Run to Evil

Book 0: A Vic Varallo Mystery

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

The neighbours all said ten-year-old Paul Brandon would grow up to be a detective: he was remarkably observant and inquisitive. But Paul doesn't grow up to be a detective; after failing to return one night, his body is found buried under a road excavation site. A tragic, unnecessary accident it seems. But after the foreman insists that no child could move that amount of earth, Vic Varallo begins to suspect foul play and follows the leads to Paul's reticent playmate Gordon, who may have witnessed something terrible that night. 'My favourite American crime-writer' New York Herald Tribune

Release date: July 28, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

“Thank goodness,” said Mrs. Anderson, “school starts tomorrow.” She heaved a sigh over the low cement wall separating the Andersons’ yard from the
Varallos’. “Seems the kids get noisier every year. And that Brandon boy—! I see he’s been bothering you lately, too.”

Laura said fervently that he had. “We never saw much of him until I quit work, you know—I suppose that was it, we were only home in the evening and I will say they seem to keep him
in at night.”

“Oh, they’re nice people, the Brandons, sure, try to bring him up right. But that boy—And you may not have seen much of him, but he was telling everybody about you before
you’d been moved in a month, if you’ll believe me. How your husband has two eggs for breakfast and likes his bacon real crisp, and you only have coffee and toast. But you ought to be
having more now, dear, you know. About four months along, are you?”

“But how on earth could he—Do you mean to say he’d been snooping around looking in windows and listening? I never—”

“He doesn’t mean any harm,” said Mrs. Anderson. “But what I say, he’ll grow up to be a private detective.” And added, “Oh, lordy, those
potatoes!” and ran for her back door.

Really, thought Laura, starting back to the house, having added the coffee grounds to Vic’s compost heap as he’d asked. Really, that boy . . .

They’d lived here almost six months without hearing much about Paul Brandon or meeting him. It wasn’t until that first summer he’d bothered them much; and, both of them being
away all day most days, it hadn’t been too much. But then last April Vic had got his promotion, to Detective, and after all they weren’t getting any younger and with the raise in pay
they could manage, even with the size of the house payments—so the baby got started and Laura quit her job and stayed home. And the Brandon boy began to be more of a nuisance. . . .

She remembered the first time she’d seen him, when they’d been living here about six months. She’d been standing at the stove, peacefully watching potatoes boil and stirring
the warming asparagus, about six-fifteen. Expecting Vic any minute, she turned when the service-porch door opened, not startled, though she hadn’t heard the car. And in had walked this
perfectly strange boy, a boy about nine, a sandy-haired, freckled boy with a wide friendly grin. Nonchalantly coming into the kitchen, saying, “Hi, Mrs. Varallo. I’m Paul Brandon,
everybody around here knows me, I figured it’s time you folks did too. You want me to cut the grass or maybe run any errands for you? Got a new stove, haven’t you? A Westinghouse, I
guess they’re pretty good, the Bradleys down the street got one too.”

Taken aback, Laura had stared at him. Obviously a boy from a good home. His slacks were newish, clean, and he had on a clean shirt. He spoke up well, grammatical, and his grin was utterly
confident. But just walking in—She said something about that; his grin never faltered. “Oh, you don’t want to mind me, Mrs. Varallo, everybody knows me. I just like to
get to know people, see. People, they’re kind of interesting.” And his bright blue eyes under their sandy lashes were darting around, absorbing every detail of the kitchen: the new
stove, the round maple table and chairs in the breakfast alcove (because Laura detested those cold chrome things), the cheerful yellow curtains matching the linoleum and the yellow-enameled
cupboards, and the portable mixer left out on the tiled drainboard.

“Oh, you got a Kenmore mixer,” he said interestedly. “Mrs. Anderson and Mrs. Keith both got Sunbeams.” And then the car did come up the drive and Vic came in, in uniform.
Ridiculously handsome, tawny-blond Vic, and her heart still turning over at the sight of him. He looked at the boy in surprise. “Gee,” the boy said admiringly, staring back at him.
“I never saw you in your uniform before, sir. What do you do in the cops, drive a car or stay at headquarters doing something?”

They’d got rid of him finally, and Vic asked, “Where did that come from?”

