Halo in Blood

by Howard Browne

  It seemed like a good time to look at her. She was wearing patent-leather pumps on narrow, well-bred feet below long slim ankles and beautiful calves in sheer hose that were not rayon. I couldn’t see her knees but I remembered there was enough meat on them for dimples. Her two-piece suit was of very dark blue gabardine that fitted her slender lines as if it appreciated the opportunity. The blouse was white and simple, with a severe neckline, and probably had cost enough to pay my hotel bill for a week. She was still wearing her hair long and bare, but the swirl and the ribbon were gone, replaced by a ruler-straight part in the middle.

  She was very beautiful and she was very angry. Anger, tightly controlled anger, showed in the pinched look around her nose and mouth, in the stiff set of her shoulders, in the way her long, ringless fingers dug into the surface of the shiny black leather bag she carried.

  I opened the cage door and followed her in. Sam was still standing at the desk and staring, his mouth open. I had ruined the night for him.

  Nothing was said on the way up. I couldn’t think of anything to say and she was waiting to get me alone. We went along the corridor to 307 and I got out my keys and unlocked the door and flicked the wall switch, lighting the two end-table lamps that flanked the blue-and-beige-striped davenport against the far wall.

  Leona Sandmark stalked in and stood in the middle of the room and looked around, although I don’t think she saw anything. I closed the door and threw my hat on the lounge chair and said, “Won’t you sit down, Miss Sandmark?”

  Her eyes came around and clawed my face. “This isn’t a social call,” she said with a distant kind of coldness. “I came here to find out why you lied to me. And I want to know why you were calling on my father this afternoon.”

  “Is that going to keep you from sitting down?”

  Some of the pinched tightness around her mouth smoothed out, leaving her with a curiously baffled expression that threatened to overshadow the anger. She said, “Thank you,” in a vague kind of way and took two or three stiff steps over to the couch and sank down on the edge.

  I took out my cigarettes, tapped a couple part way out. and extended the pack. “Smoke?”

  She took one and continued to hold it between the tips of her thumb and forefinger, her eyes never leaving my face. I gave all my attention to striking a match and holding the flame out to her. She put the cigarette between her lips, bent her head and dragged smoke deep into her lungs. Then she leaned back and crossed her legs and exhaled the smoke in a thin blue line. . . .

  When I looked up from lighting my own cigarette, she was watching me again. It surprised me a little to see that there was no expression at all on her face now, and for the first time it really came to me that Leona Sandmark was very young in years.

  I said, “Can I offer you a drink, Miss Sandmark.”

  “You seem to insist on making this a social call.”

  “Is there any reason why it shouldn’t be one?”

  “Not if you decide to answer my questions.”

  “I might do that.”

  “Why were you calling on my father?”

  “Will you have that drink?”

  “No!”

  “Okay,” I said mildly. “You don’t have to yell at me.”

  Her lips twitched . . . and she was smiling. It was my turn to stare. She wasn’t an unspanked brat from the idle rich any more. She was a nice firm round young woman, with bowels and a complexion and a sense of humor. There was a personality to her—a personality born of fire and ice and tungsten steel. She could be a hell of a lot of fun . . . and you could end up paying for your fun, too.

  “Damn you,” she said, without rancor. “I’ll have that drink after all.”

  I said, “Excuse me,” meekly and tottered into the kitchen and got a bottle of Scotch and a couple of tall glasses, some charged water and ice cubes. I brought the stuff in and put it on the coffee table. She refused a highball, took the Scotch bottle from me and poured better than a jigger into one of the glasses and drank it like water after an aspirin.

  She made a face as she put down the glass. “I don’t think much of your choice of liquor, Mr. Pine.”

  “How would you know about my choice of liquor?” I said, nettled. “I’ll bet that one never even touched your tongue.”

  She watched me sample my drink, her eyes thoughtful. Just when she was on the point of saying something, she bit her lip and stood up abruptly and began to wander aimlessly about the room. I sat where I was and watched the way her thighs moved under the blue gabardine skirt.

  “At least you know how to furnish a room,” she said, her back to me.

  “Well, that’s something,” I said.

  She had forgotten me. She was running her finger along the backs of the books in the corner shelf, while, in the other hand, her cigarette sent up a thin wavering line of smoke. The yellow light from the lamps picked out the red in her hair, forming a misty halo the color of a bloodstain.

  “For a private detective,” she said over her shoulder, “you certainly read some odd books. Wilkinson’s Flower Encyclopedia; Warrior of the Dawn, by Howard Browne —whoever he is; and Marx’s Das Kapital. What happened to your copy of Five Little Peppers?”

  “I loaned it to another private detective,” I said.

  She drifted on, touching things, straightening the edge of a picture frame, smoothing the window draperies, fingering the material of the bridge lamp. She was trying to get across to me the impression of being perfectly at ease, but the tense lines in her face told a different story. . . .

  I said: “Will you for Chrisakes light somewhere?”

  She stopped in her tracks, her back to me, and it was half a minute before she turned around. The light gave a shine to her eyes that might have been tears. If it was, they weren’t running down her cheeks. She put out her hands in a kind of futile gesture and said:

  “I might as well leave. I can see I wasted my time coming here.”

