The Case of the Crime King

Chapter 7

Christmas and New Year’s passed. January drifted into February and February into March.

On Wednesday, March 19th, at 3:32 p.m., Frank and I were driving down Sunset Boulevard on our way back to the office after interviewing a robbery witness in Hollywood. Frank was just slowing for the stop at Vermont Avenue when the radio sounded off.

“Attention, all units. All units in the vicinity of Vermont Avenue and Fountain Avenue. Two-eleven in progress at Dane’s Liquor Store, corner of Vermont and Fountain avenues. Witness reports lone WMA armed with pistol holding up store. Units Six-A-Seventy-seven and Six-A-Eighty-six handle the call. Attention, all units—!” Frank gave his horn button a push and swung right through the stop. At the same moment I pulled the transmission microphone from its bracket and called in, “Unit Nine-K-Two to Control One. Nine-K-Two to Control One.”

“Go ahead, Nine-K-Two,” the reply came.

“We are answering call at Vermont and Fountain avenues. We are one block from the scene.”

“Control One to Nine-K-Two. Roger.”

I hung up the microphone just as Frank swung into the curb a dozen feet this side of the liquor store. As we spilled out of either side of the car, a man wearing a tan leather jacket walked rapidly from the door of the establishment. He was of medium build, with a thin, weak-chinned face. He was about thirty years old. One hand was thrust inside the opening of his jacket.

Frank and I simultaneously drew our guns. I called, “Police officers, mister. Hold it right there.”

His hand came from inside his jacket, gripping a small-caliber revolver. I dropped to one knee just as he fired, felt the bullet pluck at the crown of my hat. My answering shot was echoed by one from Frank’s gun a microsecond later.

Both bullets hit the suspect, their impact causing him to trot backward on his heels for several steps. Then he sat heavily, let out a groan, and toppled over on his side.

I got to the man first. With one foot I kicked his fallen gun to Frank, who scooped it up and dropped it into a pocket. I knelt over him just as two radio cars screeched to a halt from opposite directions.

By the time I rose again, Frank had identified himself to the four uniformed policemen who had come in the cars, and they were putting their guns away.

I said, “He’s dead.”

Frank looked at the dead man and slowly holstered his gun. “Which one was it, Joe?” he asked in a low voice.

“Which what?”

“Which bullet?”

I looked at him, and saw that while his face was expressionless, it was slightly pale.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe both.”

The proprietor of the store came outside then, but it was some minutes before he calmed down enough to give us a coherent story. Meantime, a crowd was gathering. The four uniformed policemen began to disperse the crowd while Frank called in a report over the radio and I questioned the proprietor.

There wasn’t much to the story. The liquor-store owner said the suspect had entered the store about ten minutes earlier, had asked for a bottle of whisky, then had pulled a gun and held him up. The owner had given him seventy-two dollars from the cash register. He said he had never before seen the dead man, and had no idea who he was.

A check of the body disclosed that the suspect had thrust the seventy-two dollars into one of his jacket pockets. There was also three dollars in his wallet and a little change in another pocket. Papers in the wallet identified him as Gerald Federson and gave his address as a rooming house near New Chinatown.

An ambulance arrived to pick up the body. Frank and I climbed back into Unit 9K2 and resumed our trip to the Police Building.

We drove along in silence for a few moments. Then Frank said tentatively, “Joe?”

“Yeah?” I said.

“You think maybe we could have taken him alive?”

“How?” I asked.

“Well, shot at his arm, for instance. It all happened so fast, I aimed right for his belt buckle.”

“So did I,” I told him. “Think you could have hit his arm?”

Frank was silent for a time. Then he said, “What bothers me is I didn’t try.”

“Both bullets were in his chest,” I said. “We both shot high. If we’d tried for his arm, we’d have missed him altogether.”

Frank glanced sidewise at me. “That right?”

“Yeah.”

Belatedly remembering the bullet that had plucked at my hat, I took it off and looked at it. It had two neat holes in the crown, one at the front and one at the back. I stuck my finger through the front one from inside and held it up for Frank to see.

Frank didn’t say anything when he glanced at it. But he suddenly looked relieved.

4:17 p.m. Back at the Police Building, we checked the name Gerald Federson through R & I. We drew a blank. We got off a teletype to C.I.I. in Sacramento to have them check it.

