The Case of the Poisoned Eclairs

5

The L. A. Cops

Masuto stopped off for a hamburger and a cup of coffee, and he had them wrap two and fill a container of coffee for Beckman. Knowing Beckman, he knew that it would make no appreciable difference to Beckman’s appetite if he had brought a sandwich to the vigil. For Beckman to sit in the car, preserving a sandwich for some future dinner hour, was unthinkable. He turned out to have been right.

“I’m starved,” was the first thing Beckman said to him.

“I brought you two hamburgers and coffee.”

“With pickles?”

“With pickles.”

“You know,” Beckman said as he unwrapped the first hamburger, “under that cold, inscrutable shell of yours, you got heart.”

“I’m relieved to know that. What happened?”

“You mean with the kid or here?”

“First the kid.”

“Well, we rounded up a couple of kids near the bakery, and they identified him. Jesus Consolo, fourteen years old. A good kid. Never got into any trouble, no dope, tenth grade, good marks. The L.A. investigators matched it up with a missing report, and I let them break the news to his parents. I’m no good for that kind of thing. I got a fourteen-year-old kid of my own, Masao, and I swear if I ever find that lunatic bastard-”

“No, you won’t. Now what about the kids who identified him? Did they see anything?”

“Nothing, nothing-nothing until it stinks. This bastard leaves no loose ends.”

“They all leave loose ends.”

“I sure as hell hope so.”

“And what about here?”

“Well, when I got here, I rang the bell and told Mrs. Crombie that I’d be here in the car. She wasn’t crazy about the idea, and I asked her about the three other women, just to make sure they were inside.”

“Were they?”

“Yeah, they’re there. I told her to bolt the back door and to call me in case anyone came to the back door. That’s it. All quiet as a graveyard.”

“Good. Patch in a call to your wife and tell her you won’t be home tonight.”

“What? She’ll skin me.”

“I want you to stay overnight in the Crombie house.”

“You’re putting me on.”

“Dead serious. I’m going to convince all four women to remain there overnight and I want you to stay with them.”

“And that’s what I tell my wife-that I’m sleeping in Beverly Hills with four dames?”

“If you want to be perfectly honest.”

“Masao,” Beckman said seriously, “I think you’re a little nutty with this one. They don’t need me there overnight. They lock the doors and the windows. Every one of these Beverly Hills houses has a burglar alarm system.”

“I need you there.”

“You’re a heartless bastard.”

“Am I? Locking you up with four lovely women-that’s what every red-blooded American boy dreams of, or so I’m told.”

“Okay, okay. When will you be back?”

“Before ten. Just hang in.”

“I still don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to do if someone comes to the door.”

“Just find out who he is and what he wants. You don’t keep him or her out. Let Mrs. Crombie decide about that.”

Masuto’s radio phone was speaking to him as he drove off. Wainwright’s voice was demanding, “Where the hell are you, Masao?”

“Turning a corner two blocks away.”

“Well, get over here. Do you know what time it is? It’s eight o’clock, and I’m sitting here on my butt when I should be home eating a decent dinner, and I’m sitting here because the Los Angeles cops are sore as hell. They want your scalp and they want me here when they take it.”

“I’ll be there in two minutes.”

“What in hell have you been up to?”

“Two minutes.”

Masuto pulled into his parking space on Rexford Drive and went inside. Wainwright was pacing in front of Masuto’s office. “What’s this all about?” he snapped.

“I don’t know. I have to call my wife.”

“So help me, Masao, if there’s one thing a crummy little police force like ours can’t afford, it’s a ruckus with the L.A. cops. Not now. Not with the city refusing to shell out a nickel for new equipment. We depend on those miserable bastards. I don’t want them to mark us lousy.”

“Who did you talk to?”

“A lieutenant, Pete Bones. He’s coming up here with a Captain Kennedy.”

“Pete’s an old friend.”

“He didn’t sound like a friend, old or new.”

“Let’s take it easy and wait until they get here. Meanwhile, I have to call Kati, or I’ll have more trouble than the Los Angeles cops could ever give me.”

