Exploit of Death - Dell Shannon (8 page)

"Because I don't want no trouble." The man
leaning on the bar was thickset rather than fat, with a flourishing
full black mustache and bushy black eyebrows. He looked nervous.
"Tony, he's got a temper on him. He starts to cuss out this guy,
I don't know the dude—he just come in off the street—and Tony's
started fights before, I don't want no busted furniture and bottles,
I says to him, Cool it, Tony, but I see he's about to blow up, and
I'm sorry, I don't want to get him in trouble, Tony's a right guy
mostly—it's just he's got a temper on him. He's not drunk. You can
see he's not drunk. I don't let guys get stoned in here. I run a
quiet place."

"All right, Mr.—"

"Perez, I'm Bob Perez."

"Mr. Perez. What were they fighting about, do
you know?" asked Grace.

Perez licked his lips. "I'm an honest man,"
he said irrelevantly. "I don't run no clip joint, boys. It was
just a little game of draw—nothing important."

That, of course, spelled out the situation.
Unrealistic as it might seem, it was against the law to gamble in
public, except inside the racetrack——the only place it was legal
around here was down in Gardena where all the cardrooms were located.

Aguilar raised his eyes from the handcuffs and said
morosely, "He was cheating. He had cards up his sleeve or
something. He took every pot and Diego called him a cheat and quit
the game. I was fool enough to stay in, but I'm not fool enough to
let him get by with a royal flush when one of the high cards already
got played, and I said—"

The dead man still had the knife in his chest, a big
hornhandled jackknife.

"You shoulda listened to me, Tony," said
Perez mournfully. "Now what's your wife gonna say? So he was a
cheat, you didn't have to go and kill him, Tony."

"I didn't mean to kill him, for God's sake."

There were eight or ten other men there standing
around watching. The squad-car man had a list of names. "Does
anyone know who this is?" asked Grace.

Perez shrugged. "Who knows? He just come in off
the street. Had three or four beers and got into the game."

Palliser squatted over the corpse and felt in the
pockets, came up with a billfold. There were eighty-four dollars in
it and in the first plastic slot a driver's license for Alfredo
Delgado. He'd been a moderately handsome man in the mid-thirties, and
the address was Brooklyn Avenue in Boyle Heights.

They talked to the other three men who had been in
the game, who told the same story.

"Diego who?" asked Grace. "Diego
Allesandro. He's a regular here. He left before it happened. He
wasn't here," said Perez. "You going to lay a fine on me?"

Grace surveyed him amusedly, brushing his narrow
mustache in unconscious imitation of Mendoza. "I don't know, Mr.
Perez. It would be up to the district attorney's office, but I don't
suppose they'll bother." The token fine, the unrealistic rules
weren't going to stop the card games in bars or anywhere else.

"It was just a friendly little game," said
Perez uneasily.

"I mean it started out like that, see. The guys
don't get to playing cards in here—I mean all the time, I mean it's
not a regular thing. Just once in a while. You can tell them, can't
you?"I

Grace exchanged a cynical look with Palliser, who
shrugged. But it took the rest of the afternoon to clear it away. The
morgue wagon came for the body and they took Aguilar down to the jail
and booked him, went back to the office. Palliser set the machinery
going on the warrant. It would get called murder two and might easily
be reduced to plain manslaughter under the circumstances.

Grace typed the report and then they went over to
Boyle Heights and talked to Delgado's landlady. He'd been renting a
room in an old single-family house. The landlady's name was Bream and
she didn't seem very much upset to hear about her roomer. "Wel1,
he wasn't here much. I never had much talk with him. Couldn't say if
he had any relatives." She agreed indifferently to let them see
his room and they looked through drawers and pockets, but found no
address book or letters. Delgado had probably been a drifter and
somewhere there might be people concerned about him, but there was
nothing to say so here. They let it go. And that took them nearly
till the end of shift, and thankfully they both left early.

