The Death Bringers

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

The Death-bringers means tragedy for LAPD Homicide. One of Lieutenant Luis Mendoza's friends is killed while going into a bank. Now Mendoza and his team of detectives are dealing with the loss of a friend and a colleague - and trying to find his murderer among the criminals of Los Angeles... 'Builds up to a superbly exciting mystery - with not one, but three climaxes' Manchester Evening News

Release date: May 21, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

Alison Mendoza smiled out the front window of the house on Rayo Grande Avenue, as Máiri MacTaggart, that jewel of a housekeeper-nurse, hurried up the front walk, trowel
still in hand. Mr. Warbeck, with a backward glance at her, continued on down the street. He was a funny little man, with his shock of untidy hair and overearnest manner.

“I believe,” she said to Máiri, “you’ve acquired an admirer.”

“Ah, get on,” said Mrs. MacTaggart. “And me in shouting distance of sixty? What I—”

“No, really, but he does always stop to talk to you if you’re out in the yard.”

“Two, three times, is it? He admires the twins, is the truth. Daft over children the poor man is.”

“You don’t convince me—you didn’t have them out there right now.”

“Tosh,” said Mrs. MacTaggart roundly. “The man’s lonely, is all—retired and not knowing what to do with himself. He talks to most people roundabout. What
I—”

“Mmh,” said Alison. Mr. Warbeck had become a tolerably familiar sight in this area for only a few months. This was a newly subdivided section, but Laurel Canyon was an old
residential site and down the hill were older, shabbier homes; Mr. Warbeck, it was understood, rented a room in one of them. He seemed to walk a good deal, and all the kids and dogs for blocks
around knew him. A nice little man, thought Alison vaguely; and if he was getting up the courage to lay siege to their Màiri, who was a widow, she didn’t sound very receptive, which
was a good thing.

“What I came in to tell you, if you’ll stop joking a minute, he had his transistor radio on, and it was the news. There’s been another one.”

“Not another—”

“Another bank robbery is what I’m saying. Right downtown, the Security-First Bank on Spring Street. At noontime again, like all the rest, a couple of hours ago, and the villain got
clean away.”

“Oh, dear,” said Alison inadequately.

“Clean away again, can you imagine it? But thanks to God he didn’t shoot anybody this time.”

“It doesn’t seem possible . . . And I suppose that means,” said Alison, “that we won’t be seeing Luis until midnight again.”

Lieutenant Luis Mendoza had never, as he expressed it, brought himself to resign from the honest job, despite the unexpected fortune his grandfather had left him; he was still, dapper as ever,
holding down his desk at the Homicide Bureau at Central Headquarters downtown.

“Very likely,” agreed Mrs. MacTaggart with a sigh. “All things considered. It does seem a great pity they can’t be spaced out more sensible.”

“Homicides, you mean?” said Alison gravely. “It does seem that way. But all this—it doesn’t seem possible he can go on getting away with it. Maybe
they’ll get a useful lead this time—”

“The Invisible Man, the newspapers are calling him,” said Mrs. MacTaggart. She looked serious. “And if they don’t, then, maybe I’d best make a novena for it. The
poor lieutenant, not in until one last night—ruining his health he’ll be!”

It was the fourth bank robbery in twenty-seven days. All the jobs had apparently been pulled by the same man. He was a loner, and it just didn’t seem possible that he
could so utterly vanish moments after each job.

As if they didn’t have enough on their hands already. As if September wasn’t about the damnedest month of the year anyway, with the temperatures hitting a hundred degrees and over
and the homicide rate naturally rising too. As if . . .

It was, in fact, turning out to be one hell of a month for the cops at Headquarters Homicide. Hackett, the senior sergeant, was still in the hospital, due to go home in a couple of weeks and
spend another month convalescing before he came back on the job. Landers was on vacation, and so was Farrell. And Piggott, impossibly, was home in bed with the ’flu.

“The ’flu,” said Palliser bitterly. “How the hell could he catch ’flu in September, for God’s sake?”

But that was the way the ball bounced, so they were undermanned to start with. And there’d been that shooting over on San Pedro—that was three weeks old and looked like coming to a
dead end; the corpse had been a near-Skid-Row drifter and anybody might have had some reason to cool him, good or bad—and the suicide that just possibly wasn’t—though after a lot
of probing into it Palliser was almost convinced that it was—and the teenage gang rumble with two kids dead and several in the hospital, and yet another child-beating with the baby dead. And
just this morning somebody, probably in some kind of car, had held up a Shell station on Figueroa and left a corpse behind him—the corpse of a nineteen-year-old kid who’d have been back
at his classes at L. A. C. C. three days from now, if somebody hadn’t wanted a little ready cash.

