The Wine of Violence

Book 0: A Vic Varallo Mystery

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

Lieutenant Charles O'Connor of the Glendale police bureau is warned by the Feds that Conway, a crook whose brother was shot by O'Connor during a hold-up, has escaped from jail and is probably bent on vengeance. This news could not have come at a worse time - the Glendale P.D. is currently investigating three separate violent deaths, giving O'Connor no time for special protection. He reckons that he can take care of himself and pursue romance at the same time, and all the while Conway plans his revenge . . . 'My favourite American crime-writer' New York Herald Tribune

Release date: July 28, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

CONWAY knew, in the first ten seconds, that it was going to go just right, just the way he’d planned. He took the Fed
completely by surprise, a beautiful clean smack right to the jawpoint; and in the cramped confines of the toilet cubicle, the Fed’s head snapped back against the wall as the train swayed at
top speed. Conway hit him twice more, hard, but he was out then. Conway eased him down across the toilet and began searching him for the key to the cuffs.

He found it, and released his right hand. Maybe he’d known it was all going to turn out right for him, all the way, the very second he’d heard that Colorado was going to try him
after all. The heaven-sent chance—catch the law transporting a con by air when there was a cheaper way. So, the train ride right across the state from Leavenworth, cuffed to a Fed. And the
law didn’t know about Conway—there was a lot they didn’t know about Gene Conway. The first time he’d been dropped on for anything serious was up in Nebraska, and it was
after Pa had kicked him out and he hadn’t seen any need to say he had any relatives. The law didn’t know that Conway came from a little place called Russell Springs, Kansas. . . . They
could have found out, from Danny, after Danny teamed up with him, but the last caper Danny was on with him—

Conway swore under his breath. He stood up; the train was not traveling quite so fast now. He’d timed it to a T. All going smooth, just like he’d planned. For Danny . . .

The Fed groaned and Conway hit him again.

Talk about heaven-sent. At Leavenworth this morning, the Fed—a Fed who didn’t know Conway—with the cuffs, innocently locking the cuff on Conway’s meekly proffered right
wrist. A chance there that the pen guard (who did know Conway) would notice, but he hadn’t. The Fed hadn’t known that Conway was left-handed. And all the way into K.C., and ever since
in the day coach back there, Conway meek and mild as milk, so the Fed relaxed: just a little chore to the Fed, ferry Conway over to Denver.

They didn’t know they were sending him right past his old stamping ground—they didn’t know about the safely hidden loot, if only he could get at it—

He slid the empty cuff over the Fed’s right wrist, locked it, and pocketed the key. That Fed was going to be in bad trouble for letting him get away. The train slowed some more. Conway
eased open the door of the cubicle to the men’s room. Luck again; it was empty. He was going to have luck all the way.

He had timed it. He had unobtrusively kept an eye on the stations as they passed, rattling along nonstop across the flat country. When he had seen GRINNELL slide past the
window, he had started counting to himself. It was about eight, nine miles from Grinnell to Oakley—and the train would stop at Oakley, very briefly, to take on mail, and that would be the
last stop this side of the Colorado border. Did he know the U.P. trains through here!

And Oakley was only about eighteen miles northeast of Russell Springs. . . . The train slowed more. It would be stopping at Oakley very soon.

It was twenty-five past seven now, and full dark outside in late April. More luck; they’d picked the ten A.M. train from K.C. A lot of the
passengers would be in the diner right now.

He didn’t dare go back to the coach for his bag; too many people there, seeing the cuffs linking him and the Fed, had looked at him curiously and would remember his face. But it
didn’t matter. He had the loot waiting, to buy new clothes, food—

To get him to California, to kill a cop. The cop who had killed Danny.

