Exploit of Death

THREE

HACKETT WAS THE FIRST MAN in on Friday morning. The heat was getting to him. It had been consistently in the high eighties for weeks, but lately it had been a lot worse. He'd be ready for his vacation six weeks from now-they weren't going anywhere, they couldn't afford it and they couldn't take Mark out of school-and that monster of a dog Angel had saddled them with ate as much as a horse-but it would be nice just to relax and not have to get up so early.

They hadn't got much from Joe Bauman yesterday, just profane denials. They'd tackle him again today. But before Landers came in Sergeant Lake buzzed him and said somebody at the hospital wanted to talk to police, a Dr. Richter at Cedars-Sinai. Hackett picked up the phone and said,

"Robbery-Homicide, Sergeant Hackett."

"Rob- Well, I just wanted to report the death," said a doubtful masculine voice. "We understood the police were concerned. This Mrs. Leach."

"Ieach. I'm afraid I don't know-"

"Well, she died last night. I don't know the details, but the ambulance man said it was a police officer had called him."

"I don't know anything about it. What did she die of?"

"My God, she was in a terrible state- I was at the end of my shift in Emergency when she was brought in- I never saw anything like it," said Richter. "Gross malnutrition, in and she was filthy. Hadn't bathed or eaten in God knows how long. We took it that she lived alone and hadn't been able to look after herself, and she was probably in the late seventies. She was dying when she was brought in, there wasn't much we could do. She went into a coma about seven P.M. and died a couple of hours later. The heart just gave out. All we have is the name. I understood the police had the background-it was an officer called the ambulance."

Hackett was a little annoyed at new business. He called down to Traffic-they would have the records of what went on in all the beats in Central Division, if it had been Central business-the fact that the hospital was Cedars-Sinai said nothing, that was the emergency hospital. Traffic eventually found the record for him. The patrolman was a Dave Turner, the address Banning Street. It didn't sound like any business for Robbery-Homicide, a natural death; but he got Turner's phone number and woke him up.

What Turner had to say put a little different look on it. They'd better talk to this Leach anyway. "I mean, Sergeant, he acted a little bit senile as far as I could see, but he looks O.K. physically. He could've helped the old lady if he wanted."

"Yes," said Hackett. The other men were drifting in. It was Galeano's day off. It still didn't sound like much and it would take some time, but he started out to talk to Leach. Palliser and Grace were talking to a couple of witnesses-probably on that mugging last night. The paperwork went on forever.

It was already at least ninety outside. He had to look up Banning Street in the Country Guide. At the ramshackle little house he waited awhile before the door was opened.

"Mr. Leach?" He proffered the badge. "I'm sorry to have to tell you that your sister died last night. I'd like to ask you a few questions if you don't mind."

The old man peered at him blearily. "I got no money to pay for a funeral," he said.

"How long had she been ill?"

Leach said indifferently, "Awhile. It' was a damn nuisance. Leave me to do the cookin'. She allus did. But it sure saved on grocery money. Yes, sir. Time she took sick"- He worked his slack mouth as if savoring something-"said all she wanted-tea and toast. I brung it to her a time or two, but it was a damn nuisance. But it sure cut down on expenses." Suddenly he cackled gleefully. "I come to see that, first week or so-reckon I got by for no more than six, seven bucks a week."

"Why didn't you call a doctor for her?" asked Hackett.

Leach said, "Doctors, they cost a lot of money."

"You hadn't been giving her anything to eat?"

"She wanted, let her get up and get it. Leavin' me do all the cookin'. She allus been a pretty good worker up till then." Leach gave Hackett a furtive, silly smile. His mouth was slack and he dribbled a little.

Hackett swore to himself. The old man going senile, that poor damned old woman left helpless. They'd have to find out if there were any responsible relatives, get Leach safely tucked away. It was a little mess and not really police business. It wouldn't add up to any charge but contributory negligence, and Leach obviously wasn't in possession of all his faculties.

He started to ask another question, but Leach suddenly turned and went over to the T.V. and switched it on, blaring.

Hackett looked through the house. There wasn't much in it and it was filthy. The kitchen was piled with dirty dishes, alive with flies, and the whole place stank like a sewer. He didn't find an address book or any letters. There wasn't a phone.