As Palliser drove home, he was thinking vaguely about
the way the crime rate was up in Hollywood. But they had an equity in
the house, and Trina was a good watchdog. Maybe when he got his next
raise they could look somewhere farther out.

And Grace, easily shelving
the routine job, was thinking fondly and fatuously about the new
baby. The plump brown little boy who would be christened Adam John at
the Episcopal Church next Sunday. He'd been worth waiting for.

* * *

IT WAS Piggott's night off. Schenke and Conway
drifted in together at eight o'clock to the big communal detective
office that always seemed so much bigger and emptier at night than
when it was full of busy men on day watch.

"What do you bet we'll have a busy night?"
said Schenke. "The heat building and the weekend coming up."

The switchboard was shut down. Any calls would be
relayed up from the desk downstairs.

Conway assented cheerfully. He had a date set up with
his new girl, Marilyn, tomorrow afternoon. They were going to one of
the few new movies worth seeing and out to an early dinner at that
Italian place on the Strip. She was on the eleven-to-seven shift at
Cedars-Sinai. He thought about Marilyn happily. A nice girl, no
nonsense to her, perfectly happy to have the date without going all
serious. He'd just met her last month when they had that rape case.
After his latest couple of girls starting to talk suggestively about
real estate prices and what good cooks they were, Marilyn was a
joy—pretty, too, with her glossy brown hair and blue eyes. Conway
was a good-looking man himself with his regular features and cool
gray eyes, which he appreciated without undue vanity.

He was sitting at Higgins' desk and there were a
couple of glossy eight by tens on the desk blotter. Conway looked at
them appreciatively. He could see that the poor girl was dead, but
she'd been a hell of a good-looker. "I wonder what this is
about," he said.

Schenke, also a born bachelor, but not particularly a
man for the girls, said indifferently, "No idea."

They got their first call at eight-fifteen, a heist
at a liquor store on Third Street. The address rang a faint bell in
Conway's mind. They both went out on it, and when they got there, the
owner was mad as hell. "It's the third time I've been held up in
five months, goddamn it. I have had it. I have had it up to here,
I've goddamned well had my fill of this goddamned business. My wife's
been after me to retire and move up to Santa Barbara— Hell, who can
afford to retire with the goddamned Social Security about to go down
the drain, and I'm only fifty-five but these goddamned punks roaming
around—"

He looked vaguely familiar to both Schenke and
Conway. His name was Bernard Wolf and he was a short, stocky, dark
fellow with an unexpected bass voice. Schenke said, "Yeah, the
latest one was back in July, wasn't it? We were both out on that
then."

"I remember you," said Wolf. "You
goddamned well were, and goddamn it, you never picked up that
bastard, he got away with a hundred and seventy bucks—it was a
Saturday night. You had me down there looking at pictures of all the
punks and I couldn't make any, all of these god-damned louts look
alike—"

"Well, can you give us any description of this
one tonight, Mr. Wolf?" asked Schenke patiently.

Wolf let out a long exasperated sigh of resignation.
"I don't know that I can, goddamn it. There'd be ten thousand
punks look like him—all over this goddamned town. I was alone in
the place—my wife's nervous about me being here at night, but the
young guy I hired to come in, he's in the hospital with a leg in
traction. Do I shut at six and miss all the business—the weekend
coming up? There'd been a customer just left, the punk came in and
showed me the gun and I gave him all the paper in the register and he
went out—call it three minutes. All I can tell you, goddamn it, he
was a spick."

"Latin," said Conway.

"Sure, maybe five ten, thin, black hair, little
mustache, and he couldn't talk English so good, had a thick accent.
He got maybe a hundred and fifty bucks. Goddamn it. God-damn it, I
have had it. I can't afford to retire, but the hell with it. I'll get
something for the business and maybe I can find a part-time job up in
Santa Barbara. I have had it with this goddamned business and this
goddamned town—"

"Did he touch anything in here?" asked
Schenke.

"Nothing but the goddamned money," said
Wolf.

