Streets of Death - Dell Shannon (14 page)

The boy turned. "Oh. Maybe she just went to
church. You--you don’t want to buy the car, do you? Because she
gave me first option on it. That’s what I came to tell her, I got
the money to pay for it now."

"That’s good," said Galeano. "I know
she wants to sell it."

"It’s a real good deal," said the kid. "A
sixty-three Dodge, only sixty thousand on it, for four-fifty. The
tires are good too, and it handles O.K.--I’ve drove it some
already. If we can sort of clinch the deal right away, I'd like to."

Galeano said it sounded fine. "Anyway,"
said the kid, "even if we can’t, I want to borrow it again
this afternoon to take Mom to Aunt Madge’s. Mrs. Fleming let me
borrow it before, take her to the doctor’s. You a friend of hers?
She’s a nice lady, isn’t she?"

"Oh, yes," said Galeano.

"You suppose she’ll be home pretty soon?"

"I don’t know."

"Well--uh--my name’s Newton. Jim Newton."

"Galeano." They shook hands solemnly.

"There she is," said Jim a moment later as
the front door shut below. "I bet she was just out to church."
And remembering Mrs. Del Sardo’s revelation, Galeano heard the
light footsteps running up the stairs with a leaden heart. She
stopped short on the landing, startled to see them.

She wore the hooded coat again, and her tawny hair
was spangled with a few drops of rain; just since he’d been here,
it must have started again. She had a little purse in one hand, a
bunch of keys in the other.

"Hello, Mrs. Fleming. I come by to tell you I
can get the car. I already saved up two hundred and my dad says he’ll
go the rest if I take Mom places in it and pay the gas. Could I maybe
take it now? I got the money, if you’ll take Dad’s check. Oh, Mr.
Galeano wants to see you too, but I guess I got here first."

"I have no doubt," said Marta. She came
between them and unlocked the door. "It is all right that you
buy the car, Jimmy, but now I do not know about the--the legalities,
it is registered to my husband."

"If you’ve got the pink slip," said
Galeano, "you can just hand it over, and Jim can re-register it
to himself."

"I see. You would know," she said. They had
both followed her into the neat little living room.

"
You haven’t been driving it much, have you,
Mrs. F1eming?"

"I have not been driving it at all," she
said.

"Oh, I know you had it out a couple of weeks
ago, because I came to ask to borrow it and it wasn’t here. I just
wondered."

Marta turned to stare at him. "I have not driven
the car since we moved here. That can’t be, Jimmy."

"No, it was gone--honest. It was two weeks ago
Friday, I wanted it to take Mom to the doctor’s. Gee, Mrs. Fleming,
you seen it since, haven’t you? I mean, nobody’s stole it?"
He was suddenly anxious.

"Just a minute," said Galeano. "I’d
like to hear more about this, Jim. Two weeks ago Friday? You came to
borrow the car, and it wasn’t in the garage? How’d you know?"

"Well, gee--" He looked from her to Galeano
uneasily. "Because I looked. Acourse I knew you’d be at work,
Mrs. Fleming, but Mr. Fleming had keys to it. It was raining so hard,
Mom said to see could I borrow it because the buses are so bad, so
I--but there wasn’t any answer to the bell so I thought maybe Mr.
Fleming had to go to the doctor or something and you’d took him, so
I looked in the garage and the Dodge wasn’t there."

Marta was standing very still in the middle of the
room. "I do not know anything about this," she said. "It
must be a mistake."

"What time was this?" asked Galeano. "You
know, Jim?"

"Sure. It was about one o’clock, Mom’s
appointment was for two-thirty, and I took off from school because of
helping her on and off the bus with the cast still on her ankle, see.
Say, listen, Mrs. Fleming, you sure it hasn’t been stolen, if you
didn’t know--"

"Let’s all go down and look at it," said
Galeano.

"This is all very silly," said Marta.

"Come on," said Galeano. They all went
downstairs together and down the driveway. It was drizzling very
slightly. "You’ve driven the Dodge, have you, Jim? Trying it
out? I suppose, you interested in buying it, you noticed the
mileage."

