Halo in Blood

by Howard Browne

  It was a long speech for me and left my throat parched. Sandmark sat there without moving, looking at me from behind a stone face. I took a long pull at my highball that about finished it and put down the glass and lighted another cigarette from the stub of the first and waited. . . .

  He smiled. I’ve seen wider smiles on a cue ball, but there it was. He took his cigar from a groove in the ash tray and put it in his mouth. His hand was steady as ever. He said:

  “You’ll do, Mr. Pine. . . . When Leona was sixteen, two years after her mother’s death, she ran off with a boy in her class at high school and lived with him alone for a week in his parents’ summer home in Wisconsin. Naturally I did not prefer charges. . . . When she was twenty she became involved with a married man twelve years her senior and was named as corespondent in the wife’s divorce suit. I managed to keep that out of the papers. . . . When Leona was almost twenty-three she —I’ll be frank with you, Mr. Pine—she had an affair with a criminal . . . a handsome devil who had served time for armed robbery, counterfeiting, operating a confidence game—I don’t know what all. Fortunately no one ever found out about it because he pulled something shortly after he met Leona and was sent to prison for two years.”

  He sighed. “That’s the worst of it, Although about three months ago I paid off six thousand dollars in IOU’s— gambling debts at a place called the Peacock Club. I could have refused to honor them, of course, but there were some especially nasty threats made.

  “Another time, just recently in fact, I was called down to Central Station to arrange bail for her. She had been arrested in a gambling raid. It so happened she had a gun in her bag at the time. . . . And only three weeks ago she came to me for money—quite a considerable sum. She refused to tell me why she wanted it. Leona has quite a temper at times, and there was something of a scene.”

  “Still,” I said, “you gave her the money?”

  “Yes. Yes. I have never been able, really, to refuse her a thing.”

  “How much did she want?”

  “Five thousand dollars.”

  “You’ve no idea why she wanted it?”

  “It is not difficult to figure out. Gambling fascinates her.”

  “It fascinates me too,” I said. “But not five thousand dollars’ worth.”

  There was pain in his fine eyes—pain and a fierce pride. I finished my drink and sat there holding the glass, thinking about what he’d told me. Presently I said:

  “It isn’t pretty, but I’ve heard worse. Much. What have you against this Jerry Marlin, Mr. Sandmark? Why shouldn’t your stepdaughter marry him—if that’s what he intends to do.”

  His jaw stiffened and his thick black brows came together in an uncompromising line. “Because he is the same type of man that has hurt Leona before: a wavy-haired, smooth-talking, flashily dressed young man with no visible means of support. Eventually I would have to buy an uncontested divorce for her, and you can be sure the price would be considerable.”

  I said, “I understood you to say you’d never met him.”

  “I was never introduced to him,” landmark said grimly. “I managed to avoid that. At first he called for Leona on several occasions and I caught glimpses of him. I didn’t need any more than that.”

  “How old a man is he?”

  “Hard to say. He might be twenty-eight and he might be thirty-five. Somewhere between those figures I’d say.”

  “How would you describe him?”

  He thought for a minute. “Around five feet ten, a hundred and sixty pounds, slender build, narrow face with small features and an olive skin, black eyes set close together, black hair with a wave in it, and I don’t like his taste in clothing. . . . I’m afraid that’s the best I can do.”

  “You did fine,” I said. “I feel as though I went to school with him. Do you happen to know his address?”

  “No.”

  “Any of the places he might hang around?”

  “No!”

  “You don’t think he works for a living?”

  “If he does it’s probably something outside the law.”

  “All right,” I said. “I think I get the pitch; correct me if I’m wrong. You want me to dig into Marlin. You want something on him that will be strong enough to turn your stepdaughter against him. And if I can dig up something that will put him away for a few years, you’ll like that a lot.”

  We stared into each other’s eyes. The fingers of his right hand tapped softly against the chair arm. Very slowly he said, “I see that we understand each other, Mr. Pine.”

