Exploit of Death

SEVEN

ON SATURDAY, Palliser finally got around to looking up Toby Wells. The rest of the Coffey family had come in to have their prints taken and these had checked out with the other prints the lab had picked up. Wells worked at a Thrifty drugstore on Hollywood Boulevard, and he was an ordinary-looking young black fellow, round-faced, slow-spoken, and he was frank on answering questions. "You were in a little trouble a couple of years ago," said Palliser.

Wells said a little nervously, "Well, yeah, that was kind of a damn' fool thing to do-steal those clothes-but I like nice clothes, and I had a new girl then and I guess I wanted to show off to her. My grandma paid up for me and I never been in any trouble since. Oh yeah, it's an awful thing about Grandma." He shied a little when Palliser asked him about that Friday night, but answered readily, -"I was out with my girl, Mae Weaver. We went to a disco down on Jefferson Boulevard. I guess it was about midnight when I got home, we both had to go to work the next day, a course." He lived with a couple of other young fellows at an apartment on Virgil Avenue. It wasn't worth writing a further report on. Half of them were now doing the legwork on that heister, the rest winding down the investigation at the hospital. That had been a bastard of a thing to work. They must have chased down over a hundred people, trying to identify all the visitors, looking into personal backgrounds, and all for nothing. There was no way to find out who might have done that queer killing-why or when. It was another case that would wind up in the Pending file.

On Sunday morning, the lab report came up on the Holzer car and there was nothing in it at all. The steering wheel had evidently been wiped clean and the only other prints in the car belonged to Edna Holzer and the girl, Frances. The autopsy report came in that afternoon too and she hadn't been raped, just knocked around and strangled manually. The lab hadn't picked up anything significant from her clothes.

Mendoza took the reports out to the communal office to pass on and said to Hackett, "Just damn all on everything we' re working-nothing."

"Well, that's the way it goes sometimes, and then all of a sudden we'll get some breaks."

"Don't philosophize at me," said Mendoza irritably. He sat down at Higgins' desk and added abruptly, "And we're never going to hear anything from France, you know. I've got a strong hunch on that."

"I don't see that, Luis. The girl must've had friends. There's the fiance."

" Es cierto, se. But that's my hunch." He was silent for a moment and then said, "The only way we'll get anything from France is for somebody to go over there and look."

Hackett took his glasses off to stare at him. "You're not serious."

"I might be, Art. At least I've got a passport in order."

"You don't know where to start looking," said Hackett.

"But the trail starts there, damn it?Condenacion! Grandfather. If there was just some little lead?"

"You don't even know whether the Martin girl lived in Paris-anywhere in France-"

"The probability is Paris, I think. Such a simple, artful little setup. By God, I'll find out what was behind that if it takes a year," said Mendoza violently. "And I think we can let that hospital staff go about its business. We're never going to turn up any evidence on that damn thing." Hackett agreed thoughtfully. The autopsy on Alisio had said exactly what they expected it to say.

By now, four possible suspects on that heist had been found and questioned, but there was nothing to tie in any of them definitely. Two more heists had gone down last night with no clear descriptions. The heat wave was still with them.

Hackett said, "We get these spells sometimes. Stymied on everything. Then all of a sudden we'll start to get the breaks."

"Pollyanna," said Mendoza.

What broke on Monday afternoon was another homicide, at a junior high school down on Vernon Avenue. One of the teachers, Mrs. Vera Robertson, was found by another teacher, knifed to death in her own classroom. Mendoza and Higgins went out to have a first look and talked to a shaken and angry principal, Lee Olliphant.

"We've never had anything as bad as this," he said. "There's always the dope problem. You can't do anything with some of these damn kids, they come to school stoned on the dope, on the liquor, or both. About all we can do is try to see they don't disturb the kids who are teachable. Mrs. Robertson had complained to me of several boys in her class, the first week of school. It was her first semester with us, you know. She'd been transferred from a junior high school in Hollywood." He was a big pear-shaped man in a baggy wrinkled suit and he eyed Mendoza's fastidious dapperness with faint disapproval. The knifing had apparently happened during the lunch hour. She had been found at twelve-thirty by the other teacher, Wilma Fox.

