“Not good, Lieutenant.”
“Anything I can do?”
Lundahl cleared his throat uncomfortably. He hated to disturb lieutenants that early in the morning, especially with bad news.
“Yeah, Lieutenant. You can come down to the morgue. I got a hunch Captain Tower and maybe even the chief will be down pretty soon. They’re calling them now.”
A cold chill wiped away Reardon’s previous ebullience.
“What happened?”
“We just fished a stiff out of the bay—”
“Pop?”
“Not Pop,” Lundahl said, and bit back a yawn. It had been a long miserable graveyard shift. “Another poor bastard.”
Reardon felt ashamed of his relief. After all, life had probably been sweet to whoever the victim was, and his family would feel his loss as much as or more than they would feel Pop’s.
“Murdered?”
“Yeah. He looks bad. Somebody must have tried to get some information out of him using matches, and a candle, too, it looks like, because there were tallow stains, and what all. And then, when they either got what they were looking for, or when they got tired of playing games with him, it looks like they held his face under water until he just quit living.”
Reardon made a face. “Messy, huh?”
“Real messy.”
“Any identification?” Something else Lundahl had said suddenly struck Reardon. “And what’s this about Captain Tower and maybe Chief Boynton coming down at this hour? Just for some stranger fished out of the bay?”
“Well, that’s just the point,” Lundahl said wearily. “He ain’t exactly a stranger. There’re going to be a lot of questions asked, Lieutenant — a lot of questions! Because we just got through checking out the stiff’s identification, and according to the card, he wasn’t supposed to be getting himself drowned out in the bay. He was supposed to be upstairs under our protection. His name was Lazaretti.”
Chapter 9
Monday — 8:20 A.M.
There were other men in Chief Boynton’s office, many of them, but from the charged atmosphere it was plain that Lieutenant Anton Zelinski, in charge of Detention, and Patrolman Charles Travers, the night guard of the main cell block, considered themselves practically alone. Reardon thought that Zelinski’s jaw looked hard enough to strike fire off of with flint, and if Travers was at all intimidated by his superior’s belligerent appearance he didn’t show it.
“Goddamn it, Lieutenant!” Travers was saying with what he obviously considered justifiable resentment, “a guy comes walking in with a paper, what am I supposed to do?”
“You should use your head, goddamn it!”
“Jeez, thanks!”
“Jeez, thanks, yourself! How many times somebody comes up to you at one o’clock in the morning with a prisoner release?” Zelinski asked with withering scorn. “Fifteen?”
“So maybe it was the first time,” Travers admitted without backing down one inch. “So there’s got to be a first time for everything, don’t they?” He raised a thick finger in the lieutenant’s face. “You ain’t saying it wasn’t a proper release form, you notice? You ain’t saying that.”
“So did you even bother to see whose John Hancock was on the release?” Zelinski demanded. “Or was that too complicated for you?”
Travers looked at the ceiling in supplication, and then brought his hot blue eyes back to the lieutenant’s angry red face.
“No, I didn’t bother to send the signature down to the lab if that’s what you mean. I saw it was signed, that’s enough. I honestly don’t know who signs releases; Charley Finley, for all I know. Anyways, lots of judges sign releases, and I don’t know all their signatures. This one was just a big scrawl, anyways. You couldn’t hardly read it, even.”
“My God!” Zelinski struck his head with exaggerated dramatics. “And the fact that a guy hands you a release form with a signature you can’t even read — that don’t mean a thing to you?”
“Jeez, Lieutenant, I can’t even read your signature!”
“Except you know damn well I don’t sign release forms for prisoners!”
Travers almost wailed in frustration.
“Damn it, Lieutenant, you ain’t being fair! A cop — a sergeant I know is a cop — comes to me with a proper release form like I’ve seen hundreds of times, saying this Lazaretti is being transferred from the Hall to Soledad, and this sergeant I know is a cop tells me he’s been assigned to accompany the prisoner.” He appealed to the faces around him. “What in hell am I supposed to do? Refuse to honor a release? Tell the sergeant to go to hell?” He turned back to Zelinski. “Call you up at one o’clock in the morning and get reamed out for bothering you for nothing? Jeez, Lieutenant, try to see it from my angle!”
“I’ll see it from your angle! I’ll—”
Boynton had had enough. If he had previously thought any useful information might come out of the confrontation, he was pretty well convinced by now that it wouldn’t. He banged on the table, breaking up the tête-à-tête.
“We’re not getting anywhere,” he said heavily. “Let’s take it over again from the top.” He swiveled about, looking at Captain Tower stonily. “As I understand it, Captain, your Sergeant Dondero went up to the cell blocks last night with a falsified release form and took a prisoner from custody. A prisoner, incidentally, that the board had specifically decided was not to be released. And a few hours later that prisoner, with every evidence of having been extensively tortured, is found dead. And now your Sergeant Dondero can’t be located. Is that the case?”
Tower clenched his jaw. “Yes, sir.” He was unhappy and both looked and sounded it. It was the first time since he had taken over Homicide that anything like this had happened, and in his mind he promised all subordinates silently and grimly that it would be the last. “We’ve checked everywhere he might be, but so far we’ve been unable to locate him. We’ve put an all-points out on the man, and we have a watch being kept on his apartment as well as on most of his known hangouts, in case he shows.” Tower hesitated a moment and then went on, although he knew he was courting trouble. “Sir, do we have to give this story to the papers?”
Boynton’s expression turned to rock.
“What are you suggesting? A cover-up for a cop? Then we’d really be in the—”
“No, that isn’t it—”
“Then what the devil is it?” Chief Boynton studied the head of Homicide blackly. “And are you also trying to tell me the newspapers haven’t got the story yet?”
“They’ve got the story about the body being found,” Tower said, “but as far as they know, it’s an unknown. They don’t have his identity so far, and they don’t know he was a prisoner here. They also don’t know about the torture inflicted on the body, nor that a police officer is involved. Maybe if we—”
Boynton exploded. “Damn it, don’t give me any ‘maybes’! Maybe if more of our men were properly motivated, things like this wouldn’t happen! And there’s going to be no cover-up for this Dondero, I assure you of that!”
“What I’m trying to say,” Tower said stubbornly, “is that it seems to me we ought to sit on as much of the story as we can until we get our hands on Dondero and hear his side—”
Zelinski snorted. He was still irritated at having the security of his detention cells violated.
“His side! What side? Hell, he was up there yesterday during the day and he had Lazaretti in the ‘conference room’ and beat the living crap out of him there.” He jerked a contemptuous thumb. “Reardon was with him. Ask him.”