Skeletons in the Closet

Book 0: An Ivor Maddox Mystery

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

'My favourite American crime-writer' New York Herald Tribune Ivor Maddox has his hands more full than ever, with his wife Sue expecting a baby. To add to this, he also faces several of the most complex and frustrating cases of his career: the killing of a thirteen-year-old whose grief-stricken father takes the law into his own hands, and the shooting of a wealthy businessman, which sends Maddox digging into the past. Most extraordinary of all are the corpses that keep turning up under the floorboards of abandoned houses all over the country. And when the vital clue to the identity of the mass murderer turns up in Maddox's territory, it's up to him to solve one of the crimes of the century.

Release date: October 14, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

It was sprinkling slightly as Maddox turned left on Cole from Fountain Avenue, and into the parking lot behind the Hollywood station. He was late; the ancient Maserati had been
stubborn about starting. He was thinking halfway seriously about a new car; if Sue was starting a family they’d need another sedan, and her old Chrysler was on its last legs. By a couple of
lucky chances the new-old house in Glendale was clear of payments, and it might make economic sense to buy something brand-new and let Sue drive the Maserati until it fell to pieces.

Everybody else was in; it was twenty to nine. This was the second rain they had had, and only the first week in November; evidently southern California was going to have another wet winter,
after the usual baking-hot summer.

Maddox went in the back door of the station house, past the door to their modest laboratory, the rest rooms, to the big communal detective office across the hall from the small office relegated
to Sue and Daisy. Sergeant Daisy Hoffman, slim and trim and blond, not resembling remotely the grandmother she was, looked up as he paused in the doorway.

“D-day,” she said.

“Well, her appointment’s for two o’clock. The doctor’s supposed to have the results on the tests.” It was Sue’s day off.

“Fingers crossed,” said Daisy seriously.

“I don’t know,” said Maddox. “It’s a lunatic world to bring innocent children into.” He turned across to the big office, shrugging off his trench coat.

The business of the day was already started. Rodriguez was talking to a citizen at his desk, taking notes; Feinman was on the phone. D’Arcy was brooding over a report. There was no sign of
anybody else—probably already out on the legwork—and the door to Ellis’s office across the hall was shut.

They had, as usual, this and that on hand: the perennial heists and burglaries to make the endless paperwork, the occasional corpses, the monotonous daily round of crime.

“And what delayed you?” asked D’Arcy.

“Car wouldn’t start. I’m thinking about a new one.”

“Who can afford the payments? Those heisters hit again.” D’Arcy handed over the report: the night-watch report. “The same pair, by the descriptions.”

“Hell,” said Maddox mildly.

“Two other heists, entirely anonymous, and four more burglaries,” said D’Arcy morosely. “All the damn paperwork, and nowhere to go on any of it. Naturally.”

“What we’re paid to do,” said Maddox. “Busywork.” He opened his notebook and lit a cigarette. The immediate busywork on his agenda was getting a statement from that
pharmacist who’d been held up on Monday night; he was supposed to come in at nine-thirty.

“Nolan and Dowling went out on this liquor-store heist.” D’Arcy sniffed. “Let’s hope they remember all the standard questions.”

“Now, D’Arcy,” said Maddox inattentively. The phone rang on D’Arcy’s desk.

“Well, after what Bill pulled on that homicide, forgetting to search the body—when I think of anybody making rank at twenty-six, for God’s sake—” D’Arcy
reached a hand to the phone.

“Give him time.” There had been a few changes at the Hollywood station, L.A.P.D., in the last couple of months. Lieutenant Roseman, who had been coasting along anticipating
retirement and doing as little as possible, had finally retired in August, and George Ellis had been promoted to lieutenant and his office. They had gotten three new detectives to add to the
strength. Roger Stacey was an experienced man from the Hollenbeck station and had gone to beef up the night watch; Lee Dowling and Bill Nolan had just graduated from uniform to plainclothes, but
experience would make them more useful in time.

“D’Arcy . . . So what’ve we got now? Oh. Oh, well, that’s got to be—Yeah. What’s the location? O.K., we’re on it.” D’Arcy put down the
phone. “More new business. And it’s got to be that kid.”

