Halo in Blood

by Howard Browne

  Neither of my two hats went well with the monkey suit, so I wore my hair and let it go at that. I rode down in the elevator to keep from bending my knees more than necessary. Sam Wilson was behind the switchboard with his nose in another pulp magazine. Or maybe it was the same one.

  He looked up as I came out of the elevator, said, “Evening, Mr. Pine,” and waggled his eyebrows at the tuxedo.

  I said, “How they going, Sam?”

  He said, “Stepping out tonight, hunh?”

  I said, “You’ve been reading my mail, damn you.”

  He was cut to the quick. It hadn’t been sharp enough to cut to core. “I wouldn’t do nothing like that, Mr. Pine. Honest. I meant you being all dressed up and everything, you must be stepping out.” His muddy brown eyes grew wistful. “A big society case, I bet. You sure lead yourself a tough life, Mr. Pine.”

  “Someday,” I said, “I’ll trade you and sit behind a switchboard that never buzzes and read detective stories.”

  He slid off the stool and came over to the counter and looked around the lobby with a secretive air, like a spy in an E. Phillips Oppenheim novel, and whispered: “Honest, Mr. Pine, was there really all that money in the package you had last night?”

  Last night. It seemed a hundred years ago.

  I matched his look at the lobby and put my lips near his ear and said, “Straight goods, Sam. Twenty-five grand. You know what I did with it?”

  He was so excited he began to sweat. “No, sir. I can keep my mouth shut, Mr. Pine. You can tell me.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I burned it and flushed the ashes down the can.”

  He straightened like somebody had used a thumb on him, said, “Aw, for Pete’s sake!” in an offended tone and went back to his magazine.

  They’ll believe anything but the truth.

  There was a thick hunk of moon out and you could see the stars if you tried hard enough. A hint of coolness in the air came from the first lake breeze in nearly a week. It would keep my collar from wilting. I got into the Plymouth, rolled down the windows and drove off into the night.

  It lacked a few minutes of being ten o’clock by the time I pulled in at the curb in front of the Austin Boulevard address. There were other cars moving along the street and I waited a minute or two to find out if I might have a tail. Nothing showed, however; it seemed D’Allemand had taken me at my word.

  I got out and went past the spot where Jerry Marlin died with three holes in his back and his mouth full of blood, and on into the foyer of 1317, its imitation marble walls and tessellated flooring as antiseptic as I remembered them. I jabbed the button beside 6A and almost immediately the lock on the inner door began to click. I went through and rode the chrome-and-mirror cage to the sixth floor . . . and there she was waiting for me, with an uneven smile on her lips and fear in her eyes.

  She said, “Come in, Paul. How nice you look,” without any bounce to her voice. We went into the living room and she sat me in one of the two lounge chairs and put a glass in my right hand. She moved slowly over to the couch and sat down where the light from a table lamp wouldn’t show her face clearly to me.

  I drank some of my drink and put the glass on the corner of the coffee table and stared with approval at what I could see of her. I could see considerable. She was wearing a hunk of soft yellow stuff that narrowly missed being white. There wasn’t enough above the waist to make Sunday dinner for a moth, but downstairs there were yards of it. Her shining reddish-brown hair was swept up on top of her head, with a pair of gold diamond-set clips above her ears to keep it off her face.

  “You,” I said, “are as lovely as the fourth queen in a poker hand. Also something is eating on you—something that wasn’t there when I talked to you on the phone. Give it to me, beautiful.”

  She sat there and watched me out of a shadow, her breathing ragged, her lower lip twisted as if it was being punished for quivering. She said, “Paul . . .” stopped, swallowed, tried again.

  “Paul, tell me what you know about Jerry Marlin’s murder.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think I can do that.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “Maybe because I don’t know much about it.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “It’s the only answer you’re going to get, Miss Sandmark.”

  Her hands came slowly together, the long, carefully groomed fingers curling about themselves. “Must you be disagreeable?”

  “Tell me how to say ‘no’ agreeably.”

  “I’m sorry, Paul.”

  “That’s all right,” I said.

  I sat there and watched her take deep unsteady breaths that forced her breasts against the tight-fitting bodice of the evening gown. Her hands were locked together in her lap but that didn’t keep them from trembling.

  “About a minute,” I said mildly, “and you’re going to throw a wing-ding they’ll hear in Detroit, You’re wound up tighter than a dollar watch, and the more questions you ask the tighter you get. Why don’t you try giving some information instead of demanding it?”

  She tried to knock off a light little laugh but it broke on her. “You run true to form, don’t you, Mr. Pine? Detectives are all alike, aren’t they? Even private detectives. Even private detectives with broad shoulders and bony faces and eyes that fool you into thinking they’re honest eyes.” Her voice was climbing. “All they really want is information—the kind of information they can use to hound and torture innocent people you-I love . . .”

  I said, “Relax, Tallulah. We’ve run out of film.”

  That made her mad. She came off the couch like a cat off a stove and took a couple of steps toward me, her face white and twisted until it was hardly beautiful any more.

