The Nameless Ones

Book 0: A Vic Varallo Mystery

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

Someone in Glendale is murdering elderly housewives in their homes. The signs point to a serial killer but could the police be mistaken? In each case, the killer knew the victim's routine; but what possible connection can there be between victims at opposite ends of town and who could know just where all of them would be at a given time? Vic Varallo is tasked with the investigation to discover the link between the victims. However, he has more than just murder on his plate, with a new baby to contend with as well as a nasty flu epidemic sweeping through the department. 'My favourite American crime-writer' New York Herald Tribune

Release date: July 28, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

When Varallo came into the headquarters building at five to eight, Sergeant Albert Duff was still there, leaning on the main desk talking to Copeland, who’d just come in.
Sergeant Duff was on nights this month.

They both said, “Morning, Vic.”

“Nice quiet night?” asked Varallo.

“Well, a couple of things,” said Duff. “I was just telling Bill. We got a call to a child-beating out on Chevy Chase—”

Varallo grimaced and said, “Deh. I will never understand—”

“—But,” said Duff, grinning, “when Harrison got there it turned out it was a false alarm. Just a nervous new papa, and mama had left him with baby while she went to see
her sister, and he was just trying to change the baby, which same he’d never done before. Stuck a pin in wrong or something, baby yelled, and one of the neighbors got excited.”

Varallo laughed, starting for the stairs. “Nice quiet night. Any more heist jobs?” They had somebody around pulling a few; not much of a lead on him yet.

“Uh-uh. Well, I’m off,” said Duff, yawning. The Traffic shift had already changed; the headquarters building felt quiet and a little sleepy. Katz came in with Poor just behind
him, and as Varallo started up the stairs Copeland was telling them about the false alarm. Varallo grinned again, feeling superior: not that Laura let him in for the diaper bit very often, at that.
And besides, his darling Ginevra was such a good baby and hardly ever did yell. Much. Of course, most babies—but Ginevra wasn’t like most babies. Equally of course. Their darling
Ginevra—

“I can’t get over it,” said Katz behind him. “Just look at him.”

Varallo turned in the doorway of the big Detective Bureau which spread all across the front of the second floor of the new police building. “Look at him,” said Katz, shaking
his head. “Our big handsome blond Eyetie. No bloodshot eyes, no yawns, no snarls. With a two-month-old baby at home. It’s not natural. You don’t mean to tell me she slept right
through again?”

“She always does,” said Varallo, feeling more superior. “I told you. Since the week after she came home from the hospital. Eight to six thirty, no trouble at all.
She—”

“It’s not fair,” said Poor.

“That’s what I say,” said Katz gloomily. “My God, it aged me ten years. Both times. With Joe Junior and Johnny. Ten years. Going off like time bombs at two-thirty every
single damn morning, and keeping it up for hours. I swear, there were times I liked to fall asleep questioning witnesses. She hasn’t even once, Vic?”

“No, I told you. Of course not. She’s—”

“Please,” said Katz hastily, “no raptures. All right, all right, she’s the most beautiful baby ever, if she still does need her diapers changed. Sleeping right through.
God, when I think—”

“Not fair,” said Poor again. “I tell you, Joe—you’ll remember—I had to take sick leave, get caught up on my sleep. There was nearly three months
there—just like you said, a time bomb. Every morning, two, three o’clock, the baby yelling.” They both looked at Varallo enviously, crossing to their desks.

“Well, Ginevra just—”

“Spare us the raptures,” said O’Connor from the door. “I’m a tender plant this morning.” He slapped his hat on the rack and sat down heavily at his desk.
“Anything new in?”

“Don’t tell me you’ve got a hangover, Lieutenant,” said Poor.

O’Connor just looked at him. O’Connor the tough, who couldn’t open his mouth without swearing, was curiously puritanical in some directions and was rarely known to take more
than one drink. “I don’t feel so hot,” he said querulously. “I just don’t feel so damn hot. I feel as if I might be coming down with a cold, damn it. For God’s
sake, I haven’t had a cold in five years!” He sounded aggrieved. He felt his throat tenderly.

