Random Death

Book 0: A Vic Varallo Mystery

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

'My favourite American crime-writer' New York Herald Tribune As usual, crime is a boom industry in Los Angeles. A gunman walks into a café and shoots a waitress dead, seemingly at random. A schoolgirl is shot from a passing car. A prostitute trying to escape her job is killed by her pimp. Then there's the kidnapped daughter, the shot father and the strangled nurse who scrawls a clue to her assailant's identity. The Glendale Police Department is being kept very busy with these cases and more off-beat conundrums, including a series of burglaries in which nothing is stolen and a string of break-ins that could only have been committed by midgets or contortionists.

Release date: July 28, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

It was raining again. This was going to be a wet winter in southern California. Since the official beginning of the rainy season two months ago in September they had had four
heavy storms. In the big, square, communal detective office on the second floor of Glendale Police headquarters, the tall windows streamed grayly, and all the strip fluorescent lighting was on.

At his desk next to Delia’s, Varallo was reading a report. Leo Boswell was typing one a couple of desks away, cussing now and then at the typewriter. Everybody else was out somewhere.
Delia was listening to Mrs. Grace Phillips.

“I tell you, Miss—what did you say— Riordan, that poor girl never had a chance. See, she opened up to me, I heard the whole story. She never had a damned chance. Raised on a
farm some place in Kansas, for God’s sake, and never seen a town bigger than the wide place in the road she went to school—runs away to Hollywood on the bus with the idea she’d
get the swell modeling job next day, people always said she was pretty enough to be a movie star—my God!” Grace Phillips was a hard-faced blonde by request somewhere in her fifties; she
looked as if life had used her hard, but she had her head screwed on the right way and had kept a sense of humor and a warm heart. “Haven’t we all heard the story before!”

“Yes,” said Delia. “Did she tell you anything about Jerry Rubio?”

“Oh, you know his name. Maybe I’m not telling you nothing you don’t know? Well, the cops are smart these days.” Grace Phillips stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray on
Delia’s desk. Her expression was brooding. “These poor damned silly kids. Yeah, she told me the whole story, she needed a shoulder to cry on— I told you she’d just got hired
at the place I work, Chris’s Night Owl Cafe on San Fernando, and middle of the evening it’s usually slow, there was just me and her. Look, she wasn’t a bad kid, Miss
Riordan— Rosalie—she was just silly, and young, and she got took.”

“Like a lot of others,” said Delia.

“Yeah. Yeah. She just didn’t know which way to turn—she lands here last year, and with the money running out, she couldn’t get a job, and this guy gets hold of her.
Rubio. Over in Hollywood. She never set out to be a hooker, it was him roped her in. Working for him. I thought I’d be blowing the whistle on him, but you know about it already,
hah?”

“About Rubio, yes. What did Rosalie say?”

“Well, she was into it before she hardly realized, see, and she didn’t like it no way. She’d been brought up right, she wanted out as soon as she got in. She’d tried to
get away before, and he beat her up. He kept her pretty short of money, but she managed to squirrel some away, and she come over here about three weeks ago, like I say got the waitress job at
Chris’s, and a cheap room, and was kind of laying low. I don’t know how Rubio found her, could be she’d said something to one of his other girls about where she was going. My God,
when I come to work last night and Ollie—that’s the owner—tells me she’s got murdered, I like to died! I said right off, it’s that Goddamned pimp found out where she
was, and Ollie says prob’ly the cops’ll want to talk to me. My God, I felt sorry for that girl, I did. She was only nineteen. She was a damned little fool maybe, but I guess most of us
have made mistakes, ain’t we?”

“Most of us,” said Delia wryly. “Did she know where Rubio was living?”

Grace Phillips shook her head. “If she did, she never said. She said he showed up every day to take most of the money she’d got from the johns. She’d had a room on Harold Way
in Hollywood. He paid the rent and left her some eating money, was all. The poor damn little fool. Only nineteen. It must have been him killed her, wasn’t it?”

Delia said, “Probably. We don’t know yet.” As a matter of fact, Jerry Rubio’s prints had showed up in the shabby cheap apartment on Everett Street, and there was
sufficient physical evidence to show that he had probably not intended murder, just a severe enough beating to scare Rosalie back to his little stable of hookers. “This fills in a
little,” she added, though what Grace Phillips had to say was largely redundant. “Thanks very much for coming in, Mrs. Phillips.”