The train was running dead slow now. Conway put on his hat; he had hoped the Fed wouldn’t take much notice that he’d brought his hat along to visit the men’s room, and the Fed
hadn’t. The hat made a big difference to Conway’s looks, hiding the mop of curly brown hair that bushed out even with a prison cut. He slid open the door and came out at the end of the
coach. He didn’t glance back to the coach at all, but quickly stepped out to the platform between cars and stood there. The train slid to a full stop at Oakley—no big station, no
porters: Oakley wasn’t a big town. The train sat there hissing, for about four minutes, and men out on the platform exchanged shouted words, the brakeman came past the cars where Conway
waited. Then with a slight jerk, the train quietly started up again. Nobody had passed Conway, going from one coach to the next. Slowly the train ran on past the little frame building marking the
station; it accelerated to walking pace, and with a quick look to either side Conway got a leg over the panel side there, hung on while he got the other leg over, and jumped.

He fell and rolled, the breath knocked out of him, but he wasn’t hurt, falling on turf. He got up quickly and started walking; the Oakley depot was at the outskirts of town and it was
dark; nobody was around. When the train had run by he crossed the tracks, heading south. There was a road about half a mile up from here, a road going north-south; and after you crossed Hackberry
Creek, there was a road heading southwest—toward Russell Springs.

He was a shrewd and canny man, Conway: he planned carefully. It was that innate caution in him that had always prompted him, unlike any other pro crook, to save part of the loot from every
caper. Against the rainy day. And nobody but Danny had known where this latest saved loot lay; and that was funny too, he thought now, starting his eighteen-mile tramp. Very funny. After that bank
job in Kansas City—the bank job he’d been doing the ten-to-twenty in Leavenworth for—he and Danny and Jim heading back across Kansas, Jim talking about California and
all—and Danny going all sentimental over some girl back home, wanting to stop and see her, and Conway with that cold practical streak in him taking the chance to slip off and hide that
loot—

Five G’s. His share of the bank loot had been fifteen G’s. And a place nobody would ever look. He’d never been out of the Middle West, he didn’t expect to be; but so they
did go to California with Jim, there the loot would be, waiting for him to pick up any time. Folks around Russell Springs tended to be conservative; modern progress wouldn’t be apt to make
any changes in the old filled-up cemetery just outside of town. Not in only three years. The nice safe steel box, all but airtight and asbestos-lined, buried on top of Grandpa’s grave right
there, waiting for him.

Conway pressed on as a full moon rose. His mind moved cold and sure; he knew how the law operated. Cops hanging together, cooperating. So he’d make it very quiet and careful. They
wouldn’t know he had money. They’d think they were hunting a penniless man, desperate on the run, stealing a car, trying for the Mexican border. But all the same, go careful and do it
smart.

He figured he ought to make Russell Springs by midnight. Collect the loot, and by then he’d be ready for a meal too, but—he grinned tightly to himself—no need to go walking
into Jimmy’s greasy-spoon bar-and-grill either. Three years ago old lady Noonan had still been alive, she was likely too mean to die, and her deaf as a post, he could get in her back porch
and pick up enough food to start out with. Another twenty-five miles down to scott City, the nearest place he could buy a car, but he could make that in two nights’ walking—hole up
daytimes, some place—and maybe pick up some different clothes too. Buy a car there, anything that ran—but do things smart: the law could be very damn cute, all the scientific gadgets
they had these days. Change cars maybe three, four times between here and California.

And no restaurants: buy stuff to eat in the car. No hotels, even after he got to California. Likely by then they’d have all the fliers out and all the fuzz everywhere alerted. Find a
really private base of operations somewhere in that town.

And they’d think first, of course, of contacting all his known pals. Conway scowled to himself, tramping along under the moon across the flat, flat land. He’d been a damn fool to
talk so much to Jiggs—other guys—but he’d never imagined the heaven-sent chance to get away would be handed him like that. Now it had—well, water under the bridge, but Jiggs
wasn’t the only one he’d talked to either. About that goddamned cop. That cop shooting Danny—Danny not a tough one, it’d been a mistake to let Danny in on that kind of
job—Danny’d been scared, ready to drop the gun, and that goddamned cop blasting him down in cold blood.