The house to the left side was boarded up and empty. The house on the other side was occupied by a fat, mustached Mrs. Sanchez who said in thick English that she didn't know none of the neighbors-she just moved in.

Hackett went back to headquarters and talked to the Health Department. Then he called the appropriate Social Services office and talked to a Mrs. Peabody. They would get the old man committed, sort out who owned the old house, get the old lady buried. And by that time he'd wasted half the morning on it.

Nobody was in the office but Higgins, sitting at his desk, smoking and staring into space.

"Goofing off," said Hackett. "Where is everybody?"

"Tom went to talk to that heister, and Baby Face's latest victim came in to make a statement and Jase took him down to look at mug shoots-not that he'll make one."

"No," agreed Hackett. "I don't think Baby Face is in anybody's records. What's the boss up to?"

MENDOZA WAS TALKING to a Sergeant Donovan in Chicago. "Listen," said Donovan plaintively, "what do you expect, bricks without straw? All you give us is a name-Ruth Hoffman-you know how many pages of Hoffmans there are in the phone book?"

"I can guess," said Mendoza. "We're just going through the motions, Donovan. But we'd like you to prove there never was a Ruth Hoffman who came out here last month from Chicago."

Donovan groaned. "Not a hope in hell, either way. There could be a dozen Ruth Hoffmans, anywhere in greater Chicago-you want us to check through the whole damn phone book?"I

Mendoza said brusquely, "Just the usual cooperation. If you can't find a trace of a Ruth Hoffman who left Chicago recently, that'd be very gratifying?

Donovan groaned again. "I'll set a couple of boys to phoning. Just hope we can get you to return the favor sometime."

Mendoza put the phone down and wandered out to the big detective office. Hackett and Higgins were there and he passed on what Chicago had to say, which was expectable, and heard about Leach.

"And damn it, no lab report on that apartment yet. We should get an autopsy report today or tomorrow or something from the French police, or the airlines, or Customs. Where the hell is everybody, on what? Anything new down?"

Higgins said, "A squad called in about an hour ago. Body in an alley on Skid Row. John went out to look at it. Probably nothing to work. I'd just as soon nothing new went down to take us out of the air-conditioning."

Palliser came in and said, "My God, it must be nearly a hundred out there." He looked tired and yanked his tie loose, sitting down at his desk and pulling the cover off his typewriter, rummaging for report forms in the top drawer.

"What was the body?" asked Hackett.

"Nothing much. Looked like an old wino. Either natural causes or the alcohol. Man about sixty, little I.D. on him-Manuel Garcia. Lived at one of those dollar-a-night flophouses on the Row-the city will have to bury him." Palliser started to type the triplicate report.

It was getting on for noon. Landers came in looking hot and tired and said, "There's going to be a riot over at the jail-the air-conditioning's broken down and it's like a damned oven. My God. But Bauman had been thinking things over and decided to tell us who his pal was-one Albert Gerber."

"And Gerber was the one who fired the gun and killed the pharmacist," said Hackett.

"Naturally." Landers picked up his phone, told Sergeant Lake to get him R. and I., and asked if they had a package on Gerber. "Bauman gives us an address-Houston Street in Boyle Heights. We'd better go and see if Gerber's home."

"After lunch," said Hackett.

Five minutes later R. and I. called back to say that Gerber had a package with them of two counts of armed robbery.

It was a quarter past twelve. Palliser finished the report and they all started out for lunch. But as they passed the switchboard, a uniformed man came in and handed Lake a manila envelope.

"Cable from Paris. You've been asking about it."

Mendoza seized it eagerly and slit it open with his thumbnail. Twenty seconds later he said exasperatedly,

"?Diez millones de demonios! " He thrust the cable at Hackett. That prestigious police force, the Surete Nationale, had nothing to say. PRINTS WILL CHECK. INSUFFICIENT DATA YOUR REQUEST INFO MARTIN NO AVAILABLE INFO UNLESS SUPPLY FURTHER DETAILS.

"?Condenacion! " said Mendoza. "If we had any further details, don't they suppose we'd have said so?"