“Got to help the cops. That poor damn girl.” She got up, a square hefty woman, and picked up her raincoat from the back of the chair and put it on slowly. “Do you want me to
sign a statement or something?”

“If we want one, we’ll let you know, thanks,” said Delia. There would probably be enough evidence to nail Rubio legally; and equally probably there would be a plea bargain, a
reduced charge, and he’d spend a couple of years in and come out to prey on more silly women.

She watched Mrs. Phillips out with a mental sigh. Now there’d be another report to write, in case the DA’s office decided it needed testimony from Grace Phillips. She didn’t
immediately reach for a form to roll into her typewriter. It was twenty past two, three and a half hours to end of shift on this late November Thursday, and she was feeling bored and stale. Since
Rosalie King’s beaten body had been found by her landlady yesterday morning, and the lab had turned up Rubio’s prints and long record with the LAPD, there was an all-points bulletin out
on him and his car, and it was just a question of time before he’d be picked up. It was just the latest little sordid job to be worked, not remotely interesting. They also had a hit-run they
were never going to get anywhere with, and the paperwork on the latest suicide was just about cleaned up. Delia yawned, looking at the steady gray rain streaming down the windows.

Sergeant Joe Katz came in with Detective John Poor. They sat down at their respective desks and Katz said, “I wrote the last report.”

“All right, all right,” said Poor, and rummaged in his desk for forms and carbon.

The phone rang on Varallo’s desk and he picked it up. “Sergeant Varallo . . . oh, hell. Where? All right, we’re on it.” He looked over at Delia. “We’ve got a
new homicide.”

“Fine,” said Delia. “The more the merrier. Give me five minutes and I’m with you.” She got her handbag out of the bottom drawer and went down the hall to the
ladies’ room. Shrugging into her raincoat, she got out powder puff and lipstick, eyeing herself in the mirror impersonally.

All those long years of proving herself as an LAPD policewoman, the long hours of studying, acquiring all the useful extra skills to help her make rank—the fluent Spanish, the courses in
police science—most of the time working the swing shift, which just made everything more difficult—she had deliberately cultivated the plain-Jane effect. No-nonsense Riordan,
poker-faced Riordan, all out to make rank and the great career. Neil had tried to tell her how foolish that was—how foolish all of it was—and of course he had been quite right. About
that as well as other things. Now, when it was too late, forever too late, and there was nothing ahead of her for the rest of her life but the sordid thankless job, she was at least looking
different: a small compensation. She had let her dark brown hair grow, and it was professionally cut and styled, in loose waves halfway to her shoulders, showing its chestnut lights. She was using
more makeup, and her wardrobe had expanded to something more than the plain dark dresses and pantsuits, and included some good jewelry. She powdered her nose, touched up her lipstick, and fastening
the plastic rain hood reflected that she might almost pass as still twenty-nine, instead of a year and a half older.

These last two and a half years had dragged by uncertainly, now speeding too fast, now moving in slow motion. A lot had happened, but very little that had happened to her had been good.

She finished buttoning her coat and opened the door to the hall, to face Detective Mary Champion just coming in. “Damn,” said Mary, looking at her, “I thought we could take a
coffee break together.”

“There’s a new body,” said Delia. She liked Mary, who was a plump fortyish grass widow with a teenage daughter and a breezy disposition. She had come to them from eighteen
years on the Santa Monica force, wanting to be nearer her ailing mother. One of the things that had happened in the last two and a half years was that the crime rate in Glendale—conservative,
quiet, bedroom-community Glendale—had shot up to unprecedented heights, and, however reluctantly, the city fathers had had to part with the wherewithal to upgrade the police department. Not
before it was time, they had acquired sixty new uniformed men and a fleet of new squad cars; there were five more men in the lab and two policewomen in the scientific investigation unit; six more
detectives added to the former strength were now nominally divided into a Robbery-Homicide Bureau, Burglary, and Narcotics, with detectives Ben Guernsey and Mary Champion aided by a couple of
policewomen forming a Juvenile Division in a cubbyhole of an office downstairs. Varallo had made sergeant. Lieutenant O’Connor, to his annoyance, had been given the dignity of his own office,
a closet-sized room behind the communal office, and he and Leo Boswell constituted the Narco Bureau. As the gregarious soul he was, O’Connor resented the isolation and was as often to be
found in the big office as his own; and in practice, being still shorthanded for the normal amount of work on hand, they still filled in for each other regardless of the type of crime to be
worked.

