Halo in Blood

by Howard Browne

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “But you were all hot and bothered about me being at that screwy funeral. This is where you get the answer to why it took twelve preachers to bury the old man.”

  The lieutenant’s heavy brows went up. “Damned if I hadn’t forgotten about that! Don’t tell me Sandmark was the one who hired all those parsons and paid for the funeral!”

  “Certainly not,” I said. “He’d be the last one in the world to stir up interest in the dead man. Nope, there was only one person who would have a reason for making a circus out of that burial.”

  “Who?” Zarr growled.

  “Jerry Marlin.”

  They sat there and blinked at me. My bombshell was a dud; the fuse had been too short.

  “Okay,” I said wearily, “I’ll draw you a picture.” I glanced at my wrist watch; not much time left. “Marlin had quite a hold on Leona Sandmark. If it could come out who the Laycroft corpse was, all that dough would go to the daughter and make her a nicely curved gold mine. Without it, she would still be nicely curved but not much use from a dollar-and-cents standpoint, since her only income came from her stepfather.”

  “But, Marlin reasoned, if he should tip off the cops to who the dead man was, they might find out that Sandmark was mixed up with Fleming. That could result in bringing out the very facts that Sandmark was paying Marlin not to spill, thereby ending that source of income.

  “So Marlin schemes a scheme: he will hire a bunch of preachers to bury Fleming, send money to the coroner for a private funeral; in other words, put on a circus ceremony so fantastic that the newspapers will be bound to get interested. That way Fleming’s picture is certain to be circulated all over the world, and somebody will recognize it as a picture of an African millionaire and identify him. Millionaires, I hear tell, have a wide circle of people interested in them. Eventually Fleming’s right name would come out and his daughter would get his fortune. Meanwhile, enough time would have elapsed to bury any clues to Fleming’s murder so Sandmark would not even be suspected of doing the job.

  “Understand: I’m not saying it was a perfect idea. I’m not saying it was a good idea. Nobody ever accused Marlin of being overly smart. But there’s your answer to that screwy funeral.”

  Lieutenant Zarr was pleased—so pleased that I could see three gold fillings in his upper left bicuspids. “I’m satisfied,” he said, nodding. “It fits right in there. You’re okay, gumshoe; remind me to like you from now on.”

  “That’s good of you.” I said, and if right then I recalled his fist in my face the day before, my expression didn’t tell him so. . . .

  “Anyway,” I went on. “I got to snooping around, hunting for Marlin’s killer, and I dug out a lot of this story. Over at Clyne’s I thought things over and made up my mind to let you boys in on it.” They grinned at each other but I ignored it. I could afford to now. “Anyhow, Crandall, you went out to see Sandmark and let out just enough to scare him. Then, when you said you wanted to talk to his stepdaughter and him the next day . . . well, he went off the deep end. Leona Sandmark was bound to crack; she was a girl; how could she outsmart the law? Leona Sandmark had to die.”

  “It wasn’t as if she was his own kid; she was Fleming’s brat. His neck was worth more than hers. So early this morning . . .”

  My voice trailed off. Through the closed door we could hear quiet feet coming along the hall outside.

  I whispered: “This is the pay-off, boys. You got a gun, Crandall? Get it out. . . . Slump down, Zarr, so you can’t be spotted right away.”

  They followed orders. They were trained to follow orders. I moved over and stood next to where Crandall was sitting. He had a Smith & Wesson .38/.44 Heavy Duty revolver in his right hand, resting it lightly on his knee. He seemed casual enough but his jaw muscles were tight with strain.

  The steps came up to the library door. They were light, uncertain steps. The steps of a man walking toward something he didn’t understand and probably wouldn’t like.

  The knob turned. You could see the light glint on it as it turned. The door opened. Leona Sandmark came in.

  Ike Crandall saw her first. He hadn’t been expecting a girl. His eyebrows went one way and his jaw the other. Zarr, whose back was to the girl, took hold of the chair arms and pushed himself up a ways and turned his head toward the door.

  I flashed a hand down and grabbed the gun from Crandall’s slack fingers, leveled it, and said, “Don’t move, you son of a bitch.”

