Root of All Evil

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

Lieutenant Luis Mendoza likes nothing better than to wrap up his homicide cases neatly. The latest Jane Doe is identified as Valerie Ellis, a spoiled rich kid who was left penniless when her parents died four years ago. But, as Mendoza is about to find out, there are many layers to this complex case... 'One of his best' Observer 'Mendoza is back again and on form' Spectator

Release date: May 21, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

Master John Luis Mendoza and Miss Teresa Ann Mendoza yelled. Collectively and loudly they howled into the night, and their joint volume was astonishing.

After a long moment, Alison sat up and said sleepily, “Damn.” She slid her legs over the side of the bed and groped for her slippers. Mendoza mumbled something indistinctly
profane.

“All right, I’m coming,” said Alison crossly, fumbling for her robe.

“—Senseless,” said Mendoza.

The collective howls redoubled from the next room. “I’m beginning to think you’re right,” said Alison, yawning. She felt her way over to the door and put on the hall
light. He heard her soothing voice reassuring the twins.

He shut his eyes again and tried to close his ears, but it was hopeless. After three minutes he got up, switched on the bedside lamp, put on his robe, and joined Alison. “It is simply not
common sense,” he said. “At this age, they don’t know or care who comes running when they yell. We’ve got enough money, God knows, to hire a nursemaid. Let her stay
up all night—in the back bedroom. With the door shut.” He took Miss Teresa Ann from Alison and looked down at her screwed-up small face without, at the moment, much affection. Miss
Teresa Ann had a good deal of curly black hair and a pair of large brown eyes framed in long black lashes, but right now the eyes were squeezed tight shut, the rosebud mouth was open, and she was
emitting regular bellows. Resignedly Mendoza walked up and down joggling her.

“Ridiculous,” he said. “If anybody had told me a couple of years ago I’d be walking the floor with a baby at 2:30 A.M. just like any ordinary
domesticated male—!”

Alison passed him, going the opposite direction, joggling Master John Luis. “Not exactly your forte,” she agreed with somewhat malicious amusement.

“And all so unnecessary! But no, you remember all those tear-jerking Victorian novels about the poor little rich child whose mama and daddy left her to the servants— Caray,
how can one five-month-old infant make such a racket? Do they all do this?”

“Most of them,” said Alison. They had to raise their voices over the formidable noise. She sat down in the nursery chair and joggled Master John automatically, shutting her eyes.
“I’m beginning to think you have something, Luis.”

“Of course I’ve got something. My God, I can sympathize with Art now—‘like a time-bomb,’ he said. How right he was. How the hell do people stand it who can’t
afford—”

“Surprising what you can get used to,” said Alison through a yawn, joggling Master John grimly.

“Well, I’m too old to change my habits,” said Mendoza. “I’m used to sleeping at night. I’ve got a job to do all day. Right now, specifically, this
burglar-rapist.” He peered down at Miss Teresa’s red face. “Though from one point of view, I can sympathize with him—slaughtering females.” He yawned too.
“Te estás engañando a tí misma—you’re just fooling yourself. At five months, they don’t know whether it’s Mama or a nice kind hired
nurse. Later on you can be the loving parent. When they’ve learned to sleep at night.”

“Think I agree with you,” said Alison, nodding sleepily over the yelling Master John. “But the back bedroom isn’t decorated for a nursery.”

“¡Eso basta!” said Mendoza. “So, get the painters back—put up the pretty circus animals on the walls! And make this a nice neutral spare room. But the
first thing to do is to acquire the nursemaid, ¿es verdad?” He joggled Miss Teresa violently.

“Yes,” said Alison. “You’re perfectly right. I’ll go looking tomorrow, if I’ve got the strength.”

“Today. It’s nearly three o’clock. Where the hell do they get the strength?”

“Babies,” said Alison sleepily, “have a lot of energy. If they’re healthy babies.”

“These two must be the damnedest healthiest babies in Los Angeles County,” said Mendoza bitterly. “If anybody had told me I’d be— Do you think it’d be any
good singing lullabies?”

