With Intent to Kill

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

'A Luis Mendoza story means superlative suspense' Los Angeles Times When a respectable young woman's naked body is found far from her home, the case proves baffling for Lieutenant Luis Mendoza of the Los Angeles Homicide squad. But Mendoza is struggling with more than the case. He's a man down too. Sergeant Higgins' first baby has arrived and he is far too preoccupied to put his mind to murder. But killers go on killing...

Release date: May 21, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

MENDOZA woke abruptly. It was pitch dark and out in the hall the phone was ringing, shrill and monotonous. He sat up, swearing. Beside him Alison
stirred and muttered, and from the tangle of cats at the foot of the bed El Señor cursed at being disturbed.

The luminous face of the bedside clock informed Mendoza that it was two thirty-seven A.M. Swearing, he got out of bed and made for the phone in the hall. As he stumbled
against the telephone table, the central light went on and Mrs. MacTaggart appeared at the end of the hall, looking like a woolly blue lamb in her fleece robe.

“Mendoza,” he said through a yawn.

“Luis, it’s me! Listen, I’ve got to—it’s Mary, and I’ve got to take her—she says it might be pretty soon— Listen, you said—it’s the
kids, and I’ve got to—”

“Yes, George,” said Mendoza. “Take a long breath and simmer down. I’ll—”

“That’s a hell of a lot of help!” said Sergeant Higgins wildly. “Mary says they’re about twelve minutes apart now and— Listen, I know she’s had
experience at it but I haven’t, damn it, and the kids—”

“You go on, Máiri’ll be right over, George.”

“But how the hell—we can’t leave the house unlocked, for—”

“Now, you’re not really taking Steve and Laura to the hospital with you, George.”

“Oh!” said Higgins. “Oh, of— Well, all right, but I— Mary, don’t you dare go down those steps al—” The phone crashed in Mendoza’s ear.

“It’s the Higgins’ baby,” he said through another yawn to Alison and Mrs. MacTaggart.

“But it’s a good six weeks early, that’ll be,” said Mrs. MacTaggart interestedly. “They’ll be wanting me to stay with the children, then. I’ll be
dressed and off in a jiffy—”

“You are not,” said Mendoza, “going to drive clear across town alone at this hour of night, Máiri. I’ll take you over.”

She shook her silver curls at him. “And if you please, how am I to get on withoot my ain car? And who’d bother an old biddy like me at all?”

“I’ll bring your car over in the morning,” said Alison. “He’s quite right. Isn’t it funny how babies so often do start arriving in the middle of the night?
But you said October, and it’s only September fifteenth—”

“It’ll be a lively one, anxious to get here,” said Mrs. MacTaggart thoughtfully, and went back to her room to dress. Mendoza flung on shirt, trousers, jacket, and rummaged for
car keys and cigarettes on the dresser.

“Well, now I’m up I think I’ll have a glass of milk,” said Alison, running fingers through her red hair. El Señor cursed again at the noise and lights. “I
only hope we haven’t waked up the twins.”

The twins slumbered peacefully; but another member of the household had been disturbed too. As Mendoza came out to the hall again he nearly fell over Cedric, the shaggy Old English sheepdog,
coming to look for burglars.

“George is in a dither,” said Mendoza as he started the Ferrari’s engine.

“And why wouldna he be, poor man? His first one, and him pushing forty, you said. Naturally he’s all twittery over it,” said Mrs. MacTaggart comfortably. “I warrant you
the Dwyer children’ll be in a state too.”

That, they discovered at the old house on Silver Lake Boulevard, was an understatement. Higgins, the longtime bachelor, solemnly falling for Sergeant Bert Dwyer’s widow, was fond of the
Dwyer children too, and they of him. It was possible that twelve-year-old Steve and ten-year-old Laura Dwyer were more excited about the baby than Higgins was.

“Those kids won’t get back to sleep tonight,” Mendoza reported, laughing, when he came home. “They’re wild to know which it is.”

“Well, you’d better get back to sleep,” said Alison, “or you’ll be late at the office.”