  “Get out!” she said, her voice hardly more than a whisper. “Get out, you sneaking, filthy little—little—”

  “—detective,” I said. “And I’m not little, so watch your step.” I picked up my glass and leaned back and grinned at her. “Sit down, Miss Sandmark, and try to be as nice as you look. I’m sure you didn’t ask me to put on a boiled shirt and come over just to point out what a dirty name I am.”

  She backed up and let herself slowly down on the couch without taking her eyes off me. She was still angry, but it was an uncertain, groping kind of anger that was chiefly fear—fear that had nothing at all to do with me.

  “They are after him, Paul.” Her voice was still a whisper. “They say he killed him. He didn’t kill him, Paul. I know he didn’t. He couldn’t kill anyone. . . .”

  “If you say so,” I said. I lighted a cigarette to give her time to steady down some. “I’m a little hazy on identities, Miss Sandmark. Who says who killed who? Or is it whom?”

  “There was a man out to see my stepfather.” She was getting past the whispering stage. “He was some kind of policeman from the State’s Attorney’s office.”

  That would be Crandall, I thought. “He accuse your stepfather of killing somebody, Miss Sandmark?”

  “Yes. That is—not right out. But he seemed to know a lot of things and . . . Well, the way he asked questions was really an accusation.”

  “How do you know about it?” I asked. “Were you present when he talked to your stepfather?”

  “No. John called me a few minutes before you arrived.”

  “Why did he do that? I mean, you’d sort of expect him not to upset you with something that actually hadn’t come to a head so far.”

  “He had to, Paul. This man wants to talk to my stepfather again tomorrow and he wants to ask me some questions, too.”

  I nodded. “They do things like that. They hand out just enough heat to worry you so that you’ll talk things over with the other suspects and get a story worked out to fit all the points mentioned. Then they call in everyone concerned and ask questions until they get the story you’ve prepared. Everything checks. Then, wham! they throw in a few high trumps you didn’t know they were holding, and your nice little story blows up and you get rattled and
start contradicting one another. The beginning of the end, as somebody so aptly put it.”

  She spread her hands in a helpless gesture. “What can John and I do?”

  “Tell the truth, if you can stand it. Otherwise, get a lawyer and make the best deal possible.”

  “He didn’t kill him,” she said stubbornly.

  “Then what are you worried about?”

  She wet her lips. “They might make it seem that he did. It—it’s kind of a mix-up, Paul. I—can’t explain it.”

  “Maybe I can,” I said. “Who is it your stepfather is supposed to have killed?”

  She began to shiver uncontrollably and her face went behind her hands. “He didn’t do it! He didn’t do it!”

  I put some smoke in my lungs and let it out slowly and waited. A few minutes went by with stones in their shoes. I could hear a piano in one of the neighboring apartments. Somebody was playing the “Largo” from Dvorak’s Fifth Symphony, playing it with too heavy a touch.

  Presently the girl on the sofa stopped shaking enough to get up and take a handkerchief from a bag lying on one of the end tables. She wiped her eyes and dug up a smile that looked like a scream sounds.

  “I’m sorry, Paul. It’s just that I don’t believe—don’t know . . . I just don’t know!”

  “Let’s try it again,” I said. “Who do they think your stepfather murdered?”

  “My real father.”

  I said, “This is important: Did the investigator say it was your real father?”

  “No. No, this man from the State’s Attorney’s office wouldn’t say anything definite. He wanted to know about a man who was found murdered in a hotel on Madison Street about a month ago.”

  “But you knew this man was your real father?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I was there. At the hotel.”

  “When?”

  “The night he was—was killed.”

  Well, brother! I got up and walked the rug a time or two before I stopped in front of her. I said, “It looks like you better start at the beginning and let me have it all, Miss Sandmark.”

  She looked away from me, and for a moment there I thought she was going to refuse to say any more. Finally she sighed the deepest sigh in the world and said, “I think I’d like a drink, Paul.”

  “Okay. Where do you keep the stuff?”

  She pointed out a portable bar in a walnut cabinet with a built-in freezing unit for ice cubes. I made her a highball and freshened up my own and sat down on the couch next to her.

  A lusty pull at the highball put some color back in her cheeks. She leaned back against the sofa as though her head was something she’d been carrying too long and too far.

  “It began one evening about five weeks ago. Jerry had been here and he left quite early—around ten, I think. As he reached the street, a man called to him from a car parked in front of the apartment.”

  “He asked Jerry all about me. When Jerry wanted to know what his interest was, the man explained he’d been watching me at a distance for more than a week, trying to get up the courage to approach me himself. He said he’d noticed that Jerry was with me a lot and he would like to know if Jerry was in love with me. Jerry told him yes, that we were to be married. It wasn’t exactly the truth; he said it to find out what the man wanted.”

  “The man then said his name was Raoul Fleming— my real father’s name—and wanted to know if the name meant anything to Jerry. When Jerry said it didn’t, Mr. Fleming told him that I was his daughter and that circumstances had kept him from seeing me for many years. He said there had been a shadow over his name all that time, but now he was in a position to reopen the case and that he would spend a fortune, if necessary, to clear himself and regain the love of his only child; that, while it was too late to redeem himself in the eyes of the woman he loved, he could bring retribution to the man who had taken her from him.”

