Case Pending - Dell Shannon (2 page)

The problem created, Morgan thought as he had before,
went beyond the Williamses or any individual—or the amount of
public money. In essence, a social problem, and not a new one. If it
wasn't money from this county office, it'd be money from another:
people like the Williamses didn't give a damn. Williams, letting
himself be branded a wife- and child-deserter, getting a job and a
cheap room somewhere out of town, sneaking back for week-ends with
his family, all to cheat sixty-three-fifty a month out of the county
top of the three hundred or more he could earn as a skilled workman.

At a bar last night with his wife until midnight.
Last thing they'd worry about was leaving the kids alone: four kids,
the oldest eleven. It was a shabby, cheap neighborhood, almost a
slum, though there were worse streets. People like the Williamses
didn't care where or how they lived: often they had more money than
others who lived better, but their money went on ephemeral thing n
flashy cars and clothes and liquor.

Morgan was driving a six-year-old Ford. He wouldn't
be surprised to find that Williams' car was a new model, and
something more expensive. But all that was on the surface of his
mind; he couldn't, for once, be less concerned. Deeper inside a voice
was screaming at him soundlessly, What the hell are you going to do?
Ten thousand bucks. Ten thousand.

All right, so he knew what he ought to do: Richard
Alden Morgan, law-abiding citizen, who'd always accepted
responsibilities and stood on his own two feet, and where had it got
him? So it was just the breaks: everybody had bad luck. But, God damn
it, so much bad . . . . And a damn funny thing to think maybe, but if
he could blame himself (or anybody), some concrete way, reason he'd
just brought it on himself, he wouldn't feel so bitter. Nothing like
that with Dick Morgan, he thought in savage sarcasm: respectable,
righteous Morgan who paid his bills and lived within his income,
Morgan the faithful, considerate husband and father—how did the old
song go, everything he should do and nothing that he oughtn't—and
got kicked in the teeth all the same. You could say "the
breaks," but it damn well wasn't fair that Sue should be dragged
under with him. Sue hadn't done anything, neither of them had done
anything to deserve it. Janny hadn't done anything. Except get born.

He coasted gently to the curb two doors from the
apartment house where the Williamses lived, and sat for a minute,
getting out the watchers' report, rereading it but not really taking
it in. Parked smack in front of the apartment was a year-old Buick, a
two-tone hardtop. That'd be Williams, sure; Henry had taken down the
license.

All right, so he knew what he ought to do. Go to the
police, tell the story. Honest citizen. Sure. The police would take
care of the man with the pock-marked face and dirty nails and cold
gray eyes and the rasping voice that said Ten thousand bucks, see.
And would that be the end of it? Like hell it would. The juvenile
court would have something to say then, miles of red tape to unwind,
and in the end they'd lose Janny anyway—he knew how those things
went, how judges figured, how the cumbersome, impersonal law read. It
was all the fault of the damned pompous law to start with: the silly
God-damned inhumanly logical rules of the accredited agencies.

Suddenly his control broke one moment and he pounded
his fist on the steering wheel in blind, impotent fury. Not fair,
after everything else—the panic in Sue's eyes, the panic he heard
in his own voice telling
her—ten thousand—what
the hell could he do? The police. The money. No choice for him even
here, it had to be the police; he couldn't raise money like that.

You had to be logical about it. Juvenile hall, a
state foster home, an orphanage, still better than anywhere with that
pock-marked hood, the kind of woman he'd... Ten thousand. The car
wouldn't bring five hundred.

They still owed four thousand on the house, a second
mortgage wouldn't—Sue's engagement ring, the little odds and ends
of jewelry they had, maybe another five hundred if they were lucky.

He'd sat still to be kicked in the teeth for the last
time. If he could get from under this by forgetting every righteous
standard he had— But it wasn't so easy, it never was. So, go and
rob a bank, hold up a liquor store, sure, get the ten thousand. It
wouldn't cancel out: the threat would be just as potent, and in a
month, six months, a year, there'd be another demand.