He was late to the office anyway; Alison let him oversleep. Finding her preoccupied with the twins’ breakfast, he kissed her hastily and said he’d get something
somewhere on the way; he stopped at a Mannings’ coffee shop, and drifted into the office at half past nine, as usual immaculate in silver-gray Italian silk, snowy shirt, discreet tie.

Sergeant Lake was sitting at the switchboard in the anteroom, past the door labeled Homicide. “You’re late,” he commented. Mendoza agreed.

“Who’s here? Anything new gone down?”

“You’ve got a new body,” said Lake gloomily, and picked up his book again. The sedentary years had caught up with him of late, and the book was How to Eat Well and Stay
Slim. Mendoza went into the sergeants’ office. Its sole occupant was Sergeant Arthur Hackett, big and sandy, who was typing a report.

“You’re late. So’s George, Goofing off,” said Hackett, and hit a wrong key and swore.

“George we may not see much of today,” said Mendoza. “The baby started arriving about two thirty and he woke us all up dithering for Máiri to come stay with the kids.
He’ll probably call in, some time. What’s—”

“It’s early,” said Hackett. “Well, I suppose they’ll both be relieved to have it over. You taking a bet, boy or girl?”

“No bets. It won’t matter to George,” grinned Mendoza. “What’s the new body?”

Hackett leaned back in his chair and it creaked under his weight. “I was saying to George just yesterday,” he said sleepily, “most of what we see on this job can be summed up
in two words. Stupidity and cupidity.”

“That’s quite an epigram, Arturo.” Mendoza hoisted one hip onto John Palliser’s desk and lit a cigarette.

“But I don’t know which applies to the new body. Yet. John Hagan, forty-nine, worked for The Broadway department store as a bookkeeper. Lived in an apartment over on Virgil with his
wife—one married daughter back in Florida. The Hagans have a dog. A Dachsie. Every night about ten o’clock Hagan took the dog for a walk round the block. Last night neither of ’em
came home. A man named Fellows heard a shot about a quarter past ten—he lives just past the corner of Virgil and Fourth—went out and found Hagan. Shot in the body. D.O.A. The dog found
its way home just about as Schenke got there to break the news to the widow.”

“Hagan rolled?”

“It doesn’t look as if he was,” said Hackett. “Wife told Bob that he never carried any cash on him, out that late at night, and apparently nobody went through his
pockets. He was still wearing a diamond ring worth about a hundred bucks, according to the wife.”

“¿Qué es esto?” said Mendoza. “Funny. See what the lab gives us—ask around about quarrels and so on. Where’s everybody else?”

“John went out on the Carroll thing—the heist. He’ll probably fetch in a dozen witnesses to make statements, tie up the office the rest of the day. I don’t know where
Jase is, but I’ve been out on this thing—” And another two from the day watch were accounted for. It was Tom Landers’ day off. And Matt Piggott’s vacation had started
last Monday, and he’d got married to his Prudence and gone off to Yosemite on a honeymoon; they wouldn’t see Piggott until the end of the month.

And of course the deceased Mr. Hagan was just the latest thing Homicide had to work. There was also the heist job pulled on Wednesday night, at the little dairy store owned by Patrick Carroll,
with several witnesses. He had evidently put up a fight and was still on the critical list at Central Receiving Hospital. There was the unidentified body of a woman, found in the street last Monday
morning: no lead had turned up on that at all. There was the inevitable suicide with the paperwork still to do. There was the equally inevitable wino dead in an alley off Main Street, paperwork to
do on that. Now, Mr. Hagan: and neither Mendoza nor Hackett would take any bets that a couple of more new things might show up, today or tomorrow or Sunday. The Homicide office of the L.A.P.D. was
kept busy as a rule.

“I’ll take a look at Hagan,” said Mendoza.

“And welcome. I left Bob’s report on your desk.”

Mendoza went into his office, automatically straightened the desk-blotter, brushed a few ashes from the desk as he sat down, and lit a new cigarette, taking up Detective Bob Schenke’s
initial report on John Hagan. It didn’t, on the one hand, look like a very interesting kill—few were—but on the other, it was just a little funny-peculiar. He read the terse
phrases over twice, got up and took down his wide-brimmed homburg. “I’ll go see the widow,” he told Hackett. “Back in an hour or so.”

