Halo in Blood

by Howard Browne

  “You mean the Northcrest?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We went through things pretty thoroughly there, Pine, but drew only a blank.”

  I grinned at him. “I’m pretty smart, hunh?”

  Silence. I looked around for an ash tray, saw none, and compromised by grinding the butt into the rug with my heel.

  Crandall said, “We want to be reasonable about this, fellow, but you’re not helping any. Sandmark hired you to find out who killed Marlin, didn’t he?”

  “Why should he be interested?” I said. “I understand his daughter is in the clear.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Nobody. I’m going by the newspaper accounts.”

  “You ought to know better than that.”

  I shrugged. “That’s all I had to go on.”

  Crandall bounced the tobacco pouch gently on his palm, studied me gravely for a moment, dropped the pouch back into his pocket, turned around and went out of the bedroom, closing the door softly behind him.

  The room was quiet again. Zarr put his open hands on his knees and moved his fingers carefully up and down while he stared at them as though they belonged to someone else. A patch of sunlight made a sharp square on one of the side walls. The same fly droned fitfully against the screen.

  Zarr stood up suddenly, said, “I told you I don’t like coincidences, damn you,” and hit me hard in the mouth with his right fist. I went over backward and fell to the floor on the opposite side of the bed. By the time I was back on my feet I was alone in the room.

  My legs were shaking a little as I walked over and looked into the full-length mirror set into the closet door. My eyes stared back at me, hot, fever-bright, ashamed. A muscle in my left cheek began to twitch. There was blood at one corner of my mouth; as I watched, it trickled down to my chin, leaving a crooked red path. There was a tiny cut there and the underlip was beginning to swell. I stood there, waiting for that muscle to stop jumping and my legs to stop shaking. . . .

  I went over and opened the door and walked into the living room. The body was gone, but there were chalk marks on the rug, and the puddle of blood and brains stuck out sharp and clear, as that kind of mess always does. A photographer with horn-rimmed glasses was putting plates in a black bag, and a little guy in a baggy blue suit was making a sketch in a notebook.

  Over by the window seat Crandall and Zarr had their heads together. Crandall was holding a triangular piece of newspaper in the fingers of one hand. He thrust the paper out at me as I came over.

  “This was found under the body, Pine. Know anything about it?”

  It wasn’t much larger than his hand. There was red on one corner . . . a sticky red that was beginning to turn dark brown. Along one side was a straight blue line of printers’ ink.

  “It’s a piece of newspaper,” I said.

  “Hell, I can see that.”

  “Well, you asked me.” I took off my hat and laid it on the window ledge and ran my hands through my hair and lighted a cigarette.

  Crandall was staring at my face, his expression one of sudden concern. “Hey,” he said, “there’s blood on your mouth.”

  “So there is,” I said coldly.

  “What happened?”

  There was a faint curl to Zarr’s lips. I said, “I tripped over something. . . . Did you find the newspaper this hunk came from?”

  “No.” He was still staring at me. “Too bad about your mouth, Pine. What did you trip on?”

  “Make it Mount Everest,” I said wearily, “and the hell with it. I’ve been thinking things over, Crandall. Maybe I can put you onto something after all.”

  Crandall’s smile was faintly sardonic as his eyes met Zarr’s. “Funny how tripping over something can change a guy’s way of thinking, eh, George?”

  “Don’t squeeze it too hard, Crandall,” I growled. “It might break on you.”

  “Oh, don’t think for a minute we don’t appreciate your help, Pine. Let’s go back in the other room and you can have your say.”

  “I’ll say it right here,” I told him. “It won’t take too long.” I leaned against the window frame and thought a minute. Crandall was watching me from under the hooded lids of his eyes, while Zarr still wore traces of his sneer.

  “A lot of this,” I began, “comes from putting two and two together. I can be wrong on some points but not on many. It all started around twenty-five years ago out in San Diego, California. A couple of guys were working for an armored-express company out there. One, the owner’s son-in-law, was named Raoul Fleming; the other was John Sandmark.