She said, "Vera just hated it here. Heaven knows the kids anywhere are bad enough nowadays, but down here it's worse than other places, more of the kids on dope and some of the rest impossible to teach for other reasons, and I'm sorry if I sound prejudiced, but that is the plain truth. But this-I'm going to be scared to come to work and I've got to earn a living-"

Olliphant said heavily, "My God, I'm thankful I'm due to retire next year. It's not unusual for the boys here to carry knives, there's a lot of gang activity and the decent kids get intimidated for the lunch money and so on." He sighed. "Not an easy job. Yes, I can give you the names of the boys she complained about-showing up high on dope, resisting discipline-but that doesn't say it was one of them who did it. We have a lot of difficult youngsters."

Half of the names were Latin-Ortiz, Gonzales, Lopez. The rest of the boys were black. Classes were out by then, the lab men busy in the classroom, but they wouldn't turn up anything useful. They couldn't print juveniles, and with all the kids milling around at the lunch hour nobody would have noticed any disturbance in that classroom, and nobody would tell the fuzz if they had. Her handbag was missing. She had kept it in a drawer in her desk. She had been thirty-five, had a husband and two young daughters. The husband was a bookkeeper at a savings-and-loan company in Hollywood, and he told them that she never carried more than a few dollars to school. She had had her wallet rifled the first day she was there and there wasn't a lock on any of her drawers. "These goddamn punk kids. Not a white kid in that damn place. All the spicks and dinges. And you want to arrest me for being prejudiced, go ahead. I told her for God's sake not to turn her back on any of them. All of those goddamn kids carrying knives or worse. Damn it, if we hadn't needed her salary, she wouldn't have been there-"

It was a waste of time to talk to the kids. The biggest one of those she'd complained about was Rudy Ortiz, a hulking fourteen-year-old. He didn't like the fuzz worth a damn but he knew they couldn't do anything to him. He said sullenly what the other ones had said, as if it were the same record being played. "She just hated anybody with a Latin name-like she hated all the black kids. All the kids knew that. Nobody liked old lady Robertson, but I don't know nothing about what happened."

Her handbag turned up the next day, in a trash container behind the school cafeteria. Her wallet was in it, empty of the few dollars it had held. This was another one that would go into Pending after a couple of follow-up reports. But on the following Thursday, the unexpected happened. The Security Pacific Bank which had issued Edna Holzer's Visa card called headquarters to report, as requested, that an attempt had been made to use that account. The routine check had showed up the hold on it. The card had been presented at the Broadway Department Store at Hollywood and Vine in the women's dress section.

Mendoza and Hackett went up there in a hurry and talked to the clerk who had checked the card. She was an amiable middle-aged woman who'd worked there for years, and she said, "It's funny how you get feelings, sort of a sixth sense, when somebody's trying to pull something, a shoplifter or something like this. I kind of had a feeling about that girl as soon as I saw her. It was funny."

"Can you describe her?" asked Mendoza.

"Oh, sure, I think I can do better than that for you. Of course, she didn't get away with the merchandise, she'd picked out a couple of dresses and a blouse, and these credit cards get stopped for a lot of reasons-I couldn't know she'd stolen it, I just let her walk out. But I'd seen her before, you know, and when the department head said the police were interested, I did some thinking on it, and I can tell you where to find her."

"By God, Art, you're a prophet," said Mendoza. "Don't tell me we're going to get a break. Where and who?"

"She's a waitress at this coffee shop just up the block. Faye's Cafe. I drop in there for lunch sometimes. She's about twenty-five, size twelve, she's got red hair. Yes, I'm sure it's her. I'd swear to it."

