Murder Most Strange (16 page)

Hackett stared at her. “Now what in—"

"Well, it was funny," she said
thoughtfully. "I suppose we'll find out when Alice comes back.
At least, thank goodness, the baby's fine now."
 

SIX

Grace and Higgins were down on Wesley Street talking
to neighbors of Edna Patterson's. The lab men had done some work here
yesterday, and were back again today, now busy dusting the whole
place for possible prints.

The neighbors on one side were Albert and Maria
Jimson, and they were ordinary honest people; he drove a truck for a
laundry, and they were both in their forties, with children grown and
away. They were shocked and grieved about Mrs. Patterson, a fine
woman, they said. Neighborly, and it was a nice family, two sons and
a daughter, all doing well. Mrs. Jimson worked too, selling on
commission for a local furniture store, and neither of them had seen
Mrs. Patterson since Monday when she'd been putting her refuse can
out as usual for the weekly pickup on Tuesday morning. They hadn't
heard any disturbance, any night; and they'd been home Monday and
Tuesday nights, watching TV until around eleven. It looked as if she
had been killed either Monday or Tuesday, but then what the people on
the other side had to say changed that—which they'd eventually have
seen for themselves. Mr. and Mrs. Fred Leaman, who hadn't seen her to
speak to since Sunday, when they saw her leaving for church, had
noticed that her refuse can, emptied, had been taken back to the
garage sometime on Tuesday. That, of course, left Tuesday night
still, but narrowed the time a little. They were another upright pair
of citizens: he worked for the Parks and Recreation Department. None
of them had heard any unusual sounds from Mrs. Patterson's house,
noticed anyone going in there. The Leamans had been out on Tuesday
night, visiting friends, but home on Monday. Watching TV. Grace met
Higgins briefly in mid-block, and Higgins hadn't  heard anything
helpful either. "Just what a nice woman she was. What a nice
family. The husband died of a heart attack last year, only
sixty-three, he worked for a construction company. She probably
didn't have much—his little pension, and she'd just applied for
Social Security, and probably the children helped her out. Nobody
heard or saw anything, and both nights most people were home,
watching TV."

"I'm beginning to think," said Grace, “that
TV is the curse of the twentieth century." They split up again;
he crossed the street. And of course you got a cross section of
people in any big-city neighborhood, people of all sorts, but after
the upstanding respectability of the Jimsons and Leamans, the house
directly across the street provided a violent contrast. The door was
opened by a gangling, very black fellow in dirty jeans and a torn
sweat shirt, smelling of beer and sweat; in the living room behind
him a TV was blaring sports news.

Somewhere a baby yelled. He told Grace they didn't
pay any notice to neighbors, and was annoyed when Grace insisted on
seeing his wife. She was a superficially pretty slattern, with a
yelling baby on one shoulder. She said eagerly, "Did she really
get murdered? Honest to God! She was an old bitch, so damn uppity and
look down her nose, goin' to church alla time." They hadn't seen
or heard a thing.

Next door to that place he found the Wisters, a young
couple in a nice clean neat house, who couldn't tell him anything.
Wister was a waiter at a very top class restaurant in Beverly Hills,
and didn't get home until midnight. Mrs. Wister and her mother had
been making new curtains for the kitchen and bedroom every night this
week; they hadn't seen or heard anything out of the ordinary. They
were shocked and frightened by the murder; Wister said, "The
crime rate's just awful. This is a pretty quiet neighborhood, but I
guess it can happen anywhere."

Nobody, of those who had been at home those two
nights, had heard or seen anything unusual; and most of the people
seemed to be honest citizens. "Damn it, Jase," said
Higgins, looking up and down the shabby little street, "that
must have been a hell of a lot of time and work, to clean out the
whole house. When we moved, it took five men half a day to get
everything 1oaded."

"Yes, and that's another thing," said
Grace.

They'd come down in Higgins' Pontiac; they abandoned
the unhelpful neighbors and drove up to Hollywood, to the Gilmans'
apartment.