“What kid?”

“In Donaldson’s report. Reported missing last night—it didn’t get sent up here until after midnight, naturally the Traffic men didn’t think it was any big deal, but
by what Ken left us, the father finally convinced them the kid wasn’t a runaway type and they did a little looking around. Now we’ve got a body, and ten to one it’s him. That was
the desk—Traffic just called in. Kid’s body in an alley out on Sunset.”

Maddox abandoned his notebook and glanced over the night-watch report. There wasn’t much on it: Roy Kelsey, reporting his thirteen-year-old son missing—Robert Kelsey, a vague
description, nondescript clothes, supposed to be home by dark.

“We’ll have to go look at it anyway,” said D’Arcy. Maddox sighed, got up and went over to Rodriguez’ desk.

“If this pharmacist shows, ask him to wait or talk to him yourself, César. We seem to have a new homicide.”

“Surprise, surprise,” said Rodriguez.

It was raining a little harder. They took D’Arcy’s old Dodge. The location was just down from the intersection of Sunset and Western, a narrow alley behind the shop fronts on Sunset;
the squad car was parked at the mouth of the alley, behind a big trash-collection truck, and Patrolman Day was standing there with another man waiting for them.

“My God,” the other man was exclaiming, probably for the dozenth time, as Maddox and D’Arcy came up, “I was late—I usually hit along here half an hour earlier, but
there was a big mess at one place on Vermont, but anyways when I pulled in here, my God, I thought it was just a pile of old clothes and then when I looked, my God—and I didn’t have a
dime for the phone, I hadda get change at the drugstore on the corner—my God, it’s just a kid—maybe a hit-run, but what a goddamn thing, just a kid—”

They looked. “Well, it’s got to be the Kelsey kid,” said D’Arcy, “doesn’t it?”

“I think,” said Maddox, “we’d better have some pictures.” They didn’t exchange any comments in front of the civilian, but at first glance they didn’t
think this was a hit-run. The boy was about average size for thirteen or so, lying facedown on the dirty blacktop of the alley, alongside a big dumpster crammed with trash. He was wearing jeans and
a plaid shirt, and the jeans had been pulled halfway down his legs; on top of the upper half of the body was a blue quilted nylon jacket with a hood. He had curly blond hair, and just behind the
left ear was a little mess of coagulated blood matting the curls.

“Yeah,” said D’Arcy, and walked back to the squad to call the lab.

Maddox told the driver to get back on his route and collect the trash later. They’d be busy. Eventually the mobile lab truck showed up with Baker in it; he took some flash shots from
various angles and a while after that the morgue wagon came. There wouldn’t be much use poking around for possible scientific evidence at the scene. The doctors would pin down the time
closer, but the body had probably been here all night. It had rained hard, briefly, in the early hours of the morning, and the boy’s clothes were still sodden. The chances were that he had
died somewhere else and been dumped here.

They drove back to the station and Maddox called the father. It was a modest address on Loma Linda. The night watch had just taken the bare information; there’d be details to get, but
first of all they wanted a positive identification. It was one of the dirty jobs detectives came in for, breaking the bad news and escorting the relatives to identify bodies.

Roy Kelsey came into the office twenty minutes later. He was a big stocky man about thirty-five, with thinning fair hair and steady blue eyes in a round face. He wore a rumpled tan jump suit; he
looked tired and his eyes were bloodshot. He said in a heavy voice, “Sergeant Maddox?—you’re the one called—the desk sergeant said just to come back here. You’ve found
Bobby—you said—”

“We don’t know, Mr. Kelsey. We want you to look at a body,” said Maddox gently. “We think it may be your son.”

Kelsey sat down suddenly in the chair beside Maddox’s desk. “A body,” he said numbly. He looked at them, and around the big office, with a vague expression: at thin dark
nondescript Maddox, long lanky D’Arcy looming over him—Rodriguez slouching at his desk talking on the phone, Feinman hunched over his typewriter pecking at a report, Rowan talking to a
raddled-looking blond woman and taking notes. The rain was streaming thinly down the tall windows. “A body,” said Kelsey.

