The facts fitted. And this is how they fitted: Marlin meets Leona Sandmark. From some remark she may have dropped, or from some lead that came to his hands through knowing her, he gets started on something the family is trying to hide. The roots of the secret are in San Diego. Marlin can’t get out there himself to investigate, so he sends his best friend, a guy named Ken Clyne. Clyne gets the dope and comes back and gives it to Marlin. So Marlin starts putting the squeeze on one of the Sandmarks.
Which one? Well, it can’t be Leona; she was just a kid when she left San Diego. That makes it the old man. But the old man decides to hit back. He hires a private dick to get something on Marlin. Then he goes out and shoots Marlin in the back. If facts come out that make him a suspect, he can say he offered that private dick a nice bonus to keep Marlin from bothering his charming daughter. “Naturally I didn’t mean murder, gentlemen; I merely wanted Mr. Pine to get something so damning on Mr. Marlin that my daughter would be relieved of his attentions.”
I began to wonder about Mr. Sandmark.
There was another angle. This guy Ken Clyne may have decided there was no reason why he shouldn’t get rid of Marlin and put the squeeze on Sandmark by himself. No sense splitting all that dough two ways.
I kind of liked that one.
The time had come to see a man . . . a man named Ken Clyne.
The phone again. I called a special office at the Rogers Park exchange and asked for the listing on Rogers Park 0473. The girl gave it to me and I wrote it down on the scratch pad and cradled the receiver.
The Lakefield Apartments, 5312 Lakewood. Out on the North Side, a block north of Foster Avenue, a few blocks in from the lake shore. Not a neighborhood for the wealthy, but not a slum district either.
I took out the .38 and moved it around thoughtfully in my hands . . . and slid it back in my underarm holster. Since I was going to call on a guy that could have bumped Jerry Marlin, it might be smart to take some heat with me.
I put on my hat and coat and went out into the summer sun.
The Lakefield Apartments was an oblong gray stone building of seven floors. It needed sandblasting and a fresh paint job on the woodwork around the windows. There was a dark green canvas canopy with the words LAKEFIELD APARTMENTS in white letters on the sides and the number 5312 on the section facing the street.
I opened one of a pair of copper screen doors with diagonal brass rods across them for handles, and walked into a good-sized lobby with light gray stippled-plaster walls and a Caenstone trim. On one side was a sunken lounge that looked a lot more cheerful than most apartment lounges, and there was a semicircular polished red-sandstone ledge across from it where the office and switchboard were kept.
An elderly man with glasses and a shiny bald head said, “Good afternoon,” in a gentle voice from behind the ledge. He had a thin body and a knifeblade face, and the skin of his neck seemed mostly wrinkles under a stiff detachable white collar and a black four-in-hand tie.
I said, “Mr. Clyne is expecting me. What’s his apartment number?”
“3H, sir. But I’m afraid he isn’t in.”
I appeared to be as surprised as he thought I should be. “I don’t get it,” I said. “I was supposed to meet him here today at two-thirty. Isn’t he back from San Diego?”
“Oh, yes, sir. Over a week now. He went out just a few minutes ago. Would you care to wait? Possibly he just step—”
He looked past my shoulder and raised his voice. “Oh, Mr. Clyne. This gentleman is waiting for you.”
I turned around and there was a tall square-shouldered lad about my own age standing there looking at me. He had the high rounded forehead of a bank examiner, with regular features to match. His suit was of gray twill and not particularly well tailored. He held a panama hat with a narrow blue band in one hand and a cigarette hung between the fingers of the other. There was a folded copy of an afternoon edition of the Daily News shoved into one of his jacket pockets. His sharp blue eyes went over me carefully and without recognition. That was to be expected since, to my knowledge, he had never seen me before.
I said, “Hello, Ken. Where can we talk?”
He studied me warily, suspicious as an orchestra leader’s wife. “I don’t recall knowing you.”
“I’m an old friend of Jerry’s.”
His eyes widened slightly but not with relief. He said,
“What do you want?”
“What I want won’t sound good in public.”
That didn’t seem to bother him especially. He said, “Who are you?” still chilly, still tough.
“All right,” I said. “If you want to talk in front of people, let’s go down to Eleventh and State where a police sergeant can take it down in shorthand.”
“Come up to my apartment.”
He turned around stiffly and stalked over to the elevator a few feet past the desk, and I tagged along behind him.
We got out at the third floor and went along a pleasant corridor to a door marked 3H. He produced a key chain and opened up and I followed him into a wide dim cool-looking living room, with a bedroom off it visible through an open door. He shut the hall door, spun around and glared at me.
“All right,” he snarled. “Spit it out. Who are you and what do you want?”
I lifted my eyebrows at him. “Just like that?”
He gave me a thin smile. He now had charge of the situation. “Exactly like that.”
“Okay,” I said. “It keeps from wasting time. My name is Pine and I’m a detective and where were you at four o’clock yesterday morning?”
I would hate to be as stupid as his eyes said I was. He gave a sharp snort that. could have been a laugh and turned his back on me to go over and sit down on a padded ledge in front of the room’s three windows. I stood where he had left me, my hat pushed back on my head and my arms dangling. He eyed me with cool contempt and gave an airy wave of his cigarette and said, “Is this a pinch?”