“Lots of cold around,” said Poor. “Flu too. I tell you what it is, the change in temperature. March, after all. That little hot spell at the first of the month like we usually
get, and then going down to the fifties again, and all the wind. Is your throat sore?”

“It feels a little bit sore, damn it. I think,” said O’Connor.

“You ought not to come in. Spread it all around.”

O’Connor growled. “Goddamn it, I’m all right! Just a damn cold. If it is. Maybe I’ve just been smoking too much.” He swallowed experimentally.

“Now listen, Charles,” said Varallo. “If it is a cold, I don’t want to be carrying it home to the baby. You ought not to—”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” said O’Connor. “I’m all right. With this kite flier wandering around, and the heist man, and that Goddamned
homicide—”

Forbes ambled in and over to his desk. “I think we can give up on that, Lieutenant. Not one smell of a lead. Ask me, and Wayne thinks so too, that was the random, impulsive thing, and it
might have been anybody, from some moronic j.d. from over in east L.A. to some ditto transient just passing through.”

O’Connor growled again. “Where’s Fred?”

“Gone back there to question the neighbors again. With Rhys.”

Varallo sat down at his desk, with a slight effort removed his mind from that best and most remarkable of all babies ever, certainly, vouchsafed to any set of parents, and frowned at the top
sheet on the blotter. That homicide . . . Forbes was probably right. It looked like that sort of thing.

Glendale, California, that nice quiet town, third largest in L.A. County but possessing nothing that could be called a slum, didn’t as a rule have a very high crime rate. As the population
climbed so did crime, but not really very high—compared with lots of other places. In the last eight months they’d had six homicides and three of those had been suicides. The petty
break-ins, the vandalism, the purse snatching, once in a long while a mugging on some dark street—that was how it went in Glendale.

Right now they had this homicide. Elderly woman who lived alone, a Mrs. Martha Collins, owned a modest house on Geneva Street. An inquisitive neighbor had wondered why she hadn’t been seen
in her yard for several days and eventually called the police. Mrs. Collins dead on her dining-room floor, dead about four days, beaten to death, and the house ransacked. Back door broken in. And
no lead at all, as Forbes said. Might have been anybody. Anybody, among the too many types around—a few right here, a lot more over in L.A., and Hollywood and environs—who, maybe hopped
up on H. or not, wouldn’t think twice about doing a think like that. Or even at all.

You got them. And it was cops had to cope with them. Only— Varallo shook his head. One like that, crawl back into the jungle, and just how did a poor damned cop put the finger on him?

Then they had the kite flier. Or rather in the plural, because the smooth fellow wandering around town passing checks not worth the ink on them seemed to have a girl friend who’d helped
pass a few. That precious pair had strayed over into Burbank too, and that set of cops was looking for them as well. Checks for pretty sure printed by the passers, nice-looking, impressive-looking
pay checks—and other kinds—fancily printed up with the names of nonexistent corporations.

La é cosí, reflected Varallo sardonically. All the paper: the sea of paper the entire economy rested on and perpetuated: my God, even places like dime stores taking checks
these days (and inviting charge accounts, for God’s sake). All busily accepting the checks, the credit cards: the paper maybe even more commonplace than the coinage. In a way, only themselves
to thank for the bouncy checks. Lodovico Giovanni Varallo, maybe from a poor and rural upbringing and maybe just by nature, distrusted the paper; and having the ability to figure percentages of
interest, never bought anything on time if he could possibly avoid it.

However. Then there was the heist man. He had—successfully, from his viewpoint—robbed a drugstore, a dry cleaner’s, a small movie theater downtown, a second drugstore and a
hole-in-the-wall malt shop. He hadn’t got much of a haul except at the theater. They had a description of a sort: the citizenry sometimes seemed to be all blind, but this and that they gave
them. A young man, middle-sized, dark, with a gun. So they were looking for that one too.

