Dell Shannon - Streets of Death

Mendoza told her about that, and she stared. "I didn’t know that, about him being paralyzed. That’s terrible. She never said a thing, and she’s worked here nearly six months. But you don’t mean you think she had anything to do with it? Honestly, she’s-she wouldn’t have-that other cop asking if she had boyfriends, that strikes me as silly, honestly-she’s so serious, all business. If you want to know, it’s my guess she’s been awful homesick. That sounds silly too, but I think she is."

Mendoza was slightly taken aback. Cigarette halfway to his mouth, he said, "Why do you say that?"

"Oh, well-she’s quiet like I said, but once we took a break together, and I forget what brought it up, somebody’s birthday I think, but she got to talking about Germany, and her family-someplace they’d gone on a picnic for her sister’s birthday, in the country, and she was all different, sort of gay and laughing hard. She’d never talked about her family to me before. I don’t know what you’re thinking about her, but honestly she’s so straitlaced, I wouldn’t think-"

"Cops don’t tell what they think," said Mendoza absently. The other two waitresses here worked different hours, didn’t know Marta as well even as these two had, and Carey hadn’t got anything out of them. Mendoza didn’t ask to talk to Marta; yesterday, with Carey’s report in his mind, he’d thought he had read her, and been amused at Nick Galeano. Now he took the Ferrari up Vermont Avenue to the office of Dr. Sylvester Toussaint, and used the badge to pull rank again.

Dr. Toussaint, annoyed at having routine interrupted, answered questions briefly. "I hadn’t seen Fleming in sometime, there was nothing I could do for him after all. Nothing anybody could do, poor devil. He was referred to me by the specialist in therapy at the General-he hadn’t had a regular physician, and it was just to keep an eye on him generally. Apart from the paralysis-the spine was almost completely severed-he seems to have made a good adjustment-ah, that is, physically. Quite a healthy specimen. Did I understand you to say he’s disappeared? I don’t see how-"

"Neither do we. He could manipulate the wheelchair by himself?"

"Oh, yes. The couple of times his wife brought him in here-as is often the case, he was developing extra strength in his arms. But," said the doctor, "but how on earth-"

"His wife thinks he’s committed suicide. You said, the couple of times he was in. Not regularly? Not in how long?"

"I’d have to look at his file. Not for four or five months, I’d say. I told them there was nothing to be done, and there seemed to be some financial difficulty-there was no insurance. I told her there was no necessity for me to see him on a regular basis."

"You’re an honest man, Doctor," said Mendoza dryly. "What did you think of her, by the way?"

Toussaint took off his glasses and polished them with his handkerchief. "Mrs. Fleming? She seems like a nice young woman-not much to say for herself. She took good care of him, I will say-he was clean and neat."

"Did he ever seem suicidal to you?"

Toussaint put his glasses back on. He was looking very interested now. "That’s a difficult thing to say about anybody, Lieutenant. But the last time I saw him-well, he felt resentful, which I suppose we can both understand. A man his age, a hopeless invalid. He said to me, he could live to be eighty, and it wasn’t fair to his wife. He’d be better off to cut his throat and save everybody the trouble, he said."

Mendoza cocked his head at him. "He said it just like that-cut his throat? I see. Interesante."

"But evidently he didn’t," said the doctor. "How could he have disappeared?"

Mendoza got up and yanked down his cuffs. "Simpler if he had cut his throat. And if he thought of suicide in those terms, and really wanted to-but if I’ve learned one thing at this job, Doctor, it’s that you never can tell what people will do. As I suppose you have, too. Thanks so. much." He left the doctor looking very curious, and ambled slowly back downtown in traffic a little heavier than usual, in the gray mist.

Before he got off the freeway it began to rain again in a hesitant way, short of storm but getting everything very wet. The little side street down from Wilshire was empty, only an occasional car parked along the one side where parking was legal. He was on the wrong side, and had to back and fill around four times to turn the Ferrari’s length. He walked across the street and down the drive of the apartment house. All the garages but one were open and empty; the exception was the one at the left end, and he went around to peer into the little window. Inside was a middle-aged tan Dodge sedan, and by Carey’s report that would be the car owned by Edwin Fleming, the car too expensive to run, which they’d been going to sell. There’d be some red tape to that now, without his signature.

He wondered suddenly if she had a driver’s license. How had she got him to the doctor’s office?

He went back up the drive and into the building. It was as silent as it had been yesterday, everybody out at work. Anything could have gone on here, damn it, and nobody been the wiser. The Archangel Gabriel could have swooped down and carried Fleming off, with no witnesses. More realistically, how easy it would have been for the boyfriend-Rappaport or somebody else-to have walked in, got into the apartment by the simple expedient of ringing the bell, and knocked Fleming out.

"?De veras? " said Mendoza to himself. But why in hell’s name take him away? If that had been the general plan, to fake a suicide, easy enough to slash Edwin’s throat, cut his wrists, leave the knife there with his prints on it, and walk quietly off. There was a good solid suicide, with a reasonable motive behind it, and likely nobody would have asked questions.

Mendoza was annoyed. Untidiness always annoyed him, and the strange case of Edwin Fleming was very untidy.

He climbed another flight of stairs and paused outside the right-hand door. Beyond it Mr. Offerdahl was feeling happy. Filtered through whiskey, the sound of singing emerged into the hall; Mr. Offerdahl was forever blowing bubbles.

The new call went down just after Mendoza left the office, and Hackett and Higgins went out to look at it. Over the years, they had gone together to look at a number of things like it, not that that reconciled them to the necessity; but in the last couple of years there seemed to be more and more such things to go and look at.

"Mr. Weinstein found her and called in," said the uniformed man waiting by the squad car. "It’s a mess. He’s got the pawnshop next door, knew her. Says her name’s Mrs. Ruth Faber. I guess it must have happened last night."

They went in to look. This was a side street off Olympic, still downtown but the kind of half-and-half neighborhood old sections of big cities sprout. There was an access alley between two rows of old two-story buildings here, the first floors business places, old apartments above. This place was a little grocery store. There was a sign over the door that had been there a long time, FAER'S MARKET. Just one big room inside, a small refrigerator case, three walls of shelves with cans and packages, a wooden counter with an old-fashioned cash register, a Coke machine. In the middle of the uncarpeted pine floor lay the body of an old lady, horridly dead. There was blood all around and on her, and they couldn’t tell what she’d looked like in life because her face had been beaten or kicked in. She was a thin old lady, wearing a cotton housedress, and one black felt slipper had fallen off, lay on a pair of smashed steel spectacles five feet from the body.

"What a mess," said Higgins. "Stop where you are, Art, or the lab boys’ll chew you out. They’ll have a field day here." There wasn’t anything they could do until the lab men had processed the place for physical evidence, so they called S.I.D. and went to talk to Weinstein, who was waiting at the curb with the Traffic man.