Halo in Blood

by Howard Browne

  My fingers tightened on the receiver until the knuckles shone. I said, “Get that tail off me, you hear? I don’t like tails; they make me nervous and interfere with my work. You paid me to do a job and I’m doing it my way and I don’t want any sidewalk superintendents. Is that clear?”

  “I called to tell you, sir, that Clyne won’t be able to do much for you. He is the friend of Marlin’s I mentioned . . . the man I called in and paid money to. I am a bit curious as to how you learned about him.”

  I gritted my teeth into the mouthpiece. “Look. If you want my professional secrets, it’ll cost you extra. Either unpin that goddam tail or send around to pick up your five hundred bucks and get yourself another investigator.”

  I slammer up the receiver and put my feet on the floor, talking to myself, and got out the office bottle. While I was pouring a drink, the corridor door opened and closed and feet came lightly across the reception hall.

  It was Leona Sandmark. She was wearing an expensively simple silvery green linen dress with a virginal V at the throat and a patch pocket over her left breast, and there was a white envelope bag with a green jeweled initialed L, under her left arm. A circular white hat the size of a bicycle wheel slanted on her shining hair. She looked cool and competent and impossibly beautiful, and there was a humorous quirk to her lips and the corners of her gray-blue eyes.

  She leaned a white-gloved hand against the frame of the door and said, “Hello there.”

  “And very nice, too,” I said, getting up because I had been raised right when I was a kid. “Won’t you come in and sit down, Miss Sandmark?”

  She came slowly over to the customer’s chair and sat down gracefully, crossed her legs and laid the bag on a corner of the desk. Her shoes were brown and white, open-toed. Her legs were just as lovely as I remembered them.

  She sighed a little. “Goodness, it’s warm in here.”

  “Take off your hat,” I said, “and let whatever air there is find you.”

  She fumbled out a hatpin and took off the wheel and put it on the desk too. That didn’t leave much surface showing but I wasn’t using it anyway.

  I watched her look around the office. The Varga calendar seemed to fascinate her. It was that kind of calendar. She said, “I hope you don’t mind my dropping in on you this way. Are you very busy?”

  “I just this minute finished my midafternoon drinking,” I said. “Sorry I can’t offer you one, but all I have is bad bourbon and a glass that needs washing.”

  Her nose wrinkled a little and she laughed. “No, thank you. . . . I’ve been to a movie. It seemed much too warm to go back to the apartment.”

  “For that matter,” I said, making light conversation, “it’s too warm to be downtown at all.”

  “I had to come down. I was at the—the inquest this morning.” She shuddered abruptly and her lips twitched. “It was rather horrible. I thought perhaps you’d like to hear about it.”

  “Not especially,” I said. “Is there any reason I should hear about it?”

  “Well . . .” She looked a me from the corners of her eyes. “You were there when Jerry . . . when it happened.”

  “So I was,” I said. “Did that come out at the inquest?”

  “Oh, no!” She seemed shocked at the question, as though I had accused her of a breach of faith or something. “You asked me not to tell anybody. . . . What did my stepfather hire you to do, Mr. Pine?”

  “If you’re being subtle,” I said, “you need more practice.”

  I was given the benefit of a wide, uncomprehending stare. “That sounds like one of those ‘fraught-with-meaning’ statements, Mr. Pine. Would you mind making it a little clearer?”

  I stared into her eyes, letting her see my poker face. “Not at all, Miss Sandmark. It goes something like this: You have a secret of mine—a secret the police might like to be let in on. But you wouldn’t dream of telling them, because after all you and I are friends, and telling a friend’s secret is simply not done. Of course, friends shouldn’t have secrets from each other; otherwise they couldn’t stay friends. So you would like me to tell you what my business was with John Sandmark.”

  She was young enough to get red in the face, but her eyes never wavered. “Well . . . what was your business with John?”

  I leaned back in my chair and laced my fingers and smiled at her. “The real reason is going to disappoint you, Miss Sandmark. Your stepfather hired me to throw hooks into Jerry Marlin.”