  “Maybe not too well,” I said. “There’s always the possibility Marlin is okay. Some people can’t help how they look.”

  His smile was as bleak as the Siberian steppes. “I’m not engaging your services to prove Marlin is a suitable match for my daughter. I want this romance cut off at the roots and I don’t give a damn how it’s done.”

  I looked at the empty glass in my hand and said, “I don’t go in for framing people. Mr. Sandmark.”

  He didn’t say anything although I waited to give him the chance. I said. “I’ll look into it. It will cost you thirty bucks a day. That includes expenses; I don’t like to make out expense reports. Is that satisfactory?”

  His eyes were still watching me and his smile was still cold. “There will be a thousand-dollar bonus if you get the proper results. I would like you to remember that.”

  I nodded and let him see a face as expressionless as his own. “That’s nice and I can use the money. I’ll work to earn it, too. but no harder than the original thirty a day would cover.”

  He didn’t say anything to that. I put down the glass and took out another cigarette and turned it in my fingers. I said, “I gather that I’m to stay away from your daughter on this.”

  “Unless it can’t be helped,” Sandmark said quietly. “Certainly she must not know what I’ve engaged you to do.”

  “Have you a snapshot of her I can have? It might help.”

  He pushed back the swivel chair and stood up easily and went over to the bookshelves on the west wall and took a dark leather album from one of the lower shelves. He leafed through the pages, found what he wanted, pulled it loose, put the album back and came over and tossed a small glossy print face up on the desk in front of me.

  While he was getting into his chair, I picked up the snapshot. It showed a girl in shorts and a sweater against a background of bougainvillaea and pepper trees. She was fairly tall for a girl, I judged, and slender with a kind of curved slenderness. She had at least two excellent reasons for wearing a sweater and her legs were probably good for walking too.

  I got around to her face finally. It was a little too angular for perfect beauty maybe, but I was satisfied. She was wearing a lot of hair in a shoulder-length bob with a swirl on top. She had a good forehead and narrow eyes, wide-spaced, and a thin aristocratic nose. Her mouth was small arid nicely shaped, with the lower lip a little fuller than it might have been. It would be fun to nibble on that lip. She was looking sulky, so I couldn’t see her teeth; but I would have bet she didn’t have gingivitis.

  I said, “It’s a nice picture. Too bad it isn’t in color.”

  In a faraway voice he said, “Her eyes are gray-blue, like her mother’s. Her hair is reddish-brown—the kind they call chestnut, although you don’t hear that word much these days.”

  I took out my billfold and tucked the snap into one of the pockets and put it away again. “All right, Mr. Sandmark. I have enough to start on. I’ll telephone in a report in a day or two. Unless you prefer me to make them in person.”

  I stood up and so did he. “The telephone, will do. Meanwhile you will want some money.”

  He took a black pin-seal wallet from an inner coat pocket, counted out three fifty-dollar bills and handed them to me. It meant taking out my billfold again but it was worth it. I refused a second drink although it hurt me to do so and he pushed a button set in the desk’s edge. The same maid, opened the door, waited while I shook Sandm
ark’s hand, and led me into the smaller hall and gave me back my hat.

  She put me gently out on the small porch and closed the door. I walked slowly down the path between the irises, through the bronze gate and out into the street.

  The Plymouth was still parked at the opposite curb. That surprised me a little. Considering the neighborhood someone might have had it hauled away to the dump.

  CHAPTER 3

  I was opening the car door when a big black custom-built Packard convertible coupé with its top down swung around the corner on two wheels and came down the street toward me with a soundless rush.

  A girl was behind the wheel—a girl in a green-linen tailored sport dress out of Vogue and a ribbon to match in her shoulder-length reddish-brown hair. There was a brown leather bag of golf clubs propped in the seat next to her. She came up even with me and swung the car’s nose into the Sandmark driveway entrance and applied the brakes.