Linda Gilman's husband was there; he owned his own
printing shop; and her two brothers, both older, settled family men.
Roland Patterson was a dental technician, Ben Patterson manager of a
Safeway supermarket. They had been trying to draw up a list of the
contents of the house. Higgins and Grace looked at it, and Grace
said, "Nobody moved all that in a single night alone. There must
have been at least four or five men." There had been three
double beds, the refrigerator, gas stove, washer and dryer, kitchen
table and chairs, a big couch, four upholstered chairs from the
living room, mirrors—they knew now, the only things left in the
house were her clothes in the closet, linens, dishes in the kitchen.
They wouldn't have gotten anything for those.

"Was this all pretty good stuff?" Higgins
asked Linda.

"Well, yes, it is. Not the most expensive, but
we always got the best we could afford, and all of this she'd had for
years."

"And these days the solid good old stuff goes
for quite a price at the secondhand stores," said Higgins. "It
could have amounted to quite a nice piece of loot."

He expanded on that to Grace over lunch, and Grace
said, "Granted. But just think about it a minute. Records can
give us the names and pedigrees of a hundred burglars. But they're
usually shy birds. Would types like that commit a murder for a
houseful of furniture?"

"Well, when you put
it like that—" said Higgins. "I see what you mean."

* * *

Mendoza stared at Hackett. "
¡Parece
mentira!
The wickedest man in the world! Now
that's very interesting, Art. I do wonder what she'd found out about
him."

"I'll tell you one little notion that occurred
to me," said Hackett. "She might have felt like that about
Parmenter if she'd found out he'd been peddling the pills to the
neighborhood kids. Or even, possibly, supplying a pusher."

"Oh, yes, that I can see. You know, your old
recluse without any friends begins to interest me, amigo. Let's go
and ask questions around that block."

"I've done some of that, and nobody really knew
him."

"Maybe you didn't ask the right questions."

They drove over to the tired old block of businesses
on Alvarado, and talked to the other business people. It wasn't a
block to attract much foot traffic, only a little way above the
Hollywood freeway, residential streets not so immediately joining it;
a block or two away, the looming bulk of the old Queen of the Angels
hospital.

The young man in the music store, behind his beard,
was uninterested. It was a part-time job for him and he didn't know
any of the people along here. The two maiden sisters who kept the
doughnut shop had thought Mr. Parmenter was a little queer.
Unfriendly. Children, or teen-agers, frequenting the pharmacy? They
couldn't say they'd specially noticed many going in and out. There
weren't many around here as a rule. The languid woman at the dress
shop tried mildly to flirt with Mendoza, and didn't know a thing
about the pharmacy or Mr. Parmenter.

At the cleaning shop next door to the pharmacy they
met Mr. Benjamin Rauschman, who tried to pump them for details of
Parmenter's death. "He was a queer one all right," he said,
unrepentant when Hackett squelched him with the routine platitude of
police policy. And at Mendoza's question about kids, teen-agers, he
leaped to the conclusion, eager and helpful. "You're thinking he
was maybe selling the pills on the side to the kids? I wouldn't know
about that." Mr. Rauschman was short and squat, with beautiful
dark curling hair, alive dark eyes in a narrow face. "I didn't
know the man—he was always polite enough, good morning, nice day,
that was as far as it went—but I got the impression he was honest
enough. Wasn't he?"

"I'll tell you, Mr. Rauschman," said
Mendoza, "we don't know much about him either."

"Is that so?" said Rauschman. He accepted
the offered cigarette and let Mendoza light it. "Well, I'll tell
you something that probably doesn't mean one damn thing, but it
struck me as—funny. Just funny." They waited, and he looked at
the cigarette. "It just so happens that we got a married
daughter lives up in Hollywood, and she's expecting a baby, and she
hasn't been so good. Has to keep lying down a lot. So a good many
nights, the last four or live months, the wife and I've been going up
there so the wife can help out in the house and so on. And living
over on Montana, naturally I take Sunset and go right past this
corner, see? Well, old Parmenter, he always closed the store at six
and went home. Same as all the rest of us along here, nothing open at
night. But I tell you, three out of five nights we go past here,
seven, seven-thirty, the pharmacy was lit up. He was there, or
somebody was."