Masuto went into his office and dialed his home number. The first thing Kati said was, “Your dinner has spoiled.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t think you are. I think it’s something you’re saying. There are other policemen in the world and they work from nine to five and they see their children and their wives.”

“You haven’t gone to that women’s consciousness-raising session yet?”

“I’m going tonight. I thought you would be here. Then when I realized you would not be here, I telephoned Suzi Asata, and she will be my baby sitter. I will have to pay her five dollars. I don’t think it ought to come out of my household money. I think it ought to come out of your pocket.”

“I agree with you,” he said meekly.

“You do?”

“Yes. Why should that surprise you?”

“Oh, Masao, why do you make me so angry?”

“I don’t think you’re really angry.”

“Please tell me that you will not do anything dangerous tonight.”

“I promise you.”

“And what will you do?”

“Only talk to some ladies.”

“Stop teasing me. Why must you always tease me?”

“I’m not teasing. I promise to tell you the whole story when I see you. I am not talking to these ladies for pleasure. I am talking to them because they are part of this case I am on.”

“I sometimes think that it is always a pleasure for you to talk to American ladies.”

“Kati, I love you.”

“Well-”

“Believe me. And how are the children?”

“Someday you will see them and decide for yourself.”

He put down the phone as Polly entered. She was still small, blonde, and pretty. “I stayed an extra hour waiting for you, Masao.”

“Oh?”

“I’m not making a pass. I’m saving that until you get divorced.”

“I have no intention of getting divorced,” he said severely.

“Baloney. All cops get divorced. Their wives can’t put up with them. Anyway, we can save that discussion for another time. What I got for you now is a very funny phone call.”

“Tell me about it.”

“First place, foreign accent but phony.”

“How do you know it was phony?”

She shrugged. “You watch enough TV, you know. He says to me, Who’s on the poisoned candy case? Me, nobody tells me anything. I just answer the phone, and everything else I do, which is practically everything around here, it’s guess-work. So I ask for his name, and he says Horst Brandt, to go with the phony German accent.”

“Address?”

“Just as phony, I’m sure.” She took a slip of paper from her purse and read him the address. It had a familiar ring, and Masuto consulted his notebook. It was Alice Greene’s address on Roxbury Drive.

“Does it mean something?” Polly asked him.

“Maybe. Maybe not. You’re sure he said candy? Nothing about eclairs?”

“What eclairs? Candy, eclairs. Nobody tells me a thing around here.”

“And you’re sure it was a man’s voice, not a woman’s?”

She stared at him in disgust. “What am I, Masao, a jerk, a nut? A man’s voice. I told you that.”

“I’m sorry. Go on.”

“So I tell him that if it’s a homicide case, it’s Sergeant Masuto’s department. Then he says, ‘Masuto? You mean that Jap plainclothes cop?’ He sort of forgets his accent too, and believe me, I get plenty steamed with that kind of talk and I’m ready to tell him to buzz off and sell his apples somewhere else, but I got enough sense to know that it may be important, so I tell him, yes, but we don’t talk about people that way, and then he wants to talk to you, and I tell him you’re not in but expected.”

“Very interesting,” Masuto said.

“Okay, I’m going. But if you don’t tell me what this is all about tomorrow, I won’t talk to you again.”

“Promise. And thank you, Polly. Thank you for waiting.”

“You can say that again.”

For a few minutes after she had left, Masuto sat at his desk and stared at the door facing him. He was still staring at it when Wainwright opened the door and said shortly, “They’re here. In my office.”

Masuto followed Wainwright into the captain’s office. Bones and Kennedy were seated. They made no move to rise, nor did they smile or do any more than nod their heads coldly. Kennedy was the very image of a proper Los Angeles cop, about forty-five, trim, handsome, sandy hair, cold blue eyes.

Bones opened the conversation by saying, “God damn you, Masuto, we dragged our asses up here for your cute tricks, Like we got nothing else to do with our time.”

