The Richard Deming Mystery Megapack

by Richard Deming

  Martha held her breath. She could feel the gas cooling her cheeks as it was forced from both sides of the mask by her refusal to breathe. She could also feel the pressure of Joanne’s right thumb on her cheek alongside the mask.

  Martha’s lungs were on the verge of bursting and she was ready to capitulate by taking a deep breath when the hurried voice of the receptionist said from the open door, “I left my bus ticket in my desk, doctor. I have to rush—” There was a pause, then, “What—”

  Dr. Waters started so violently that he released his grip on Martha’s shoulders and half rose from his position across her body. Joanne started too, less violently, but enough to relax momentarily the pressure of both hands.

  Martha jerked her head to one side and used the exceptionally fine teeth Dr. Waters had admired to bite his wife’s thumb nearly to the bone.

  With a yowl of pain, the blonde dropped the face mask and staggered backward. Martha drew both knees to her chest and pushed the dentist away by placing her feet in his stomach and shoving. He reeled across the room to crash into an instrument table.

  Martha bounced from the dental chair and sped past the astonished redhead in the open doorway.

  She was thankful that the dental office was on the first floor, because she had to gulp air into her starved lungs while she was running, and she probably would have collapsed if she had been required to race downstairs. Desperation made her good for a short sprint, though. She was outdoors, into her car and had the engine started before there was any sign of pursuit. As she shot away from the curb, she spotted Dr. Waters in the rear-view mirror, just emerging from the building.

  Martha headed for police headquarters.

  SAY IT WITH FLOWERS

  Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July 1974.

  I had just logged in at eight a.m. when a radio message came in from a squad car that there was a dead body lying on the grass at the foot of Art Hill in Forest Park. The cop who radioed in said it was a homicide. I didn’t ask what made him so sure of that, but when I got out there twenty minutes later, it was obvious.

  By then three squad cars were at the scene and an area had been roped off about fifty feet in all directions from the body. Art Hill, so called because the Art Museum sits on top of it, has a lot of trees on both sides of the road at its foot, and the rope had been stretched from tree trunk to tree trunk at waist height to form a rough circle.

  Six cops were spaced around the circle to prevent curiosity seekers from ducking under the rope. With nothing but the rope holding back the crowd, it was quite possible all evidence would have been trampled out of existence before I ever got there.

  A lot of drivers cut through Forest Park on their way to work mornings. Consequently a lot of cars were halted on each side of the roped-off section of road. A few cars were backing and swinging around to find some other route, but most were parked and their occupants were pressed up against the rope, peering avidly toward the body.

  There were no parking places on either side of the road within a half block of the roped-off area. Since they took me off a beat and assigned me to Homicide twenty years ago, I have avoided walking any farther than necessary. I honked my way through the crowd right up to the rope.

  Climbing from the car, I went over and showed my badge to a tall, skinny young cop on the other side of the rope. “Sergeant Sod Harris, Homicide,” I said.

  “Oh, hi, Sarge,” he said. “Patrolman Mike Hurley. I’m the one who radioed in.”

  He lifted the rope so that I could duck under it. I went over to look at the body.

  The dead man lay on his back beneath a tall sycamore, on the side of the tree away from the road. He was dressed in neatly-pressed, dark-green gabardine slacks, highly-polished brown shoes and a yellow sport shirt. He was about five ten, with a lean but muscular build.

  It was impossible to estimate the victim’s age by his face, because there was not enough left of it. The bloody imprint of a man’s heel on the forehead indicated the massive damage had been done by kicking and stomping on his head.

  That wasn’t what had killed him, though. The relatively small amount of blood spattered about from the head wounds indicated his arteries had stopped pumping blood before the kicking began. A half dozen punctures in his stomach and chest, apparently bullet holes, were what had killed him. His shirt front was soaked with blood, probably shed some hours earlier, since it had dried to a dull brown color.

  A large spot of dried blood in the gutter, some twenty feet from where the body lay, indicated that the shooting had taken place there. Twin furrows in the grass that looked as though they might have been made by dragging heels, denoted that the body had been dragged behind the tree after the shooting.

  The dead man’s hands, neatly folded in the center of his chest, clasped a single dandelion.

  Once, the multiple gunshot wounds, the brutal head-kicking after the victim was dead, and the sardonic clasping of the dead hands about a flower, would have been prima-facie evidence of a grudge killing. However, we have developed a new breed of criminal that sometimes brutalizes victims just for kicks. The man could have been killed by an enemy, but he just as well could have been murdered by some mugger who had never seen him before.

  I went within only about six feet of the corpse, and I carefully stayed clear of the drag marks in the grass. After a long look, I returned to Patrolman Mike Hurley.

  “You spot him, or did somebody report it to your precinct house?” I asked.

  “My partner spotted him. George Detting.” He pointed to a middle-aged cop a few yards away. “We were cruising past, me driving, when George suddenly told me to stop. That was a couple of minutes to eight.”

  I glanced first one way, then the other at the cars parked on both sides of the roped-off area. “Are those all bystanders’ cars?” I asked.

  The young patrolman nodded. “There were no cars parked within sight of here when we found the body.”

  That meant the victim had either been walking through the park when attacked, or had been riding with his murderer. The former seemed unlikely, because no one in his right mind would walk through Forest Park at night.

  Ducking back under the rope, I went over to my undercover car and radioed in for a lab man. I left instructions for him to bring along an electronic metal detector to search out empty cartridges.