“It can grow to be one.”
“You’re wasting your time.”
“I’ve got the time to waste.”
“You didn’t have, a minute ago.”
“Be cute tomorrow,” I said. “I asked you a question.”
“I was in bed.”
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“Alone?”
“Certainly.”
“I didn’t mean to insult you,” I said.
He colored up and his fingers worked but he didn’t say anything.
“How was the trip to San Diego?” I asked.
Wariness veiled his eyes. “Who said I was in San Diego?”
“I said you were in San Diego.” I put an edge on my voice. “I know when you were there and I know why you were there. That makes two of the reasons I’m asking where you were at four yesterday morning. Now start using that tongue before I wipe your nose with it.”
His hands balled and he hopped off the ledge with his not very strong jaw shoved out. “Don’t talk that way to me!” he sputtered. “John or no John, I don’t take that kind of stuff.”
I walked up to him and put a palm where his lapels crossed and slammed him back onto the window seat.
“You’ll take it, sweetheart. I’m talking about a murder and you know whose murder. Tell me you don’t know whose murder and I’ll feed you knuckles until you puke.”
A white ring formed around his mouth and his eyes rolled a little. “I read the papers,” he mumbled. “I know Jerry was killed around that time, but I had nothing to do with it.”
“You had a reason to plug him,” I said. “You had a hell of a good reason. There isn’t a better reason than money. After you picked up that information out on the West Coast, you knew as much as Marlin. Get him out of the way, you figured, and the dough would go to you. All of it. So you put some bullets in him. Get your toothbrush and a clean handkerchief, lover. You and me are going downtown.”
“No!” The courage was leaking out of him like sweat from a steel puddler. “I didn’t kill J
erry. I didn’t know what angles he was working. He was too closemouthed to spill anything.”
“What did you find out at the San Diego end?”
“Nothing that was any good to him.”
“Cut it, Clyne. I won’t take that kind of answer.”
“But it’s true! Jerry told me the information I brought back was worthless to him. it didn’t seem to bother him, though; he said what he already had would get him five thousand down and five hundred a month until the big pay-off worked out.”
“What big pay-off?”
‘That’s what he wouldn’t tell me.”
“Give me the details on what you were digging into out on the Coast.”
He wet his lips while his eyes slid nervously about the room. “I . . . can’t go into that. It would tie me up with something else. I’m not going to get involved in—in anything.”
“That’s a laugh,” I said. “You’re in over your hatband right now and you know it. Don’t make us pound it out of you, Clyne.”
His jaw set. “It don’t go, copper. I didn’t shoot Jerry and you can’t make saying I did it stick. So go ahead and take me in and the hell with it.”
Rats can get as stubborn as people. I swung a chair around and sat down facing him with the chair’s back between us. I lighted a cigarette and rested my arms across the back of the chair and blew smoke through my nose and gave him the gimlet eye. I said:
“Maybe we can kind of make a deal. You say you didn’t do in your pal, so I’ll play it along that way for a while. My interest is in finding out who did kill him, and you can help me find out.”
“I’m not one of the City boys. I’m a private eye and I’ve got a customer who wants to know who kissed off Marlin . . . and why. Far as I know the homicide lads don’t have you linked up with Marlin. They don’t necessarily have to either, if you feel like playing catch with me.”
Relief piled back into his face and he began to get cocky again. “A snooper, hunh? I should of caught on when you didn’t flash a buzzer on me.”
“All I carry is a sheriff’s “star,” I said. “But I can get the boys at Central to show you the real thing.”
His lips stopped curling. “What do you want to know?” he muttered.
“The works. Some of it I know already. But don’t let that handicap you. Just start at the beginning and get it all in.”
He fumbled for a cigarette and I tossed him my matches. He sucked in smoke and let it trickle out and stared at the rug. “Jerry looked me up about three weeks ago,” he began. “He told me he was running around with a hot little mouse named Leona Sandmark, whose old man had a bankful. Jerry said he’d stumbled onto something that could turn into a lot of money if it was handled right, but that it would take a while to really clean up unless he could uncover more information. He said he had a lead that might get him what he needed, but someone would have to help him run it down, as he couldn’t afford to let things cool off by going out of town.
“It seems the Sandmarks came here from San Diego about fifteen years ago. About eight or ten years before that, Sandmark, who was just a working stiff, fell into a sweet spot with his boss’s daughter and married her. Her old man was Michael Gannett, who owned an express company out there.
“Before that, the Gannett doll had married one of the company officials, a guy named Raoul Fleming . . . a fast-stepping lad, from all reports. Well, it seems Fleming tried to knock off the contents of the company safe one night, but something went wrong and a watchman got killed. Fleming scooped up fifty grand and took it on the lam.
“This was back in the early twenties, before outfits like Gannett’s were careful to fingerprint the help, so all they had on Fleming was his description. They got readers out on him and there was quite a hunt, but he never showed. Meanwhile, Sandmark sucked around Fleming’s wife and talked her into divorcing her husband and marrying him. This Leona Sandmark was Fleming’s kid, and just a baby when all this took place.”
