The Case of the Crime King

Chapter 16

As a result of Captain Peters’ conference with Chief Brown, Martin and Strife were put back under round-the-clock surveillance. A search warrant was obtained, and their apartment was given a thorough shakedown for weapons and for the false noses with attached glasses frames that the bandits had worn.

Nothing was found. The surveillance had no result, either. It was almost as though the suspects knew they were under close observation and were carefully refraining from making contact with their confederates.

Captain Peters also talked by phone with the Attorney General’s office. It was decided to resume the original stakeouts on all the suspects throughout the state who were on the list of possible gang members.

Unfortunately only about half of them could now be located.

On Saturday, April 19th, a robbery team consisting of one man of average size and one tall, lean man about six feet one hit two supermarkets in downtown Los Angeles within an hour, both at closing time. One of the markets closed at 8:00 p.m., the other at 9:00. In both cases the manager was accosted as he approached his car after locking up for the night, was forced at gunpoint to reopen the door and open the safe.

Also, in both cases the suspects wore false noses attached to glasses frames, and bound their victims with adhesive tape before leaving. It was some hours after the crimes before the victims struggled loose from their bonds and reported the robberies.

The total take from both scores came to $7,000.

The physical descriptions of neither man came anywhere close to Big Julie or Harry Strite. Besides, they had iron-clad alibis for the period in question. They had been dining together in a restaurant under the eyes of a police stakeout.

One suspect fitted the description of Maury Wey. The other, the tall, lean man, was described as having a large purple birthmark on the left side of his neck. Stat’s turned a number of possibles who had similar marks, but all checked out clean.

None of the twenty-four men on the list of possible gang members we had compiled fitted the description.

It was Frank who came up with the idea that gave us our only real lead. We had just checked in on Monday morning when the thought hit him.

“Hey, Joe,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Remember way back when Martin and Strite pulled that first supermarket job? The place on Sunset. What was the guy’s name?”

“Dehelvey,” I said. “James Dehelvey.”

“Yeah. And remember how sure we were that some pal of Martin and Strife’s had gotten to Dehelvey and scared him out of testifying?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, doesn’t it seem logical that a guy who was that good a friend of theirs would be a member of this gang?”

“Possibly. What are you getting at?”

“Maybe we ought to pay Mr. Dehelvey a visit.”

“Why?” I asked. “He wouldn’t talk before.”

“He might now if we offered him immunity. Told him we just wanted the dope off-the-record, and wouldn’t pull him into court to testify.”

After mulling this over, I said, “Worth a try, anyway. Let’s roll.”

9:01 a.m. We found James Dehelvey giving instructions to his meat-cutter when we arrived. He greeted us with polite surprise, then asked us to wait until he finished his instructions. When he was finally through with the meat-cutter, he turned to us and said briskly, “Well, Officers? What is it this time?”

“Afraid it’s the same old thing, sir,” I said. “We’d like to talk to you about your robbery again.”

He frowned. “I thought that was finished and done with long ago.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “We’re not going to rake up the case again. But we have reason to believe the same men are responsible for several similar recent crimes. It might help if you gave us some off-the-record information.”

“About what?”

“About whoever it was who threatened you.”

He thought this over. “You guarantee I won’t have to testify to anything in court?” he asked.

Frank said, “All we’re after is information for our own use.”

“But if I told you, even after all this time, that the two men you arrested were really the robbers, wouldn’t you have to bring them to trial and call me as a witness?”

“Yes, if you admitted it,” I told him honestly.

“Then I won’t admit it.”

Frank said patiently, “We’re not asking you to admit anything. All we want is information about the man who threatened you. We’ll keep it confidential.”

He thought some more, finally said, “I guess that’s fair enough.”

He told us the whole story then. He said that shortly after his visit to the Police Building on the occasion he had tentatively picked out Big Julie Martin’s picture, he got a phone call at the store. A man’s voice he did not recognize told him to go to the front door and look across the street. Then the man hung up.

Puzzled, Dehelvey had gone to the front door, opened it, and looked in all directions. At first he saw nothing out of the way. Then he glanced upward and got a shock. Above the store immediately across the street were some apartments. A rifle barrel protruded from one of the windows, aiming straight at him. Dehelvey said he had stood rooted to the spot, unable to move. Then the rifle was drawn back inside, and a man’s face appeared at the window. It was a lean, dark face, but from that distance Dehelvey couldn’t tell much more than that about it. The man merely stared at him without expression, then drew back from the window.

Dehelvey said he had stumbled back inside and made straight for the phone to call the police. But it rang before he got there. It was the man who had phoned him before.

“You don’t want to yell copper,” the voice said. “It might be fatal.”

Dehelvey said he had been too frightened to do anything except stutter.

The man went on in a cold voice, “We just wanted to show you how easy it would be to put a slug in your skull. When you come out of work — when you leave your flat in the morning — any place. You’d never know when it was coming. Or where.”

Dehelvey managed to ask, “What do you want?”