"I said you'd never get anything more on it. It's all up in the air," said Higgins. "You don't know anything about the girl-what to ask for-or where. Where she was bound for here. Anything-it's a dead end. If there's anything to it all." And Mendoza gave him a bitter look.

"In other words, I'm just woolgathering."

"Don't rile the man, George," said Hackett. "Maybe the lab report will have something useful."

THE LAB REPORT wasn't in when everybody came back from lunch. Hackett and Landers took off to look for Albert Gerber, and ten minutes later a new call went down to a bar on Temple. Palliser and Grace went out on that. Five minutes after that information started to come in all at once. American Airlines called Mendoza from New York to confirm as requested that a Juliette Martin had been booked on that flight from New York to Los Angeles with a stop-over at Chicago and a change of planes, last Saturday. Air France called from its New York office to confirm that Juliette Martin had been on its flight from Paris to New York-leaving Orly Airport at eight P.M. a week ago today. "Something to tell the Surete anyway," grunted Mendoza. Then the Customs office in New York called to confirm that French citizen Juliette Martin had passed through Kennedy Airport with a French passport at approximately five P.M. a week ago today. They gave him the passport number.

"Something concrete," said Mendoza pleasedly.

"For what it's worth," said Higgins.

"You're just a little ray of sunshine, aren't you?"

"And that's impossible. If she left Paris at eight that evening she couldn't get here at-"

"Time differences," said Mendoza tersely. "Europe's eight hours ahead of us."

"But it's nothing you didn't know already," said Higgins.

Then a uniformed man came in with a manila envelope.

The lab report on the apartment. Mendoza scanned it hastily and said, "Hell, nada absolutamente -or nothing useful."

The only latent prints the lab had picked up in the apartment were the girl's. There had been a clear print of her right thumb on the top of the handle of the refrigerator-just where it might be expected-and others on the kitchen counter, a table in the living room. Nothing else but smudges anywhere, except for one clear print of her right forefinger on the plastic, medicine bottle. There hadn't been enough residue of anything in that for analysis. And that was all the lab had to tell them. Mendoza passed the report over.

"And I'm wondering now-how did she get there?" he said dreamily. "Already drugged, already unconscious-"

He stabbed out his cigarette and immediately lit another, his gaze abstracted on the view over the Hollywood Hills in the distance through the big window behind his desk. "Going to visit her grandfather! No possible way to find out the name this side of France-anywhere in greater Los Angeles-and where the hell was she between Saturday and Tuesday? We haven't got an estimated time of death yet but it looked as if it could've been Tuesday night. No address book there. Well, they'd have got rid of anything informative, of course."

"The Daggetts?"

"I don't know," said Mendoza in a dissatisfied voice. He had asked Records about the Daggetts and Helen Garvey. They looked simply like ordinary little people-unimportant. "They know something but it might not be much. But Grandfather comes into it somewhere, George."

"And how the hell do you make that out?"

"Grandfather would've been expecting her. Knew she was coming. Was he going to meet her at the airport? We didn't see anything of her after we got off the plane. Grandfather is probably an elderly man-maybe he doesn't drive. Was she expecting to be met?-And-Hell and damnation!" He sat up with a jerk.

"I just saw that too-not operating on all cylinders," said Higgins. "Better ask the cab companies if she picked up a cab at the airport."

Mendoza already had the phone off the hook. "And damn it-no way to be sure but show the photos to any cabby who had a fare there. A little legwork. But George, the reason I say Grandfather's in it somehow-he'd be expecting her. If she was intercepted somehow, by whoever, for whatever reason only God knows-and didn't show up, Grandfather would be concerned. The natural thing to do would be to check with the airline, and he'd find out she landed here. If he isn't in on the caper-whatever the hell it is-why hasn't he reported her missing?"

Higgins passed one hand over his prognathous jaw.

"Maybe he has."

Mendoza shut his eyes. " Muy bien. Not operating on all cylinders you can say. Grandfather may not be a villain. He could live anywhere from Malibu to Monrovia, Tujunga to Lakewood-and he may have reported her to one of a hundred police forces. Thank you, George."

"Well, it was just a thought."

