Halo in Blood

by Howard Browne

  A few tempers got strained before the boys worked out a deal, but it was finally decided that each was to have a turn at officiating—both at the chapel and at the cemetery.

  Anyway, they got John Doe planted, dusted off their hands and went back to their churches. Then somebody —not necessarily one of the turned-collar boys—tipped off at least one city editor and things started to buzz. You could bet your umbilicus the newshawks weren’t through digging into the puzzle. Circulations have been upped on stories that started on a tamer note than this one.

  By the time I finished the article I knew why Lieutenant George Zarr of the Homicide Detail had asked so many questions. Well, he could ask somebody else. I had my own living to make.

  I folded the paper and put it in the wastebasket and set about earning the money John Sandmark had paid me earlier in the afternoon. The envelopes from under the mail slot were just a couple of bills. I pawed them into the middle desk drawer, dug a Chicago telephone directory out of another drawer and flopped it down on the desk pad.

  There were six listings under the name Marlin. None of them was Gerald or Jerry, and one was a company. That meant five numbers to call.

  I pulled the phone over in front of me and, one by one, called all five. Among them was one Jerry Marlin, but he was nine years old and doing his homework, so I passed him up.

  That was that. I put back the receiver and lighted another cigarette and twiddled my thumbs over some thinking. Then I reached for the phone again and dialed a number I didn’t have to look up. It belonged to an unlisted telephone in a six-by-eight cubbyhole at the Criminal Courts Building out on Twenty-sixth and California.

  “ . . . H’lo.”

  I said, “Harvey?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is Paul Pine.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Still a one-syllable guy,” I said. “How’ve you been, Harvey?”

  “Okay.”

  I gave it up. “How about a little help, pal?”

  “Okay.”

  “You ever hear of a gee named Marlin—Jerry Marlin?”

  “No.”

  “Check up on it, anyway, will you, Harvey? I’ll hold on.”

  “Okay.”

  I propped my feet up against the edge of the desk and leaned back and waited. A wilted breeze slipped in through the open window and riffled the leaves of the Varga calendar, and the brunette in the red bathing suit wiggled her hips at me. She was wasting her time. An elevated train screeched on the Van Buren Street curve two blocks away, a faint thin screech like the E string on a violin.

  “Pine?” said the receiver against my ear.

  “Yeah, Harvey. Anything?”

  “Nothing on him.”

  I sighed. “Okay. Thanks for trying.”

  I reached out and pressed the cut-off button and took the telephone standard on my lap and dialed police headquarters at Eleventh and State. It took another fifteen minutes of talking and waiting—mostly waiting—to get the same answer Harvey out at the State’s Attorney’s had given me. Mr. Gerald Marlin was as clean as a commencement-day neck. Under that name anyway.

  I thought some more, a little sourly this time. If I was going to find out what kind of jamoke Marlin was, I had to start by finding him, where he lived and what he did for a living. There were three million people in town. Finding one of them who wasn’t in the phone book or on the records of the local law could get to be quite a job.

  In my line of business I was used to being called on to find people. But my clients usually supplied former addresses, a list of friends, former jobs: information that made locating the missing person mostly a matter of leg work.

  All John Sandmark had given was a name, a description that would fit a lot of guys, and orders to break up a romance. Of course, I could always pick up Marlin by tailing Leona Sandmark around until she met him someplace. But I had instructions to stay away from her, and in the circumstances, it was probably the better thing to do. She had spotted me outside her stepfather’s home; if she found me underfoot a second time I could get pressured off the case. I made my living by staying on cases.

  I went back over my talk with Sandmark. By the time I finished there was an idea or two within reach. I blew on them and polished them up a bit and discovered they were pretty good ideas. So I took my hat off the filing case and locked the office door and went out to see a movie.

