Halo in Blood

by Howard Browne

  Leona Sandmark was at the table. She looked sharply at me as I sat down. “I was beginning to worry, darling. The waiter wouldn’t say anything except that you would be back. Where were you?”

  “Getting threatened at,” I said. She had ordered a fresh drink for me and I drank half of it very quickly. “I talk too much. I always have. Not only that but I say things to make people sore at me. So I got threatened at.”

  “ ‘Threatened at. Threatened at.’ ” She repeated the words aloud, listening to them intently. She was a little tight, but only enough to make her sparkle. “It doesn’t sound just—quite—right, darling.”

  “Why not?” I said. “It’s a verb, or something. Like shot, or thrown. I could say I got shot at, couldn’t I? Or thrown at. But not me. I got threatened at.”

  She crinkled her nose at me and laughed a little and leaned forward to pick up her glass. The crease between the soft swell of her breasts deepened and stirred, and there was no other place for my eyes. . . .

  I wet my lips and my smile wasn’t any too certain “You can talk me into another dance,” I said.

  “No.” Her face had the soft warm look of a woman with drinks under her waist and a man within reach, and the glow in her cheeks hadn’t come out of the brocaded bag lying next to her arm. “No, Paul. I want to go for a ride. A long ride, away from people, out of the city, along the lake, where the wind can get in my hair and your arm can go around me. I want your arm around me, Paul. You see, for the first time in a long, long time. I am very happy, dear.”

  She sighed and smiled and ran the tips of her fingers lightly along the back of my hand where it lay on the table.

  “Can we go now, Paul?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  At that hour there was no traffic to speak of. The Packard drove itself, but I sat behind the wheel in case I needed something to lean on.

  We skimmed along the avenue until we passed the Drake, made the bend there and rolled on north, keeping the Oak Street beach on the right.

  Leona sat next to me, almost stiffly so, both feet on the floorboards, her head back and her eyes closed. The cool fingers of the night wind slid in and fumbled with her hair and strands of it came loose and swept my cheek and put the smell of tar soap where my nose could reach it.

  I switched on the radio and a dance band came in and played for us. Leona stirred, murmured, “That makes it perfect,” and hummed a few bars of what was being played.

  And out across the restless reaches of the lake an occasional buoy light winked red and white and red again and overhead the circling silver sweep of a beacon endlessly sought the horizons.

  “Where are we going, Paul?”

  “Just . . . north.”

  “I don’t really care, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “Do you like me a little, Paul?”

  “I like you a little,” I said.

  “Why do you like me—a little?”

  “Oh . . . I don’t know. You’re pretty and your legs are nice.”

  “Lots of girls are pretty and have nice legs.”

  “Yeah. I suppose they do, all right.”

  “Why else do you like me?”

  “Well, you’ve got a rich stepfather. . . .”

  “That wouldn’t make any difference to you, and you know it!”

  I gave the wheel a casual touch and the Packard went around a curve as though it was on tracks.

  “You know something, darling?”

  “Umm?”

  “You have brown eyes.”

  “Is that good?”

  “Unh-hunh. Mine are gray.”

  “Blue.”

  “Sometimes they’re green.”

  “Especially when you get mad,” I said.

  “Or when I want to be kissed.”

  “Somebody must have told you that.”

  “Yes. . . . You don’t mind, do you, Paul?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I think I’d like it better if you did. Mind, I mean.”

  “It could grow into that.”

  “You’re sweet. . . .”

  She began to sing an accompaniment to the music from the radio. She sang very soft, in hardly more than a whisper, but in perfect pitch. I let about three grams more of gas into the carburetor and damn near went out the back window. I throttled down in a hurry and my fingers were shaking slightly as I groped for a cigarette. She wanted one, too. and I lighted both with the dashboard lighter.

  We talked . . . wandering, pointless talk that had meaning only for the moment. We both sang with the radio a time or two; nobody complained and the only laughter was our own.

  And all the time, the convertible ate miles like a kid eating peanuts. Past the city limits at Howard Street, through Evanston, Wilmette, Kenilworth and Winnetka, where people live in homes like magazine illustrations and vote the Republican ticket. Overhead the branches of huge cottonwoods and oaks and elms made the boulevard and unending tunnel where light standards and traffic signals were jewel-tipped stalagmites against the night.

  By the time we were passing the huge, walled estates in Glencoe it was nearly two-thirty in the morning. Leona Sandmark came out of a silence that had lasted for two or three miles, to say, “You can turn back whenever you like, Paul.”

  “All right.”

  “You must be tired of just sitting there holding the wheel.”

  “It there something else you would like me to hold?”

  Her laugh wasn’t much more than a contented murmur, and she gave me one of those twisted answers. “It’s too bad we can’t see the lake from here. It must be beautiful.”

  I said, “It just so happens the next through street leads down to the lake. Okay?”

  “That would be lovely,” she said, like a well-mannered child.

  So a couple of minutes later I made the turn and rolled east along a quiet, night-shrouded street with a high stone wall on one side and an almost equally high hedge on the other. After two blocks the headlights showed a curving cement railing that blocked off the street end. I coasted up almost to it and put on the brakes and turned off the lights and the motor. Beyond the railing, the ground dropped abruptly in a wooded slope to a sandy strip of beach and the steady, sullen slap of surf beyond.