  “Sounds like a very old, very bad movie,” I said. “But then the truth often sounds that way.”

  “Jerry wanted him to come up right then and there and talk to me,” Leona continued, as though I hadn’t spoken. “But he wouldn’t. Said I had probably been taught to hate him, and it would be too much of a shock for me to face him without warning. He asked Jerry to tell me of their conversation, to beg me not to tell any one, especially John Sandmark, and that he would get in touch with me in a day or two. Then he drove away.”

  “Of course, Jerry came back up and told me about it. I was too astonished and confused to know exactly what to do. The man seemed to know too much about me and my family to be an imposter; and it was true that I had been taught to hate him. Not taught, exactly; it was just that his name was never mentioned, there were no pictures of him, nothing that ever belonged to him. It was as though he had never existed. My mother wanted it that way, I suppose. . . .”

  “We finally decided, Jerry and I, to do nothing until Mr. Fleming came directly to me. I worried a little about not telling my stepfather, because of what the man had said about revenge.”

  “The next night, Jerry and I went out and didn’t get in until very late. The following morning my stepfather stopped by to see me; he often does so on his way downtown. While, he was here, the postman rang and John went down to get the mail for me. He came back up and gave me some bills or something, and said that was all there was. He seemed strangely disturbed about something and left almost at once.”

  “Around one o’clock that same afternoon,” she went on, “my phone rang. It was my real father. He said Jerry had given him my number, and that he was calling to learn if I would come to see him that night, as he had requested in his note. When I told him I knew nothing of any note, he said he left one in my mailbox the evening before. I asked him to hold the wire while I went down and looked for it. There was no note in the box. I realized that John must have taken it, although I didn’t tell Mr. Fleming that.”

  “He wanted me to come to the Laycroft Hotel on Madison and Hermitage at ten o’clock that evening. I asked him why he couldn’t come to my apartment. He was afraid my stepfather might stop by unexpectedly, he said, and he wasn’t ready for that . . . yet. He talked a little wildly about having come five thousand miles to cover me with diamonds, about living far from civilized people for years with only the thought of someday seeing me to keep him from going mad—things like that.”

  “I finally agreed to meet him. He told me his room number and said to come directly to the room without stopping at the desk.”

  She stopped talking and sat there with her head back, her eyes closed, her face empty of emotion. When she showed no sign of saying anything more, I tried prodding her a little.

  “Did you keep the appointment, Miss Sandmark?”

  “Yes.” She sounded tired. She had talked enough to be tired.

  “What did he have to say?”

  Her head turned slowly toward me and the long-lashed eyes slowly opened. “That’s the odd part of it,” she said musingly. “He hardly said a word. He seemed almost anxious to get rid of me, in fact.”

  “ ‘Hardly a word’ means some words. What did he say?”

  “Oh, that he would like to have a long talk with me, but since he was leaving town in a few hours, he would need time to pack. He said I would hear from him again but not to worry if it wasn’t for a long time. Before I knew it I was out in the corridor and the door was shut. Actually, Paul, I think he was expecting another visitor.”

  “Did you wait around to make sure?”

  “Certainly not. It was none of my business.”

  “If the visitor was John Sandmark, it would have been your business.”

  That hurt her, but she tried hard not to show how much it hurt her. “I know,” she whispered. “And that could mean John—” She couldn’t get out the rest of it.

  “All right.” I got up to do some more pacing. “You went right home after that?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mention any of this
to John Sandmark?”

  “No. I . . . no.”

  “Why not?”

  “It wouldn’t have done any good.”

  “Was it because you were afraid he would admit to you that he murdered Fleming?”

  “John didn’t kill him,” she said stubbornly, without conviction.

  “Why didn’t you let the cops know who he was?”

  “And get mixed up in a murder?” she blazed.

  “Too damn bad. He was your father, wasn’t he?”

  “That means nothing to me! Not a thing! How could it. after what he did to my mother? John Sandmark is the only true father I—”

  “Okay,” I said resignedly. “Don’t get yourself all worked up again. In my own awkward way I’m trying to straighten things out for you.”

  “I know, Paul. But John didn’t kill him.”

  “So you’ve said.” I punched out my cigarette, lighted another and drank the rest of my highball. I stood there, looking down at her, thinking over what she had told me. . . .

  “What about Jerry Marlin?” I said at last.

  She stared at me woodenly. “What about him?”

  “He have a date with you that night?”

  “Oh.” Somehow she seemed relieved. “He was to call for me at eight. I got rid of him immediately.”

  “Then you went out to keep the appointment with Fleming?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you learn your father had been killed?”

  “It . . . was in the paper. The hotel and room number were given.”

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s go back a ways. You say Fleming eased you out of his room by saying he had to pack because he was leaving town right away?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It was a stall, then,” I said. “Because when the cops were called, after the body was discovered, there wasn’t a thing in the room to pack. Not so much as another shirt.”