Felony File (16 page)

Landers laughed sharply. "At least it won't be
us pawing all through the employee records, if that's the route you
want to go."

They had met the Glendale men—Sergeant Costello,
Detective Dahlman—at the Robinsons' store that had been knocked off
last night. It wasn't nearly as big a store as Bullock's downtown,
and they wouldn't have got as big a haul, but it would amount to a
nice take even so. Maybe all department stores had much the same
arrangements; this one resembled Bullock's in miniature, with its
administrative offices on the top floor. Here there was only one
freight elevator: other than that, it was the same arrangement:
registers closed out, money bags taken up to Accounting, then taken
to the bank night drop by two guards.

The store was in a pleasant small shopping plaza,
with smaller shops around it but at a little distance. They were now
sitting on a couple of stone benches facing the front of the store,
smoking and kicking it around. "I don't think much," said
Costello, "of that little idea you got from the boy in Philly."
He was a stocky blue-chinned tough. Dahlman was younger, quieter,
competent-looking. Glendale had a pretty good force, if a small one.

"
Neither do I," said Palliser, "but
it's all we've got to hand you."

The operation had gone off the same way: four masked
men in the Accounting office just as the store was closing, the staff
and security guards tied up. "I'll tell you another way it was
one Goddamned slick job," said Costello morosely. "They'd
have taken a bigger haul in the Galleria, but they played it safe."

"What's that?"

"
Big new shopping center—well, a few years
old—over on the other side of town. There are bigger department
stores—The Broadway, Buffums', Penneys'. But also a lot more
lights, and restaurants open after the stores close, and more people
around. They played it safe and hit here."

"
The accountants," said Dahlman, "are
saying around seventy thousand."

"
And we had another thought on that aspect,"
said Landers. "The Bullock's people said three hundred G's,
which seemed fantastic—of course they deal in a lot of expensive
stuff, furs, cameras, furniture—but when we had second thoughts and
asked, it wouldn't have been that much in cash. A lot of the take
isn't actual take—just transference of credit with Master Charge,
Visa, Bullock's own credit cards. And there'd be a certain number of
personal checks. They finally said, more than half of all
transactions would have been like that. But even so, it was a good
haul."

"
So say it's the same here, and it probably is,"
said Costello. "Auuggh! People thinking of the paper as
money—robbing Peter to pay Paul. Say it was half cash. They'll just
have dumped all the checks from both jobs, burned them somewhere?

"
So we go through the motions," said
Dahlman, "checking the guards, the employees? I buy your idea,
Landers, anybody could have spotted that routine with a little
snooping. Ask me, the security wasn't so damn tight either at
Bullock's or this place."

They sat in silence for
awhile; nobody had any more ideas. The Glendale lab, of course, was
dusting for prints and looking at the rope used; they would probably
turn up the same results the lab downtown had. Or rather, the lack of
them.

* * *

The lawyer's name was Duane Earnshaw, and he was a
large genial man about sixty. His practice was obviously successful;
his offices were on Fairfax Avenue in a low, modern, single building.
He had two partners and the front office boasted three glossy,
youngish secretaries. He had been conventionally sorry and surprised
to hear about Marion Stromberg. He said he and his wife had been
socially acquainted with the Strombergs. He volunteered information,
and none of it was of immediate use to Mendoza. Stromberg, he said,
had been a shrewd investor: stock, real estate. He had left her
around two hundred and fifty thousand soundly invested, a couple of
pieces of rental property. Marion Stromberg had made a will after his
death, which still held: she had divided the estate between a second
cousin of hers back in Illinois and her husband's niece. "The
only relatives either of them had, a very fair thing to do,"
said Earnshaw.

"
You say you knew them socially. What did you
think of her, Mr. Earnshaw—as a person?"

