Halo in Blood

by Howard Browne

  He grunted and hung up. I depressed the cut-off bar, released it and dialed the Austin number.

  Two long buzzes. A click. A male voice, tenor, said, “Hello.”

  I was ready for that too. “Mr. Martin?” I said slurring the name.

  He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it even a little bit. His voice went down three octaves and got as cadgy as a virgin at a picnic.

  “Who is this?”

  I said, “This is Ed McGuire, Mr. Martin. I’ve thought it over and decided not to sell after all. I hope there’s no hard feelings.”

  “What number do you want?” His voice was back to normal.

  “Austin 0117,” I said, getting short about it. “I want to speak to—”

  “Wrong number.” The phone went dead.

  I took the receiver away from my ear, leered at it, said, “The hell you say, brother,” and laid it gently back on the cradle. I put on my hat and coat, slipped an extra pack of cigarettes into a pocket, turned out the light, locked the inner office door and went out into the corridor.

  The night man took me down in the elevator and I walked around the corner to the parking station and had one of the attendants bring out the car. He used a cloth on the windshield and came over to the window as I started the motor.

  “She needs a wash job pretty bad, Mr. Pine.”

  “She always does,” I said, reaching for the gearshift. “It’s an indication of my character.”

  He was polite about it but he wasn’t amused. I rolled out onto Wabash, dodged the el pillars south to Jackson, turned west and went on about my business.

  Heavy clouds had piled up to the west, blotting out the stars. There were occasional flickers of heat lightning, and a weighted coolness in the air promised rain.

  Rain would be all right if I didn’t have to get out into it. I figured I wouldn’t have to get out into it.

  At a quarter to eleven I turned north into Austin Boulevard. Beyond Lake Street the homes thinned out and high-grade apartment buildings took over. Trees lined the parkways between street and sidewalk, and while there were street lights, they couldn’t do much because of all the leaves.

  The 1300 block was just as dark and just as quiet as the others along there. A few cars, most of them beyond the popular-priced field, were parked parallel to both curbs, their outlines dim in the heavy tree shadows. The smell of rain was stronger now, the air cooler, and thunder grunted from far off.

  There was plenty of room to park in front of where I judged 1317 to be. I pulled in at the curb, cut off my lights and the motor and stepped out onto the strip of grass.

  It was a six-story yellow-brick apartment building, very new, with five entrances off a central court. The court was filled with bushes and flower beds laid out in neat lines by a gardener with no imagination, and bounded with the rectangle formed by the sidewalk leading to the entrances. A vine-covered arch of yellow brick straddled the walk in front of the court, with a massive iron lantern attached to each abutment. Yellow light from electric globes in the lanterns illuminated copper numerals directly below them. The number on the left was 1317; on the right, 1325.

  I walked slowly through the arch and turned left where the walk divided. The sharp straight lines of the roof edge against the flickering sky gave me the illusion of standing at the bottom of a quarry.

  Behind a few of the windows soft lights burned against the night, but most of them were dark. A very good radio let the muted strains of a dance orchestra drift down into the courtyard. and a woman laughed close by, full-throated yet subdued.

  The first entrance showed 1317 in neat gold figures painted in a slanted line across the door glass. I pushed open the door and came into a foyer with imitation marble walls and two-tone tessellated stone to walk on. It looked as clean as a hospital corridor; it probably always looked that clean.

  Two rows of bell buttons and an intercom phone were set in a niche in the wall on my right. Six buttons to a row; that meant twelve apartments, two to a floor. The top button on the left was opposite a glassed-in card that read: L. Sandmark 6A.

  As I remembered, the windows on the top floor had been dark. That could mean any one of several things. To learn exactly, I pressed the button next to L. Sandmark 6A.

  Nothing happened. I shifted my feet to ruin the silence and put my thumb back on the button and left it there for maybe ten seconds.

  It might as well have been ten years. Either they were afraid to answer, which hardly seemed likely, or they had gone out since I telephoned. And if they had gone out at that hour, it would probably be daylight before they thought of coming home.