“I’m gonna get him for you, Danny,” whispered Conway aloud. “I said I would and I will. I’ll get him.”

Only he didn’t claim to be any hero, even for Danny. He also wanted to get away safe afterward. Mexico, maybe. Where they’d never find him to stash him away again. So, do it real
careful and keep covered up.

That was a pretty big town, the one in California where it had happened. A big town compared, anyway, to Russell Springs—or even Dubuque. The town where that cop was on the city force. He
ought to be able to find a nice private hidey-hole somewhere there, while he tracked down that cop—God, he had to be still there for Conway to find!—and found a way to get him and then
took off without being dropped on. To get him for Danny. Best kid brother a guy ever— To blast him like he’d blasted Danny.

It was easy to pick up a gun, even all legal, in most of the Western states.

He’d never forget the name of that town. Glendale, California. In L.A. County. And he’d never forget the name of that cop either. That goddamned trigger-happy tough Irish
cop—for Danny he’d get him good—

“So all right, where did Jim get it?” asked O’Connor. “Come on, come on, spill it, for G—” he caught himself just in time. Varallo
suppressed a grin. O’Connor’s schoolteacher, Katharine Mason, had recently expressed herself severely about his habitual absent-minded language, and O’Connor was making a gallant
effort to notice when he swore and tone it down some. “Who gave it to him—sold it to him?”

They looked at the kids in silence, Varallo cancelling the grin; they got silence back. The kids were sullen and reluctant. My God, the kids, thought Varallo. And inevitably he thought of
three-months-old Ginevra, his darling, at home: what kind of nightmare world was she born into? He was willing to grant that most parents tried; if you got the uncaring ones, the irresponsible
ones, they were still a minority. Probably the parents of these kids had tried. But the teenagers, at once so rebellious and so curiously conformist—

Four of them they could question. Another three had died half an hour ago in a spectacular crash along East Glenoaks Boulevard, and all they’d got out of these four—riding in a
second car behind—was that that driver had been taking a trip on LSD.

“I dunno where Jim got it,” muttered one of the boys. “He didn’t say. He just—”

Two boys and two girls, and you had to look twice to see which was which, thought Varallo. He ran an absent hand over his thick crest of tawny-blond hair, looking at them here in the big
detective-bureau room on the second floor of Glendale Police Headquarters. Both girls were brown-haired, the hair long, straight, and stringy. Both wore drab-colored stretch pants and sweaters.
Both boys (sixteen, seventeen?) had near-shoulder-length hair and wore tight trousers and boots. None of them looked very clean.

One of the girls said, sounding bewildered, “Gee, Jimmy was a good driver, I don’t know how he came to have an accident like that—it doesn’t seem—”

“And we’re all minors, you can’t hold us without you let our parents know and—” The other girl stared at O’Connor defiantly. “We didn’t know
anything about it, where Jim got the stuff or anything—and besides, I read where it’s absolutely O.K., really a kind of religious thing— Cops always picking on kids having
any—”

“Fun?” said Varallo quietly. “You were going to say? There’s three of your friends dead. Is that fun?”

Her eyes dropped. “It’s awful—but Jim—”

Varallo looked at O’Connor. They shrugged at each other. Detective John Poor looked in the door and said, “Mr. and Mrs. Haskell are here, and Mrs. Plummer—”

“Mother!” sobbed one of the girls, and rushed to fling herself into the arms of the plump youngish woman who came in past Poor. “They’ve been
awful—pestering us with questions and saying such things about Jim and Dottie—”

The woman gave O’Connor and Varallo a cold look, patting the girl soothingly.

“Oh, hell,” said O’Connor under his breath, and swung out of the room. “Let ’em all go—we’ve got the addresses!” At the water cooler down the
hall, he drank thirstily and crumpling the paper cup uttered the one word forcefully—“Glendale!”