John Palliser didn’t like to talk to bereaved parents. He was a young man for a sergeant, and a sympathetic young man who liked people. He didn’t mind talking to the bad boys, and he
could get as tough with them as need be, but he never knew what to say to people like Mr. and Mrs. Walsh.

“Why did it have to be Jimmy?” asked Mrs. Walsh. “Why my Jimmy?” And Palliser didn’t know, so he couldn’t tell her.

“He was a good boy,” said Walsh numbly. “A good boy. Earning his own way through college. He wanted to be a lawyer. He’d’ve been a good lawyer. Never in any
trouble, even if we don’t live in too fancy a neighborhood.” Walsh was a clerk in a Bekins’ warehouse.

Palliser asked the questions that had to be asked. Jimmy had worked at the station two summers. The owner, Mr. Hammer, had liked him, treated him well, trusted him. “Why did it have to
happen to Jimmy?” Walsh asked blankly. “Why did it happen at all? He said Mr. Hammer always told him—Jimmy and this other guy works there, the mechanic—anybody ever tries to
hold up the station, play along, don’t get brave, hand over the money. So Jimmy wouldn’t have— Why?”

There wasn’t any immediate answer; possibly there never would be. The shooting had been done, as near as they could figure, about nine this morning, and you’d think that in those
teeming city streets, in broad daylight, somebody would have seen something; but by noon it was apparent that nobody had, among immediately available possible witnesses. The shooting had been done
not in the glass-enclosed station office but in the garage, set back farther from the sidewalk. The lab team was still going over every square inch of everything in there. The shooting had been
discovered about ten o’clock when the mechanic, Mike Partridge, came on duty and found young Walsh’s body. The owner, summoned down then, thought the heist man had got away with
somewhere around forty dollars.

Palliser left Higgins and Dwyer still asking questions in the neighborhood and called the morgue from a drugstore phone. They hadn’t, of course, got to an autopsy yet, but they had dug the
bullet out. It was too much damaged for Ballistics to identify, thought the doctor, but he’d send it over anyway.

“Oh, great,” said Palliser gloomily. He left his drugstore sandwich half eaten and went back to the Homicide office. As he came in, Sergeant Lake slammed down the phone and got up in
a hurry.

“Lieutenant—another one! The same bastard—Security-First at First and Spring—just now, the guard called in—”

“¡Bastante! ¿Qué es esto? For God’s sake, it’s less than a week since he hit that Bank of America—” Mendoza seized his hat and
caught Palliser’s arm. “All right, call the Feds and the lab, but we’ll get damn all this time, too, I’ll just bet. For God’s sake. Come on, John.”

“Well, I just—”

“Nobody else here, damn it,” said Mendoza.

“It’s hot as hell outside,” said Palliser plaintively. “Where do you suppose he gets the energy? And how in hell does he do it—disappear like that?”

“By all we’ve got so far,” said Mendoza, “he’s found out how to dematerialize, is all I can figure.” They got into the elevator.

Homicide, with quite enough on its plate, thank you, had not been concerned with the first bank job. That had been the Broadway-Washington branch of the Bank of America, and nobody had got hurt.
The loner had just walked away and vanished with twelve hundred and fifty-three dollars of the bank’s money, so that headache had belonged to Lieutenant Saul Goldberg of Robbery.

But exactly a week later, on August nineteenth, the loner had walked into the Security-First National Bank at Main and Commercial, showed a gun to the chief teller, collected a little under
three thousand bucks in the inevitable paper bag, and started to walk out. The bank guard, belatedly catching on, had run after him and collared him at a side door, whereupon the loner had calmly
fired three bullets into him and pulled his vanishing act again.

The guard died just as the ambulance got there, so that laid it right in Homicide’s lap, and the headache had been getting worse ever since. Of course the Feds were on it, too, but there
was an old saying that you can’t make bricks without straw, and while they had a rudimentary kind of description, it didn’t give them any leads.

“It all happened so fast—” said the chief teller helplessly. And it was the same story five days ago, at the Bank of America at Ninth and Main. This time one of
the male tellers had spotted what was going on and had quietly slipped out into the main part of the bank and waited for him—followed and tackled him before he got to the door. If the teller
had hoped to be called a hero in the headlines he’d been sadly mistaken; what he was called in the headlines was dead.

They got all sorts of descriptions from various witnesses, which was par for the course; the general public, Mendoza thought, when asked to remember details, usually wound up proving the truth
of that bit from Holy Writ: They have eyes and see not. But one thing the witnesses all agreed on was that the man was bald. Very bald.