"So we get on the phone and start asking. The logical force would be Inglewood where the airport is. But what in God's name it's all about- Por Dios, I swear that was a cold-blooded killing, and it was planned out right here, whatever the hell was behind it-and there have got to be some leads if we dig deep enough." He picked up the phone again. "Jimmy, I want to talk to some cab companies."

Higgins yawned. "There must be people who knew where she was heading. She'd have had friends-there's the boyfriend."

"Don't suggest that I cable to the Surete again," said Mendoza bitterly.

HACKETT AND LANDERS were trailing Albert Gerber in ninety-eight-degree heat. Gerber wasn't at the Houston Street address, which was an old four-story apartment building, and the only tenant at home didn't know him, but the manager lived on the premises and said helpfully that he knew Gerber had a pal who worked at the Shell Station up on the corner of Soto. He didn't think Gerber had a job since awhile back but he was up to date on the rent all right. They had queried the DMV about a car and knew Gerber was driving a ten-year-old Chevy, plate number so-and-so.

They tried the Shell Station. An indolent-looking fellow with a big paunch, shirt opened to his belt, looked at them lackadaisically over a canned Coke and said, "Oh, him. Yeah, he hangs around here some-working on his car. He's a a friend of Mike's-Mike Sullivan, he spells me part-time and nights, he's supposed to show up at four if you want to talk to him."

"Do you know where he lives?" asked Landers.

The man said reluctantly, "Oh, hell, I got it wrote down somewhere." He moved slowly into the grubby little office, rummaged and found an address scrawled in a ragged ledger. It was Cornwell Street, only a couple of blocks away, a shabby old duplex. The girl who answered the door had a luscious model's figure, clearly visible in a pair of shorts and a halter, and she didn't know where Mike was but she knew where Gerber might be. He'd been dating Marlene Foster pretty heavy lately, she said, she and Marlene had been to school together, and Marlene had just got laid off her job so she might be out somewhere with Al. That address was Pennsylvania Avenue. The air-conditioning in the Monte Carlo barely had time to get going when they found the place, a single frame house with peeling paint. A shapeless woman in a wrinkled tent dress opened the door.

"Oh," she said to the question. "No, Al's not here. Him and Marlene went to the movies. Mostly for the air-conditioning. They went to the first show when it opened at one o'clock."

"Do you know which one?" asked Landers.

"Sure, the Bijou over on Whittier. Unless they changed their minds. You're cops, aren't you?" She looked doubtfully at Landers. "Even if you don't look old enough to be."

Landers with his perennially boyish face would be hearing that one until he was a grandfather.

It was a little past three-thirty then and the first show was probably about over. They looked up the address at the nearest public phone and got to the theater fifteen minutes later. There was a public parking lot half a block away. They looked and spotted Gerber's old Chevy, so they waited.

There wasn't any shade and the sun beat fiercely on the sticky blacktop. They waited another fifteen minutes and a couple walked up to the car laughing and talking.

"Albert Gerber?" asked Hackett.

"Yeah, that's me." He recognized them for what they were instantly and said, "What the hell you want anyways?" He was tall and dark with a heavy tan and bulging muscles. The girl was small and blond. She looked scared.

"You," said Landers and brought out the badge. They had already applied for the warrant.

Gerber came out with a string of obscenities and the girl began to cry. "You promised you wouldn't get into any more trouble," she wailed.

"I haven't done a thing, the dirty fuzz just pick on anybody got a little pedigree-"

"Well, Joe Bauman says you were with him on that heist the other day, and it's a charge of murder two this time, Gerber. That pharmacist is dead."

Gerber said this and that about Bauman. "I don't know what the hell you're talking about."

"Come on," said Landers. "We're taking you in."

Gerber fished out his car keys and gave them to the girl. He said, "You get hold of Mike and tell him I'll need some bail money. The goddanm fuzz."

They ferried him down to the jail and booked him in. Hackett said, "We can talk to him some more later on, Tom-after they've got the air-conditioning fixed."

The air-conditioning was still off at the jail and it felt hotter than it had outside, stuffy and stagnant.