It was about par for the course, in Glendale. A quiet town as a rule. Maybe today they’d get called on an overnight break-in, or a car theft, or a piece of vandalism. Maybe the night men
would get called out to a fight in a bar. Maybe—

“It can’t be a cold, damn it,” said O’Connor. “I don’t get colds, for God’s sake. I’m never sick, you all know that, for
God’s—”

“Look, anybody can catch a cold,” said Poor.

“I don’t,” said O’Connor. “I just damn well don’t. I’ve just been smoking too much.” He swallowed again and felt his nose.

“I suppose,” said Katz, “somebody ought to go see that Melvin again. The guy who took the latest check, at the Pep Boys’. He was so mad when I talked to him yesterday he
couldn’t give me any description, but maybe when he’s thought it over—”

“Go, go,” said O’Connor gloomily, hunching his wide beefy shoulders. “Did somebody call all the local papers to pass on all the goddamned phony corporation
names—and this joker’s aliases?”

“I did,” said Varallo. “The News-Press was very upstage. They might find space or not. The Independent was very cooperative. But even so, Charles, will
everybody take the trouble—or remember a third of them?”

“People!” said O’Connor. “I know, I know.” Katz had gone out, looking unhopeful, and Forbes was starting to type up a report on the heist man. The phone rang on
O’Connor’s desk and he picked it up. “O’Connor . . . What? Where? . . . For Christ’s sweet sake. All we need. O.K., thanks, Bill, we’re on it. You call Goulding?
For God’s sake.” He put the phone down. “I tell you, boys, it’s all these new apartments—different class of people coming in. Damn town’s changing. Now
it seems we’ve got another homicide. A murder yet.”

Varallo jerked upright. “Where and who?”

“Barker called in just now. Jeweler’s up on North Central—” O’Connor passed over the scrawled address. “You and John go look, hah?” He swallowed, felt
his throat and squashed out his cigarette.

“If it is a cold,” said Poor as they went down the stairs, “he’s got no business to come in—spraying germs all over.”

“You expect he’d ever admit any little thing like a cold could get him down?” Varallo grinned. “My wife says he’s obviously got a king-sized inferiority complex and
is just compensating for it. You know, the big tough cop.”

“O’Connor?” said Poor.

“No, I know, even Laura doesn’t believe it,” said Varallo.

“And I wonder what more we’ve got now,” said Poor. “Could be he’s right, all these apartments. Another homicide. Want to take my car? What’s the
address?”

Up here on North Central Avenue, in the midst of a large and mixed residential area, was a little pocket of business. Old business, which had been there for years. There was a
good-sized market on one corner, with a large parking lot; across the street was a gas station, a plumbing company and a dry cleaner’s. Across the intersection there was a small dress shop,
an ice-cream store and a photography shop, and across from there, on the same side of the street as the market, was a drugstore on the corner, a small coffee shop, a large furniture store and
rather unexpectedly a small jewelry shop.

The jewelry shop had a faded sign over the door, KESSLER’S FINE JEWELRY. The same legend in dingy gold paint was on the one display window,
and under it, Engraving to Order. Kessler’s was their destination, by the squad car and the little crowd outside.

“Funny place for a jeweler,” said Poor as they got out of his car. Varallo agreed. Kessler’s was the end shop in the small block of stores; down from it the block was entirely
residential, single houses, old and fairly well-groomed houses, mostly frame. The one nearest the block of store fronts, he saw, was empty, with a FOR SALE sign on the front
lawn.

A dozen people stood outside the jewelry shop, and the tan-uniformed Barker stood close outside the narrow front door. He hailed Varallo and Poor with relief. “You call the doctor? The
guy’s dead in there. Could be our heist man, looks sort of like that. This is Mr. Vincent Moore, you’ll want to talk to him.”

Mr. Vincent Moore looked at the two tall detectives a little nervously. “I don’t know anything about it,” he said, licking his lips. Mr. Moore was perhaps twenty-five,
weedy and pale, with narrow shoulders and what he obviously hoped might turn into a real mustache someday. “I just, it being Saturday, you know, I don’t work Saturdays, I’m a
clerk at Hornblower and Weeks, that is I’m studying accounting, but anyway it was for Marjorie’s birthday which is on Sunday. Tomorrow. Four fifty a week I’d been paying on it,
and I came to make the last payment so as to give it to her, my wife I mean, Marjorie’s my wife.”

