Felony File Read Online Free

Lingerie on the seventh floor. It only goes from seven to
nine, where Lost and Found is. Anyway, they showed up at the door to
Accounting at ten past six on the dot, and of course there was only
six guys there, everybody else had left. All four of 'em had guns,
and Mr. Anderson said it didn't take three minutes, three of 'em went
to work—they had the rope with 'em—and got them all tied up like
packages. Just in time to come out to the elevator and meet me and
Bob peacefully riding up with all that loot. There wasn't one damned
thing we could do. In about another two minutes they had us tied up,
and down they go in the elevator."
    " Taking off the masks as they went," said
Landers, "to, hopefully, slide out without any trouble
downstairs. As indeed they did."
    "Yeah," said Lee. "See, the men on the
first floor then aren't usually very near that alley door. Two
men—Decker and Robinson, but usually Robinson'd be on his way up to
the second floor around then. Decker'd have got the van from the
parking lot and brought it around to the alley, left the keys in it.
And we told you these bastards had on uniforms—not really like
ours, but blue—and unless Decker was close enough, he couldn't see
it wasn't us, if they slid out in pairs."
    " A very smart little operation indeedy,"
said Grace.
    They had put out an A.P.B. for the van, and it had
been spotted an hour ago parked over on Garondelet. It was now in the
police garage being gone over by the lab men.
    " Not to tell you your business," said
Masters diffidently, "but we kind of wondered—maybe one of
them used to work as a guard at the store. Knew the routine from
that, see?"
    " It is a thought," said Grace. That, of
course, had occurred to them.
    Lee was looking around the big office, at the two
detectives, with interest. Only Glasser was there, bent over his
typewriter. Lee said to Landers, "Excuse me, but you don't look
old enough to be a detective, you know?"
    Of necessity, after long suffering, Landers had
learned to bear his cross philosophically. He just had the kind of
face that would look about twenty until he was a grandfather, and he
had to live with it.
    It was nearly the end of shift. They thanked the two
guards and saw them out. Grace left, and Landers was just going out
the door when the phone on his desk rang. He went back to pick it up
and found his wife at the other end.
    Phillippa Rosemary, unfortunately christened by
parents who never dreamed she would turn into a policewoman, was
annoyed. "These damn Narco men," she said. "I'm going
to be here—" here was Records and Identification downstairs—
"for at least another hour, Tom—they've got three citizens
looking for a pusher. So will you please pick up a pound of hamburger
and some frozen french fries on the way home?"
    "Certainly," said Landers. "Maybe this
kind of thing will convince you to start a family and turn into an
old-fashioned homemaker."
    "I'm thinking about it, I'm thinking about it,"
said Phil. "What with all the stupid civilians I've had to deal
with today, and now Lieutenant Goldberg telling me all about his
allergies—"
    Landers laughed. "We'll
discuss it later at closer quarters. I'll expect you when I see you."
    * * *
    The chief accountant at Bullock's had come up with a
rough estimate of the loot: somewhere around three hundred and fifty
grand. Sergeant John Palliser drove home through the steady rain
thinking about that very smart job. He had never been especially
gifted with ESP—Mendoza was the one with the crystal ball—but a
dim presentiment moved in his mind, and as he pulled into the drive
of the house on Hillcrest Road in Hollywood he thought, that ought to
be enough to last them for a while, but-
    Roberta had really been working with the big black
German shepherd Trina, who hardly jumped on them anymore at all. She
brought him a Scotch-and-water, said there were pork chops for dinner
and she'd just got the baby to sleep. "Have you been on that
Bullock's thing?—it was