They picked her up at the cafe. Her name was Sally Pitman and at first she wouldn't tell them anything, just kept denying she'd done it. But Higgins came and loomed at her and she didn't like him at all, or the big businesslike detective office. Finally she said weakly, "I didn't really do anything, did I? I just thought if I could use that card to get some things-well, it'd be easy. I didn't know there was anything wrong with it. Somebody just lost it."

"Where did you get it?" asked Higgins for the third time.

"I found it. I told you. I just found it on the sidewalk."

They went on pounding at her about that and finally in exasperation they left her alone for five minutes and turned Wanda Larsen on to her.

"You know, Lieutenant," said Wanda sweetly, "there's an old saying that you catch more flies with honey. Why did you try to scare the poor kid? All she needed were a few sympathetic words. I think she'll talk to you now."

"Thank you so much," said Mendoza.

Sally Pitman was still sullen but ready to talk straighter. "Oh, for God's sake," she said wearily. "I found the damn card in my boyfriend's pocket. We were just sitting around the other night and I was out of cigarettes and I looked to see if he had any in his jacket."

"Boyfriend's name?" asked Hackett briskly.

"Ray Siemens. He doesn't know anything about it either."

"Did you ask him about it?"

"He found it. He just found it in the street. He said he forgot he'd picked it up and I better throw it away, it was no good. But I just thought-but he doesn't know anything about all this. He told me to throw it away."

Ray Siemens worked at a gas station on Western. They brought him in to talk to and he laughed at them. He was a big husky dark-haired fellow about twenty-five, and he didn't appreciate being grilled by the fuzz, but they couldn't shake his story. He'd found the card on the sidewalk right outside the station. Didn't know why he bothered to pick it up. He'd forgotten he had. He told Sally to thrown it away, it was no good to anybody. He went on saying that over again and of course there was no evidence on him at all. He could have found it where the X on Edna Holzer had dropped it. The car had been clean. He had a little pedigree with them-one count of assault with intent. He had served a year in the men's colony at San Luis Obispo. Both Mendoza and Hackett liked that, but without any definite evidence they'd never tie him in.

Siemens lived alone in a little apartment over the garage at the rear of a single house on Berendo Avenue, and the owners lived in the front house, a Mr. and Mrs. Dearborn. They said he was a quiet tenant, out a lot, always paid the rent on time. Mendoza got a search warrant for the place and they looked at it, Higgins trailing along. It was a shabby bare little apartment, not much furniture, but he had a nice wardrobe of clothes. In one corner of the living room stood one of the newly popular reproductions of an old Franklin stove-economical heating. Mendoza opened the door and looked in and said, "Why has he had a fire in this, compadres? In ninety-degree weather‘?" The stove was half full of ashes, partly burned lumps of unidentifiable burned matter.

"So that's what he did with the handbag," said Higgins, a hand to his jaw.

"I rather think so," said Mendoza. "Let's turn the lab loose on it.".

"Impossible," said Hackett. "Nobody could say what that stuff once was."

"Well, see what they make of it."

A lab crew went out next morning. They talked to Siemens again that afternoon and he was openly contemptuous.

"I don't know what the hell you're trying to tie me into, but you might as well stop wasting your goddamn time, gents, I'm clean and you'll never prove I'm not." His cocky attitude just reinforced their conviction. He said he'd been with the girl that Saturdays night and she backed him up, but nobody believed her. Then Hackett went to talk to the owner of the gas station again. All he had to say was that Siemens was a damn good mechanic and he'd always liked him fine.

"I don't know why the cops are picking on him," he said now. "What the hell you think he's done, anyways? When's he supposed to have done something?"

"Two weeks ago Saturday night," said Hackett absently.

"Well, there you are," said the owner. "Cops picking on him. I don't know any of his pals or what he does at night, but I just happen to remember that one. He told me his sister just had a baby and he was going to see her in the hospital."

"The French Hospital downtown?" asked Hackett mildly.

"How do I know what hospital?"

The sister's name was Marcia Field and she had been in the French Hospital.

