Streets of Death - Dell Shannon (10 page)

Mendoza was annoyed. Untidiness always annoyed him,
and the strange case of Edwin Fleming was very untidy.

He climbed another flight
of stairs and paused outside the right-hand door. Beyond it Mr.
Offerdahl was feeling happy. Filtered through whiskey, the sound of
singing emerged into the hall; Mr. Offerdahl was forever blowing
bubbles.

* * *

The new call went down just after Mendoza left the
office, and Hackett and Higgins went out to look at it. Over the
years, they had gone together to look at a number of things like it,
not that that reconciled them to the necessity; but in the last
couple of years there seemed to be more and more such things to go
and look at.

"Mr. Weinstein found her and called in,"
said the uniformed man waiting by the squad car. "It’s a mess.
He’s got the pawnshop next door, knew her. Says her name’s Mrs.
Ruth Faber. I guess it must have happened last night."

They went in to look. This was a side street off
Olympic, still downtown but the kind of half-and-half neighborhood
old sections of big cities sprout. There was an access alley between
two rows of old two-story buildings here, the first floors business
places, old apartments above. This place was a little grocery store.
There was a sign over the door that had been there a long time,
FAER'S MARKET. Just one big room inside, a small refrigerator case,
three walls of shelves with cans and packages, a wooden counter with
an old-fashioned cash register, a Coke machine. In the middle of the
uncarpeted pine floor lay the body of an old lady, horridly dead.
There was blood all around and on her, and they couldn’t tell what
she’d looked like in life because her face had been beaten or
kicked in. She was a thin old lady, wearing a cotton housedress, and
one black felt slipper had fallen off, lay on a pair of smashed steel
spectacles five feet from the body.

"What a mess," said Higgins. "Stop
where you are, Art, or the lab boys’ll chew you out. They’ll have
a field day here." There wasn’t anything they could do until
the lab men had processed the place for physical evidence, so they
called S.I.D. and went to talk to Weinstein, who was waiting at the
curb with the Traffic man.

"Yi," he said, "they hire you
plainclothes fellows by the yard?" He looked at the two big men
with sorrowful interest. He was a squat, square man with a dark
good-humored ugly face and very bright black eyes. "This is just
a terrible thing. The things that go on nowadays-- You read about it,
it don’t touch you till it happens to somebody you know. What gets
me, being in business, it used to be the places got held up, robbed,
were places where anybody’d know there’d be loot--jewelry stores,
banks, millionaires’ houses--you know? These days, any place. Half
these hoods are high on something, don’t know what the hell they’re
doing."

"What can you tell us about this, Mr.
Weinstein?" asked Hackett. "You knew her?"

"Nothing much I can tell. That poor old lady,
Mrs. Faber, I knew her since I been in business here, that’s thirty
years. She and her husband had that little market there maybe forty
years, longer. She always ran it, and it was ridiculous she still
did. I told her so. She made nothing on it, if she cleared fifty a
month that’d be about it, people have cars now, go to the
supermarkets. She didn’t need to, she had her husband’s pension
from the railroad--he’s been gone ten, twelve years. You ask me, it
was habit--she didn’t know how to stop. She lived in the apartment
upstairs, and she must’ve been eighty if she was a day. The place
was always open when I came to open up mornings, and I’d look in,
say good morning. You could say I kind of kept an eye on her--old
like she was, she could have a stroke, heart attack, and she hadn’t
any family at all. So, today"--he gestured eloquent1y--"I
look in, there she is. My God. The poor old soul, these thugs around.
At least, for what it’s worth, they didn’t get much, I hope."

"How’s that'?" asked Higgins.

"Yi, these old ladies," said Weinstein.
"She was old-fashioned, kept her business to herself, which is
O.K., but she’d got to know me all this time, that I’m O.K. too,
and about six months ago she gives me nearly a heart attack myself. I
go in to get a Coke. It was just after that big bank job uptown, and
I mentioned it, and she says she never put any trust in banks, keeps
her money where she can lay her hands on it. I had a fit, I talked to
her like a brother. She was a close old lady, didn’t spend much on
herself, and God knows what she mighta had there, saved up fifty
years, in a drawer or a closet shelf or somewhere. She finally
listened to me and got a lock-box at the bank, I know that, she told
me about it."