He looked up at me to see how I was taking it. “And that,” he said, “is all there was to it. Gannett died about five or six years later, leaving everything to Sandmark’s wife, which is how Sandmark came to get it. He sold out the company and moved his family to Chicago. His wife died right after that.”
I sorted it over in my mind. “Did Marlin know any of this before he sent you out there?”
“No. All he seemed to know was that there had been some trouble in the family back in San Diego that involved the girl’s real father.”
“And what you’ve told me is all you were able to dig up out there?”
“You’ve got the works, Pine.”
“Nuts!” I said. “Marlin could have got all that out of the back files of a newspaper. He’d have been better off letting a private dick do his snooping—if he could find one who didn’t mind dabbling in a little polite blackmail.”
I thought some more, then said, “This Fleming. The case against him was tight?”
“Tight as a ten-day drunk. The gun used was his; fifty G’s were gone and so was he. What more would you need?”
It looked like enough, all right. I fingered through what Clyne had told me, looking for some angle I might have missed.
“Any loose ends that could have meant something?”
He stopped in the middle of shaking his head, and a couple of wrinkles developed in the smooth rounded surface of his forehead.
“Come to think of it,” he said slowly, “the same morning they found the dead watchman and the empty safe, one of the Gannett guards didn’t report for duty. Man named Engle . . . Engle—no, Ederle. Jeff Ederle. For a while there the law thought he might have figured in the caper with Fleming; but it turned out later he’d been cozying with the wife of a San Diego gambler and had probably taken a powder to keep his health. Those Coast boys play pretty rough, I hear.”
“What did Marlin hope to get from all this?”
“I told you that,” Clyne said impatiently. “He had an idea maybe there were angles that didn’t get into the papers. Sandmark could have had a hand in that robbery somehow. You must admit it was sure as hell nice the way things worked out so he could marry all that money. Gannett left better than a million.”
“I suppose the papers out there really played up the killing?”
“Yeah. Pictures of the principals, diagrams, life histories—it chased everything else off the first three pages for a week.”
“But none of it could do Marlin any good?”
“So he told me. He said he guessed he could get along on what he already had—at least until the big dough was untied. And he did say he didn’t think it would be too long until then.”
“Meaning what?”
He scowled. “We’ve been over that, Pine,” he complained. “I don’t know what he meant. My personal belief is that he was putting the bite on Sandmark on some other matter. It’s possible, you know, that Sandmark put those slugs into Jerry—either by himself or by hiring somebody to do it for him.”
I sighed. “Could be.” I got off the chair, and Clyne went with me to the door. In the hall, I turned to where he was standing in the open door, and said:
“Keep thinking about it, Clyne. You may remember something I can use. If you do, call me. There could be dough in it for you.”
“Where do I reach you?”
I got out a business card and wrote my hotel phone number on the back and gave it to him. “If I’m not at the office, leave a message with the hotel operator.”
“Okay.”
I rode down to the first floor and got into my heap and drove back to the office.
CHAPTER 12
There weren’t any customers. I sat down behind the desk and put my heels on the blotter and unfolded the Daily News I had picked up after parking the car. The heavy blue line along the right side of page one. still smelled strongly of printers’ ink.
I found two items on page three that were worth reading all the way through. One told about the inquest, that same morning, on
the Marlin murder. Leona Sandmark, being related to a million dollars, came in for a lot of favorable and sympathetic mention. The rest was just words about no one knowing anything about anything, and at the request of the police, proceedings were postponed a few weeks.
On the other side of the same page was a two-column follow-up of the story about the unidentified corpse twelve preachers had buried. There was a small cut of the dead man’s face—the kind of picture taken after death for police files. It was a face of a man who could have been almost any age past forty; a thin, hard-bitten face without much chin; a face that once might have been on the handsome side in a sort of dashing, to-hell-with-you way. The article itself wasn’t much: a few stickfuls of type about “the unusual turn taken by what seemed nothing more than an obscure murder, has the police digging frantically for new information.”
I grunted and turned the page. While I was in the middle of O’Brien’s column, the phone rang sharply. Or maybe it just seemed to ring that way.
I picked up the receiver and said, “Hello.”
“Mr. Pine?” It was a man’s voice, deep and brisk and dry.
“Yeah. Who’s this?”
“I would rather not mention names over the phone. At least, not my name. Let’s say, instead, that I’m the man who paid you five hundred dollars very early this morning.”
That made it D’Allemand. “Okay,” I said. “What can I do for you?”
“How is your head?”
“It’s a little lopsided but I’m still wearing it.”
The receiver made a dry sound that might have been a chuckle. “Are you making any progress, sir?”
“On what?”
“On what I hired you to do.”
“I’ve been looking around here and there,” I said.
“Was Clyne able to tell you anything of value?”
Anger began to turn over in me. I said, “You wouldn’t still have a tail on me by any chance?”
His voice sounded stiff, probably because of my tone. “As you yourself pointed out, Mr. Pine, I do not overlook much. I like to keep informed on matters of importance to me. Does that answer your question?”
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