Watching Masuto, Wainwright saw his dark eyes harden, his mouth tighten. He had fought for Masuto before, and he often said that Masuto was the best cop he had on his force, but he also knew that Masuto was unpredictable. Whereby he stepped into the moment of silence and said, “Now, hold on, Bones. I don’t know what you and Kennedy are so pissed off at, but you’re in our town, and that calls for a little bit of restraint. So suppose you tell us what this is all about and we’ll save the name-calling.”

“I’ll tell you what it’s all about,” Kennedy said coldly. “Today this joker-” nodding at Masuto-“comes downtown to get the advice of our poison lab, which we don’t begrudge him, and then he goes to Pete here and tells Pete that a chemist whom he doesn’t identify but who has a criminal record is going to be murdered. Then he walks out, and then two hours later the man is murdered. Now what in hell goes on? You don’t want us to be pissed off? He’s your cop. Why the hell aren’t you pissed off?”

Masuto watched Wainwright, who was trying to repress a smile. “How does it stand?” Wainwright asked. “Do you think Masuto killed him?”

“It could be.”

“All right,” Wainwright said tiredly. “You drove all the way up here from downtown and I missed my dinner and my wife is sore as hell. As far as Sergeant Masuto is concerned, when he left headquarters downtown, he drove up to Mulholland Drive. He was there for almost an hour, and then he came here. So how the hell could he kill your goddamn chemist? Anyway, I got cause to be pissed off, the two of you coming up here sore as hell because I got a cop on my force smart enough to figure out that something is going to happen!”

Bones started to say something, and Wainwright cut him off. “Also, I don’t like nobody coming here and accusing one of my men. I’ll match my force against any.”

“Just a minute, before we say a lot of things we’re going to regret. Nobody accused anyone. You asked us if we thought Masuto had killed him. You got to admit, it’s goddamn strange. Also, what about this killing up on Mulholland? Your man Beckman practically gets into a fight with our cops-they shouldn’t touch the body until Masuto gets there. Who the hell is Masuto? The body was in Los Angeles, not in Beverly Hills, and your men come bulling in there and pushing us around.”

Wainwright turned to Masuto. “What about it, Masao?”

Masuto spoke slowly and chose his words carefully. The last thing in the world he desired at this moment was a feud with the Los Angeles police. “Perhaps Beckman was assertive. It’s the way he works. But he doesn’t push people around, certainly not Los Angeles policemen. No one does. I think Captain Kennedy knows that. It’s quite true that the boy’s body was in Los Angeles, but he wasn’t killed there. His body was dumped out of a car. We think the boy was involved in a murder case, and the killer executed him to get rid of a witness.”

“What murder case?”

Masuto spelled out the events of the day, detail for detail. When he had finished, there was a long moment of silence, and then Kennedy said, “And what about the chemist?”

“We are dealing here,” Masuto said, “with a pure botulism toxin, not with decayed food, but with the toxin that the botulinus produces. Your man at the poison lab assured me that only a trained chemist could produce it. Well, what kind of a chemist would risk his freedom and career to produce a deadly poison-a poison which he would have to surmise would be used to kill people? What kind of a chemist would be vulnerable? Almost certainly a chemist mixed up in the dope rackets. The odds are that he would have a criminal record. My own guess is that we are dealing with a killer who is indifferent to human life and allows nothing to stand in his way. He gets rid of witnesses. That’s why he killed the Chicano kid, so my analysis was not entirely fortuitous. I guessed that sooner or later he would kill the chemist. He tried the botulism, and it failed. Now, something else. Was the chemist killed with a twenty-two pistol?”

“That’s right,” Bones said grudgingly.

“Shot behind the ear?”

“Yes.”

“No sound of the shot?”

“No, no sound of a shot,” Kennedy said.

“Have you got anything?”

“Not a damn thing. The chemist’s name is Leroy Kender. He served time for refining horse. Then he was picked up for angel dust, but that didn’t stick. He lived alone in a furnished room on Sixth Street. He had almost nine hundred dollars in his pocket, so it wasn’t robbery.”