  I said, “You spoke just in time. This is the only place within three miles you can get this near the water. The big estates along here have made it a private lake, just about.”

  Her face was a pale blur in the darkness. “This is glorious, dearest. No noise, no people. Just you and I . . . alone.”

  There was only one answer to that. I gave it.

  I let loose of her, finally, and gasped some breath into my lungs. She took one of my hands and leaned her cheek against it and didn’t say anything. I could feel all the muscles in my body sort of stretch out and relax, and the knot of bitterness I had carried just below my ribs for almost a year seemed less tight now and the pain of it was hardly more than a dull ache. A woman had put that knot there—a woman a great deal like the one now beside me. . . .

  Pretty soon a tree frog or two started rubbing their wings together, or whatever they do to make that high skirling note. That and the rhythmic pound of the lake waves were the only sounds. Outside the car windows the darkness hung like black-velvet curtains, and away off to the south a single pin point of light marked a building of some sort. It probably was the nearest building to us.

  “Paul, dear.”

  “Umm?”

  “Nice?”

  “Very.”

  “Just . . . one-kiss nice?”

  I settled that point.

  “ . . . Paul.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you married?”

  “Hell of a time to ask that.”

  “Well, are you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Were you ever?”

  “Still nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “Nobody likes me.”

  “I . . . like you.
”

  “I couldn’t keep you in cotton drawers.”

  “I don’t wear them!”

  “Shame on you.”

  “I mean cotton, you pig!”

  The radio said, “This is station WXYZ, Denver. At this time we leave the air, to return—” I leaned over and clicked the switch. The sudden silence seemed almost to have substance.

  “We’ll miss the music,” I said inanely.

  Almost as an answer Leona Sandmark turned on the seat until her back was to me, then she let herself drop across my legs. My arms went around her and I bent and put my mouth against hers. Her lips parted and her breath came quick and uneven, and when my hands slipped beneath the folds of the green wrap, she stiffened a little, then let herself go limp and yielding. . . .

  I lighted cigarettes for both of us. The dashboard clock read three-ten. I said, “Not that I want to be a cad, lady, but it will take quite a while to drive back.”

  She drew deeply on her cigarette and her face stood out sharp and clear in the brief light. “Not yet, my darling.” Her voice was deeper than usual, soft and caressing. “This is perfect . . . a moment that must never end. I’ve never been so completely happy, so . . . well, happy.”

  “I must be pretty good,” I said, grinning.

  She caught my hand and hugged it to her, embarrassing me a little. “You are, darling! You’ll never know how wonderful!” Her breath caught slightly in a gasp and she giggled suddenly. “Oh, I don’t mean— I mean, part of it probably is because you took away my fear that John had killed my father. The fact that my real father killed some stranger isn’t important. I never knew him, so it doesn’t make any difference, does it?”

  “The stranger, or your father?”

  “Either. Both. All I know—”

  The car door next to me jerked open and a flashlight beam smacked me square in the eyes. A quiet, half-familiar voice said: “All right, Romeo, pile out!”

  The startled gasp belonged to Leona; I was too petrified to do more than goggle my eyes at the hot lance of light in my face. I turned my head to get the thing out of my eyes and said: “Okay, copper. Take it easy.”

  “This is no pinch, Romeo.” The words made me even more sure that I had heard the voice before, and at the back of my mind a couple of gray cells were trying to figure out where. “You could call it a stick-up. Now get out. before I blow a hole in you.”

  The light came down just far enough to let my eyes go back to work. The man behind it was no more than a black hulk, but the dark metal of an automatic was clear enough in his other hand.

  “Come on! Out of there, you bastard!”

  “Wait!” It was Leona’s voice—high-pitched with fear. In the light from the torch I saw her hand scoop up the brocaded bag from the seat. “I have money! I’ll give it to you!”

  She snapped open the bag and took out a small gun and shot the man three times squarely in the face.

  The heavy automatic went off while he was getting the second bullet. The floorboards developed a jagged hole between my feet, but the man was crumpling forward even as it happened. Leona said something like “Ugk.” and the gun fell from her fingers. Then she jerked her head around and half out the window and was sick—very sick.

  I said. “Jesus Christ.” shakily. It was a prayer, nothing else. I got out of the car by stepping over the body, and picked up the flashlight and the automatic. When the light found the dead man’s face, there was enough light and enough face for me to recognize him.

  C. L. Baird. The man who wanted to pay twenty-five G’s in phony dough for the release of his business partner.

  “Paul! Darling! Are you all right?”

  I looked up and let the light flicker across Leona Sandmark’s face as she sat huddled in the far corner of the seat. The face was still beautiful but a trifle green.

  “You gave it to him, all right.” I said.

  “He—is he—?”

  “Very,” I said. “This was no stick-up, Leona. This guy was after my gizzard. He trailed us out here and tried to knock me off.” I stared at her curiously. “That was fast thinking—and fast shooting. Do you always carry a gun, baby?”