It was an old apartment, the kind of place people like the Hagans lived; little people, you could say, living on modest incomes from the unglamorous jobs. The apartment was
very neat, with a good deal of old furniture and flowered drapes and a fairly good amateur landscape in a gold frame over the imitation hearth. Mrs. Hagan, plump, tearful, still incredulous, told
him, “Our daughter painted that, did you say Lieutenant? She’s a very good artist, Annie is. But you asked—you said—and there’s just nothing. No reason for
anybody to— Why John? John never had a—an argument with anybody. He didn’t like rows and upsets. I don’t recall we ever had a quarrel all the twenty-six years we were
married. I just can’t take it in—”

“What about his job?” asked Mendoza. “The people he worked with?”

She had the little red Dachsie on her lap, stroking it automatically; she went on shaking her head. “There’s nothing. He’d been there since we were married. Steady—John
was always steady, you know? Everybody liked him, he always got on fine with everybody. There’s just no—”

Well, see the people at the Broadway, thought Mendoza; they might have some different answers. Homicide was seldom very complex, and it had often been done for a very slight motive.

That thought reoccurred to him as he pushed open the door of the big headquarters building, Parker Center. Just ahead of him in the lobby was Jason Grace, half-turned lighting a cigarette, and
he looked a little glum.

“Have you been goofing off again, as Art puts it? Over at the County Adoption Agency?”

Grace said, “So you finally showed up. Who’s goofing off? Virginia’s filling out more forms down there today.” It had really been no motive at all, last month, which had
orphaned three-month-old Celia Ann Harlow. And the Graces, disappointed in not producing their own family, were wading through all the red tape trying to acquire her legally. Grace brushed his
narrow moustache in unconscious mimicry of Mendoza now, his regular-featured chocolate-brown face thoughtful. “Red tape,” he said. “Well. No, I’ve been down to the morgue
escorting another fearful husband. It isn’t his runaway wife. Jane Doe still unidentified. I don’t think we’ll ever make her now, Lieutenant.”

“Only four days. Oh, did—”

“And Higgins hasn’t turned up, talking about goofing off.”

Mendoza told him why. “It’s getting on for eleven, he may be calling in.”

They went up to the office. Hackett had apparently gone out and come back: he was taking a statement from an excited-looking middle-aged man who gestured violently as he talked. John Palliser
was talking quietly to a scared-looking young woman in a tight green sheath.

“All the statements on that heist,” sighed Grace.

“Any word from George, Jimmy?”

“Nope,” said Lake, not looking up from his book.

Henry Glasser came in with an elderly woman. “It’s just a matter of making a statement, Mrs. Ritter. Half an hour.” She looked around the big room bewilderedly as he led her to
his desk.

“There’s something funny about this Hagan,” said Mendoza meditatively.

“A hunch tells you. Who’s Hagan?”

“I don’t know that it’s a hunch exactly—” Mendoza wandered into his own office. Hunches, he thought, maybe he didn’t need: twenty-four years’ experience
on the job was what told him this and that. He hung up his hat and was just about to have a look at any other overnight reports when Sergeant Lake looked in and beckoned, with a resigned
expression.

“¿Qué?” Mendoza came out, to find Assistant Police Chief Durward being hearty to a tall slim fellow in very British tailoring. Whenever Assistant Chief Durward
sounded hearty, it was a sign that he was feeling annoyed. “Lieutenant Mendoza,” he said now, punctiliously. “Assistant Commissioner Hayes-Worthington of Scotland Yard, Mendoza.
Over here on business, and he’d like a look at our little operation here. Hope you don’t mind our invading Homicide, Luis.”

“Certainly not. How do you do,” said Mendoza unenthusiastically.

Hayes-Worthington bared yellow false teeth at him and remarked in nearly understandable Oxfordese that he understood the Los Angeles police enjoyed a somewhat better reputation than most
Amurrican forces, haw. Durward beamed at him steadily.