They went back to the office and Conway typed the
report on it. It was probably the only report there'd be. There would
be a hundred possible heisters conforming to that description in
Records, and they'd never pin the charge on any one of them. He
stopped typing to light a cigarette. "At least it would be
cooler up in Santa Barbara," he said. He had just finished the
report when another call came in, and another a minute later.

The first was a heist at an all—night pharmacy on
Beverly Boulevard, and the other was a body on Rosemont Avenue in the
Echo Park area. Schenke went out on the heist and Conway looked up
Rosemont Avenue in the County Guide. When he got there, it was a
narrow, shabby old eight-unit apartment building. Four apartments
down, four up. The man waiting for him at the entrance was about
forty-five, a heavily built man with a bald head and rimless glasses.
His name was Robert Peterson. He was the manager of the apartments,
lived in the right front one downstairs. The door was open and an
anxious-looking gray-haired woman was visible in there listening.

"I don't know what happened, Officer, but it's
Mrs. Eberhart. Maybe a stroke or something, only she's not that old.
Why, she could've laid there hours before anybody found her—a
terrible thing—the Kohlers are off on vacation, they've got the
apartment across the hall, they've gone to visit their daughter—you
see Mrs. Eberhart's apartment is on the rear right. Why, she could've
laid there all night, except that I took the trash out and naturally
went out the back door and passed her apartment."

"So, let's have a look," said Conway.

Down the dim hall the door of the rear apartment on
the right was open. With Peterson dithering in the background, Conway
took a quick experienced look. The woman was dead. A big, buxom blond
woman, the blond courtesy of peroxide, wearing a flowered cotton
house robe. She was sprawled just inside the door and there was dried
blood on one temple—just a trace. There was a table beside the
door, standing sideways out from the wall. You could read it. She'd
been knocked down, hit the table. The autopsy report would probably
say, fractured skull. He thought resignedly, better get out the lab.
It could, of course, have been accidental: Maybe she'd been drunk and
fallen down, but also it could be something else.

He asked questions. Peterson said, "Well, her
name's Rose Eberhart. I don't know about any relations. She's lived
here about six years. Well, yes, I do know where she worked. It was
McClintock's Restatuant on Sunset. She was a nice quiet tenant,
Officer, never any trouble and always on time with the rent. I
suppose it could've been a heart attack. That can happen to anybody,
age doesn't seem to matter. Oh, for goodness' sake, no, I'd never
seen her under the influence of alcohol."

A couple of men from the night watch at the lab
showed up in a mobile truck. Conway said, "You better give it
the full treatment, boys."

Just in case. And leave it to the day watch to look
at further.
 
 

FOUR

SATURDAY WAS Sergeant Lake's day off and Rory Farrell
was sitting on the switchboard. Mendoza glanced over the night report
and passed it on to Hackett. "So we'd better find out something
about this Eberhart woman, in case it is a homicide. Wolf's coming in
sometime today to make a statement, but there's damn all on that, we
can file it and forget it."

Hackett said, "I wonder if they've got the
air-conditioning back on at the jail. “We've still got to talk to
Gerber. Of course, Bauman had the gun, it's likelier he did the
shooting. Which reminds me—" He called the lab and talked to
Horder.

He had dropped the gun off at the lab on Thursday.

Horder said, "Oh, yeah, that's the equalizer,
O.K. Matched the slug out of the body."

So they could write a report after they got the
statement from Gerber, if he'd say anything, and send in the evidence
to the D.A.'s office and forget it. This time, Bauman might go up for
a sizable stretch.

It was Landers' day off.

On the other heist last night, the pharmacist had
given a fairly good description, volunteered to look at mug shots.
He'd be in this morning. Hackett went over to the jail to talk to
Gerber. Palliser said, looking over the night report, "I suppose
this restaurant won't be open until ten or so. Has the warrant come
through on Aguilar?" It hadn't, but would be showing up sometime
today.