She was waiting for them. Her name was Alice Rabinovich and she was still excited and scared but she had kept her head. She was around forty, dark with a scrawny figure in an old cotton bathrobe over a nightgown, and scuffed bedroom slippers. The apartment was at the side of the building, looking down on Hoover Street.
She said, "I couldn't sleep, it's so hot. I was tired, we had a busy day at the store, but I couldn't sleep. I went to bed, but it was no use, and I got up and sat by the window, the fan helped some. I was sitting in the dark and you can see-" she was gesturing the men into the bedroom. There was an electric fan going on a table by the open window, and a chair, and the window looked down directly to those store buildings on Hoover. The door of the appliance store would be about a hundred feet away, seen at a slightly oblique angle.
"I saw the whole thing. It's terrible about the policeman. There were two men-it was a pickup truck, they parked right in front of the store-you can see the sign from here-and one had a flashlight and the other one had a tool of some kind. There wasn't anything in the street so late-cars or people-and they broke in the door, I could see them plain, they went in and I was sure they were burglars. I was just picking up the phone to call the police, but I was still watching and they came out with a T.V. and put it in the truck and went back in, and they brought out another T.V. and went back and it was just as they came out again with another the police car came up and the policeman got out, and I could see he had his gun in his hand, and I guess he'd have told them to put their hands up or something, but he never had the chance. One of the men just shot him-bang-like that-and he fell down and I called the police back again and told them what had happened-and the men put the T.V. in the truck and drove away fast-and about five minutes later the other two police cars drove up and then the ambulance came. I hope the poor policeman isn't hurt bad-"
"So do we," said Conway. "That's fine, Mrs. Rabinovich, you've been a big help. We're lucky you were here. Could you give any description of the men?"
She said regretfully, "Oh, no, I'm afraid not. My sight is good, but they weren't that close and it was dark even with the streetlight. But it was a Ford pickup truck. It wasn't very far from the streetlight and I saw the letters plain across the front. It was light-colored-white or light blue-something like that."
"Are you sure?" asked Conway.
"Yes, I'm sure about that."
They went back across the street. By then the owner was there and he said there were three T.V.'s missing-nothing else. They told him as they'd told her to come to headquarters to make a statement in the morning. Then they went out to Cedars-Sinai to ask about Dubois.
That was about an hour and a half after the shooting, and the doctors weren't saying anything definite. He had lost a lot of blood before he was brought in.
Dubois wasn't married, but somebody had called-Turner?-and his mother was there in the waiting room down the hall in Emergency. She was a tall thin black woman with dignified regular features and she sat there quietly without crying. She looked at the Robbery-Homicide men without speaking and Conway said, "You know everybody's concerned, Mrs. Dubois. It's one of the possibilities that goes with the job."
"Do you have to tell me that?" she said in a remote voice. "I've been afraid ever since Don put on that uniform. But he always wanted to be a police officer-ever since he was a little boy. A good, honest, honorable police officer-like his father." She raised her eyes from the floor. "His father was on the force in Chicago. He got shot by a drunk when Don was five. We came out here to live with my sister and her family then."
"Mrs. Dubois, we're sorry," said Schenke. There wasn't anything else to say to her.
"We'll all be praying for him," said Piggott.
"I did quite a lot of praying for Don's father-twenty-one years ago," she said quietly.
THAT WAS THE MOST IMPORTANT item on the agenda waiting for the day watch on Sunday morning. Hackett called Mendoza at home to tell him about it and Mendoza said, "?Maria y Jose! I hope he makes it. But we might get some leads from the pickup truck."
"George is talking to the DMV right now."
"I'll be in," said Mendoza. "I'm flying to France on Tuesday, but I'll be in pronto." "
"My God, you are persistent. You'll never find out a damned thing. You haven't anywhere to start looking and you know about four words of French."
"By God, I'll have a try at it. I'll be down. Thank God they've got computers in Sacramento."
The computers, of course, would give them some legwork-a lot of it. The computers would sort out all the Ford pickup trucks registered in L.A. County a lot more quickly than the detectives could take the individual looks at the owners, and while there wouldn't be as many pickup trucks i in an urban area as in a rural one, there would be plenty. The names and addresses were still coming in by the middle of the afternoon, and they had other cases to work, and probably other calls would go down. But there was priority on this pair, who had attacked one of their own.
Dubois was still holding his own, but still unconscious. As the names of those owners came in, the first use they made of them was to run them through the R. and I. Office. It was possible that one or both of that pair had a prior record. It was even probable, given the instant unprovoked attack on Dubois. The break-in artist seldom went armed, and whoever had fired those shots was quick and handy with a gun.
There were more pickup trucks in the county than anyone could have predicted. They did some overtime, but they hadn't finished looking through Records with their own computers by the middle of Sunday evening.
THEY ALL LANDED at the office together, a little early on Monday morning. Palliser had come in even if it was his day off. Mendoza called the hospital. Dubois had rallied a little. There was a full day's work ahead and maddeningly, just as they settled down to it, they had a call. The job was like women's work, never done, and they were always having to drop one thing and pick up another.
And this one would just pose a lot of paperwork, and you could blame it directly on the fact that at eight o'clock that morning, at the intersection of Grand and Sixth Street in downtown Los Angeles, the temperature had hit ninety-nine degrees and was rising.
The patrolman who brought the woman into the office said, "My God, it's like a battlefield. You never saw such a hell of a thing. There were five squads out and three ambulances. I don't know how many people got killed, but I saw three bodies myself. When we got her out of the car, she looked ready to throw a fit, and then all of a sudden she calmed down. But maybe you ought to get her to a doctor."
Her name was Laura Fenn and by her driver's license she was forty-four and lived in South Pasadena. She told them in a dead and dull voice that she was a librarian at the main library and asked someone to call the library and explain that she'd be late. Then she just sat and looked at the wall and Wanda Larsen tried to talk to her.
"My goodness, you never saw such a thing," said the patrolman. Miss Fenn, driving a nine-year-old Dodge without air-conditioning, had caught a red light at that corner on her way to work. A good many other people had caught it too-on both streets. The lights were stuck, both on red. After about four minutes, the horns started, tempers began to rise, and cars began to edge cautiously into any opening. There were also a good many pedestrians on both streets.
The Dodge, second in line at the light on Grand, had gone roaring up onto the sidewalk, sideswiped the car first at the light, charged across the intersection where people on foot were crossing, and finally plowed into a city bus on Grand. When Wanda finally got her to say anything, she just said, "It was too hot-just too hot. I had a headache and the library's air-conditioned-and there was such a jam on the freeway-and all of a sudden it was just too much. "