"You don’t say," said Hackett, exchanging
a glance with Higgins. The mobile lab truck slid to the curb behind
the squad car. "Well, we’ll ask you to make a statement later,
Mr. Weinstein."

"Whatever I can do, gents." He turned away
to the little pawnshop across the alley from the market. "Maybe
the word hadn’t got round," said Higgins, watching Marx and
Horder unload equipment from the truck.

"Or maybe," said
Hackett, "it was just what the man said--a hood high on
something who didn’t know what he was doing. Bears the general
resemblance to our pretty boys, only they’ve been grabbing them off
the street. And this kind of violence is not so unusual now." It
was to be hoped the hood had left some clues behind for the lab.

* * *

Galeano was just as glad it was Rich Conway’s day
off. He expected Rich wouldn’t know when to stop kidding him about
that blonde. It was like a lot of things in life, he thought: it came
back to people, not facts. Maybe people versus facts. Damn it, he
thought, when you heard a story like that, you said fishy, you said
the gall, but meeting that girl--

As he rode up in the elevator, it came to him more
clearly just why she’d made an impression on him, and it was a
funny word to use: dignity. And maybe that was why Carey and Conway
and, for God’s sake, Mendoza, had reacted the way they had. If
she’d gone all to pieces, nobody would have thought twice about it,
just about the mystery . . . though, of course, anything happened to
a husband you automatically looked at the wife, and vice versa . . .
but, maybe on account of her different upbringing or something, Marta
had that dignity, didn’t go parading her feelings in public, and
the cynics naturally thought she hadn’t any.

Damn it, I’1l believe her, thought Galeano. That it
happened just that way: she’d come home and he was gone. But how
and where? And why? The thing didn’t make any sense.

Say he had been murdered by somebody else, there was
no earthly reason to conceal the body, was there? But ruminating on
it, Galeano had come up with a couple of ideas which might open the
case wider. Carey had been thinking just about Marta, and the
hypothetical boyfriend; but what about Edwin? There he was all day in
his wheelchair, nothing to do. Maybe he listened to the radio,
watched TV some, but not all day. They’d only moved to that place a
couple of months ago. It could be that he’d spent some time on the
phone, talking to old friends where they used to live in Hollywood;
they had had friends there. Carey hadn’t located all of them to
talk to. It could be, thought Galeano vaguely, that somebody who
hadn’t heard about this could give them some ideas about Edwin.
Anyway, they ought to chase down everybody who knew the Flemings.

Mendoza had gone out somewhere, and Lake was hunched
over one of his eternal books about dieting. Galeano slid into
Mendoza’s office and found the manila envelope with Carey’s
notes, rummaged through it and took down addresses. People named
Frost, Cadby, Prescott, Deal, up in Hollywood: Cahuenga Boulevard,
Berendo, Las Palmas.

He drew a blank at the Cahuenga Boulevard apartment;
a neighbor just going out told him that Mr. and Mrs. Cadby both
worked. He drove down to Berendo. This was the place the Flemings had
been living before his accident: one of the old Hollywood streets
getting refurbished these days, old houses torn down to make way for
new apartments. It was a new, brightly painted two-story building
with balconies on the upper floor units, a small blue pool in a side
yard, patio tables. The Prescotts lived upstairs at the back; he rang
the bell and waited.

The girl who opened the door was a slim leggy
brunette in slacks and turtleneck sweater. "Yes?" She
looked at the badge in his hand with surprise.

He said economically he’d like to ask a few
questions about the Flemings--people who used to live here. "You
knew them?"

"Why, yes. What’s the matter, they’re not in
any trouble, are they? Pat, it’s a cop about Marta and Ed. This is
Mrs. Frost, er--"

"Galeano."

"Mr. Galeano. I’m Marion Prescott. Pat knew
them too. But what is the matter? What do you want to know?"

