Halo in Brass

by Howard Browne

  I sniffed at the air. No smell of gunsmoke or rare Oriental poisons. I edged past the trim legs and knelt down and brushed the hair away from the cheek. It wasn’t really dark hair after all, but a rich warm brown with what might have been a natural curl and a reddish glint from the light.

  And she was breathing.

  The knot under my ribs began to unravel. I put a finger against the artery in her firm young neck and felt the slow regular thump of her heart. No bruises that I could see. And no blood. Certainly no blood.

  I got my arms under her and straightened up and carried her to the couch. She stirred slightly as I put her down. She moaned softly and the long curling eyelashes fluttered. She would be coming around any second now. It might have been only a faint, but she seemed too knocked out for that.

  On the floor between the sofa and the closed door was a blue leather handbag. I stooped, picked it up and released the catch. The usual collection of junk, among it a checkbook in a black folder. I lifted the snap and saw a name and address printed in the lower left-hand corner of the top check. Susan Griswold, 1124 North Avon Road, Lake Ridge, Illinois. I knew about Lake Ridge, but only from hearsay. For upperstrata millionaires only. A municipality all to itself, located between Lake Forest and Highland Park along Lake Michigan fifteen miles north of the Chicago city limits. I leafed through the stubs to the last balance shown and whistled silently before letting the folder slip back into the bag.

  While I was putting it down on the table, her eyes opened. They were gray-blue eyes, lovely eyes, quite large in a face that was on the small side. She didn’t see me ; it would be a moment or two before she saw anything. She groaned and put up a hand and touched one side of her head, high up, flinching under the slight pressure of her fingers. That answered one of my questions, but only one. I flinched a little with her, knowing how it would feel. I had been there myself—and recently.

  When she started to push herself up in a fumbling way, I reached out to help her, propping her in a sitting position against one of the couch arms. Her head lolled to one side and the soft strands of hair moved across one eye. She brushed at it vaguely.

  “My head hurts,” she breathed. The words weren’t for me. She didn’t know I existed.

  “Just let it go,” I said. “These things take some getting over.”

  She blinked a time or two, getting me into focus. Her frown was more puzzled than anything else. “Are you the one who rescued me? Or have I been rescued?”

  “All over by the time I showed up,” I said. “My contribution was sweeping you off the rug.”

  She moved her hands aimlessly. They were small capable-looking hands that would handle a car or a tennis racket with casual competence. One of them was clenched into a loose fist. Something was in that fist, something that dangled its free ends against her wrist. Something that seemed to be a scrap of black lace.

  She saw where I was looking and her own eyes dropped to the fist. Slowly she let the fingers peel back. It was lace all right—a ragged shred of it. Fragile and wispy, like the edging from a brassiere or a slip. I reached down and lifted it out of her unresisting hand.

  I said, “What’s been going on around here?”

  She started to shake her head but thought better of it. “I’m not sure myself. I was supposed to meet Miss Conrad here at three o’clock. When she didn’t answer my knock I thought she might not be awake yet. The door was unlocked, so I came on in and knocked on what I thought would be the bedroom door. I heard the creak of bed springs and then nothing at all. I knocked again and called out her name. She said to come in and I opened the door—and the roof caved in!”

  “Why would she want to slug you?” I said.

  “Good Lord, I don’t know.” She wet her lips. “You wouldn’t happen to have a glass of water on you? I think there’s a sand dune in my throat.”

  “Coming up,” I said. I turned and went over to the partly open door and through it. Another small room; a kitchen this time, filled with ghostly half-light from a square window framed with a cottage curtain.

  I found a glass on the porcelain sink and was reaching for the tap when I caught the faint click of metal against metal from the other room. I stepped back quickly and looked through the open doorway. Susan Griswold was at the hall door, a hand on the knob, ready to leave without saying good-by.

  I was in there before she could get the door open more than a foot. I slapped a palm hard against the wood and the door banged shut. Our faces were no more than inches apart. Hers was flushed and the gray-blue eyes gleamed with anger and alarm. We stood like that, breathing at each other, not saying anything, while the seconds ticked away.

  I said, “Thirst all gone, hunh?”

  She didn’t give an inch. I continued to look at her, really seeing her now. She was past twenty, but not very far past. She had all the figure any girl would want, no more and no less, wearing a gray-blue suit and a high-necked yellow sweater under that. The face had a wholesome out-of-doors look, with a dusting of cautious freckles across the bridge of a small nose. You wouldn’t see the freckles until you were right on top of them. The mouth belonged to her type of face and suggested she would be generous to the people she liked. So far I didn’t qualify. As a face it wouldn’t start any wars but it would make coming home from one something special.

  When she spoke there was an edge to her voice. “Look, I’m getting out of here.”

  “Not yet,” I said. “Not until the clouds drift by. Let’s go back and sit down. My feet hurt.”

  Her chin lifted. “Get out of my way.”

  I had a hand around her wrist before she knew it. She caught her breath and tried to jerk away. “Behave yourself,” I growled and drew her away from the door. She hung back but it was no more than a token resistance.

