Murder Most Strange (29 page)

"Helen didn't want the house, maybe she had some
conscience and saw how I'd be left—there was still thirty-seven
thousand owing on it and she knew I couldn't swing that, I was still
paying off the medical bills, and what with the alimony I knew I
couldn't keep the house—the payments— Not that I suppose she
knew, the lease was up at the store, I had to sign a new one and they
raised the ante, nine hundred a month for a twenty-by-forty space
facing on Fairfax. I knew I had to sell the house. It was then I did
it the first time," said Gage suddenly.

"How did it happen to occur to you?" asked
Mendoza curiously.

"Helen had moved out. She'd gotten an apartment
in Santa Monica and a job—she was a legal secretary before we were
married, and she got a good job down there. I'd just had an offer for
the house—we had to drop the price—and I was so damned worried
about money," said Gage. "So—damn—worried. The five
hundred a month had to come right off the top. Well, I'd taken Bruno
out for a walk that night as usual, and I saw these people going up
to a car just ahead of me, and the woman looked at Bruno and sort of
shied a little. My good God, I don't know where the damn fool idea
came from, but so many people are afraid of Dobermans—and for God's
sake, the man handed over the money like a lamb. I felt like a damned
fool when he did—good God, I was in a bad enough fix as it was, I
didn't have to turn into a crook! Well"—he took a long drag on
the cigarette—"I sold the house, and I applied all the money
to the medical bills, which cut it down to only about thirty-five
thousand I still owed. Only!" He looked at Mendoza. "I
don't know why you're listening to all this."

"Go on, Mr. Gage."

"I had a hell of a time to find a place to rent
where I could keep Bruno. I finally found a duplex, it's on
Kensington up toward Elysian Park, an old run-down neighborhood, but
the owner lives on the other side and he said he'd be glad of a dog
there to scare burglars. But it's just a little yard. I took him for
a walk every night. I was so damned strapped for money," said
Gage, bitterly. "The rent at the store, and the utility bills
had doubled since last year, and business was way off with inflation
so high and wholesale prices up—even the tourist season didn't
help—and that goddamned girl left me with no backlog, I couldn't
order new stock—and the alimony every month—the rent at the
duplex is three hundred—"

"Many a man," said Mendoza, blowing smoke
at the ceiling, "has been driven to crime through desperation."

"You could damn well say I was," said Gage.
"But of course I must have been crazy. Just crazy. You see, I
thought afterward—about that first time, I thought it could be that
those people needed that money just as badly as I did. But when it
got—really a little desperate—the business way off, the stock
getting low, and I cou1dn't hire another employee, and I was doing
without lunch—oh, there were a lot of times when eating money was
hard to come by—I thought, people who could afford to go to
expensive theaters anywhere, the money I'd take wouldn't be food and
rent money, at 1east."

"So that was why. I see."

"That was why." Gage lay back on the bed,
and turned his face away. "One haul I got—it was about forty
dollars went to pay for Bruno's rabies and booster shots. That may
sound crazy to you, but—you have a dog—you have responsibilities.
Bruno was all I had left. I didn't have enough money for a decent
meal that week. Soup and cereal—and even milk—the utilities are
extra at the duplex—" And he said draggingly, drearily, "But
the very worst—I know you'll send me to prison for it, and I
deserve that—but the very worst is what I've done to Bruno. The dog
didn't know—doing anything wrong. And now—there's no one to take
care of him. People we knew—mostly Helen's friends—like her,
don't care for dogs, know anything about—" Gage was silent.

"I've killed him, you know. My Bruno. He's only
five. There's no one to look after him. Just because I was such a
god-damned fool, I've killed him, and I deserve to be hanged for
that."

"You know," said
Mendoza consideringly, "I think there may be a solution, Mr.
Gage. It is queer how things happen. You just happening to walk up to
the Warrens last night. It just goes to show"—he grinned at
Gage—"which the atheists so stubbornly deny, that there is
something arranging life in patterns after all."