He straightened up after a while and took a couple of
long breaths. It wasn't any good agonizing round and round in the
same circle, they'd gone over all this a hundred times last night. 
He'd just have to play it by ear. Meanwhile he had a day's work to
do—conscientious, methodical Morgan, he thought tiredly.

He got out of the car, slipping the ignition key in
his pocket. See the Williamses and try to put the fear of God into
them. The county wouldn't prosecute this time, on a first offense
involving a relatively small amount: the courts were working overtime
as it was. Morgan looked up Commerce Street to the corner of
Humboldt, where something seemed to be going on—he could see the
tall end of a black-and white police car, its roof light flashing,
and the fat Italian grocer had come out of his corner shop with a few
early customers. Whatever it was, a drunk or a fight or an accident,
it was round the corner on Humboldt. He started up the worn steps of
the apartment. After he'd dealt with the Williamses he might as well
drop in on Mrs. Kling, and that new one was somewhere around here
too, if he remembered the address—he got out his case-notebook to
look. Yes, Mrs. Marion Lindstrom 273 Graham Court.
 
 

TWO

There were worse streets than Commerce, but it wasn't
a neighborhood where anyone would choose to live, except those who
didn't think or care much about their surroundings, or those who
couldn't afford anything better. Ironically, only a few blocks away
rose the clean modern forest of civic buildings, shining with glass
and newness and surrounded by neat squares of asphalt-paved parking
lots. Like many cities, this one sprouted its civic and business
center in its oldest section, inevitably bordered with slums. It
might look easy to change matters with the power of condemnation, the
expenditure of public money, but it wouldn't work out that way if the
city fathers tried it. There'd grow up other such streets elsewhere
if not here; there were always the people who did not care, the
landlords who wouldn't spend on repairs. Every city always has its
Commerce Streets.
 

Commerce started ten or twelve blocks up, at the big
freight yards, and dead-ended two blocks down from Humboldt. It was a
dreary length of ancient macadam lined mostly with single
houses-narrow, one-storey, ramshackle clapboard houses as old as the
century or older, and never lovingly cared for: here and there was
one with a fresh coat of paint, or a greener strip of grass in front,
or cleaner-looking curtains showing, but most were a uniform dun
color with old paint cracked, brown devil grass high around the front
steps. About halfway down its length, the street grew some bigger
houses of two storeys, square frame houses not much younger and no
neater: most of those were rooming houses by the signs over their
porches. Interspersed with these were a few dingy apartment
buildings, a gas station or two, neighborhood stores—a
delicatessen, a family grocery; and in windows along nearly every
block were little signs—SEWING DONE CHEAP, CANARIES FOR SALE,
FIX-IT SHOP, HAND-TMLORING.

Agnes Browne lived behind one of the signs, that said
primly, SEAMSTRESS, in the ground-floor right window of the house at
the corner of Commerce and Wade, two blocks up from Humboldt. She
worked as a waitress at a dime-store lunch counter; the sewing added
to her wages some, and anyway she liked to sew and figured she might
as well get paid for it. She didn't care much for going out and
around; it still made her kind of nervous. She couldn't help but be
afraid people were looking at her and thinking, Huh, kind of dark
even for Spanish, wonder if— When the landlady said Browne didn't
sound very Spanish, Agnes had told her it was her married name and
she was a widow. But she was kind of sorry she'd ever started it now;
it was like what the minister said for sure, about the guilty fleeing
where no man pursueth. It hadn't been the money, she could earn as
much anyway, maybe even more, at a dozen jobs colored girls got hired
for; but there were other things besides money. Only she felt guilty
at making friends under false pretenses, and as for Joe, well, she
just couldn't. Joe was a nice boy, he had a good job at a garage, he
was ambitious; he'd asked her for a date half a dozen times, but it
wouldn't be right she should take up with him. Not without telling
him. A lot of girls would have, but Agnes didn't figure it'd be fair.
All the same, she liked Joe and it was hard. She was thinking about
it this morning as she started for work; seemed like she couldn't
think of anything else these days. She was a little late, it was ten
past eight already, and she hurried; she could walk to work, it was
only two blocks down to Main and four more to the store.

