With a Vengeance

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

At first the murder of Nelson Jamison seemed fairly straightforward. He had been strangled, but next to his corpse lay a hand-printed card with the words The Vengeance is Just. Jamison, a rich ne'er-do-well, has a prison record for rape, and everything pointed towards a victim's revenge killing. But within hours Lieutenant Luis Mendoza and his team have an identical killing on their hands, and then a third. But is the killer about slip up and reveal their identity? 'A Luis Mendoza story means superlative suspense' Los Angeles Times

Release date: May 21, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

IT all began a long while before the boys in the Homicide Bureau at Central, LAPD, knew one thing about it. Some of
them weren’t in Homicide when it all began. Mendoza was still new in Homicide then, and still Sergeant Mendoza, and it was long before he’d met Alison Weir or ever even contemplated
matrimony, much less had any remote notion about the twin monsters arriving to upset his life. And it was long before Hackett—not then Sergeant—had met his Angel, and worried and
wondered about her, and ended up loving her.

Bert Dwyer wasn’t yet transferred to Homicide when it all began, his feet set on the path which brought him in the end to bloody death on the cold marble floor of a bank. And George
Higgins was at Homicide then, but newer to the office than Mendoza, and even then pretty well settled in his bachelorhood and never dreaming that Fate had set his path alongside Dwyer’s that
in the end he should commit himself—gravely and solidly and efficiently as Higgins did everything—to Bert Dwyer’s widow. Tom Landers was still riding a patrol car, and Galeano was
still down in auto theft, and John Palliser was studying for the detectives’ examination, still in uniform.

It was a long while back when it started. Matt Piggott wasn’t at Homicide, or Rory Farrell, and Sergeant Lake who nowadays sat at the desk outside Mendoza’s office dealing with all
the phones, was down in Forgery. Schenke wasn’t there, or Thoms, or Glasser. Some of the men at Homicide then were since retired. And anyway, the start of it all wasn’t any concern of
Homicide’s and they never heard about it then.

The men at Homicide then were involved as always in the endless routine, the sordid and violent and wanton and random deaths that happen too often in that section of any big city. With the
junkies dead of the overdose, the stabbings during a brawl, the drunks dead of drink in the alleys, the bashings and muggings and armed assaults, they were busy.

And when the years-old motive started to operate, Homicide was routinely busy then, too. As per usual. Things were always coming along.

They had a fatal child-beating case, for one thing. Not much mystery about it, but a nasty case and all the paperwork to be done. Jason Grace was on that with Glasser. They were both seasoned
cops but that sort of thing always did shake you a little, the purely Neanderthal thing—“I hadda stop her yellin’, I hadda awful head on me, I just sorta slapped her a couple
times, didn’t go to—”

They had a liquor-store clerk held up and shot over on Main. That was being a bastard to work, not one single lead on it; probably they’d never get anybody for it. All they knew was the
gun used, that nine-shot Harrington and Richardson .22.

They had a suicide: a straight suicide, twenty-year-old girl in a cheap rooming house on Temple, took an overdose and left a note. Boyfriend walked out on her, didn’t want to go on,
he’d know now how much she loved him . . . “People, people,” said Hackett, shaking his head. “Poor pathetic little fool. Twenty, my God.”

And Higgins said, “Maybe why, Art. Another five years, she’d maybe have grown some common sense. And then again, maybe not.” But there was all the paperwork to do on it; and
they hadn’t so far found any relatives to pay for the funeral.

They had also an unidentified corpse, and all the paperwork on that: the flyers sent out with the description, man approximately 55-60 years of age, Caucasian, five-feet-eight, 150 pounds,
appendectomy scar—and so forth. He’d been found alongside a derelict building on Second Street, not too good a section—dead of a heart attack—but his clothes were fairly
good and he’d been clean and neat, no drink in him, so he probably hadn’t been a bum and somebody ought to know him somewhere.