"He's our X on Holzer. He's guilty as hell," said Higgins, "and goddamn it, we'll never prove it on him. All the evidence there ever was is long gone. Connections, but nebulous." He hunched his brawny shoulders angrily. "He wasn't the only one at that hospital that night. That Visa card could have been dropped by somebody else. There's damn all to show a judge." And that kind of thing happened too, and it was always frustrating.

But on the following Tuesday morning, Scarne showed up in the Robbery-Homicide office with a manila envelope. He was looking pleased. He said to Mendoza, "I think we've got something interesting for you, Lieutenant. It was one hell of a job. We had to use the ultraviolet and infrared film, but it came up better than I thought it would." He slid an enlarged glossy photograph out of the envelope and laid it tenderly on Mendoza's desk. "All we could salvage out of all that burned material in the Franklin stove, but maybe it's enough. There was what was left of a billfold, just the corners and a spine, and what looks like the handle of a woman's handbag, which says you're right about Siemens. The plastic slots from the billfold were completely gone, of course. Any I.D. was past recall. But this thing-" He cocked his head at it. "It was about three by five originally, and we can deduce that it was in the middle of a bunch of other papers-other snapshots possibly-in an inside pocket of the billfold. It was protected enough that all of it didn't burn, and we brought up about half of it."

It had been a snapshot, probably in color. The delicate lab processing wouldn't restore that, and the picture was gray and fuzzy from the rate of enlargement. It showed the upper half of a little girl smiling at the camera. She was wearing a polka-dotted dress and a big hair bow.

" Muy lindo, " said Mendoza. "You bring about the miracles these days, don't you? Thank you so much."

"It was one hell of a job. But it might," said Scarne, "be almost as good as a driver's license."

Mendoza and Hackett took the enlargement up to Hollywood, where Frances Holzer worked at the Fidelity Federal Savings and Loan, and she took one look at it and said in surprise, "Why, it's that snapshot of Monica. My niece-Mona's little girl. Mona just sent it down about three weeks ago. Yes, Mother had it in her billfold with some other snapshots of the family, and of course Mona has a print of it too. Where on earth did you get it? And what happened to it?"

"Jackpot," said Hackett in immense satisfaction..

" Mejor tarde que nunca," said Mendoza. "Better late than never. Let's go pick him up and get the warrant." But they never got Siemens to open his mouth. Even when they spelled out the evidence to him, he stayed cocky and silent. They had to speculate on exactly what had happened to Edna Holzer. Had he been in the parking lot at the same time, grabbed her on impulse for what she had in her billfold, or intending rape, and then, finding he had put the quietus on her permanently, stashed the car with her in it to give himself time? Had he abstracted the Visa card, intending to use it, and then changed his mind? They didn't know, and Siemens wasn't talking. But there had been only two prints of that snapshot and the other one was up in Bakersfield.

Siemens had thought he'd got rid of all the evidence. What he hadn't reckoned on was the simple yen on Sally's part for a couple of free dresses, and the little miracles the lab could perform.

AND NOTHING CAME IN from the French police. "I said so," said Mendoza to Hackett on Friday. He had just got back from a session on Siemens at the D.A.'s office. He perched one hip on the corner of Hackett's desk. "It's a dead end. There and here. Why? Why the hell hasn't someone missed her by now? By all logic, somebody should have."

"You'd think so. But you had the hunch."

"By God," said Mendoza savagely. "I'm tempted to go over there and try to pick up the trail myself."

Hackett took his glasses off. "How would you know where to start looking, for God's sake?"

"There must be a record of her somewhere, damn it. There's got to be. From this distance there's not a hope in hell of locating it-of placing her. But on her home ground-" He smoked in silence for a moment and said, "What are you brooding about, John?"

Palliser at the next desk had stopped typing and was sitting staring into space.

"There's probably nothing to it. But damn it," said Palliser, "I keep thinking about that Toby Wells. On the Coffey case. His prints were there, but so were the rest of the family's. I saw his girlfriend and she confirmed that they were at that disco on Jefferson that night. I talked to his roommates, and they'd both gone to bed before he came in. It's nothing. He's got no record of violence at all. But with the lab turning that evidence for you on Siemens- Well, Duke said something to me about shoes. If we ever got a hot suspect."

