Halo in Blood

by Howard Browne

  “When Fleming’s body is found, Zarr takes over the case. He handles it carefully and without any show. He’ll be the happiest guy alive once the time comes for the body to be stuck in a numbered grave out in Oak Forest.”

  “And right there is where he runs into a snag. For a couple of days before Fleming is due for a Cook County burial, Marlin gets his brainstorm, and all those screwy funeral arrangements take place. The papers get going on the thing and Zarr begins to worry that somebody will identify the body.”

  “And he’s got other troubles, too; don’t ever think he hasn’t! There is always the danger he’ll run into one of the Sandmarks and get recognized. Maybe Sandmark himself wouldn’t do anything about it; but think of him running into the girl and having her yell, ‘Father!’ at him, like she did a few minutes ago.”

  Zarr’s face was like the death mask of a very old man. He seemed unable to speak, to move a muscle, to do anything more than sit there and stare at me with killer eyes.

  But Crandall was thinking now. He glanced to where the girl was sitting in a small pull-up chair and said: “Miss Sandmark, how does what Pine has said connect up with your knowledge of this thing?”

  She put a hand slowly up to her mouth and looked stonily back at him. “Father—I mean John Sandmark— knew where Raoul Fleming was staying. I knew Fleming hated him. This man—is the man I saw in room 318 at the Laycroft that night. He said he was my father. I had every reason to believe him.”

  There was nothing of indecision in Crandall’s eyes or expression now. He said, “I guess maybe we’d better hear from you, Zarr.”

  “You always were a sucker for a fancy yarn, Ike.” It was the first quotable thing he had said since I flashed Crandall’s gun on him. “I’ll do my talking to a lawyer.”

  That showed his training. He was too old a hand at the business to make any admissions, no matter what the evidence against him.

  Crandall grunted. “If it turns out you’re Ederle, you’re done for, Zarr. Particularly when Miss Sandmark has already identified you as the man in her father’s room the night of the murder.”

  He waited for Zarr to say something more, but the police lieutenant had gone back to hating me with his eyes.

  To me, Crandall said, “When did you start measuring Zarr for all this, Paul?”

  “Not until just a few hours ago,” I said, “although little things were piling up all along. I guess the first one was on the second morning after that nutty funeral. Zarr came to my office and gave me a song-and-dance about how he might lose his job because of all the attention the funeral would get. It sounded a trifle too farfetched for me, although I didn’t attach any importance to it at the time.”

  “The second item was when he fed me knuckles over at Clyne’s that afternoon. Just before he clipped me, he said, ‘I told you I don’t like coincidences.’ That crack referred back to a remark he had passed to me when he was asking about my being mixed up in that funeral. It showed Zarr tied up the funeral with Clyne’s death, something he had no business knowing about.”

  “Another point: A few minutes after he smacked me, Zarr mentioned, in your hearing, the name of the Gannett Express Company. Since I hadn’t given him the company’s name up to that time . . . how did he know it?”

  “Another: Zarr refused to go with you to see Sandmark when you suggested it that day. Why? Well, now you know. Sandmark would have put the finger on him right then and there as Ederle. Yet this morning Zarr had no hesitation about coming here once you told him Leona Sandmark was dead.”

  “Of course, the real clincher was when Miss Sandmark described her ‘father’ to me. It was Zarr she described; and you know, Ike, even with all the points I’ve told you about, I still didn’t realize it was Zarr she saw in that hotel room. Not until after he tried to kill her awhile ago, and I learned Sandmark hadn’t been home all night, did I wake up enough to learn the score.”

  But Crandall was shaking his head. “There’s a big hole right there, Paul. Zarr didn’t object this time to coming here. How could he be sure he wouldn’t run into John Sandmark and get recognized?”

  I didn’t say a word. I just looked him in the eye and waited.

  Leona Sandmark saw it first. She stood up slowly, her mouth trembling, her eyes stricken. “No! You don’t know what you’re saying! How can you—?”

