The Case of the Courteous Killer

Chapter IX

Although I felt perfectly all right and capable of pulling at least restricted duty, the captain insisted I take a week’s sick leave because of my wound. I spent it lying around my apartment catching up on my reading.

Frank phoned every day to find out how I was and brief me on what was going on at Homicide. Especially on the progress of the convertible-bandit case, as I had a particular interest in that. Most police work is impersonal, but when a suspect puts a bullet in you, you tend to develop a personal interest in his apprehension.

There hadn’t been any progress. Latent Prints had developed a number of prints from the Buick the suspect had abandoned, but it turned out to be another stolen car, and all the prints checked out as having been made by the owner or members of his family. A pair of ordinary white work gloves were found on the seat of the car. Apparently they had been worn by the suspect when he’d stolen it, and he hadn’t taken them off until he got out of the Buick to approach the convertible. They were of a type purchasable in any dime store, and were untraceable.

Several spots of blood had been found on the board fence, proving that the suspect had been wounded. The Crime Lab established the blood type as O+, which gave us one more factor of information about him. All physicians within a hundred-mile radius had been alerted to be on the lookout for a man of the suspect’s description requesting medical attention for gunshot wounds.

The newspapers became interested in the case and gave it page-one publicity. As the suspect’s known record was now two murders plus the injury of three other people, one a police officer, he began to attain the local status of Public Enemy Number One. When one feature writer referred to him as the “Courteous Killer,” the name caught the public fancy, and the suspect became a general topic of conversation.

All this publicity had the usual effect. Hundreds of people gave us tips about the suspect’s location or identity. Some honestly believed they had seen him; others were merely cranks hoping to share in the publicity. Seven men, none of them even faintly resembling the suspect, walked into the Homicide office and confessed. The suspect was reported as simultaneously having been seen in Santa Monica, Burbank, downtown Los Angeles, and as far away as San Diego.

All these leads had to be painstakingly checked out, but came to nothing. The bandit had disappeared completely.

In an all-out effort to locate him, composite pictures and all known data about him were sent to every major city in the country. Meantime, local newspapers and local business groups began posting rewards for information leading to an arrest and conviction. Eventually these rewards grew to five thousand dollars. The reward notices were sent to all major cities as fast as they were announced, so as to insure more than routine treatment of the want.

I reported back to duty on Tuesday, August 13th, at 4:21 p.m. I stopped by the captain’s office first to check in. When I left there and walked into the squad room, Frank, Jack Emlet, and Tony Ramirez had already logged in for the night watch. All three shook my hand as though I had been away for a year instead of a mere week.

Of course, after this display of comradeship I had to listen to the usual riding about malingering that any police officer takes on his return from sick leave. Jack Emlet asked, “How was the fishing?” and Tony Ramirez said, “It wasn’t fishing, Jack. It was that blonde over in Intelligence. Didn’t you notice she’s been out all week, too?”

Amador Ramirez, nicknamed Tony, and Jack Emlet are partners. Ramirez is broad and dark and good-looking, Emlet slim and wiry and wears a blond crewcut. They practice a running end-man act, usually with each other as targets, but today they both concentrated on me. For five minutes I listened to suggestions ranging from one that I had deliberately stepped in front of a bullet in order to get a week off, to one that I had really only cut myself shaving.

I grinned it off and logged myself in.

“Anything going?” I asked Frank.

“Nothing in the message book,” he said. “Some mail in your box.”

Frank had been forwarding my mail to my home address while I was out, so only the day’s accumulation was there. I dropped a couple of ads in the wastebasket and examined the lone envelope that remained. It was a legal-size post-office envelope, addressed by pencil in block letters to Sergeant JOE FRIDAY, HOMICIDE DIVISION, POLICE BUILDING, 150 LOS ANGELES STREET, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA. It was postmarked from Los Angeles at 6:30 p.m. the previous day, and there was no return address.