  CHAPTER 19

  The whole thing hadn’t taken six seconds. Leona Sandmark, a few steps inside the room now, stopped short and stared at me. Ike Crandall and George Zarr were staring too. But they were not staring at me. They were staring at where the gun was pointing.

  It was pointing at George Zarr.

  The silence was so thick you could have walked on it. Zarr’s mind was trying to catch up with his eyes; by the time it succeeded it would be too late. It was already too late. There was a gun under his coattails, but even with a few second’s warning he would never have been able to get to it quick enough. Not while he was sitting in that high-armed chair—which was why I had wanted him there in the first place.

  Crandall croaked, “Hey, that’s my gun!”

  Nobody laughed, although I have never heard anything funnier.

  I said, “Come here, Leona,” without taking my eyes off the petrified police lieutenant.

  When she was where she could see all three of us, I said, “Take a look around, baby. Do you see—”

  I didn’t have a chance to finish. Her eyes were on the frozen face of George Zarr. Her lips sagged and she gasped one word:

  “Father!”

  It broke the ice on Zarr’s muscles and he came out of the chair as if he had been shot out of a bazooka. His hand darted for his hip—

  I yelled at him. Not words; just a yell. It stopped him like one of Medusa’s snakes. I said, “In the kneecap, flattie. Not where it will kill you. Hell with that noise. You got a date with the fireless cooker.”

  His eyes would have burned holes in Superman. He let himself slowly back into the chair and he laid his fingers gently and carefully down on the arms and he kept on looking at me.

  Crandall had his lips close enough together by this time to put out the point of his tongue and wet them. He said hoarsely, “What is this? What is this? Will you for Chrisakes tell me what is this?”

  Leona Sandmark was still standing there in a sort of unhinged fashion, staring at Zarr’s murderous expression. She said, “Father,” again, with the toneless lack of inflection of a village idiot. “Father, what—”

  I said, “No, Leona. He’s not your father. He’s a guy called George Zarr. Only he’s not George Zarr, either. His name is Jeff Ederle.”

  That meant about half as much as nothing at all to her. It couldn’t have meant anything to a girl who had never been allowed to hear the details of something that had happened when she was in rompers.

  But it meant something to Ike Crandall. He said, “Ederle? Wait a minute, Pine. That’s this express-company guard you mentioned out at Clyne’s yesterday, isn’t it?”

  “That’s it,” I said. “But hold up a second; I can talk better when I know this guy isn’t heeled. . . . Stand up, Zarr. Slow.”

  He stood up as though he had bolts for joints and iron rods for bones. I circled around him and pushed the Smith & Wesson against his spine and snaked a hand under his coat and took the .38 he had there. I slipped it into my side pocket and ran my hand over him to make sure there wasn’t another one around; then I got clear and in front of him and said, “Okay, sit down again.”

  When I was back near Crandall, I said, “This is too big for the two of us to handle, Ike. I think we better get a squad over here to take him.”

  He shook his head—not for no; just to clean out the cobwebs. “But, Pine—I thought we were here to pick up Sandmark. I thought you said the stepfather had killed this girl. Why, you built up a case against him that—”
/>   “Leona.”

  She looked at me with glazed eyes. “Yes . . . yes, Paul?”

  “Get on the phone. Call the Oak Park police and tell them to get a cruiser out here to pick up a guy who’s been disturbing the peace. Don’t say any more than that; we don’t want any reporters in this for a while yet.”

  She started for the phone on the desk. I said, “No. Make the call from another extension. There’s a reason.”

  She hesitated, frowning at me in a mixture of wonder and worry, then turned and went over to the hall door and disappeared.

  I sat down next to Ike Crandall and used my free hand to get out a cigarette and start it going. I blew a shred of tobacco off my lip and my breath moved the thin streamer of smoke rising from the ash stand where Zarr’s forgotten cigar smoldered.

  I said. “You’re right, Crandall. Sure I built up a case against Sandmark. You could probably have fried him with it too. That should teach you a lesson, but I know damn well it won’t. . . .”

