Rain with Violence

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

The rain brought problems - difficult, ugly, weird problems - for Lieutenant Luis Mendoza. Senseless killings, cold-blooded murders, suicides. To say nothing of a ruthless gang of B-girls whose knockout drops knocked their victims out for good. And then, on his own doorstep, Mendoza stumbled across a clue to one of the most vicious crimes he had ever been called on to solve. 'A Luis Mendoza mystery means superlative suspense' Los Angeles Times

Release date: December 14, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 192

Sample

THEY MET where they’d met a few times before, at a little coffee shop called Jean’s on Sunset Boulevard not far from Highland. It was clean
and quiet: decorated in very pseudo Olde Englishe, it didn’t attract the casual male trade, and didn’t mind customers sitting over pots of tea and sandwiches. Not that the older girl,
Dorothy Swanson, who arrived first, meant to order tea; after four years in California, she’d discovered that Americans simply don’t know how to make it properly.

She took a booth at the back of the little dim place and ordered coffee, waiting for the other girl. She’d about had California, she thought; like the many other English girls working
here, mostly as children’s nurses, she’d found the money good, but after you got used to the different atmosphere and the climate, well, there were other things than sunshine, after
all. She got homesick sometimes for Winscombe and the quiet Cotswold hills. She sipped coffee and thought she might just tell Mrs. Spain that this temporary job she’d just taken would be her
last here: she was going home.

Then the other girl slipped into the booth across the table to her and said, “I missed the twelve o’clock bus, am I late? I am sorry, Dot. Dot, I want to ask
you—” she paused as the waitress came up, and ordered coffee and a bacon and tomato sandwich. “Dot—”

The older girl asked, “How’s the job going?” She was feeling exasperated about Carole Leslie, about her own (quite unnecessary, reason told her) feeling of responsibility for
the other girl and her naiveté. And nobody, Dorothy reminded herself ruefully, to blame but herself. If Carole hadn’t gone to school with Dorothy’s younger sister, and inevitably
heard about the wonderful time Dot was having in America—if her mother, a friend of Dot’s mother, hadn’t written asking her to “keep an eye on Carole”—if she
hadn’t been raised to have some responsibility—Well, there it was.

“Oh, I’m getting fed up with it.” Carole had very blond hair cut short in a halo effect, and a peaches-and-cream skin, and very blue eyes, and was currently addicted to
shocking-pink nail varnish and lipstick, of which Dorothy disapproved. Carole was nineteen. “I want to tell you—But what about your new one?” It was an obvious effort at surface
politeness. “You said it was only temp’rary—”

“Their regular’s off,” said the older girl absently. “It’s only for a couple of months. The twins are sweet—”

“Oh, twins, how darling. How old?”

“Nearly two—a boy and a girl.” The waitress came back with Carole’s sandwich and Dorothy ordered one to match. “But, Carole, I want to hear about yours. These
Newhouses—the last time you said—”

“Um,” said Carole through a bite of her sandwich. “I’ve got to tell you, Dot, I don’t like it—I mean, any of it, not just the queerness but the job. I
though it’d be a change anyway—you know, after those horrible Miller children on the first job Mrs. Spain got for me—but even then it sounded a little
funny—companion-maid—because she must be at least thirty-five. I told you. I mean, for a while it was all right, she’s quite pretty and likes to talk about clothes and lipstick
and so on, just like anybody, but after a while she’s just horribly boring. I must have heard about everything that’s happened to her since she was born, and she says the most
awful things about her husband and he’s really a very nice man—he reminds me a little of Daddy, actually—and how she inherited all the money so unexpectedly from this old uncle
she hardly remembered—I told you that. And I can’t say it’s hard work, there isn’t really anything for me to do, getting her lunch and mostly just listening to
her—she doesn’t even knit or anything—but, Dot, I—I think there’s something funny.” Carole put down her sandwich, her forehead wrinkling.

“How d’you mean?” The little Carole had told her a couple of weeks ago, Dorothy had thought it sounded strange, too. A queer sort of job. Possibly Mrs. Spain at the agency had
thought so, too.