“It wasn’t robbery,” Masuto said. “This one doesn’t touch the money in his victims’ pockets.”

“That’s rich blood,” Kennedy said.

“Very rich. Fingerprints?”

“We’ll have plenty of fingerprints. But what the hell good are fingerprints unless you got something to match them with?” Kennedy asked.

“This one doesn’t leave fingerprints. But you have something to match if you want it,” Masuto said.

“What’s that?”

“The bullet that killed the Chicano boy you found on Mulholland and the bullet that killed the chemist. I have a notion they’ll match up.”

“Okay,” Kennedy said. “I’m glad you leveled with us, Masuto. Maybe we had a reason to be sore, maybe not. If you catch up with this killer-well, we got our own case against him.”

“I’ll stay in touch,” Masuto said.

“And keep us informed,” Wainwright said. “We’re in this together.”

When the two Los Angeles cops had left, Wainwright shook his head and said, “One day, Masao, you’ll get us in deep, and I swear when you do I’ll let you fry in your own juice. Where’s Beckman?”

“Sitting in his car outside the Crombie place.”

“On overtime.”

“Yes.” Then he added, “I have the four women there.”

“Where?”

“In the Crombie house. I had Laura Crombie bring them over.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to talk to them. Because someone is trying to kill them, and if it happens it won’t do this city’s image one bit of good.”

“You really think someone’s trying to kill four dames whose only crime is that they live in Beverly Hills?”

“He’s killed three people already.”

“I got to call my wife,” Wainwright said.

Masuto went downstairs. He came out of the building and paused for a moment under the light at the entrance. He never heard the shot, only felt a hot pain at the side of his chin, as if a bee had stung him. As he put his hand up to his face, he heard the roar of a motor, and across the street a dark car shot away.

There was blood on his hand.

A prowl car had just parked, and the officer leaped out and ran over to him. “What happened, Sarge?”

“A bullet nicked me,” Masuto said.

“I didn’t hear a shot.”

“He uses a silencer. Look around a bit, Cowley. See if you can find the bullet. A little slug, a twenty-two. It might be embedded in the door.”

“I ought to get after him.”

“We don’t know who he is or where he went,” Masuto said gently. “Look for the bullet.” Then he went back into the building.

Wainwright was just putting down the phone. “What in hell happened to you?” he demanded.

“I have been shot.”

“Let me look at it. Yeah, it just nicked your cheek. Where do they keep the peroxide?”

“In the john.”

Wainwright swabbed out the cut and put a Band-Aid across it. “You say he was in his car across the street. That has got to be sixty feet, and with a twenty-two pistol, he is cne hell of a shot, maybe an impossible shot.”

“He could have had a shoulder brace or it could have been a target gun this time, maybe a rifle. Or maybe just laying the pistol on the door of his car to steady it. Or he might have been aiming for my chest.”

“Which would still be pretty damn good shooting.”

“It would.”

“Why you?” Wainwright asked. “If it’s the same guy?”

“It is.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because he called and spoke to Polly, and she told him I was handling the case.”

“That’s stupid!”

“No-he might have had information. How was she to know? I’m the one who’s stupid. He knows a lot about us. Well, now I know something about him.”

“What, if I may ask?”

“He-it-the killer is a man. He’s an expert pistol shot. He drives a Mercedes.”

“So do half the people in Beverly Hills. But why a Mercedes? You said you couldn’t see the car, just that it was dark.”

“I know that sound. There’s a particular sound when you gun a Mercedes. Also, he’s rich.”

“Not uncommon in this town.”

“And he has an enormous ego and a complicated but childish mind. The botulism, for example. Not brilliant, not even clever, but complicated. Also-and this I think is where I’ll get him-he has killed before.”

“You mean the chemist and the Chicano kid?”

“No-no. There’s killing somewhere in his past that we don’t know about.”

As Masuto was leaving, Wainwright called after him, “Masao, be careful.”

“I am always careful,” Masuto said.