“Damn,” said Mary again. She ran her fingers through her short graying hair, setting it in wilder disorder than usual. “Well, I’d better fortify myself
anyway—another hour and we’ll have the Mata Haris in with the latest. It is to be hoped. The things we get into. Well, see you around.”

“How’s it shaping?” asked Delia.

“By what it looks like, we’ll be hauling in half the student body,” said Mary cheerfully. “The lieutenant’s fit to be tied. These kids.” She brushed by Delia
into the ladies’ room.

In the lobby downstairs, Varallo was belting an ancient trench coat. “It’s coming down cats and dogs,” he said unenthusiastically. “I’ll drive.” He opened one
panel of the double front doors for her and clapped his hat over his crest of tawny-blond hair. “I hope to God we don’t get too much more of this or we’ll be getting more
landslides up in the hills. What a climate.”

They made a dash for the parking lot and his year-old Ford sedan. Some while ago, he had got tired of the cramped space in the Gremlin, and now the children were older and Laura’s car not
always reliable, they had needed something bigger. He fished out keys. Delia asked, “Where are we headed?”

“Address on South Glendale. I don’t know what it is, the squad just called in a shooting. All we need.” He started the engine.

The address was two blocks this side of Chevy Chase on Glendale Avenue, and the pounding rain had kept any potential crowd from collecting. There was a drugstore on the corner, offices and a few
stores up from there. The squad was parked in the red-painted curb zone outside the drugstore. The ambulance was ahead of it, and the two paramedics and Patrolman Steiner were standing under the
awning over the drugstore door. There was a white-smocked clerk in the doorway looking shaken. In front of the other three men was a boy about twelve, just standing there. As the Ford pulled up
behind the squad, Steiner came over. They all, by tacit agreement, joined up under the awning.

On the sidewalk just in front of the door to the drugstore was something under a blanket. There were splotches of red on it rapidly darkening in the pelting rain.

“Look, we didn’t know how you’d want us to handle it,” said one of the paramedics. “It’s always, don’t move the body, don’t touch
anything—and God knows she’s dead all right—but this damned rain— I said we should move it into the ambulance, but Jack says you’d jump all over us—”

“So let’s have a look.” Varallo squatted and lifted the blanket, Delia looking over his shoulder.

She couldn’t be more than ten or eleven, a thin little girl with dark hair; her face was untouched, and she had been a pretty little girl with neat small features. She was wearing a blue
pullover sweater and a dark skirt, a red coat and ankle-high black boots.

“My God,” said Varallo. What could still be seen of her clothes was a mass of blood, torn intestines spilled out; she had been nearly cut in two.

“Yeah,” said the other paramedic. “A shotgun, what it looks like.”

“I heard the shot—it must have been the shot,” gabbled the clerk. “I don’t believe it—just a little kid— I don’t believe the things that happen
these days—”

“The other kid says he was with her, he saw it happen. It was a car going past, somebody stuck a gun out the window. I tried to get him into the squad,” said Steiner. “Maybe
he’s in shock—”

Delia went up nearer to the boy. He was a nice-looking boy about twelve, in nondescript shabby clothes, rubber boots, an old raincoat. “Can you tell us your name? We’re police, we
have to ask questions about this.”

He nodded his head once, jerkily, without looking at her. His eyes were glassy. “Richard Gilmore. She’s Connie—she’s my sister.”

“Where do you live?”

“Maple Street. Just—up a ways. We were going home from school. Just walking—walking along. I never even noticed the car—till there was this big bang—and
Connie—and Connie—” He sagged, and one of the paramedics caught him and took him over to the ambulance.

“I heard the shot,” said the clerk. “There wasn’t anybody in, I was putting out some stock. I heard the shot— I knew it was a shot, and I ran out to look, and saw
this poor kid—sure, it had to be a car going past, there wasn’t anybody on the street but the kids—”

“Did you see the car?” asked Varallo.

