Crime Takes No Holiday: A Detective Story Novella Page 7

  “I have no idea. I don’t see no shotgun anywhere, ‘Defective’. Do you?”

  “So a shotgun, that magically evaporated. Daniels, you are a fucking piece of work. And that’s ‘De-tec-tive’!”

  “And that’s Daniellllll!” as I grabbed my lower lip and shook it in his face.

  “Where’s your nine iron?” Funny.

  “Seven iron. You guys still have it. And I want that back!”

  Staring seemed to be Dooley’s chief investigative strategy.

  “Come in here with me.”

  I shrugged and followed him. While my plan had honestly been just to get the drop on these guys and get them taken in for questioning so we could find out who was behind all of this, that didn’t exactly pan out the way I’d hoped it might. We’d tried to stage a version of the aftermath that would be the most acceptable and believable.

  Dooley then found something else that had fallen behind a trash can that I’d meant to destroy, but hadn’t. He pulled out a pencil and lifted up what remained of a Black Cat pack, singed newspaper wadding mostly, sniffed it, and turned to me. I shrugged again.

  “These little shit cutters wouldn’t happen to belong to you, now, would they?”

  “OK, yeah. I lit and tossed that in just before I came charging back in to save my client from these motherfuckers! So what? They both were already down by then. Maybe the firecrackers spooked them and that’s why they shot each other.”

  He scoffed and shook his head. “Doubtful. I smelled the gunpowder out there. Not in here.”

  “Andy, these two goons both brandished firearms with illegal silencers, inside this woman’s home, after not being invited in. Right here!” pointing.

  “There’s all your evidence of what happened, right there. They were not here to throw her a surprise party or wish her a happy birthday, ‘Defective’.”

  Luckily, police forensics, around since the thirteenth century, was honestly still not sophisticated here now in 1949. Blood-spatter expertise hadn’t filtered down to the LAPD quite yet. Photos taken at a home invasion crime scene weren’t even a guaranteed procedure, did not happen this morning, and would not happen this evening.

  Also, Dooley routinely ignored the evidence. Always had. Not sure how he ever made ‘defective’, other than by stepping on my back to get there.

  “So you stood night watch with a shotgun, blasted this one guy’s grapes off from seven feet away–”

  “–I never said that.”

  “Then you took the other guy out with your .38, and every single shotgun pellet went into the first guy. Maybe both barrels. I don’t see any pellet holes in the walls. Not much blood.”

  “I never said that either. Maybe you don’t see pellet holes because the ‘shotgun’ is just your fantasy. The uniforms have my weapon. Still loaded, unfired. And are you blind? There’s blood everywhere.”

  “Yeah, most likely from your first adventure this morning.”

  “As Miss Wellesley’s hired security force, the ‘castle law’ would indemnify both of us from all of this, even if you were to somehow prove we had anything to do with stopping these murderous freaking goons. Which you won’t. You can’t.”

  “We’ll see about that. How did you manage–”

  “Andy, nobody’s throwing a parade for these lowlifes. They came here specifically to screw with my client. And me. They broke in, just like those other dickwads. Somebody wants this girl dead.”

  Well, they did break in, and they did try to fire on me. Both of them, this time.

  “OK, no argument here. But, Jesus, you sure are a pill, aren’t you”

  “I never set out to hurt anybody, and I didn’t. What would you do, Andy, if you saw these two hulks in your house and then saw two silencers turn towards you through the moonlight? What choice would you have? What decision would you make? I cocked the damned–”

  Smartly, I clammed up before admitting anything.

  His hand bending his giant ear for effect, “Shotgun? A shotgun, you were about to say?” now grinning as if he’d caught me in a trap.

  “They were going after her. I had … they were gonna kill her! And me! What part of this do you not get?”

  “We’ll see how this holds up in the post mortem. Where’s the bolt from the crossbow?” (I’d yanked it from the tree and Kate took it with her.)

  I picked the Zhuge up.

  “As you can see, this repeating crossbow here, has no bolts in it. It’s been sitting right here since I first got here. I never fired it.”

  I hadn’t.

  “… Christ, Daniels,” yanking the crossbow away from me to inspect it.

  I think Andy always gets my name wrong just to piss me off. Been doing that since before the Krauts surrendered.

  “All right, so where’s the boom stick?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Dooley. I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout no god-damned ‘boom stick’. You want me to shit one for you? I’ll try.”

  I crouched a bit and grunted like I was taking a giant dump. I think he actually laughed at that for a split second, then stifled and shook his head in disgust.

  “So you carry an armory in your car, and you went after that first clown earlier today with a nine iron?”

