Halo in Blood

by Howard Browne

  Her eyes widened into a blank stare. “That is odd.”

  “You’re damn right it’s odd,” I said. “Unless maybe he had a room someplace else and used this one at the Laycroft to meet you in, like an office. . . . You see any personal stuff lying around while you were there? Stuff like a suitcase, or clothing, or shaving tools?”

  “No-o. Although his suitcase might have been in the closet, and his clothing and things in the dresser drawers.”

  I rubbed the back of my neck and scowled and thought some more. This thing was making me old before my time. . . .

  “Just what gave you the idea that he might be expecting another visitor?”

  She thought about that while inspecting a manicured forefinger. “I don’t really know,” she said to the finger. “It was just that he kept looking toward the door as though listening for somebody. Then he’d turn back to me and say a few words, stop in the middle of a sentence and look at the door again. He would set his long jaw in hard lines and his thin nostrils would flare a little and his eyes would get like blue steel. He would sort of draw up his big shoulders as though he were going to hit somebody.”

  My mouth was open by this time. I said, “Someone’s lying. I think it’s you.” It sounded harsh, even to my own ears.

  She jerked her eyes off that finger and put them on me. If she wasn’t astonished, they’ve been giving Oscars to the wrong people. “Are you crazy?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not crazy. I’m not a fool, either. Your father didn’t have big shoulders or a long jaw or steel in his eyes. Your father was a little guy, with a thin face and a weak sort of handsomeness that has nothing to do with your description.”

  She did nothing but sit there and look dazed at me.

  I reached in my pocket and took out my wallet, opened it, pulled out a newspaper clipping and shoved it into one of her hands. “Look at it.”

  She looked at it.

  “Did you ever see that face before?”

  Her expression gave me her answer before she said, “Who is it supposed to be?”

  I said, “Are you telling me that is not your father?”

  “My father? It certainly is not!”

  I was licked. I was finished. I was a hell of a detective. I went over and poured some Scotch in my empty glass and drank it like distilled water.

  Leona Sandmark got off the sofa and came over and put a hand on my arm. Something was beginning to come into her face and eyes . . . a kind of wild unbelieving hope. She shook my arm impatiently, holding the clipping out to me with her other hand.

  “Paul! Listen to me, Paul! Why did you think this was a picture of my father?”

  “That picture,” I said, “is of the man who was found dead in your father’s room at the Laycroft.”

  “But I—but how—”

  “I cut it out of the paper less than an hour ago,” I said dully. “I was going to send it out to a detective friend of mine on the West Coast and ask him to compare it with the pictures of the people who were mixed up in an old murder case out there, just to make sure I was on the right road.”

  She wasn’t listening. She stood there, holding onto my arm, her shining green eyes looking at me, through me, beyond me. She was beginning to understand something . . . something I had realized ten seconds after learning the picture was not of Raoul Fleming.

  “Paul! Listen to me, Paul! Don’t you see what this means? It has to mean that!”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m glad for you that it’s worked out this way. If I sounded a little sore, it was only me being sore at me. I was so sure I knew all the answers. And all the time I didn’t even know the questions. . . .”

  “Here’s what it means, Leona. It means John Sandmark didn’t kill your father. It was your father who did the killing; and the dead man was the visitor your father was expecting while you were there. That means tomorrow you and John Sandmark can tell the State’s Attorney’s man to go see a ball game, or something. It means—”

  Suddenly she threw her arms around my neck and buried her face against my shoulder and began a wild mixture of laughs and sobs that would have brought in the neighbors if my coat hadn’t muffled her. I stood there and patted the soft smooth skin of her bare shoulder and waited for the storm to pass.

  Finally she drew away a little and looked up at me, her face streaked with tears and blotches of caked powder but still too lovely to feed to the hogs.

  “Oh, darling, I’m so happy,” she said, her words hardly more than a spent whimper. “You’ve no idea what a horrible weight I’ve carried this past month. If it hadn’t been for you . . .”