  CHAPTER 4

  It was a clear hot night, with half a platinum moon hanging above the Chicago Avenue water tower and a blanket of gasoline fumes settling over Michigan Avenue. I turned off at Huron Street and parked halfway down the block from Rush and walked around the corner to the Peacock Club—a night club that drew most of its clientele from the powdered-shoulders and white-tie crowd.

  I let the doorman open the door for me and went into the glittering foyer. It was empty of customers, and beyond the arched entrance the semicircular rows of white-clothed tables showed only a few diners dotted about the empty dance floor. Only part of the orchestra was on the stand and they were playing quietly, almost to themselves, with most of the brasses loafing. The time was nine-forty-five.

  The bar was off to one side behind a glass partition from ceiling to floor. It was a long straight hunk of what looked like mahogany, with rounded corners and, at the far end, a redhead in a black evening dress behind a twenty-six board under a light with a green glass shade. A narrow mirror ran the full length of the shelving behind the bar, with a mural above it that was mostly nudes. There wasn’t much light, but then there never is in places like that. The only customers were four men drinking together just inside the door.

  I climbed onto the red-leather top of one of the chrome stools halfway down the bar and the nearer of the two aprons unfolded his arms and drifted over.

  “Your order, sir?”

  He was a compact little man, put together with the neat precision of a Swiss watch. His black hair was plastered down above a small white face with a brief nose and a mouth like a pencil mark. His small narrow eyes didn’t really see me.

  “A dry Martini,” I said.

  He put it together with the economy of motion of an old hand at the game. When he set the glass in front of me, I said, “Marlin been in tonight?”

  Now he saw me, but nothing else changed in his face. He put two narrow stubby-fingered white hands on his edge of the bar and leaned forward with polite attentiveness. He said, “What was the name, sir?” His voice had a peculiar false brightness to it that was going to grow into nastiness if I let it.

  I didn’t intend to let it. I said, “The name was Marlin and it probably still is. I asked you if he had been in tonight.”

  His lips curled back but he wasn’t smiling. The light wasn’t strong enough for me to see what was in his eyes but I knew what was in them just the same. He said, “I don’t think I’ve seen you around before, sir.”

  I turned the stem of my glass slowly between a thumb and forefinger and waited for him to say something more or move away and say it to somebody else. He had told me all I wanted to know.

  He straightened up stiffly and moved a few steps down the bar and found a towel and wiped off a section of the already immaculate wood. He studiously kept his eyes away from me but he was conscious that I was still siting there. I sipped at my drink and lighted a cigarette and looked smugly at myself in the mirror behind the bar.

  When I turned my head again the barkeep was talking into a telephone. It didn’t last more than thirty seconds. He put back the receiver and turned his head quickly and saw me watching him. It made him jump a little. For a moment or two he was very busy doing nothing important. then he sidled along the bar to where I was sitting and smiled tightly and said. “Shall I fill your glass, sir?”

  “Not until I empty it.” I said.

  “Yes, sir.” He found another towel and wiped off some more of the bar in my vicinity. Two girls in bright evening dresses came into the bar with a tall thin guy with a long neck. They sat down a few stools t
o my left and called over my new friend and ordered cocktails. They never got cocktails any quicker than those, and all the time the bar-keep was keeping one eye on me.

  I finished my Martini and he had hold of the glass before it had time to make a ring on the wood. “Another, sir?”

  “Relax,” I said. “I won’t run away.”

  He stood there, holding the glass and smiling his tight smile. I took out my wallet and gave him a bill. He put the glass under the bar and went over to the register for change.”

  It took him twice the necessary time to get the proper change together. He came back and was counting it out carefully for me—something no experienced apron would ever do—when a medium-sized man wearing a tuxedo came into the bar, looked around quickly and came over to me. The barkeep got the stiffness out of his fingers and face, gave me the rest of my change without counting and moved away.

  The man said, “Pardon me,” in a soft voice and I looked around at him. He was five or six years older than I, with dark hair turning gray at the temples, pointed ears and a face like a tired fox.