  “One night, Fleming, a pretty wild sort from what I hear, knocked off a watchman at the company and lit out with fifty grand. He made a clean getaway and nobody ever heard from him again. Meanwhile, John Sandmark held the wife’s hand and sympathized her into getting a divorce and marrying him. When his father-in-law died, Sandmark was the boy who took over the business. Eventually he sold out and moved to Chicago with his wife and stepdaughter.”

  I shifted my position and took a long drag on my cigarette. “Before I go any farther,” I said, “I’d like to point out that something stinks about this job Fleming was supposed to have pulled. There he was—sitting on top of the heap, swell job, married to the boss’s daughter, in a spot to take over a big company and his father-in-law’s fortune when the time came. Still he tosses all that away on a crazy attempt to heist fifty G’s. Maybe you two will buy it but I won’t. I’ll admit there was plenty of evidence to fasten the job on Fleming: his gun, all that. But for my money it still smells.”

  “All right. Now we come up to this year. Around a month ago a middle-aged man was found in a Madison Street hotel with his skull bashed in. No identification, no nothing—not even a toothbrush. Yet that Madison Street killing ties right in with Sandmark and San Diego. In a minute or two I’ll show you how it ties in.”

  Zarr had stiffened the moment I mentioned the Madison Street killing. He muttered something under his breath that I didn’t catch. It probably wasn’t important anyway.

  “About two-three months ago,” I went on, “Leona Sandmark, Fleming’s daughter and now John Sandmark’s stepdaughter, started to run around with Jerry Marlin— night-club pickup from what I hear. Marlin was the kind of character that would take a fast dollar and not worry how clean it was. In some way he got hold of some dirt on Sandmark. It was pretty hot stuff the way he had it but he figured he could make it still better. With that in mind, he sent Ken Clyne out to San Diego to dig into that old robbery and killing. But Clyne came back with nothing to add to what Marlin already knew.”

  “Then Marlin gets knocked off. It could have been done by a lot of people we never heard of, or it could be by one of two people we have heard of. One of those two is Sandmark; the other was Clyne. Sandmark, because Marlin was blackmailing him; Clyne, because he wanted to take over the job himself.”

  Crandall was pulling at his chin. “You’ve left a couple of angles wide open, Pine. What did Marlin have on Sandmark, and how do you tie in this Madison Street killing?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Those are good questions and I think I can give you a fair answer to at least the last one.”

  “When I saw Clyne here earlier this afternoon he told me he didn’t know what Marlin had on Sandmark. He said he’d gone over the back-newspaper files in San Diego, read about the case, looked at the pictures, and so on, without having any luck. Yet around an hour after I left him, he was on my phone yelling he had the answer to everything and I should run over with my hands full of lettuce and buy it from him.”

  I stopped and snicked cigarette ash onto the rug. “Right here,” I said, grinning, “is where my knack of observing details pays off. By putting together a couple of what seemed to be only minor—”

  “Skim it down!” Zarr interrupted angrily. “Let’s have the rest of it.”

  “Well,” I said, “when I came here the first time, I met Clyne down in the lobby. He had just come in from the street and there was
a blue-streak edition of today’s News in his coat pocket. I didn’t think anything of it at the time; but on my way back to the office it happened I bought a copy of the same edition.”

  “On page three were two items of interest. One was on the Marlin inquest; the other was a follow-up to earlier stories about the stiff it took twelve preachers to bury. Along with this story was a picture of the guy. It wasn’t a very good picture, but anybody who knew the guy would have recognized it.”

  “Now here’s what I say happened. Clyne, reading his paper, turns to page three and sees the face of the unknown corpse. He recognizes it as that of one of the principals in the San Diego caper. Remember, he’s been studying those pictures out there.”

  Crandall and Zarr stared at each other in silence for a long moment. I sat down on the window seat, feeling suddenly very old and very tired, as though I’d run a hundred miles only to learn I must run all the way back again.

  “No.” Lieutenant Zarr was shaking his head. “You can’t tell me Clyne could look at two pictures taken twenty-five years apart and identify them as being of the same man. That would be hard to do even for somebody who had known the guy personally. And Clyne didn’t. The people in that Gannett case don’t look today like they did when those pictures were taken in San Diego.”