"What?" said Hackett. "I'll be
damned."

"Maybe he was working on his books, or his
income tax," said Rauschman, shrugging. "I wouldn't know."

Mendoza was rocking back and forth, heel to toe.
"That's very interesting," he said gently. "I think
I'd like a look at that place, Art—have you got the keys?"
Rauschman watched them out with lively curiosity in his bright dark
eyes.

"There's nothing here," said Hackett,
unlocking the door of the Independent Pharmacy. "We've pawed all
over everything. And it's all just what you'd expect, just his
account books, receipts, ordinary stock. And I wonder what the hell
will happen to it, whatever he's got in the bank, the house, when
there aren't any relatives. I suppose the state will come in for it."

Mendoza was prowling around, looking at everything.
He said, "It doesn't look like a very prosperous business. I'd
say he was just about making a living. Why did he need a clerk? He
couldn't have been too busy to wait on all the trade himself."

"I suppose he wanted a woman who knew the
cosmetic stock and so on."

"
¿Como?
"
Mendoza penetrated back to the big storeroom behind the body of the
shop. It was largely bare, shelves at one side holding extra stock of
miscellaneous items. There was a large folding table against the back
wall, stacked folding chairs. There was a container for holding the
delivered spring water, and the bottle was half empty.

"There's nothing in the lab report either,"
said Hackett.

"I finally got it yesterday, and as I said, I
don't think whoever killed him went into the house at all. The lab
dusted every surface they could reach and by all the latents there
hadn't been anybody but him in the house for years, except the
Coffman woman, and she kicked up a hell of a fuss at having her
prints taken for comparison. I just can't imagine what was behind it.
He could easily have made an enemy, the queer old cuss he was, but
nothing says who."

"Yes," said Mendoza. "But why the hell
should he come back here at night? It's not as if he—mmh—had to
hide the pornography from a loving wife and family, and it'd be
easier
and safer to get drunk at home if he
was a secret drinker—"

"He wasn't. Liquor costs too much."

"Well, you're right, there's nothing here. And
SID is usually thorough, but I think I'd like a look at the house."

"Oh, for God's sake, if you want to waste the
time . . ."

They went over to the quiet little backwater and
parked in front of the old frame house. Hackett unlocked the front
door and they went in. It was a gloomy dank place, the few bare
sticks of furniture, the stained walls, the uncarpeted floors
redolent not so much of asceticism as of meanness. Mendoza went
around opening cupboards and drawers and looking in closets, and
Hackett asked, "What are you looking for?"

“
I haven't the faintest idea," said Mendoza.
"But I do wonder, Art, how he spent his evenings? He couldn't
work in his garden after dark. There isn't a book or a magazine here,
or a TV set, or a radio. Why the hell did he go back to the store at
night? There's nothing like that there either."

Hackett trailed him patiently. "Your invisible
crystal ball telling you something,
compadre
?"

"Just following my nose." Mendoza wound up
out in the garage, which didn't have a workbench; there was just the
old Ford sitting there, and everything was dusty and dirty. Mendoza
came out, automatically brushing at his silver-gray Dacron suit.

"He was," said Hackett, "a
professional blackmailer. Somewhere here there's a stash of
incriminating information on some millionaires?"

"I wonder," said Mendoza seriously. "What
about his banking records?"

"All perfectly straightforward. We found his
bankbooks. You're right, he wasn't making any fat profit."

"What the hell was he doing," said Mendoza,
"that he had to go back there at night?" He opened the door
and went into the house again, into the old-fashioned square service
porch. Hackett followed him. Mendoza stood gazing around
meditatively, and then raised his eyes to the ceiling. "Well,
now, I wonder," he said. "Do you remember that corpse we
found under the trapdoor in that apartment?"