"Do no harm to have a closer look at him," said Hackett.

"By God, I am thinking about it," said Mendoza. "I'd surely to God like to know who set up that little farce, and why, and how."

Palliser abandoned his report and went out. It was Galeano's day off and everybody else was out hunting heisters or hospital visitors. They had descriptions on two more heisters now. There weren't, for once, any indictments or arraignments coming up to waste time in court. There wasn't anything to be done about the Robertson homicide. Higgins had talked to somebody in Juvenile and none of those kids she had complained about had any record with them. It wouldn't say much if they had.

There had been another teenager found dead by his mother in his own bed. It was another O.D. of the 'ludes, combined with liquor.

Mendoza wandered down to his own office and Hackett was alone when Grace came in with a possible suspect on one of the heists, so he sat in on that. It was all inconclusive. The man didn't have an alibi, but there was nothing else but his description to connect him to the heist. They decided to hold him overnight and arrange for a lineup in the morning to see whether the witnesses would pick him out.

PALLISER THOUGHT this was probably a waste of time, but he applied for a search warrant for Toby Wells' apartment. It came through on Saturday morning, and he and Galeano went out to execute it. There wasn't anybody at home in the apartment, but they showed the warrant to the manager and he agreed to let them in. He said the three young dudes who lived there seemed to be nice quiet boys. They all had jobs and paid regular.

They looked around the place. It was just a place for sleeping. No sign in the kitchen that much cooking was done there. There were two bedrooms, and the largest one contained twin beds, had a walk-in closet. In the other one there was a framed photograph of Mae Weaver on the dresser, so this was Toby Wells' bedroom. It just had a wardrobe with sliding doors. On the floor of that were five pairs of shoes-a pair of brown moccasins, a newer pair of black oxfords, another pair of moccasins-black-and some sneakers. Palliser had a look at them but couldn't see anything suggestive. He stashed them all in a plastic evidence bag and they drove back downtown to drop them off at the lab. Then they went up to that Thrifty in Hollywood to talk to Wells. He wasn't as amiable as before, when Palliser asked questions over again. "What the hell you want with my shoes, anyway? I didn't know cops could go right in a person's pad and just steal stuff."

"You'll get them back," said Galeano easily. "We may want to borrow the ones you're wearing too. Are all those I the only shoes you've got?"

"For Gossakes, what am I supposed to do till then? I don't know why you guys are bothering me, I never had anything to do with that-you know what I mean. I haven't done anything at all."

"So you've got nothing to worry about," said Galeano in a friendly tone. "We can't prove you did anything. We're just looking around, Wells."

"So you can go and look around somewhere else."

"You'd like us to find out who killed your grandmother, wouldn't you?" asked Palliser.

"Oh, sure, sure, I sure hope you do. But I told you where I was that night, you asked Mae and she told you, we were out at that disco all the time."

"Yes, we know you were."

"Then why are you bothering me? Go stealing my shoes! Cops! When do I get them back?"

"When we're finished with them," said Galeano. They went back to the parking lot and sat in the car and Palliser switched on the engine for the air-conditioning. "In a sort of way," said Galeano, "I see what you mean, John. Another Baby Face. A little too innocent to be true, but on the other hand-"

"Oh, I know, I know," said Palliser. "He's got no remote history of violence-only that one little count on him, and it's an honest upright family."

"What the hell is all this business about shoes?"

"I've got no idea," said Palliser. "It was Duke suggested it. He must have something in mind. Something they spotted in that apartment. But there wasn't any mention in the lab report."

"Well, I suppose they'll tell us sometime. My God, why does anybody stay in this climate?-and the way the smog's hanging on it'll likely be the middle of October before we get any relief."

"You like to start building seniority all over again, some place where it never gets over seventy degrees."

