Extra Kill - Dell Shannon (15 page)

"Sure I know where he is," said Laidlaw. "I
read in the papers the other day, Lieutenant, that you L.A. boys got
a pat on the back from some Washington office for being tops among
the ten most efficient city forces in the country—but outside that
category, we sort of fancy ourselves as pretty hot, you know. We're
not much interested in Andy Whalen, but we looked to see where he
went. He's driving a truck for Orange State Trucking, on the San
Diego—L.A. run, and he lives in room number 312 at the Chester
Hotel on Fourth."

"Thanks very much. Would it discommode you at
all if I took him in for questioning?"

"I don't think so," said Laidlaw. "His
bosses don't rate him any bigger-time than we do."

"What about the trucking outfit? Can I take it
he's still on the payroll of the gang in another capacity?"

"Well, now, I don't think we'll go into that, if
you don't mind. I'll just say, it's possible."

"You boys with your secrets," said Mendoza.
"Well, I may and I may not, right away. All that rigmarole—your
quotes from the cashier—gospel truth?"

"And nothing but."

"Mmh. Yes, a couple of little things that occur
to me aside from Whalen. But I want to look at him closer, of course.
Thanks very much, Laidlaw, and good luck on your business."

"Same to you—happy to oblige, Lieutenant. We
like to cooperate with the locals where we can," said Laidlaw
blandly.

"I might," said Mendoza, sliding out of the
car, "like the polite tone of that better if you didn't somehow
sound like a professional race driver assuring his little boy he'll
teach him to ride his new bicycle."

"Why, Loo-tenant, suh, I nevah meant no such
thing, suh," said Laidlaw. Mendoza laughed, shut the door, and
dodged back to the shadow of the wall as the building door opened up
there. Laidlaw slid the Ford out to the street; Mendoza waited until
Stuart had driven out in the Buick before going back to his own car.
 
 

NINE

"You want to make it read," said Hackett,
"that this Whalen got so mad at Twelvetrees—six months after
he stopped paying this genteel blackmail—that he killed him?"

"I don't want to make it read any way,"
said Mendoza. "We don't know what dealings they may have had
since. All I say is, no harm to look at Whalen."

"I don't believe it," said Hackett. "In
the first place, I can't see a rough-and-ready customer like this
Whalen taking the trouble to bury him. And there may have been a
renewed motive, but there's nothing to show they ever laid eyes on
each other after last August, when Whalen got fired. I don't—"

"
No seas tan
exigente
—don't be so difficult," said
Mendoza. "If I want a warrant for Whalen, I've got to be able to
give some logical reason to authority. And it may be that I will.
Like—mmh—looking openly pleased to draw a five-spot when I'm
already holding a royal flush."

"Oh!" said Hackett. He laughed. "So
that's what's in your mind. It's a thought. Set somebody's mind at
rest so maybe he'll do something silly."

"Did you spot, in all these inverted quotes I've
been giving you, the one really interesting little thing? You
remember that Whalen suggested to Twelvetrees that his boss might not
like hearing about the little stretch Twelvetrees had done—and
Twelvetrees just laughed and said it wouldn't matter a damn."

"Which of course sounds as if these Kingmans
knew all about him.

"Yes. You're laying your blue chips on the
Kingmans?"

Mendoza swiveled around in his desk-chair to look out
the window at the hazy panorama of the city stretching away to hills
invisible this gray morning. "I've sent out queries to
Pennsylvania on Twelvetrees and the Kingmans—we'll see what they
can give us, if anything. Unfortunately I didn't have the Kingmans'
prints to send, but I sent Twelvetrees', of course. I don't know,
Art, there's a couple of things that say this and that to me, on that
deal. Look at the way Twelvetrees landed here and slid into such a
soft spot—five hundred a month, for what? Woods says, he
ingratiated himself. Well, somehow I don't think Mr. Dale Carnegie
himself would find it very easy to ingratiate that far with Mr.
Martin Kingman. What it amounted to was muscling in on Mr. Kingman's
own racket and cutting Mr. Kingman's net take by that five hundred."

"Yes, and you know the thought I had about that?
Considering the times. It sounds to me as if just maybe those three
had made up a crowd before, and for some reason—maybe because he
was inside—Twelvetrees was a little late joining them out here."

