Mark of Murder llm-7

by Dell Shannon

  Mark of Murder

  ( Lieutenant Luis Mendoza - 7 )

  Dell Shannon

  Dell Shannon

  Mark of Murder

  … their works are works of iniquity, and the act of violence is in their hands. Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood: their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity; wasting and destruction are in their paths. The way of peace they know not…

  - --Isaiah 59:6-8

  ONE

  "Such a blessing," said Alison, "to be able to walk right off, with never a minute's worry. Mairi's such a dear, and so reliable. Isn't it a beautiful day!" She sat up in her deck chair and conscientiously inhaled several deep breaths of the sparkling sea air.

  Mendoza grunted. "All the same, you're worrying because there wasn't a card or letter at Norfolk."

  "I'm not really," said Alison. "She probably wasn't sure of catching us, and will write direct to the hotel in Bermuda."

  Mendoza grunted again.

  "For goodness' sake, look at the pretty ocean or-You're supposed to be enjoying yourself, on vacation."

  "I know, I know," said Mendoza. He sat up and looked at the calm blue Atlantic, bright in the sun of early July, said perfunctorily, " Que bello," and leaned back again. "I wish the damn boat would go faster. Maybe I can get a Times in Bermuda."

  "And the first vacation you've had in years," Alison went on. "From what I can make out, whenever you have taken a few days, you've found some excuse to go back and hang around the office, and never got a proper vacation at all. It's ridiculous-"

  Mendoza turned lazily and looked at her, from her wind-blown gleaming red head to her frivolous green linen sandals, which matched her sleeveless linen dress, which in turn displayed her very satisfactory figure.

  "Things come up," he said. "You finally managed to drag me away, querida."

  "Well, you might enjoy it a little more, that's all," said Alison.

  "I am, I am." Mendoza sat up and looked at a man walking briskly past down the deck. "Well, fancy that," he said.

  "What?"

  "That fellow looked like Benny Metzer. We had the word he'd gone to working the liners since we chased him out of town the last time. I think I'll just-"

  "You'll stay right where you are," said Alison firmly, "and enjoy the nice sea breeze-. I swear you're more married to your job than you are to me." She looked at him with her head cocked. "What's wrong, Luis? You did enjoy New York, and the first night and all. But ever since we've been on this ship you've been-fidgety. It can't be seasickness, you'd have succumbed by now."

  "Damn it," said Mendoza, "it's just-three weeks. Out of touch. I wonder whether Art got anywhere on that body in the hotel. It looked damned anonymous. Damn it, I've just got the feeling I shouldn't be here, there's something going on that-”

  "?Que disparate! " said Alison, and laughed. "And I know why, too. It's not that you're psychic, it's just that you're firmly convinced the L.A.P.D. can't operate efficiently without you there in the homicide office at headquarters. Egotist!"

  Unwillingly he grinned. "And maybe you're right. But -" He stood up; he still felt undressed in the casual gray slacks and open-necked sports shirt; he felt uncomfortable without tie or jacket. "I'm going to take a walk," he said. "The way they feed you on these ships…" He didn't much care for the consciously superior service of the stewards and waiters either, as too, too British as this cruise liner. And he definitely didn't like-"Oh, my God," he said, looking up the deck, "I'm off indeed, here they come again. Those Kitcheners."

  Alison giggled. "You've no idea how funny it is, watching you evade Evadne."

  Mendoza said shortly that Kitchener ought to beat her, and fled up the deck; Alison was left to withstand the Kitcheners' onslaught. Evadne Kitchener had attached herself and her paunchy little husband to the Mendozas the first day out; professing to recognize Mendoza as a certain well-known actor incognito, she-as Alison put it-arched at him simperingly while her husband told Alison how vivacious dear Evadne was.

  "Your charming husband not with you?" she called gaily now. "How too disappointing! I do trust he isn't straying toward that rather vulgar little blonde at your table. I must say, I thought-"

  "He's brooding," said Alison gravely, "on all the murderers he might be arresting, instead of wasting time like this."

