “Something to do with TV, on the technical side. They admit they were both pretty well stoned when they went
to bed, so they never heard the burglar at all. He got about five Gs’ worth. Who’s going to write the report?”

“I’ll toss you for it,” said Maddox, yawning, and offered him a quarter. D’Arcy flipped and lost the call.

“Oh hell,” he said, sat down and pulled the typewriter closer, got out his notebook and reached for report forms.

“Did Corbett lose some underwear too?” asked Feinman.

“She did,” said Rodriguez. “Off the clothesline, on Friday. A bra and a pair of panties.”

“So that about cinches it that it’s the same boy,” said Maddox thoughtfully. “Funny. Not the spur-of-the-moment thing. That’s very offbeat for a rapist,
César.” Miss Janet Reede, last Monday, had come home from work to find her apartment door broken in and only a bra and a pair of panties missing from an open bureau drawer. She
hadn’t called the police, had mentioned it to her landlady. The following night the rapist broke in and assaulted her in bed, about one A.M. The apartment had its own
washer and drier, so Miss Reede didn’t hang her laundry outside. Miss Rhoda Hauser, on the other hand, did: she lived in one unit of a triplex that had a drying yard and clothesline in back,
and she lost from it—on Wednesday afternoon—a half-slip, two pairs of panties and a bra. She had called the police; Maddox had seen her.

“Because I do read the papers,” Miss Hauser had told him. “I know these sex criminals usually start out stealing women’s underwear, don’t they? And if you catch up
to him now, before he does anything worse—”

The trouble was, there wasn’t really any way to catch up to him. It was unlikely he’d come back there. And on Thursday night the rapist had got into Miss Hauser’s apartment
through the bedroom window and beaten and raped her.

And now, Norma Corbett.

“I don’t like it,” said Maddox. “It’s funny. It’s off the beaten track.”

“That you can say,” said Rodriguez, swearing and x-ing out a misspelled word. “But we get the press to mention it, at least it’ll maybe warn his next—”

“Not every female around bothers to read the papers,” said Maddox. “What it says, César, is that he’s picking them. Beforehand. And that’s very offbeat
indeed.”

“It is.” Rodriguez lit a cigarette and went on typing. Maddox wandered down the hall to the coffee machine. He pressed the cream button and sipped coffee, wandered a few steps
further down the hall to the bulletin board. Tacked to its cork surface was a neat handwritten notice in Lieutenant Eden’s writing. It said:

Vacation Schedule

E. Eden—July 30

G. Ellis—Aug. 7

C. Rodriguez—Aug. 15

D. Hoffman—Aug. 15

I. Maddox—Aug. 30

J. Feinman—Aug. 30

K. Donaldson—Sept. 1

F. Buck—Sept. 1

D. D’Arcy—Sept. 7

J. Rowan—Sept. 7

S. Carstairs—Sept. 15

J. O’Neill—Sept. 15

R. Brougham—Sept. 15

J. Dabney—Sept. 18

Maddox looked at it, sipping coffee. It would have to be Dick Brougham, he thought. Just asking for it to ask Johnny O’Neill, who could put two and two together twice as
fast as a computer. Brougham was on the night watch and therefore not seeing much of the day crew, which was just as well. But if Dick wouldn’t change with him—well, damnation, thought
Maddox, it could be done the other way around. Feinman would play. Or there was Dabney, of course. If. He finished the coffee, and strongly resisting the impulse to stray into Sergeant Daisy
Hoffman’s office down the hall, righteously went back to the big detective office. It was bare and rather dusty, all the furniture old and scarred—the city fathers had built that nice
new Police Facilities Building downtown and then forgotten about the precinct houses. Oh, Seventy-Seventh Street was a fairly new building; but Wilcox Street here one of the oldest houses. It was
also very hot, this summer Sunday: all the men had taken off jackets and loosened ties.

“Aren’t you going to do anything about your burglar?” asked Feinman.

“I left Dabney there poking around for prints. See what shows,” said Maddox absently. He sat down at his desk and immediately the phone rang. He picked it up. “Yes,
Johnny?”

“You’ve got a new corpse, avic,” said O’Neill. “At least it’s a classy neighborhood—up on Sycamore Avenue. The ambulance is on the way and the
squad car sitting on it till you get there.”

“Thanks so much,” said Maddox. Well, July—the homicide rate always went up in summer. Hell, and Dabney still over on Cahuenga on the burglary. He went down to the lab and found
Rowan in. “Pick up a kit and let’s go, Joe. New body.”