  She was so close to me I could smell her. It was that same smell, a good smell, an exciting smell that walked over my skin and made it tingle.

  Her eyes were more green than blue, heavy with the dreamy look that comes from emotion. Her hands came up and fluttered against the lapels of my coat. Her face was inches from mine, tilted up, her lips full and soft and glistening a little, as though they were wet.

  My arms were getting to be a problem, so I put them around her. I couldn’t have picked a nicer place to put them. That didn’t leave much room for her hands on my lapels, so she slid her arms up and put them around my neck.

  Her lips were warm, but they got warmer. . . .

  She drew her head away and gave a small unsteady laugh and put her hands back on my lapels and pressed her cheek against my shirt front.

  “I can hear your heart beating, darling.”

  “Pretty noisy, I guess.”

  “I was so afraid I would never find . . . this.”

  There was nothing I could think of to say to that.

  When she spoke again, the words were so low I could barely hear them. “Kiss me again, dearest. . . .”

  I kissed her again. I even nibbled a little on her lower lip. She shivered suddenly and tightened her hold on my neck and her breathing came quick and shallow, almost rasping. Asthma, probably. Her knees began to shake against my legs and she drew her face away from mine and hid it against me.

  I thought once more of the high-school boy and the ex-convict and the married man, of Jerry Marlin and twin hollows in a rose-satin bedspread. None of those bothered me. I was never cut out to be a trail blazer anyway.

  Sure. I knew what to do. My body was telling me what to do. But part of my mind was pulling at my elbow and saying this could grow into something more wonderful than just another roll in the hay; this could become the one thing every man wants and which a few men actually find.

  And then I remembered that I had felt that same way once before not so long ago . . . and right there is where I stopped thinking.

  I took hold of her shoulders and pushed her gently away. I looked down into that lovely face and said, “Okay. You figure I took the weight off your shoulders and you’re grateful. The truth is I had hardly anything to do with getting rid of your troubles. But you’re grateful and that’s nice and I’m grateful for the way you are grateful.”

  She stared at me with her mouth open, as though her ears were a pair of damned liars. And then she leaned her forehead against my lapels and began to laugh. No hysteria this time; just soft everyday female laughter that was nice to hear.

  “You f-fool!” she gasped. “You crazy delicious hard-boiled fool! And you call it gratitude!”

  She pushed abruptly away from me and turned and went into the bedroom and closed the door without looking back. I walked over to the portable bar and poured myself some more Scotch, and if my hands were shaking a little I didn’t blame them.

  Almost at once she was back, a dark green velvet wrap over one arm. Her face was made up again, the tear streaks and caked powder gone. She gave the wrap to me and I held it while she slipped her bare arms into the sleeves. There was a gold diamond clip set high on one shoulder; it matched those in her hair. She looked like a million dollars. Why shouldn’t she? Her stepfather had a million dollars.

  She left me standing there and crossed over to the ivory gr
and piano, picked up a brocaded bag and looked inside, clicked it shut and put it under one arm and came back to me.

  “I’m ready, Paul.”

  “Are we going somewhere?” I asked politely.

  “Of course, you lug! Out to see the bright spots. Remember?”

  “Now I do.”

  She laughed cozily and brushed a smear of powder off one of my lapels, tucked a hand under my arm and out we went.

  Downstairs, I started to steer her toward my heap waiting at the curb, but she said her Packard was parked around the corner and didn’t I think it would be more comfortable. I admitted that it probably would and we went around the corner and stepped into eighty-five-hundred dollars’ worth of custom-built metal and plush and plate glass. Calling it a car would be the same as calling Buckingham Palace a home. With its instrument panel and a ham sandwich I could have flown a tennis racquet to Belgium.

  Behind the wheel, with Leona Sandmark close beside me, I stepped cautiously on the starter. An old contented mother cat began to purr under the hood and I shifted gears and let her roll.

  Once I was used to turning corners from the middle of the block, I said, “Where shall I drive modom?”