  Evadne gave a little scream of mirth. "You will keep up your little joke! Calling himself a policeman indeed, when we both know who the dear man really-but we won't give you away, my dear. So thrilling-"

  Mendoza paced moodily down the deck, ignoring the bright sun on the beautifully calm sea. He wondered what Art was getting on that corpse. If anything. And there'd been that deliberate wrecking of the S.P. Daylight too. Homicide got the train wrecks. The engineer being quick-witted, it hadn't been a bad one, nobody killed; but that switch had been thrown deliberately, and they'd have to find out who had done it. There'd been a couple of prints, but not in Records.

  Well, damn it, Alison was probably quite right. Other men went off on vacation and the force struggled along without them. But ever since he'd been on this damn cruise liner he'd had the irrational feeling, the nervous feeling, that he hadn't any business to be heading leisurely for Bermuda and the luxury hotel. That he was needed in the office, that something big was happening and they needed him. Damn fool, he said to himself now, standing at the rail and staring back in the general direction of New York. Just, probably, because he'd never been away from the job this long before, in all the twenty-two years he'd been on the L.A. force.

  He'd enjoyed a week or so of the vacation, and so had Alison-when she wasn't worrying about the twins, though she wouldn't admit it. Which was silly too, because that treasure Mrs. MacTaggart was completely reliable.

  But suddenly now he felt-well, admit it, he thought ruefully, he felt homesick. For his own office, where he ought to be, in respectable city clothes, going over the latest cases with Hackett and his other sergeants, deploying men, making decisions.

  There hadn't been much to get hold of, he thought, on that bloodily slashed corpse in the Third Street hotel room. The doctor had said, a distinctive knife, but…

  He wondered how it had turned out. The damn New York papers didn't print news from anywhere west of the Hudson, unless it concerned a national catastrophe. They'd be in Bermuda tomorrow. Maybe Art had found time to write him a few lines. Maybe he could get an L.A. Times somewhere. Didn't most resorts stock papers from all over? Of course it was British territory…

  And, my God, there were the Kitcheners and Alison bearing down on him. Undoubtedly-he could see the words forming on Evadne's mauve-painted lips-to carry him off for pre-lunch cocktails. Foreseeing the present impossibility of detaching Alison without downright rudeness, Mendoza left her to her fate and, pretending he hadn't seen them, dived down the nearest companionway. He found himself at the door of one of the plush saloons and dodged in.

  Almost at once he began to feel a little happier. Various groups, mostly of men, were sitting over cards here; in one corner he saw the man who looked like Benny Metzer just sitting down with four other men. He sauntered in that direction. That flat back to the man's head, and the left shoulder carried higher, and the lobeless ears…

  It was Benny, all right. Dressed to kill in expensive sports clothes. Mendoza stood a little way off and watched with professional admiration as Benny, chatting genially with his companions, deftly got the innocent deck off the table and substituted his own-probably a deck of concave strippers. As another man cut the cards, Mendoza walked up and slapped Benny on the back.

  "Well, fancy running into you, old pal, old pal!" he said heartily. "Introduce me round, friend, and invite me to sit in, won't you? I'm just in the mood for
a few hands of draw!"

  Benny showed his teeth like a cornered rat, recognizing him with starting eyes, an arm of the law that ought to have been thirty-five hundred miles away. "I-why, sure, old pal," he said between his teeth. "I-gennelmen, like you to meet-"

  A prosperous-looking middle-aged man in too gay sports clothes said that any friend of Mr. Johnson's was welcome. Mendoza said that was fine, leaned over Benny's shoulder and as he added, "Haven't run across this old pal in many a year," rescued the honest deck from Benny's specially tailored coattail pocket. Benny felt it go and wriggled in helpless rage. Mendoza drew up another chair, sat down at the table, and casually swept the doctored deck into his left hand. "New deal, gentlemen-first cut?" He laid the honest deck out, neatly stacked, before his neighbor, and smiled at Benny. The others looked as if they could afford to lose a little, and he'd enjoy taking some of Benny's ill-gotten gains.