Earnshaw sat back in his large expensive desk chair
and lighted a cigarette. "Well," he said a little
perplexedly, "they were difficult people to know, Lieutenant. My
wife didn't care for either of them, and it had been a very tenuous
acquaintanceship—we never saw them often. Dr. Stromberg didn't seem
to have any particular interests at all, you couldn't get him talking
on politics, sports, any subject you could name. He was a colorless
sort of fellow, all business, and she was the same. I must say she
surprised me a little, after he died—she had quite a good business
head, she was a more intelligent woman than I'd thought. But—well,
colorless is as good a word as any."

"
Yes," said Mendoza. By all they'd heard, a
sterile sort of life; but if she'd never known anything else,
possibly she hadn't realized that. "What about this niece? Were
they close at all?"

"
I doubt it. She said—" Earnshaw thought
back—"when she made the will, she thought it was only fair
that Mrs. Dunn should share the money, being Fred's only relation and
it being Fred who'd made the money. The Dunns live in Santa Monica,
by the way."

"
Well, thanks very much." Mendoza stood up.
He had gone to the house on Beachwood Drive before coming here, and
rummaged; in a photograph album in the den he had found a studio
portrait of her taken, he thought, about five or six years ago; he'd
wondered why. Or was it older, had it belonged to her mother? She
hadn't had a face that changed much with time; he thought anyone
would recognize it who had seen her lately. It wouldn't do any harm
to get it into the
Times
;
maybe it would jog someone's memory, who had seen her last Friday
night.

The Brown Derby, he thought, getting into the car. Or
the other restaurant. Unfortunately, the staff who would have been on
duty at the dinner hour on Friday wouldn't be on until this
afternoon. Catch them then. He stopped at the
Times-Mirror
building, saw a sub-editor and passed over the photograph. He walked
into the Robbery-Homicide office at ten minutes to eleven. Lake was
reading a paperback at the switchboard. Hackett was on the phone, and
nobody else was in. He went into his office and found the morning
Times
neatly spread
out on his desk blotter.

Hackett grinned as a wounded roar rose from the inner
office. "
¿Para qué es esto?
Diez millones de demonios desde el inferno! ¿Y
ahora qué?
Goddamn it, of all the gall—and
who the hell wrote this guff—"

Hackett strolled in. "Pretty picture," he
said. "You look quite romantic, Luis—just a little reminiscent
of Barrymore playing Hamlet three sheets in the wind."

"
And where in hell they got that picture—"
Mendoza flung himself on the phone book. "The fire station—damn
it, there wasn't any press there—Jimmy!"

He called the fire station on Sunset, got the
assistant chief, and fired off furious questions. The assistant chief
was amused. "Why, Lieutenant, we always carry a camera in case
of getting records for the arson squad—when I saw what that was
yesterday, I told Tony to get a few shots. He must have peddled that
one to the
Times
for
human interest value—not supposed to do it, of course. I thought it
was kind of nice, myself. You so concerned for that poor little
kitty-cat."

"You can go to hell!" snapped Mendoza. He
sat back and brushed his moustache back and forth irritably. He was
still fuming when Galeano came in and told them about the Whalen
inquest. "What about Reynolds? Have you got anything on it?"
Galeano started to tell him about that, and Lake came in with a new
call.

"
It's a double homicide. Coronado Street."

"
Oh, for God's sake," said Mendoza, getting
up. "One thing after another. Come on, Art."

It wasn't quite as cold today, which could mean that
it was building up to more rain. They took the Ferrari and Mendoza
got on Beverly, driving a little faster than usual. Coronado crossed
there just below Rampart, and as they turned the corner they saw the
squad sitting about halfway down the block. This was a residential
street, the houses old in this part of the city; it was a
middle-class block of comfortable places, nothing fancy. The house
where the squad car waited was an old California bungalow flanked by
others very similar; it was painted white with green trim. A lawn in
front was brown with winter.

Patrolman Yeager had two people in the back of the
squad. He got out as Mendoza and Hackett came up.