  I continued to look at her without saying anything.

  “All right.” She crossed to the lounge chair and picked up my hat and put it on the coffee table and sat down, resting the black leather bag in her lap. “I’ve lit, Mr. Pine. Are you ready to talk to me?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Where did you get my address?”

  She frowned impatiently. “What difference does it make?”

  “None, probably. I’d just like to know.”

  “I took down your car’s license number. A friend at the city hall got me the information on it.”

  “You go a long way to satisfy your curiosity, Miss Sandmark.”

  That put more color in her cheeks. “It wasn’t just curiosity. I had to talk to you. I must know why you called on my father.”

  “Did your father say I called on him?”

  “No. I . . . didn’t ask him.”

  “Then how do you know?”

  “Rose told me.”

  “Rose?”

  “The maid.”

  “She must have told you my name. Then why all this hocus-pocus about my license number?”

  “All she knew was that your name was Pine. . . . Will you answer one question, Mr. Pine?”

  “That depends.”

  Her fingers tightened on the bag and she bent forward a little and stared into my eyes. “Did you call and ask my father to see you, or did he call you first for some reason of his own?”

  I rotated the highball glass gently in my fingers and the tinkle of ice cubes against its sides was a cool sound against the silence. Leona Sandmark remained in her bent, strained position, her lips parted a trifle, her breasts rising and falling under shallow, uneven breathing. Her cigarette, forgotten, smoldered in the fingers of one hand.

  I said, “Who’s tightening the screws on you, Miss Sandmark?”

  It made her jerk back as though I’d slapped her. The purse slid off her knees and hit the floor with a dull thud. I bent and scooped it up before she could move. It seemed heavier than necessary and my fing
ers felt out the shape of an object not usually carried in ladies’ bags.

  I unsnapped the catch, reached in and took out a gun. It was a blue steel Colt .32 Pocket Positive, the kind with the two-and-one-half-inch barrel and weighing around fifteen or sixteen ounces.

  “Somebody,” I said, glancing up at her, “should speak to you about your taste in compacts.”

  She was mad at me again. Her eyes flashed and the full lower lip had tightened up till her mouth was an uneven red line. “You—you snoop!” she spat at me. “You had no right to do that. Put it back where you found it and give me my bag.”

  I turned out the cylinder and spun it. There was a cartridge in every chamber. I clicked the cylinder back in place, took the handkerchief from the breast pocket of my coat, spread it over my right hand and laid the gun in its center. I wiped it carefully and let it slide from the handkerchief into the bag, closed the bag and laid it on the far end of the coffee table.

  I tucked the handkerchief back in my pocket. “It’s against the law to carry guns, Miss Sandmark,” I said mildly. “Didn’t you know?”

  She shook her head impatiently. “Please. Whether or not I carry a gun is none of your business. I asked you whether your call on my father was his idea or yours.”

  “And I,” I said, “asked who is blackmailing you.”

  Her eyes regarded me levelly. “I heard you. The question doesn’t make sense. Why should anyone try to blackmail me? I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “Everybody at one time or another has done something wrong, Miss Sandmark,” I said soberly. “I make my living at being a detective and I see things a certain way. Look: this afternoon you get in a sweat because you find me coming out of your house. I might have been the maid’s new boy friend, or reading the gas meter, or selling can openers. But you got excited enough to take my license number and find out who I was. You were afraid to ask the old man what his business was with me. Then you stick a gun in your purse and come tearing out here to ask me if calling on John Sandmark was my idea or his. Your nerves are jumping like a juke joint on Saturday night.”

  “You know how that looks to me? It looks as if you stubbed your toe on something and the wrong guy picked you up. He wants dough to keep his mouth shut—lots of it. Either you lay it in his mitt or your dad will be asked to pay off. You’ve tried to stall him off, but you can’t be sure he’ll wait.”

  “Then I show up. Maybe I’m working with the blackmailer. You find out I’m a private dick. I could still be working on the squeeze, or your old man has already been contacted and is calling me in to work on it for him. Either way, you’ve got to know.”

  There was a curious mixture of fear and relief and rage in her face. Even with all that she managed to stay beautiful. She stood up slowly and picked up her purse from the table and put it under her arm.

  “I want to know why you saw my father today, Mr. Pine. How much will it cost me to find that out?”

  I looked at her through the veil of smoke from my cigarette. She was back on the idle-rich side of the tracks again. Her eyes were hotly contemptuous, her mouth a sneer that said every man had his price and how much was mine?

  I said, “How much have you got?”

  She paid me the compliment of being surprised by the question. That meant she hadn’t really pegged me as a guy who would sell out a client.

  “Would—would four hundred do?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well?”

  “Shall I read you a sermon on human behavior, Miss Sandmark? When you want something from somebody, don’t make him think he’d be a heel for giving it to you.”

  Her narrow nostrils flared. “I’ll tell you something. Being superior and condescending won’t get you anything, either.”

  “I don’t want anything,” I reminded her.

  One more like that and I’d get that black leather purse against my jaw.

  “Will you tell me why you called on my father, Mr. Pine?”

  “Nope.”