  It was better than walking the deck, feeling homesick for the homicide office and his real job. All the same, better tell the captain-and the Bermuda police-about Benny. Mendoza sighed. Duty. He never could get worked up about the Bennys, himself. Largely harmless; and any fool who sat down to play cards with a stranger was asking for it.

  He looked at a fair-to-middling hand and wondered what was going on right now back home, at the office.

  ***

  Hackett came into the office, set a cardboard carton on Sergeant Lake's desk, and said, "Get that up to the lab pronto, will you? God, I wish Luis hadn't gone gallivanting off. He might have one of his famous hunches on this one.”

  Lake looked at him and said, "Don't tell me-"

  "That's right," said Hackett. "Looks like the same boy. That's four in ten days. The press boys've got him named now, in the afternoon editions. The Slasher. City terrified, et cetera. It looks like the same knife, on this new one. See what Bainbridge says, but it looks the same to me."

  "I'll be damned," said Lake. "Another woman?"

  Hackett shook his head, looking a little sick. "Fourteen-year-old Mexican boy. Everybody says, a good boy. On his way home from a Boy Scout meeting at the Y.M.C.A.”

  "Oh, my God," said Lake, "what a thing. And another one just came in.”

  "Oh, damn," said Hackett. By what they had on this Slasher-damn fool name to hang on him-that was going to be a tough one, a lot of plodding routine, using a lot of men. "What?"

  Lake shuffled papers on his desk. "Call just came in, from the squad car. I was going to pass it to Palliser, he's the only one in, but- Man found dead in his office. A doctor, I think. Shot. They've just found him. Address over on Wilshire."

  Hackett wrote it down. "You sent a doctor and so on?"

  "Just finished that when you came in. Bainbridge, and Marx and Horder to do the printing, and Scarne."

  "O.K." Hackett looked into the communal sergeants' office, which was occupied solely by Palliser at the moment. Palliser's desk was littered with papers and he was reading one, his long dark face looking gloomy. "Take a little break," invited Hackett. "Come look at another corpse with me. I may have to turn it over to you, so you'd better be in from the start."

  Palliser didn't object. "We'll never get anywhere on that train wrecking," he predicted as they walked toward the elevators. "Even when we've got prints off the switch."

  "Doesn't look promising? Where've you been looking, in general?”

  "Everywhere there is to look," said Palliser morosely. "We've collected about a hundred and fifty prints from possible suspects, but none's matched up and all the possibles are just that-men fired by the S.P. or some other local railroad. Nothing really says-"

  But it would be nice, thought Hackett, to drop on that X. That could have been one hell of a train wreck…Whoever had thrown that switch, just as the Daylight was past the Sun Valley intersection, had pretty evidently intended the train-traveling at a moderate clip there as its next stop wasn't until Glendale-to enter a short siding and plow into the rear of a chemical factory nearby. Owing to the quick eye of the engineer, who had spotted the switch standing wrong before they reached it and thrown on the brakes at once, the train had managed to stop before the end of the siding-four cars jack-knifed, the engine derailed, minor injuries. Not a major wreck, as had been intended.

  Somebody who had once worked for a railroad and knew how to operate a switch… And the hell of it was, of course, he'd been right there on the scene, had to be, because the switch had been used twenty minutes before for a freight dropping off a few cars there. The signalman hadn't seen a thing; and in the confusion afterward…

  They'd been plodding through the local railroads' records on past employees, concentrating on the Southern Pacific, but nothing said he was among those. He might just be somebody who liked to see train wrecks.

  "You might know," said Hackett, "we'd get handed another one. July, after all. The rate always goes up in summer." Which, oddly enough, was true of other crimes as well as homicide.

  The new one was at an address on Wilshire, close in downtown, just the other side of the Harbor Freeway. When they got there, in Hackett's car, they saw a rather elegant small building, new-looking, of stucco and synthetic decorative stone. The stucco was painted gray and the trim white. There was a sign swinging from a fancy wrought-iron post at the sidewalk: Dr. Francis Nestor, Doctor of Chiropractic, it announced.

  A squad car sat in front of the building, and Hackett recognized Dr. Bainbridge's old Chevy.