They’d just cleaned up a series of muggings in a couple of city parks, and got the nice evidence and seen the mugger arraigned. In fact, for an average week at Homicide, it was fairly
quiet and slow, and this sunny Saturday in June, with the real heat not yet upon them, Mendoza had gone home early, leaving Hackett and Jason Grace and Higgins discussing, of all things, the
contemporary novel.

“Just to point up the fact,” the lieutenant had said, picking up his black Homburg, “that this is the deeply intellectual force we all know it is.”

“Well, blame it on Virginia,” said Grace in his soft voice. “She takes these serious kicks once in a while—joined this study club, you know, and brings the damn books
home and—” He grinned, touching his hairline mustache, as precise as Mendoza’s own against his coffee-colored complexion.

“Intellectual be damned,” said Hackett sleepily, propping his feet up on his desk in the communal sergeants’ office. “Half of ’em disguised pornography and the
other half egghead political treatises disguised as fiction. I can’t read that stuff.”

“That’s not a bad description, Sergeant,” said Grace thoughtfully.

Higgins yawned and said he didn’t try to read it. A cop had enough to do, he said, without keeping up with The Saturday Review of Literature for God’s sake. And had anything
come in from Missing Persons on the description of that corpse, or were they still pawing through their records by hand?

“I’ll call Carey,” said Hackett, reluctantly sitting up and reaching for the phone.

It had been a quiet day. So Mendoza went home, to the big Spanish house on Rayo Grande Avenue in the Hollywood hills. He found his house empty of all save the four cats: and, strange for the
reformed man-about-town, he felt annoyed. When he came home, his household should be there to acknowledge him. He gave himself a small drink, talked to the cats, replaced the record albums El
Señor inevitably dragged out of the cabinet while nobody was around, and investigating the refrigerator found some Roquefort cheese. He was scattering cracker crumbs on the living-room
carpet when Alison arrived home from a day’s painting visit to the beach, and presently Mrs. MacTaggart and the twin monsters from an afternoon’s visit to Barnsdall Park.

The twins, tired out by the swings and sandboxes, were tucked away to bed without protest; dinner materialized under Mrs. MacTaggart’s deft hands. And at eleven o’clock, Mendoza was
wandering around the big master bedroom starting to get undressed, while Alison sat up in bed with a book, looking very fetching in pale-green nylon with her copper hair loose to her shoulders;
she’d been letting it grow.

“I don’t know but what it is a good description,” said Mendoza suddenly, taking off his watch. “Mmh, yes. Contemporary literature. ¡Por mi
vida!”

“What?” said Alison vaguely.

“Just—what are you reading, contemporary literature?”

“Con——heavens, no. Most of the stuff all the critics rave over is terrible, honestly. No, it’s a life of Landseer.”

“Oh. The fellow who painted all those sad-eyed dogs and horses.”

Alison bristled. “Well, I expect it’s very old-fashioned of me—”

The telephone rang.

“—but I like Landseer. I really—”

Mendoza went out to the hall. “Mendoza here.”

“We’ve got a kind of funny little thing down here, Lieutenant,” said Sergeant Farrell. “Something that looks—well, Galeano and Piggott went out on it, and Nick just
called in, said we’d better brief you. Kind of offbeat, you know.”

“Oh? What kind of offbeat?”

“Well, it’s a body, of course. Found about half an hour ago, under a tree in the Old Plaza. By, I gather, a couple of neckers. The man called in, Traffic chased a squad car out, and
the squad-car men called us when they saw the guy was dead. So Nick and Matt went out to look at it. Offbeat you can say. Down there, and—well, we’ve got an ambulance on the way, see
what Bainbridge says about the corpse in the morning, but Nick says it looks very funny, Lieutenant. A fellow about forty, ordinary-looking, but he’s dressed to the nines—expensive
clothes—and Nick says he’s been strangled by something like a thin wire or a piece of clothesline, something like that—and there was a card tucked halfway into his shirt
pocket—”

“A business card? I don’t—”

“No, no. A card, Nick says, that’s all, I don’t know what kind, but it’s got written on it, The Vengeance is Just. Just that. He thought it was offbeat enough
that you ought to—”

“¡Vaya por Dios! Yes, indeed,” said Mendoza. “Very funny, Rory. Did you—?”