Varallo lit a cigarette, eyes on the civilians up there—kids and parents—hastily quitting headquarters, both girls sobbing now. He knew what O’Connor meant. “Times
changing on us, Charles. No longer the respectable middle-class sleepy town, sidewalks rolled up at nine P.M. This year of grace.”

“Be damned to that,” said O’Connor. “It’s not change, damn it, Vic, it’s the outsiders coming in. Pushing it. Pushing it all on the kids, pornography, the
dope, the—” He lifted his broad shoulders in a massive shrug, the bulge that was the S. and W. .357 magnum standing out plainly for a second. “And what the hell can we do about
kids like that? Sold on the idea that you mustn’t tattle on a pal, even when the pal is playing with dynamite? Dynamite, my good Lord, worse—the acid, to ruin their whole lives, and
sold the idea it’s harmless—these damn—”

“I know, I know.”

Poor came up the hall. “Those parents at least didn’t look very cooperative. Brutal cops after my chee-ild.”

“Don’t tell me!” said O’Connor violently. “All we’re trying to do here is protect the citizenry—the damn— And these kids. In
Glendale. My sweet C— for the love of heaven, the first five years I was on this force we had one homicide. One. And now, from the kids yet, I get this diabolical—”
He stopped and let out a huge sigh. “Any ideas?”

For this wasn’t, the last month or so, the first time they’d run across the problem. And they weren’t the only cops trying to cope with it. Drug addiction, of this and that
sort, had risen an unprecedented and frightening 600 percent since the start of the year in southern California; inevitably Glendale was having some too. And it was mostly among the kids. In the
high schools. Last week patrolmen had picked up three kids from Hoover High, full of the acid; one of them had subsequently attempted suicide.

“It’s a thing,” said Varallo. “Quite possibly none of that batch did know where Jimmy got the acid. And cause and effect, Charles—if the parents are like that,
brutal cops picking on my baby, at least part of the reason the kids are in with that kind of crowd, and also we’ve got a hope of questioning them hard enough to get anything they might know.
Minors. How quick they learn that one.” He laughed without mirth.

“Oh, granted,” said O’Connor. He ran a finger round his collar. As usual, he looked as if he’d slept in his clothes; he could put on a suit straight from the
cleaner’s and ten minutes later give that effect. He also, at this hour of the afternoon, needed a shave, and possibly with indignation building up within seemed to bulge more broadly than
usual. He looked up at Varallo as they went back down the hall. “So, no ideas?”

“Look for somebody running with the kids who’s over eighteen,” said Varallo mildly. “There’s bound to be one. Or more.”

“I had thought of that,” said O’Connor. “Shadowing kids yet. John, you like to do some nosing around Hoover High? You’re a nice clean-cut-looking fellow, not so
obviously fuzz as our glamor boy Eytie—or me.”

“Or you especially,” said Poor. “I don’t mind. Anybody with kids—” He shook his head. “I’ll tell you,” he added suddenly, “what we
want is one of the all-right kids. The ones brought up to know right from wrong with no ifs, ands, or buts. They really are still in the majority, you know. And never mind that one of those
doesn’t run with the kind of gang that gets conned into thinking the acid’s harmless, still kids know other kids in the same school—know what’s going on.”

“Which is a thought,” said Varallo.

“Yeah. I seem to recollect,” said Poor, “that Al Duff has a boy in Hoover.” Sergeant Duff was one of the desk men downstairs.

“So go and ask,” said O’Connor. “I don’t think it’s such a hot idea, but you can try.” He sat down at his desk as Poor went out and fumbled for a
cigarette. “And I’ve never been just so d— so religious,” he said to Varallo, “but I will go along that there are the moral absolutes, you know. Good versus
evil. This dope bit—the acid—my good God, the brain damage and all from just one dose, and a pusher—one or more—here in Glendale, my G—”

“Every place these days, Charles,” said Varallo wryly. Anybody with kids, Poor said; yes; you were bound to do some thinking. The light for the inside phone went on on
O’Connor’s desk.

