of the Traffic men. 'Looks like a B. and E. and assault for robbery. Maybe somebody didn’t expect him to be home.'
'That’s why I got worried,' said the paunchy man.
'Dick usually was home-he’s a great homebody, and he was between jobs, see, I told you that, he’s in construction and they can’t work this weather, but it didn’t matter to Dick, he’s got savings, makes good money, and besides he don’t buy much for himself-he just lost his wife last year and it kind of took the heart out of him, they hadn’t any kids, and I used to call him three, four times a week, just to talk-oh, I didn’t tell you fellows, Dick’s my brother-I’m Robert-we were always kind of close-and I couldn’t raise him on the phone no way, the last three days, and I got worried about it, maybe he was sick or something, because he’s not one for going out much, maybe once a month he’ll go up to a neighborhood bar for a couple of beers, but not regular-and I said to my wife, I got to find out if anything’s wrong, and I drove up right after work. I live way out past Thousand Oaks and it was murder on the freeway but I-' He stopped, gulped, and said, 'Murder! Dick! But who’d murder Dick? A quiet fellow like Dick! It don’t make sense!'
'He had a key to the house, went in and found him and called us,' said the Traffic man, sounding tired. Piggott and Schenke went up the narrow front walk. The front door was open, past a neatly mended screen door. The body was in the middle of the living room, a small square room crowded with old-fashioned furniture, a big TV console in one corner. A straight chair was overturned, the carpet rucked up in folds, a clock and vase from an overturned table lying around the corpse; there’d been some sort of scuffle here. The TV was on, volume turned low.
The body was lying face up in the middle of the room, a big fleshy middle-aged man with a Roman nose and a mop of gray hair. They looked at him and Schenke said, 'He was in a fight all right, probably right here. Could be he hit his head on something, or the other guy hit him deliberately to kill. We can ask the brother what’s missing. We better get S.I.D. out for pictures and so on.'
They called up the lab boys and talked to Robert Buford while they waited. He said his brother Dick was kind of a loner, didn’t have too many friends; trouble was he and Mary, his wife, had been awful close, didn’t seem to want anybody else, and when she died- Since then, when Dick wasn’t working, he mostly stayed home, watched TV. He didn’t have any worries about money, they owned the house; Dick was kind of close with money.
When the lab men had taken pictures and printed the body, they went over him. In one pocket there was seventeen cents, a handkerchief, what looked like car keys, and an empty wallet. There was an old Chevy in the garage, Buford’s car, undisturbed. They asked Robert about what cash Dick might have carried, and he said helplessly, 'Jesus, I don’t know what to say, I don’t know how much he might have had-could be he’d just run out and was figuring to go to the bank tomorrow, or he coulda had a bundle and been robbed-I don’t know.' He peered sorrowfully at the dead man. 'You don’t figure he coulda just had a heart attack or something? He was fifty-nine. No, I suppose it wasn’t.'
The autopsy would tell them, but they’d both seen enough bodies to have an educated guess about this. It would give the day watch something else to work.
Hackett was off on Thursdays. 'Thank heaven,' said Angel, getting out her car keys, 'there’s one day I can go to the market without the kids. But I’m going to see Alison first. Poor darling, she’s feeling awful with this one so far- I think it was a mistake myself-'
'I’m taking bets it’ll be a redhead,' said Hackett.
'And, Art-if you touch a crumb of that cream pie I’ll kill you. You’re ten pounds up again.'
'All right, all right.' But after she’d backed out, he listened to Mark prattle about school-Mark would be starting kindergarten next month, which seemed impossible-and thought, It was probably something like that. Whatever that Yeager had overheard, or thought he had. People said things, I’ll kill you, It was murder-and also made jokes. What they didn’t do, at least people like these Lamperts, from what he’d gathered about them, was casually plan a real killing with the apartment door open and people wandering around.
He called in after a while, keeping an eye on his darling Sheila trotting busily around, to hear if anything new had gone down. Lake told him that that priest had died, about the dead teenager, and the new one last night. So that unholy trio had done a murder now; Hackett wished there was some way to get a lead to them.
The first thing Mendoza did on Thursday morning was to get on to S.I.D. as to what, if anything, they’d got on that Pontiac.
'We’ve been busy,' said Duke. 'I was just getting out a report. Nothing. The priest’s prints were in it, and that other priest’s, he used it sometimes-but that’s all. If he was jumped around there, it was before he got into the car. No, we didn’t turn up any keys anywhere.'
'Thanks so much for nothing.' But there was a little something there, Mendoza thought, and said so to Higgins who had just come in, looming as bulkily as Hackett.
'What?' asked Higgins. 'I don’t see anything, Luis.'
'Like the dog that didn’t bark in the night, George. O’Brien dropped the keys when they jumped him, but they didn’t take the car. I know we’ve got nada absolutamente on these louts, as far as court evidence goes, but a picture builds in my mind.' Jason Grace had wandered in, Landers and Conway behind him, and Galeano; they listened to the boss having a hunch. 'The fancy clothes,' said Mendoza, picking up the flame-thrower lighter and pointing it absently at Higgins, who shied back. 'And one of the victims-a woman-said that one of them, she thinks the tall blond one, called her a dirty peasant. Which is not the kind of-mmh-invective you hear around Temple Street, boys. And they couldn’t be bothered to steal a ten-year-old Pontiac. I get the feeling they’re not native to our beat.'
'Then what the hell are they doing down here, jumping the senior citizens?' said Higgins. 'For kicks?'
' Es posible,' said Mendoza. He pressed the trigger, the flame shot out and he lit his cigarette. 'They haven’t made any kind of haul. Any halfway smart four-year-old around here would know that the average senior citizen in this area isn’t exactly loaded, or he wouldn’t still be living in the area. It’s possible our pretty boys in their fancy clothes-from somewhere a little way up the social scale-are prowling around here just for the kicks, beating up the senior citizens for fun. Mmh. Como no -maybe with the idea that cops wouldn’t go to much trouble over these particular senior citizens.'
'That’s a little far out,' said Higgins, 'or is it?'
'He smells these things,' said Grace seriously. 'I’ll add, what you might call a mixed population down here. One of these here racists, Loo-tenant suh?'
Mendoza laughed. 'I don’t know if I smell anything or not, Jase. Just off the top of my mind, if I remember right, two of the victims were Mexican, three black, the rest just people-and O’Brien. They must have seen his priest’s collar-but it was dark. But-? vaya historia! -that 'dirty peasant’ sticks in my mind. Not Temple Street. More like U.C.L.A.'
'Which may be a thought, but it doesn’t take us anywhere to look,' said Conway. 'Have you had a chance to look at the offbeat thing Carey handed us? I like it, as a story, but it’s going to be a lot of work for nothing. I want to see that blonde.'
Mendoza picked up the night report, didn’t start reading it. 'You’ll tell me about it. A blonde?'
'I’m bound to say,' said Galeano, 'it’s the wheelchair that sort of caught my imagination-the empty wheelchair. You can see what Carey means-it’s a locked-room puzzle in a sort of way.'
'An empty wheelchair,' said Mendoza, cigarette suspended. 'So, I’ll hear about it.'
Sergeant Lake looked in. 'There’s a Mrs. Chard here and some other people. A Mrs. Moseley and a Mr. and Mrs. Peacock asking for Palliser.'
'So the night watch got hold of the Chard woman,' said Galeano. 'I’d better talk to her, Jimmy. John hasn’t showed up yet. You can tell the boss about the wheelchair, Rich.'