"Is there such a place this side of heaven?" wondered Galeano.

THAT SATURDAY NIGHT turned out to be a busy one for the night watch. It was still ninety-four at eight o'clock. September was the worst month for heat in Southern California. There was a bar on Third Street held up by two men at about nine o'clock and Conway wrote the report on that. There'd be eight witnesses to come in and keep the day watch busy making statements. They got a call to a mugging before he finished the report and Schenke went out on that. The victim had managed to get to a public phone and call in, but by the time Schenke got there he was looking green and couldn't stand up, so Schenke called an ambulance. He was a man in the sixties, Clarence Anderson, and all Schenke got was that he'd been working late in his office on Wilshire, been jumped when he came back to his car in a public lot. His home address, by the I.D. on him, was West Hollywood. He passed out as the ambulance arrived, but Schenke didn't think he was too bad. Probably a mild concussion.

However, they were supposedly there to serve the citizens, so when he came back to the office to find it empty, he called Anderson's wife and broke the news to her. Piggott and Conway came back at eleven-thirty. There'd been another affluent-looking couple jumped and manhandled and robbed in the parking lot of the Shubert Theatre. "Why wasn't there a crowd if the show was just over?" asked Schenke.

"They were about the last people to come back to the lot. They'd stopped for a drink at the Sushi bar on the way. The punks got about another fifty and some more jewelry."

"Hell," said Schenke. "I wish there was just some handle to it, some way to chase them down."

"Wel1, there isn't," said Conway. "And they seem to be fairly rough and ready with the M.O. One of these nights they're going to tackle somebody with a weak heart and leave a corpse for us."

"And still no way to chase them down," said Piggott dryly. The phone rang and he picked it up. "Robbery-Homicide." In the next thirty seconds his mouth went tight and the usually mild-mannered, easygoing Piggott was an angry man when he put the phone down and stood up.

"We'd all better ride on this one. It's a shooting and it's one of the uniformed men.".

"Christ," said Conway.

"The squad man said he didn't look too good. It's the corner of Hoover and Eleventh." They went downstairs in a hurry and piled into Conway's car.

Down there, a normally busy secondary main drag, at that time of night the streets were empty of traffic and the traffic lights had stopped working. There were three squads parked in a row at the curb in front of half a block of store buildings. One of the squads had the driver's door hanging open. The uniformed men were Bill Moss and Dave Turner and they were looking grim and shaken. "It was at the appliance store," said Moss. "A break-in." There had been a dim security light left on above the door. By the streetlight at the corner they could read the sign-PURDUE'S T.V. AND APPLIANCES. "All we've heard on it is, two men, and Dubois walked into it. He looked bad, Conway-a couple of slugs in the chest. The ambulance just left. A woman across the street in the apartment at the corner of Eleventh saw it and called in, and Dubois got chased over. She called again when she heard the shooting, but they were long gone when Dave and I got here."

Turner's hand was shaking as he raised the cigarette to his mouth. "We were in the same class at the Academy," he said.

"We haven't called the owner yet. The woman's in apartment Twelve-B."

"O.K." said Conway. "You get the emergency number off the door and contact the owner. We'll go talk to her."

She was waiting for them. Her name was Alice Rabinovich and she was still excited and scared but she had kept her head. She was around forty, dark with a scrawny figure in an old cotton bathrobe over a nightgown, and scuffed bedroom slippers. The apartment was at the side of the building, looking down on Hoover Street.

She said, "I couldn't sleep, it's so hot. I was tired, we had a busy day at the store, but I couldn't sleep. I went to bed, but it was no use, and I got up and sat by the window, the fan helped some. I was sitting in the dark and you can see-" she was gesturing the men into the bedroom. There was an electric fan going on a table by the open window, and a chair, and the window looked down directly to those store buildings on Hoover. The door of the appliance store would be about a hundred feet away, seen at a slightly oblique angle.