"Also a thought. But I don't like it nearly so
well as I like mine—that he might have pulled exactly the same sort
of genteel blackmail on the Kingmans that he did on Whalen. Look. The
Temple's been a going concern for over a year when Twelvetrees lands
here. You never did catch up to this Mona Ferne yesterday but you
will today, and I think what she'll tell you is that her original
contact with Twelvetrees wasn't through the Temple, but that she met
him somewhere in connection ith his movie aspirations. And that she
was the one who led him to the Temple. Because he took a job when he
got here, remember?—not a very good job, clerking in a store-he was
broke, or close to it. I get the picture of this fairly canny young
fellow, who's taken one rap and means to find some legal racket—where
he doesn't have to work too hard. He'd like to get into pictures—he's
got all the requirements, so he thinks, but he finds it isn't so
easy. Then, by accident, he discovers the Kingmans and their Temple.
And almost immediately he becomes 'secretary-treasurer' or whatever
they call it and starts drawing that nice salary for practically no
work. Now that looks to me as if he had something on them. That he
took one look at Mr. Martin Kingman, maybe, and said, ‘Ah, my old
friend Giovanni Scipio—or Mike O'Connor—or Harold J.
Cholmondeley—from good old Philly.'
Comprende
?
And Kingman had to kick in, let him in on the racket, to protect the
investment—because, while the people who've fallen for Mystic Truth
aren't exactly Einsteins, most of them would think again about
dropping folding money into the collection bag if they knew, for
instance, that Kingman had done a stretch for fraud or something like
that."

"That's so. It makes a picture, all right. And
that'd give the Kingmans a dandy reason to put him out of the way.
I'll say this too, it makes it look even more natural, maybe, that
they stood it nearly four years before getting fed up. Because con
men don't use violence, they like everything nice and easy and
smooth, it isn't once in a blue moon you find one of 'em committing
actual physical assault. It might be that it wasn't until Twelvetrees
got a little too greedy and asked too much blackmail that they got
worked up to that. The only thing I don't like about it, Luis, is the
spot Twelvetrees landed in—treasurer. The Kingmans wouldn't have
handed him anything like that, as blackmail payment. Why, he could
have taken off with the whole bank account any day."

"So he could. But I think we'd find, Arturo,
that it was treasurer in name only—that Kingman was damned careful
to keep a check on the account. A kind of gentleman's agreement. You
know, let me in on your racket and I won't tell—and on Kingman's
side, you level with us on the racket or I'll tell what I know about
you. Don't forget, Twelvetrees still had dreams of a future as a big
stat. His agents wouldn't care about keeping him on their books, he
wouldn't have a chance of getting anywhere in big-time show business,
if it was known he'd served apprenticeship as a pimp and got tagged
for it. He got Kingman to give him a job openly—he wanted an excuse
to quit the nine-to-five job he had, which he probably didn't enjoy
much. But I'll bet you too that the bank will tell us that one of the
Kingmans made some excuse for coming in regularly to check up. It was
a fifty-fifty deal, scratch my back and I'll scratch yours."

"Something in that, sure."

"I should hate," said Mendoza, "to
have to arrest Madame Cara. She's a very intelligent woman, she says
I have great insight and wisdom. But it would have been so much more
convenient, you know, if there'd been two of them on the job, on
account of Twelvetrees' car. If just one person did it all, how
awkward that part of it would be—driving the Porsche clear down to
the Union Station, a good ten miles or more, and then having to get
back to pick up the car left at the apartment. If, of course, there
was one and the murderer hadn't been driven there by Twelvetrees.
It's a great pity Mrs. Bragg minded her own business so assiduously
.... There are a lot of things we don't know yet. But it's very
helpful that we can almost pin it down to that Friday night—"

"I don't see that we can," said Hackett. "I
don't like it much, Walsh's thing, about Bartlett."

"I do. I think it makes sense." Mendoza sat
up and swiveled around to the desk again. "I don't say it's
certain, no, but I like it enough that I've told the D.A.'s office to
get a continuance on bringing those kids up, until we know a little
more. Here's what Ballistics says on the gun. It's one of an
experimental lot of smooth-bore revolvers made by Winchester about
fifty years ago. Not too many like it will be floating around these
days, but it's nothing antique in the sense of being rare or
valuable—we're not likely to get an identification of ownership on
it that way. Now, as the class will remember from yesterday's
lecture, I trust, we all know that a firearm with a smooth—bored
barrel is never as accurate over distances as one whose barrel is
rifled with spiral grooves. However, at fairly short distances a
smoothbore is accurate enough in expert hands. Ballistics had a lot
of fun firing different kinds of bullets out of this at different
distances, and they tell us that with a cannelured bullet-which, if
you will recall, was the type found in Bartlett and on the kids—a
reasonably good shot can expect quite fair accuracy out of  this
at up to about twenty-five feet."