Ordinarily a liquor-story robbery would have been the business of Sergeant Henry, who was in charge of the Gas Station and Liquor Store Detail. But we don’t hold rigidly to our particular specialties in Robbery Division. If a purse-snatching case came in while Frank and I weren’t busy, and the Street Jobs Detail was up to its neck, we’d take it. If we were snowed under, the other details would give us a hand. In cases where a team of officers accidentally got in on the ground floor of a crime that was actually the business of some other detail, it was customary for them to follow it through instead of transferring it to the proper detail. So Gerald Federson remained our case.

Behind a cellophane window in the front of the dead mans wallet was an identification card that had apparently come with the wallet. It had been filled out in ink. One of the sections was headed In Case of Accident or Serious Illness, Notify:

In the space below this was written the name Lester Federson and a San Francisco address.

We did not immediately wire San Francisco, however. First we had to establish that the dead man was actually Gerald Federson, and had not simply been carrying the wallet of another man. We climbed back into 9K2 and drove over to the rooming house listed as the suspect’s address.

A plump, untidy-looking woman of about sixty answered our ring. It was now past 5:00 p.m., so presumably she’d been up all day, but she was still wearing a soiled housecoat. If it hadn’t been for her abundant but sagging bosom, we might have taken her for a man, for her hair was cropped short in a masculine cut and she had a noticeable mustache.

I showed my ID and said, “Police officers, ma’am. You the landlady here?”

She studied the ID suspiciously before nodding. “What’s the trouble, Officer?”

I said, “This is my partner, Sergeant Smith. My name’s Friday. May we come in?”

“Why not?” she inquired. “I got nothing to hide. I run a respectable place here.”

She led us into a dim sitting room furnished with Victorian furniture, littered newspapers, and dust. It looked as though it hadn’t been cleaned for a month. The woman introduced herself as Miss Martha Gresher, emphasizing the “Miss.” She offered seats, but we decided it would be more sanitary to stand.

“You have a roomer named Gerald Federson staying here, ma’am?” I asked.

Martha Gresher considered the question before saying, “Well, yes and no.”

“How do you mean, ma’am?”

“His clothes are staying here, but he’s not at the moment. His door’s locked.”

I said, “I don’t think I follow.”

“He’s two weeks back in rent,” the woman explained. “If he shows up with some money tonight, he’ll be staying here again.”

Frank and I exchanged glances. Frank said, “Can you describe him, ma’am?”

“Why?” she asked. “What’s he done?”

“We’re just making an inquiry,” Frank said. “Can you describe him?”

The woman shrugged. “Why not? About thirty. Average build. Thin face with hardly any chin. Think he was wearing a leather jacket when he left this morning. What’s this all about?”

I said, “Would you mind getting dressed, ma’am, and riding down to the Hall of Justice with us? We won’t keep you long.”

“The Hall of Justice?” she said. “That’s not where Police Headquarters is.”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “It’s where the morgue is.”

6:32 p.m. We took the landlady to the morgue in the basement of the Hall of Justice and had her observe the suspect through the viewing window. She identified him as Gerald Federson. We then drove her back home. With her permission we made a routine search of the dead man’s room.

It was Frank who found the letters. They were in the top bureau drawer. He stood reading them in silence, then said, “Joe.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“Take a look at these.”

I crossed the room and he handed me a sheaf of about fifteen pages of letter paper. Creases in the paper indicated that they had been folded to go into envelopes and after being received had been straightened out and packed flat in the drawer. Apparently the envelopes they had come in had been destroyed, as there was no sign of them in the room.

There were five letters all together, all in the same handwriting and all addressed to “Dear Gery,” who presumably was Gerald Federson. Because the envelopes were missing, there was no way of telling from where they had been mailed. The letters were signed simply with the initial M.

The script was even and highly legible, the lines moving across the pages with mathematical precision even though it was unlined paper. The writing was highly literate. The grammar was perfect and the vocabulary unusually good. And not strained, as though the writer were parading his education. Complex words and phrases were used with easy naturalness.

The possibility that someone other than the addressee might accidentally see the letters had obviously occurred to the writer. They weren’t exactly in code, but their meaning had been obscured as much as possible by reference to matters an outsider wouldn’t know about.

I read the letter on top of the stack first, which was the one most recently received. It was dated only two weeks earlier.