Halo in Blood

by Howard Browne

  I leaned on the black-glass counter in the Northcrest and showed three prongs of a 1928 deputy sheriff’s star to a small middle-aged clerk with ninety-year-old eyes and rouge on his lips. I could have shown him a suspender button and had the same reaction. He sneered at the buzzer and he sneered at me and waited for me to say something bright.

  “It’s about this Marlin murder,” I said. “I’d like to kind of take a look at his apartment.”

  He wasn’t impressed. Nothing had impressed him since his fifteenth birthday. “You would have to see the manager about that, mister.”

  “Where do I find the manager?”

  A burly guy in coveralls and cap came into the lobby carrying a pair of new telephone directories under each arm. He stacked them on the counter next to me and said, “Them are the four you was short,” to the clerk.

  The clerk sneered at him too . . . but not quite as openly as he had at me. “What about the old ones?”

  “They’ll be picked up.”

  “When? They been stacked up here for two days and they take up room.”

  “They’ll get picked up, mister,” the man said. He sounded as though he had been saying the same thing for days. “I just bring ’em in. That’s all I do.”

  He turned and went out into the morning sunlight. The clerk twitched his pointed nose and bit his lower lip and came within a shade of stamping his foot. While he was getting over it, I stood there and looked around. A couple of high-backed chairs in dark wood, with dark-red frieze seats, flanked the arched cream-colored stone entrance to the lounge. The blinds were drawn in there, cloaking the room with a dusty dusk that gave to the overstuffed couches and chairs an atmosphere of unnatural lusts.

  By the time I got back to him, the middle-aged clerk had dug out an ink pad and a number stamp and was checking a list to learn what numbers should go on the new directories. I said: “Where can I find him?”

  He put the stamp down like a girl returning your engagement ring, and gave me the frigid eye. “Find whom?”

  That was all right. There are times to get tough and there are times when being tough doesn’t get you anything. A cop with the city behind him would have thrown his weight right in that pansy’s lap and got what he wanted. I didn’t have a city behind me; I was just a private guy. . . .

  “The manager,” I said. “I wanted to see him. About getting a look at Marlin’s apartment.”

  He said, “The manager is out,” and picked up the stamp. That should finish me. I was supposed to say, “Thank you,” and crawl out the front door.

  I reached in my pocket and took out a five-dollar bill and began twisting it around in my fingers. I did it idly, unobtrusively; it was just something to play with.

  “Go on with you,” I said politely. “I’ll bet you’re the manager. I can tell an executive when I see one.”

  He put down the stamp again but kept his hand on it. He managed to look at me and the bill at the same time. He said, “The police have been through Mr. Marlin’s effects.”

  “I know,” I said. “There are just a couple of points I want to check on.”

  “I’d have to send somebody up with you.”

  “Sure.” I pushed the bill toward him. “Would this pay for his time?”

  I never saw that bill again. He went over to the switchboard and plugged in a line and fiddled the key. He jerked out the cord and came back to the counter, said, “Just a minute,” and went back to stamping numbers on the phone books.

  A boy of about eighteen came into the lobby from the inner corridor. His face was older than mine and he was wearing a maroon bell jacket and gray slacks. There were spots on one of the jacket sleeves and two of the buttons were missing. He came up to the desk and said, “Yes, sir,” to the clerk. He made it sound like a swearword.

  The clerk took a key from one of the pigeonholes behind him and handed it to the boy. “This gentleman is from the police, Fred. He wants to look through Mr. Marlin’s apartment. You can wait until he’s through.”

  I said, “Nothing’s been taken from the apartment?”

  “No. Other than some personal things, like letters. The police took them. We’re awaiting word from our attorneys before disposing of the rest.”

  I said, “Okay,” and let Fred lead me over to the automatic elevator across the lobby. He followed me into the cage and closed the outer door and pushed the top button. The inner door slid shut and we started up, slowly, with a purring sound.