  “He’s got something there, Pine,” Ike Crandall said.

  “And you guys calls yourselves cops,” I said. It was my turn to curl a lip, and I made the most of it. “This man the preachers buried was one of these lean-faced men who change very little between the ages of, say, thirty and fifty-five. A man who fattens up around the time he reaches middle age can be hard to make from an old picture, sure. But this one was skinny and he stayed skinny.”

  Crandall nodded, impressed. “That makes sense, George.” he said to Zarr. “A guy without much weight on him keeps on looking pretty much the same through the years.” He eyed me thoughtfully. “If you’re right about this, Pine, that would make the Laycroft Hotel victim almost sure to be Raoul Fleming, Leona Sandmark’s missing father.”

  “Either him,” I said, “or a guy named Ederle—Jeff Ederle.”

  They stared at me some more. “And just who the hell,” Zarr rasped, “is Jeff Ederle?”

  “He was a guard,” I said, “at the Gannett Express Company. He disappeared the day after Fleming was supposed to have rubbed out the watchman and gone south with the swag.” I took a deep breath. “I don’t think much of it, though. The dead guy being Ederle, I mean. My guess is that he was Fleming all right. Ederle had a very good reason for getting out of San Diego when he did. Married-woman trouble. And if he did have something on Sandmark, why wait twenty-five years to put on the pressure?”

  “It holds together, by God!” Crandall was beginning to get excited. “The way you tell it, it looks as if Fleming waited long enough for the heat to die out on the express job, then set about hunting up Sandmark. Maybe he figured Sandmark had framed that rap on him; maybe he was sore because Sandmark got his wife. Either way, Sandmark didn’t want the best part of him, so he killed him or had somebody else do it. Then Jerry Marlin found out about it some way and started twisting the screws, So Sandmark gets rid of Marlin. . . .”

  His voice trailed off and he did some lip chewing while he shaped things up in his mind. To me, he said, “But why would Sandmark want Clyne out of the way? And it has to follow: if he killed Marlin, he must have killed Clyne.”

  I shrugged. “That will have to be a guess, Crandall. Mine is that Clyne tried to bluff through a little blackmail of his own after Marlin was killed . . . and that was all for Clyne.”

  There was still plenty of skepticism on Zarr’s thin face. He said, “The way you paint it shamus, this Sandmark must be a dilly. Three murders in a month is better than par—even for this town.”

  “The hell of it is,” I said, “nobody’d ever take him for a killer. He’s big and he’s no pansy, but he’s more the bank-president type . . . the kind who’d use a mortgage instead of a blackjack.”

  Crandall rubbed his palms briskly together. “It looks like we’d better have a talk with this John Sandmark, George. Where does he live?”

  “Oak Park,” Zarr said slowly. “We better not go at this with our chins out, Ike. This Sandmark’s liable to be potent stuff, what with all his money. You don’t walk up to a million bucks and spit in its eye. Or do I have to tell you?”

  “That doesn’t buy him immunity from the law.” Crandall’s eyes took on a fanatical shine: a crusader after the wealthy infidel. “Sandmark’s got some explaining to do. I don’t say we should barge in and slap bracelets on him. It can be a matter of a polite call, a smooth approach, a few questions . . . then give him both barrels!”

  But Zarr was shaking his head. “There’s another angle, Ike. The Marlin killing is all Captain Locke’s. When the stepdaughter’s call came in early Wednesday morning, I sent the squad out and called Locke at home and told him about it. You know how he likes his name in the headlines. I knew damn well the papers would play up a killing involving a rich man’s daughter. Locke has handled it all the way, and if we go shoving in our nickel’s worth, he’s going to get sore. He’s the head of the department and he’s my boss. I don’t want him sore at me.”

  Office politics. There may be a police department somewhere without it, but I never heard of it.

  Crandall said hotly, “Well, he’s not my boss. You can pull in your neck if you want to, but I’m going out to Sandmark’s and do some digging.” He swung his eyes back to me. “You seem to know a lot about Sandmark, Pine. How come? He a client of yours?”

  “He came pretty near being one,” I said. “But it kind of fell through.”