“Now how could I? It was maybe fifteen seconds before I got to the door—nobody on the street for a block, all this rain, and not much traffic, but cars both ways in the next block,
not right out in front, nothing to say which car— God! Just a kid! Some one of these louts all doped up maybe—a hell of a thing—”

Varallo said to Delia, “Not very practical to try for photographs. She didn’t move after she was hit, and she wasn’t hit from far off. It was most likely a car on this side of
the street, heading south. Let’s see if the boy’s all right. They’d better take her straight to the morgue.” The blanket and what it covered was already sodden black with
rain.

The boy looked white and sick, but they thought they’d better get him home. He said his mother would be there, she didn’t work.

It was a modest frame house on an old block. Part of the thankless job was breaking bad news, and it was never easy. Mrs. Gilmore was a pleasant-faced woman in her late thirties, with untidy
brown hair, and a warm voice. The boy hurled himself at her, shaking, and she held him, patting him automatically as she listened to Varallo, her eyes glazing, her tone at first merely
bewildered.

“Connie—but she’s only eleven,” she said. “How could Connie be—shot? I don’t understand—how could Connie be shot? In the middle of town?
It’s just silly—” But of course eventually she took in what they were saying. She didn’t quite break down, but she probably would sooner or later. Delia asked questions and
called her husband; he worked at The Broadway in the Galleria. They stayed until he got there, answered his few numb questions. They had got the clerk’s name, the only other witness. Varallo
took Delia back to headquarters to write the initial report.

“You know you’ll just be wasting time asking questions down there,” she said, as he pulled up in the parking lot.

“We do have to go by the book,” he said rather savagely, lighting a cigarette. He hadn’t shut off the engine, waiting for her to get out. Eyeing his handsome regular profile,
Delia thought academically that Laura was lucky: a good man, Varallo, and a good police officer. “No, we probably won’t get a damned thing, but we have to ask and look. When the
boy’s calmed down, see if he can give us anything at all on the car.”

“Yes,” said Delia, her hand on the door. “Tell Laura I’ll be there at six tomorrow night.”

“And thanks very much,” said Varallo. “We appreciate it.”

“No trouble.” She got out and shut the door, and he took his foot off the brake, heading back for the scene. It would be a waste of time asking questions down there because obviously
no one else had heard the shot; nobody had rushed out to the street except that clerk. Any pedestrians, and they would have been few and far between on that block on a day like this, had been too
far away to hear the shot, be attracted to the scene; the people in the stores and offices shut away behind closed doors and windows. They would have heard about it now, from the clerk;
they’d be ready to ask excited questions, but they wouldn’t have any answers.

Connie Gilmore. Eleven. If there was any answer to that, it would be the answer that so often turned up: the meaningless, motiveless violence.

Delia came into the lobby, and heard O’Connor’s rough bass voice from the open door of the Juvenile office across the hall to the right. O’Connor was used to having a finger on
all the current cases, though he wasn’t technically supposed to be concerned with homicide these days. She went over and looked in the door, stripping off her coat.

It looked like an interesting little conference. O’Connor, broad and bulging and as always needing a shave at this hour, was sprawled back in a desk chair, the outline of the .357 Magnum
very visible in the shoulder holster. Mary Champion was taking notes briskly, a cigarette in one corner of her mouth and one eye screwed up against the smoke. Detective Ben Guernsey, sandy and
stocky and cynical-eyed, was leaning back fiddling with his unlit pipe and watching the two girls sitting in front of his desk. One was blonde and one was dark, but aside from that they looked like
any two average high-school girls in today’s uniform, the jeans and dun-colored pullovers, the boots, the messy hair styles—one frizzy and short, one a lank mid-parted tangle—the
chipped red nail polish and pale lipstick. And that was no small achievement, for as a matter of fact they were both policewomen. If only just. Wanda Hart was a six-month rookie just twenty-one,
and Ruth Sawyer had been sitting on the switchboard in Communications only six months longer than that.

“This Dutchy keeps coming up, Lieutenant—most of the kids seem to know about him, the ones into dope. He’s the main contact, it looks like. . .