Dell Shannon - Exploit of Death

Lander's Sportabout wasn't air-conditioned and he was perspiring and exhausted when he got home to the Hollywood apartment. The apartment, thank God, was air-conditioned, and Phil-whose parents had christened her Phillipa Rosemary before she decided to be a police-woman-looked cool and comfortable. She had got home just, ahead of him, but she had spent the day in air-conditioning down in the R. and I. office. She was bulging a good deal in the midsection these days; the baby was due at the end of December, and at the end of this month she'd be taking maternity leave and then she could stay home until the end of March. And by that time, he reflected without much enthusiasm, they'd be moved into that claptrap house in Azusa-Azusa, my God, forty miles farther to drive-and her car was eight years old and sooner or later she'd have to have another one, and he wasn't due for a raise until next year-and there'd be the house payments-and a baby-sitter.

"You look as if you had quite a day," said Phil in a concerned voice.

"Well, you look fine," said Landers. He kissed her, his cute little blond Phil with the freckles on her nose. "The rat race. I need a drink before dinner."

"It's just cold cuts and potato salad and odds and ends, unless you'd like a hamburger."

"That's fine. I'll fix us some drinks and we can take our time."

THE BRAWL in the Temple Street bar had been time consuming and took a little sorting out. There was only the one patrolman there and he said apologetically that a couple of witnesses had been long gone before he could get their names. There had been quite a little crowd in the place and most of them excited, but he'd done his best. Both Palliser and Grace had served apprenticeships riding squads and knew how awkward that kind of situation could be. "But. I've got the one who did the knifing. His name's Tony Aguilar." He had the man in cuffs, sitting at one of the battered wooden tables. "I got here just about as it happened. The owner had called in-"

"Because I don't want no trouble." The man leaning on the bar was thickset rather than fat, with a flourishing full black mustache and bushy black eyebrows. He looked nervous. "Tony, he's got a temper on him. He starts to cuss out this guy, I don't know the dude-he just come in off the street-and Tony's started fights before, I don't want no busted furniture and bottles, I says to him, Cool it, Tony, but I see he's about to blow up, and I'm sorry, I don't want to get him in trouble, Tony's a right guy mostly-it's just he's got a temper on him. He's not drunk. You can see he's not drunk. I don't let guys get stoned in here. I run a quiet place."

"All right, Mr.-"

"Perez, I'm Bob Perez."

"Mr. Perez. What were they fighting about, do you know?" asked Grace.

Perez licked his lips. "I'm an honest man," he said irrelevantly. "I don't run no clip joint, boys. It was just a little game of draw-nothing important."

That, of course, spelled out the situation. Unrealistic as it might seem, it was against the law to gamble in public, except inside the racetrack-the only place it was legal around here was down in Gardena where all the cardrooms were located.

Aguilar raised his eyes from the handcuffs and said morosely, "He was cheating. He had cards up his sleeve or something. He took every pot and Diego called him a cheat and quit the game. I was fool enough to stay in, but I'm not fool enough to let him get by with a royal flush when one of the high cards already got played, and I said-"

The dead man still had the knife in his chest, a big hornhandled jackknife.

"You shoulda listened to me, Tony," said Perez mournfully. "Now what's your wife gonna say? So he was a cheat, you didn't have to go and kill him, Tony."

"I didn't mean to kill him, for God's sake."

There were eight or ten other men there standing around watching. The squad-car man had a list of names. "Does anyone know who this is?" asked Grace.

Perez shrugged. "Who knows? He just come in off the street. Had three or four beers and got into the game."

Palliser squatted over the corpse and felt in the pockets, came up with a billfold. There were eighty-four dollars in it and in the first plastic slot a driver's license for Alfredo Delgado. He'd been a moderately handsome man in the mid-thirties, and the address was Brooklyn Avenue in Boyle Heights.

They talked to the other three men who had been in the game, who told the same story.

"Diego who?" asked Grace. "Diego Allesandro. He's a regular here. He left before it happened. He wasn't here," said Perez. "You going to lay a fine on me?"

Grace surveyed him amusedly, brushing his narrow mustache in unconscious imitation of Mendoza. "I don't know, Mr. Perez. It would be up to the district attorney's office, but I don't suppose they'll bother." The token fine, the unrealistic rules weren't going to stop the card games in bars or anywhere else.

"It was just a friendly little game," said Perez uneasily.

"I mean it started out like that, see. The guys don't get to playing cards in here-I mean all the time, I mean it's not a regular thing. Just once in a while. You can tell them, can't you?"I

Grace exchanged a cynical look with Palliser, who shrugged. But it took the rest of the afternoon to clear it away. The morgue wagon came for the body and they took Aguilar down to the jail and booked him, went back to the office. Palliser set the machinery going on the warrant. It would get called murder two and might easily be reduced to plain manslaughter under the circumstances.

Grace typed the report and then they went over to Boyle Heights and talked to Delgado's landlady. He'd been renting a room in an old single-family house. The landlady's name was Bream and she didn't seem very much upset to hear about her roomer. "Wel1, he wasn't here much. I never had much talk with him. Couldn't say if he had any relatives." She agreed indifferently to let them see his room and they looked through drawers and pockets, but found no address book or letters. Delgado had probably been a drifter and somewhere there might be people concerned about him, but there was nothing to say so here. They let it go. And that took them nearly till the end of shift, and thankfully they both left early.

As Palliser drove home, he was thinking vaguely about the way the crime rate was up in Hollywood. But they had an equity in the house, and Trina was a good watchdog. Maybe when he got his next raise they could look somewhere farther out.

And Grace, easily shelving the routine job, was thinking fondly and fatuously about the new baby. The plump brown little boy who would be christened Adam John at the Episcopal Church next Sunday. He'd been worth waiting for.

It was Piggott's night off. Schenke and Conway drifted in together at eight o'clock to the big communal detective office that always seemed so much bigger and emptier at night than when it was full of busy men on day watch.

"What do you bet we'll have a busy night?" said Schenke. "The heat building and the weekend coming up."

The switchboard was shut down. Any calls would be relayed up from the desk downstairs.

Conway assented cheerfully. He had a date set up with his new girl, Marilyn, tomorrow afternoon. They were going to one of the few new movies worth seeing and out to an early dinner at that Italian place on the Strip. She was on the eleven-to-seven shift at Cedars-Sinai. He thought about Marilyn happily. A nice girl, no nonsense to her, perfectly happy to have the date without going all serious. He'd just met her last month when they had that rape case. After his latest couple of girls starting to talk suggestively about real estate prices and what good cooks they were, Marilyn was a joy-pretty, too, with her glossy brown hair and blue eyes. Conway was a good-looking man himself with his regular features and cool gray eyes, which he appreciated without undue vanity.