“Well, not just all that I’ve been talking about. Even funnier. It’s not as if I tried to listen to what they’re saying, honestly, you know I wouldn’t. But
she’d asked me to make coffee and I was just bringing it in and couldn’t help hearing—the other one, the brother, he comes around a lot, and—Oh, well, not a lot, I
s’pose he’s got a job too, but oftener than seems—Or he’s ringing her up. Days, when Mr. Newhouse is at work. She said she used to keep after Mr. Newhouse to quit his job
and go traveling with her, now she’s got all the money, but he won’t.”

“Money can go as easy as it comes,” said Dorothy.

“I s’pose. Anyway, it wasn’t as if I tried to listen, Dot, I couldn’t help hearing—just as I was bringing the coffee in, last Saturday afternoon it was, he was
there, and he was saying, ‘We could have fun together, Evelyn, if you were shut of that slowpoke,’ and she said back, ‘And you’ve got reasons to want to get shut of him
permanently, haven’t you?’—sort of thoughtful she was—and he said, kind of quick, ‘We’ll be in it together,’ and then they stopped talking when I came in.
It just sounded funny, Dot. D’you suppose they’re going to go off together and she’ll divorce Mr. Newhouse?”

It sounded a little peculiar to the older girl, too. “I don’t know—but you don’t like the job much, do you?”

“There’s not enough to do. And she’s paying me two hundred dollars a month, nearly seventy pounds—but it’s so boring. Dot, I’d rather even have some
horrible children to take care of again. I like Mr. Newhouse but he’s only there evenings and sometimes he goes off to his chess club. That’s another thing, Tuesday nights he goes out
and the other one—the brother—he comes then to see her, the last three weeks, anyway, and they shut the door to the lounge and—”

“I should think you’d better just leave when this month’s up, and see Mrs. Spain,” said Dorothy. “It sounds as if something’s up, not very nice,
anyway.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Where’d you go on Sunday?”

“Oh—to the beach. With Randy.”

“Randy Bearley? That boy from the garage? I don’t think he’s a very good type, Carole. I—” The other girl hesitated. Sometimes Carole could be stubborn and the more
you said—

“Randy’s all right.” Carole sipped coffee. “Shall we go see a film or something? I don’t know what’s on—”

“Actually I’ve got some shopping to do.” Dorothy looked at her watch. Two o’clock already, and on Thursdays she was supposed to be back by five-thirty or so, not that the
new woman seemed very strict—nice she was, and ever so pretty, too, with red hair—but there was Mum’s birthday present to shop for and if it hadn’t been for feeling a little
responsible for Carole, she’d never have wasted this time meeting her for lunch. She got out her coin purse, looking at the bill. “If you want to come along—”

“Um,” said Carole cheerfully through the last of her sandwich. “Love to, dear. All these wonderful shops.” She beamed at Dorothy, wiping her mouth carefully and instantly
rummaging in her bag for lipstick. “And I think you’re right, it’s a funny sort of place and I’ll just leave it. Mrs. Spain says there’s heaps of jobs, and I’ve
got a little money saved. There was something else I heard him say that sounded queer—the brother—I couldn’t make out what it meant, but anyway he doesn’t think much of Mr.
Newhouse, either, and what I say, it doesn’t look right, him coming, you know, and I tell you, Dot, I don’t sort of feel comfortable about it.”

“I don’t blame you,” said Dorothy. At least Carole still knew what respectability meant; she could be a little fool in some ways, and in the six months she’d been here,
Dorothy had worried a bit over a couple of the boys she’d taken up with, but she seemed to have some sense, anyway, about this. And Dorothy would rather have gone shopping for Mum’s
birthday present by herself, without the other girl’s aimless chatter to distract her; and after all Carole had to learn to stand on her own feet and judge people for herself, but she could
hardly tell her so right out. That Randy, a low type if she had eyes for one—but good looking, and Carole was only nineteen, and she did feel a bit responsible, Carole coming from
practically the next village. She put her coin purse away and brought out a note pad.

“You haven’t got the address,” she said, “where I am now. And the telephone. You’d better. And look, dear, if anything else funny happens or—well, anything
that bothers you, you just call me.” She wrote down the address and phone number, pushed the torn-off scrap of paper across the table.

Carole was carefully blotting shocking-pink lipstick on a corner of paper napkin. “Oh, it’ll be all right. I’ll just say I’m leaving when the month’s up—she
can’t tie me up, after all, but thanks, Dot.”