  She gasped, and the color drained from her cheeks.

  “You mean . . . he hired you to . . . to . . . kill—” Her voice started as a whisper and got weaker with each word, dying out completely on the last one.

  I said patiently, “Not to kill him, no. I don’t get hired to kill people. I was hired to dig into Marlin’s past and get something on him that would keep him away from you. You see, your stepfather didn’t regard Marlin highly as a future in-law.”

  She looked away from me then, and her eyes turned soft and misty with a faraway expression. “That’s like John,” she murmured. “He has always insisted on protecting me, even when I didn’t want, or need, protection. It’s no wonder I’d do anything for him.”

  “Maybe he figures a girl like you could stand some protecting.”

  It took three seconds for that to sink in to where she could feel it. Then her eyes stopped being tender; they were blazing when she hit me with them. “What is that supposed to mean?” she demanded.

  I said, “My God, you’re touchy. I didn’t mean anything in particular. Did I step on one of your corns?”

  The heat faded from her eyes and the long dark lashes swept down, veiling them. She drew off her white gloves and laid them on the brim of the hat, took her purse in her lap and dug out a cigarette and a gold lighter. I had a match burning for her before she could use the lighter.

  She exhaled a thin blue line of smoke, dropped the lighter back in the bag and snapped it shut. She was her old self again. She said, “I’ll bet it would be fun to take you apart.” She smiled when I looked startled. “I mean in an analytical sense, of course.”

  “Go as far as you like,” I said.

  “You’ve got a hard finish,” she said slowly, not smiling now. “But I don’t believe you are quite so hard underneath it. Perhaps that finish is there because you’ve seen too much of the wrong side of people. You go in for crisp speech and a complete lack of emotion. In a way you’re playing a part . . . and it’s not always an attractive part. Yet there’s plenty of strength to you, and a kind of hardbitten code of ethics. A woman could find a lot of things in you that no other man could give her.” She flashed a sudden smile at me. “Besides, you’re rather good-looking in the lean, battered sort of way that all sensible women find so attractive in a man.”

  “How you do go on!” I said. I lighted a cigarette and threw the match out the open window. “What shall we talk about next?”

  “Are all detectives like you, Mr. Pine? I never knew one before.”

  “That makes us even,” I said. “I never knew an heiress before.”

  “We should investigate each other.”

  Her eyes were daring me, provoking me. I sat there and smiled a meaningless smile and let funny notions roll around inside my skull. I thought of a high-school girl alone with a boy in a Wisconsin cabin; of a seven-kinds-of-crook who had messed around with that high-school girl when she was a little older; of a married man whose wife had named that same girl as correspondent in a divorce suit. And abruptly my notions no longer seemed funny. I said:

  “I’m good at investigations. In this case, I would suggest dinner and a show and a ride by moonlight. I’m an open book when the moon hits me right. Come to think of it, there’s that kind of moon tonight—or there will be.”

  This time she laughed—a full-throated laugh that was good to hear. “Are you trying to date me, Mr. Pine?”

  “Not if you keep on calling me Mr. Pine.”

  “Paul? Paul. . . . That shouldn’t be hard.”
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  “You could make it ‘darling’ with a little practice.”

  The smile went off her face like a chalk mark under a damp cloth. I had gone a little too fast for her. I said. “Just clowning, Miss Sandmark. Anything unexpected develop at the inquest?”

  She stared at me. “I thought you weren’t interested in the inquest.”

  “I’m not. But I figured you wanted the subject changed.”

  To that I got an oblique answer. “I should be getting home. I took a taxi down; parking is such a problem in the Loop.”

  “I’ll be glad to drive you home, Miss Sandmark.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t hinting.”

  “I’ll still take you home—if you like.”

  “That would be sweet of you . . . Paul.”

  My blood stirred. I have blood and it can be stirred. “Not at all . . . Leona.”

  That earned me another smile to tuck away. She stood up and anchored her hat, put on her gloves and picked up her purse. She tamped her cigarette out in the ash tray and went with me to the door. I was reaching around to close it when the phone rang.