  “Will you sell me the information?”

  “Hunh-uh.”

  “Why not?”

  “You wouldn’t know why not if I told you.”

  “You’re being superior again.”

  “Then stop making me feel superior.”

  “You . . . you’re impossible!”

  I grinned, stretched out my legs. “I am also a beast. May I offer you some more of my bad liquor, Miss Sandmark?”

  For a moment her eyes blazed at me in a wildly futile way; then her teeth clicked shut and she turned abruptly and moved blindly toward the door. In the spirit of a true host, I got up to open it for her and say good night.

  It was so much wasted effort. The door banged shut before I was halfway across the room. I went back to the davenport and took off my coat and shoes and made myself a fresh highball.

  Evidently there were some angles to l’affaire Sandmark the old boy hadn’t told me about. Maybe that was because he didn’t know about them. Or maybe there was more in his mind than breaking up a romance. Maybe a lot of maybes.

  It seemed my original idea for locating Marlin would be the best way after all. At least it would be the quickest —and the way things were shaping up, I’d better get in there quick, or be left out of it altogether.

  CHAPTER 6

  A baking west wind came down the canyon called Jackson Boulevard. I stood at the office window and watched the papers flutter on the newsstand under the el tracks at Wabash Avenue. Gusts whipped skirts under frantic fingers, but from eight floors up my interest was academic. The sun was gone behind the office buildings on LaSalle Street but had left plenty of heat to remember it by. Gray-blue dusk filled the streets, like fog in a valley. Display-window lights were already on and colored neon lights cut tunnels in the thin gloom. My cigarette tasted as if it had spent a week under a hair drier.

  Chicago’s Loop . . . in the hours between the time clock and the theater. The loneliest place on earth. The Sahara could be no lonelier.

  Faintly through the wall of the neighboring office came the mosquito buzz of a dentist’s drill. I opened the window wide in case a breeze developed, got out of my coat and hung it on the back of the customer’s chair, turned on the desk lamp and unfolded the red-streak edition of the Daily News I had picked up on my way back from dinner at the Ontra, and sat down to catch up with the world.

  I found a mildly interesting article on page three: a follow-up to the previous day’s story of the funeral where twelve clergymen had taken turns smoothing a path to the hereafter for a man known only as John Doe.

  John, it developed, had been a man in his early fifties, around a hundred and fifty pounds, rather good-looking in a small-featured way, partially bald, and tanned almost to blackness. Despite the slightness of his build, the item said, Doe had been unusually muscular, and his hands were the callused hands of a laborer.

  The killer had removed all labels from his victim’s ready-made clothing, and not so much as a used razor blade had been found in the room. The clerk at the Laycroft told police that Doe had registered late one afternoon, paying a week in advance as he had no luggage. The following morning a chambermaid found Doe dead on the floor beside his untouched bed, the top of his head beaten in.

  None of the hotel employees recalled seeing any mysterious strangers the previous evening, but the building stairs were just inside the hotel entrance, making it possible to reach the upper floors without passing the desk.

  Lieutenant George Zarr of the Central Homicide Detail, said the article in conclusion, stated that in his belief the dead man had been some petty gangster from out of town. An enemy had tracked him down, killed him, then arranged the funeral as a weird kind of practical joke. It was evident, although the item didn’t say as much, that Zarr was sick of the entire matter and would like it to be forgotten.

  By the time I got past the sport page and Li’l Abner, my wrist watch showed a quarter to ten. I put the paper in the wastebasket, opened the bottom drawer of the desk an
d brought out a glass and the office bottle. The glass was smeared and there was a dead fly in it. Considering the kind of liquor I used, the fly should have known better.

  I flushed the smoke from my throat with bourbon direct from the bottle, set fire to another cigarette and put the bottle and unused glass away. For another ten minutes I sat there and poisoned the air with smoke and listened to the Polish voices of the scrubwomen down the corridor. The building’s musty wet-hay smell seeped into the room and outfought the odor of tobacco smoke. I would have liked to go home and take a shower and lie naked on the bed in front of the open window and leaf through the copy of an Oahspe Bible I had picked up a few days before. . . .

  At ten o’clock I picked up the phone and dialed Information and asked for the number listed for Miss Leona Sandmark, 1317 Austin Boulevard.

  There wasn’t any. I put back the receiver and chewed my lip. If she had a telephone, it was unlisted. Okay, there was a way to get around that. I called another number. . . .

  “Gregg?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Pine.”

  “Paul? How they hanging, pal? We missed you.”

  “Like so much,” I said. “Do something for me, Gregg?”

  “Sure.”

  “I want a phone number. It isn’t listed.”

  “All right. What’s her name?”

  “Maybe it’s a man,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be a woman, does it? You State guys are all alike—always—”

  “What’s her name?”

  I told him, including the address. He said, “It’ll take a minute. Give me your number and I’ll call you back.”

  Five minutes later the phone rang. “Austin 0017.”

  “Thanks, Gregg.”

  “Buss her for me.”

  “She’s flat-chested,” I said.

  “I said buss. It means kiss. B-u-s-s, buss.”

  “I heard you,” I said. “I was just admiring your education.”