Free Streets of Death - Dell Shannon by Dell Shannon Page 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