  I went over and pushed her gently back into the chair. “I told you things were going to get rough, baby. You’ve no choice but to take it.”

  Ike Crandall was still groping. “I don’t see this at all. What are you getting at?”

  I said impatiently, “Can’t you get your eyes past the end of your nose? John Sandmark is dead.”

  That rocked him. It rocked Zarr, too. His face got even bleaker and his hands clenched and straightened spasmodically.

  “How do you know that?” Crandall demanded harshly.

  “He’s got to be dead. Otherwise Zarr would never have agreed to come here. I say Zarr killed Sandmark last night. He called him out and took him somewhere and killed him. I’ll eat my 1928 deputy-sheriff’s star if he didn’t.”

  Suddenly Leona Sandmark put her head down on her knees and began to cry with a sort of agonized restraint that was tougher to listen to than the wildest kind of hysteria. Crandall and I looked wordlessly at each other and then at George Zarr, who sat there and stared at his hands and kept what he was thinking off his face.

  Crandall went over and stood there staring at the lieutenant’s bowed head. He said, “By God, George, you do get around! Four dead in hardly more than a month. Fleming, Marlin, Clyne . . . and now John Sandmark. Are you out for a record, or something?”

  I said wearily, “No, Ike. Only two of them belong to Zarr. Fleming and Sandmark. But that will be enough to burn him.”

  That cut him adrift again. He rubbed the side of his jaw with uncertain fingers and gaped at me. “Will you for Chrisakes quit playing detective? What about Marlin and Clyne, then?”

  “The guy that got them,” I said, “has already paid his bill. He was a man named Baird. He died outside of Glencoe just a few hours ago, while he was getting set to beat the top of my head in.”

  That was when I gave him the story of what had happened on that dark side road out along the North Shore. I gave him only the action, naming no names and making no mention of the call Glencoe’s police chief had made to Central Station. Abbott, I thought, would appreciate that.

  It interested Crandall, all right, but it didn’t satisfy him. Not that I had expected it to satisfy him. He said, “How do you know this Baird killed Marlin and Clyne?”

  “Marlin,” I said, “was double-crossing a certain party. So Marlin was taken out of there. Clyne knew too much about the connection between Marlin and that certain party. Now Clyne is no longer with us. Then I started shooting off my mouth, and I was slated to leave this life. Miss Sandmark kept that from happening—for the time being anyway.”

  “And who,” Crandall said slowly, “is this ‘certain party’?”

  “No,” I said. “The man I’m talking about is a man you couldn’t touch in a thousand years. It seems he has friends in the high places around town—friends who would not take kindly to being embarrassed. If I gave you his name, the only thing that could come of it would be my body in a ditch, and I do not want my body to be in a ditch.”

  “The man who killed Marlin and Clyne is worm meat, just as they are. Retribution is a good word: why not respect it?”

  Crandall shook his head doggedly. “I want his name, Pine.”

  “You want my testimony against Zarr, too, brother. I forget important details when I get pushed around. And for all I know, I may have another gunman out to get me. now that Baird is gone. And for the same reason he had.”

  While Crandall was chewing that over the door chimes sounded and the housekeeper let in a couple of cops in Oak Park harness. They came into the library and stood just inside the door looking uncomfortable.

  Crandall said, “Okay, George,”
to Zarr. “I’m going to have to take you in and book you. From there on it will be up to you.”

  Zarr’s expression had nothing to say. He got up, waited while Crandall told the cops enough to satisfy them, then went out the door between them.

  “Paul,” Crandall said, “you and Miss Sandmark better come along with me. I’ll have to take statements from both of you.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time for that later on,” I said. “What do you use for a heart—your gallstones? This girl has been through enough to put gray hairs on a plaster bust; and my throat hates my tongue.”

  He nodded reluctantly. “Fair enough. Get some sleep, both of you. But I want the two of you at my office around five this afternoon.”

  When he was gone, leaving Leona and me alone in the library, I said, “Try to get some sleep, Leona. Maybe a sedative will do it. I’ll pick you up around four. We’ll have to do what Crandall wants, and the sooner it’s over with, the sooner you can start living again.”