  “Oh, I don’t care much. The Peacock Club would be nice. It’s on Rush Street.”

  We went to the Peacock Club.

  CHAPTER 15

  We went into the silk-drapery and crystal-mirror elegance of a foyer crowded with people in evening clothes waiting for tables. Beyond red-velvet ropes strung across an arched opening was the same semicircular swath of tables about the glistening dance floor.

  Music with plenty of brass and a barrel-house piano, blended with the clatter of tableware, the murmur of voices and the slither of dancing feet to form a curtain of sound like the backdrop of a stage. They had Nod Noonan and his orchestra for the summer months, and a lot of people came to hear Nod and his C-alto saxophone.

  “Looks like either we wait or go someplace else,” I said, running an eye over the crowded foyer.

  Leona flicked me with an amused glance, said, “I never wait for anything, pet.” She put her hand under my arm and eased me over to the arched opening.

  A man in a dress suit with tails, his face the color of wet lime, bowed to us and said, “Good evening, Miss Sandmark.” He curled a lip at my tuxedo, and pushed aside a flunky and unhooked the velvet rope for us himself.

  We followed him right down an aisle and around to the right to a table for two bordering on the dance floor. He slid Leona’s chair under her with a flourish, removed her wrap with a flourish, whisked a “Reserved” card off the table with a flourish and handed us wine cards—with a flourish. He jerked his chin up and around, like Mussolini on a balcony, and crooked a lifted finger at a passing runt of a waiter and it stopped the little guy as if he’d run into a wall.

  While we were waiting for our drinks, Leona leaned forward and put her hands on the table for me to hold. “I’m glad we decided to go out, Paul. I’m too happy to want to do any thinking.”

  “You picked the right spot for not thinking,” I said.

  “After an earful of the noise in this place, your brains crawl down and hide behind a vertebra.”

  She crinkled her nose at me. “Dance with me, darling.”

  I sized up the packed floor. “Dance . . . no. But I’ll like putting my arms around you.”

  When we came back to the table, our drinks were waiting. Leona gulped hers, emptying the glass before putting it down. She caught the small waiter’s attention and ordered another. They were brandy cocktails, which are all right if you are young and can sleep late the next day.

  We drank and danced and drank some more. After a while they dimmed the lights and put on the floor show. I drew my chair around beside her and held her hand while we watched the acts.

  When the lights came on again, Leona picked up her purse and went out to powder her nose. I watched the dancers for a moment, finished my drink and made a brief visit to the john. When I came back, there was a little man with a round patient face and a dinner jacket sitting at my table. Leona Sandmark was nowhere in sight.

  I sat down across from him and said: “What’s the idea, sweetheart? Tired of tailing me from a distance?”

  He put his bright little eyes on me and said, “He wants to see you. I wouldn’t know why.”

  “D’Allemand?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m having me a social evening,” I said. “Tell him to give me a ring at the office tomorrow.”

  His smile was empty. “You know better, peeper.”

  “I’m with somebody.” I began to get sore. “Where is he?”

  “Upstairs. It won’t take long.”

  “I hope to spit it won’t,” I said. I called the little waiter over and told him to tell the lady I would be back in a few minutes. Cleve got out of the chair; and sure enough, his dinner jacket was a size too small across the hips. I followed him across the room and we went into a small elevator behind the checkroom, like before, up one flight and along the corridor to the same door foxy Andrew had steered me to earlier in the week. Cleve rapped lightly on the panel and the buzzer clicked and we went in.

  The room hadn’t changed any since the last time I was there. D’Allemand was sitting behind the kneehole desk. He was smoking a long thin cigar that looked as though it had been rolled from soft gold. He had on a midnight-blue dinner jacket that did a lot of flattering things for his barrel chest. He waited until I was in front of the desk before he said, “Good evening. Mr. Pine.”