* * *

And of course it was well known to everyone who knew
him that Mendoza was a cat man; and they were busy enough at
Robbery-Homicide, with two new heists last night. But he drove up to
Glendale and found the Warrens' house, which was a pleasant big house
on a quiet street with a large fenced back yard, and he told the
Warrens about Charles Gage.

"The poor devil down on his luck all right,"
said Warren.

“
I can see where he got to feeling desperate. I
wonder if he'd like me to represent him in court."

"He'll be given an attorney."

"Yes, I know, but those boys are either just out
of law school and still wet behind the ears, or drones just marking
time," said Warren. "There'll be his business to close out,
that lease to deal with—and my God, there'll be some way to get
that alimony reduced, that's outrageous when the woman's got a good
job, and there aren't any children. What do you think he might get?"

Mendoza was smoking lazily. "It's a first
charge, but a felony. He might draw a one-to-three, and be out on
parole in nine months or so. He's not worried about that, Mr. Warren.
He's worried sick about the dog, because there's no one to take care
of the dog. The dog's in the Ann Street shelter. He told me he
deserved to be hanged for that." Warren looked at his wife, and
they exchanged a little smile. "We'll look after the dog,"
said Warren. "I'd better call the shelter right away, they don't
keep them long there. He looked like a nice Dobe, and"—he
laughed—"he certainly did take to Mary Ann, didn't he?"

"Thank you very much,
Mr. Warren," said Mendoza. "That's just what I hoped you'd
say."

* * *

"Well, I don't see that there could be much in
this Rush thing," said Hackett doubtfully. "It'd be a
chancy way to try to kill somebody, fake a hit-run. We can take a
look at Rush, see what he looks like, but probably the Patillo woman
is just using her imagination."

"
Conforme
.
But we'd better look, just in case."

Business continued to hum along. Atlanta was going to
extradite Rogers, and somebody would be out, probably next week, to
pick him up. On the two new heists, at a drugstore and a small
independent market, they had fair descriptions. The inquest on the
mysterious Fuller was set for Monday. Higgins had sent the equally
mysterious Mr. Gillespie's prints to NCIC; they hadn't had a kickback
on that yet. Powell was being arraigned on Monday; the D.A. was
calling it murder two, but Mendoza said cynically that that was just
for show,  there'd be a plea bargain and it would get reduced to
voluntary manslaughter. He wondered if Rosalie would get a film
contract out of it.

The paperwork on the Patterson case was about cleared
up. That crew would probably come up for arraignment on Tuesday or
Wednesday. What legal disposition would be made of Holland was up to
the D.A. and the doctors, but the psychiatric evaluation would
undoubtedly put him in Atascadero after a court hearing.

About four o'clock that Saturday afternoon Higgins
had just brought in a heist suspect to question, when the kickback
from NCIC came in. NCIC didn't know anything about Robert Gillespie;
his prints weren't on file with them. "That's funny," said
Higgins. "I tell you, Luis, I never had such a shock in my life.
Why the hell did he kill himself?"

"You'd better have a close look at his personal
effects again. We don't know what he was up to when he took off now
and then," said Mendoza. "He could have been mixed up with
dope running—or prostitution—"

"And living in that fleabag hotel?"

"Maybe he was an international spy. But they
usually have cyanide capsules ready, don't they?"

"Very funny," said Higgins.

When Mendoza got home that night, the electric eye
was adjusted and working smoothly just as it should. But Alison
informed him that Ken had discovered that the nearest professional
sheep shearer lived somewhere above Santa Barbara and would charge a
hundred dollars and expenses to come all the way down here to shear
five sheep. "He said he'll get a book from the library and learn
how to do it so next year——-"

"My good God,"
said Mendoza, "what you do get us into—ta1k about one thing
leading to another!"