The exact change left on the little tray, with a careful twenty-five cent tip, they slid out of the booth and started for the door. When the waitress came to clear the table, she pursed her lips
sourly at the tip, and swept the little debris off—crumpled paper napkins, crumby plates, used cups—onto her large tray. Into the big refuse barrel in the kitchen, along with the paper
napkins, went a little torn-off piece of paper bearing a line of writing in a slanted backhand—

Mrs. Mendoza, 311 Rayo Grande Ave., Hollywood—377-4684

“‘BUT A FOOL must follow his natural bent. Even as you and I,’” said Mendoza, settling into his desk chair with a grunt.
“These louts. These punks. Or am I just getting bad tempered as age creeps up on me?”

“Most of ’em,” said Detective Grace in his soft voice, “wouldn’t be where they are if they weren’t fools.”

“Oh, granted,” said Mendoza, shutting his eyes. “Only I sometimes get very tired of dealing with them, Jase.”

Higgins said nothing, just lit a cigarette and blew out smoke with a long sigh. They had just had a session with one of the fools. The louts they had perennially to deal with, incapable—or
unwilling—to think five minutes ahead, who went through life doing what comes naturally and reacting with pained surprise or indignation when natural retribution caught up with them. This
one, a William Roudybush by name, had a long pedigree of little offenses—D. and D., purse snatching, petty theft—and had just, quite inadvertently, got into the big time because
he’d got into a brawl in a bar down on First Street and knocked the other participant down against the bar, effectively cracking his skull.

It would be brought in as involuntary manslaughter and he’d get maybe seven years, but they’d had to do some work on it all the same.

“Well, hell, I was drunk,” he’d said. “I didn’t go to kill nobody. I was drunk, thass all. I dint even know the guy. You ain’t gonna do anything to me just
for that, are you?”

Sometimes Mendoza got tired dealing with all the louts. But there they were, and it was the job to be done.

So far, this November—thank God, a November which had remembered that it was supposed to be an autumn month, and had brought gray skies and cool temperatures and a grudging half inch of
rain to Southern California—so far, L.A.P.D. Homicide had had its share of louts. A hopped-up kid hunting money to support the habit shooting a liquor-store clerk. A couple of gang rumbles,
with two teenagers knifed to death, over the other side of the Southern Pacific yards. An elderly woman beaten to death in the course of a robbery—they hadn’t any leads on that at all
and it looked dead; would probably get filed away in Pending. They had had a straightforward suicide by gas over on Fourth Street, with the note left, and then the fellow who strangled his wife
because she’d been chasing ground—Palliser was still busy on the paperwork on that, and Piggott and Glasser were out poking around trying to turn up whoever had, (probably also
inadvertently) fatally fractured the skull of the druggist on San Pedro Street while ransacking the place for narcotics.

Sergeant Lake looked in the door and asked, “Like some coffee? There was a hew call while you were busy with the punk—Art went out on it.”

Mendoza muttered, “¿Pues y qué?” but Higgins asked with faint curiosity what it sounded like.

Lake shrugged. “Woman dead, all I can tell you. Pomeroy Avenue, over the other side of the San Berdu freeway.” The phone rang out on his desk in the anteroom and he departed.

Mendoza yawned, and Lake came back and said, “It’s Art, Lieutenant. On the phone.” Mendoza picked up the outside phone.

“So what’ve you got?”

“Rape and murder, looks like,” said Hackett in his ear. “I want the full team, Luis. It’s sort of confused. Kid went to the neighbors and said there was a bad man came
and hurt Mommy, Mommy fell down and the bad man hit her and the kid was scared and ran away. You know kids and time—no telling. Neighbor—a Mrs. Farber—went up to the house to see.
And called us. All I’ve got so far, Mommy is Mrs. May Gerner, husband’s a bartender somewhere, three kids from seven down, and the interns say she was probably raped and strangled.
Looks that way, anyway. At least she’s dead. Bainbridge will say how. Interns say, very provisionally, about an hour dead.”

“No rest for the wicked,” said Mendoza. He glanced out the window. Five-forty of a November day, and dark, yes, but an hour ago, only the deepening-toward-dusk of fall in Southern
California. Pomeroy Avenue—one of the shabby old residential streets of downtown L.A., hardly a slum, even if the streets were old and tired down there—and the old houses cheek-by-jowl,
forty-foot lots: an assault, rape, and murder that time and place? Well, it happened, unlikely as it seemed. “All right, we’ll get on it. I’ll come and have a look.” He told
Sergeant Lake to rout out the lab men, and got up. “We might as well all go. Fill out the day nicely.”