  It was none of my business. I slid in behind my own wheel and put the key in the ignition.

  “Say. You there.”

  As a voice it was probably all right—a little husky but clear and not too high-pitched. If there was a queen-to-commoner quality to the tone the convertible probably justified it.

  I ducked my head and looked out the window. The girl was swung partially around in the seat and staring over at me.

  “You,” she called. “In the Plymouth.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I hear you.”

  “Come over here a minute.”

  There would have been no point in refusing. With that head of hair she wasn’t likely to be anybody other than Leona Sandmark. I had been told to stay away from her, more or less, but nothing was said about this kind of situation.

  So I got out of the Plymouth and walked over to her. She had a cool, impersonal expression on her lovely face, the kind of expression installment collectors get used to. She flicked me with a glance and said:

  “Pardon me, but did you just leave this place?”

  I suppose I should have taken my hat off and stood there clutching the brim like a share cropper being interviewed by the mistress of the manor. You could see it was what she expected. Instead I pushed my hat back and hooked my shoe over the fender apron and gave her a leer and said:

  “I hate to admit it, but I can’t quite place you. You’re not the Smith’s second maid, are you?”

  She straightened up as though I’d laid a cadaver in her lap and her face turned as red as a slaughterhouse floor. “Well, I beg your—”

  “My mistake,” I said. “You don’t have to apologize.”

  John Sandmark had been wrong about her eyes. They were green instead of gray-blue and right now they were hot as twelve passes in a crap game. “I suppose you’re trying to be funny!”

  I shook my head mournfully. “I guess I’m not very good at it.” I turned around and started back. “Well, it was nice seeing you.”

  “Please don’t go. I’m—sorry.”

  The lorgnette was gone from her voice. I came back and said, “‘Okay. Maybe I made a mistake. Is there something you wanted?”

  She managed to push out a smile but it was the hardest work she had done all day. Her face seemed a little less angular than the snapshot indicated and the lower lip wasn’t quite as full. But there wasn’t any doubt that she was Leona Sandmark. Her dress was pulled up well above her knees and I could see two generous lengths of suntan nylons and a strip of skin the color and texture of new ivory.

  I might have been looking at the radiator cap for all she cared. She said: “There’s no need for either of us to be rude. I only wanted to know if you just came out of 1424.”

  I glanced over at the double gates of the driveway. “From the looks of the place it would be nice to come out of.”

  She took a quick breath and her chin rose a degree or two. “Would you mind answering my question?”

  “Is there any reason why I should?”

  Her left hand jerked against the wheel as though she had been on the point of smacking me across the chops but managed to control herself at the last moment. She tried to stare me down but my conscience was clear and she was the first to look away.

  She said, “All right. I’m Leona Sandmark, and I live here. I know my father is worried about something. When I saw you coming out I thought maybe you had something to do with—with—well, with what he is worried about.”

  “What’s he worried about?”

  “I don’t know.” She seemed to have cooled off some and her eyes were more blue than green. “I hoped you could tell me that.”

  “You made a nice try,” I said. “It’s been swell meeting you, but I have to go now.”

  I was on the point of turning away but she reached out and caught hold of my sleeve. “No . . . wait! You’re keeping something from me, I can tell. What did you want with my father?”

  I looked down at her fingers. They were very pretty fingers: long and tapering and without the knobby knuckles you see on so many feminine hands. She wore no rings and the skin was tanned and clear. I let my eyes move slowly along the softly rounded bare arm to her shoulder, to the V of her neckline, to the poorly hidden panic in her face. Right then she looked older than twenty-four has any right to look, older because she was scared to death. It flickered in her eyes, it pulled at the corners of her mouth, it beat in the pulse of her throat.

  “Look at it this way, Miss Sandmark,” I said gently. “If I had anything to hide from you, I’d have given you some smooth little story about being an insurance man, or something, long before this. By looking at it that way, you’ll see that my business in the neighborhood must be something that couldn’t possibly be of any interest to you.”