  “He didn’t want you to rub out somebody, did he?”

  “Go ahead, be funny,” I said wearily. “Just leave my name out of this when you talk to him, is all. I don’t want it noised around that I do the cops’ work for them. It could hurt my business.”

  Zarr gave me a leer. “Then you want to be careful about tripping over things. It seems as though you leak a lot of information when that happens.”

  I put up a hand and touched my lips gingerly. “Yeah. I’ll admit I bruise easy. I don’t always heal quick though. My memory won’t let me.”

  The lieutenant’s leer became a thin smile. “Don’t stretch that memory of yours too far, sport. It might snap back and tear your head off.”

  I stood up and took my hat off the ledge and put it back on my head. “If you boys are through sticking pins in me, I’d like to go. I think maybe I got a date.”

  Crandall said absently, “It’s up to Lieutenant Zarr, Pine. Personally I’d say you’ve been of great help to us and I appreciate it.”

  Zarr jerked his head toward the door. “All right, shamus, blow.”

  I went out and walked slowly along the corridor to the elevator and rode down to the first floor. The bald old gentleman behind the desk gave me an icy glare as though I was the one who had bled all over the upstairs rug. A dark-haired girl with a sallow skin peered around the switchboard at me with mingled loathing and fascination. I went out into the sun-yellowed street and dragged around the corner to where I had left the Plymouth.

  It was still there. I climbed in behind the wheel and sat there for a minute or two, looking at nothing at all, fingering my swelling lip and thinking bitter thoughts.

  I couldn’t find anything admirable in throwing a man to the wolves, particularly since I was more than reasonably sure he had killed neither Marlin nor Clyne. But the real killer had to be smoked out and I was hard pressed for fuel. John Sandmark would have to serve that purpose. Let the cops think they’d bluffed me into talking. A hell of a lot I cared what they thought.

  I started the motor, turned north at the corner and went home.

  CHAPTER 14

  “It’s probably too late for dinner and a show,” I said. “But that’s no reason why we shouldn’t take in a couple of night spots, is it?”

  Even on the telephone, h
er laugh was musical. “I’d just about given you up,” she said. “Where are you?”

  “At home. I just this minute got in. I’m weary and I smell of policemen but it’s nothing a hot shower won’t fix up.”

  “Policemen? Don’t tell me you got yourself arrested!”

  “I didn’t miss it by far,” I said. “I called on a man who wanted to see me, but somebody emptied the life out of him before I got there. The boys with the hard hats always ask a lot of questions about such goings-on.”

  “Heavens! Murder makes a habit of happening around you, it seems. I wonder if I dare go out with you.”

  “I’ve used up my quota for the month. You’ll be as safe as a babe in arms. Which isn’t a bad idea, come to think of it.”

  “I think I’ll ignore that,” she said severely. Anyway she tried to sound severe but it didn’t work out too well. “About the night spots. I think’d like that. Would you call for me around ten? And . . . detectives have dinner clothes, don’t they?”

  “I should hope to tell you,” I said. “You don’t think I go around eating in my underwear, do you?”

  She laughed again, said, “See you at ten, Paul,” and broke the connection.

  I put back the receiver, said, “Dinner clothes yet!” and went into the bedroom and dug through the closet and hauled out the tuxedo I bought two years before to attend the dinner of the American Private Detectives’ convention at the Hotel Sherman. That was the night I shook Ray Schindler’s hand and drank twenty-seven Old-Fashioneds and woke up the next afternoon in a room with a northern exposure and a southern blonde.

  There were no liquor stains on the suit and only two or three wrinkles. I figured no one would notice the wrinkles. The. dress shirt in the bottom dresser drawer was still in the tissue paper the laundry had returned it in. I discovered they had managed to get the lipstick off the bosom.

  I took my time over showering, shaving and dressing; and it was fifteen minutes past nine before I was ready to leave the apartment. I stopped for a last look in the mirror and it slapped me on the back and told me feminine hearts would go pitty-pat this night. I wondered about taking along a gun, decided it would spoil the coat’s faultless drape and locked it away in a drawer. If Miss Sandmark made improper advances I could always appeal to her better nature.