Unexpected Death

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

'A Luis Mendoza story means superlative suspense' Los Angeles Times A beautiful Hollywood blonde inexplicably vanishes from the restaurant she is dining in with her fiancé and is found with her neck broken and miles away from the scene of her disappearance. Who lured her away? How? And, the most puzzling question for Lieutenant Luis Mendoza of Los Angeles' Homicide Squad, is why?

Release date: May 21, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

Lieutenant Luis Mendoza, L.A.P.D., Homicide, came into the office a little late that Tuesday morning in late March. They had this and that on hand, and nobody else was there
but Sergeant Lake at the switchboard and Glasser typing a report in the big detective-office.

“George and Art went out to see that Donovan,” said Lake.

“Dios, I’d forgotten about him,” said Mendoza. Donovan they’d just picked up yesterday afternoon. He and his pal Roderick Dover had had some boyish fun last week
sniping at an innocent driver—probably while high on something. But it was just as Hackett had brought Donovan in yesterday that the other case had broken, the funny one that had had them
talking to themselves, that Edward Holly, and they’d never questioned Donovan at all; they had booked him straight into jail.

“New report on your desk,” added Lake.

Mendoza went on into his office, sat at the desk and looked at the report. It was signed by Schenke. And it was a curious enough little thing that Mendoza’s eyebrows shot up and he said to
himself, “Extraño. I do wonder.”

At half-past eleven last night a Mr. and Mrs. John Hurley had come prosaically home from the movies. They lived in a four-family place on Elmyra Street, the other side of the railroad yards, and
the garages were in the rear along a little alley. As Hurley had turned the car into the alley, his headlights had showed them a body up there. About, Hurley had told Schenke, in front of
Hurley’s own garage. The Hurleys had called for cops, and first of course they got a patrol car and then Bob Schenke. The body, said Schenke, was interesting. The body of a very pretty young
woman, early twenties at most, in a green lace evening gown. Hardly a mark on her: no jewelry: no purse. Just the beautiful blonde, dead in the alley. The interns said her neck was broken.
“The body,” wrote Schenke, “obviously not local. Dress looks like Beverly Hills,” and that was in a note to Mendoza. “Hurleys ordinary citizens—middle-aged, he
works for the city. N.G. Looks like a real mystery—have fun with it.”

Mendoza’s curiosity took him down to the morgue.

The blonde had been a good-looker all right. About twenty, twenty-two, fine small features, very white skin, big blue eyes, and her naturally blonde, shoulder-length hair looked to have been
professionally cared for. Not, as the report said, a mark on her but for a couple of dark bruises on her slender throat.

“Let’s have a look at her clothes,” said Mendoza interestedly. The attendant brought them out for him. Schenke’s instinct had been quite right: the green lace formal bore
the label of Gina, a shop in Beverly Hills—a very expensive shop. The underclothes—white lace bra, nylon lace panties, garter-belt and very sheer nylon stockings—were all of
expensive quality. The high-heeled black patent pumps likewise wore an expensive label; they were size four and a half. She’d been a small girl: five feet, one hundred pounds. And no
indication on her hands that she’d fought back when she was attacked: her nails were pristine, freshly manicured, painted a modest iridescent pink.

“Muy extraño,” said Mendoza. “Now who is she and how did she end up on Elmyra Street?”

“I’m just paid to keep track of ’em until the funeral,” said the morgue attendant gloomily. “Seen all you want?”

“For the moment,” said Mendoza. He went back to his office and told Lake to connect him with Missing Persons. “Carey? Mendoza. Our latest corpse—” He described her
minutely. “Ring any bells?”

“Nary a bell,” said Lieutenant Carey. “I’d have remembered one like that. Nobody’s reported her.”

“Also funny,” said Mendoza. “She looks like somebody who’d be missed right off. She’d been—mmh—taken care of. Pampered. Somebody’s
darling.”

“Well, I’ll let you know if we hear anything about her,” said Carey.

“Yes, thanks.” Mendoza put the phone down, smoothing his moustache absently.

“Oh, I didn’t say,” said Lake, looking into the office, “but Tom went out on a tip—that Milner, one of the pigeons called in, said he was at a greasy spoon over on
the Row.”

“Um,” said Mendoza. That one. A longtime hood with a long pedigree, who had for pretty sure shot the part-time liquor store clerk last month. Nice to catch up to him.

“And Matt went out on a new call.”

“Um,” said Mendoza again. “What?”

“Old woman dead in her own kitchen—Cortez Street in Boyle Heights. Daughter-in-law found her.”