The other girl was smaller, blonde, with a rather
scraggly figure. Galeano told them that Fleming was missing and
inquiries were being made. "Missing!" said Marion Prescott.
"How could he be missing? He couldn’t just walk away, a man in
a wheelchair. That poor man! It made us all feel guilty, for--"

"For what?" asked Galeano as she stopped.

"Oh, heavens, you’d better come in," she
said. "It’s cold with the door open. Pat and I were just
having some coffee, would you like some? I’ll get you a cup, sit
down."

"I can’t get over it," said Pat Frost
with avid interest. "You mean he’s just disappeared? How
funny. It’s not as if he had any imagination?

"How do you mean?" asked Galeano.

"Oh, you know, like all those stories with
ingenious plots, people vanishing and then turning out to be the mail
carrier," she said vaguely. Mrs. Prescott came back and handed
Galeano a cup of coffee.

"There’s cream and sugar on the coffee table.
Heavens, I suppose we’d better tell you whatever you want to know.
Not that we knew them well, and we couldn’t tell you anything about
them since they moved away. It was just, we all lived here, and none
of us was working--the wives, I mean--we’d have morning coffee and
so on. Marta--she’s not an easy person to know, would you say,
Pat?"

"What did you mean about feeling guilty, Mrs.
Prescott?"

"Oh--" She flushed. "You’ll think
we’re a lot of snobs. Ed’s a nice fellow, but, well, let’s face
it, he hasn’t much education, many interests outside baseball and
the corniest shows on TV. I don’t mean the rest of us are
intellectuals, for heaven’s sake, but my husband’s a broker and
Pat’s is a therapist at the Cedars, and the few times we all got
together for a potluck supper by the pool, you could see Ed was out
of his depth, he just didn’t have anything to talk about to the
men. Now Marta’s very well educated, in that very correct German
way, I’d say, and I could see she was embarrassed for him. And then
when he had that accident, and was paralyzed--"

"Didn’t he have some kind of pension or
disability pay or something?" asked Pat Frost; her nose twitched
with curiosity just the way Mendoza’s did, Galeano noticed. "We
wondered, but she never said a word, and then when they moved--he
must have had, hadn’t he? I mean, these days everybody--I know
there was a fuss, the man he was working for claimed it was Ed’s
own fault, but we did hear he had to pay for the hospital--"

Marta not parading her troubles in public, that just
confirmed his convictions. "I’m afraid I couldn’t say about
that. Have any of you been in touch with Fleming since they moved?"

"Heavens, no," said Marion Prescott. "It
was just proximity, you could say. We hadn’t much in common. As I
say, Marta’s difficult to know. Maybe the foreign upbringing, but
she’s so formal--well, I’ll say one thing, I think she was
homesick, she missed her family, she was always writing to them. I
don’t think she’d made any close friends here, I gather they’d
moved around a good deal since Ed was out of the service."

"And I’ll tell you something else," said
Pat Frost, her eyes bright with interest in gossip. "And that
is, Marta wasn’t in love with Ed and never had been. I got the idea
she just married him to get here and have more money, a better life.
Well, she got disappointed there, Ed ending up in a wheelchair."
She laughed.

Galeano looked at her with dislike, and decided the
laugh was malicious. "You can’t say that for certain, Mrs.
Frost."

"Well, girls do know girls, don’t we, Marion?"

"She was awfully broken up about the baby,"
said Marion hastily. "A darling little girl, she was named Elisa
for Marta’s sister."

"Have either of you seen her since they moved?
Has she contacted either of you?" And why would she, these two,
lightminded women, what had they in common? "Neither of your
husbands been in touch with Fleming?"

"I told you, there’d be no reason," said
Marion. "We were sorry--when that happened to him--but that’s
all there was to it. I don’t even know where they moved."

"I see,” said Galeano, and stood up.

"Do the police think Marta had something to do
with Ed’s disappearing?" Pat Frost’s eyes were uncomfortably
sharp. "He is--was--a lot of care, I suppose. My goodness,
Marion! If she did something--my goodness! But I wouldn’t be
surprised, is all I can say."

"That’s slander, Mrs. Frost," said
Galeano mildly.