  The white door was open; they went in. The waiting room was well furnished in very modern style: gray carpet, low turquoise sectional, black plastic chairs, one of those modern paintings that to Hackett looked like the product of a kindergarten.

  A woman sat on the sectional; she looked dazed and a little frightened. "But it just doesn't seem possible," she was saying, shaking her head. "Frank, dead. All of a sudden, like this."

  The big uniformed man standing beside her came over to Hackett, who introduced himself and Palliser. "Glad to have you here, sir, I'm Bronson-I ought to be getting back on tour. That's the wife, by the way. See, what happened is, far as I can make it out, this guy-the chiropractor-had an evening appointment last night. He should've been in by at least midnight, only he wasn't. Naturally, I suppose, Mrs. Nestor sat up worrying, but maybe he used to step out on her once in a while, and she thought-well, anyway, it wasn't until about an hour ago she decided to do something about it and came down to his office. Found the front door locked, went round to the side, and saw that door'd been forced open-lock broken. She was afraid to go in alone, so she called in and I got chased over. And there he is, shot-and no gun, so I-"

  "Well," said Hackett. "That about it? Wait a minute and show me that door, will you?" He went over to the woman. "Mrs. Nestor?"

  She looked up at him. "Yes."

  "We're from headquarters. I'll want to ask you a few questions, but not right now. Will you stay here or would you rather go home?"

  "Oh," she said. "Of course. No, that's all right, I'll wait. It just doesn't seem possible, that's all. So sudden."

  She was a woman in her early thirties, he judged, and ordinary-looking: not very attractive, what another woman might call mousy. Her hair was dun-colored, fluffed out around her thin sallow face in a too youthful style; she didn't have on much make-up, and she wore a plain, neat blue cotton dress, no stockings, a pair of saddle shoes with white ankle socks. Interestingly, she didn't seem to have been crying.

  The patrolman led him out the single door at the rear of the room, to a short cross hall with several doors.

  "Down here, sir." The second outside entrance was on the right side of the building. The door had been forced: crudely forced, with something like a tire iron or, of course, a jemmy. This building sat between two much larger ones; on this side its nearest neighbor, across a small parking lot, was a three-story office building. Without much doubt, nobody there at night. Hackett sighed, said, "O.K., I guess you might as well get back on tour."

  He went down to the other end of the hall, past
two open-doored examination rooms, to the scene of activity. This was a private office; there was a glass-topped walnut desk, a plastic-upholstered swivel chair behind it, a glass-fronted bookcase, a couple of other chairs. The floor was marble-patterned vinyl. This building, and the rooms they had seen, looked like class: Dr. Nestor had evidently been doing very well indeed with his practice.

  "What does it look like?" he asked. In that confined space, several men were having difficulty avoiding each other or disturbing possible evidence as they went about their jobs. Dr. Bainbridge was squatting over the body.

  Scarne was taking flash shots. Marx was printing the top of the desk, and Horder was printing the flat slab door. Bainbridge glanced up testily. "I've just got here. You can see he's been shot. Probably a small caliber, and until I've looked inside and so on I'll say roughly between- oh, call it twelve and sixteen hours."

  Hackett looked at his watch. "Putting it between eight and midnight last night." He bent and looked at the corpse.

  Frank Nestor had been, probably, around thirty-five. Hackett's first thought was that, even dead, he looked an unlikely husband for the plain sallow woman out there in the waiting room. You could see that Nestor had been a very good-looking man, the type you could call a ladies' man. Not very big, middle size, but he had lean, handsome, regular features, with a hairline dark mustache and curly dark hair. And he was dressed to the nines, in beige flannel slacks, an expensive brown sports jacket, white shirt, and a beige silk tie with brown horse heads on it; that was neatly confined by a gold tie clasp set with a piece of carved jade. He was lying on his back directly in front of the desk, almost parallel to its length. One arm, the left, was flung out and twisted so that the back of the hand was uppermost; there was a heavy gold ring set with a black star sapphire on the little finger. The other arm was across the chest, and that hand was clenched. He'd been shot once in the forehead, very neatly. As Bainbridge said, probably a small caliber; there was very little mess.