  “It’s a good thing you didn’t take any longer getting here,” I said. “Your stooge had his nails just about gnawed down to the elbow.”

  He looked me over carefully before he said, “You wanted to see Mr. Marlin?”

  “Not that I recall,” I said. “I asked if he had been in tonight, that’s all.”

  “You know Mr. Marlin?” His politeness was acquiring an edge.

  “We have a mutual friend, I believe.”

  “Yes?”

  “You wouldn’t know him,” I said.

  He put a long-fingered hand into the jacket pocket next to me and said, “This isn’t the best place to talk. Come with me, please.”

  If he had a gun in there it didn’t mean anything. Only a hophead would do any blasting where we were and he wasn’t a hophead. I was satisfied with the way things were working out.

  I got off the stool and he steered me through the foyer and into a small private elevator around the corner from the checkroom. I let him push the button and we went up one flight and along a narrow, heavily carpeted corridor with blue walls and past two or three doors to one at the end of the hall. My guide gave a pair of soft knocks on the panel and the lock began to click and he pushed open the door and we went in.

  It wasn’t a very large room but there was enough space for a kneehole desk in chrome with a blue composition top, and three leather chairs with bent metal tubing for legs. Heavy gold draperies with long fringing were drawn at the two windows and there was the feel of air conditioning.

  The man behind the desk was someone I had never seen before. He was a good six feet four, two hundred and fifty pounds if an ounce, and about as much fat on him as you’d find on the handle of a cane. His shoulders were as broad as the jokes at a Legion stag and the head above them seemed too small to be his own. His hair was black and there wasn’t much of it and what there was he wore long and combed across to hide the bald spot. He had small ears that lay close to his head and small black glittering eyes at the bottom of deep shadowy sockets. The hollows under his cheekbones were as deep as the pocket in a catcher’s mitt.

  When I was standing in front of the desk across from him, he stared at me with a kind of brooding composure like a department-store president about to bawl hell out of an assistant buyer. You could tell right off that he took himself seriously and expected you to take him the same way.

  His first words were to the guy who had brought me there. “See if he is armed, Andrew.” His voice was deep but strangely flat, dry as an old bone.

  Hands came from behind and patted over me, then fell away. “He’s clean, sir.”

  I got looked at some more before the man behind the desk said, “My name is D’Allemand, sir. Who are you?”

  I told him my name but it didn’t seem to make much of an impression. He picked up an ivory-handled letter opener that matched the rest of the desk accessories and moved it around in his broad heavy hands and continued to stare at me. It would have been nice for him to ask me to sit down but, clearly, the thought never crossed his mind.

  He said, “What is your business with Mr. Marlin?”

  “I don’t have any business with him,” I said. “I don’t even know him.”

  “Yet you asked for him?”

  “I asked about him,” I corrected.

  ‘“Don’t split hairs with me. Mr. Pine. I want to know what your interest is in Marlin.”

  His feudal-baron air began to heat up the back of my neck. I said, “‘What the hell do I care what you want, Mac. I came up—”

  Something hard came out of nowhere and exploded against the side of my jaw. I spun sideways and slammed against one of the tubular chairs and went over with it, plowing the rough beige carpeting with my right cheek. I tried to roll as I fell but a pointed shoe hammered into my right side just below the ribs and the breath whooshed out of me. The room began to swim in dim circles and I went as limp as a sunburned candle. . . .

  A hand twisted into my coat front and hauled me up on rubber legs. I blinked a few times and slowly the room came back into focus. The hand released me and I swayed and would have fallen if I hadn’t reached out and caught hold of the desk across from D’Allemand.

  He sat there toying with the letter opener, and if his expression had changed any I couldn’t tell it. I straightened up gradually and looked around at foxy-faced Andrew. He was smiling a bitter little smile and running a thumb lightly over the knuckles of his right hand.

  My voice sounded thick in my ears. “You kind of made a mistake there, friend. I’ll talk to you about it sometime.”