Ripping it open, I drew out a news clipping and a single sheet of paper. The clipping was from a week previous, and described the gunfight between the convertible bandit and Harriet and me. This was before the newspapers had begun giving the case page-one treatment, so it was a bare account of the fracas. Both Harriet Shaffer’s and my full names and ranks were given, however.

The message, like the address on the envelope, was printed by pencil in block letters. There was no salutation and no signature. It read:

In the process of unfolding the sheet, I had already left my fingerprints on it, and possibly had obscured those made by the sender, if any. I dropped the message, the clipping, and the envelope onto a table before any more damage could be done.

“Look at this,” I said.

Frank, Emlet, and Ramirez gathered around as I spread the anonymous note flat with a pair of pencils. The three of them read it in silence.

Then Jack Emlet said, “Didn’t go far in school, did he?”

“How would you know?” Ramirez inquired. “If it wasn’t printed, you couldn’t even read it.”

Emlet only grinned at him.

Frank said seriously, “This guy must be a psycho, Joe. Nobody with all his marbles would mail a thing like that.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe it’s a break, though. We’ll shoot it down to Latent Prints.”

With one of the pencils, I pushed the three items into an empty file folder. Then Frank and I took it downstairs to Room 208. Sergeant McLaughlin and Bill Tucker were on duty. It took them only a few minutes to determine that the only prints on the message and clipping were mine. There were a few smudged prints on the envelope, probably from post-office handling, but none of them was good enough for comparison purposes.

“Must have worn gloves,” McLaughlin said. “Doubt that any of the prints on the envelope would be his, even if we could bring them out. He wouldn’t be likely to make a mistake with the envelope after being so careful with the inside contents.”

“Let’s, see what Pinker can do with it,” I said to Frank.

We took the elevator up to the fourth floor and went to the Crime Lab. After examining the items, Ray Pinker shook his head.

“Common-type bond paper that’s sold through thousands of outlets,” he said. “Post-office envelope. We might establish the brand of pencil by running a spectogram of the graphite, but what would it prove? Pencils are sold through thousands of outlets, too. Best bet would be Larry Sloan.”

Larry Sloan is the department’s handwriting expert. We took the material to him. After studying the message and the envelope through a magnifying glass, he, too, shook his head.

“Best I can do is make a suggestion,” he said. “Possibly the two spelling errors — ‘your’ for ‘you’re’ and ‘swetting’ for ‘sweating’ — were deliberate. The attempt of a literate person to make you think he was uneducated.”

“How do you figure that?” I asked.

“I don’t figure it,” Sloan said. “I only suggest it as a possibility. But look here.” He pointed to the printed message. “The printing is pretty regular. It’s no draftsman’s job, but it’s even and legible. There are no hesitation marks, and no inverted letters. Semiliterate people sometimes make N’s and S’s backward. This was done by someone who at least is used to holding a pencil. Furthermore, while there’s a little idiom used, there are no grammatical errors. Note the comma before the word cop. Most people uneducated enough to misspell as common a word as sweating wouldn’t use that comma. The line would read, ‘Nobody burns me and lives cop.’”

“So he might actually be a college graduate?”

“He might,” the handwriting expert said. “He might also be as illiterate as he sounds. It’s too small a sample to make much of a guess.”

That left us with little more than we had had before the anonymous note arrived. We did have three additional items of information. We knew the suspect was still in Los Angeles, or at least had been up to the time the letter was mailed the day before. We knew his wounds were sufficiently healed for him to walk to a mailbox.

And we knew he wanted to kill me.

This wasn’t the first threat I had ever received. I couldn’t count the number of convicted felons who had snarled threats of revenge as they were led away to prison after being convicted on the basis of my testimony. Every police officer is used to such threats, and dismisses them for what they are: the childish and momentary anger of caught criminals railing at their fate.

But this wasn’t in the same category. This threat was from a dangerous and nameless killer who I knew wouldn’t hesitate an instant to carry out his threat, if he had the opportunity. He had already twice demonstrated that he would kill on the slightest provocation.

Then another thought struck me. Harriet Shaffer’s name had been included in the news item, too, and the item had said that it was believed the first wound the bandit had received had been inflicted by Harriet’s gun.