“Yes, Mr. Moore,” said Varallo patiently.

“I came, and the door was open, and I went in and saw him. The proprietor.” Mr. Moore gulped. “On the floor. And I hope I know how to keep my head, I went right to the
drugstore, the pay phone, and I called—”

“Yes. If you’ll just wait a few minutes,” said Varallo, “we’ll want a statement. Did you touch anything in there?”

“I did not,” said Moore.

Barker moved him away from the door. Varallo and Poor went in, glancing at the door which had been obviously forced with a jemmy or something like that.

It was a very small shop, no more than twenty by fifteen feet. It was an old building, and though some effort had been made to keep this little shop clean and neat, the hardwood flooring was
scuffed, the walls needed painting. There was a single display case, its glass top and sides shining clean, which served as a counter; against the wall behind it hung a variety of wall clocks, and
under those a metal table bore an old cash register. At the far end of the shop, down from an inner door, was a long table bearing more clocks.

He was sprawled on his face, legs twisted, halfway behind the display case, as if he’d tried to run toward that inner door and hadn’t made it. They couldn’t see his face, but
Varallo could almost imagine it from the rest of him: a little man, about five-five, a scrawny little man wearing a pair of shabby dark slacks and a white shirt; the slacks were pulled up and his
socks were handmade Argyle-pattern socks and the heels of his old black moccasins run over badly. He was nearly bald. His arms were flung out over his head and he was wearing a plain gold wedding
ring on his left hand and a Masonic-order ring on his right. Bending over him, Varallo saw that his soft-looking white hands were well-manicured.

He had been shot. In the back—probably more then once there—and high in the left shoulder, and in the back of the head, low toward the spinal column. He had bled a little, not too
much, and from that Varallo could deduce one fact at once.

“First shot probably killed him,” he said, straightening. “The one in the head.”

“Um,” said Poor. “So maybe, Vic, is this our elevator boy taking his first shot at somebody?” The heist man who had held up the drugstore, et al., had not yet
taken a shot at anybody; but there was always a first time.

“Could be,” said Varallo. He looked around too.

Barker had followed them in. “I heard this and that while I was waiting for you,” he said. “The guy’s name is Horace Kessler. He’s had this place maybe twenty,
twenty-five years. Quiet little business, looks like. Doesn’t seem like he’d get an awful lot of business—just enough to get by. His wife’s dead—most people around
here knew him. The pharmacist at the drugstore says he lived in an apartment upstairs, over the store.”

“Oh,” said Varallo. “Any other apartments upstairs besides his?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Funny,” said Poor, “nobody heard the shots, Vic. At night, maybe? Last night?”

“Maybe. If there aren’t any other apartments. Or if they’re empty,” said Varallo. He looked at little Mr. Kessler, pathetically sprawled out behind his counter,
thoughtfully. Most of the shops along here—possibly not the small coffee shop next door—would be open until nine or so in the evening, on Friday nights. If they all conformed to
Glendale custom. Which, of course, they might not. This was some way from downtown proper, where Friday night was shopping night. The market at least would be open, probably the drugstore. But even
if Kessler hadn’t been open, living on the premises he might well answer the bell downstairs; or equally he’d have come down if he heard somebody trying to break in. He was dressed. So,
after the market and drugstore were closed, but some time before midnight, say? And the nearest house empty: no one close to hear the shots.

Dr. Goulding would narrow the time a little. Maybe be able to give an educated guess about the caliber, if no slugs were available from the body. Just as a guess, Varallo thought it had been a
fairly big caliber, and the slugs might be smashed in consequence.

And it was a very long chance, of course, that X would have left some pretty prints on the glass case.

“It looks,” said Poor, nodding around, “kind of open and shut. Which doesn’t take us far finding him.”

“Yes,” said Varallo. Either the heist man—one man they knew was wandering around town with a gun—or somebody else breaking in (maybe not knowing Kessler lived upstairs?)
and being surprised. Open and shut you co. . .