Which didn’t sound like much, of course. Wait and see. The blonde was a good deal more interesting. The night men had, of course, taken her prints, and passed them on to the Feds in
Washington as well as Records here. The Feds had a lot of prints of quite respectable citizens as well as the pros; maybe they had hers.

Maybe the little mystery would clear itself up in short order; but Mendoza had a small hunch that also maybe it wouldn’t.

Both Palliser and Grace were off on Tuesdays.

Mendoza’s mind strayed momentarily to the offbeat one they’d just cleared up yesterday: that had been something, all right. Now they had something else coming along; they usually
did. Central Homicide, L.A.P.D., got kept busy.

Lake looked in again. “I’ve got that John Holly,” he said. “Wants to see you.”

“Who’s—oh,” said Mendoza. “Oh, well, we haven’t even got the autopsy report yet—Bainbridge is busy—I don’t know anything to tell him.”
John Holly’s father—that was another queer little thing, of course. Edward Holly, in his fifties, market-manager at a supermart, but rapidly going blind. Who never went out at night.
Rented a small rear apartment on Crosby Lane. Found dead a block over on Crosby Place, Sunday morning, on the front porch of an elderly widow who hadn’t known him. “Oh, well, I’ll
see him,” said Mendoza. “Shove him in, Jimmy.”

John Holly was a thin, rather shabbily dressed young man. He was an accountant at one of the smaller brokerages on Spring. He looked at Mendoza drearily and said, “But I just can’t
figure it. I just can’t. Dad was so—so regular about everything. I mean, following routine and all. He never went out after dark, since his sight had been going so fast. He wasn’t
going to be able to work much longer—I told the other detective about that. And I—”

“You said there wasn’t anything missing from his apartment? Detective Landers asked you to look.”

“Yes. I know. There isn’t. He was going—going to move in with us—Bonnie and me—Bonnie, that’s my wife, she thought an awful lot of Dad—we were going to
look after him—get a bigger apartment—he’d sold some of his furniture already. See, my mother died about ten years back and Dad—but it wasn’t as if he’d had a
lot of money or anything valuable—and if it was just a burglar, how come Dad was way a block away from home? I—”

It was, when you thought about it, a teasing little problem. Why had he been? Even stranger, of course, the fact that his wallet had still been on him, with fifty-six dollars in it.

“We ought to get the autopsy report some time today, Mr. Holly,” said Mendoza. “That will tell us something more.”

“I just can’t figure it,” said Holly miserably. “I just wondered if you’d found out anything. Well, thanks.” He stood up.

As he went out Hackett and Higgins came in, the two big men dwarfing the office as usual. “So Donovan’s a carbon copy of Dover,” said Hackett, sounding exasperated,
“except that he wasn’t high when we brought him in. The damn fuzz interfering with his fun. But of course Dover ties him in, what we got there, and his prints’ll probably be in
the car.”

“Yes,” said Mendoza. “Is that so? Sit down and hear about our newest mystery.” He handed over Schenke’s report. Higgins read it over Hackett’s shoulder.
“I went and had a look at her. She was, surely to God, irrelevant—that’s a word for it—irrelevant to Elmyra Street,” said Mendoza. “No missing report on
her.”

“That’s a funny one all right,” said Higgins, his rough-hewn face thoughtful. “Wait to see if she’s in Records, or Washington knows her.”

“Sí. How’s the family?” asked Mendoza.

Higgins smiled. “Fine. Just fine.” The men at Central Homicide had all been wishing Higgins luck in his humble pursuit of Bert Dwyer’s widow, and had been pleased when she
married him six months back, to give him his ready-made family of Dwyer’s good kids, Steve and Laura; and now she was going to have a new baby, and Higgins as foolish and fond over that as
any prospective parent—Higgins the longtime bachelor.

Landers looked in and said, “That Milner. He was there—I picked him up. Somebody want to sit in on the questioning?” He was rubbing his shoulder; Landers was just back on the
job the last month since getting shot up by a sniper. “You know,” he said now, “I think that Chalmers guy did me a favor. This damn shoulder. I’ve kind of tested it, and
I’ll be damned but it’s made a weather prophet out of me. Starts to ache the day before it rains.”

Hackett sighed and stood up. “As if we haven’t had enough of that.” It had been the wettest winter, so the papers said, in seventy years. “I’ll sit in. Always the
routine. He give you any trouble?”

“Nope. He was too surprised.”

At about the same time Bertha Hoffman was feeling surprised and asking, “Off on a trip?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” said the boy. “Mom said I was to tell you not to come for a while. She’ll let you know. When they get back.”

“How come you kids didn’t go along?”