“O’Connor . . . Oh? Well, what do the Feds want of us? O.K., send him up.”

The detective bureau was empty, at two forty of this April afternoon, except for Varallo and O’Connor. Joe Katz was out on a reported suicide with Sergeant Wayne, and Forbes was out with
Rhys on a burglary. Harrison was on nights this month with the new boy, Dick Hunter. It had been a quiet week for Glendale: a couple of holdup jobs, nothing solid on those at all: a couple of
burglaries, after a spate of them last month and no leads there either; now this acid thing and the kids. The poor ignorant—and sullen—kids. “A Fed,” said O’Connor,
leaning back and tugging at his collar. “Asking for me.”

“About what?”

“God knows.” O’Connor nodded at the FBI man as he came in, looking exactly like any and all FBI men Varallo had ever met, tall, well-dressed, unobtrusive, and very polite.
“So what does Uncle Sam want with us overworked suburban cops? This is Detective Varallo—I’m O’Connor.”

“Fletcher,” said the Fed, offering a hand. He looked slightly amused, sitting down in the chair beside O’Connor’s desk. “An errand of mercy, Lieutenant. We just
thought you’d like to know. In fact, we thought you’d better know. Gene Conway’s loose.”

O’Connor looked at him blankly. “Conway? Who’s Conway?”

“A few years back,” said Fletcher, “you shot a heist man named Daniel Conway.”

“I don’t make a point of remembering all their names,” said O’Connor. “Did I?”

“You did.” Fletcher would know, of course, that O’Connor was the top marksman among California peace officers. “Three men held up the Better Foods market on Central,
about midnight one Saturday—we looked it up—and one of the checkers managed to get away and call the police. You—”

“By God, yes,” said O’Connor suddenly. “I remember. I was here late because I was waiting for— Before you inflicted yourself on us,” he said to Varallo.
“Katz and I got on it, the squad-car boys had rounded ’em up all right and then one of them put up a fight just as we—”

“That was when you shot Daniel Conway,” said Fletcher. “You remember the other one?”

O’Connor put out his cigarette. “I didn’t aim to kill him,” he said unnecessarily. “He was running across the parking lot and it was a snap shot in bad light. So
what?”

“So he’s loose. Gene Conway. We do sometimes slip up. A pity, but there it is. Conway was doing a ten-to-twenty in Leavenworth—you remember Kansas extradited him away from you
that time—for a bank job in K.C., when Colorado decided to extradite him for a homicide they’d just turned up some new evidence on. And impossible as it sounds, he got away from the
guard on the train. On the way over. Some place in west Kansas. That was six days back, Lieutenant, and there hasn’t been a smell of him since. Impossible as that sounds. So far as we
know—but we don’t really know much about him—he hailed from Nebraska to start with, but he’s got pals that we do know of in K.C. and Omaha. So far as we can tell, he
hasn’t been in contact with any of them. Any known associates. He’s kind of a lone wolf anyway. But he hadn’t a dime on him, and only the clothes he stood up in—it’s
impossible, but he’s got clean away.” Fletcher shrugged, accepting a light for his cigarette from Varallo.

“So why tell me?” asked O’Connor. “Kansas is a thousand miles away.”

“And a lot of cars there,” said Fletcher sadly. “We don’t see how, but he might have got hold of some money. He almost certainly had to, to disappear like this. There
just hasn’t been a smell, and our boys back there have been on it, I assure you. His mug shots flooding the state. Nobody’s seen him. The usual number of stolen cars, and we’re on
that too—and we’ve got men with his mug shots at every point of entry along the California border.” California was the one state which stopped incoming cars at the border, for the
fruit inspection bit. Government agencies could get up to some outlandish business but that was probably the most outlandish of all: solemnly confiscating all fresh fruit, and what was to stop the
. . .