“We’ve tried that,” Alison reminded him. “They don’t seem to be very musical— I think I sing reasonably well, but it just makes them yell harder. Maybe I
don’t know the right lullabies.” She shifted Master John to the opposite arm.

“There must be hundreds of nice experienced nursemaids available.”

“Well, I couldn’t say. I’ll go and look.”

“Today,” said Mendoza. “This is undermining my morale, cara. I used to think I was a fairly tough fellow, when I was getting eight hours of sleep every night. But with
these two time-bombs going off regular at 2:30 A.M., I’m feeling my age.”

“I will,” said Alison meekly. “I promise. Of course we don’t want just anybody, but a good employment agency ought to—”

“I’ll tell you one thing,” said Mendoza. “It’s very damned lucky we haven’t any near neighbors, or they’d be complaining to the police. A nice thing,
veteran officer like me getting reported for disturbing the peace.” Miss Teresa let out a particularly rousing bellow, and he looked at her small person even more bitterly. “I amend the
statement,” he said. “The damnedest healthiest babies in the state of California!”

As usual, the twins drifted off into beautiful quiet slumber at 5 A.M. Mendoza was prodded awake by a sleepy and sympathetic Alison at eight
o’clock; by the time he’d shaved and dressed and had two cups of coffee he felt slightly more human.

“You go and look for that nursemaid,” he admonished her.

“I said I promised. I back down,” said Alison. “You’re quite right, it’s senseless when we can afford to pay somebody else.”

When he came into the office at a quarter to nine, Hackett surveyed him and grinned. “I told you so, didn’t I? You live through it, but you wonder how.” He spoke from the
mature viewpoint of a parent whose offspring had achieved its first birthday and was creating different kinds of disturbances than sleepless nights.

Mendoza sat down at his desk. “You needn’t sound so damn smug. I’ve got Alison to back down—she’s going to hire a nurse. Senseless damn thing, these sentimental
notions— After all, as I pointed out, what about me? Valuable public servant, nerves all shot to hell. And why in God’s name I ever got involved in all these domesticities in the first
place— If anybody had told me a few years ago I’d be—”

Hackett laughed. “We mostly get caught up with sooner or later. . . . We’ve got a possible ident on that Garey Street corpse. Fellow called in just a few minutes ago—he’s
coming down. One James Ellis, sounds very ordinary and level.”

“Oh? That’d be a step forward.”

“I thought you could see him. I want to go over what we’ve got on this rapist with Palliser.”

“All right,” said Mendoza, yawning. The rapist was being a tough one; that kind of thing always was. The burglar-killer had, so far as they knew now, entered seven houses—very
crudely, in broad daylight—and finding women at home, had assaulted four (raping two of them), and in the course of assault killed the other three, burglarizing five of the houses afterward.
The four survivors had been seriously beaten and mauled, but had been able to give the police a good description: it added up to the same man, but that didn’t help much in pointing out the
right fellow. A Negro, said the survivors, medium dark, a big fellow over six feet and broad, with a pock-marked complexion. They all said, shabby work clothes, dark pants, a tan shirt; one woman
said, a tan billed cap. One of those women and two of the neighbors of others had seen him get away, and said he was driving a battered, middle-aged, light-blue pickup truck, a Ford or Chevvy. The
fourth, woman, one of those he’d raped, was under psychiatric treatment and not very coherent or helpful.

And that might sound as if they had quite a lot on him; but it wasn’t too much, actually. Los Angeles County had a very large Negro population; a certain proportion of it, of
course—larger than you might expect—was made up of professional people, educated people, a good many of whom had very respectable incomes and lived in upper-class residential areas. But
there was a larger proportion left over. A lot of men both white and black wore tan shirts and dark pants. And there were a lot of middle-aged, light-blue pickup trucks around.

Right now they were going through the list, gleaned from the D.M.V. records in Sacramento, of all such trucks registered in L.A. County. No guarantee that the right one was on the list, no
guarantee that the right one was registered in L.A. County. But it was quite a list and was taking time and manpower to go through. If it didn’t turn up anything interesting, then
they’d ask Sacramento for wider coverage and start over again. Meanwhile hoping that Lover Boy wouldn’t get the urge again before they got a line on him.