  She sat there, her shoulders bowed, her eyes fixed on nothing at all. “Is he really dead, Paul?”

  “I’m sorry, kid. But there’s not a chance that he’s alive. Go on to bed.”

  She looked at me dully. “No. I can’t stay here. I couldn’t bear to stay here. Take me home, Paul—to my own apartment. Please.”

  “If that’s what you want,” I said. “Come on.”

  CHAPTER 20

  She gave me her keys and I unlocked the door to 6A and flicked the switch, flooding the tiny reception hall with soft light. Daylight through the windows bathed the living room in a warm glow and we went in there.

  She crossed over to the windows and leaned against one of the frames, letting the early morning breeze from the east cool her skin. The harsh light showed lines around her eyes and mouth—lines that were not there before. They did not surprise me; what she had gone through during the past eight hours would put lines in the Washington Monument.

  I mixed two drinks, using Scotch, soda and ice cubes. I took one over to her and leaned against the opposite side of the same window frame.

  “Here’s to you,” I said, lifting my glass in salute.

  She nodded. “To you,” she repeated soberly and touched the rim of her glass to mine.

  We drank. Deeply. She lowered her glass and stared down into it as though the future was there for her to read.

  “What’s left for me, Paul?”

  “Probably fifty years,” I said. “and you’ll need less than one of them to get over what tonight has done to you.”

  “I loved him, Paul. He was the only man who was ever good to me.”

  I said, “Look. You’ve taken an awful wallop and it hurts. But it won’t kill you and it won’t hurt forever. A right kind of guy would hold your hand and pat you on the back and let you cry into his shoulder padding. But I’m not the right kind of guy. I’m tired and I’m sleepy and my feet hurt. Suppose you go on to bed, and about three-thirty I’ll phone you to be ready at four. Okay?”

  She looked out the window without seeing anything. “I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I don’t think I can ever sleep again.”

  “I know. You’ll be thinking that while you’re snoring.”

  She ran a finger slowly up and down the side of the glass in her hand. “You’re a funny person, Paul. You seem so—so -calloused. Hard. Bitter. Why are you that way?”

  She wanted to talk; and, like most people when they’ve taken a bad jolt, she wanted to talk about personal things. Like what makes you tick and why are you the way you are. I figured another ten minutes wouldn’t ruin me and maybe she would feel better. So I said:

  “I don’t think I’m hard or calloused or bitter. At least I don’t mean to be. I get wet-eyed in the movies once in a while, and I think kids are wonderful.”

  “Maybe I give the impression you get, Leona, because my work makes me see people as they actually are. Oh, I used to be a trusting soul. I thought people, even the shoddy ones, would give a straight deal if they got one themselves. And I used to go to bat for them, right down the line.

  “But after a few years of being lied to and cheated and double-crossed—well, I quit handing out halos. Too many of them were turning out to be tarnished instead of glowing; red instead of gold . . . halos in blood.”

  There was a brooding wonder, a thoughtful curiosity in her eyes. And then she smiled a little, although she was not amused. “I think,” she said softly, “that if you ever fell in love, you’d go back to seeing things in their true perspective.”

  I stood there and looked at how my thumb curled around the glass I was holding.

  “You were in love once, weren’t you, Paul? I mean really in love?”

  “You could call it that.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I’ll tell you nothing about it.”

  “Why?”

  “That would be telling you about it.”

  She lifted her glass and drank the rest of her highball, then turned and walked slowly over to the lounge chair, sat down and put her head back and closed her eyes.

  I straightened, put my glass down on an end table and said, “I’ll be running along. See you late this afternoon.”

  “Stay with me, Paul.”

  She had not moved . . . she just sat there with her head thrown back, her eyes closed, the words coming out without her having anything to do with them.

  I said, “You’ve got to go to bed, baby.”

  Her eyes opened slowly—and they were green again. “So do you, darling.”

  A minute ticked away while we looked deep into each others eyes. I said, “Just like that?”