“Oh, Mom and Dad, they had to go back east, take care of my grandma—she’s sick. Besides, we got to go to school. I’ll be late for first class—I just stayed to tell
you, Mom said you needn’t bother to come.”

Mrs. Hoffman was annoyed. She earned her living cleaning other people’s houses for them, and the loss of a weekly half day’s revenue was irritating. This particular employer had
usually paid on the dot too. “Well,” she said. “Well, all right.”

“I just stayed to tell you,” said the boy. “I got to go—I’ll be late.” He banged the front door behind him and came past her down the front steps.

Mrs. Hoffman hesitated. She always spent Tuesday mornings here, and Tuesday afternoons at a house across the street, the house of another old and prompt-paying employer. It seemed a waste of
time to go all the way home—perhaps she could work over there this morning instead.

She crossed the street to ask.

“Now, Mrs. Darley,” said Piggott, “I realize you’re upset, but if you’d just—”

“Upset!” exclaimed Rose Darley. “Upset! That’s a funny sort of word for it—finding my own mother-in-law murdered! Upset! And what Charley’ll
say—my goodness, it’s just awful, what’s happening these days—and old people alone—but none of us had the room for her and besides she owned this place—and my
goodness, I got to call Charley and tell him—”

“The patrol-car men have gone to get your husband,” said Piggott patiently. He’d put in a call for the mobile lab and the men were at work here now. Piggott looked around the
place and suppressed a sigh. Cops saw the bottom of things, inevitably.

This was an old, small, shabby house on Cortez Street, not far from headquarters. It was a sagging frame house, unpainted for years, and at least for the years in which Mrs. Marion Darley had
owned it, it had not been a house well cared-for. Piggott and youngish Mrs. Rose Darley were in the living room now, but he remembered the kitchen vividly, where the lab men were busy now—a
dim hole of a room, with a stack of dirty dishes in the sink, something gone bad in the ancient refrigerator, and the rather ghastly corpse of Marion Darley on the floor—a grossly fat old
woman in a tattered flannel bathrobe over a worn flannel nightdress. The living room was, in some ways, just as bad. It was sparsely furnished with aged, falling-apart furniture—a sagging
couch, two upholstered chairs, no carpet: and against the walls were stacked literally thousands and thousands of old magazines—old movie magazines, True Love, True Romance.
The whole place was dirty and dusty.

“Mrs. Darley, if you’d just—”

“Well, I told you how I found her. I usually stop by on my way to market two or three times a week—see, we live up on Bixel, only a couple of blocks—ask if she wants anything
at the market, like that. And I usually come in the back door, because she usually sits in the kitchen, if you get me. And so I walk in and there she was. Dead. Murdered. Well, my
goodness—”

Looking, Piggott reflected, very thoroughly beaten up. Not a very nice corpse. “Mrs. Darley, was your mother-in-law in good health? Able to get around? Do any of her own shopping, or did
you—”

“Well, sure. Sure she was. I just stopped by, maybe save her the walk, that’s all.” Rose Darley stared at him. She was about thirty, a little too plump, and darkhaired. Her
husband Charley had a job at a service station somewhere down here. Mrs. Darley’s other two sons were both currently on Welfare. She’d had the state old-age pension.

“How long had she lived here? Do you know whether anyone around here might have had a reason to do this to her?”

“Anybody around here? How the hell should I know? She’d lived here maybe thirty years, I guess—they just got the house paid for when her husband died. Charley’s
father. He worked for the railroad. I don’t know anything about it, except I walked in and found her. How would I? It must’ve been a burglar breaking in—my God, the things that
happen nowadays! Just last week it was the Harts only four doors up from us got robbed—”

“Would you know if anything’s missing? If you’d look around—”

“Yeah, I guess I would. But she didn’t have much of anything—I mean, she was just on the pension, that’s all she had. I can’t see as anything’s
gone.”

“Did she have a TV?” Most people did, even the ones on Welfare and the pension. Piggott amended that thought to, especially those.

“No, she didn’t. She used to come watch ours—and Bill’s and Joe’s.” Her other two sons. “And other people’s around. You know.”

One of the lab men, Duke, looked in and caught Piggott’s eye. Piggott went out to him, in the tiny square passage just inside the front door. “So?”

“So, a lot of prints,” said Duke, and grimaced. “Hell of a dirty, dusty old place—hasn’t been cleaned in years. So what’s to say any latents we pick up mean
anything? As for anything else, the interns say she’s been dead since some time last night—maybe around midnight. You saw the setup in the kitchen—evidently she’d got
undressed and was sitting at the table there having a glass of beer, when in comes X. Just walked in—the back door wasn’t locked.”