  There was a vise slowly squeezing the back of my head: the beginning of a headache brought on by lack of sleep and no lack of strain. I put up my hand and rubbed my left temple a little. I looked across to where Zarr sat behind the stone wall that was his face, and then I looked down at the gun in my right hand. I wondered if I couldn’t join a union and go on strike and sleep through the negotiations. . . .

  “There wasn’t any other way I could play it, Ike,” I said. “When you called Zarr at his apartment a little while ago and told him Sandmark had killed his daughter and that the three of us were going to make the pinch . . . from that moment he was suspicious. He knew we weren’t going to do anything of the kind, but he did think that maybe you and I thought that’s what we were going to do.

  “Every word I said up until Leona Sandmark came in here was aimed toward taking away his suspicion by making him believe I saw things the way he wanted them seen.

  The more evidence I piled up against Sandmark, the less on guard Zarr became. And right at the moment when he was breathing easiest . . . that door opened and the last person in the world he expected walked in!

  “That paralyzed him. Honest to God, Ike, nobody ever took a worse jolt than Zarr did right then! I’ll bet I could have gone out and bought a gun and come back and pointed it at him before he could come unstuck from the shock of seeing Leona Sandmark—the girl he had killed— walk in that door!”

  Crandall said slowly, “You’re a permanent smear on the police blotter if you can’t make this stick, my friend.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” I snarled. “Let me give you this thing, Crandall. Let me show you the whole picture of it.”

  “Let’s go back twenty-five years. Three guys are working in San Diego, for the Gannett Express Company— Raoul Fleming, John Sandmark and Jeff Ederle. One night there’s fifty grand in the company safe. Sandmark figures out a pitch where he can get that dough, frame the job on Fleming and get rid of him so he can take over Fleming’s wife.”

  “Around this time Jeff Ederle, a guard at Gannett’s, has got himself tangled up with some married woman and has to leave town. His fingers get to itching for those fifty G’s; with it he can go somewhere and live in style.”

  “So let’s reason it out this way: Ederle goes down to the office that night, knocks off the watchman and is about ready to clean out the safe, when Sandmark comes in. Ederle is scared off, leaving Sandmark to find the dead watchman.”

  “That makes it perfect for Sandmark. He calls Fleming from the office and gives him some wild story to get him down there. When Fleming shows up, Sandmark maybe tricks him into shooting at what appears to be a prowler in the darkened office. Then Fleming turns on the light . . . and there is the dead watchman!”

  “A moment later in comes Sandmark—obviously having just arrived. He says something like, ‘My God, Raoul, you’ve killed the man! Lam out of here, you fool; I’ll cover you somehow until this can be straightened out.’ So of course Fleming, rattled as hell, takes a powder. That’s all Sandmark wants; he crosses Fleming like a T, gets his wife and his job and, eventually, the express company.”

  Crandall pursed his lips and began to shake his head before I finished those last few words. “Hunh-uh, Pine. No ’cutor’s going to make a case out of that many guesses. Christ, I could ride sidesaddle through some of the holes in your story.”

  “No prosecutor will have to make a case out of it,” I told him impatiently. “Naturally I don’t know the details. I don’t have to know them and neither do you. We don’t have to hang that old job on Zarr. He gets his for murder —for a couple of murders—right here in town and during the last month.”

  Crandall looked over at the motionless man in the lounge chair. He looked at him with a kind of obscure curiosity, as though seeing Zarr for the first time. He said, “What about all this, George?”

  What George said was not for nice ears. Most of it had to do with my parents’ morals, and my teeth began to ache a little from the pressure I was putting on them. But none of the words gave Crandall anything he could use.

  I think that did more than anything I had said to convince the State’s investigator. He tightened up around the mouth and eyes, and the faintly yellow cast to his skin seemed to deepen. He turned back to me and said, “What’s the rest of it, Pine?”

  The door opened and Leona Sandmark came back in, still walking in her sleep. She said, “They’re sending somebody right away.”

  I smiled at her and said, “You better go upstairs and lie down awhile, baby.”

  If she heard me, she showed no sign of it. “Hilda says John isn’t home. Have you any idea where he is, Paul?”

  “No. He’s big enough to be out by himself. Go on to bed.”