  “Yes.” She said it so softly I barely heard her.

  “You,” I said, “are a woman, by God! You’ve shot a man, been shot at, seen a man proved a murderer, learned your step-father is dead—all within a few hours. And now you want to be slept with. I give, you a bow, damned if I don’t!”

  Her gaze never wavered . . . and very slowly her lips curved in a smile. It was the kind of smile that was already old when Eve was born—a patient smile, a confident smile, the smile that comes to a woman when she looks upon the man she wants and means to have—and who knows at last that she belongs to him.

  “I love you, Paul.”

  My hands began to shake. “How do you know who you love? You’re as punchy as a cauliflower ear. You couldn’t be anything else after last night.”

  “This is different, darling. This is real. I love you . . . and you love me.”

  “I do like so much!” Every cell in my body was crying for me to go over and get down on my knees beside her and put my arms around her. “You’re just another beautiful woman. You’re rich and spoiled and hard as nails. I don’t love you. Why should you think I love you?”

  She was smiling and holding out her arms to me. “Please, sweetheart. I want you near to me. . . .”

  And then she was in my arms and her body was pressed against me and her eyes were large and luminous and her breath was warm against my mouth. . . .

  I put her away from me abruptly and went over to the liquor cabinet and made two fresh drinks. I came back and sat down on the arm of her chair and gave her one of the glasses and lighted cigarettes for both of us. I said:

  “Before retiring, a lady and gentleman always share a drink and a cigarette. It wouldn’t do for us to treat tradition lightly.”

  We drank, smiling into each other’s eyes. She said, “John would have approved of this, darling. I only wish he could have lived to see it.”

  She watched the smoke spiral up from the glowing end of her cigarette and went on talking, her mood pensive now. “Think how many have died, Paul. My real father, and Charles, and Jerry, and this man Clyne whom I never knew . . . and John. And I suppose that police officer will be executed for his part in what happened.”

  She sighed softly and rubbed her cheek against my sleeve and her lips curved in a slow smile. “But I’m not going to think of death any more. I’m going to thin
k of living . . . with you, Paul.”

  I finished my drink . . . and if my hand shook a little, it had a reason for shaking. I got off the chair arm and set the glass carefully on the coffee table and turned my back on Leona Sandmark and went over to the wall and stared at a framed print hanging there.

  Just one word. But one word too many. Now I knew the truth—and no truth was ever more bitter: I looked down at my hand and it was a fist and I was not surprised. . . .

  I turned around then and looked at Leona Sandmark. She was still sitting there smiling at me. She was still beautiful—she would never be more beautiful. But it wasn’t beauty to me now. It was just some meat, with patches of hair here and there—nothing I wanted any more. I said:

  “It seems I closed the books a little too early, baby. You see, one more will have to die. That will happen the day they put you in the electric chair and throw the switch.”

  She sat there and looked at me, the smile frozen on her lips. And it seemed that very slowly the face behind that smile began to wither and fade away, leaving the smile hanging there. Just as slowly one of her hands came up and she put her fingers against her cheek.

  “What are—you saying, Paul?”

  The muscles bunched under my jaws. “ ‘I love you, Paul; come sleep with me.’ Why, you two-bit little tart, I ought to feed you a sap until you spit buckshot. So it was you who murdered Jerry Marlin . . . you who killed Clyne. But I couldn’t see it because your face and your body were so beautiful I couldn’t see past them.”

  It wasn’t until she tried a second time that her shock-stiffened lips parted enough for her to speak.

  “You’re mad! Mad! How can you say such a thing! You know I didn’t kill them. You yourself saw a man kill Jerry while he was with me. You must be insa—”

  I said savagely, “Shut up, you bitch! You’re through lying to me. If you can’t tell the truth, then by God you’ll hear it.

  “The day I called on John Sandmark he told me of some of your love affairs. He told me of a high-school boy, of a married man . . . and of a crook. A crook who was a confidence man, a gunman, a phony-money passer. He never told me this crook’s name, but now I know it.