"
My week for looking at bloody messes," he
said gloomily. "These people just found them. Mr. and Mrs.
Coons. That's their car." It was an ancient Chevy parked in the
drive. "They're old friends of these people—Mr. and Mrs.
Jackman, Brian and Jessie Jackman. They hadn't seen them in a month
or so, and landed here about half an hour ago, found the door
unlocked, walked in and found them. They're pretty old, and it was a
shock—they had to go back to the main drag, find a phone and call
in."

They were walking up to the house.

There was a screen door sagging on its hinges; the
inner door was wide open. They went in to the expectable living room
of this kind of house, old-fashioned furniture, a worn flowered rug,
rather fussy curtains. It was a combination living-dining room, with
a built-in sideboard with glass doors at the far end, an old round,
oak table there and chairs. The room was dusty and dim, the house
facing north, but it looked fairly neat.

"
The kitchen," said Yeager behind them.
They went through the dining area to a swinging door propped open.
The kitchen, as usual in a place of this vintage, was large and
square. There was a square painted table to one side with a pair of
matching chairs. And the kitchen was not neat.

The table had been shoved crookedly against the wall,
and one chair had fallen over on its side. There were dishes on the
table with food on them and two pans on the stove. A large bowl had
been upturned on the floor and lay in pieces among the remains of
whatever it had held. And sprawled on the floor, lying against one
another, were two corpses, a man's and a woman's.

"
This didn't happen yesterday," said
Mendoza. The food was congealed and moldy; the blood on the floor and
the bodies was long dry and brown. The heat was on in the house, a
gas furnace most likely, but the thermostat was turned low and the
bodies had not suffered much change except discoloration.

"
We'd better turn the lab loose first,"
said Hackett.

"
And I want a doctor's opinion about time, right
now," said Mendoza. "By all the blood, they were knifed."

"
You better take a look in the bedroom,"
said Yeager. In silence they followed him down a cross hall.

There were two bedrooms. The front one was the
larger; it held an old-fashioned bedroom set, double bed, large
dresser with a mirror fixed over it, another chest of drawers.

"
¡Por Dios!
"
said Mendoza. On the mirror, crudely drawn in what looked like black
paint, in letters three inches high, were the two words IDLE
WERSHIPERS!

"
I'll be damned," said Hackett under his
breath.

On the dresser, just below that, stood a small china
statue of the Virgin. There was a crystal rosary on the dresser tray,
and a framed lithograph of the vision of the Virgin at Fatima on one
wall. Mendoza backed out and went down to the living room again,
looking around. On a table in front of the window was another china
statue of Our Lady of Carmel, and in an open—shelved curio cabinet
in one corner were several other religious figurines—St. Francis,
St. Anthony, St. Michael.

"
You see what I mean," said Yeager.

"
I do indeed." Mendoza led them both out,
got in the front seat of the squad and called in for a lab truck,
talked to the coroner's office. Hackett got into the passenger seat.
Mendoza swung around and introduced himself abruptly to the silent
couple in the rear seat.

"This is Sergeant Hackett. Now I know you're
considerably upset by this and we don't want to make things any
harder for you, we'll let you go home as soon as we can. But you
understand, we'd like to know something about Mr. and Mrs. Jackman."

They nodded at him dumbly. They were over the first
shock, though she had been crying. They were very old people, perhaps
in the late seventies. He was a tall, gaunt, bald man with stringy
jowls and faded-blue eyes; she, a short, heavy woman with a round
face, neat gray hair. "What d'you want to know?" he asked.

"
About any family, for one thing."

"
They had a son and daughter," said Mr.
Coons promptly. "Bill Jackman, he's a pharmacist, works at a
Thrifty up in Hollywood, he's married and they got a couple of grown
children. The daughter's Mrs. Helen Burley, her husband manages a
chain market, they live in Burbank." He was shaking just a
little. "Awful to die like that. Awful. Some maniac."