Halo in Blood

by Howard Browne

  About HALO IN BLOOD

  PAUL PINE had knocked around plenty since he left the State’s Attorney Office and opened his own private detective office in Chicago. He thought his experiences had prepared him for anything, no matter how unexpected; but he was mistaken.

  On his way to hold a conference with his new client, Pine gets snarled in a procession that forces him to witness a funeral. It is a crazy affair. There are no mourners, but 12 ministers show up to conduct the services for the corpse known only as John Doe.

  Finally Pine breaks away. Arriving at his client’s house, he learns he has been engaged by wealthy John Sandmark to break up an affair between Sandmark’s daughter, Leona, and a very slick young man. Still nothing tips Pine off that this case will be anything more than a tricky one.

  That night Pine changes his mind. He finds himself in a game being played for huge stakes. His assignment has turned into a case of murder, murder open and unashamed. How Pine maneuvers his way through a maze of love and greed and sudden death makes a tough mystery about a tough guy in a pretty tough city.

  To the memory of

  SIDNEY M. SPIEGEL, JR.

  who, if he had written a book,

  would have filled it with two words

  HALO IN BLOOD

  By

  JOHN EVANS

  BANTAM BOOKS • NEW YORK

  Contents

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Paul Pine was a one-man detective agency, and he knew how to play tough and ruthless even if he got hurt himself.

  John Sandmark, a large wealthy man, looked people over closely without apology. His main fear was for his daughter Leona.

  Leona Sandmark had excellent reasons for wearing a sweater, but extremely poor taste in escorts.

  Gerald Marlin was a smooth young man with no visible means of support.

  D’Allemand, whose infuriating courtesy was hard to take, impossible to refuse.

  Pasty Face, D’Allemand’s muscle-man, had a toadstool complexion.

  Lt. George Zarr of the Homicide Department was a small and overly deliberate man.

  C. L. Baird, whose smooth voice made him sound like a radio commentator . . . or a con man. He found kidnapping just one of the occupational hazards in his business.

  Kenneth Clyne was as suspicious as an orchestra leader’s wife, and just as obvious.

  Crandall of the State’s Attorney Office knew how to wait and which man to back.

  A BANTAM BOOK published by arrangement with

  The Bobbs-Merrill Company

  Bantam Edition Published

  December, 1946

  Second Printing

  Copyright, 1946, by The Bobbs-Merrill Company

  Printed in the United States of America

  CHAPTER 1

  That was the afternoon I drove out to one of the colonial modern homes in the Lincolnwood district to talk a nineteen-year-old named Sally Kurowski into giving up her job as housemaid and going home to mother.

  I didn’t have any luck in convincing her, but I didn’t try very hard either. She had her own room, the work was light, the place was clean, and the man of the house didn’t make any passes at her. It didn’t take long for me to find out things were different in her own home.

  As it turned out, we decided she should keep her job since she was of legal age and beyond the control of her folks. She agreed to drop her old lady a card to let her know the white slavers hadn’t got hold of her. And that was that. It meant I wasn’t going to get paid but it wouldn’t have amounted to much anyway.

  She insisted on making me a glass of iced tea and I drank it to be polite and went out into the hot June sun to where the Plymouth waited under a giant cottonwood at the curb.

  I lighted a cigarette to kill the taste of tea and looked at my wrist watch. One-forty-five. My appointment in Oak Park was for three o’clock and I was a long way from there.

  I drove south and crossed Devon Avenue into Chicago proper. After a couple of blocks I found a diagonal street that would bring me out onto Crawford Avenue. From there on it would be just a matter of ignoring the speedometer.

  After a mile or so I spotted a traffic light at a crossing up ahead. It was red, against me, but the yellow came on while I was forty or fifty feet away. I kept going, figuring the green would show with room to spare.

  It showed, all right. But I was pretty well out into the intersection before I realized the northbound cross traffic hadn’t stopped for its red light. The lead car was a heavy Nash sedan, painted a nice genteel blue, and the driver was pouring it on to close the gap between him and the car he was following.

  I said some words, hit my foot brake hard and cut sharply to the right. Tires screeched like cats on a fence, and I braced for the crash I knew was coming.

  It didn’t come. I dug my fingers out of the steering wheel and looked to see why it hadn’t come. The sedan’s front bumper was stationary no more than six inches away.

  I was going to enjoy this. I put my head out the open window and opened my mouth to say a few well-chosen words . . . and right then I saw some things I should have seen before.

  For one, the sedan’s headlights were burning—as were the headlights on the cars lined up behind it. And every windshield in the line had a purple-and-white sticker on it—a sticker that read: FUNERAL.

  There was more. On the west side of the intersection a park wheeler was getting off the seat of his motorcycle without any particular hurry. His black leather gauntlets were already tucked under his left arm and he was digging under his uniform coat for his book of traffic-violation blanks. The city of Chicago makes a few bucks every time some fatheaded motorist gets caught bulling his way through a funeral procession.