  Fred folded his arms and leaned against one of the panels with his back to me. I looked at my reflection in the chipped mirror on the back wall and decided I could use a haircut.

  At the top floor, five, the cage shuddered to a stop. Fred opened the doors for me and I trailed after him down a narrow corridor that smelled of tobacco and cologne and depravities.

  We stopped in front of a walnut-stained door with 532 in bronze numerals on it. Fred used the key and let me go in first.

  There were two rooms and a bath. The living room proved to be better than I might have expected. It was fairly large, furnished with cherry-red mahogany pieces, and a light and dark striped green tapestry on the couch and lounge chair. The rug was sand-colored broadloom, and figured russet drapes and a valance framed the three windows overlooking the parkway.

  The bedroom was small and masculine, with two small Chinese rugs on the polished floor. A heavy walnut chifforobe stood along one wall, with a pair of German silver military brushes placed at an angle on the top. The bed was low and narrow, with a square headboard and an orange batik spread that was too gaudy for the rest of the room. The bathroom was just a bathroom.

  I made like a detective. I dug into everything. I found out a few things, too. I learned that the late Mr. Marlin bought his shirts at Field’s, his ties at Sulka’s, his underwear and pajamas at Finchley’s, his suits at Rothschild’s and Carson’s. Only his socks baffled me. I learned he shaved with an electric razor. I found out what kind of soap and deodorant he used, and I discovered he liked lavender dusting powder. Paul Pine, the supersleuth.

  I pushed past Freddie and went back to the living room. I took the place to pieces and put it back together again. Nothing. Not a thing. The cops had taken everything that could tell about Jerry Marlin. There wasn’t even a match-book cover to tell where he bought his cigarettes or did his off-duty drinking.

  I stood in the middle of the rug and mangled a cigarette and looked for some angle I might have missed. The telephone. I walked over to the niche in the wall where it stood and examined the wood around it, hunting for phone numbers. There weren’t any.

  I took the phone book from the shelf underneath and glanced at the inside cover to see if any numbers were written in the spaces provided. It was as clean as a monk’s mind. It would be; the book was brand-new.

  Brand-new. I turned back to the outside cover and saw the neat black numbers 532 in one corner. I thought of something. I got excited thinking about it. I said, “Freddie.”

  He straightened up from where he was leaning against the wall watching me. “Yes, sir?”

  “These phone books were just changed?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The old ones have room numbers on them too? Like these?”

  “Yeah. Yes, sir. We do that on all the books soon’s we get them. That keeps—”

  “Never mind what it keeps,” I said. “The clerk downstairs said the old books hadn’t been picked up yet. Where are they?”

  “Why, in some boxes down on the first floor next the service elevator. The phone people—”

  “Show me.”

  He took me down in the service elevator and we stepped out into a big square room with whitewashed walls just off the alleyway. There was a lot of miscellaneous junk scattered around, but all I was interested in were four or five big pasteboard cartons filled with telephone directories with pale green covers.

  Freddie stood there with his mouth open while I dug into them. I didn’t hit pay dirt until near the bottom of the secon
d box. The numbers 532 jumped out at me and I sat down on a pile of the books and flipped back the cover.

  Four names, with telephone numbers behind them. No addresses. I got out my notebook and a pencil and copied them down

  Millie GRA 9165

  Liquor store DEL 3311

  Ken ROG 0473

  Leona AUS 0017

  The first three were written with pencil, the last with ink. That meant Leona’s name had been put down some time after the others. They had met and got around to being friends . . . such good friends, in fact, that he had her phone number listed along with the place he bought his liquor. Pythias never rated any higher with Damon.

  The notebook and pencil went into my pocket. “Back to the desk, Freddie,” I said cheerfully. “I aim to ask your boss something.”

  “He ain’t no boss of mine,” Freddie growled, but he took me through a door and along a corridor and into the lobby.