  All right. I would wait. I had the time. I had all the time in the world. I lighted a cigarette and threw the match stub on the nice clean tessellated floor, which put me in the same class as a guy who would wipe his feet on the “Mona Lisa,” and went back out to the street and got in behind the wheel.

  For a while I did nothing more exciting than sit there and blow smoke through my nose and listen to the cars whisper past and watch people walk by on their way home from the neighborhood movies or the corner tavern. What had been a slight breeze was now an uncertain wind that blew in brief angry gusts, like a fat man working up a rage. It had the clinging damp feel of rain close by, and the flicker of lightning was almost continuous.

  Two or three times people turned in through the yellow-brick arch of the apartment building, but only once did anybody open the door to 1317, and that was an elderly couple.

  Pedestrians got to be farther and farther apart and hardly any more cars went by. I struck a match and looked at my watch. Twelve-forty-five. I yawned and took off my hat, turned on the radio very soft, slumped down and put my feet on the dashboard and let the minutes drift. . . .

  A box car going through a bass drum snapped me out of a light doze. Thunder. Lightning forked the sky bright enough to read by and another bucket of noise spilled over the car. And here came the rain.

  I rolled up the side windows and switched off the radio and continued to sit, listening to the drumming drops against the roof. It was coming down very hard—too hard to last long. One of these summer rains you think is going to cool off the town for a few days but seldom does.

  A car pulled in behind me, its headlights showing the big drops bouncing knee-high off the black pavement. A minute later the door slammed and a man and a woman in evening clothes dashed across the sidewalk. It wasn’t my couple; I saw that right away. They disappeared quick and the car turned out and rolled past me and away. It was a Checker cab.

  I took another look at my watch. Three-thirty-five. I began to wonder if Marlin and the Sandmark girl hadn’t returned while I was pounding my ear. He could have taken her in and gone out again and all this was for nothing. Paul Pine, ace detective. Dependable for walking the dog and firing the cook.

  Twenty more minutes went by like rolling a brick uphill. The rain had settled down to a steady cloudburst and the lightning and thunder were in there pitching. I smoked another cigarette and shivered a time or two and thought longingly of the Scotch I had had in John Sandmark’s library the afternoon before.

  Headlights cut a swath in the rain and a big black Packard convertible moved slowly past me and cut in to the curb not more than six feet in front of my radiator. Right then it seemed I caught the gleam of another set of headlights at my rear, but it was gone before I could be sure. The taillights of the convertible shone wetly red, like the bleary eyes of a drunk with a crying jag.

  The car door opened and a man in a tan trench coat stepped out on the curb. He was an inch or two under six feet, slender, and the rain glistened on thick black hair with a wave in it. Lightning flashes let me see him clearly enough to be satisfied it was Jerry Marlin.

  He put his hand in and helped out a girl in a red evening wrap over a long white dress. She was holding up a newspaper to protect the dark cloud of hair that fell to her shoulders. Marlin banged the door shut and they ran, side by side, toward the yellow arch. I sat there
and watched them go.

  Just as they reached the sidewalk, a man in a dark raincoat and a pulled-down felt hat came from behind my car and took four long fast strides that brought him up close behind Marlin. His right arm, bent at the elbow, was stiffly extended and something gleamed dully in that hand.

  That much I saw during one flash of lightning. Then the light went out and thunder let loose like shooting a cannon in a cave. Right in the middle of it, there were three orange streaks of fire and three dim flat sounds.

  By this time I could have been out of the car and on my way over there. I could have gone out and sailed twigs in the gutter, too. That would have made about as much sense and it would have been a lot safer. I was packing about as much heat as you’d find in an icicle, and without a gun I tackle no killers. Nor with a gun, if I can help it.

  I sat very still and waited for the next flash of lightning. It came within a few seconds, just as a motor roared suddenly somewhere in back of me. Headlights flashed through my window in a sweeping arc and a small dark coupé slashed past me and faded into the night.