“I told him to call back in five minutes, I’d find out if you wanted to have a personal look, and—”

“I think I do,” said Mendoza. “Yes. Tell him to hold the corpse, Rory—I’m on my way.” He went back to the bedroom, put on his watch, reached for a tie,
telling Alison about it.

She laughed, looking up from Landseer. “You and your talk about resigning, and enjoying the money and maybe going round the world, after twenty-three years’ service.
¡Cómo no, ni qué niña muerto! You’d die of boredom. Talk about born cops.”

Mendoza grinned at her, putting on his jacket. “Fool that I am. Only a cop could be idiot enough to walk out on you already in bed. I don’t suppose it’ll take more than an
hour. Can Landseer occupy you that long?”

“I’m taking no bets,” said Alison darkly. “Not with you. Go and have fun with your corpse, amante.”

And it wasn’t that he had, then, any premonitions; nor did he think of himself as the dedicated cop. But, along with a few other necessary traits to the good cop, Luis
Rodolfo Vicente Mendoza had a larger bump of curiosity than the average citizen, and anything a little offbeat that happened along he wanted to look at pronto.

The Old Plaza, he thought, backing out the Ferrari. A funny place for a corpse. On a Saturday night. True, very dark there under the few old trees: and later at night, there wouldn’t be
the old men occupying the benches as they did during the day, and on warm summer evenings. (So, the corpse not there very long?) But lights and people close around. He visualized it thoughtfully.
The Union Station with its cab rank and blazing lights a long block down the hill. Olvera Street, the first street in L.A., preserved as a tourist attraction, a block away across North Spring. Of
course, the old Mission Church right across the street from the Plaza, and everything else right around, dark and silent at this time of night: no businesses or bars near. Still, a funny place. He
didn’t remember any instance of a body turning up in the Plaza, all the years he’d been at Homicide.

They’d held it for him. A black-and-white squad car, Galeano’s old Ford, an ambulance, parked illegally at the curb on the Los Angeles Street side of the Plaza, and a spotlight up
there under the trees. This was the original part of L.A. here, the little squarish Plaza and the old church up there, and the first little street of shops and houses which marked the beginning of
this city. The Town of Our Lady Queen of the Angels of the Little Portion. Today it was not as it had been then; the city fathers had made a tasteful tiny park of it. There was green grass; the
ground rose a little steeply in this small-block-square of park, to the spreading shelter of a few ancient olive trees, a bronze statue—Father Serra? Mendoza had never bothered to identify
it—a few benches. Up the gentle rise to the center was the spotlight.

He came into the little circle, the interns from the ambulance standing around smoking, stocky dark Galeano, thin serious-looking Piggott, the two uniformed squad-car men—and the dead man;
and Galeano greeted him sardonically.

“I thought you couldn’t resist it. The vengeance bit. It’s funny.”

“It’s funny,” agreed Mendoza. “Let’s see it. Any I.D. on him?”

“Oh, sure. He’s Nelson Edward Jamison. Wallet on him all shipshape. Money too—forty-seven bucks and some change. And a lot of I.D. Social Security, driver’s license,
bank-account number card.”

“You don’t tell me. All the funnier,” said Mendoza.

“I do tell you. He lives in Pasadena,” said Galeano. “On Belvidere Street. And God knows I’m not the expert on fancy tailoring you are, Lieutenant, but if he paid less
than fifty bucks for his sports jacket or less than a quarter-century for his shoes, I’ll eat ’em.”

“You don’t tell me,” said Mendoza again. He stepped over to the corpse delicately—there wouldn’t be footprints, though the grass was thinner under the trees; there
hadn’t, of course, in Southern California, been a drop of rain for months. There wasn’t, in fact, anything very much around the body, and of what there was—cigarette ends, candy
wrappers, a half-empty sack that had held popcorn—who could say whether they connected with the body? It was lying crumpled in front of one of the benches, as if the man had toppled from a
sitting position. Mendoza squatted down to look at it.