“Nothing. Just for you to forget all about your robbery. Don’t identify no pictures, don’t identify nobody at a show-up. You’ll do us that favor, won’t you?”

“Why?” Dehelvey asked.

“Because then we’ll do one for you.”

“What?”

“Let you live,” the man said, and hung up.

I interrupted the story long enough to ask him to point out the window the man had been in. Dehelvey led us over to the door and pointed across the street to a second-story window immediately above the street entrance to the flats.

I said, “Excuse us a minute. We’ll be right back.”

Frank and I crossed the street. There was not only no lock to the street entrance, there was no door. It was merely an open doorway leading to the stairs. We climbed to the second floor and walked back along the upper hall to the window. It wasn’t a room window. It overlooked the street from the end of the hallway. On the wall a few feet from it was a pay telephone.

Frank grunted. “Could have been anybody,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “All he had to do was walk in.”

We returned to the supermarket. James Dehelvey continued with his story.

All the rest of that day he had struggled with the problem of whether to risk reporting the incident to the police. Finally he decided to sleep on it. But when he got home he found the decision had been made for him.

In his front room he found the man he had glimpsed in the window. He was comfortably seated on the couch, with his feet on the cocktail table. He had a gun in his hand. Dehelvey said that he had nearly fainted.

“See how easy it would be?” the man said. “You wouldn’t stand a chance. Now, if my friends go up, you know what’s going to happen to you?”

All Dehelvey could do was mutely shake his head.

“You’re going to die,” the man said without emotion. “And if you think you can beat the rap by telling the cops about me, just try it. Even if they got to me, you’d be done. I got friends, too, you see. All the cops in the world couldn’t save you. Got it?”

Dehelvey said, “Yes, sir.”

“That’s all,” the man said. “See you around — you better not hope.”

He rose then, and leisurely left the apartment. Dehelvey said he had never seen him again, but had gotten two more phone calls from him. All the voice said on both occasions was, “We’re still watching you, friend.” Then he hung up.

When Dehelvey finished the story, I started to open my mouth to explain that such threats were seldom carried out and that he should have phoned us immediately. Then I decided it was too late to amend what had already happened, that it was the sort of incident that would probably never again occur to him, so I’d be only wasting my time.

Instead I asked, “Can you describe this man?”

“Sure,” the market owner said. “I’ll never forget that guy as long as I live. He was about thirty years old and tall and thin. I’d say about six-one, and no more than a hundred fifty or sixty pounds. A long, lean face with a dark complexion. Black hair and eyes. And, oh yeah—”

“What?” Frank asked.

“Had a big mottled birthmark on the left side of his neck.”

9:42 a.m. James Dehelvey agreed to come back to the office with us and look at mugg shots. We ran the description and MO of the suspect through the Stat’s Office, and they came up with twenty possibles that they hadn’t given us on the previous run.

Dehelvey said none of them was the man who had threatened him.

He spent another two hours going through mugg books with equal lack of result. We asked if he would be willing to work with Ector Garcia, our Crime Lab artist, in drawing a composite.

“How long will it take?” he wanted to know.

“Depends,” I said. “Sometimes they go fast, sometimes they take hours. You could have some lunch in the cafeteria here, and go to work with him right afterward.”

“Well, if it will help,” he said. “I guess I owe you men something for letting you down last time. They can get by at the store without me for one afternoon.”

We took him upstairs and bought him some lunch, then took him to the Crime Lab and left him with Garcia.

3:31 p.m. Ector Garcia and James Dehelvey came into the squad room. Ector was carrying a completed composite drawing-

Handing it to me, Garcia said, “Says it’s a good likeness.”

The face in the picture was thin, with sunken cheeks. The eyes were close-set and narrow. It wasn’t a pleasant face. If it really resembled the suspect closely, it wasn’t surprising that Dehelvey had been impressed. The man wouldn’t have had a bit of trouble in Hollywood getting villain roles.

We thanked Dehelvey and had him driven back to the supermarket. Then we sent the composite upstairs to be reproduced in quantity and distributed to outside members of the force, to other police departments, and to C.I.I.

On Tuesday, April 21st, two supermarket robberies took place in San Francisco. Again one of the suspects was a tall, lean man with a purple birthmark on the left side of his neck. But this time his companion was a short, heavy-set man. Both, as usual, wore false noses with attached glasses frames.

Three of the names on our list of possibles fit the latter description. All three were among those whose trails couldn’t be picked up when the order to resume the stakeouts on a statewide basis went out.

On Wednesday teletypes came in reporting two more robberies by men wearing false noses attached to glasses frames: one robbery was in Stockton and one in Sacramento. The team combination in the first holdup was the tall man and the one we believed to be Maury Wey. In the second it was the tall man and the heavy-set man again.

Tuesday afternoon at 3:32 Chief Brown called an emergency meeting in his office. Captain Peters, Captain Hertel of Homicide Division, Frank and I were present.