“We’re very sorry, sir. But if you can tell us definitely—”

“Yeah,” said Kelsey. “Yeah, sure. Whatever I got to do—O.K.”

At first, sitting in the front seat of the Dodge, he was silent. Then he began to talk. He said, “Was it an accident? Somebody hit him? He’s always careful in
traffic—Bobby’s an awful sensible kid, you know. Responsible. I told him, be home before dark, and he would have been—he always is. I can always trust Bobby—never had any
worry about him. See, there’s just the two of us now—my wife—Bobby’s mother—died of cancer last year. She was only thirty-four. It was so sudden—just thought she
was run-down, and then the doctor said—She was gone in three months. So there’s just Bobby and me. I’m not at home when he gets back from school, I work at Nick’s garage on
Hillhurst, but I never worry about Bobby. I can trust him, you know? He said—yesterday morning—he was going out collecting for his paper route, after school. He delivers the Herald,
see. And I said to him, you be home before dark, and he said sure, he would be. I got home as usual about six-twenty, and it was dark then. And when he wasn’t home by seven, I
knew—something must’ve happened. I called—and that first cop—asking if he’d ever run away before, if he was into drugs—Bobby! It made me mad—I tried to
tell him that was just crazy—I knew something bad must’ve happened—”

At the morgue he stood over the tray and looked at the boy’s face. The body had just been covered with a sheet: the doctors, the lab, would want to go over the clothes. The face was
unmarked, curiously peaceful and very young-looking, a round freckled face with a snub nose.

“That’s Bobby,” said Kelsey dully. “Was it an accident?”

“We don’t know yet, Mr. Kelsey.”

“It wouldn’t have been his fault. He was always careful in traffic. He was just down on Ardmore, Hobart, he only had the boulevard to cross, coming home. Maybe some
drunk—” He turned away blindly. “We never went to church much. I don’t know—about a funeral, a minister—”

“We’ll let you know, sir,” said Maddox. “You understand, there’ll have to be an autopsy. We’d like to know what happened to him.”

“Yeah,” said Kelsey. “All right. But an accident—wouldn’t have been his fault. He was always careful. He was a sensible kid.”

Maddox and D’Arcy didn’t tell him they doubted if it had been an accident. They drove him back to the station. The pharmacist had come in, said Rodriguez, and made a statement, but
there wasn’t anything in it, not a passable description of Monday night’s heister. “But the pair who hit that bowling alley last night sound like this pair we’ve heard about
before. I don’t know what the hell Nolan and Dowling are doing on it, they’re not back yet, but—”

Kelsey had gone. D’Arcy started to type a report, grumbling about paperwork, and Maddox called the morgue, got handed around a little before talking to one of the doctors. Bergner
wasn’t there; the doctor was one of the newest in the coroner’s office, annoyed at the cops trying to tell him his job.

“Simmer down,” said Maddox. “Of course you’ll have a thorough look. I just thought you’d appreciate a shortcut, Doctor. As an educated guess, the boy was picked up
by a pervert. We’d like to know yes or no as soon as possible.”

“Not that there’s much you can do about it if he was. They’re a dime a dozen anywhere around—but they don’t usually end up killing ’em, at that.
Somebody’ll be on it. We’ll get back to you.”

Maddox put the phone down and leaned back. He realized with surprise that he was hungry. Somehow it had gotten to be after twelve, half the day gone and not much done. D’Arcy finished the
initial report and they went out to lunch together, at a coffee shop on Fountain. They didn’t discuss the Kelsey boy; it was a depressing and discouraging thing, and of course they
didn’t have any facts on it yet.

When they got back to the station, there was a man talking to Sergeant Whitwell at the front desk, a man dressed in black with a clergyman’s back-to-front white collar. “Oh,
God,” said D’Arcy, “not another one.”

“These are the detectives, sir, you can tell them about it,” said Whitwell. “Mr. Honeycutt, Sergeant.”

