Dell Shannon - Mark of Murder

"Yes,” he said. "It does feel rather like that."

"Mairi says to tell you to get a proper dinner somewhere." Alison uttered a little laugh.

"I will if I have time."

"And El Senor broke that jardiniere you don't like. The green one the Mawsons gave us for a wedding present. He knocked it over quite deliberately--"

"?Senor Comedido!" said Mendoza. "How tactful of him… I don't know when I'll see you, amante. Take care… " He put the phone down and said to Sergeant Lake, "Get me a gun somewhere, will you? And a cup of coffee if you can."

"See what I can do," said Lake, and got up. In the doorway he collided with Lieutenant Goldberg of Burglary, just coming in.

"Well, and what can we do for you, Saul?" asked Mendoza. Goldberg asked first about Hackett and shook his head at the latest report. "It's more the other way around, I'm afraid. I just thought it'd be neighborly to mention it, in case anything does happen."

"Make it short, we've got quite a night's project mapped 0ut."

"Well," said Goldberg, "there was a break-in last night at a gunsmith's shop over on Spring. Quite a lot of stuff gone, and-"

"Your problem," said Mendoza.

"It could turn into yours. I don't like it," said Goldberg. "All they took was guns-and the hell of a lot of ammo for them. There was other valuable stuff there-he had a color TV in the back room he was keeping for his wife's birthday, and he does a side line in transistor radios, there were about twenty of those. And he'd left a few bucks in the register. Well, the first thing a burglar looks for is cash, usually. But all somebody, or several somebodies, was interested in, was guns. We've been all round the suspected fences and pawnbrokers today, and not a smell has turned up. Which makes it look as if whoever the somebodies were, they just wanted guns-as guns."

"Oh,” said Mendoza. "I begin not to like it too. My God, on top of-"

"Listen to the list," said Goldberg, unfolding a sheet of paper. "They or whoever took an old Springfield. 22 rifle, a Ruger Standard Single-Six. 22, an S. and W.. 357 Magnum, a. 38 CoIt Trooper, an Iver-Johnson Supershot. 22, a Whitney Lightning. 22 automatic, and three of the gunsmith's own target revolvers-he's a pro shot-a CoIt Python. 357 Magnum, a CoIt Cfficers' Match Model. 38 revolver, and an S. and W. Target. 45. And about twenty rounds of ammo for all nine guns."

"?Santa Maria! " said Mendoza. "Is he starting a little private war?"

"That may be too close for comfort," said Goldberg soberly. "Tell you what just crossed my mind-a gang of juveniles. Planning a rumble with something new added."

"?Por Dios! And you could be right," said Mendoza. "God, on top of all the rest of this- We can only hope, if that's so, the rumble isn't planned for tonight. Thanks for the warning, anyway."

"I could be just woolgathering," said Goldberg, sneezing and groping for the inevitable Kleenex. "Just thought you ought to know. All but one of them handguns, you know, and all that ammo-"

"Yes indeed."

Sergeant Lake came back and handed Mendoza a. 38 Police Special, a shoulder holster, and a box of ammunition.

"Hey, what's up?” said Goldberg. "You never pack a gun unless it's something damn serious."

"I think," said Mendoza, taking off his jacket, "we're on damn serious business tonight, Saul."

Nobody else thought so for quite a while. Dwyer said to Scarne, "Work our tails off on an all-night job, just because he gets a wild hunch! There's nothing to say the Slasher's holed up in that area. Why just that area?"

"First cast," said Scarne gloomily, "I guess."

"My God, sure, we sweat it out all night and don't find him because he's a block outside the line our Luis drew on the map!"

But Mendoza was the one who gave the orders. They set it up, with the fifty-six men from Traffic and those available in the homicide office-Dwyer, Scarne, Palliser, Piggott, Landers-and Higgins and Galeano would be in later.

There were some residential streets in the area they were covering, but more of it was business. The residential streets were shabby and poor, and a lot of those old houses had derelict shacks built at the rear of the lots; a few still had henhouses standing from years back before the town was a city. But along the main drags-San Pedro, Main, Los Angeles, Third and Second, First and Temple-were many kinds of small business and some large: a solid block of warehouses, some, they discovered, empty. Store owners were called, keys to the empty buildings were sent for, the men were briefed. They assigned one crew of men, in pairs, to two-square-block sections, and started them out. It was, of course, very unlikely that their boy was holed up in a private residence; but if there was an empty house somewhere even that was possible.

They got the men all down there by five-thirty, with seven cars roaming at random, and the operation started. Dwyer, paired off with Landers, was still grumbling. They were let out of a squad car with the other two men, both uniformed, who were on this particular block with them; Dwyer looked at the building on the corner, a four-story warehouse, blank-faced. "Hell of a waste of time," he said. "Just because Mendoza the brain gets a hunch-"

"Hey, I've heard of him," said one of the uniformed men interestedly. "Is this one of his deals?"

"One of his wild deals. We're supposed to look for an open window or something this boy could have got in by-but I've got the keys. You go round to the side and look, and then come back."

In many streets other men were dropped, began their search. They made polite requests of householders and shopkeepers; in almost all cases they met no resistance. Over on Stevens Street, Officers Carlson and Ramirez ran into a belligerent householder who tried to start a fight, so they hailed a patrol car, put him in it to cool, went through the house, and found several hundred gallons of homemade beer in the garage. But there weren't many cases like that.

The dogs and their handlers arrived. By that time the word had got out that a mass raid of cops was in the neighborhood, and people came out to stare, form little crowds. The dogs fascinated them, of course.

And then it was getting on for eight-thirty, and the dark had come down full, not insidiously and reasonably as it does elsewhere; the sky changed from pink-streaked silver blue to full dark within fifteen minutes, and after that the dark was studded with the men's flashlights, little eyes of light moving along the sidewalks, and, here and there where a house or building was empty, moving past windows inside.

Mendoza was over on Temple Street with Palliser then. "For God's sake," he said to the driver of a squad car at the curb, "can't we get these people off the streets?" Little knots of people stood about, at front doors, under street lights. "They've been warned-they ought to know-"

"You think he might try another one, with all this force out and about?"

"We don't know," said Mendoza. "With one like that, who can say?"

"Well, we can tell 'em to go home," said the driver, "but it's supposed to be a free country." He gunned the car up to the nearest little group, got out, and began to talk to them.

That kind of job was always a tiresome one; at the same time, tonight, the men were all a little keyed up at the thought that they might, just might, find themselves unexpectedly facing the Slasher

…

It was ten twenty-three when Patrolmen McLelland and Leslie, both of the Wilcox Street station, came out of an ancient brick office building on Los Angeles Street and paused to light cigarettes. The office building was on a corner, and a little wind had got up; they went round the side of the building to get their lights, and Leslie said, "Half these old places ought to be knocked down. Did you see the state of those lavatories?"