“The long hot summer,” said Rowan philosophically. As they started down for the stairs Policewoman Carstairs, neat in her navy uniform, whisked out of Sergeant Hoffman’s office
and passed them. She flashed a smile between them and was down the stairs before they reached them. “Nice girl,” said Rowan.

“Oh, sure,” said Maddox. And if Feinman wouldn’t play, or Dabney either, then what? Well, damn it, he had some sick leave accumulated, which probably also had—“Take
my car?” They got into his nice little girl, the blue Maserati.

When they found the address on Sycamore, up in that expensive area above Franklin, it was one of the older places up there, a very dignified two-story Spanish place, with a red
tile roof. There was a circular drive, a good deal of planting in the front yard, ivy instead of a lawn. The squad car was parked before the front door, the ambulance just behind. One of the
uniformed men was standing at the door.

“So what’s the story?” Maddox asked him.

“Looks a little funny, Sergeant. It’s the guy’s mother called in. They’d just finished breakfast—late because of it being Sunday, you know—and she went up to
make the beds. Little bit later heard a shot, and when she came down she saw this guy just getting out the back door and her son there with a bullet in him. Killed instantly, I’d
guess.”

“Funny’s hardly the word,” said Maddox. “We are getting them these days.” He and Rowan went in.

There was money here, by the old and good furniture, the thick carpeting. It was all a little old-fashioned, very substantial, very solid. A long hall past a big living room, a formal dining
room, with a wide staircase to the left, led them down to a door which gave onto a big square kitchen.

The body was in the middle of the floor: a biggish, youngish man just lying there flat on his back. He was dressed in good sports clothes: gray slacks, a white shirt without a tie. A
good-looking man, dark-haired. He’d been shot once in the middle of the forehead; there wasn’t much blood. The interns and the other uniformed man were ministering to a tearful elderly
woman sitting at the table in the little breakfast nook opening off the kitchen. Maddox went over there, introduced himself.

“We just left him for you,” said one of the interns. “You boys are so fussy about messing up evidence. This is his mother. Mrs. Latimer.”

“Mrs. Latimer,” said Maddox. She looked up at him slowly. “I’m very sorry to bother you at a time like this, but if you can answer some questions—we’d like to
get right on this, you know.”

She gulped and blew her nose. “Yes, I—yes, of course. I’m sorry to—but he—was—my—baby, that’s all. The youngest one. My Joel.” She blinked
up at Maddox. She was the loveliest old lady he’d ever seen; she must have been a real beauty in her youth. A little woman, not over five feet, very slender and beautifully dressed in plain
blue silk that had probably cost something. She had shimmering white hair that curled softly about her face, and very blue eyes. “And such a shock—it all happened so
fast—”

“Just a moment, Mrs. Latimer. This is your son Joel? He lived here with you?”

“Why, yes. He’s a lawyer—his own offices—and that’s—that’s his gun.” The gun was lying on the floor beside the body. It was—Maddox bent to
look at it—a Smith and Wesson target .22. “He was going to the desert for a few days, he liked the desert, and he’d got it out to clean it, or oil it, or something, after
breakfast. I went upstairs, and when the doorbell chimed—it was just once for the back door—J-Joel called up he’d get it. I don’t know who it was, I—”

“Just take it easy, Mrs. Latimer. Can you make any guess as to what time that was?”

“I don’t—” Her eyes sought the clock: it was eleven fifty now. “M-Maybe half an hour ago. I don’t know. It was about ten minutes later I heard the—the
shot. I was so startled—and then I ran down the stairs and—and there was Joel, and I just screamed and ran to him, I didn’t notice the man until he moved. He ran out the back door
and—”

“Mrs. Latimer, please think hard and try to remember what he looked like. I know, you only had a glimpse, but you did see him. What do you remember about him?”

She straightened a little in her chair. “Yes, I’ll—I’ll try. He was young, I don’t think more than twenty-two or twenty-three. He had on—just slacks and a
sports shirt—blue or bluey-green—and he had kind of sandy hair. He was tall—oh, six feet anyway. That’s about all I could—I’d never seen him before in my life!
Oh, and I just remembered that—he was holding the gun. Joel’s gun. When I came in. He just threw it down, or dropped it—and ran out the back door.”

“All right, that’s fine, Mrs. Latimer,” said Maddox gently. “That’s just fine. Now we’ll be busy here, and you don’t want to watch us. Why don’t
you just go up and lie down, rest awhile—or if there’s anyone you’d like us to call, any other family or friends?”