  The clerk was sorting mail. I rapped on the counter and he turned around and gave me one of his sneers. It seemed I had used up my five dollars’ worth of co-operation. I said, “You keep a record of outgoing calls. Let me have those on. 532 for as far back as you’ve got them.”

  He bristled a little at my tone. “It seems you don’t know much about the police for a man who claims to be one. They took those records yesterday. I have a receipt.”

  It didn’t surprise me any. The homicide boys weren’t always so thorough. Once in a while you could pick up something they’d missed.

  I tried to think of something else. “What about incoming calls?”

  “There is no record of them. Naturally.” His tone said I was a fool.

  “There’s a record kept of incoming long-distance calls,” I said.

  I had him there. He bit his lip and twitched his nose before he got around to saying, “Mr. Marlin received no long-distance calls.”

  Freddie kicked a hole in that one for him. He said. “Yes, he did too, Mr. Simack. Maybe a week back, he did. I was on the board, Mr. Simack. From San’ Anita, I think. I remember.”

  Mr. Simack gave Freddie a glare you could have boiled water with. He bent down and dug around under the ledge and finally came up with a clipboard holding some ruled sheets with writing on them. He slapped it down in front of me without a word and went back to sorting mail at the far end of the counter.

  There had been two long-distance calls for Jerry Marlin during the two months or so he had lived at the Northcrest. Both came in within the past two weeks—one on June 14, the other three days later—and both were from San Diego. Freddie’s mention of Santa Anita was the natural error of a man who thinks a nose is the part of a horse where you put two dollars.

  It wouldn’t be any trick to find out who had placed those calls, provided they hadn’t been made from a pay station. But that could come later. First there were the numbers I’d found in Marlin’s phone book to dig into. Actually there were only two; Leona Sandmark I already knew about, and I didn’t think the liquor store was going to be much help.

  I gave Freddie a dollar, since he would never see any of the five in Mr. Simack’s pocket, and drifted out onto Dearborn Parkway.

  It was half an hour short of noon. The sun was hot against the pavement and the humidity made my clothes a lump of sodden cloth. Five minutes under a shower right then would have been like two weeks in the mountains.

  But I was a workingman. I crawled into the Plymouth and drove slowly downtown.

  CHAPTER 11

  Instead of going directly to the office, I had a light lunch where there was air conditioning, then dropped in at the bank and deposited most of the money that had been pushed at me during the past two days. That made it well after one o’clock by the time I crossed the empty reception room and unlocked the inner office door and went in.

  I opened the window and put my hat on one of the file cabinets and got out of my coat. There was mail under the slot: an ad on men’s suits, a letter from a girl I used to know who was now private secretary to a big shot in a New York advertising agency, and a short note on a fancy letterhead from Cliff Morrison out in Los Angeles, asking when I was going to get tired of being my own boss and go to work for his detective agency.

  The ad went into the wastebasket and the letters into the middle drawer. I mopped my face with my handkerchief and lighted a cigarette and got out my notebook with the phone numbers in it.

  Millie was on top. Okay . . . Millie. I dialed the number and hooked a leg over the chair arm and swung my foot and waited.

  “Hel-lo.”

  She had a blonde voice with a kittenish drawl, and I could feel her yawn all the way over here. “Millie?”

  “Uh-hunh.”

  “This is Paul.”

  “Oh? Hiyoo, honey?”

  Hell, I didn’t need television. She was in the middle of a crumpled bed in a one-room kitchenette apartment. There were hairpins and spilled face powder on the dresser and pieces of Kleenex stained with lip rouge on the carpet and stockings and rayon panties drying in the bathroom. She was sprawled out with her head on a pillow and the receiver against her ear and her free hand fluffing her blonde mop which could stand a new permanent and a fresh rinse.

  I said, “Millie, Jerry Marlin is dead.”

  “Oh?” She yawned, a delicious, intimate little yawn. Turkey had signed an agreement with Bulgaria on importing manganese ore, Kansas City had beat Milwaukee 5 to 4 in the tenth, Jerry Marlin was dead, Labrador was having a heat wave. “Gee, I’m sure sorry to hear that. When’d it happen?”

