'Can you give us any description of him?' asked Schenke.
'Description? I could draw you a picture.' The owner was a little fat man about sixty, named Wensink. 'Talk about adding insult to injury, they not only walked off with the cash from the register, about a hundred and forty, they loaded up a station wagon with a thousand bucks’ retail of my best stuff! There was three of them. One with the gun. The one I saw best was that one. A guy maybe forty, medium-size, not much hair and he had one walleye. And what looked like a forty-five. All business, he was. The other two were younger, one with a mustache, the long hair.'
'Well, that’s a switch,' said Schenke. 'Taking the stock. A station wagon? You got a look at it?'
'I sure did,' said Wensink. 'They parked right in front, come in just at closing time. Anybody noticed them carrying stuff out, I suppose thought they were just customers. I didn’t get a look at the license plate but it was a Ford nine-passenger wagon, white over brown, about five years old.'
He thought the one with the gun might have touched the register, so they called out a man from S.I.D. to dust for prints. Wensink said he’d recognize a mug-shot and would come in tomorrow to look.
When they got back to the office, Shogart had gone out on another call; also a heist, he reported when he came in. An all-night movie-house on Fourth, and the girl in the ticket box was a nitwit, couldn’t say anything except that he’d had a gun. 'I wouldn’t even take a bet on that. And God knows they deserve to lose some of their ill- gotten gains, it’s a porno house.'
'Amen to that,' said Piggott, 'but two wrongs, E. M.-' He was interrupted by the phone, and the Traffic man on the other end said he and his partner had just come across a body.
Schenke went out to look at it while Piggott typed up a report on the liquor-store heist. It didn’t, said Schenke when he came back, look like any mysterious homicide to occupy the day watch: an old bum dead in a doorway over on Skid Row; but a report had to be written, an I.D. made if possible.
Piggott had just finished the first report and Schenke was swearing at the typewriter when the phone buzzed and Piggott picked it up. 'Robbery-Homicide, Detective Piggott.'
There was silence at the other end, and then a cautious male voice said, 'You guys picked up Bobby Chard, you got him in your morgue. You read it he got took off by accident like. You better look again.'
Piggott didn’t ask who was calling. 'Is that so? Why?'
'There was reasons.' The phone clicked and was dead.
'Chard,' said Piggott to himself. The one Traffic had thought was a hit-run. Well, maybe they’d better look three times instead of twice. Or it might be a mare’s nest. He wrote a note for Higgins and left it on his desk.
On Friday morning, with Glasser off, Palliser roped Landers in to help out on the legwork on Sandra. The two likeliest suspects Stephanie had picked out of Records, on account of their pedigrees, were Richard Lamont and Earl Rank. Lamont’s latest address was Burbank, Rank’s Van Nuys, but as Palliser pointed out, people did move. They went looking.
Landers found Lamont after three tries. Lamont’s sister in Burbank thought he might be staying with a pal in Hollywood; the pal said Dick was living with a woman in the Atwater section, and there Landers ran him to ground, in one side of an old duplex, watching TV. Lamont fit Stephanie’s description, down to the little goatee, but he told Landers earnestly he was real clean. Last time he’d been in, the judge had sent him to one of those head doctors, cured him from wanting to do funny things to girls, and he’d never do a thing like that again.
'So you can tell me where you were last Tuesday?' asked Landers.
Lamont thought. 'All day, sir? Well, I was at my job all day, it’s at McGill’s garage out Vermont, Mr. McGill’s teaching me all about engines and says I take to it good. I got to leave for the job pretty soon too, I don’t go on till noon ’cause we’re open tonight. I just come home-last Tuesday you mean, sir?-and Lilly Ann could say I was here, if that’s good enough, sir. She’s a real honest girl, never been in no trouble, we’re fixin’ to get married. She works at this upholstery place on Jefferson, you could ask and she’d say.'
Landers went on to find Lilly Ann; there was no point in hauling Lamont in to lean on him heavier until they were a lot surer. Lilly Ann sounded positive, and had a clean record. This one was up in the air.
He came back to headquarters to find Palliser just bringing in a likelier suspect.
Earl Rank had the kind of record which made him likely, and he hadn’t any alibi; he was living alone in a single room on Fourth, but Palliser had found him at his mother’s place on a tip from a pal at the car-wash where he worked.
'A house down on Ceres,' he told Landers. 'Two-bedroom place, about what you’d expect, but it could tie in.' Ceres Street was five blocks from San Pedro. 'And his mother’s just got back from visiting a married daughter in ’Frisco, how about that?'
'I like it,' said Landers. 'It ties in very neat. Let’s see what he has to say about it.'
They took him into an interrogation room and started asking questions. Rank was sullen and belligerent in turns, the usual attitude, and they didn’t get much out of him.'Don’t you remember where you were last Tuesday, Rank?'
'Around. Just around.' He was about thirty, a pale-skinned black with a wispy little goatee, a thin mustache, secretive eyes, a hard mouth. 'I didn’t do anything.'
'We’ve got a witness who says maybe you did. You picked up any juvenile females to sweet-talk lately, Earl?'
He’d done that at least once, by his record; the parents had reneged on letting her testify, and there’d been no prosecution.
'I never did no such thing. You can’t prove I done nothing.'
They couldn’t. It might be interesting to hear what Stephanie would say about his mother’s house on Ceres Street; but they’d have to show cause and get a court order even to take pictures, and she might not recognize pictures. It was just suggestive, no real evidence at all. 'And you know, Tom,' said Palliser, scratching his nose, 'that girl was so scared, by her own admission, I wouldn’t like to take her description of the man or the house as gospel truth. She couldn’t be certain. You stop to think, she only saw the man three or four times-in a car at night, and at the house. She spent some time at the house, but we couldn’t get much of a description-al1 she could say was, two bedrooms, no rugs, an old refrigerator, the TV was new. She also picked this other mug-shot, Steven Smith. He’s got no sex counts, just B. and E., but I suppose there’s always a first time. But I wouldn’t bet on it.'
'They do train us to be thorough,' said Landers.
'We’d better look for him too.'
They let Rank go, at least temporarily, and went looking for Smith without any luck. He was off parole, he’d moved from the latest address in his tile, and nobody admitted to knowing where he was. There were no relatives listed for him. He could be Stephanie’s Harry, but he needn’t be.
And Palliser said, 'I tell you, Tom, I wouldn’t rely on that girl. If I felt surer she’d been sure about that description, I’d like Rank for it a lot. As it is, she picked out two other shots too. In a way, I think we’d be safer just going by the general description and looking at mug-shots ourselves.'
'You do like to do it the hard way. You talked to her,' said Landers with a shrug. 'So where do we go from here?'
'We go call on Earl Rank’s mother,' said Palliser. 'She may be a perfectly honest woman-nothing says she isn’t, though she didn’t like it much when I brought him in-and if Earl is the X on Sandra, possibly Mrs. Rank noticed something when she came home yesterday. Things missing from the refrigerator-or that nice little greenstriped plane case he forgot to get rid of.'
'Well, we can ask,' said Landers. He didn’t sound very hopeful.
Mendoza’s insatiable curiosity had fastened on the strange case of Edwin Fleming. There wasn’t much to be done, in the way of the usual routine, on the equally strange rape-assaults or the merely brutal pretty boys, but questions could be asked about Fleming. After a desultory glance at the night report, he went out to ask some; and he’d be covering ground Carey had already been over, but then Mendoza always preferred to ask the questions