  Her hand slipped slowly from my sleeve as doubt began to replace fear. “Then you’re not—a police officer?”

  I shook my head gravely. “No, ma’am.”

  “But you did call on my father?”

  “I give you my word, Miss Sandmark, so far as I know I’ve never laid my eyes on your father.”

  “Then, damn you,” she snapped, “why didn’t you say so to begin with?”

  She slammed the tip of her golf shoe against the starter and the hundred and twenty horses tried to kick the convertible’s hood over the hedge. It made me jump back. Not that Leona Sandmark noticed. The hell with me. I wasn’t important any more. Maybe I never had been.

  She kept her eyes straight ahead and began to jab savagely at the horn button. But it was one of those musical horns and the sound matched her mood right then like pink ribbons on a prize fighter.

  I could have hung around and pouted. Instead I went back across the street and climbed into my car. While I was stepping on the starter, the driveway gates folded back and the convertible roared through and out of sight ahead of a swirl of blue exhaust smoke.

  I drove south and east until I was back over the line into Chicago, at Jackson Boulevard, then directly east to the Loop. It was getting well into five in the afternoon, but I had a job to do and now was as good a time as any.

  By the time I parked the car and put away a sandwich and malted milk at a Walgreen drugstore, six o’clock had rolled around. I picked a red-streak edition of the Daily News off the stand at Jackson and Wabash and went on to where I spent the sitting part of my days.

  The Clawson Building was twelve stories of tired red brick between a couple of modern skyscrapers on the south side of Jackson Boulevard, just west of Michigan Avenue. It had been put together before the turn of the century by an architect who must have figured he wasn’t going to be paid. There were gargoyles on the cornices and one in the superintendent’s office. The halls were dark and forever smelled of lye and damp hay. The offices had businesses in them: one business to each office and the kind of business that made very little money or none at all. I fitted right in there.

  I had a reception room and an inner office on the eighth floor, with a window in each. There wasn’t anyone sitting on the secondhand leather couch or in either o
f the two chairs, and the magazines on the reed table were just as the cleaning woman had left them the night before.

  I unlocked the inner office door and went in and tossed my hat on one of the two brown metal filing cabinets in one corner. There were a couple of envelopes under the mail slot and I picked them up, put them on the desk and went over and opened the window a crack from the bottom. Two flies and a little air came in behind the sound of streetcars from Wabash Avenue. I pulled back the golden-oak swivel chair and sat down behind the oak desk and snapped on the lamp and spread out the newspaper.

  The article was under a heading on a three-column box near the foot of the first page.

  UNIDENTIFIED MURDER

  VICTIM GIVEN UNIQUE

  FUNERAL

  It was my funeral, all right. Some rewrite man had really enjoyed himself putting that yarn together. It seemed that about thirty days earlier some floater had been sapped to death in a room at the Laycroft Hotel, a flea-trap on West Madison Street in the heart of Chicago’s Bumville. Nobody could identify the corpse and the name on his registration card was illegible, so it ended up at the morgue and lay on ice for a month waiting for some relative to come along and claim it. Nobody showed, however; and about the time the coroner’s office was ready to bury the body in the Oak Forest potter’s field, an anonymous letter had come in. The letter instructed the coroner to turn the body over to any undertaker for interment after chapel and graveside services of a religious nature. Money accompanied the letter —enough money to pay for a cemetery lot and the cost of the funeral.

  If there was any excitement over the letter, it wasn’t enough to get the story into the papers. Since the corpse had got that way by being murdered, the police probably kept the letter quiet, hoping the murderer, or at least the anonymous philanthropist, would show up at the funeral.

  Nothing like that happened; but when twelve clergymen, each of a different denomination, arrived to officiate at the services . . . brother, there was a commotion! Each clergyman produced an unsigned letter engaging him to run the show, and each was going to run it, come drought or flood!