Mendoza bent a brilliant smile on him and said cordially, “We do like to think so, Commissioner, and it’s always gratifying to have our own opinion backed up. I understand that
your—mmh—well-known scientific laboratory has consulted ours for help on a number of occasions. We’re always happy to be of service to baffled bobbies, you know.”

Hayes-Worthington said, “Oh—haw—is that so indeed?”

“I’m sure,” said Durward, looking remotely amused, “that a quick look around your facilities here—if you wouldn’t mind— Now this is the sergeants’
office, Commissioner—”

They were just rid of Durward and the Assistant Commissioner, and it was ten past twelve and Mendoza was thinking about lunch—the other boys could finish the paperwork
later—when Higgins rushed in breathlessly and stood leaning on Sergeant Lake’s desk. He was clad in the top half of blue pajamas and an old pair of slacks. He needed a shave, and with
his dark hair on end he looked even more of a thug than usual.

“Luis—Art!” he croaked excitedly. “She’s here, and it’s a girl! It’s Margaret Emily! Mary’s fine! It’s a girl, eight pounds even, even six
weeks early! She’s got a lot of black hair and fingernails! She—”

“Well, that’s fine, George, just fine,” said Hackett, coming out to pound his shoulder.

“And keep up the good work, compadre,” added Mendoza. “But what about you?”

“Me? I’m just fine,” said Higgins. “We thought it’d be sooner, but she didn’t come till two minutes before eleven. And they wouldn’t let me in right
away—and then they let me—I phoned home to tell Steve and Laura, and then—”

“Yes, yes, all’s well that ends well,” said Mendoza, “but you’re not exactly dressed for the office, you know, and when did you have anything to eat?”

“Eat?” said Higgins. “Oh, she’s fine, she’s just fine, boys! Wait till you— Now that you mention it, I’m starving. What the hell time is it? Well,
I’ll be damned!” He looked down at himself. “My God, I never thought—”

The rest of them were laughing. “We’ll make an exception and let you tag along to Federico’s,” said Mendoza. “You’ve got an excuse, after all.”

“Damn right,” said Higgins. “Wait till you see her! She’s got blue eyes but Mary said they all do at first, so maybe—but all that hair, a lot of babies don’t
have any, and she—”

“Judging from experience,” said Hackett as they waited for the elevator, “we’ll have to listen to all the rhapsodizing until the first few times he has to change
her.”

“If you ask me, boys,” said Mendoza, “I’m keeping fingers crossed. Babies! We’re hearing about nothing else these days. ¿Qué pasa
aquí? Here’s John’s wife expecting too—”

“Unexpectedly,” said Palliser with a grin.

“And Jase using every spare minute to persuade the Adoption Agency they’re fit parents—and now Margaret Emily. The fingers firmly crossed,” said Mendoza. “Those
twin monsters are quite enough to cope with!”

And when he got home, after an otherwise unprofitable day, he found Alison coping with the twin monsters, who were as full of energy as usual, and over their milk toast and
apricot pudding demanding to be read to.

“¡La bruja!” nodded Teresa solemnly. “Make all the bad magia.”

“¡El lobo!” shouted Johnny. “He eat la abuela all down!”

“The grandmother,” said Alison absently. “English, Johnny. Hello, amado. Oh, damn.” As both their parents were as apt to come out with Spanish as English, the
twins at the official age of three had only the vaguest notion of any difference. The current campaign to correct the situation was not meeting with much success. The battered copy of Grimm,
however, had been an instant hit.

“Burn up in la estufa,” said Johnny darkly now.

His sister contributed, “La bruja make ever’body dead por la magia!”

“Oh, dear,” said Alison. “But isn’t it nice about Margaret Emily? Máiri phoned—I’d just got back from taking her car over. Your offspring much
enjoyed the ride in the cab, by the way. Quite a novelty. Johnny wants you to put a meter in the Ferrari—he likes the tick.”

“He would,” said Mendoza. “I suppose we’ll be without Máiri for a week or so.”