  It seemed like a good time to be brave. I opened the door and went over to help gather up the pieces.

  Jerry Marlin was flat on his face a yard or two short of the vine-covered arch. I bent over him and saw three small round holes in the material of the tan trench coat squarely between the shoulders. You could have covered all three with a silver dollar, if you had the kind of mind that ran to such experiments. Blood had not yet soaked through but there would be plenty underneath. He was dead. Even with practice he would never be any deader.

  The girl stood there, swaying a little, hands locked together and pressed to her stomach, her mouth stupid with shock, small whimpering noises climbing over her teeth. She hadn’t heard me, she didn’t see me, there wasn’t anything in the world but the limp length of lifelessness in front of her open-toed shoes.

  I looked around but couldn’t see anybody. I put my fingers around her arm and said, “You’re getting wet, Miss Sandmark. We better go in, hunh?”

  She heard me the way they heard me on Mars. I pulled a little on her arm to get her moving. That got results, but not the kind I could use. She opened her mouth a little wider and took a deep breath and started to yell. Before the first note was all the way out I slapped her across the face so hard that only my hold kept her from falling.

  It stopped the yell. She put her free hand up to her cheek and her eyes came into focus. Very distinctly she said, “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Like hell I didn’t,” I said. “Now do you move or do I carry you? Come on.”

  She came. She came as though she was walking in her sleep. I steered her into the imitation-marble hall and took the sequined bag out of her hand and fished out a key and unlocked the inner door. There was an automatic elevator but the cage was somewhere above. I pushed the button and the “in use” indicator glowed behind its small circle of amber glass.

  She stood there, her shoulders slumped, her face a white oval of despair. Her eyes were half closed and saw nothing, nothing at all. Her chin and lips were trembling— little uneven movements that started strong and ran down slowly, then started over again.

  She let me lead her in and we rode up to the sixth floor and got out there. It was a small square corridor, with two ivory-paneled doors facing each other. The one on the left was marked 6A. I unlocked it and found a wall switch just inside the door that lighted a drum lamp on a dark wood table in a small reception hall papered in pale yellow. Above the table hung a round mirror in a gold frame.

  In the wall opposite the door was an arched opening to a darkened room. Leona Sandmark shucked off the red evening wrap, dropped it blindly on the table, and pressed another wall switch that lighted a pair of table lamps beyond the arch.

  I followed her in there. It was a long, rather narrow room with five windows in a row overlooking the court. Beige carpeting extended to the ivory baseboards, and dark blue velvet window draperies pointed up the tapestried upholstery of the couch. The furniture was modern and there wasn’t too much of it. An ivory grand piano blocked off most of the far wall.

  I took a quick look around and said, “Where’s your phone, Miss Sandmark?”

  She stood there, blinking at me, and recognition came slowly into her eyes. For the first time I was something to her besides a voice. An expression I could not identify crossed her face, followed very quickly with good old-fashioned alarm.

  “You!” she gasped. “You killed him!”

  “Why, certainly,” I said in disgust, “I kill everybody these days. Where’s your phone?”

  She put the back of one hand against her lips and took a couple of slow, cautious steps backward, like somebody trying to get out of a lion’s cage without exciting the lion. The davenport stopped her and very carefully she let herself stiffly down on the edge, not once taking her eyes off my face.

  “Look,” I said, “tomorrow we’ll play East Lynne and I’ll let you carry the baby. But right now you’ve got to follow orders or you’ll get your neck in a sling. First thing: where’s your phone? And don’t make me ask you again.”

  She took the hand away from her mouth and looked at it vaguely, then pointed it at one of the two ivory doors leading off the room. “In th-there.”

  “Fine,” I said. I gave her a smile that was meant to make her realize I was actually a very nice guy—a guy to be trusted. “I didn’t kill him, Miss Sandmark. But maybe I can find out who did.”

