Whim to Kill

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

'A Luis Mendoza story means superlative suspense' Los Angeles Times Things begin to heat up in the Los Angeles Police Department when Lieutenant Luis Mendoza's stolid and good-natured colleague Sergeant Higgins is kidnapped by three dangerous escaped prisoners. A manhunt is launched but no one expects Higgins to be seen alive again. Can Mendoza's team ever recover, or is the officer's return just around the corner?

Release date: May 21, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

MENDOZA was reading the autopsy report on the latest unidentified body when Hackett came back from the first call of the day. It was Wednesday, so
Landers was off. Palliser and Grace were out on something, and both had inquests to attend later; Higgins was typing a report on yesterday’s suicide, and Piggott and Glasser were out
wandering around looking for possible Xs, culled from Records, on the robbery-homicide of last week. At least the weather was nice, as usual in Southern California in April.

“So what’s the new one look like?” asked Mendoza as Hackett came in. The unidentified corpse wasn’t anything interesting: an elderly drifter, probably, dead of a
coronary.

Hackett settled his bulk in the chair beside the desk. “At the Biltmore Hotel,” he said. “One of the guests registered there. Albert Spaulding, home town Pittsburgh, presumably
on a business trip. In the forties somewhere. Some sort of executive with an oil company, the hotel people think. Anyway, money. Looks like. I left the lab men poking around the room. But
there’s a funny twist to it, Luis—”

“¡Dios me libre!” said Mendoza.

Hackett grinned. “Yeah, come to think we’ve had our share lately.” He got out a cigarette and lit it thoughtfully. Central Homicide, L.A.P.D., so seldom did get the exotic or
mysterious cases; but just lately they had had a little spate of cases that were—surprising. Not, when unraveled, very complex or even queer, but just surprising. There’d been that
witchcraft thing last month, and the girl in the green lace evening gown, and that Holly business—other things.

“So what’s the twist?”

“Well, it looks as if he was just knocked over the head with the usual blunt instrument, for what he had. Interns say somewhere around eleven to midnight. He’d left a call for eight
o’clock, and when he didn’t answer, one of the clerks went up and found him. The hotel people say he had three expensive suitcases with, probably, a lot of expensive clothes, and
they’re gone. No watch or billfold or jewelry around. But the funny thing is that by all the signs X hung around afterward to take a shower and shave, before he got away with the loot.
There’s blood on Spaulding’s electric razor—”

“Extraño,” agreed Mendoza. “Funny you can say. Door forced?”

“Nope. I suppose he could have said he was Western Union, or the hotel was on fire, or something. Room on one side unoccupied, and the couple in the one on the other side didn’t get
back to the hotel until after two, they were at a party. And the man in the room across the hall wears a hearing aid—”

“And takes it off when he goes to bed. We do get them,” said Mendoza.

“But on the plus side,” said Hackett, “X obligingly left his clothes for us. After showering and shaving he put on some of Spaulding’s nice expensive clothes. And the
ones he left—pants, jacket, tan shirt, cotton shorts—just might be regulation Army issue.”

“Oh, really,” said Mendoza. “But what idiots they will be, Art, ¿cómo no?”

Hackett stubbed out his cigarette. “I’d better get out an initial report on it.” Mendoza came out to the anteroom with him just as Higgins appeared at the door of the
sergeants’ office. Sergeant Lake was on the phone; he swiveled around and said, “Got it. Sit on it—somebody’ll be there. New body, Lieutenant. In an alley off Figueroa.
There’s a black-and-white there now.”

“Always something,” said Mendoza. “So you can come help look at it, George.” He went back for his hat. “And you’d better get on to the Army, Art—if
that’s so, it could turn up X overnight.”

“Will do,” said Hackett.

The new body, at first glance, looked like posing a few small mysteries. The alley was in the middle of a business block on Figueroa; the black-and-white squad car sitting at
the entrance to mark it, and a badly shaken middle-aged man was still talking compulsively to the uniformed men.