That was the kind very tough to crack.

Mendoza yawned and thought about the Garey Street corpse. He was interested in the Garey Street corpse because it looked like an offbeat sort of thing.

It had turned up on Monday morning; this was Wednesday. A very shocked and upset Father Michael Aloysius O’Callaghan had reported that it had been found by some kids at the far end of the
playground of a big parochial school. A homicide crew had gone down to look at it, and at the first casual glance it had looked like a fairly run-of-the-mill thing. The body of a young woman,
between, say, twenty and twenty-four, a middling good-looking young woman when she’d been alive, blonde; no handbag, no observable exterior injuries, and no clues on the scene at all.

Hackett had said then, grimly, “Another dope party, probably. Or third-rail stuff. Girl passes out on them and they ditch the body the handiest place.” Mendoza had agreed. That
wasn’t the classiest section of town, Garey Street. That kind of thing had happened before: a party of young people experimenting with heroin, or homemade liquor, one of them getting a little
too much, the others dumping the corpse in a panic.

The only reservation in his mind was because of the place she was dumped. The parochial school was a large one and, like the public schools, had a twenty-five-foot-high chain-link fence around
its playground. The several gates were, of course, locked overnight. It wouldn’t have been the easiest job in the world to hoist a body over that fence; and there were all sorts of other
places where the body could have been abandoned without any trouble at all: dark alleys, side streets, empty lots.

Still, it had looked fairly run-of-the-mill, until Dr. Bainbridge sent up the autopsy report. The middling good-looking young blonde hadn’t died of an overdose of heroin or straight
alcohol. She had died from an overdose of codeine; and Bainbridge had pinpointed it as a rather common opiate prescription, even named the firm which manufactured it.

Which aroused Mendoza’s curiosity in the blonde. A lot of people committed suicide by taking sleeping-tablets, but suicides didn’t confuse things by removing their bodies to
unexpected places. This had been, in all probability, a deliberately planned murder; and contrary to all the fiction, a big-city homicide bureau didn’t run into that sort of thing very
often.

“This Ellis seem very positive?” he asked Hackett now.

“Kind of cautious,” said Hackett. “Said when he and his wife saw the cut in the paper this morning they both thought it could be—but of course a corpse doesn’t
always look very much the way it did alive. They were coming right down.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got a date with Palliser, see you later.” He went out, and a minute
later Sergeant Lake put his head in the door and said a Mr. and Mrs. Ellis were here.

James Ellis was a stocky, short man in the fifties, very neatly and conventionally dressed: thinning gray hair, honest blue eyes, a square jaw. Mrs. Ellis was his counterpart:
a plain middle-aged woman, just now looking distressed but also very conventional, obviously in her best clothes—printed silk dress, navy-blue coat and hat. Ellis was a bank teller: a very
respectable fellow.

He was now sitting in Mendoza’s office, still looking a bit pale and shaken even twenty minutes after his visit to the morgue, and taking long breaths, mopping his forehead agitatedly.

“Just a terrible thing,” he said. “A terrible tragedy. Poor little Val.”

Mrs. Ellis was crying gently. “We did try to help, Jamie, you know that. I’ll never believe she was really bad. It was just it all came at a bad time for her—she
couldn’t— Only twenty-three, it doesn’t seem hardly fair. Poor child.”

“Valerie Ellis,” Mendoza prompted gently. “What can you tell me about her, Mr. Ellis? She was your niece, you said.”