"I saw the whole thing. It's terrible about the policeman. There were two men-it was a pickup truck, they parked right in front of the store-you can see the sign from here-and one had a flashlight and the other one had a tool of some kind. There wasn't anything in the street so late-cars or people-and they broke in the door, I could see them plain, they went in and I was sure they were burglars. I was just picking up the phone to call the police, but I was still watching and they came out with a T.V. and put it in the truck and went back in, and they brought out another T.V. and went back and it was just as they came out again with another the police car came up and the policeman got out, and I could see he had his gun in his hand, and I guess he'd have told them to put their hands up or something, but he never had the chance. One of the men just shot him-bang-like that-and he fell down and I called the police back again and told them what had happened-and the men put the T.V. in the truck and drove away fast-and about five minutes later the other two police cars drove up and then the ambulance came. I hope the poor policeman isn't hurt bad-"

"So do we," said Conway. "That's fine, Mrs. Rabinovich, you've been a big help. We're lucky you were here. Could you give any description of the men?"

She said regretfully, "Oh, no, I'm afraid not. My sight is good, but they weren't that close and it was dark even with the streetlight. But it was a Ford pickup truck. It wasn't very far from the streetlight and I saw the letters plain across the front. It was light-colored-white or light blue-something like that."

"Are you sure?" asked Conway.

"Yes, I'm sure about that."

They went back across the street. By then the owner was there and he said there were three T.V.'s missing-nothing else. They told him as they'd told her to come to headquarters to make a statement in the morning. Then they went out to Cedars-Sinai to ask about Dubois.

That was about an hour and a half after the shooting, and the doctors weren't saying anything definite. He had lost a lot of blood before he was brought in.

Dubois wasn't married, but somebody had called-Turner?-and his mother was there in the waiting room down the hall in Emergency. She was a tall thin black woman with dignified regular features and she sat there quietly without crying. She looked at the Robbery-Homicide men without speaking and Conway said, "You know everybody's concerned, Mrs. Dubois. It's one of the possibilities that goes with the job."

"Do you have to tell me that?" she said in a remote voice. "I've been afraid ever since Don put on that uniform. But he always wanted to be a police officer-ever since he was a little boy. A good, honest, honorable police officer-like his father." She raised her eyes from the floor. "His father was on the force in Chicago. He got shot by a drunk when Don was five. We came out here to live with my sister and her family then."

"Mrs. Dubois, we're sorry," said Schenke. There wasn't anything else to say to her.

"We'll all be praying for him," said Piggott.

"I did quite a lot of praying for Don's father-twenty-one years ago," she said quietly.

THAT WAS THE MOST IMPORTANT item on the agenda waiting for the day watch on Sunday morning. Hackett called Mendoza at home to tell him about it and Mendoza said, "?Maria y Jose! I hope he makes it. But we might get some leads from the pickup truck."

"George is talking to the DMV right now."

"I'll be in," said Mendoza. "I'm flying to France on Tuesday, but I'll be in pronto." "

"My God, you are persistent. You'll never find out a damned thing. You haven't anywhere to start looking and you know about four words of French."

"By God, I'll have a try at it. I'll be down. Thank God they've got computers in Sacramento."

The computers, of course, would give them some legwork-a lot of it. The computers would sort out all the Ford pickup trucks registered in L.A. County a lot more quickly than the detectives could take the individual looks at the owners, and while there wouldn't be as many pickup trucks i in an urban area as in a rural one, there would be plenty. The names and addresses were still coming in by the middle of the afternoon, and they had other cases to work, and probably other calls would go down. But there was priority on this pair, who had attacked one of their own.

Dubois was still holding his own, but still unconscious. As the names of those owners came in, the first use they made of them was to run them through the R. and I. Office. It was possible that one or both of that pair had a prior record. It was even probable, given the instant unprovoked attack on Dubois. The break-in artist seldom went armed, and whoever had fired those shots was quick and handy with a gun.

There were more pickup trucks in the county than anyone could have predicted. They did some overtime, but they hadn't finished looking through Records with their own computers by the middle of Sunday evening.