“—Couldn’t believe my eyes—a corpse, right there at the back door! A dead woman! I couldn’t believe my—see, I always come in the back way because the
parking lot’s in back, for store personnel that is, and I—”

“Mr. Shotwell,” said one of the patrolmen, “these are detectives from Homicide. If you’d—”

“Oh, my goodness,” said Shotwell. “Homicide. I just couldn’t— What? Oh, well, you see, I’m the bookkeeper here—at Pattons’. Pattons’ Books
and Stationers. I usually get here shortly after nine—we open at nine-thirty—actually I’m alone here this week except for Milly, Mr. Patton’s on a trip—oh, my
goodness, here comes Milly, she oughtn’t to see this terrible—”

A plump young dark woman was walking up the alley, just dropping a bunch of keys into her purse. At Mendoza’s nod the uniformed men went to intercept her.

“Any use to ask the lab to look around?” said Mendoza.

“Six of one, half dozen of another.” Higgins shrugged his massive shoulders. Shotwell retreated to join the group up the alley, to tell Milly all about it.

The body was sprawled across the single shallow step from the rough blacktop of the alley up to the rear door of the bookstore. These old buildings along here were shabby, and the alley had
collected a good deal of refuse of this and that sort. The body was that of a slight young woman, and in life she had been a good-looker. Dark hair in a short gamin cut, pert features: a triangular
kitten face, big dark eyes. And a very good figure indeed, which was immediately apparent because she hadn’t a stitch of clothes on. And at first glance there were no marks on the body of any
sort. Nothing to say how she had died, no blood, not even—pending a closer look—any surgical scars or birthmarks.

“¡Qué Iindo!” said Mendoza under his breath. “She can’t have been more than twenty-five, George. A looker, wasn’t she? It must be a sign of
age, me going sentimental over a corpse, but—” Suddenly he squatted down and carefully moved the corpse’s left arm a little. The hand had been hanging down palm up, fingers
crooked; he turned it over. “So. A wedding ring,” he said interestedly, and reached for the other hand. On that was a larger ring, a big cocktail ring, gold, but only costume jewelry,
he thought.

“Here’s the ambulance,” said Higgins. “You want the whole works according to the rules?”

“I think so,” said Mendoza slowly, and Higgins went up to the patrol car to call up the lab truck. “Don’t move her,” said Mendoza, “but can you give us a
rough idea of when?”

One of the interns squatted over the body and uttered an absent wolf-whistle. “Say, this one was really something. Poor damn girl. Damn shame. Doesn’t seem to be a mark on her, I
can’t see she was choked or—” He felt the body, lifted it slightly. “No rigor yet, but that doesn’t say much—it can vary. From the temperature I’d
say very roughly between eight and eleven hours.”

“Between ten last night and one this morning,” said Mendoza. He lit a cigarette and went on staring thoughtfully at the body.

“And it does happen, young people can have heart attacks,” offered the other intern.

“But so seldom when they’re stark naked in an alley in downtown L.A.,” said Mendoza. Higgins came back and said a lab truck was on the way. He and Mendoza started to search the
alley in opposite directions, but nothing showed that might connect with the body—no purse, clothes, anything.

The lab truck arrived and Scarne got out of it and began to take photographs. “You know, George,” said Mendoza, “I have a small hunch that this is going to be one of those
tough ones.”

“And let’s hope you’re wrong,” said Higgins. “After the spate of funny ones we’ve been getting, I wouldn’t complain about some nice plain routine. Did I
tell you we’ve definitely decided on the names? Steve and Laura—those kids, my God, they came up with some wild ones, but we sort of put the collective foot down, you know—”
He laughed. Higgins the confirmed bachelor had been pleased and happy enough with his secondhand family, Bert Dwyer’s two kids, and he was still feeling a little incredulous that he and Mary
would have a firsthand family in October. “Margaret Emily for my mother, or David George. Mary said—”

“Yes,” said Mendoza absently. He wondered if those clothes left in the unfortunate Spaulding’s hotel room were G.I. issue. A long step further on if they were.

“Can we take her?”

“Take her.” Nothing in the alley that was immediately connected to the body. But she looked like a young woman who’d be missed, and reported. If she were living with her
husband, and the wedding ring made that probable, he’d miss her right away: maybe already had.

“So suppose we go ask Carey,” said Higgins, having arrived at the same conclusion. They walked back to the street, got into Mendoza’s long black Ferrari, drove back to
headquarters and went up to Missing Persons.

Lieutenant Carey listened to a description of the body and said, “That might ring a bell all right,” and rummaged in his current files. “This just got called down from Wilcox
Street about an hour ago. A Mrs. Jean Everett, twenty-three, five-one, a hundred and five, dark hair, brown eyes. Address on Berendo in Hollywood. She didn’t come home from work
yesterday—husband’s been out hunting for her all over, asking friends and so on. He called Wilcox Street first thing this morning.”