  “I—I thought we might do some gambling at the Peacock. I usually take a gun with me when I do that. I never know when someone might try to hold me up on the way home.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “The law will want to know. That’s why I asked.”

  She began to tremble. “What will they do to me. Paul?”

  “The police will love you,” I said. “The papers will have a field day. This guy was a hired killer—and hired killers almost always have records.”

  “How do you know he was a hired killer?”

  I shrugged. “He had no personal reason to want me dead. I never saw the guy in my life until a couple of days ago. So, he must have been hired to get rid of me.”

  “But who in the world would want to do that?”

  I didn’t answer her. I was thinking of a fat guy behind a kneehole desk—a guy who didn’t want his empire messed up. It seemed he didn’t like the kind of theories I went around handing out. so he put a man on my trail when I left the Peacock Club—a man who had a job to do, a man who had come damn near doing his job.

  Well, the cops could do the digging into that angle . . . if the cops found out about it. They wouldn’t find it out from me, though; as far as I was concerned the dead man had tried a Lovers’ Lane stick-up and walked into bullets instead of money.

  “What shall we do, dear?”

  Before replying, I stooped and took hold of Baird’s coattails and yanked him out of the doorway and let him flop into the street. I said, “Okay, beautiful, here’s what you do. Get behind the wheel and drive back into Glencoe and find the local police station. Get hold of whoever’s in charge and tell him exactly what happened. I’ll wait here to keep anyone from stealing our prize.”

  She shrank back against the upholstery, her face stricken. “No! I can’t go—not alone! Why must you stay here, Paul?”

  “Do it my way,” I said wearily, “and quit asking questions. If the body should be found with neither of us around, and an alarm get phoned in and we get picked up before reporting what happened—well, the police could get the idea we were trying to skip out without letting them know things. . . . Go on, get moving. And answer their questions and tell the truth and don’t babble. Just keep in mind that neither of us ever saw this guy before. After you get back here, I’ll do the talking.”

  She pulled in her lower lip and bit it indecisively. Then she nodded in a petrified way and slid behind the wheel and started the motor. The headlights flashed on and she turned the car around, clashing the gears some, and drove away.

  I lighted a cigarette and looked down at the loose heap of meat and cloth that had been a man a few minutes earlier. It would keep me from being lonesome. I didn’t plan on being appreciative.

  CHAPTER 16

  They came in an ambulance—a nice white one that probably had a siren but it wasn’t being used at three-twenty-five in the morning. The people who lived in the estates around there paid too much in real-estate taxes to have their sleep disturbed at that hour.

  There were two of them, in plain clothes. One wore a dark panama; the other was bareheaded. They hopped out after the ambulance pulled up three feet short of where the body lay in the sharp glare of the headlights. The guy in the panama came up to where I was standing and peered at my face. He could see mine because of the headlights, but his back was to them so that he was only a collection of shadows. He said, “You Pine?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m Royden, chief of detectives.”

  I nodded without saying anything. Royden turned around and said, “Okay, Milt, get the stretcher.”

  His companion went around behind the ambulance and swung back the big door and came back with a rolled stretcher. Royden left me standing there while he and Milt went over the vicinity with a flashlight. They said a word or two to each ot
her that I didn’t catch, then between them they got Baird’s body on to the stretcher and into the ambulance and closed the door.

  Milt got in behind the wheel, and Royden said, “Okay, Pine, there’s room in front for all of us.”

  I got in between them. Milt turned the wagon nice and quiet and we went with a soft rush back up the street, turned south and into the main part of Glencoe.

  We pulled in at a curving asphalt driveway that went past a square white-stone building of two floors, and around behind it to a long low garage large enough to hold a dozen cars.

  Royden got out and I followed him through a rear screen door into the white-stone building. We went along the tan linoleum of a narrow corridor and into a large room divided lengthwise by an oak railing. There were green-shaded bulbs hanging on cords from the ceiling, a few desks and chairs and three tall brass spittoons on black-rubber mats. The place was clean and smelled strongly of Lysol. An elderly man with a fringe of white hair around a pink scalp was pecking out a report form on a Royal typewriter with most of the finish chipped off.

  I followed Royden through a swinging gate in the railing and over to an oak door. He rapped his knuckles against it once, and a heavy pleasant voice on the other side told us to come in.

  It was a fairly large office, with three windows along one side covered with heavy black screens. A bank of green metal filing cabinets stood against one wall, and there was a long heavy glass tank containing water and tropical fish under the windows. A picture of ex-President Herbert Hoover, in a dark walnut frame, hung above the filing cabinets. The people of Glencoe had probably put the police chief into office on the strength of that picture.

  Behind a plain oak desk sat a large, fleshy man in a pair of gray flannels and a loose-weave shirt of the same color. The shirt was open at the throat, showing a thick clump of coarse black hair that matched the close-cropped growth above his square, heavy-featured face. In one corner of his strong mouth was an amber-stemmed pipe with a straight stem and a silver ring around the bowl.

  As Royden and I came in, the man behind the desk took the pipe out of his mouth and pointed the stem at an empty oak armchair. “Sit down, Mr. Pine. I’m Myles Abbott, chief of police.”