  She sank onto the sofa, rubbing her wrist where my fingers had been and stared at me sullenly. I found my cigarettes and shook one loose and held it out to her. She started to refuse, then shrugged and accepted it and a light. The set of her chin told me I might succeed in keeping her here but silence was all it would get me.

  I left her there and prowled the room, looking for anything and nothing. The drip from the kitchen faucet went on and on, as wearing as any torture dreamed up by the Chinese.

  When I reached what would be the bedroom I stopped. The knob turned easily under my hand and I jolted the door open with my knee. Not enough light to make out anything; if there was a window the blind was tightly drawn. The lamp behind me put a yellow oblong across the floor and halfway up the far wall. My shadow seemed all legs. A wall switch was just inside the door.

  Pale-rose light sprang up from under frilly shades on a pair of vanity lamps. A full-sized bed with a low endboard. A chest of drawers between an open closet and the bathroom. Scatter rugs in white and brown to match the valance above a narrow window.

  A clean, orderly, feminine room, with the smell of sandalwood lightly in the air and the smell of death even lighter but there just the same. Face up across the bed lay the body of a naked woman, a sun-tan stocking twisted tightly around her neck. '

  CHAPTER 10

  SHE HAD died hard and not quick. The cream-colored spread was rumpled and half on the floor. Her coal-black hair was tangled. Her mouth was open wider than seemed possible and the tongue was enormous and the wrong color. Her eyes were swollen beyond their lids until they were no longer eyes but a nameless obscenity.

  And for a final touch, four broad shallow scratches in leering red slanting across the white belly from below one overripe breast to a point well below the opposite ribs. Four parallel scratches, close together, left by four broad fingernails in one last gesture of contempt.

  “Oh-h-hl” A soft stricken gasp from behind me. Susan Griswold was standing there, no blood in her face, her eyes dark with horror. I twisted sharply and closed the door hard, cutting us off from the bedroom. Her knees were buckling as I caught her. She leaned against me and began to shake.

  I lugged her back to t
he couch and dumped her not gently on it. I sat down at the other end and lighted a cigarette and did nothing except breathe smoke for what seemed a long time. The wind, stronger now, whined uneasily past the window and in the kitchen the refrigerator clicked against the silence and began to hum quietly to itself.

  And after a while I began to think again.

  Susan Griswold’s cigarette still smoldered, forgotten, between the ringless fingers of her left hand. I reached down and took it away and ground it out in a flat metal ash tray alongside the table lamp.

  “You know who she is?” I asked.

  She nodded and moved the tip of her tongue along her lips. “It’s . . . Mary Conrad,” she said, her voice barely audible.

  “How well did you know her?”

  “Not at all, really. I spoke to her twice, once on the phone.”

  “Any idea who would want her dead?”

  “Of course not. How could I?”

  “I thought I’d ask—although it’s not my place to.” I stood up slowly and looked around the room. “You say there’s a phone here?”

  Her expression was startled. “Phone? Why a phone?”

  “To call the law,” I said. “This is murder, lady. When a murder happens the cops have to know. I thought everybody knew that.”

  She jumped to her feet, ready to run. “I can’t let them find me here. There isn’t anything I can tell them anyway.”

  “That won’t keep them from asking,” I said. “Look, you were here, Miss Griswold. You got knocked on the head by the murderer. When you came to, there was a strip of lace in your hand—something you must have clawed from the killer while you were falling. That makes it a clue—and the police lab just loves clues. And they’ll want to know why you were here to begin with.”

  She was rubbing a hand along the other wrist, over and over as if she was cold. “No!” The word came out loudly, driven by panic. “It’s not so much what my being mixed up in a murder would do to my father. But if Eve found out I’d come here to see Mary Conrad . . . well, she’d guess what my reason was. That would put her on guard and I’d never find out anything.”

  “You’re forgetting I missed the first act, Miss Griswold. Want to bring me up to date a little?” I asked.

  It was a new thought to her. She looked at me narrowly, thinking about it. “What good would that do?” she said sharply. “I don’t know you or anything about you.”

  I reached for my wallet. Her eyes jumped, following my hand. “No gun,” I said solemnly, holding up the identification panel with the photostat of my business license in it.

  She stared at it woodenly and from it to me. “A private detective,” she said, almost groaning the words. “That’s fine. That’s simply wonderful. And all along I thought she didn’t know. How much is she paying you to spy on me?”

  “I’m very reasonable,” I said. “Any housewife can afford me out of her pin money. No extra charge for insults.”

  “All right,” she said, sighing. “I could be wrong and I hope I am. But you haven’t said why you’re here.”

  “Neither have you,” I pointed out. “Me, I’m the guy who wants to yell for the cops—and intends to. Right now.”

  She caught my sleeve as I turned away. “I believe you! I have to believe you! Listen, Mr. Pine, if I tell you, if I convince you I couldn’t possibly know who killed Mary Conrad, will you let me go? And not tell the police I was here?”

  “You think I’m nuts?” I growled. “I could be crucified for a trick like that—and don’t think they wouldn’t enjoy doing it.” I stuffed the wallet back in my pocket. “Tell it or don’t tell it, Miss Griswold. But you’ll get no guarantees.”