Palliser came in and laid a report in triplicate on the desk. “That finished that one off. Don’t tell me—” as Mendoza took up his hat “—we’ve got a new
one at this time of day.”

“What else?” Higgins yawned. “What does time matter to the punks?”

Palliser looked apprehensive. “You want me?” he asked fearfully.

Mendoza grinned at him. “I’ll let you off this time. Go home, novio.” Palliser had a bride of two months waiting at home on Tamarind Avenue. “You did some overtime
last night. . . . Damn, by the time we get there—I suppose I’d better call Alison.” Sergeant Lake was already dialing, and held out the phone to him as Higgins resettled his tie
and Grace reached for his own hat. “Hermosa? Me. I’ll be—”

“Late,” said Alison. “Yes. They are keeping you busy, aren’t they? All right, I’ll expect you when I see you.”

“Everything serene? How’s the nursemaid working out, satisfactory?”

“Oh, yes,” said Alison. “Quite all right, though not like Máiri.”

“Naturalmente.” Their paragon, Máiri MacTaggart, was only temporarily lost to them: her sister had broken her hip and Máiri was dutifully departed to nurse
her—(“It’ll not be long, mind you, if I know Janet she’ll be on the mend in no time, it takes more than that to down the likes of us permanent, achara—but the two of
us being sole alone, you can see it’s my plain duty, and these things are sent to try us—I’m wondering now, there was this woman Janet spoke about, an agency like for foreign
girls working here, English mostly and though it goes against the grain to say it, achara, English being English as we both well know, still some of them a sight better trained and willing
to work—and it’s only temporary if I know Janet—”)

“I won’t be late, I don’t think,” said Mendoza.

“Which I have heard before. It’s only creamed chipped beef and saffron rice,” said Alison. “And odds and ends. It’ll keep. Go look at your latest corpse.”

THEY WENT and looked at it. For a few minutes, before Mendoza said the interns could take it away for expert examination elsewhere, by the irascible Dr.
Bainbridge. It wasn’t the most unsavory corpse they had ever looked at, but no corpse is ever very pleasant. It was a young woman, who had been a rather pretty young woman, a lot of curly
dark hair and a pert turned-up nose and a nice figure, dead and bloody on the floor of her own living room. A room neat and clean, in an old but proudly maintained house.

The neighbor, Mrs. Farber, from two houses down the street, was voluble, as the lab men Marx and Horder filed by there on the front porch with their little bags.

“It just don’t seem possible—houses so close here and all—and I never heard a thing, of course, there was kids out playing on the street, kind of noisy, but even
so—And the Weavers next door, they both work and they wouldn’t—but there’s Mrs. Pitts right next door, you’d think somebody would have—A nice girl she was,
pretty strict with the children, a good wife ’n’ mother like they say—kids always nice and polite, they’re nice people. I mean, you can tell—we don’t know Mr. Gerner
so good, naturally he’s at work and not around, but Mrs. Gerner, she was nice—Just possible she’s dead. Like that. Killed. I mean, a lot of people
around and all, that time of an afternoon.”

She was a thin middle-aged woman in a faded blue cotton housedress, and in the chill breeze of evening she clutched a torn sweater round her shoulders, shivering. “I didn’t think
nothing at all, little Bobby Gerner coming over—he’s the same age as our Kenny, I oughta say, maybe, I take care of my daughter’s two, she works and her husband’s in the
service—Kenny’s just turned five, and him and Bobby play together—only when I come out to bring the baby in, he says about this bad man hurting his mommy, and I
thought—well, you know how kids make things up, but I—Beg pardon? Oh, my, I couldn’t say at all when I first saw Bobby in the yard—maybe four-thirty, a little later—I
don’t know. It was only when he said that—and I thought I’d just better see—and I went up here to the Gerners’, and the door was open and that poor soul just
laying there, all the blood—”

Sergeant George Higgins looked at May Gerner, before they took her away, with an unexpected little secret pang. May Gerner, lying there spread-eagled for the lab men to run their chalk-marks
around, and the autopsy surgeon later to lay his knife into . . .