“Oh, no, thank you,” she said. “That’s all right. I’ll just—” She started up the back stairs slowly; her thin straight back looked forlorn. Maddox
rubbed his jaw, wondering if he had a legit excuse to call for a policewoman. Reluctantly he decided he hadn’t.

Rowan had already printed the gun and tucked it away in a plastic bag. He took several shots of the body with the Speed Graphic and packed that away. He was now dusting the knob of the rear
door. Maddox went out that way and looked around.

Highly unlikely there’d be any nice footprints. There was a cement-floored patio, wrought-iron yard furniture, neat narrow raised flower beds, no lawn at all. X would most likely have run
across to the paved drive and down it to the street. . . . Damn, thought Maddox, he hadn’t asked her if she’d heard a car. Coming or going. A quiet street like this, she probably would
have. Obviously hadn’t seen one, she’d have said. And if she hadn’t heard one? The neighbors she’d know, and X was a stranger. . . .

And, damn it, thought Maddox, it’d be a dead giveaway if they both are away at the same time. You couldn’t just take off without getting the lieutenant’s say, when you
weren’t really sick. But—

He dragged his mind back on the job and went back to the kitchen. “You getting anything?” he asked Rowan.

“Some latents on the knob. Nothing usable from the gun—all smudged.”

“Damnation,” said Maddox, and started to go through the dead man’s pockets. Joel Latimer, he thought, had been a personable-looking fellow. About thirty-five, a good square
jaw, a strong mouth. And there wasn’t much on him. Well, it was Sunday; he wouldn’t have been going to work. A wallet with fourteen dollars in it. Loose change. A handkerchief. Not
robbed, anyway. Though possibly that had been the intention, and the woman had scared X off.

“Talk about funny,” he said, straightening. “X just rings the bell, walks in and shoots him with his own gun? Of course, in the ten minutes or so after she heard the bell they
could have had an argument. Latimer a lawyer—maybe a disgruntled client or something. I suppose he had a secretary—office staff. Ask them if he’d had any trouble with somebody
recently.”

“Yeah,” said Rowan. “All the routine.” He was dusting the door itself now. Maddox watched him in silence.

And damn it, today—tonight, rather—was Dick’s night off and he couldn’t catch him. Tomorrow.

At one o’clock he ran into Rodriguez and D’Arcy at the Grotto and over lunch passed on the news about the latest corpse. Rodriguez was more concerned about their
rapist, and they kicked that around some.

“And I’ll tell you something else, Ivor,” said Rodriguez. “It just occurred to me after I’d finished the report on Corbett. They’re all the same
type.”

“What?”

“Reede, Hauser, Corbett,” said Rodriguez. “All smallish girls with dark hair. His type?”

“Well, rapists sometimes do have preferences,” said Maddox. “You do get that, César. There’re the ones who go in exclusively for older women—”

“Having grudges on their mothers, the head doctors say,” said D’Arcy. “Which I do not altogether buy. But I don’t know that I ever did hear of one picking the same
type of good-looker every time.”

“Yes, you have. They haven’t caught him yet—back East somewhere, it was written up in Official Detective awhile back. He goes exclusively for redheads. Though of all
ages,” said Maddox.

“Oh? New one to me.”

“It’s the underwear bit that gets me,” said Maddox. “That tells us now—three times—it’s the same boy. And I don’t know that that little idea would
pay off, César. So the press shouts about it, so at least females who read the papers will get alarmed if they find underwear missing. Just offhand, could either of you tell me exactly how
many pairs of shorts you’ve got at home? How many undershirts? The Reede girl admitted to me she’d never have realized anything was gone at all except for two things—the drawer
was left open and just by chance it was a new matched set of panties and bra that he took, she hadn’t worn them yet. Sure, when he takes things off a clothesline, they’d know. But the
funny thing is—we can say that, can’t we?—is that it’s evidently a compulsion with him. He has to get the underwear first. He went to the trouble of breaking in after it
when there wasn’t any on the clothesline.”

Rodriguez poured more coffee. “That is a thought. Our pessimistic little Welshman. And all the women can tell us about him is that he’s big and strong. We don’t even know his
color. And I tell you, if we don’t catch up to him soon he’ll kill one of them. Norma Corbett’ll be off work awhile. Broken arm, face battered up, three teeth knocked out and two
broken fingers. And assorted bruises.”

“Um, yes,” said Maddox. “Another thing. Reede and Hauser both single, both very respectable young women. Corbett?”

“Very definitely, I’d say.”

“Yes. Also single? Um. Can we say, all virgins?”

“Well, this day and age,” said Rodriguez.

“I think maybe so. What does Corbett do, by the way?”

“Legal secretary.”