The clergyman was tall and spare, with a thin ascetic face and a surprising bass voice. “It is,” he said, “an outrage. An outrage. The wanton destruction bad enough, but the
implications—I was nearly sick when I saw—”

Maddox felt tired. Thank God, he thought, tomorrow was his day off. Just about now Sue would be in the doctor’s office, getting the good news or the bad. He and D’Arcy took the
Reverend Mr. Honeycutt into the detective office and heard what he had to say. There wasn’t much they could do about it, but they had to go through the motions; the lab men would go over and
take pictures for the records, dust the place for possible prints, and that would be the end of it.

Mr. Honeycutt’s church was the seventh to be vandalized in the last five weeks. The builders of churches did not think first and foremost of burglar-proofing, and the vandals had gotten
into the churches without much trouble, through basement windows and rear doors. There were no signs of the slick pro burglars, and of course no pro burglar would pick a church to hit; by all the
evidence, the simple motive was the vandalism, and that said almost for sure that the vandals were juveniles, and even if they had left any prints they wouldn’t be in records.

The only slight difference this time was that the vandalism had been even more wholesale, because Mr. Honeycutt’s church had contained more to vandalize. All the other six churches had
belonged to evangelical sects, which did not go in for the cushioned pews, elaborate communion services or religious statues; but Mr. Honeycutt was the spiritual leader of St. James’
Episcopal Church on Hollywood Boulevard, one of the oldest in town and one of the most ornate. Subsequently, surveying the damage while the lab men started to poke around, Maddox felt a little cold
anger at the mindlessness of it: the slashed cushions, knife gouges on the carved pews, hymn books ripped apart, the Bible from the lectern torn to pieces, the painted plaster statues broken to
bits in the aisles. There were the usual obscenities scrawled on the walls, and one feature that had appeared only once before, in the latest case of a small Catholic church a few blocks away from
here: besides the four-letter words in black spray paint were some others—ONLY FOUL BELIEVE GOD and GOD IS SATIN.

“Can one believe, Satanists?” exclaimed Mr. Honeycutt incredulously. “But of all the vile—I could hardly believe it when I—”

“No,” said Maddox sadly. “I think mostly the ones who go in for black magic are better educated than to make elementary spelling mistakes. When had you been in the church
last?”

“Not since Sunday night—the evening service. We have a Wednesday night candlelight service, and I had just come by to post the hymn numbers and leave my robes—I had, er, just
picked up one set at the cleaners’—”

“What about your cleaning service, in the church I mean?”

“The janitorial crew comes in on Thursdays—my dear heaven, how they will ever clean up all this—I called Mr. Wilson, my curate, and the organist—we’ll have to put
off tonight’s service, but dear heaven, all this terrible mess—”

“Yes, it is a mess,” said Maddox. “And I’m afraid there’s not much chance of laying hands on the vandals, Mr. Honeycutt.” He went on to explain why, and
Honeycutt exhibited some righteous anger.

The lab work was a waste of time, but just on the chance, it had to be done. Maddox was feeling even more tired. It had been an unproductive week so far, full of the tedious legwork and even
more tedious paperwork. There was an unidentified corpse, picked up last Sunday night, of all places on the front lawn of the Hollywood Cemetery; it was the corpse of a man about twenty-five, and
it had got to be a corpse by an O.D. of heroin, but that was all they knew about it. There were currently nine unsolved heists being worked, not including the three that had probably been pulled by
the same pair: they had some good descriptions of those two, but it hadn’t led anywhere yet, and one of those counts added up to attempted homicide, when they’d taken a shot at one
victim who had showed a little resistance. The slug had been smashed on a cement wall, so the lab couldn’t identify the gun, which wouldn’t have been much help anyway. The perennial
rash of burglaries had hit a new high last month, and there was never much to do about the burglaries either, except to hope that one of the burglars would leave a print already in records, and
they could get the description of the loot on the hot list to all pawnbrokers. Since the Metro Squad had turned out last May to crack down on the hordes of prostitutes, of both sexes, infesting the
main drags of town, that situation was a little better, but they were beginning to come out in daylight again and annoy the respectable citizens. It was about time—school had been open for a
couple of months—that they had some gang rumbles on the campuses. And the narco business was always with them: the pushers recruiting new customers, the users out shoplifting and mugging for
the wherewithal to get the supply. If there had ever been any glamor to the big town that was Hollywood, it was long gone and dead.

It was after three-t. . .