“Helpful,” said Piggott. Piggott tended to be a pessimist. “So, ask the neighbors if anybody saw or heard anything. The routine. It might have been anybody—and anybody
living alone, even in neighborhoods like this, the gossip gets round about the cash stashed away, it could have been something like that. But the place hasn’t been ransacked, of course. Which
it probably would have been if— Well, thanks for nothing.”

“Something may show—we’ll have a look at her clothes and so on. I want to get her daughter-in-law’s prints for comparison,” said Duke. “She walked in the back
door too, and all too likely messed up any X might have left.”

The front door burst open, shuddering on its ancient hinges, and a stocky dark man rushed in. The uniformed men were behind him. “What the hell is this all
about?—Ma?—these guys said—”

“Mr. Darley? I’m Detective Piggott of Homicide.” Piggott hauled out the badge. “I’m afraid your mother is dead. I know you’re upset to hear—”

“Upset!” said Mrs. Darley behind him. “For God’s sake, upset!”

It went on being a usual day for Central Homicide. Landers and Hackett spent a while questioning the hood Milner, and got exactly nothing. They already had, of course, some
beautiful latent prints of Milner’s off the cash register at that liquor store where the clerk had been shot. They had thought the clerk had nicked Milner somewhere—blood found in the
street—and interestingly enough there was a nearly-healed scar of some sort of wound on Milner’s left upper arm. It was a gamble whether they’d be able to nail him for it, but
they booked him in and asked for a warrant to look at his rented room—they might come across the gun.

Piggott came back to type up a preliminary report on the new one, and Mendoza heard about that.

“Another mystery,” he said. “Probably not a very big one. The routine may turn up something.”

There was another anonymous corpse over on the Row, probably dead of an overdose of alcohol. Higgins went out on that. There was a suicide found in an old hotel out on Olive: a middle-aged
woman, note left, so just the paperwork on that. There was a hit-run with the victim D.O.A., over on Wilshire: a ten-year-old boy. Hackett went to look at that.

And Mendoza continued to wonder about the blonde in green lace. When he came back from lunch he asked Sergeant Lake to get him Beverly Hills headquarters, was passed around a little, and finally
described the blonde to a Sergeant Macy. “She looks like Beverly Hills, if you get me. The labels in the clothes and so on. Our Missing Persons hasn’t had a report on her. Just occurred
to me maybe yours has. Depending on where she’s missing from.”

“We aren’t divided up into neat departments like the big-city fuzz,” said Macy dryly. “So I can tell you right off, we’ve heard nothing about your fancy lady in
green lace. If we ever do, I’ll let you know.”

“You do that,” said Mendoza. “It’s strange—one like that, I’d have thought she’d have been missed by now.”

He called Sergeant Barth at the Wilcox Street precinct in Hollywood, but Wilcox Street hadn’t heard anything about the blonde either.

Piggott and Landers had gone back to Cortez Street to start the routine on Marion Darley. Talk to the neighbors, had anyone seen or heard anything suspicious. The routine so often did pay
off.

Everybody was out except Mendoza when the General Hospital called at three-forty. The doctor reporting was apologetic; the General tried to be careful about these things, but there it was.
Roderick Dover had succeeded in slashing his wrists a couple of hours ago.

“¡Por vida!” said Mendoza. “Eso sí que está bueno. And it doesn’t even save the taxpayers the trial expenses, because there’s
Donovan. Damnation, yes, and it makes it all the more likely that Donovan’ll get off clear—we know it was Dover who fired the gun. Or are you going to pull him through?”

The doctor said he doubted it. “He’d been on the acid, LSD, hadn’t he, as well as heroin? Well, they will do the most fantastic—naturally we’d taken everything
potentially dangerous away from him. His belt, pocketknife, etcetera. That’s routine. He—”

“So how did he manage it?”

“There wasn’t even a drinking glass in the room. He used the bulb from the ceiling fixture. Evidently stood on the bed—he was six-two, of course—and unscrewed the bulb,
and smashed it. Used the biggest piece to— Well, he’s all but dead now. He’d just been given sedation, and nobody checked on him for about an hour, and he was pretty far gone
then. Evidently did it before the shot reached him.”

“Vaya.” So, more paperwork. And very likely now Donovan would be let loose on probation, thought Mendoza, annoyed. One just as potentially dangerous as Dover, but he’d
only been driving the car on that caper.

Well. Better inform the father. Derek Dover: that sad man washing his hands of a son so unexpectedly gone to the dogs. And then type a report.

Hackett came back as he was finishing the report, and said, “Do I have to tell you? That hit-run. About forty witnesses, and so forty different de. . .