“It simply walked in,” said Laura. “A funny one, isn’t he? I mean, you can’t say he isn’t polite, but—”

After that they heard a little about him from the Andersons. The Varallo house was on the corner and they hadn’t got acquainted with anyone in the neighborhood except the Andersons next
door—Mr. Anderson retired, nice people in the sixties. By then Vic had got captured by his roses and Marvin Anderson being a rose man too, they foregathered over the wall quite a lot.
Everybody, said the Andersons, certainly did know Paul Brandon. For several blocks around. And he knew everybody. No harm in the kid, you couldn’t even say he was brash; just an awful
friendly kid, and friendly the way one adult would be to another—people on equal standing. And one awful damn curious kid, said Marvin Anderson. He liked to know everything about people. Just
to know.

The second time Laura had encountered him was on a hot October Sunday; Vic on duty, she was sitting in the living room under the electric fan reading the latest Doris Miles Disney when the
Brandon boy rang the doorbell. Ostensibly he wanted to ask if he could do any errands for her, he was going down to the market for his mother; but he came into the entry hall as he asked, and
inventoried what he could see of the living room as she answered. Three minutes later when she shut the door on him, Laura was amusedly aware that he could tell anyone who wanted to know all about
the Varallos’ plain beige rug, rather shabby old couch and chair in tan tweed, one new plastic-covered armchair and ottoman, middle-aged twenty-one-inch TV, mahogany coffee table and the
reproduction of Vermeer’s “A Woman Weighing Gold” hanging over the mantel. Not that he’d know what that was; he’d probably say, a funny old picture of a lady in
old-fashioned clothes with a big stomach. (Why, she wondered irrelevantly, were so many of Vermeer’s women so obviously pregnant?)

And then she thought of Aunt Lorinda, and sat down and laughed and laughed.

Aunt Lorinda hadn’t been a mean gossip, or really a gossip at all; but she had been, well, nosy. She liked to know about people, the smallest things about them—whether they used
handkerchiefs or Kleenex, slept in nightgowns or pajamas, and where they kept things in the kitchen, and what time they had dinner. It wasn’t as if she went around (having found out) saying,
“You know, that Allister woman does dye her hair,” or, “Mr. Clarke lost forty dollars at the race track last Saturday.” She just liked to know.

And the look in ten-year-old Paul Brandon’s blue eyes had been the exact look that came into Aunt Lorinda’s when, having stormed the citadel of new neighbors, she made amiable small
talk while cataloguing the furniture and her hostess’s clothes, and accurately estimated incomes.

Aunt Lorinda and the Brandon boy . . . It was a queer quality to find in a ten-year-old boy, but then, as Vic said, people came all sorts. And the Brandons, as Mrs. Anderson said, were quite
nice people. They lived a block up on Hillcroft Road. Paul’s father was a salesman of some kind, a big, hearty, sandy man. Laura had met Mrs. Brandon a few times at the nearest
supermart—a little, dark, untidy woman with the same wide friendly smile as her son. He was an only child.

Very fortunately, when they’d had their murder last year (as Laura always thought of that Ross Duncan affair) the Brandon boy had been (probably to his frenzied frustration) in bed with
the measles. . . . (So innocently they’d fixed up the maids’-quarters garage apartment to rent, and then discovering that it was illegal in this single-residence zone! A pity, too, the
money had been useful. Oh, well.)

Since Laura had quit her job, she’d seen a good deal more of Paul Brandon, it being summer vacation. He’d turned up that first day she stayed home—neat and clean at that early
hour, smiling and polite at the front door.

“Hi, Mrs. Varallo. You’ve quit your job, haven’t you? Because you’re going to have a baby—that’s nice. What you want, boy or girl? Well, I just came by, tell
you, any time you want any little errands done, anything like that, I’d be obliged, see. Being it’s vacation now.”

Once or twice she’d taken him up on that, too lazy to get her car out, and let him bicycle down to the market, the drugstore, for her; and he was quick and reliable, cheerfully refusing
any little tip. “That’s O.K., I get a good allowance, just like to oblige, Mrs. Varallo.” But then, very obviously he admired Vic—big, handsome, tough-cop Detective
Varallo.

No, you couldn’t say he was exactly brash. Just friendly—and curious. That you could say. Talk about the Elephant’s Child, thought Laura. . . . At this end of another summer
vacation, she could agree with Mrs. Anderson, thank goodness school was starting. The Brandon boy safely confined elsewhere six hours a day anyway. She wondered what his teachers made of him.
Probably a highly intelligent boy . . .