  “One minute,” I said and went back and picked up the receiver and said, “Hello,” into the mouthpiece.

  “Pine?” A man’s voice I didn’t recognize, and I would hate to get as excited as it sounded.

  “Yeah,” I said. “This is Pine. Who—”

  “I’ve got it, shamus! I had it right in my pocket all the time you were here and never knew it! No wonder—”

  “Who is this?” I said mechanically. Actually I knew by now.

  “Clyne. What the hell do you use for a memory? I tell you I’ve got the answer to everything!”

  “Give.”

  He went cagy on me. “You said something about dough, Pine. I want to see some green in front of my eyes. Get over here and we’ll do some haggling.”

  I glanced over to where Leona Sandmark was standing in the doorway watching me. Into the mouthpiece I said, “Are you doing a little high-powered guessing or do you really know something?”

  “This is no guesswork. I leave that to private dicks. You want this, you come after it . . . with your hands full of money.”

  The click against my ear told me he had hung up. I replaced the receiver thoughtfully and went out into the reception room and locked the office door.

  Leona Sandmark was watching me, a puzzled frown ruining her lovely brow. “Is something wrong, Paul?”

  I said, “When were you in San Diego last?”

  Her shoulders jerked and she stared at me, completely bewildered. “What in the world . . .”

  I didn’t say anything. I was waiting for an answer.

  “If it makes any difference,” she said shortly, “I was there last year for a month or two.”

  “It doesn’t mean a thing,” I said. “I just like to appear mysterious. It’s an old detective custom. Incidentally, it looks like I’m going to have to renig on that lift home. Something’s come up.”

  “Of course. Some other time, then.”

  “This isn’t going to take all night,” I said. “We could still get in that dinner and a show.”

  “You could call me,” she said gravely. “The number is Austin 0017.”

  Just as gravely I wrote it down.

  I left her at the corner of Jackson and Wabash, after getting her a cab, and went on to the lot to get my own car. I wasn’t too excited about Clyne’s call. He probably had remembered some minor detail and got all hot over it after tying some guesses on it. Either way, I couldn’t let it go by without checking. In my business you never know. Nor in any other, I suppose.

  Twenty-five minutes was long enough to get me there by way of the Outer Drive. I parked around the corner on Berwyn Avenue, got out of the car and walked along the quiet sun-filled street to the Lakefield Apartments.

  The same bald-pated old gentleman was behind the desk. I nodded to him and went into the elevator and rode to the third floor.

  There was an imitation pearl button set in the woodwork outside 3H. I pressed it and a buzzer sounded inside. Nothing happened and there was no sound of feet coming to answer the buzzer. I jabbed the button again but it didn’t mean any more than the first time. I rattled the knob and the door swung back . . . and there he was.

  I went in and closed the door and bent over him. He was lying on his belly and he looked all right except there was no back to his head. In the form of a neat circular stain in the blue-and-black patterned rug was a great deal of blood, with gray patches of stuff in it and a couple of hunks of white bone. He was still warm; he couldn’t have been anything else after talking to me about half an hour earlier.

  The rest of the room looked just as it had when I last was there. The bedroom door was still open and everything was neat and clean and in order. I took out my .38 and walked into the bedroom and snooped around. Nothing. The black-and-white bathroom didn’t have any bloody towels in the bowl or red fingerprints on the walls. There were clothes in the closets but nobody was wearing them.

  I hummed a little tune and went back into the living room and picked up the phone. It looked as though I wasn’t going to have dinner with Miss Sandmark tonight.

  “Office,” a girlish voice said in my ear.

  I was aware that the. fingers of my right hand were beginning to ache a little. I looked down and saw I was still gripping the checked walnut handle of the .38. My face felt a trifle stiff as I smiled about it. I put the gun back under my arm.

  “Office,” the girlish voice said again, a little on the waspish side this time.

  I let my breath out slowly. “Let’s have some police, lady.”