“At least. Anything exciting happen at the office? And I’ve got steaks and baked potatoes.”

“Muy lindo. Nothing,” said Mendoza, “but an Assistant Commissioner from Scotland Yard. And hasn’t that breed of Homo sapiens brought the art to
perfection.”

“What art?”

“Oh, the simple arrogance.”

“I told you it’d be a girl,” said Angel. “The worst spoiled brat in the state, if Mary Higgins doesn’t put her foot down. Bad as you.”

“Me?” said Hackett. “Don’t be silly.” He’d been dutifully admiring four-year-old Mark’s crayon sketches; now he squeezed his daughter and inquired
fondly, “And how’s Daddy’s own Sheila?” At eighteen months she had suddenly developed a dimple, and her hair was definitely auburn.

“Men!” said Angel, casting her eyes to heaven.

“But I just can’t hardly wait to see her, George!” Laura’s big gray eyes, so like Mary’s, were shining. “Our own little baby! I don’t
care a bit she’s a girl—”

“I always said it’d be a girl,” said Steve proudly. “I knew she was Margaret Emily all along, George! Gee, can’t Mother come home with her till next
week? Gee—”

“Oh, she’s fine, just fine,” said Higgins, beaming at them. “Wait till you see! And you know, I just remembered something—you know that old rhyme? She was born on a
Friday—‘loving and giving’ she’ll be—”

Mrs. MacTaggart, ladling out plates of rich stew, regarded the three of them benignly.

“Belatedly, I’m having qualms,” said Roberta Palliser. “What you say about Sergeant Higgins. Heavens, you’re thirty-five, and a first one—if
it’s a girl you’ll spoil her rotten.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Palliser. “And it’s not my fault we didn’t start one right away,”

“I rather wish we had now,” said Roberta. “Oh, well, it can’t be helped. Only—Margaret. It’s one of my favorites, I’d almost settled on it if it is a
girl.”

“There’s no law we can’t use it too, Robin. Yes, I do like it.”

“And David. Or possibly Andrew. And I really can’t see you acting quite like that, dithering around, at that. You’re much too reserved.”

“Now really, Robin—”

The first news that greeted them on Saturday morning was that Pat Carroll was off the danger list and could be questioned, briefly.

Landers and Grace went over to Central Receiving to see him. Tom Landers was feeling annoyed at women, and said so. “Your level-headed blonde,” nodded Grace.

“That Phil,” said Landers. “Toss you for who drives?” He won; they climbed into Grace’s little blue racer, the Elva. Landers had fallen for his blonde back in
June—Phil O’Neill who was also an L.A.P.D. officer, down in R. and I., but Phillipa Rosemary O’Neill was a very common-sensible blonde and still saying they hadn’t known
each other long enough, and she was still making up her mind about him. . . . “I’ll get her eventually,” vowed Landers. “I’m smarter than she is, according to my I.Q.
score.”

At the hospital, they were allowed five minutes with Carroll. He’d taken a bullet in one lung, another in the stomach, and extensive surgery had been done; he was still very weak. But when
he understood that they were police officers, he was anxious to talk: the nurse gently pressed him down as he tried to sit up.

“Two of ’em,” he said. “Two. Big louts—but just kids— seventeen, eighteen. One—’bout six feet, long blond hair, dirty—both of ’em
dirty, sloppy clothes—”

“Take it easy, Mr. Carroll,” said Landers.

“Other one darker—not s’ big.” Carroll was a big man, an ex-Army sergeant who had kept in condition, but he wasn’t a young man. They’d taken his false teeth
out, which made it harder for him to talk. “Called th’ other one Bernie. Bernie. Gun—maybe a .32, about—”

“Yes, sir.” They knew about the gun. Ballistics had said, a Smith and Wesson .32 revolver, an old one and in poor condition. “Had you ever seen either of them
before?”

He shook his head. “An’ people in th’ store—five, six customers. Crazy. Be about fifty, sixty bucks in the register. Just louts. Lazy sloppy dirty louts.
An’ high on somethin’. Dope, liquor, dunno. Don’t think—drunk. Hi. . .