  She didn’t like that. Her face turned red and her eyes blazed at me. “Well! I’ll do nothing of the kind!”

  “It won’t do, Leona.” The gentleness in my voice startled her. “I can’t say what I have to say if you’re here.”

  She worked up a smile but it wasn’t much of a success. “Now you’ve made me curious. Paul. I’m staying.”

  Crandall cleared his throat and moved his feet on the rug. “Let her stay. Her stepfather’s in the clear, you said. Let’s hear the rest of it. Paul.”

  Calling me “Paul” was his way of indicating he was on my side now. I could use that.

  I shrugged. “Have it your way. . . . Okay—we’re back in San Diego. Zarr—I can’t get used to calling him Ederle— skips town that night, thinking he’ll be wanted for the watchman’s murder. When he finally reads about it he is amazed to learn the San Diego cops want Raoul Fleming for the murder and for some missing money. Now Zarr knows damn well he, himself, killed that watchman. Maybe, he reasons, the law is using the story about Fleming and some stolen money as a blind, figuring Zarr will grow careless and get himself picked up.”

  “So he comes to Chicago, changes his name and gets —of all places—on the local police force. Back in those days fingerprints weren’t so widely used and Zarr’s weren’t on record.”

  “He works his way up until he’s a lieutenant on homicide. Then here about a month ago a gambling joint is raided and some of the customers brought in, among them Leona Sandmark.

  “Zarr, on duty that night, sees those customers brought in. Naturally he doesn’t recognize Miss Sandmark, here, but when her stepfather arrives to bail her out . . . well, Zarr recognizes him and gets panicky. If Sandmark pegs him as Ederle—ouch! And Zarr hasn’t changed so much since the old days that he can’t be recognized.”

  “So Zarr decides to keep an eye on Sandmark. He checks on him, learns what Sandmark’s setup is here in town. He finds out Sandmark’s daughter is running around with a shady character named Jerry Marlin. And right there is where he gets an angle.”

  “If, reasons the lieutenant, he can get something on Sandmark or the daughter, then he won’t have to worry about being turned in if Sandmark ever does run across him again.

  “Sandmark himself
doesn’t seem to be the kind of guy who does anything he can be nailed for. But the daughter —that’s something else again. A girl who gambles and runs around with the wrong kind of people. Sounds like she’s the best bet.”

  I heard Leona Sandmark gasp faintly at this point, but I avoided meeting her eyes. I turned my head just far enough to locate the fireplace and tossed the small stub of my neglected cigarette past the huge brass andirons.

  “Zarr,” I continued, “spends some time watching Miss Sandmark and Marlin. And one of those times he sees Marlin with none other than Raoul Fleming!”

  “That really gets Zarr excited! Fleming is the one guy who can tell him if the West Coast bulls actually want him for the watchman’s murder. If not, then Zarr has nothing to fear from Sandmark or anyone else! So he tails Fleming, learns the old boy has a room at the Laycroft and goes up to see him one night.”

  “Well, something goes wrong—I don’t know what—and Zarr beats the guy to death with a sap. Maybe Zarr said the wrong thing and accidentally let Fleming see who had bumped that watchman. Or maybe Zarr found out he was carrying around the hatful of diamonds Fleming told Miss Sandmark he was going to cover her with. Your guess is as good as mine and neither of them matters.”

  “Anyway, while Zarr is standing in Fleming’s room, the dead man on the floor, there’s a knock at the door. I’ll bet Zarr damn near had a stroke right there! What can he do? Refuse to answer? No, he’s been moving around and whoever’s outside may have heard him.”

  “He shoves the body into the closet, opens the door . . . and there is Leona Sandmark. He knows her right off; he saw her at police headquarters the night of the gambling-house raid.”

  “But she doesn’t know him; and before he can say anything, she says something like, ‘Father? I’m Leona. ‘

  “Right then it’s all clear to him. This girl has never seen her real dad because he skipped out while she was still an infant. Zarr, thinking fast, passes himself off as her old man, and gives her a fast line of patter and a faster brush-off. A couple minutes after she leaves, he gets out of there too.”