But bald, curly-haired, white, black, or green, how the hell did he get away so quickly and completely? Somebody should have noticed him—which direction he went, at least—and unless
he’d had the devil’s own luck every time he’d never have found a parking space on the street near those banks, and even if he went off on foot, among the usual crowds somebody
should have seen him . . . Although, of course, anonymity could hide in a crowd easily.

And very probably, thought Mendoza grimly, they wouldn’t get anything more suggestive on him from the new set of witnesses.

They didn’t. They got just about what they’d got before. As far as it went, it was helpful, because it added up to the same boy—again allowing for the variations of the
witnesses. They discounted the hysterical female at the bank last week, who claimed he was a big black man over six feet tall with a scar on his face, and the man who insisted the loner wore a
beard. The descriptions they had from those who’d had the best looks at him roughly said the same thing. And there was nothing very useful there.

“Was he bald?” Mendoza asked the chief teller. Palliser was talking to the guard and the bank manager, and a handful of Feds had turned up and were questioning the other tellers, the
few members of the general public who’d been here.

“Oh, yes, sir.” The chief teller was a pretty youngish woman, brown-haired and brown-eyed; she had on a bottle-green linen sheath and a chunky five-strand necklace of green beads.
She kept clutching at the beads nervously. “But it all happened so fast—”

“Just tell me what you remember for sure, how he looked.”

“Well—well, he wasn’t a young man, I don’t think. I think his eyes were light . . . I couldn’t say about his coloring, I mean, he was a white man, but I
wouldn’t like to say, I guess he was sort of medium—and he was bald as could be, I remember his bald head sort of shining . . . And he had on a dark-gray suit and a white shirt and a
tie—a—a black tie, I think. Dark anyway. It was all so fast—I got the shakes when I saw that gun. Mister, I really got the shakes. With those two fellows shot dead, I mean!
It looked as big as a c-cannon—”

They knew about the gun, at least, and it would look something like a cannon to anybody not familiar with guns. The doctors had recovered bullets from both the guard and the teller, and
Ballistics had examined their lands and grooves and looked in their records and come up with a make on the gun. It was a Smith and Wesson 1955 target revolver; it had a six-and-a-half-inch barrel,
and it fired .45 ACP caliber slugs. It was a big gun. It was a heavy gun. In the hands it was now in it was a damn dangerous gun.

“What did he say?”

“He didn’t s-say very much.” Another similarity. What the hell good did it do them to find out it was the same boy? “He showed me the gun and just said something
like—oh, ‘You know what I want,’ like that—and honestly, I was so scared and surprised—I mean, even reading in the papers about this guy, even knowing somebody like
that’s around, you just don’t expect—I just started grabbing up money. I don’t know to a penny what I had, but I usually have more on hand than the
other— Honestly, I just wanted it over—”

“He had a paper sack?”

“Yes, he did. It was, oh, a sort of medium-sized one, not really big. Now wait a minute,” she said. “Wait a minute. That was kind of funny. See, I was stuffing bills into this
bag, and all the time I was thinking—as well as I could think, you know—I mustn’t let anybody see what’s going on, Jean at the next cage, or Bill Harding over at
Money Orders—they’re nearest me, see—or somebody might try to get smart like that fellow last week and wind up dead. So I was trying to be real quiet and easy about it, see. And I
got the bag full, and there was still a little pile of bills left in my drawer, but he says, ‘That’s fine, Miss Thomas’—you see, there’s my name plate right inside the
window, he saw that—and before I could try to get any more bills in, he took back the bag and shoved it under his jacket and put the gun away, too, and off he went. I don’t know, he
didn’t seem to walk fast, but he was just—gone.”

“He saw the bag was full and took what was already in it. I see. Not a greedy fellow. You can’t remember any of his features near enough to describe? Nose? Ears? Jaw?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t really look at him but just at first, you know. After that I was concentrating on the money. Naturally. He had a sort of roundish face, I
think.”

“Which way did he go?” Mendoza looked around the bank. It was a large bank; this main-floor office was perhaps a hundred by a hundred and fifty feet, with marble counters around most
of three sides. There were two doors giving onto Spring Street and one onto First. There was also a door out of the bank into the lobby of the building; it was, of course, an ordinary office
building above the main floor.

That was the door she pointed at. And the lobby had a street door of its own, too, onto Spring.