“What’s the address? We’d better check it. Maybe I had a dud hunch after all,” said Mendoza.

Higgins drove up to Hollywood and found John Everett at the Berendo Street address, a rather handsome young man now wearing a ravaged look. “Jean’s
dead?” he said wildly. “Oh, my God, you’re telling me Jean’s—but, my God, how could—”

“Take it easy, Mr. Everett. We don’t know that this is your wife at all. That’s what we want to find out.”

“It can’t be. It just can’t be, I don’t see how—but where is she, for God’s sake? I don’t— What? Yes, yes, I understand that,
I’ll—” He sat beside Higgins in numb silence all the way downtown.

At the morgue, when the attendant slid out the tray, Everett visibly braced himself. He stared at the corpse for twenty seconds and let out a long breath. “Thank God, no, that’s not
Jean. It’s not Jean. Oh, thank God. But—”

“Easy, Mr. Everett,” said Higgins. “We have to be sure. Are you sure? Naturally you don’t want it to be your wife, but by the description—”

Everett straightened. “Of course I’m sure,” he said in a steadier voice. “Yes, this—this woman’s the same general type as Jean, but you see, Jean—Jean
had to have a Caesarean when the baby—And there’s no scar on this woman at all. Is there?”

There certainly wasn’t.

“But where is she? I just can’t—”

That wasn’t Homicide’s business. Higgins sent him home in a patrol car and went back to the office to tell Mendoza it was no dice. They were still going over it for any possible
ideas—of course the autopsy would give them something—when Palliser came in from the Fox inquest.

“Short and sweet,” he said. “Open verdict. If you ask me, we ought to throw it in Pending now. We’ll never get anywhere on it.” Isabel Fox, last Wednesday night,
had stayed to do some overtime work at her boss’s office; she was a legal secretary. She was found next morning, raped and choked to death, beside her car in the building’s parking lot.
There were absolutely no leads on it; any known rapist from Records might have done it—and there were a lot of those, in a place the size of L.A.—or it might have been somebody’s
first time round. Being a professional typist, Miss Fox had kept her nails short and there weren’t even any scrapings to be had there.

“Well, we have to look as if we’re trying, John,” said Mendoza.

Palliser said resignedly he knew that, and how long did Mendoza estimate it might take to find and question every rapist out of Records. “And what good would it do? There was nothing to
tie anybody in at all.” Moodily he went off to write a follow-up report.

Hackett looked in and said, “We’d better go through the motions at the Biltmore. The lab says definitely those clothes are G.I. issue, and they picked up some good latents. Maybe a
couple of Xs, if we’re lucky. I’ve asked the Army if it has any current AWOLs in this area. Place to start, anyway. Like to come back me up, George?”

“Sure,” said Higgins. He stood up, he and Hackett together suddenly dwarfing Mendoza’s office. As they went out, Hackett was asking how Mary was and Higgins telling him about
the names; Mendoza grinned after him. The older they were, the harder they fell, all right; and he just hoped Bert Dwyer’s widow appreciated George.

Jason Grace came in five minutes later, and he was chuckling to himself. “Joke?” asked Mendoza.

“Oh, my,” said Grace. His narrow moustache was as dapper as Mendoza’s, his charcoal suit as neat, his dark tie as discreet; the smile widened on his chocolate-brown face.
“Join the force and see life, all right. I had to go over to the facility on Alameda to see that Richter again—I think he knows something about the heist shooting, but he’s making
like the Tar Baby—and just as I came out, up comes a clutch of boys in blue with six nuts. I tell you. They’d had to radio in for blankets—”

“Blankets?”

“I am telling you,” said Grace. “Assorted sexes, three of each. They climbed out of a car and started wandering around MacArthur Park naked as jaybirds. They’re preaching
some new religion, instant utopia—”

“Naked as jaybirds,” said Mendoza. “What’s that got to do—”

“Oh, the general idea, I gathered, is that clothes represent hypocrisy,” said Grace. Mendoza burst out laughing. “There is a kind of point there, I guess. But when not
everybody’s got a perfect figure—”

“Oh, that reminds me,” said Mendoza. “We’ve got a new one. Another funny one, I think, Jase.”

“With a perfect figure?” asked Grace amusedly.