  “Seven Iron. And I want that back!”

  More nervous throat clearing. I gotta figure out how to stop doing this; I don’t need a tell.

  “Hey, it worked.”

  That response elicited another long stare from Dooley. Take a picture; it’ll last longer, prick.

  After checking the first guy’s sidearm and handing it off to a tech,

  “This Luger has two shots left in it. Where’s the six slugs this guy got off?” was Dooley’s next brilliant question. “They should be in the walls somewhere, right?”

  “I dunno, Andy,” shrugging. “I still think you’re gonna find them in the other guy. Or maybe he was taking target practice earlier.”

  Butter couldn’t melt in my mouth.

  “Uh-huh. If so, he might have needed more. Never even grazed you, right?”

  This was a trick question, one I was familiar with from once standing where Dooley now stood.

  I shrugged. “Still standing. Because I was outside when these two shot each other.”

  ‘Defective’ Dooley dropped his head and sighed.

  “Tell me. What would you have done in this situation, ‘Defective’?”

  “That’s …”

  He just scowled. He’d given up on correcting me.

  “The only thing you got’s your imagination. It still looks to me like these two got squirrelly ‘cuz of the firecrackers and shot each other.”

  “Jack, don’t insult my intelligence.”

  “What intelligence? I happened on this scene the same way you did. You don’t got a stinkin’ thing you can charge me with. I made the freakin’ phone call to bring you guys here. You got nothin’. Face it.”

  I could tell from the look on Dooley’s face that he realized, finally, he was never going to get a straight story, and he was going to have to mop up two questionable self-defense cases in one day, without being able to fully close them. From the same ‘victim’, and at the same crime scene. Total body count would rise to four. No witnesses, no proof, no evidence. All he had for sure was that I was standing there in the aftermath, just like he was. Not a happy guy; not his finest hour.

  If he’d been looking at that Captain’s promotion, a blind ambition started when he stepped all over my back a few years ago, let’s hope this might be a bit of a setback. Sucks for him. Couldn’t happen to a nicer ‘Defective’.

  Unless he could help us find Elle, which would really be nice. But I was hardly out of the woods, either.

  PART NINE

  Bring Me The Spruce Goose

  Although Dooley was having a bad day, and while I still had some hurdles to vault, would the rest of the story have a happy ending?

  As we walked back to the front, a black Packard rolled up and
parked between the two squad cars. Out climbed Armando ‘Doghouse’ Lauro and his new partner, Louie Chang.

  “Whadja do now, shamus?”

  Glad to see him, but that only made me frown.

  Just then, a little hooptie puttered into a spot by the corner. Clambering out, Barney Pyle, wearing dungarees, shitkickers, and a red western shirt with fringe on it.

  This had Armando laughing pretty hard. He flicked Barney’s bright yellow kerchief.

  “What? The missus and I go square dancing on Thursdays.”

  Armando has a knack for dispelling tension at a crime scene. Chang’s lucky to have him as a partner. Mando’d been working late and overheard Captain Janks call Dooley and Pyle back in, and heard my name in vain.

  “Yes, dammit! It’s that same exact address as this morning. Shots fired. Whaddya mean ‘again’? Of course, ‘again’. Gotta be that fuckin’ Jack Daniel, that bastard. Get your narrow asses over there and bring me his head on a platter.”

  The captain’s ire aside, standard good police work by Armando and Chang, after conferring with Dooley and Pyle, along with pieces of the puzzle I provided from my conversations with Kate, which neither of us knew were even pieces at the time, led us to figure out why Kate was a target. And one of these last two’s guns was registered, so that led to some connecting of the dots.

  ‘Drugstore Cowboy’ Barney Pyle made that connection. Hard to imagine, I know. But not all that necessary. Our unlucky friend who caught the double-barrel blast survived long enough to roll on his boss.

  Armando, noticing the lack of urgency as they wheeled Thug Number One toward the ambo, had the presence of mind to ask the attendant if he was going to ‘make it’. He shook his head, so Armando rode the bus with them.

  “Who sent you? Who?”

  Mando was about to ‘lean on’ his injury, but the attendant held him back. Still, the last words Mando heard were:

  “Waldheim … Waldheim sent us here.”

  “You mean Davis Waldheim? Davis? That high-tech moron?”

  Thug Number One nodded.

  “Davis Wa–”

  And that was all she wrote.

  “Where’s the girl? Where is she?”

  Armando was questioning a suspect who could no longer reply. Getting up in his face was of little help. He might as well have asked the universe this question. If Thug Number One knew, he wasn’t telling. The attendant pulled up the sheet.