  I did what I could: I swung my wheel still more to the right and tramped on the gas and lit out after that part of the parade already past the corner and well down the street.

  For a minute there I thought I was going to get away with it. The cars behind me closed up to keep the line in tight order, and I didn’t hear any siren to indicate the cop was going to make an issue out of it.

  My idea was to swing out of line at the next corner and go on about my business. It was an idea to be proud of, particularly if there had been a next corner.

  There wasn’t. I kept right on rolling, through an open pair of ornamental iron gates in a red brick wall and onto a narrow, winding, crushed-rock roadway that cut a sweeping curve between rows of gravestones and monuments and mausoleums. There were trees all over the place: tall and heavy elms and cottonwoods and some oaks, and all kinds of bushes and vines. The grass was thick and it was green, and the trees and bushes had their June clothes on.

  After a hundred yards or so. I eased on my brakes when the Buick coupé in front of me winked on its warning lights. The road wasn’t wide enough for me to pull out of line and go on. I was stuck—stuck in the middle of somebody’s funeral while the minutes ticked away and half a city stood between me and my three-o’clock appointment.

  I cut the motor and leaned back and fished for a cigarette. There was only one left in the pack; I took it and crumpled the pack and tossed it at a gravestone. While I was finding a match the door of the Buick slammed shut and a tall
, slender man in a dark suit and gray hat was standing in the roadway. He stood there a moment and rubbed a hand over his smooth-shaven face, then smoothed down the skirt of his coat and went over and prodded the right front tire with a shoe toe in an appraising way as if he was worried a little about the air pressure.

  It wasn’t until then that I saw he was wearing the turned-around collar of a clergyman.

  Feet crunched against the crushed stone of the driveway and five or six men filed past the right side of my car on their way to the hearse. They were a good fifteen feet beyond me before it suddenly dawned on me that every one of them was a clergyman.

  I said, “What the hell?” under my breath and finished lighting my cigarette. I slid over and put my head out the window and looked back at the cars lined up behind me. There were six, all different makes.

  Except for the cars the roadway was deserted. I got a fresh pack of smokes from the glove compartment, dropped them into the side pocket of my coat and stepped out into the open.

  The blue sedan was parked with its front bumper almost against my rear license plate. A man was behind the steering wheel. He sat slumped down in the seat with only a uniform cap and the upper part of his face showing. The eyes were watching me. They blinked a time or two, slow deliberate movements as though the brain behind them was tired.

  Without hurrying I walked over to a rounded headstone in the grass bordering the far side of the driveway. Raised letters on the top read: FATHER. Weather had softened the contours of the limestone edges. I flicked away some of the dust with my handkerchief and sat down, stretched out my legs and breathed in some smoke from my cigarette. It probably was bad taste to sit on somebody’s father, but no one yelled at me.

  Up ahead maybe a hundred and fifty feet, things were going on. The hearse was drawn up near an open grave a few feet off the road where there were no trees or bushes. Twelve men were standing in a group off to one side and discussing something quietly among themselves. As near as I could make out, every man in the bunch was a preacher of one kind or another. Some carried Bibles or prayer books and there was a black robe or two among them.

  The undertaker’s assistants were fishing the casket out of the hearse by this time. From where I sat, it wasn’t much of a casket: one of these cheap pine black boxes that run about fifty bucks and aren’t worth more than ten.

  The assistants weren’t wasting any time building up the solemn atmosphere you find at a run-of-the-mill planting.

  They hauled the coffin out quick and laid hold of the sides and ran it over the grave like a butcher bringing a beef haunch out to the block. They got it set up on the slings ready for lowering and stepped back and took off their hats and mopped their heads.

  A car door slammed near me and I turned my head. The man behind the wheel of the Nash was out of the car and coming across the road toward me. He was a little man, not more than five feet four, with a small wise face full of shallow wrinkles in skin the color and texture of gray sand. His nose was bigger than it should have been and was set slightly off center. His mouth was about the size of the quarter slot in a juke box. He was wearing a chauffeur’s uniform of gray gabardine and the pushed-back uniform cap showed reddish-brown hair pretty much thinned out at the temples.

  He came over with a casual slowness and tipped a hand at me and showed stained teeth in what might have been a smile and said:

  “You’re a hell of a driver, Mac. You got a extra smoke?”

  I tossed him the fresh pack. He tore off the cellophane and one corner of the foil with quick nervous movements of his stubby fingers, took a cigarette, tossed back the pack and struck a kitchen match against a thumbnail. He blew smoke through his nose and flicked the matchstick into the roadway. He said:

  “Yessir, Mac, you come prit near getting yourself smacked back there. Lucky I got good brakes, hunh?”

  He wasn’t tall enough to make me uncomfortable by standing there. He wanted to talk and I had nothing else to do right then anyway, so I said: “From the looks of things, one of the Twelve Apostles must have died. Why all the preachers for just one funeral?”

  His chuckle wasn’t loud enough to wake a cat. He put the sole of a polished boot against the headstone I was sitting on and ducked his head a little nearer to mine.