  He could move quick. I’d say that for him. I started to jerk my head aside as his fist came up. but my reflexes weren’t back to normal yet. The blow caught me high on one cheek and I sat down on the floor and leaned my head wearily against one of the cool metal desk legs. . . .

  “Get me his wallet, Andrew.”

  A hand slid into my inner coat pocket. I didn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t do anything about it. It came out again with my billfold between the fingers and disappeared somewhere into the void above me.

  “Get him to his feet, Andrew.”

  Up I came, with a jerk that made my teeth rattle. I leaned against the desk and put fingers gently against my cheek and said nothing at all.

  D’Allemand was flipping idly through the transparent identification panels in my wallet. Presently he tossed it over in front of me and said, “You may put it away, Mr. Pine. I haven’t kept anything.”

  I put it away.

  “So you are a private detective.” He nodded his head about a quarter of an inch and for some reason seemed faintly pleased. “I don’t suppose you would care to tell me who has hired you to inquire after Mr. Marlin?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Well, I won’t press you, Mr. Pine. I will advise you to forget your interest in Jerry, however. I don’t like my employees to be bothered.”

  He waited for me to say something to that but I failed him. The only thing I was capable of saying right then would have earned me another drop kick.

  He shrugged. “Very well, Mr. Pine. . . . Help him find his way out, Andrew.”

  We went out and left him sitting there behind his desk. The man with the foxy face followed me down the corridor and into the elevator. He pushed the button and we dropped down a floor and stepped out into the foyer. And all the time neither of us so much as looked at the other.

  I turned and walked through the door and left him standing there. . . .

  CHAPTER 5

  I parked a block north of Pratt Boulevard and walked around the corner to the apartment hotel where I kept my books and my other shirt. The tree-sheltered street was dark and quiet and I could hear, faintly, the traffic sounds from Sheridan Road two blocks to the east.

  Most of the lights were out in the lobby of the Dinsmore Arms as I came in through the heavy screen door and crossed to the desk
where Wilson, the night clerk, sat in his shirt sleeves behind the switchboard reading a pulp magazine.

  I don’t walk heavy and there was thick carpeting under my feet; but he heard me anyway. He jerked up his head and peered at me through the thick lenses bridging his shapeless nose.

  I said, “Evening, Sam. Any mail?”

  He got out of his chair and came over to the ledge, staring at me with his thick neck bent forward a little, like a dog that recognizes you but wants to take a sniff to be sure. His last shave had been a little careless and there was a patch of stubble on the underside of his second chin and another at one corner of his loose-lipped mouth. He smelled some of stale sweat and cigarette smoke. He always smelled that way.

  “G’d evening, Mr. Pine,” he said in his thin sharp voice. “No mail, no, sir. But this-here lady’s been waiting for you.”

  I knew she was there before he was past the first three words. There was a perfume—a scent so subtle you weren’t really conscious of the odor; you knew only that a very lovely woman was somewhere near.

  I turned around, not fast and not slow. It was Leona Sandmark.

  She said, “You lied to me,” in a small tight voice.

  Behind me, Sam Wilson shifted his feet and began to breathe with his mouth open. He was probably thinking that my past had caught up with me and maybe she was going to pull a gun and make her illegitimate child half an orphan before it was born.

  “You’re pretty good,” I said, staring at her. “My office address is the only one in the book.”

  For all I could tell she might not have heard me. She said, “You did see my father this afternoon, didn’t you?” in the same small tight voice.

  Sam’s breathing was getting noisier. I said, “Shall we kick it around down here, or would you rather come upstairs for some privacy?”

  She blinked and her head jerked back slightly as though I’d jabbed a finger at her eyes. Her glance shifted and went past me to the night clerk.

  “Very well.” She whirled around and marched stiffly across the lobby to the push-button elevator, and I trailed along. The cage was on one of the upper floors and I put an arm in front of her and pressed the button to bring it down. For all the attention she paid I might as well have been in Vancouver.