  But I gotta hand it to these guys, all of them stayed through the night to help solve this and try to get Elle back safely. Chang woke a judge and got a warrant signed. Dooley sort of stood around scratching his ass and whining. Mando’d had just about enough of this.

  “Shut it, Dooley. I’m the fuckin’ primary on this case.”

  The rest of us took some time and formulated a solid plan. Davis Waldheim is one powerful cat. We’d need all our ducks in a neat, tidy row to nail him. But quickly. Tonight. Right now. A young woman’s life was at stake.

  Once we had enough ducks lined up for a quorum, at dawn the next morning the five of us, me (well, technically I was only there as an informant; this time they told me to ‘stay in the car’, which of course I didn’t), Dooley, Pyle, Armando, and Chang, along with four uniforms, rousted out of bed and arrested Davis Waldheim, the CEO and owner of a technology company that was threatened by research Kate was doing as part of a graduate work thesis.

  We arrived stealthily at Waldheim’s estate. ‘Casa De Shithead’. There was a turquoise Delahaye 175 Roadster crouching in the porte-cochère like a panther ready to pounce. Looked like something out of the distant future.

  With the rest of us out of sight, Armando took his coat and shoulder holster off and leaned on the bell. Waldheim finally answered.

  “Hi. You wanna buy some chocolate bars? My kid needs money for his school.”

  “Get the fuck off my property!”

  Waldheim slammed the door, which didn’t really slam, because Mando’s size-thirteen shoe was in the way. Waldheim looked down at the shoe, then back up at Mando, who was grinning evilly.

  “Heh heh!”

  Before Waldheim could say a word, Mando reached through, grabbed him by the lapel of his monogrammed robe, and yanked him out the front door. He then backed him up against the clapboards, drew his .38 out from behind his back, inserted the barrel in Waldheim’s right nostril, and pulled the hammer back.

  “Tell me where she is. I’m only gonna count to three.”

  Waldheim promptly fainted dead away.

  “Fuckin’ pussy,” throwing the search warrant at him as he let him crumple to the ground.

  The uniforms quickly searched the estate and grounds. No Elle.

  Tech titans had already been converging on mentor Howard Thorne and his young protege Kate to cash in on what they assumed would be an eventual bonanza, something she and Thorne had been cooking up and wooing investors for, and which they’d presciently secured the rights to.

  They’d spoken to Waldheim, but he’d only posed as an investor to figure out what they were up to, and he considered Kate an existential threat to his business plan. He decided to wage war, instead. The Thornes were likely next on his list.

  What Kate and the company she would run someday were proposing could have potentially put his company out of business, had not the eventual incarceration for twenty-five-to-life and the draining of his resources by his lawyers and the civil suits not done that already.

  Key frequency hand-off technology eventually behind some sort of multi-tower-based two-way radio system that would work like a telephone network without wires. Crazy shit that probably could never really happen for another 40-50 years anyway. But Bell Labs could see this future and would eventually give Kate and Thorne a ton of dough over it.

  Why anyone thinks this weird fantasy would be worth killing for, I do not know. But the ‘scientists’ in the crowd seemed to, so I nodded along, as we milled around in Waldheim’s grand entrance area.

  Then I noticed something. A woman’s scarf, laying on the giant Persian rug and mostly hidden behind a potted plant, as if it had been thrown there. It was dark blue with a ‘Scottie Dog’ print pattern on it. I looked at it closely, then pulled the photos Kate had given me out of my pocket. There was a picture of Elle, wearing that same scarf. Maybe Elle was smart enough to have left a trail of breadcrumbs for us.

  The scarf had a lingering perfume on it, the same perfume Kate was wearing today. I shoved the scarf and the picture under Armando’s nose.

  A slow grin came over his face. He turned to Waldheim, who was standing erect once again, and held the scarf aloft in his face.

  “Gotcha!”

  Armando even let me slap the cuffs on for old time’s sake.

  “Screw the Captain! This bust will make him a chief.”

  But he’d guessed wrong on that score. As they were about to escort Waldheim out …

  “Hold up, fellas.”

  I walked over in front of him and stared at him from about two feet away. His nose was dripping blood onto his fancy robe. Yep. Pretty oily. Mrs. Thorne had sized him up accurately.

  “What do you want, cop?”

  Cop. Funny. I paused …

  “Oh, I got what I want. Now I’m just gloating.”

  As Armando was about to lead him away,

  “Oh, hold up, hold up. You know what, Waldie? There is one thing you could do.”

  I waited for him to ask.

  “OK, what?”

  I grinned widely.

  “You could blow me.”