  “You hit it there, Mac,” he rasped. “Yessir, you really picked a lulu to bust in on. I get in on a lot of these plantings—I drive for Reverend Clark of St. John’s Lutheran. But this one, by God, beats ’em all. Just kind of take a look at what goes on down there.”

  I looked. One of the clergymen was standing at the edge of the grave with his head bowed, probably saying a prayer although he was too far away for me to hear his voice. The rest were standing back a ways and watching him. their heads bared. The undertaker’s boys were off to themselves by the hearse and one was sneaking a smoke. A couple of grave-diggers in stained overalls leaned on their shovels a few yards behind the mound of tan clay at the opposite side of the open grave. The only sounds were from birds among the trees and the occasional scrape of a shoe against the crushed-stone driveway.

  “See what I mean. Mac?” the chauffeur said heavily. He took a long drag at his cigarette, the smoke coming out ahead of his words like Indian signals. “I ask you: what the hell kind of a funeral do you call that? In the first place, where’s the mourners? A guy’s got a right to expect his family to show up when the time comes to throw dirt in his face. All right. maybe he ain’t got no family. Then his friends ought to come. But say he’s fresh out of friends; then his neighbors or his landlord or the people he owes money to . . . somebody for Chrisakes!”

  “And that ain’t all. I been to a lot of these things, like I said. But I never—not once, Mac—been to one where they was more’n one psalm-slinger to say the words over the stiff. Even two preachers would of been something to really talk about.”

  “But what we got here, Mac. I’ll tell you what we got here. We got twelve—you hear me?—twelve of the Bible boys. Now what the hell? I ask you, Mac. what the hell? No guy could of led the kind of life that needs twelve Holy Joes to get him past them Pearly Gates, could he?”

  By this time he was around to the knee-tapping stage. I put my cigarette under my heel and ground it into the grass and stood up and dusted off the seat of my pants. I said:

  “It does seem a little overdone. But then some guys get funny ideas when it comes time to die. What’s this one’s name?”

  He grinned like a marmoset. “John Doe.”

  I stared at him. “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “That’s what the card on the chapel door said,” he insisted, still grinning. “How do you like that?”

  “It’s a beaut, all right,” I said. We walked back over to my car and I opened the door.

  He said wistfully, “You ain’t got a racing form on you, have you, Mac?”

  I shook my head. “The horses don’t mean a thing to me, friend.”

  He sighed. “I used to be a jockey up to when I got all this weight. I like to follow the gee-gees but the reverend don’t like me to read the form. Hell, he don’t like me to swear or smoke or nothing. I’m getting old before my time.”

  He plodded back to the Nash. I got back in my car and sat down to watch the rest of the funeral.

  They finished up finally, just when my watch hit two-twenty. I was going to be late for my appointment, which is no way to treat a possible client, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. The twelve clergymen split up and went back to their individual cars, while the grave-diggers started throwing clay back into the hole.

  The hearse got under way and the line of cars was moving again. I held onto the heels of the Buick while we went sailing around the curve, through another iron gate in the cemetery wall and back out onto the street. At the next intersection the hearse and most of the cars turned off to the east; I swung west and lit out for Crawford Avenue. Out in the best section of Oak Park my client was probably wearing a path in his Oriental rug waiting for m
e to ring his doorbell.

  Before I’d gone more than a block a siren went off behind me. It lasted only a second or two and then shut off, the way the cruiser boys do when they want your attention. I idled down and glanced at the rear-view mirror and there was a gray prowl car right behind me. The driver was motioning for me to pull in at the curb.

  This was turning into a trying day, all right. I cut over to the side of the street and switched off the motor and sat there taking the Lord’s name in vain but not out loud.

  The prowl heap pulled in behind me and one of the three men in it got out and came over and put his head in at the open window opposite of where I was sitting. He was in plain clothes . . . about forty-five, taller than average and beefy through the shoulders. His face was gray and thin and a little too long, with too much chin for any claim to handsomeness. His narrow blue eyes were cold and direct and slightly contemptuous, as eyes are apt to be when they’ve seen too much, and he showed about the same amount of expression as the sole my foot.

  His name was Zarr—George Zarr—and he was a police lieutenant attached to the Homicide Detail at Central Station. I had met him for the first time when I was working as an investigator for the State’s Attorney’s office. Zarr had been a sergeant attached to the Robbery Detail in those days, and even though we were technically on the same side of the fence we just hadn’t got along. He was given too much to slapping people around when it wasn’t necessary, a little too much in a hurry to go for a gun. Still, he was an honest cop, and that will always excuse a lot.

  I said, “Hello, George. What’s on your mind?”

  His eyes got even narrower and a scowl developed between them. “Pine, hunh? I might have known it. Who was your friend, shamus?”

  “Friend?”

  He put one of his big feet on the running board and pushed the gray snap-brim felt hat back off his forehead, exposing the thick black hair with streaks of gray over his ears. “Friend is what I said. You were at that cold-meat party. I spotted you coming out of the cemetery.”