new-looking suitcase with some female clothes in it about the right size for the corpse, and an overnight bag ditto. We’ve just been over those, and there were some pretty good prints on the suitcase.'
'Send the bags up if you’re finished with them, will you? Thanks.' Palliser relayed that to Glasser. 'There you are. He dumped both her and the luggage there, maybe overlooking the plane case. The damn funny thing is, Henry, if he hadn’t tried to set fire to the corpse she might not have been found until the powers that be finally came to demolish that building, which could be years.'
'Fate,' said Glasser. 'That’s so. Let’s go have some 1unch.'
When Wanda brought Stephanie back she identified the suitcase immediately, and Sandra’s overnight bag. Palliser took her prints to compare to those S.I.D. had collected from the suitcase, and they wasted an hour or so cruising around in the Rambler in the vicinity of that building on San Pedro. Stephanie was vague; it had been dark when Steve brought them to the house and dark when she ran away: she didn’t recognize anything but the public library. So he brought her back, down to the Records office, and introduced her to Phil Landers.
'Mrs. Landers will give you some photographs to look at, Stephanie. If you recognize him, you tell her-or if you see any picture that might be him.'
'Yes, sir, I’ll look good. You’re pretty sure it was him killed Sandra, aren’t you?'
'Pretty sure.' He left her to it, under Phil’s eye.
'Why, yes, sir, I knew Dick Buford, very nice guy. Beg pardon? Oh, my name’s Cutler. I couldn’t believe it, I heard he got killed by a robber, right next door, and we never heard a thing!' Cutler was pleased at finding Landers and Grace on his doorstep, to talk about it. 'Last person in the world you’d think-nice quiet fellow, him and his wife just devoted like they say till she passed on-' He rambled on, giving them nothing. He said he was a widower himself, that he’d been at the movies Tuesday night, when Buford had probably been killed.
At the house on the other side of Buford’s they met a Mrs. Skinner who told them they’d just moved in, and if they’d realized it was the kind of neighborhood where murders happened they’d never have rented the house. She and Mr. Skinner had been at her sister’s in Huntington Park on Tuesday night, got home late.
'All very helpful,' said Grace, brushing his dapper mustache. 'But the brother said he sometimes went up to a local bar for a few beers. Maybe he did that night.'
'So what?' said Landers. 'He was attacked at home.'
'Well, we have to go through the motions.'
Up on Virgil Street, in the two blocks each side, were three small bars. It wasn’t quite noon, and only one was open. They went in and asked the lone bartender if he knew Buford. It was a little place, licensed for beer and wine only. He didn’t react to the name or description. Pending the opening of the other two, they went to have some lunch, and Grace said over coffee, 'A handful of nothing. It could’ve been any thug in L.A. picking a house at random to go after loot. The brother’s supposed to look and see if anything’s missing. Up in the air, like those damned funny rapes.'
'I said we’d be in for another spate of the funny ones,' agreed Landers. 'And of course, if that kid is as young as those women say, he won’t be in Records, that is to have prints and a mug-shot. Unless one of them happens to spot him on the street, there’s no way to look. That is one for the books all right.'
At one-thirty they went back to that block and tried Ben’s Bar and Grill on the corner of Virgil. It was just open, no customers in. A fat bald fellow with a white apron round his middle was polishing the bar; it was just a small place, but looked clean and comfortable, with tables covered in red-checked cloths. 'Do for you, gents?' asked the bartender genially.
Landers flashed the badge. 'Is a Mr. Buford one of your regular customers here? Dick Buford?' He added a description. 'Maybe he didn’t come in often, just sometimes?'
The bartender’s geniality vanished. 'Oh,' he said in a subdued tone, 'yeah, that’s so. Yeah, I knew that guy. I heard something happened to him-some guy down the street said he got killed. That’s a shame, seemed like a nice guy. No, I didn’t know him good, just a customer, not very often like you said.”
'Was he here on Tuesday night?' asked Grace in his soft voice.
The bartender passed a fat hand across his mouth and said unwillingly, 'I guess maybe he was. I guess it was Tuesday. He never stayed long-two, three beers, and he’d go out.'
'Did he get talking to anybody else here that night'?'
'I don’t remember. We were kind of busy, I didn’t take any notice. He never stayed long, like I said, in and out. I don’t remember what time it was.'
'Remember any other regular customers here at the same time?' asked Landers.
'No. I couldn’t tell you a thing. I’m not even sure now it was Tuesday,' said the bartender. A couple of men came in and he turned his back on police.
'Well, do tell,' said Grace outside. 'That’s a little funny, Tom. What’s he feeling nervous about?'
'Just doesn’t want to be mixed in-you know the citizens, Jase. This is a waste of time. The only way we’ll find out what happened to Buford is if the lab picked up some good evidence at the scene.'
Higgins had had some paperwork to clean up on a suicide from last week, and was the only one in when a call came from Traffic about a new body. It was a rooming house over on Beaudry, and the landlady had walked in to confiscate anything there until the rent was paid up, and found the tenant dead in bed. Higgins went to look at it.
Anywhere there was always the narco bit, the addicts and the pushers; these days something new had been added. Time was the heaviest traffic in the hard stuff was in heroin; a while back the H had started to be old hat, and the thing now was cocaine. It was just as lethal but it took a little longer to kill its victims. But the younger generation had added a refinement, and increasingly now they were picking up the kids half high on dope of one sort or another and half high on gin or vodka.
Higgins couldn’t say exactly what might have taken off the fellow in the little bare rented room; the autopsy would tell them. But he didn’t look over twenty-five, and there were needle-marks on both arms, not a dime in the place, a few old clothes, an empty vodka bottle beside the bed. No I.D. in the clothes, but the corpse was wearing a tattoo on one upper arm that said Jacob Altmeyer in a wreath of flowers. Higgins called up the morgue wagon and went back to Parker Center, down to Records.
'And how’s Tom treating you these days?' he asked a cute flaxen-haired Phil Landers as she came up. Phil smiled at him.
'So-so. I think his Italian blood’s showing, he’s getting stingy with a buck.'
'God knows aren’t we all these days.'
'I understand,' said Phil gravely, 'that the baby’s walking at last.'
Higgins grinned unwillingly; he’d taken some kidding about that. Well, since he’d belatedly acquired a family, his lovely Mary and Bert Dwyer’s kids Steve and Laura, and then their own Margaret Emily, he found he worried about them. And he’d never known any babies before, but by what everybody said they ought to start walking at about a year, and she hadn’t, and he had worried. She’d been a year old in September. Mary said don’t be silly, George, she’s a big baby, she’ll walk in her own good time. But he’d fussed about it, in case anything was wrong. And then suddenly, a couple of weeks ago, she’d got up and started walking just fine, and he’d been damned relieved. Probably bored everybody in the office about it.
'That’s so,' he said. 'She’s just fine. Have we got a Jacob Altmeyer on file anywhere?'
Phil said she’d look, and while she was gone Higgins thought about what Luis had said about the pretty boys.
When that had begun to show a pattern, not just the one-time thing, they had asked the computer about known threesomes at muggings, but that had come to nothing. Anyway, nothing said these three had been together very long. And even if Luis was right, and they didn’t belong to this beat, there was no way to go looking for them. Phil came back with a small package on Altmeyer. He had a rap-sheet of B. and E., possession, assault. Just another dopie, whatever he was on, supporting a habit which had finally removed him from his misery. There was an address for his mother in Glendale. Higgins went back to the office and got her on the phone to break the news.