THEY ALL LANDED at the office together, a little early on Monday morning. Palliser had come in even if it was his day off. Mendoza called the hospital. Dubois had rallied a little. There was a full day's work ahead and maddeningly, just as they settled down to it, they had a call. The job was like women's work, never done, and they were always having to drop one thing and pick up another.

And this one would just pose a lot of paperwork, and you could blame it directly on the fact that at eight o'clock that morning, at the intersection of Grand and Sixth Street in downtown Los Angeles, the temperature had hit ninety-nine degrees and was rising.

The patrolman who brought the woman into the office said, "My God, it's like a battlefield. You never saw such a hell of a thing. There were five squads out and three ambulances. I don't know how many people got killed, but I saw three bodies myself. When we got her out of the car, she looked ready to throw a fit, and then all of a sudden she calmed down. But maybe you ought to get her to a doctor."

Her name was Laura Fenn and by her driver's license she was forty-four and lived in South Pasadena. She told them in a dead and dull voice that she was a librarian at the main library and asked someone to call the library and explain that she'd be late. Then she just sat and looked at the wall and Wanda Larsen tried to talk to her.

"My goodness, you never saw such a thing," said the patrolman. Miss Fenn, driving a nine-year-old Dodge without air-conditioning, had caught a red light at that corner on her way to work. A good many other people had caught it too-on both streets. The lights were stuck, both on red. After about four minutes, the horns started, tempers began to rise, and cars began to edge cautiously into any opening. There were also a good many pedestrians on both streets.

The Dodge, second in line at the light on Grand, had gone roaring up onto the sidewalk, sideswiped the car first at the light, charged across the intersection where people on foot were crossing, and finally plowed into a city bus on Grand. When Wanda finally got her to say anything, she just said, "It was too hot-just too hot. I had a headache and the library's air-conditioned-and there was such a jam on the freeway-and all of a sudden it was just too much. "

When they came to sort it out, she had killed four people and injured eleven seriously and severely damaged three cars. The Dodge was totaled. And Mendoza said exasperatedly, "Iet the D.A. worry about what to call it. People!"

IT WAS IN THE MIDDLE of Monday afternoon, with a vague idea of clearing up a muddle before he left tomorrow, that he went up to Outpost Drive and talked to Joseph Alisio.

"We'll probably never know," he told Alisio. "With so many people there, it's been very difficult to check on who was where, when. It's all up in the air."

Alisio heaved a sigh. "I can appreciate that, Lieutenant. One lunatic among all those people. My God. Poor Carl. We knew he was on the way out, the first of us to go, and I don't suppose it makes any difference whether it was now or six mouths from now. But it's a terrible thing he had to go like that. We've all been shook up about it, but poor Randy-I never saw anybody so broken up. He's all to pieces and Mary says he's been drinking some. Well, he was Carl's favorite and I guess it's been a little worry to him, he'd been managing Carl's affairs for him since the cancer got diagnosed last year and Carl was so sick. It was the obvious thing to do, Carl had left him everything anyway, but it's probably made a little extra work for him." He passed a hand over his bald head. "I appreciate your coming, Lieutenant. No, I suppose we'll never know what happened. The lunatic getting into the hospital some way."

A small cold finger inched up Mendoza's spine. The other boys laughed about his hunches. Mendoza's crystal ball. But Luis Rodolfo Vicente Mendoza had been a detective a long time and he knew enough to respect his hunches.

He stood at the curb on Outpost Drive and looked at the haze of smog over the city below him. He said to himself, " Ridiculo." His imagination working overtime. He got into the Ferrari and drove over to Glendale to that new high-rise office building.

Randy Nicolletti was at his desk in the big office, but he looked gray and ill. He had dropped some weight. Mendoza stopped beside his desk and Nicolletti looked up at him after a moment, his expression dull and vague.

"You did it, didn't you?" asked Mendoza. "I'd like to know why."

And Randy Nicolletti said in an expressionless tone, "How did you know?"