  “Night before last. Don’t you read the papers?”

  “I guess I must of missed it. What you been doing, honey? You haven’t been around lately.”

  I put back the receiver and looked at my fingernails. She probably knew Jerry . . . and fifty others like him. Every man has that kind of phone number stuck around somewhere.

  I made a decision. I picked up the receiver again and called long distance and said: “I want someone at the telephone company in San Diego, California.”

  “Did you want to make a station-to-station call?”

  “That’s the ticket.”

  “What’s your number, please?”

  I gave it to her and waited. There followed some chitchat between various operators that was none of my business. Pretty soon someone far off said, “This is the telephone company,” and my operator said “Chicago is calling. Go ahead, party.”

  I said, “Hello. I want some information on a long-distance call from San Diego to Chicago that was made on June 14.”

  “One moment, please.”

  A few seconds later another female came on the wire and I said, “My name is Jerry Marlin, in Chicago, Illinois. On June 14 I received a call from San Diego. It could have been placed by one of several people and I neglected to get the name. Can you tell me the name of the party and from where the call was placed?”

  “It will take a little time, Mr. Marlin. Do you want to hold the wire?”

  “All right. Remembering, of course, that this is a longdistance call.”

  I blew smoke at the ceiling and doodled on a scratch pad and waited. . . .

  “Hello, Mr. Marlin.”

  “Yeah?”

  “That call was placed by a Mr. Kenneth Clyne, from room 628, Hotel San Diego.”

  I wrote the name and address on the scratch pad and hung up. Kenneth Clyne. And on the list of numbers copied from those in Jerry Marlin’s phone book was one that read: Ken . . . ROG 0473. Things were looking up.

  I did some thinking around. San Diego. Somewhere during the past few days I had run into something else that had to do with California. It wasn’t until I went carefully back over the events of the past three days that I found what it was.

  A picture. A snapshot of a girl in shorts and a sweater against a background of bougainvillaea and pepper trees. You find bougainvillaea and pepper trees in California. San Diego is in California. Pretty thin, so far, but it could get thicker.

  I used the phone ag
ain, calling a Central exchange number, and asked for a Mr. Ingram, the attorney who had recommended me to John Sandmark. I had found some jewelry his wife lost in a stick-up, one time, and he thought I was pretty hot stuff.

  Ingram was a big, bluff, hearty guy and he came on the wire booming, “Hello, Paul. Glad to hear from you. What’s on your mind?”

  “Nothing special.” I said. “I just wanted to thank you for throwing some business my way.”

  “John Sandmark? Glad to do it, Paul.” His voice went down. “Speaking of the Sandmarks, what’s this about the daughter being mixed up in some killing?”

  “All I know is what I see in the papers,” I told him. “My job has nothing to do with it. Far as I know, she isn’t involved. Just an unfortunate choice in escorts.”

  “I suppose that’s it.” He sounded doubtful. “They’re nice people. How did you get along with John?”

  “Fine. Incidentally, is he a native of Chicago?”

  “Native? Why, I guess you could call it that. He was born here, but after college he went out to California.

  Married out there; his father-in-law owned the Gannett Armored Express Company, with branches in several West Coast cities. When the old man died, the business went to John. He sold out shortly afterward and came back to Chicago with his wife and daughter. That’s been—oh, a good fifteen years ago, I’d say.”

  I had what I wanted. I thanked him and hung up and leaned back and swung my foot while I tried on a few facts for size.

  Jerry Marlin had been running around with a cute little society number named Leona Sandmark. Leona’s stepfather had hired me to get something on Jerry Marlin. The Sandmark family once lived in San Diego. A close friend of Marlin’s had been in San Diego recently and had telephoned Marlin twice from there. Marlin had been talking around about knowing where the body was buried . . . a common way of saying he had something hot on somebody—something so hot that he expected to get a lot of money out of it. That meant blackmail.