I went to the phone to call Valley Juvenile Division and find out if Harriet had received a similar threatening note.

When I got her on the phone, I said, “Joe Friday, Harriet. How are things going?”

“Fine, Joe,” she said. “What’s up? Another decoy assignment?”

“Not tonight,” I told her. “Just checking up to see how you survived the ordeal of that night.”

“Me?” she said. “You were the one hurt.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Anything interesting going up that way?”

“Just, the usual. Runaways, vandalism, Two-eighty-eights.” Her voice sounded a little puzzled.

Since she didn’t mention an anonymous note, I knew she hadn’t received one. There was no point in upsetting her by telling her about mine.

“Well, see you around,” I said.

“Sure, Joe,” she said. She sounded even more puzzled.

I hung up.

While I had been phoning, Frank had been preparing a supplemental local bulletin giving the information that the suspect was still believed to be in town, and asking all officers to be on the lookout for him. He showed it to me, and when I agreed with the wording, he got it out.

“Let’s go talk to the skipper,” I said.

We went in to see Lieutenant Newton. As it was now well past 6:00 p.m., Captain Hertel had gone home and the night-watch commander was in charge.

After showing the lieutenant the anonymous note and explaining what we had done about it, I said, “Harriet Shaffer hasn’t received a similar one, but the suspect knows from the news item that she put a bullet in him, too. We think she ought to have some protection.”

The lieutenant thoughtfully scratched an ear. “Think she’d accept it?”

I said, “We are going to suggest not asking her. Just put her under protective surveillance until we net this guy.” Lieutenant Newton nodded. “Might be best. I’ll check with Chief Brown and see what he says. I think he’s still around.”

“Might suggest stakeouts on me, too,” I said. “If this joker’s serious, it’s the best break we’ve had yet. We might catch him in the act of potting at me.”

After thinking this over, the lieutenant said, “Yeah, I guess we better stake you out. This guy is top priority, and we haven’t a whisper on where he’s holed up. But if he means this threat, we know where he might show. Somewhere you are. Stick around while I talk to the chief.”

He rose from his desk and walked off down the hall to the chief of detectives’ office. He was gone only about ten minutes.

“All set up,” he said when he walked back into the office. “The chief’s on the phone arranging it now. We figure he won’t try to take you while you’re on duty, but he might at your place, or en route to work or home. So starting tonight, you’ll be under surveillance every minute you’re off duty. There’ll be three triplex-radio cars tailing you to and from work, alternating every few blocks so that the suspect won’t tab them as tails. They’ll also be on you whenever you leave home during off-duty hours. To make it easy for them, we want you to phone in ten minutes before you leave your place any time you plan to go anywhere off-duty, even if it’s only down to the corner for a paper. That’ll give Communications time to alert the stakeouts, and eliminate the chance of a slipup.”

I nodded. It didn’t occur to any of us that there was anything strange about an armed police officer suggesting and getting this type of protection against a lone bandit. It was simply normal routine. It’s only in western stories that lawmen go up against killers man-to-man. In dealing with a dangerous criminal, you can’t play Marquis of Queensberry rules. You use every facility you have.

Even with stakeouts following me around, it wasn’t an even contest. On the surface the odds were all on my side. I was backed by an army of 4,400 police officers, armed with the finest law-enforcement equipment in the world. My opponent was a lone man, hunted and in danger of being recognized every time he stepped outdoors.

That was only on the surface, though. I was a known quantity to the suspect; he was an unknown one to me. If he didn’t already know where my Westlake-district apartment was, he could find out by the simple method of looking in a city directory. Without much difficulty he could learn my daily routine: the time I left for work, the route over which I drove my Ford to the Police Building, the time I usually arrived home after work. He had the advantage of being able to pick his time and place. A single shot from a recessed doorway when I stopped for a traffic light would end the contest.

On the other hand, I had no idea where to look for him. I had seen him but once, fleetingly, at night. I knew practically nothing about him, except that he was a killer. Not even his name.

It was a little like fighting a wraith.