“¡Seguramente que sí!” said Mendoza. “Or in the vernacular, wow. And that was absolutely the sole thing there. No clothes, purse, birthmarks, nothing. And
I have a small hunch—”

Sergeant Lake came in with a teletype. “New A.P.B. from Oregon. Sounds like bad medicine—I hope they’re not heading for our neck of the woods.”

“¿Qué ocurre?” Mendoza took the teletype. As he read it, his eyebrows climbed. “Conforme, Jimmy. As if we hadn’t enough to cope with as it
is.” The teletype was an all-points bulletin from the warden of the state prison directed to ten western states. It detailed the records, descriptions, and known habits of three unsavory
characters who had made a trio for some time and had currently just got loose from the pen, over the wall. Rodney Trasker, six feet, one hundred eighty, thirty-two, dark hair and eyes, assorted
tattoos: in for manslaughter; an experienced heist man with a long pedigree from age thirteen; this was his second term for manslaughter. Roger Starr, five-ten, a hundred and sixty, thirty-three,
sandy, blue eyes, scar on forehead from knife fight: in for murder second; also a longtime heist man, but had other records of bodily assault, rape, mugging; serving his third count on a felony.
Donald Killeen, six-two, two hundred, thirty-one, dark hair, blue eyes: in for murder first; he’d beaten his wife to death during an argument. He had served time for heist jobs and one count
of manslaughter. Starr and Trasker had been doing time for the same job, a heist with the clerk shot. None of the three were users but had been known to deal in dope picked up on jobs; all three
were hard drinkers and unpredictable in liquor. It was not known whether they’d had outside help on breaking out; it was presumed they had picked up a car, but no make on that. Starr and
Trasker hailed originally from L.A., Killeen from San Diego. It was considered probable that they’d stay together. They might be heading south for home territory. All three were to be
considered probably armed and dangerous.

“How very nice,” said Mendoza, and passed it on to Grace. “I do hope they’ll give the big town the go-by and head for San Diego.” Piggott looked in the door, his
long dark thin face wearing a more morose expression than usual.

“I’ve picked up one of the possibilities on that heist job. Somebody like to sit in on the questioning?”

“Happy to oblige,” said Grace.

At the Biltmore, Mr. Brian Hartnett was saying to Hackett and Higgins, “A soldier? You think a soldier did that—murdered Mr. Spaulding? A G.I.?”

“Well, it’s just speculation at the moment, Mr. Hartnett. We’re just asking,” said Hackett. “Did you notice a soldier at any time in the lobby yesterday?”

Hartnett said apologetically, “Well—I can’t see all of the lobby from the desk, of course. I don’t recall noticing a soldier, but of course I might not have taken much
notice—so many people coming and going, you know— But I can tell you that nobody in uniform checked in. No. But you can ask the bellhops—and in the dining room—”

“Yes, we will,” said Higgins.

Hartnett shook his head. “A murder. Here. I can’t get over it. And not as if Mr. Spaulding would have had much cash on him, you know. He always carried travelers’ checks. What?
Oh, yes, he’d stayed here before—he was usually out here at least twice a year. On business, I suppose. He never carried much cash, it was always the travelers’ checks, mostly for
twenty dollars each.”

Which said nothing, of course. These days, with the sea of paper floating around, nobody scrutinized signatures with a magnifying glass. Whoever had Spaulding’s travelers’ checks
might cash quite a few of them without any trouble.

“I wonder,” said Hartnett suddenly, “what the family will do about the car. I suppose it could be shipped back—”

“The car?” said Hackett and Higgins simultaneously.

Hartnett looked surprised. “Mr. Spaulding’s automobile. He—”

“He was driving?” said Hackett.

“Why, yes. He generally did. He told me once that he found cross-country driving very relaxing. The car is, of course, in our underground garage. It—”

“How do we get there?” asked Higgins.

In the cavernous garage, a scrawny young man in a white jump-suit with Biltmore Hotel embroidered across the pocket stared at them. “The guy’s murdered?” he said.
“That guy? In the hotel, he’s murdered? Well, for gosh sakes! No, I dint hear a word, but I just come on duty—I did some overtime last night to oblige Mike.”

“Is the car here?” asked Hackett. “Spaulding’s car?”

“I can’t get over it. Right in the hotel he’s murdered. That guy. Well, I’ll be damned,” said the attendant suddenly. “Spaulding. That guy. . .