  She hesitated, covering it by sinking down on the couch again. She wanted desperately to come up with a quick convincing story that wouldn’t expose her hand. But a lie that fast and smooth was beyond anyone of her background and tender years. And not with those eyes. They were as easy to read as the figures in her checkbook.

  “Could I have another cigarette?” she said.

  I took them out, lighted hers and one for myself, and sat down where I could see her face. I said, “Time figures in this, you know. It’s okay to have somebody drop in and find us this way—after we notify the buttons.”

  She said, “I’m Susan Griswold, as you seem to have found out. Probably by going through my bag.” She waited, for an apology most likely, didn’t get one, bit her lip and went on. “My father is Lawrence Griswold. I suppose you know who he is.”

  “I don’t think so. Not offhand.”

  “Well, for one thing, he’s been married four times.”

  “That wouldn’t even get him on page ten,” I said. “Not these days.”

  “Must you be witty? I thought you said time was important.”

  “Carry on.”

  “My father married again six months ago,” she said, not keeping the bitterness out of her voice and not trying to. “A tall leggy blonde like the last two before her. As beautiful on the outside as the angel he thinks she is. And behind all the glamor, even more grasping and selfish and—and deceitful than the others.”

  “You can see right through her, hunh?”

  Her faced burned all the way to the hairline. “Listen, mister detective,” she said through her teeth. “I don’t think any more highly of daughters who try to break up second marriages than you do. But I’ve seen them come and go right past my nose. I’ve seen them marry my father for what they could pry out of him afterward. Just that and only that. Each one left him a little more disillusioned, a little more shaken, a little older in more than years.”

  “And don’t forget the considerable loss to his bank account,” I added.

  “You think that means anything to me?” she blazed. “If that was as far as it went, I’d mind my own business. I certainly managed to the first couple of times. But not any more. This time he married a woman with brains—a woman who’s not going to be satisfied with just kicking him in the teeth and taking a quiet divorce and a big settlement. This one’s going after everything. Even if he has to die for her to get it!”

  I said, “That’s a nice round statement if I ever heard one. What have you got to back it up with?”

  “Facts. Plus some things I can’t put into words but are there just the same. For one, she’s fired and replaced every servant we had—some of them with us for years. She hired a cold-blooded bitch—I’m sorry—of a personal secretary who’d stick a knife in her own throat if Eve told her to. And she’s got some man, I mean my stepmother has, who’s with her half the time, the kind of a person who looks like mineral oil tastes! Dad, of course, welcomes him right into the family. ‘Any friend of my wife’s is a friend of mine!’ ”

  I said, “You’ve really convinced yourself.”

  Her small nostrils flared a little. “And you’ve already made up your mind that I’m strictly a jealous, meddlesome troublemaker who is determined to make my father unhappy. Is that it?”

  “Probably not,” I said. “Not if I’m to go by your stunning figure and your nice honest eyes. Does she know how you feel about her?”

  “She knew it before I did,” Susan Griswold said grimly.

  “What was her name before she married your father?”

  “Eve Shelby was her professional name. I don’t know of any other.”

  “What was her profession?”

  She fanned the smoke between us away with her hand.

  “She sang at the Tropicabana. A night club and gambling spot out on the South Side. Dad married number three out of the same place. His one other weakness is roulette systems that never work and he spends two or three nights a week at the tables out there.”

  “It’s a rocky road.” I sighed. “Roulette and blondes. Sounds worse than a Georgia chain gang.”

  She bit down on her teeth and let that one go by. I put out my cigarette and lighted another without realizing it. “I get the background,” I said, “but how does Mary Conrad fit in?”

  S
usan Griswold swallowed, remembering the corpse in the next room. “This is going to sound sort of silly, I suppose,” she said uncomfortably. “But I had the feeling . . . no, it was more than that. I knew the time would come for a showdown between Eve Shelby and me. So I made up my mind to get all the—ammunition I could beforehand. Nobody seemed to know anything about her before she started singing at the Tropicabana—less than two months before she married Dad. I wondered about that. People cover up their past when they’ve got something to hide.”

  “True,” I said. “How true. I find this fascinating, Miss Griswold. Only—”

  “I’m coming to that,” she said tartly. “You said to tell you and I’m doing it my way.”

  “Quite.”

  Her lips tightened but she went on, her voice clear and dry. “I learned one of the entertainers in the floor show at the Tropicabana had been a close friend of Eve’s. Mary Conrad. I spoke to her at the club one night and let a hint drop that I’d be willing to pay well for information about Eve—the right kind of information. She said to give her a week to think it over, then to call her here at the apartment. I telephoned about one o’clock this afternoon and we made a date for three.”

  I shook my head. “It wasn’t smart, Miss Griswold.”

  “What wasn’t smart?”

  “Going to the Conrad dame that way. Odds are strong she went straight to your stepmother with the whole story.”

  “Then why see me today?”

  “Maybe to give you some facts. The kind of facts Mrs. Griswold would want you to have. Did Mary Conrad let out anything at all over the phone or that first time at the night club?”