"Sure," said Jim. "The last time I
brought it back, it was sixty thousand and forty-one miles. Sure I’m
sure of that. I got a good head for figures."

"I wouldn’t be surprised," said Galeano.
"The key to the garage, Mrs. Fleming?" Silently she singled
it out on her ring of keys and gave it to him. He unlocked the
padlock and swung open one leaf of the old-fashioned double doors.
The old Dodge sat inside. "Let’s see what the mileage is."
He opened the driver’s door.

"Well, there," said Jim Newton, "you
can see it’s been out since. Sixty thousand and seventy-two miles
and four tenths."

"What about it, Mrs. Fleming? Suppose you give
Jim the keys, so he can drive his mother--he can come back and make
the deal with you later. That O.K., Jim?"

"Sure, sir." Jim’s eyes were puzzled on
them. Marta gave him the keys. "I hope Mr. F1eming’s O.K.,
Mrs. Fleming."

"That’s fine," said Galeano
meaninglessly, took her arm and walked her back up the drive. "I’ve
just heard from Mrs. Del Sardo that you came home about two-thirty
that Friday, Mrs. Fleming. Not five o’clock as you said. And went
out again right away. Why didn’t you tell us about that?"

"No," she said. They stopped just inside
the front door, in the square little lobby. "No, that is not so.
I have told you all the truth."

"And now this comes to light about the car. Kids
like Newton know their cars pretty well, and he’s sure of what he
says. The car was out that Friday, and driven thirty-odd miles.
Where, Mrs. F1eming'?"

"No. I do not know. It is impossible."

"Do you have a driver’s license?"

"Yes, but I have not driven it since we came
here. Only to run the engine because of the battery, a few moments."

"Who had keys to it? How many sets?"

She was shaking her head slowly, blindly, back and
forth. "No. Edwin had keys, I have keys. Edwin’s keys are
still here, in the apartment. This is all nonsense, it cannot be."

"I don’t think so, Mrs. Fleming. Where were
you that afternoon?"

"Ach, Gott!" she
exclaimed suddenly, violently, and put her hands to her head. "But
it is all too much--too much!" She turned and plunged up the
stairs, and before he could move to follow her he heard the door bang
shut up there. Galeano stood looking after her, his heart strangely
heavy, and all he could think was, they were right. The damned
cynics. They had been right about her all along.

* * *

He drifted unhappily into Mendoza’s office to tell
him about that, and found Hackett there, one hip on a corner of
Mendoza’s desk. They both listened to what he had to say, and
Hackett commented interestedly, "The same thought, about his
faking the paralysis, crossed my mind, but of course there’s
nothing in it, they hadn’t anything to gain and more than one
doctor said it was genuine. But this bit about the car, what in hell
does it mean? That just makes it funnier, Luis. So she could have
driven him somewhere--where and why?"

"
No lo niego
,"
said Mendoza. "Funny is the word. But she didn’t drive him
anywhere, if the Dodge was out of the garage at one o’clock. She
didn’t get off work until two."

"That’d skipped my mind," said Galeano.
"But she could have given the keys to somebody."

"Or he could," said Mendoza thoughtfully.
"It’s a tangle--I don’t see through it at all. And talk
about things being up in the air--" He had been turning a
cigarette round in his fingers and now reached for his new cigarette
lighter and pressed the trigger, bent to the flame.

"This Faber thing," said Hackett. "I’ve
been telling him, sometimes S.I.D. hands us the answer right off, but
this time all they’ve done is make more work for us. My God, you
should see the list of names we got from Pendleton! Hundreds--and
that’s only military personnel, there’d be no way to check on all
the civilians wandering around, wives and so on. George is feeling
pessimistic. He said ten to one that cigarette pack was already there
when X came in, but I don’t think so. I talked to Weinstein again
and he said she was a persnickety old lady, never would have let a
thing like that lie around her clean floor. And there was something
in what Scarne said--the autopsy will say definitely but they thought
she’d been killed just before she was found, and that early in the
morning he could have been staying or living right around there. What
we’re doing now is checking with Pendleton for original home
addresses. It’s the hell of a bore, but if we do find some airman
who hailed from two blocks west of Faber’s Market and was on leave
to see his sick mother--"

"
De veras
.
The routine paying off again." Galeano had wandered out, and
Mendoza added ruminatively, "Human nature is a queer thing,
Art."