Mendoza left early and got home by six o'clock. It was a little cooler up in the hills above Burbank, but the sun was still fairly high and unrelentingly bright. Beyond the tall iron gates which opened politely as he shoved the gadget on the dashboard, the green pasture on either side of the drive looked pleasantly pastoral. The Five Graces, the woolly white sheep to keep down the weeds, were peacefully huddled in a little cluster grazing industriously. Ken Kearney had the sprinklers going on the pasture. The Kearneys would be relaxing over dinner in their apartment attached to the stables for the ponies, Star and Diamond.

At the top of the hill, where the big old Spanish ranch house sprawled behind its concrete block wall, Mendoza slid the Ferrari into the garage beside Alison's Facel-Vega and Mairi's old Chevy and went in the back way. In the rear patio, Cedric, the Old English sheepdog, greeted him amiably. His long pink tongue was out; in this weather his heavy coat must be a burden. He followed Mendoza in through the service porch.

Mairi MacTaggart was at the stove, Alison busy making a salad. She glanced up. "You're early, mi vida. The rat race just as usual?"

He bent to kiss her. " Estoy rendido – I'm exhausted, for no good reason."

"Is there anything new on the Martin girl?"

" Nada -and maybe nothing ever will show," he said moodily.

"Now that," said Mairi, shaking her silver curls at him, "is a verra strange business indeed. I wonder what happened to that poor thing? Now, you go and sit down with the man, achara, I'll finish that."

"I need a drink," said Mendoza.

El Senor, the half-Siamese, could hear that particular cupboard opened the length of the house away, and came floating up to the counter top demanding his share in a raucous voice. Mendoza poured him half an ounce of rye in a saucer. "Shortening your life,"' he said.

"I'll have a glass of sherry, carina."

In the living room the twins scrambled up from coloring books to greet him. Baby Luisa was staggering around with a stuffed dog in her arms. The other three cats, Bast, Nefertiti, and Sheba, were dozing in a tangle on the couch. Cedric sprawled at Alison's feet and Mendoza gratefully sank into his big armchair and sipped rye. It cost a fortune to run the air-conditioning in the big house, but it was worth it.

"Have you heard from the French police?" asked Alison.

"That's a dirty word," said Mendoza.

"I wish to goodness I could remember anything else she said. I've got the definite feeling there was something more, but it just won't come."

"And it could turn out to be a dead end." Mendoza sipped rye and tried to turn his mind off. No use worrying at the thing; it was futile. He sighed and leaned back. Someday maybe he would retire and be rid of the thankless job.·

Lander's Sportabout wasn't air-conditioned and he was perspiring and exhausted when he got home to the Hollywood apartment. The apartment, thank God, was air-conditioned, and Phil-whose parents had christened her Phillipa Rosemary before she decided to be a police-woman-looked cool and comfortable. She had got home just, ahead of him, but she had spent the day in air-conditioning down in the R. and I. office. She was bulging a good deal in the midsection these days; the baby was due at the end of December, and at the end of this month she'd be taking maternity leave and then she could stay home until the end of March. And by that time, he reflected without much enthusiasm, they'd be moved into that claptrap house in Azusa-Azusa, my God, forty miles farther to drive-and her car was eight years old and sooner or later she'd have to have another one, and he wasn't due for a raise until next year-and there'd be the house payments-and a baby-sitter.

"You look as if you had quite a day," said Phil in a concerned voice.

"Well, you look fine," said Landers. He kissed her, his cute little blond Phil with the freckles on her nose. "The rat race. I need a drink before dinner."

"It's just cold cuts and potato salad and odds and ends, unless you'd like a hamburger."

"That's fine. I'll fix us some drinks and we can take our time."

THE BRAWL in the Temple Street bar had been time consuming and took a little sorting out. There was only the one patrolman there and he said apologetically that a couple of witnesses had been long gone before he could get their names. There had been quite a little crowd in the place and most of them excited, but he'd done his best. Both Palliser and Grace had served apprenticeships riding squads and knew how awkward that kind of situation could be. "But. I've got the one who did the knifing. His name's Tony Aguilar." He had the man in cuffs, sitting at one of the battered wooden tables. "I got here just about as it happened. The owner had called in-"

"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.