“Yes, sir, that’s right. I just can’t figure who’d have done such an awful thing to her. But I’ve got to say we didn’t know just so much about—well, how
she was living, who she went around with—lately. Now, Mabel, don’t you carry on. You know we tried. But she—” He mopped his forehead again, looked at Mendoza
earnestly. “It was like she turned against everybody she knew, when it happened, see. Of course we told her right off, come and live with us—only relations left, and she was only
nineteen then—and our own two both off and married, you see. It wasn’t right, a young girl like that on her own. But she wouldn’t. I’m bound to say she talked kind of
wild—”

“Oh, but, Jamie, she wouldn’t have done anything wrong! Fred’s girl—”

“Well, I dunno,” said Ellis slowly. “Kids that age, they go off the rails sometimes, get into bad company. It was a damn shame, but in a kind of way all Fred’s own fault.
I told him often enough—”

“Mr. Ellis. If you’d just give me what information you have, in order? I realize you’re upset, but—”

“Oh, sure—sure. I’m sorry, sir, I see you don’t know what I’m talking about.” Ellis tucked his crumpled handkerchief away, brought out a second immaculate
folded one, and blew his nose. “Damn shame,” he said. “Little Val. She was an awful cute youngster . . . I dunno whether you’ll be interested in all this, Lieutenant, you
just say if you’re not. First off, I guess you want to know where she was living. Far as we know, up to last week anyway, it was a place on Mariposa Street in Hollywood.” He added the
address. “We’d offered to take her in, way I say, and maybe we should’ve checked up on her more—her only relatives, and she was so young. But it was—”

“We should have,” said his wife. “Just because she was maybe a little bit wild, all the more reason—” She wept gently.

“Well, maybe so, but it was—difficult,” said Ellis. “I’ll tell you how it was, Lieutenant.” His steady blue eyes were troubled. “See, Fred—my
brother—he was a go-getter. Not like me,” and he smiled briefly. “He was a moneymaker—top salesman with DeMarco and Spann last fifteen years, big engineering firm, maybe you
know. He made a pretty high income, ever since little Val’d be old enough to remember—and he spent it. Time and again I told him, Fred, you ought to sock some away, just in
case—you know? Buy some stock, bonds, invest in real estate. Sensible thing to do. But Fred, he couldn’t see it—he never did.” Ellis shook his head disapprovingly.
“They lived right up to the hilt of what he made—house in Bel-Air, two Caddys, a maid—He wasn’t ever a snob, not Fred, nor Amy either, they used to invite us to their
parties and all, but— Well, you see what I mean. Excuse me, I get to talking—you want to hear all this? I don’t know——” He was an earnest, unhappy, conventional
little man.

“Everything you can tell me,” said Mendoza.

“Time and again I tried to tell him, it’s just not sense to run charges, the interest— And he never would take out insurance either, it was like he was superstitious about it,
it’d be bad luck. Excuse me, you don’t want to hear— Poor little Val. Maybe we should have tried harder, I dunno, even when she acted rude and— But what’s
done’s done. Mabel, don’t take on so . . . It was four years back Fred and Amy got killed, in a car accident. The other fellow’s fault, it was, drunk driver—but that
didn’t help Fred or Amy. These damn drunks. Fred only just turned forty-nine—tragedy, it was. Well, just as I could’ve predicted, there wasn’t anything left, see. A lot of
debts—the house wasn’t paid off—car was a wreck, of course—no insurance. Time everything was settled, the equity he had in the house just about paid off the debts, and
little Val didn’t get anything. She was nineteen, just in her first term up at Berkeley—just joined some swanky sorority up there. And she’d always had, well, everything—you
know what I mean. Clothes, her own car since she got out of high school, anything she wanted. And she—kind of—went to pieces, I’d guess you could say, when she was left like
that.” He cast a side glance at his wife, unhappy.

“I suppose it was only natural,” she said. “A girl that age, and they’d spoiled her. Having to quit college, find a job and earn her living.” She wiped her eyes.
“We couldn’t have afforded to pay her college fees, you see, but we told her she should come right to us for a home—only right thing to do. But she wouldn’t.
She—”

“She was resentful?” Mendoza filled in as she hesitated. “Bitter at being left with nothing, when she’d been, you might say, brought up in luxury?”

“Yes, it was like that,” said Ellis. “She said some pretty sharp things about taking charity. Well, she was some spoiled, way Mabel says. She went off on her own,
and—well, we tried to keep in touch with her, we’d ask her over for dinner now and then, like that. But then again, you know, Lieutenant, as I said to Mabel at the time, it
doesn’t do any harm to young people to be on their own, have to support themselves, learn the value of money. Just the opposite. I thought maybe she’d straighten out, start to get some
sense, being all on her own like that . . . She worked at Robinson’s first, as a sales clerk. I said to her, she ought to take a business course, nights, get to be a secretary. But she
didn’t—” He stopped, looking miserable.