* * *

On Sunday morning Higgins thought it was worth an
hour's time to take Mendoza's advice. He was curious about Mr.
Gillespie. He had put a police seal on the door of the room, in case
they wanted to take another look, and he got there about nine o'clock
and first went through all the drawers in the chest. The room was
only about nine by twelve, and held the bed, the chest, a nightstand
and a small armchair. The bathroom was down the hall. There wasn't
anything in the drawers but clean underwear, shirts, ties, socks,
handkerchiefs: fair middle-priced quality. There was one extra suit
hanging in the closet, three pairs of slacks, with two pairs of
shoes, black and brown, on the floor. There were about a dozen
library books, between a cheap pair of bookends, on the chest, and
some magazines in the drawer of the night-stand. And a funny mixture
those were: Car Life, Coinage, Fate, Country Life and American
Astrology. The library books were even queerer: historical fiction,
psychic research, classic crimes and a book on the history of
winemaking. There was no rhyme or reason to be gotten out of that.
There were three suitcases in the closet, and they all looked empty,
but he felt carefully at sides and bottoms, and in the third one
discovered that the bottom lining was loose, fastened down with
Scotch tape. He pulled the tape off, lifted the lining, and looked at
a respectable amount of nice green cash.

"I'll be damned," he muttered, and took it
out to count it. It was all in tens and twenties, and it amounted to
a little over nine hundred dollars. He decided it wasn't enough for a
ransom payment or part of a bank heist, and too much for an ordinary
heist or a burglary. He put it aside, felt again in all the suitcase
pockets, and was rewarded with a small stiff card tucked in one of
the side pockets. He looked at it. It was old and shredded at the
corners, and the date on it was June 1974. It was a library card,
made out in Gillespie's name, for the library in Stamford,
Connecticut.

And that was all there was.

He took the cash back to the office to stash away as
evidence, and Mendoza was interested.

"I wonder if it'd be worthwhile to ask the
Stamford force if they know him," said Higgins.

"Explore every
avenue," said Mendoza. "There's a new one down, by the
way—Art and Tom went out on it."

* * *

The new homicide was a very messy one. It was a house
on Mott Street, an old frame place with no grass or bushes in front,
and needing paint. The squad-car man was Gomez, and he looked sick
when he told them what to expect. "The visiting nurse found them
and called in."

The house had a combination living—dining room, two
bed-rooms with a bathroom between, a square kitchen. It was in a
shambles. Every drawer had been pulled out and dumped, clothes yanked
down from closet poles, pictures torn off the walls. In the middle of
the wreckage were the two bodies and quite a lot of blood.

The bodies were those of two very aged black people,
and the first thought in Hackett's and Landers' minds was that there
hadn't been any necessity to kill them; they couldn't have put up any
tight at all. The old man had been stabbed as he sat in a wheelchair;
he couldn't have weighed ninety pounds. The old woman was even
thinner and frailer; she lay face down against one wall, and had
probably been stabbed too. They could conclude that right away, for
the knife had been left—an ordinary kitchen knife, bloody, in the
middle of the living-room floor.

"Christ," said Landers.

They couldn't do anything until the lab had gotten at
it. They called for a mobile unit, and went out and sat in the squad.
The visiting nurse was shaken and pale, and nurses didn't react that
way often. She was a competent-looking middle-aged woman with frosted
blond hair, and she was voluble, if she couldn't tell them much that
might be relevant to the murder.

"Mr. and Mrs. Eggers," she said. "William
and Clara. Oh, my God, to see them like that—and the worst of it
is, they weren't going to be here much longer. They weren't fit to be
alone, and we'd arranged for them to go into a rest home."

She pressed a handkerchief to her mouth. "He was
ninety-four and she was nearly ninety. They'd both been
schoolteachers, he was a principal once, they were so proud of that,
of getting an education, it wasn't so easy all those years ago—they
were always telling how their parents just missed being born into
slavery. But they'd been retired nearly thirty years, and back then
teachers didn't get paid much, they just got along on Social
Security, they didn't have anything—never had any children. He was
nearly helpless, and she wasn't much better. They had the
meals-on-wheels service, and I came three times a week to give them
baths—"