“He’s more or less as he was,” said Galeano. “I just lifted him up, going through his pockets.”

Strangled, yes. Strangled by brute force. See what more Bainbridge could say about that, but at first glance—any man at Homicide as long as Mendoza had been there picked up this and
that—strangled not manually but with something. Cord, wire, whatever. “And,” said Galeano, following his thought, “no sign of anything like that around.”

Discounting the bulging eyes, the tip of protruding tongue, the man had not been a very prepossessing man. A low narrow forehead, a weak receding chin, a muddy sallow complexion: sandy-blond
hair too long, tumbled over his brow, and a slack mouth even in life, probably. It was open, and the teeth were bad—discolored, one incisor half broken off. Sum him up, a fellow about
Mendoza’s size, call it five-ten, a hundred and fifty: between thirty-five and forty. And the clothes—yes. Pues sí, thought Mendoza. The spotlight showed the quality
clearly. A shadow-plaid wool sports jacket, faint heather-lavender shading to gray. “It’s a Brooks label,” said Galeano over his shoulder. Pale-gray nylon slacks—a gray
sports shirt, very clean and looking just pressed. Gray suède moccasins, silk socks. A leather bolo tie, and the sliding clasp was, Mendoza decided with one accurate look, sterling:
a sterling horseshoe. Very natty.

“Here,” said Piggott gloomily, “is the card. Somebody had a grudge against him. When are people going to learn that vengeance belongs to the Lord, Lieutenant?” Piggott
was a devout Free Methodist.

“At about the same time,” said Mendoza, standing up, “that there ceases to be any need for police forces, Matt. All right, you boys take it away—see what Bainbridge makes
of it.” He looked at the card with interest, what he could see of it. Galeano and Piggott had, of course, brought a lab kit with them, and awaiting fingerprinting the card had been maneuvered
into a small plastic bag. It was an ordinary three-by-five file card with lines printed on it. And diagonally across its face, in what looked like ball-point printing, very neatly ran the
legend:

The Vengeance is Just

“Somebody with a grudge, all right,” said Galeano. “But what was he doing down here in this part of town? In his fancy tailoring and all? Or was he strangled
somewhere else and brought here? That I don’t see.”

“No,” said Mendoza, “neither do I. He’s no lightweight, Nick. Somebody’d have had to haul him up here from a car—it’d have taken some little
while—and it’s illegal to park on all four sides of this place. And down here the squad car comes around at fairly frequent intervals. Nobody would have attempted that—lights so
near. Even as late as it probably was—I don’t think he’s more than an hour dead.”

“I thought so too,” said Galeano. “I sent the pair that found him back to the office in a squad car to give Rory a statement. Manuel Garcia and Rita Ortiz. Ordinary young
couple—out on a date, come out of a movie, stop to have a malt, think they’ll sit in the Plaza a while all cozy and smooch a little. That’s another thing—I wonder if
there’s much of that. If X knew? If there is, he might have been interrupted by half a dozen couples after the privacy. Anyway, they’re out—nothing to do with it. Garcia’s
an apprentice electrician, works for the city. Ordinary.”

The interns were bundling the corpse onto a stretcher.

“Um, yes,” said Mendoza. “I suppose you’ve looked all around here, as well as you could. Better rope it off, have another look in the morning. Just in case. So now we go
to break the bad news to the family, if any.”

“There is. One of those personal I.D. cards, in case of accident notify. A Mrs. Constance Jamison—wife or mother, I suppose, same address.”

“Lo siento tanto. As long as I’ve been at it, I don’t like breaking the bad news.”

“You don’t have to come along,” said Galeano. “But I can see that long nose of yours twitching from here.”

Mendoza grinned. “Just a glutton for work, that’s me. I admit it, I’m curious about Mr. Jamison. What was he doing down here? His shoes aren’t scuffed, and
suède would show a mark—I trust you noticed that, playing detective. It looks as if he was killed right here, right where he fell. In—”

“His gents’ fancy tailoring, sure. And with the wallet untouched.”