"A profound remark."

"
Vaya el diablo
.
That Marta Fleming’s a nice-looking girl, nothing spectacular, but
to see Nick fall for her--I’ll be damned if I can even guess what
might have happened there, but if she was mixed up in some piece of
collusion to get rid of her husband, I’d be sorry to see Nick
knocked out over it. Last man in the world, you’d think."

"I seem to remember you once said that to me,"
said Hackett dryly, and Mendoza laughed.

"Hard to guess what
people see in each other, fortunately for the continued existence of
the human race."

* * *

One of the annoyances to police work was that
something new was always coming along to interrupt other routine.
With the continued hunt for Sandra’s killer reduced to the dogged
routine, Palliser was now handed this new one by the night watch, Don
Ames. It looked from the report as if there’d be a good many people
to see, so he roped Conway in on it too.

"I think," he said as Conway digested
Piggott’s report, "I’d like to see what a doctor had to say
about this first. On the face of it, it’s another impossibility--by
this, he was sitting alone in a booth, nobody near him."

"Let’s," agreed Conway. "Though I
remember a case, when I was still riding a squad car--"

They found Dr. Bainbridge in his office,
conscientious or with nowhere else to go on a rainy Sunday. He said
he hadn’t seen the body, snorted interestedly over the report, and
said, "Humph. I can tell you better after I’ve had him open,
but let’s take a look anyway." He led the way down to the cold
room and located the right tray; in a morgue the size of L.A.’s
bodies tended to pile up. The corpse looked oddly young and
defenseless, naked there; and Bainbridge poked at the minute brown
line on his left breast, scarcely an inch long.

"There you are," he said. "I can guess
what I’ll find inside. It was a very thin blade, he probably didn’t
bleed at all immediately. The witnesses said he’d been sitting p
alone there about five minutes before he suddenly fell down dead?
Typical. He could have been stabbed fifteen, twenty minutes before
and not realized it himself."

"I saw a case something like it once," said
Conway, nodding.

"It’s possible he never felt the knife, didn’t
know he’d been stabbed. Depending how it happened, he’d have felt
a blow on the chest, thought nothing of it."

"That might put it before he got into the
restaurant," said Palliser.

"I don’t say it was that long, I don’t
know," said Bainbridge. "I just said it could be."

"Well, thanks anyway." And that was at ten
o’clock; Palliser had already been to Ames’ address in Hollywood,
where he’d lived with his parents, and been through that harrowing
scene.

They started out at Dick’s Tow Service where he’d
worked, and found out from the owner that--as usual, he said--a
couple of employees hadn’t shown up for the night shift, and he’d
been there alone with Ames since five o’clock. They hadn’t had a
call in an hour before Don went off on his break, and nothing unusual
had happened; they’d just been sitting there talking. He couldn’t
make out what had happened to Don--"I thought a lot of him, hard
worker, nice fellow, and he didn’t go around picking lights, even
getting into arguments. I just can’t make it out."

He was a straightforward type, so that seemed to put
it right back to the restaurant again, and they looked up Fred
Mallow, who was annoyed at being waked up, and heard a firsthand
account. "He came in, gave his order and went into the rest
room? How long was he there?" asked Palliser.

"Oh, three, five, six minutes--I wasn’t
watching the clock. Not long. And like I said, he came out and sat
down in the booth perfectly O.K., and then five minutes later---"

"All right. Was anybody else in the men’s room
at the same time?"

"My God, I don’t know. I was counting the
receipts, I’d just taken over from Powell. I suppose there could’ve
been, but I couldn’t say."