Smiling a little (for nobody could really dislike the Brandon boy, even with his ’satiable curiosity), she came back to the kitchen and finished getting dinner on the table. Coffee keeping
warm on simmer, she drained the peas, turned over the hamburgers a last time, stirred a large dollop of butter into the mashed potatoes. Got the salad out of the refrigerator. And called
Vic, who’d come in ten minutes ago looking tired.

“Tough day?” she asked sympathetically.

Varallo, feeling better for dinner, sipped coffee gratefully, groped for cigarettes, and said, “Maybe it’s the hot weather. Everything coming along at once. I remember seeing some
statistics a while back—the murder rate always goes up in summer. Not, of course, that all the current cases are murders. But all the red tape—We picked up those vandals, by the
way.”

“Oh? The ones who started the fire at the school?”

“Two fourteen and one twelve. And already talking up smart to the cops. . . . My God, what’s the answer on them? I don’t know. . . . And then there was a holdup—broad
daylight—at a liquor store out on Glendale Avenue. Squad-car boys got him, but of course we had all the red tape and paper work on it. Maybe I was a fool to want to make rank again.” He
smiled at her across the table. With twelve years’ service on another force upstate, ranking captain when he resigned, he’d joined the Glendale force thinking that he might get more
rapid promotion; but that didn’t come very fast on any police force. “The squad-car boys just turn him over and get back on their tour—we get the real work. . . . And then Charles
got a hot lead on the Kreiss burglary and we went out on that. And when we got back, here’s an urgent message from the Feds, to every single law-enforcement office in California, that just
maybe the Armagast kidnapers are heading west and’ll end up in our territory, kindly keep an eye out. And then—”

“Oh,” said Laura. “That awful thing.”

“Yes.” For a moment Varallo looked grim. “Not a nice bunch.” The kidnaping of small Robert Armagast, back in New Jersey two months ago, had been a rather brutal affair,
ending in the clean escape of the kidnapers with a couple of hundred thousand dollars, after the child’s body had been found: the two-year-old child dead of starvation and exposure, tied up
in a deserted mountain cabin in deep woods. The FBI was chary of giving out information, but let it be known economically that they thought two men and a woman were involved, and that they had a
couple of leads. “What the hell,” said Varallo, finishing his coffee, “do they expect us to look for? They can’t give us anything but a couple of vague descriptions. One man
about thirty-five, medium-sized and dark, calling himself John Newhall—which he obviously won’t be now. A fattish woman about forty, dyed blond hair, known as Marion Stepp. Neither of
them ever picked up, so no prints or nice profile shots. Just that. The other man they think is one Joseph Adam Kallman, and him they have a pedigree on—but it’s not certain any of them
are here, and there’s a lot of California outside L.A. County.”

“Yes. I never can understand a woman being mixed up in such a thing.”

“È vero. As Charles said, it’d be very gratifying to catch up to those jokers, quite aside from the nice publicity we’d get, but pretty farfetched that
they’re anywhere here. . . . And then, just as we were finishing up the paper work on the burglar, the lead on the vandal case came in—reason I was late. I was a hell of a lot better
off riding a squad car. Regular hours.”

“Don’t show off,” said Laura severely. “You know you love it, being back in a little authority again. And I’m just as relieved—regular hours
or not—to have you out of uniform. You catch enough feminine eyes as it is, without—And I’m a fool to say so, turn you into an egotist.” She smiled at him, knowing Vic
Varallo for what (regardless of looks) he was: a man quite without vanity, despite his handsomeness or brains: a quiet man who liked to grow roses.

“And,” said Varallo, “the Keene trial starts tomorrow and I’ll have to give evidence. Probably waste the whole day. And there’ll be something new
overnight—armed robbery or another burglary. And by the way, they’ve got Mountain shut off now—from Jackson down to Cedar. Damned nuisance.” The residents of Glendale, far
from being grateful to the progressive city fathers, were cursing them these days for the major project under way of reconstructing the main sewage lines and water mains. All over town, men and
large machines were busily ripping up whole sections of streets, setting up signs reading DETOUR and CAREFUL! and closing off blocks to maddened
residents, shutting off through intersections on main roads. Peacefully traveling some familiar route, drivers found intersections unexpectedly blocked, or had to nurse their tires over wooden
planking. “But,” said Varallo, “I haven’t asked what sort of day you had, cara. Feeling all right?”

“Never better. Babies seem to agree with me. Except that I’m getting to look so awful. . . . Don’t be so damned polite, you know I do—”

“Don’t swear.”