“Oh,” said Maddox. “Boss’s name?”

Rodriguez hauled out his notebook. “William Seidler, downtown. Spring Street.”

“Reede lives on Fountain. Hauser on Cahuenga. Corbett on Edgemont. Reede is a steno at Columbia Records, Hauser is a receptionist at an actors’ agency on the Strip. And the legal
secretary. Say anything?”

D’Arcy said, “Well, all the addresses are within central Hollywood.”

“Which says nothing,” said Maddox. “They’re still some way apart.” He visualized it on the map: Cahuenga thirty blocks from Edgemont, if Fountain did cross
Cahuenga. “All up in the air.”

They got back to the precinct house shortly before two. When they came in Johnny O’Neill was sitting at the desk whistling “Danny Boy” and working a crossword; he gave them a
casual salute. Before he thought, Maddox grinned at him and then cancelled it hastily: Johnny was sharp enough to cut himself. Johnny had just transferred up from Central a few months ago:
he’d got shot up by a bank robber, still had some lead in one ankle and they’d put him on a desk job until the doctors said he could go back on active duty. A very nice guy, Johnny,
which Maddox had only admitted recently; and it was Johnny who had unlocked Maddox’s psychological block about the junior division, of course. Yes, and let Johnny suspect it, it’d be
all through the precinct in twenty-four hours, damn it.

As he passed the desk headed for the stairs O’Neill said, “Hold it—this might be something, boys.” They turned.

A couple of uniformed men were shepherding in a man and a woman. The woman was crying and the man looked sullen. The squad-car men were Simms and Terhune. “What’ve you got?”
asked O’Neill.

Simms came up to the desk. “Child beating,” he said, looking rather grim. “The woman called for us. Little girl, ten months old. The interns said she’d been hurt pretty
bad, maybe internal injuries.”

O’Neill grimaced. “We do see the other half. I suppose you sherlocks’ll want to talk to him.”

“And the junior division to her,” said Maddox. “Name?”

“Wheeler,” said Simms. “Mr. and Mrs. Apartment over on Harold Way.”

“O.K.” Maddox shepherded the pair upstairs, D’Arcy and Rodriguez behind, and poked his head into Sergeant Hoffman’s office. They were both there—blonde Aunt Daisy
who was a grandmother and didn’t look it, and Sue. “We have a weeping female to comfort,” said Maddox. “Would one of you care to oblige? Child-beating case just
in.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Daisy. “One of those. People—”

“I’ll go,” said Sue, and got up.

But Maddox had no sooner got back to the interrogation room where they’d parked Wheeler than the phone rang in the detective office. Resignedly he went to answer it.

“It is, after all, July,” said O’Neill. “Heat triggering off tempers, you know. You have now got another assault.”

“You don’t say. Not, for God’s sake, another rape?”

“I don’t think so—woman who called just said, he’s beating her up, come quick. Over on Ardmore. The squad car dispatched, but I thought you’d want to know
too.”

“Thanks so much,” said Maddox. “Address?” He took it down. Rodriguez and D’Arcy could handle Wheeler; he went out to the Maserati again and drove down to Ardmore
Avenue.

One of the older streets in central Hollywood, old four-family apartments, shabby single houses with rental units in the rear. The squad car was sitting outside one of the oldest apartments. The
front door was open and Maddox went in. The noise guided him up the stairs: a man swearing in a loud voice, a woman crying noisily, another man trying to quiet them both.

Down the upstairs corridor there, a single uniformed man was having a little wrestling match with a civilian. “Now you quiet down, damn it—listen to me—” The neighboring
apartment door, across the hall, was open, and a silent middle-aged couple watched. Maddox went to help the patrolman in a hurry, and between them they got the civilian into the apartment and
shoved him down into a chair, where he sat and glowered at them. He was a big dark man about forty, he hadn’t shaved in a few days, and he smelled of whiskey and perspiration. The woman, a
somewhat raddled-looking blonde a few years younger, was sitting on the couch sobbing. One eye was puffed up and half closed, and she sobbed, “My arm—Bastard broke my arm, it feels
like—no call to go do that—you big bastard.” She was half-drunk, bleary-eyed.

“All right, just hold it,” said Maddox. He went out to the hall; the other couple was still there, talking now. “Did one of you call in on this?”

The woman nodded. “I did. When I heard her screaming.” Her mouth drew tight in disapproval. “I guess they both drink some. That kind. And I think they’re on welfare. They
haven’t lived here long. Name’s Neumeyer.”

“Thanks so much.” He went back to the other apartment. Neumeyer was sti. . .