“What other jobs did she hold, do you know?” Mendoza was taking notes. “Know any of her current friends?”

“No, sir, I’m afraid we don’t. We hadn’t seen her just so often this last year. I do recall her mentioning a Paul, but not what his last name was or what he did, anything
like that. She worked at The Broadway after Robinson’s, and then since about six months ago she was working as a hostess at a restaurant—The Black Cat out on La Cienega. But I
don’t know—” He broke off nervously.

“She was still working there, as far as you know?”

“Well,” said Ellis, “that’s just it. I—I suppose we’ve got to tell you. Damn it, Fred’s girl—little Val—”

“I’ll never believe she was bad,” said Mrs. Ellis. “Maybe she got into the wrong company, but— Of course we’ve got to tell them, Jamie.”

“Yes. Well, thing is,” said Ellis, “the way I say, we tried to keep in touch with Val. Asked her to dinner once in a while and so on. Sometimes she’d come, but the
last—oh, couple of years or so, more often she’d make some excuse. She always acted kind of bored when she did come, didn’t stay long. Well—middle-aged people, and she was
young.” He blinked apologetically. “Thing is—she never said, about quitting her job at the restaurant, but then we hadn’t seen her for a few months. It was about a week ago,
wasn’t it, hon, you stopped off at her place—”

Mabel Ellis nodded solemnly. “We’ve been worried about it ever since, you can see, Lieutenant. It was a week ago Tuesday—yesterday. I happened to be passing, and I thought
I’d leave her a note, ask her to come to dinner on Sunday. Alice and Jimmy were both coming, with the kids, and I thought— Well, it was about three o’clock, naturally I
didn’t expect she’d be home. But she was. She—acted queer. She wanted to get rid of me, I could tell—as if she was expecting somebody she didn’t want me to meet. And
when I asked her about her job, if she’d quit, she said—she said, sounding sort of wild and—well, queer—she said, oh, she wasn’t a sucker to slave at an
eight-hour job . . . She wouldn’t say any more—she sounded— But I can’t believe she was really bad,” said Mrs. Ellis tearfully. “Such a pretty little
girl she was— Oh, Jamie, she wasn’t really bad, was she?”

Mendoza collected Dwyer and drove up to Mariposa Street in Hollywood. It was a quarter past ten; he trusted that Alison was just setting forth on her quest for a nursemaid.
That jolly domestic, Bertha, was due at ten and could keep an eye on the peacefully slumbering twins, and feed the cats . . . Of all the damned senseless things, putting up with that pair when they
could afford to pay somebody else—

The apartment house on Mariposa was an old one, and not very big; all of forty years old, about twelve units in two stories. It was scabrous yellow stucco outside, dark and smelling of dust
inside. Six apartments downstairs, six up. Locked mailboxes set into the left-hand wall, and the first door to the right bore a brass plate with Manageress on it. “’S hope
she’s not out marketing,” said Mendoza, yawning as he pressed the bell.

She was not. She opened the door almost at once and faced them, a scraggly middle-aged woman, black hair turning gray, pinned back in a plain bun: old-fashioned rimless glasses, sharp blue eyes.
“Yay-ess?” Borderline southern.

Mendoza explained, produced identification. The woman took a step back. “Murdered!” she exclaimed “Well, don’t that beat all!” She sounded curiously pleased.
“Guess that shows I wasn’t woolgatherin’ after all, about that young woman. I was figurin’ on askin’ her to get out. Some funny goings-on.”

“Oh? We’d like to hear anything you can tell us, but also we want to see her apartment.”

“Sure you do. Tell you the truth, I been kinda curious myself, ’n’ I figured it was my right—bein’ responsible for the place, so to speak—an’ I slipped
in to look it over, t’other night. Just to see. I reckon yo. . .