“Old-fashioned! I wonder if it could possibly be twins, the way I’m—Well! Nothing very exciting, I went to the market and came home and washed my hair, and finished the new
Ursula Curtiss—very good.” Laura was a mystery fan. “And,” she added, “had a phone call from Thalia.” Her tone was significant; Varallo looked at
her.

“Thalia? Oh. The one—”

“Thalia Winters. A very nice girl”—a girl who’d worked with her at the bank—“whom I mistakenly introduced to your fat woman-chasing Irish lieutenant, Charles
O’Connor.”

“Now, look,” said Varallo defensively.

“I thought,” said Laura, “that the police were expected to have high moral standards these days. After all, Thalia’s a very nice girl. And this rake
O’Connor—”

“Oh, well, not exactly a—So she is, no harm done, she turned him down and that’s that. Sta bene. Charles—”

“That O’Connor!” said Laura.

Varallo grinned at her. “And I should be damned relieved the famous Celtic charm doesn’t reach you.” She was just being female; she liked Charles well enough.

“Charm!” said Laura. “That gorilla? Oh, well, Thalia just doesn’t like autocratic men. . . . And then, just before you came home, I had the Brandon boy.”

“That kid,” said Varallo, extending his cup for more coffee.

“Saying he noticed we’d got some new furniture—he’d seen the truck delivering the crib and so
on—and he’d be glad to help me move things around if I was going to, and he hoped I was feeling O.K.”

“That one,” said Varallo. “Damn funny kid, like a nosy old gossip in ten-year-old jeans.”

“Elephant’s child,” agreed Laura. “But a nice enough boy, in a way, Vic. I suppose he can’t help it. He had another boy in tow today. That’s funny, too, when
you see him with another boy, the other one never says a word. I suppose he teams up with the silent ones so he can do all the talking.”

Varallo laughed. “Probably grow up to be a gossip columnist.”

“I have,” said Laura, “either homemade lime sherbet or store-bought ice cream. Which?”

“Neither right now, amante. Maybe later.” He stretched. “Ought to go out and do some weeding—check for aphis.”

During the next couple of weeks, various people were thinking various thoughts about the Brandon boy.

Mr. James Keith, who owned the almost-new Spanish stucco around the corner from Hillcroft on Carmen Drive, thought about Paul Brandon in something like panic, not unmixed with hatred. That
Goddamned nosy kid! Hadn’t thought there was a soul in hearing, and then the doorbell, just as he put the phone down, and that damned kid—Damn it to hell. And he wasn’t
sure what he could or should do about him. Make a big deal of it, approach him direct and offer him five or ten bucks to forget it—that would tell the kid there was something fishy for sure.
Bring it up casual-like, explain it as a joke, or—What the hell!

Listen, he said to himself, did the kid even understand? He sort of looked as if he had. But he hadn’t said anything, not really—Not to him, thought Keith. But, he went on
thinking, sweating profusely at the mere idea, for all he knew the kid might be spouting off all over the neighborhood, to his mother, Mrs. Riegler when he cut her lawn, Ella Knox, other kids
who’d tell their mothers—oh, God!

If Alice ever found out—

Next time he saw the kid—Got to do something, thought Keith.

Steve Morehouse was also thinking vengeful—and scared—thoughts about Paul Brandon. He’d threatened to give him the beating of his young life if he told anybody, but he
wasn’t sure he’d really scared him, damn it. A damn funny kid, that Paul. And, well, brought up right, so maybe he’d get to thinking—

Oh, God, thought Steve. He went hot and cold at once when he imagined how it’d be, Mother and Dad ever finding out. It just couldn’t happen—mustn’t happen! And
that damned kid knowing—

Steve, who had also been brought up right, felt as if he’d got into one of those mazes the psychologists put rats in. Why the hell he’d ever, in the first place—But, my God,
he was eighteen, not a baby, it was his own business—Only if they ever got to hear about it—!

I could kill that damn snoopy kid, he thought in panic.

Wilma Starke was also feeling jittery about the Brandon boy. Damn little nosy-parker, she thought, with panic fluttering its whirring wild wings all around her. If Ken ever found out—And
a kid. Only ten years old. You couldn’t count on a kid, they didn’t have good sense. Sure, sure, so he looks up all friendly and sympathetic and says, “Why, no, Mrs.
Starke, I won’t tell anybody if you wouldn’t like it. Honest I won’t, you don’t need to be scared.” A kid. Forget all about that by next day, come out with it
to somebody like Ella Knox or Mabel A. . .