'So you've got nothing to worry about,' said Galeano in a friendly tone. 'We can't prove you did anything. We're just looking around, Wells.'
'So you can go and look around somewhere else.'
'You'd like us to find out who killed your grandmother, wouldn't you?' asked Palliser.
'Oh, sure, sure, I sure hope you do. But I told you where I was that night, you asked Mae and she told you, we were out at that disco all the time.'
'Yes, we know you were.'
'Then why are you bothering me? Go stealing my shoes! Cops! When do I get them back?'
'When we're finished with them,' said Galeano. They went back to the parking lot and sat in the car and Palliser switched on the engine for the air-conditioning. 'In a sort of way,' said Galeano, 'I see what you mean, John. Another Baby Face. A little too innocent to be true, but on the other hand-'
'Oh, I know, I know,' said Palliser. 'He's got no remote history of violence-only that one little count on him, and it's an honest upright family.'
'What the hell is all this business about shoes?'
'I've got no idea,' said Palliser. 'It was Duke suggested it. He must have something in mind. Something they spotted in that apartment. But there wasn't any mention in the lab report.'
'Well, I suppose they'll tell us sometime. My God, why does anybody stay in this climate?-and the way the smog's hanging on it'll likely be the middle of October before we get any relief.'
'You like to start building seniority all over again, some place where it never gets over seventy degrees.'
'Is there such a place this side of heaven?' wondered Galeano.
THAT SATURDAY NIGHT turned out to be a busy one for the night watch. It was still ninety-four at eight o'clock. September was the worst month for heat in Southern California. There was a bar on Third Street held up by two men at about nine o'clock and Conway wrote the report on that. There'd be eight witnesses to come in and keep the day watch busy making statements. They got a call to a mugging before he finished the report and Schenke went out on that. The victim had managed to get to a public phone and call in, but by the time Schenke got there he was looking green and couldn't stand up, so Schenke called an ambulance. He was a man in the sixties, Clarence Anderson, and all Schenke got was that he'd been working late in his office on Wilshire, been jumped when he came back to his car in a public lot. His home address, by the I.D. on him, was West Hollywood. He passed out as the ambulance arrived, but Schenke didn't think he was too bad. Probably a mild concussion.
However, they were supposedly there to serve the citizens, so when he came back to the office to find it empty, he called Anderson's wife and broke the news to her. Piggott and Conway came back at eleven-thirty. There'd been another affluent-looking couple jumped and manhandled and robbed in the parking lot of the Shubert Theatre. 'Why wasn't there a crowd if the show was just over?' asked Schenke.
'They were about the last people to come back to the lot. They'd stopped for a drink at the Sushi bar on the way. The punks got about another fifty and some more jewelry.'
'Hell,' said Schenke. 'I wish there was just some handle to it, some way to chase them down.'
'Wel1, there isn't,' said Conway. 'And they seem to be fairly rough and ready with the M.O. One of these nights they're going to tackle somebody with a weak heart and leave a corpse for us.'
'And still no way to chase them down,' said Piggott dryly. The phone rang and he picked it up. 'Robbery- Homicide.' In the next thirty seconds his mouth went tight and the usually mild-mannered, easygoing Piggott was an angry man when he put the phone down and stood up.
'We'd all better ride on this one. It's a shooting and it's one of the uniformed men.'.
'Christ,' said Conway.
'The squad man said he didn't look too good. It's the corner of Hoover and Eleventh.' They went downstairs in a hurry and piled into Conway's car.
Down there, a normally busy secondary main drag, at that time of night the streets were empty of traffic and the traffic lights had stopped working. There were three squads parked in a row at the curb in front of half a block of store buildings. One of the squads had the driver's door hanging open. The uniformed men were Bill Moss and Dave Turner and they were looking grim and shaken. 'It was at the appliance store,' said Moss. 'A break-in.' There had been a dim security light left on above the door. By the streetlight at the corner they could read the sign- PURDUE'S T.V. AND APPLIANCES. 'All we've heard on it is, two men, and Dubois walked into it. He looked bad, Conway-a couple of slugs in the chest. The ambulance just left. A woman across the street in the apartment at the corner of Eleventh saw it and called in, and Dubois got chased over. She called again when she heard the shooting, but they were long gone when Dave and I got here.'
Turner's hand was shaking as he raised the cigarette to his mouth. 'We were in the same class at the Academy,' he said.
'We haven't called the owner yet. The woman's in apartment Twelve-B.'
'O.K.' said Conway. 'You get the emergency number off the door and contact the owner. We'll go talk to her.'
She was waiting for them. Her name was Alice Rabinovich and she was still excited and scared but she had kept her head. She was around forty, dark with a scrawny figure in an old cotton bathrobe over a nightgown, and scuffed bedroom slippers. The apartment was at the side of the building, looking down on Hoover Street.
She said, 'I couldn't sleep, it's so hot. I was tired, we had a busy day at the store, but I couldn't sleep. I went to bed, but it was no use, and I got up and sat by the window, the fan helped some. I was sitting in the dark and you can see-' she was gesturing the men into the bedroom. There was an electric fan going on a table by the open window, and a chair, and the window looked down directly to those store buildings on Hoover. The door of the appliance store would be about a hundred feet away, seen at a slightly oblique angle.
'I saw the whole thing. It's terrible about the policeman. There were two men-it was a pickup truck, they parked right in front of the store-you can see the sign from here-and one had a flashlight and the other one had a tool of some kind. There wasn't anything in the street so late-cars or people-and they broke in the door, I could see them plain, they went in and I was sure they were burglars. I was just picking up the phone to call the police, but I was still watching and they came out with a T.V. and put it in the truck and went back in, and they brought out another T.V. and went back and it was just as they came out again with another the police car came up and the policeman got out, and I could see he had his gun in his hand, and I guess he'd have told them to put their hands up or something, but he never had the chance. One of the men just shot him-bang-like that-and he fell down and I called the police back again and told them what had happened-and the men put the T.V. in the truck and drove away fast-and about five minutes later the other two police cars drove up and then the ambulance came. I hope the poor policeman isn't hurt bad-'
'So do we,' said Conway. 'That's fine, Mrs. Rabinovich, you've been a big help. We're lucky you were here. Could you give any description of the men?'
She said regretfully, 'Oh, no, I'm afraid not. My sight is good, but they weren't that close and it was dark even with the streetlight. But it was a Ford pickup truck. It wasn't very far from the streetlight and I saw the letters plain across the front. It was light-colored-white or light blue-something like that.'
'Are you sure?' asked Conway.
'Yes, I'm sure about that.'
They went back across the street. By then the owner was there and he said there were three T.V.'s missing-nothing else. They told him as they'd told her to come to headquarters to make a statement in the morning. Then they went out to Cedars-Sinai to ask about Dubois.
That was about an hour and a half after the shooting, and the doctors weren't saying anything definite. He had lost a lot of blood before he was brought in.
Dubois wasn't married, but somebody had called-Turner?-and his mother was there in the waiting room down the hall in Emergency. She was a tall thin black woman with dignified regular features and she sat there quietly without crying. She looked at the Robbery-Homicide men without speaking and Conway said, 'You know everybody's concerned, Mrs. Dubois. It's one of the possibilities that goes with the job.'
'Do you have to tell me that?' she said in a remote voice. 'I've been afraid ever since Don put on that