As usual she cut across the empty lot at the corner
of Humboldt. There'd been a house on the lot once, but it had been so
badly damaged by fire a few years back that what was left of it was
pulled down. Now there was just the outline of the foundation left,
all overgrown with weed—devil grass and wild mustard. Agnes had
tripped over the hidden ledge of the concrete foundation before, and
skirted it automatically now; but in the middle of the lot she
tripped over something else.

When she saw what it was she clapped a hand to her
mouth and backed away without picking up the purse she'd dropped.
Then she ran across to Mr. Fratelli's store where there was a
telephone. Agnes knew her duty as a citizen, but that didn't say she
liked the idea of getting mixed up in such a thing.

Huddling her coat around
her, listening to Mr. Fratelli's excited Italian incoherence, she
wondered miserably if the cops would ask many questions about
herself. Probably so, and go on asking, and find out everything—maybe
it served her right for being deceitful, the Bible said that never
did anybody no good in the long run, and wasn't it the truth. . . . .

* * *

"I figured you'd like to take a look before they
move it," said Hackett on the phone. "The boys just got
here. If you want I'll put a hold on the stiff until you've seen it."

"Do that." Lieutenant Mendoza put down the
phone and rose from his desk.

Hackett was the one man under him who fully respected
his feeling in such matters, though it was to be feared that Hackett
put it down to conscientiousness. The truth was less flattering:
Mendoza always found it hard to delegate authority, never felt a job
well done unless he saw to it himself—which of course was simply
egotism, he acknowledged it. He could not do everything. But Hackett,
who knew him so well, had a feeling for the nuances; if Hackett
thought he should see this, he was probably right.

When he parked behind the patrol car twenty minutes
later and picked his way across the weed-grown corner toward the
little knot of men, one of the patrol officers there remarked
sotto
voce,
"That your Mex lieutenant? He
don't like to get his nice new shoes all dusty, does he?"

Detective-Sergeant Arthur Hackett said, "That's
enough about Mexes, boy. For my money he's the best we got." He
watched Mendoza stepping delicately as a cat through the tall growth:
a shin, dark man, inevitably impeccable in silver gray, his topcoat
just a shade darker than his suit, his Hamburg the exact charcoal of
the coat and with the new narrow brim, tilted at the correct angle
and no more. Mendoza's tie this morning was a subtle foulard harmony
of charcoal and silver with the discreetest of scarlet flecks, and
the shoes he was carefully guarding from scratches were probably the
custom-made gray pigskin pair.

"My God, he looks like a gigolo," commented
the patrolman, who was only a month out of training and meeting
plainclothes men for the first time on the job. "What brand of
cologne does he use, I wonder. Better get ready to hold him up when
he takes a look at the corpse."

He hadn't enjoyed the corpse much himself.

"Don't strain yourself flexing those muscles,"
said Hackett dryly. "Like Luis'd say himself,
las
apariencias engañan
—appearances are
deceiving."

Mendoza came up to them and nodded to the patrolmen
at Hackett's mention of their names. At close quarters, the young
recruit saw, you could guess him at only an inch or so under your own
five-eleven, not so small as he looked; but he had the slender Latin
bone structure, minimizing his size. Under the angled Hamburg, thin,
straight features: a long chin, a precise narrow black line of
mustache above a delicately cut mouth, a long nose, black opaque
eyes, sharp-arched heavy brows. A damn Mex gigolo, thought the
recruit.

"I thought you'd like to see it," Hackett
was saying. "It's another Carol Brooks."

Mendoza's long nose twitched once. "That is one
I'd like to have inside. You think it's the same?" His voice was
unexpectedly deep and soft, with only an occasional hint of accent to
say he had not spoken English from birth.

"Your guess, my guess, who knows until we get
him?—and maybe not then."