  CHAPTER 13

  I sat on the blue-and-gold rayon bedspread in the bedroom of the late Kenneth Clyne, and smoked a cigarette and waited for Lieutenant George Zarr to satisfy himself that the spindly-legged bedroom chair would hold his weight. Ike Crandall, an investigator from the State’s Attorney’s office, leaned against the closed bedroom door and tapped his lips lightly over and over with the stem of a gnarled black pipe.

  Crandall was a new one to me—a slender, stoop-shouldered man in his early forties, with bushy graying hair and a long intelligent face and hooded eyes. His complexion had the faintly yellow cast that goes with a faulty liver.

  Through the closed door came vague sounds as the homicide boys did the things the city paid them to do. A fly buzzed now and then against the screen of the open window in back of me, and street noises filtered in and died on the floor.

  Zarr was finally ready. He put away the blue-bordered handkerchief he had used to mop the sweat from the gray slopes of his prominent jaw, blew out his breath and looked at me without pleasure. He said, “Let’s have it, Pine. All of it.”

  “Sure,” I said. “It begins with this Marlin killing a couple of days ago. I have a client who’s interested in knowing who murdered him. I dug up a lead on this Kenneth Clyne; seems he was pretty thick with Marlin. Anyway, I came out to see him earlier this P.M. and we had a talk. He wasn’t able to give me much I could use, but said if anything occurred to him he’d let me know.”

  “Along about four o’clock he called me at the office and said to get out here quick, that he knew the answer to everything. At the time, I figured maybe he was being a little too optimistic. Now I’m not so sure. Anyway, I walked in and found him on the floor the way you saw him. I called you right away, just as any other public-spirited citizen would have done.”

  Lieutenant Zarr looked over at the placid expression on Crandall’s face. Crandall shrugged slightly and went back to his lip tapping. I flicked ashes on the rug and just sat.

  “Who,” Zarr asked me, “is this party that’s so interested in Marlin’s murder?”

  “Hunh-uh,” I said. “I don’t have to tell you that, Lieutenant. Not that I wouldn’t like to, understand. My client wants to know who shot Marlin only because Marlin was a friend of his and he wants the killer to pay the hard way. Not that he thinks Homicide will gum up the job: it’s si
mply that he wants it wound up quick. But he doesn’t want to appear in the picture . . . and he won’t. Not on my account he won’t.”

  Zarr said with controlled savagery, “Why, you goddam piddling little bastard! Where do you get off—shoving the department around this way? You’ve been under my feet too much lately; I think I’ll do something about it.”

  I rubbed a palm along one of my thighs and looked at the opposite wall. Crandall dug a transparent tobacco pouch out of a pocket and drew back the zipper and put some of the contents in the bowl of his pipe. He said, “There’s no point in going off half-cocked, Lieutenant,” in mild protest. “After all, Mr. Pine is working on our side of the fence.” He gave me a friendly smile that was as empty as a bride’s nightgown.

  I said, “Yeah.”

  He struck a match against his thumbnail and took his time lighting his pipe. Zarr’s bushy eyebrows came together in a scowl and he opened his mouth to say something, closed it instead and gave a meaningless grunt.

  Crandall said, “You can understand our position, Pine. Anyone who has worked for the State’s Attorney knows what we’re up against.”

  He waited for an answer from me but didn’t get one. He hadn’t said anything yet.

  “There’s no reason why we shouldn’t pool our information,” Crandall continued, reasoning with me. “If we succeed in learning who killed Marlin and Clyne—they’re tied together, of course—there’s no reason why we can’t let you have the information before it’s made public. That way you can get your fee and nobody’s, the wiser.” His hooded eyes shifted to Zarr. “That can be arranged, can’t it, Lieutenant?”

  Zarr said, “Why not?” and looked at me, no expression on his gray face.

  “That will be dandy,” I said. “Just as soon as I find out anything I’ll run right over and tell you all about it.”

  The blood poured into Zarr’s cheeks and he snarled, “Why, you—” But Crandall cut him off with a small motion of one hand. “Right now,” he said mildly, “we’d like to know how you happened to learn that Clyne was mixed up with Marlin.”

  “I’m a detective,” I said. “I went over where Marlin lived and I asked questions.”