"You say it's just coincidence the kids were
carrying .38 cannelured bullets and Bartlett got killed with the same
kind?"

"If you'd just think about these things, that's
all I ask—a little rudimentary logic. The kids had a homemade gun,
and quite naturally it also has a smooth-bored barrel. Actually a
piece of pipe. Anybody who knows anything at all about guns, and is
stuck with a smooth-bore, is going to try to make up for the handicap
by using cannelured bullets, which are grooved. Has the class any
questions?"

"Yes, please, teacher. How does a slick con
man—or in fact anybody we've heard of in this case so far—come to
be such a Deadeye Dick with an old cannon like this?"

"Now there you do ask an awkward question,"
admitted Mendoza. "I don't know. But it's a fifty-fifty chance
that it was just wild luck, you know. And I'll say this. We've been
thinking that whoever fired those shots at Bartlett and Walsh did it
in the dark—a dark rainy night, along a stretch of road lighted
only by high arc lights. I went out there last night, before I
waylaid Laidlaw, and roped Gonzales and Farber in on a little game.
I'd got Walsh to tell me just where the squad car was sitting in
relation to the light at the corner of Cameron and San Dominguez, and
I placed Gonzales and Farber there and drove past a couple of times.
And you know what? Just the way it had slipped my mind about
patrolmen changing round at the wheel, another little thing slipped
all our minds when we thought about this before. Go on now, be a
detective and tell me what it was."

"My God," said Hackett. "The roof
light."

"That's my boy, you get A-plus. Going on and off
almost right over the driver's head, whenever the car's standing
still. It's a nice straight road along there, and the shoulder where
the squad car was sitting is unobstructed for a hundred yards each
way. And thirty isn't really very fast, in relation to an object,
say, fifteen feet to the side—you've got time to see it, coming up.
I think it must have been a double take—that whoever it was spotted
the car by its number, maybe when Bartlett and Walsh had stopped that
car for speeding. So X speeded up and doubled back, to try his shot
without that additional witness—and so, coming up on them, he knew
it was the right car, he didn't have to spot the number and get in
position to fire, all at once. It's just a question—I tried a dry
run on it last night—of taking your right hand off the wheel, your
eyes off the road, for about three seconds, and tiring at right
angles out the driver's window."

"That's if there was only the driver—even
saying it was whoever killed Twelvetrees, that there's any
connection."

"Sure. If there were two, a lot easier. One to
drive, one to shoot. But when you come to think, whoever killed
Twelvetrees had quite a bit to do that night—"

"I still say there's nothing to show definitely
it was that night."

"
Pues mira, chico
—look
here—al1 right, but it was some night, because if it had been broad
daylight Mrs. Bragg, or one of the housewives in the other
apartments, would have seen someone arrive and leave. Going to
Twelvetrees' place you'd have to walk or drive past all those other
front doors. I refuse to believe that human nature has improved so
much since I first began to notice it among the five women who're
usually at home most of the day in that court, not one was curious
enough about a good-looking bachelor to take at least casual note of
his movements and visitors. You grant me that's likely? Then I say
it's also likely that whatever happened happened that Friday night,
when it was raining and overcast and people were staying inside
ignoring the neighbors. And also because on the Saturday and Sunday
nobody seems to recall seeing the Porsche in Twelvetrees' carport.
True, they wouldn't be looking for it, he was probably out a good
deal, and nobody would take special note of it one way or the other,
there or not there, so that's negative evidence. But we haven't yet
found anybody who remembers seeing him after the Kingmans saw him
leave the Temple at four o'clock on Friday. The three or four
restaurants he habitually used say he didn't come in that night. The
garage where he took the Porsche hadn't seen him for three weeks. No
gas station he might hit on his way home sold him any gas. His agents
don't remember that he'd come in since several days before. The
autopsy says he'd had, probably, beef stew, salad, and some kind of
pie about two to six hours before he died. Not helpful unless we find
the restaurant where he went, and they remember. All right. Nobody
remembers either how long the Porsche had been standing where it was
left. We've got no evidence, except negative evidence. But why didn't
he show up anywhere on Saturday or Sunday?"