  I crossed over and went through the door she had indicated, closing it behind me. It was a bedroom with mirrors and crystal doodads and a Hollywood bed the size of a truck garden. The rose-satin spread was mussed some, with a couple of depressions sideways across it as though two people had been lying there. I clicked my tongue a time or two when I saw those marks, and looked around until I spotted an ivory telephone on a night stand near the bed. An ivory index pad lay beside the instrument; I opened it at the letter S, found what I wanted, dialed the operator and gave an Oak Park number.

  A middle-aged voice, female, answered without too much delay, considering the hour. It sounded sleepy and cautiously indignant. I said, “Get Mr. Sandmark to the phone and do it quick. This is Paul Pine.”

  The woman was outraged. “Mr. Sandmark is sleeping and I—”

  I said, “Get him, God damn it, and stop horsing around.”

  The receiver went down as though she had thrown it on the floor. I stood there and waited, my free ear listening for the wail of police sirens. Beads of sweat felt cool against my forehead. . . .

  “Hello.” The woman was back again.

  “What’s the matter with you? I want Mr. Sandmark.”

  “He isn’t in, sir.” She was too worried to be resentful.

  “I don’t know what to make of it, I don’t. After four in the morning, it is, and he—”

  I hung up and went back into the living room. Leona Sandmark was still sitting stiff, hands lying limp in her lap. Against the white of her gown, her skin seemed much too colorless. Faint red streaks marked the cheek where my hand had landed. I said:

  “Listen to me and don’t miss a word. Go in there and dial Police 1313. Tell what’s happened. Get a little hysterical; they’ll expect it. You’ve got some acting to do, sister, and don’t you forget it.”

  She was only half listening. I went over to her and put my hand under her chin and tilted back her head until our eyes met. She made no effort to pull away. The shock was wearing off, leaving her free to think in something like a straight line. She said:

  “What if he wasn’t dead? We shouldn’t have just let him lie there in the r-rain like a—”

  “Quit it,” I said sharply. “He was dead before he bounced. You’re the one who is wide open, and you’re going to get clipped by a craphouse—pardon me—full of law if you don’t get on that telephone and get your licks in first. The time and the rain have probably covered you this far. but your luck can’t last forever. Somebody’s going to see
Marlin’s body and call the cops. Cops are very smart people, Miss Sandmark; before you can blow your nose they’ll find out he was your boy friend. Eventually they’ll find out you were with him when he got it, and they’ll be angry and suspicious because you didn’t let them know right away what happened. You can afford their anger; but by God you can’t afford their suspicion.”

  She took her chin out of my hand by standing up. She swayed a little and put a hand on my arm to steady herself. We faced each other across hardly any distance at all. Her head was tilted back a trifle to look me in the eyes. Perfume came up to me from her body—a perfume so faint I could have been mistaken about its being perfume. Maybe she just naturally smelled that way.

  There was no more alarm in her face. No more fear, If anything, she was calmer than I was right then.

  “If you didn’t shoot Jerry,” she said softly, “what was your reason for being out there?”

  “Okay,” I said. “You’re entitled to know that, now. Your stepfather hired me yesterday to keep an eye on you. He’s been worried about you, Miss Sandmark; he didn’t say why.”

  “No other reason?”

  “No other reason.”

  “Did you see who—who did it?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Her voice went down to a whisper. “Was it my . . . stepfather?”

  “I doubt it, Miss Sandmark. There’d be no sense to that.”

  “But it could have been?”

  I stepped back out of range of all that charm and said, “Shall we dance? Of course, there’s a corpse down on the sidewalk but the police wouldn’t want their pinochle game busted up over a little thing like that.”

  She let out her breath and her lips tightened. “All right. I’ll call the police.”

  I went into the bedroom with her. She reached for the receiver, but I put my hand on it ahead of her, holding it against the cradle. “Tell them exactly what happened. Only leave me out of it. Don’t forget, Miss Sandmark; leave me out of it. That’s important, and when we have more time I’ll tell you why it’s important. Okay?”

  “I think so.” There was still the drowsy, heavy-lidded look about her that means strain and shock. “Perhaps you’d better tell me what I’m to say.”