“And just possibly,” said Mendoza, stepping away from the place where the body had lain and lighting a cigarette, “just possibly, after Mrs. Constance Jamison has recovered
from the shock, she’ll tell us. It must have been Joe Doakes, he’s been threatening to murder poor Nelson—over a girl, or a gambling debt, or an argument about
politics.”

“And also she might not,” said Piggott even more gloomily. “Vengeance.” He sniffed disapprovingly.

“All right,” said Mendoza abruptly, “you see the area’s roped off and posted, Matt—” He turned to the uniformed men. “And you see that somebody’s
stationed here to reinforce that. It’ll come to nothing, ten to one, but we have to go through the motions. Nick, you and I’ll go and break the bad news,” Galeano handed over his
car keys to Piggott silently.

And it was a little joke in the Homicide Bureau, about Mendoza’s crystal ball; but whatever it was, it didn’t always work. Clicking on the directional signal, making the turn onto
the Pasadena freeway, Mendoza hadn’t any dire premonitions at all. It was just an offbeat little thing that had turned up, and he fully expected that when they came to unravel it, it’d
turn out to be the grudge over a girl, something like that. What made it a little funny was not only the card, but the fact of the strangling: grudge killings were more usually simple bashings or
shootings.

When they found the Pasadena address, it suited the clothes Jamison had been wearing. A street above Orange Grove Avenue: a street of dignified old houses, big and expensive houses: manicured
lawns. And it took a little while to wake the old house, and when at last the door opened to them, and they produced their badges, they got both less and more than they had expected. Breaking the
bad news.

“For the Lord’s sake,” said the woman. “Dead? Killed? By somebody, not just a—that Nelson? You’re cops? For the
Lord’s sake!” She shook her head at them wonderingly. “My God,” she said, “the old lady’ll go out of her mind. I just don’t relish
tellin’ her, I tell you. Not atall. But I won’t say I’m surprised. Way he ran around. Trouble he got into. What? No, I’m not Mrs. Jamison—I’m the
housekeeper. My name’s Madge Hooper. Been with her—I guess you might’s well come in—a matter o’ fifteen years. She’s nearly eighty, y’know, and got the
arthritis and a bad heart too—for the Lord’s sake, let’s hope it don’t bring on an attack, tellin’ her! Poor old soul—not but what I reckon it
was her spoilin’ him and all like that made him—”

It was a large, high-ceilinged, old-fashioned entrance hall, ornate plush-covered Victorian chairs all formal at either side of the wide old front door, a faded oriental carpet, a crystal
chandelier. “Mrs. Jamison—that’s his mother?” asked Mendoza. “What do you—?”

“Didn’t I say?” Madge Hooper was about fifty, a thin woman with friendly, curious eyes and a lot of defiantly ash-blonde hair in bristling pink curlers for the night. She was
clutching a blue corduroy robe around her, and she yawned, but her gaze on them was bright and interested. “Yes, that’s right. She’s an awful sentimental woman—nice woman,
but kind of a fool too. If you know what I mean. There’s a lot o’ money—kind of substantial old money, you know—her husband was a banker. I been with her fifteen
years, heard all about it. And seen some. That Nelson—Lordy, I can’t get over it, him getting murdered, you say? It’ll just about kill her, spite of all—well, he
was a no-goodnik all right. Kind of the usual thing, you know, her bein’ in her forties when he was born, and never expectin’ any kids, married nearly twenty years—and him being a
boy and all—and her husband dyin’ pretty soon, and her spoilin’ the kid rotten—”

“Mrs. Hooper, if you’d—”

“Oh, Lord, I’m not goin’ to be the one to tell her! Like they say, as if she thought the sun rose ’n’ set in him—and him no better than a bum,
driftin’ around, never any job, and in police trouble too—a real bad one he was, you could tell just by lookin’ at him, nearly. I tell you true, when he was here—
which he wasn’t always, driftin’ around like I say, the good Lord knows where or wh. . .