  “It was,” I said hotly, “until I found your stooge crawling out of a crack in the table. Let’s get a couple of things straight, fat boy. You paid me five hundred bucks. That five hundred buys my services. It does not buy my pale white body. It does not buy you the privilege of hauling me in every time you feel talkative. It does not give you the right to stick a tail on me. I don’t like tails; they make me mad and—all right, what do you want?”

  He took the cigar out of his mouth and rested the hand holding it on the desk in front of him. The soft indirect lighting in the room winked from polished fingernails the size of half-dollars and from a five-carat diamond in a platinum setting on his little finger. Smoke from the cigar tip floated lazily up and formed a tenuous blue curtain before the collection of planes and hollows that made up his face. Away back in their sockets his dark eyes brooded at me.

  He said, “I am a bit disappointed in you, Mr. Pine. I paid you to furnish me with information. I am not getting it.”

  I waited to hear some more.

  “There is an item in the late papers,” he continued, his voice even dryer than I last remembered it, “an item about a dead man. His name was Clyne and he had been murdered. The item did not say who discovered the body, but I learned that by telephoning my friend at police headquarters. . . . Were you about to say something, Mr. Pine?”

  “I was breathing,” I said. “I do a lot of breathing.”

  “Of course. However, I think it time you did some talking. Why didn’t you tell me Clyne was dead?”

  “I had no reason to tell you.”

  “You were paid—”

  “Certainly I was paid. I was paid to learn who killed Marlin, and to learn what he was up to that earned him bullets in the back. I was not paid to come running to you every time I found a lead.”

  “True. But Clyne’s death is linked in some way with that of Marlin. Don’t you agree?”

  “It sounds reasonable,” I said.

  “Do you know who killed Clyne, Mr. Pine?”

  “It’s possible.”

  He hadn’t expected that. He stiffened and the hand holding the cigar jerked slightly. “Who?”

  I shook my head. “No. It’s nothing but a theory and there are holes in it. Theories don’t mean a thing. I could give you several that would fit in a loose sort of way.”

  He put the cigar slowly between his lips and tightened them around it with a kind of careful savagery. “I have always been in
terested in theories. Let me hear one of your better ones, hole and all.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Jerry Marlin was working for you. He tried to give you a cross on some deal and you had him shot. I happened to be around when he got it. That bothered you for two reasons: I might be able to finger the killer, and I must have had some reason for being there in the first place. So a complicated deal was worked out whereby I would be grateful to you for saving my life— grateful enough to answer all your questions.”

  “But I wasn’t that grateful, so you hired me on the pretext that you wanted to know who had killed Marlin. That way we’d be in contact often, and eventually I might spill the reason for my original interest in Marlin.”

  He sat there and smoked his cigar, his expression that of polite interest. When I paused, he put on a wintry smile and said, “There surely is more to it than that. Mr. Pine. There would almost have to be.”

  “Not a great deal,” I said. “But you’re welcome to it. I located Clyne. You were never sure of Clyne because of his friendship with Marlin. He might have known about the cross Marlin was trying to hand you. It would never do for me to learn about that, so Clyne was beaten to death with a blackjack.”

  “That made two guys that had been sapped: Clyne, fatally; me, once over lightly. You’ve got an ape called Ownie, who packs a sap and would rather use it than eat.”

  “Put it all together and it adds up to a theory—a theory with holes, like I said.”

  He sighed microscopically. After a while he said, “I’m afraid you’ve turned out to be stupid, Mr. Pine. Also you have imagination. An unfortunate combination . . . and a dangerous one. Such combinations have destroyed empires built by intelligent men. . . . I won’t detain you any longer, Mr. Pine.”

  He looked past my shoulder and nodded in a small way. I turned my head carefully and there was Cleve, an arm’s length behind me. He didn’t appear especially alarming; he never would unless he added some inches and got rid of those hips.

  He said: “Let’s go, peeper.”

  “I’m agreeable,” I said.

  At the door I glanced back. D’Allemand hadn’t moved. He was knocking a quarter-inch of cigar ash carefully into an ash tray. He looked like a man who wanted to be alone with his thoughts for a while. . . .