“Mmh,” said Mendoza thoughtfully. “You didn’t happen to notice his hands?” No, she hadn’t. They had a witness from the first job, a sharp-eyed private dick
who’d been standing at the next window, had seen what was going on and had the sense to stay still. He said the loner had worn strips of flesh-colored adhesive tape on his finger tips. He
could be right, though nobody else had noticed that. In this weather gloves would be conspicuous. . . . But, nothing. No lead. Here was the same dark-gray suit, the same dark tie they’d heard
about from the other witnesses before. And she went on to give him more of the same. As far as she could tell, he wasn’t either very big or very small—average. She couldn’t guess
his age; she wasn’t very good at that. His voice—well, he hadn’t said much—it was sort of average. Just an ordinary voice. No accent or anything. He wasn’t very fat or
very thin—average—“Of course we only see customers about from the waist up. I couldn’t tell—”

¡Mil rayos! thought Mendoza irritably. And this was the one who’d seen him nearest to, this time. This time nobody had realized what was happening—had
happened—until after the loner had got clear away and the chief teller had gone into hysterics.

“And besides,” she said tearfully, “it’s not Miss Thomas, it’s Mrs. Thomas!”

People.

Mendoza thanked her and went over to the Feds. They hadn’t got much of anything either.

“The Invisible Man,” said one of them disgustedly. “Argh, maybe he is.”

“Well, there’s this and that,” said Mendoza, lighting a cigarette. “All in the downtown area. Why? Probably the most crowded section of town. And he hits at the lunch
hour—between twelve and one, a peak period when he’d be least likely to be noticed. But why pick banks in this area in the first place?”

“He hasn’t got a car,” said the Fed wearily, “and you know how the bus situation is. He can’t figure out where to catch a bus for anywhere else.”

“Very funny,” said Mendoza. “What it suggests to me is, he’ll keep hitting banks in this area.”

“So?” said the Fed. He was a big fellow with rough-hewn features; he reminded Mendoza a little of Hackett. “Do you see a lead there?”

“Stake out all the banks in the area bounded by, say, Washington and Sunset, Union and San Pedro?” Mendoza sighed. “Trained observers to describe him better, at
least?”

“Compadre,” said the Fed gently, “how many men you got? How many men you think we got? An army? Banks—there are thousands of them. Thousands.”

“Nineteen, twenty in the downtown area,” said Mendoza.

“Argh,” said the Fed. “So four times he hits downtown. So next time he hits Federal Savings in Glendale or the California Bank in Culver City. Who can tell? Compadre, we
got other things we’re working on, you know, and just so many men.”

“Amigo,” said Mendoza, “so have we. So have we.”

They would have to get a formal statement from Mrs. Thomas. They would be comparing what she said with what the other witnesses had said. They would—a waste of time so far—include
Mrs. Thomas in the group being showed thousands of mug shots at Records, hoping for a possible ident.

At least this time the loner hadn’t killed anybody. No telling when he might again.

A loner, for God’s sake.

Hitting banks. Such very public places, with people all around.

And then disappearing. How?

Mendoza and Palliser went back to Headquarters. “This gas-station thing,” said Palliser. “The hell of a thing. By all that shows, a nice young kid—ambitious and
hard-working. I wonder if the lab came up with anything. Damn shame. Probably one of these damned hopheads, hunting easy money to support his habit.”

Mendoza yawned and punched the elevator button again. He said, “Detective novels.”

“What? What about them?”

“Mostly about the private homicides. ¿Cómo no? Nice intimate killings. Largely very implausible. They do occur—but how many of that kind to the kind we mostly
see—the impersonal, random, wanton kills?” He sounded dispirited.

They got out of the elevator and walked down to the door marked Homicide Bureau. Sergeant Lake looked up.

“You’ve got a new one, boys. Higgins came in just after I got the call. I sent him out on it.”

“What now?” asked Mendoza resignedly.

“Over on Allen Street. Teenage girl shot. Colored. Looks like something a little funny, what the squad-car man said. I don’t know.”

“All I need,” said Mendoza. He picked up his hat again.

The city had tripled its population in the last ten years; the chief was clamoring for more money to hire more cops. The city was policing a territory ten times the size of New York City with a
quarter as many cops, and the city had the top police force in the world; but it could only stretch so far and do so much. And of all the public services the city fathers granted money to, the cops
were always last on the list.

Naturally.

When Mendoza and Palliser got to the house on Allen Street, the ambulance had just arrived; they wouldn’t move the body until the lab team had seen it. Higgins, looking
very hot and uncomfortable in the stuffy little living room, was talking to Mrs. Coffey.

It was an old frame house on a block of old frame houses. This was one of the oldest sections of L. A. . .