  It was nearing nine a.m. when Art Ward showed up with his lab kit and a camera. He had brought along a young assistant named Ken Brady, who was carrying the metal detector.

  “Hi, Sod,” Art greeted me. “Pictures first?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Okay.” Turning to his assistant, he said, “Just stand by until I’m finished, Ken.”

  Brady stayed just inside the rope while I took Art over to explain what shots I wanted. Art Ward had been taking photographs of bodies almost as long as I’ve been looking at them, but he made a face when he saw this one.

  I had him photograph the body from several angles, and take pictures of the dried blood in the gutter and the twin furrows in the grass. Then I indicated the bloody heel-print on the victim’s forehead.

  “Can you take a close-up of that so the print is actual size?” I asked.

  “I can blow it up to actual size,” he said. “I could blow Art Hill up to actual size, if necessary.”

  “The heel-print will be sufficient,” I told him.

  He took a couple of close-up shots of the heel-print, then gave me an inquiring look. “Next?”

  “That’s enough pictures,” I said. “You can put your assistant to work. What he’s looking for is empty shell casings. If the gun was an automatic, there might be ejected casings lying in the grass.”

  Nodding, he called over Ken Brady and started him circling the body with the metal detector in ever widening circles. I knelt next to the corpse and went through the pocke
ts.

  In the single pocket of the sport shirt there was nothing. In the side pants pockets there was a key ring with a half dozen keys on it and thirty-two cents in change. In the right hip pocket was a folded white handkerchief. In the left one there was a wallet containing three hundred dollars.

  That rather reduced the possibility that it had been a mugger murder. Any mugger calm enough to lay out the corpse with such funereal mockery was hardly likely to have overlooked the loot.

  A Missouri driver’s license in the wallet had been issued to a Walter Schroeder of 3512 Russell Boulevard. It gave his age as forty, height as five-feet-ten and weight as 165. Eye color was listed as blue and hair as reddish-brown. Because of facial wounds and dried blood I couldn’t make out the victim’s eye color, but his hair was reddish-brown, and the rest of the description seemed to fit.

  After copying down the name and address, I sealed the wallet and other items in an evidence envelope, recorded what the contents were, initialed the envelope and had Art Ward initial it too.

  By then, Ken Brady had thoroughly covered the area inside the rope with his metal detector. He turned up two bottle caps, a corroded penny and a metal hairpin.

  I told the two lab men they could leave, told Patrolman Mike Hurley to radio for the morgue to come after the body, and took off myself.

  Number 3512 Russell Boulevard was a neat, one-story brick bungalow. An attractive brunette of about thirty-five answered the door. She wore red lounging pajamas that showed off an exceptionally shapely figure.

  Taking off my hat, I said, “Mrs. Schroeder?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I showed her my badge. “Sergeant Harris of the police, ma’am. Is Walter Schroeder your husband?”

  “Yes,” she said, frowning. “He doesn’t live here, though.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “This is the address on his driver’s license.”

  “He just hasn’t gotten around to changing it. We’ve only been separated two weeks. His correct address is 4366 Maryland. That’s an apartment house.”

  Taking out my notebook, I jotted down the address, then asked, “When did you last see your husband, Mrs. Schroeder?”

  “Two weeks ago. Well, actually fifteen days. Since the day I had the locks changed and locked him out. I had a phone conversation with him yesterday, however. What is this all about, Sergeant?”

  Long ago I learned there is no way to break the news of death gently. I said, “A man we believe to be your husband was found dead in Forest Park this morning. I’m afraid you’re going to have to come down to the morgue to identify the body.”

  She paled slightly. “Walter’s dead? How?”

  “He appears to have been shot. We won’t know for sure until after the postmortem. The wounds could have been made by some round-bladed instrument such as a screwdriver.”

  “Wounds, you say? There were more than one?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Several.”

  She looked distressed. After a moment she said, “You want me to go down to the morgue with you now?”

  “Yes, if you will, please.”

  Stepping aside, she said, “Come in, Sergeant. You’ll have to wait while I change.”

  I stepped into a tastefully-furnished living room. Mrs. Schroeder disappeared into a central hallway. I was looking around to select a seat when a man appeared from the hallway. He was a tall, powerfully-built man in his late thirties with a ruggedly handsome face but rather sullen eyes. The short-sleeved sport shirt he was wearing disclosed thick arms covered with curly black hair. Like many men with an exceptional amount of body hair, he was becoming bald on top. He was carrying a coffee mug.

  “Janet says somebody killed Walter,” he said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  He took a sip of his coffee.

  “I’m Sergeant Sod Harris,” I offered.

  He nodded. “How are you, Sergeant?”

  “May I ask your name?”

  “Sure. Sam Clayton.”

  I gave him the same sort of nod he had given me. “How are you, Mr. Clayton? How well did you know Mr. Schroeder?”

  His lips curled sardonically. “Well enough not to be grief-stricken.”

  “Oh? Just what was your relationship with him, then?” I asked.

  “Distant, Sergeant. As distant as I could keep it.”

  “Let me put it another way. Were you business competitors? Or perhaps rivals for Mrs. Schroeder?”

  He frowned at me. “That’s a pretty personal question, Buster.”

  I smiled from the teeth out. “I often ask personal questions during homicide investigations, Buster. You want to get up an answer before I lose my patience and drag you downtown?”

  He looked startled. After a moment he said warily, “You’re a bit touchy, aren’t you, Sergeant?”

  “This business makes you that way. Particularly when some joker twenty years younger than you calls you Buster.”

  He gave me a somewhat sheepish smile. “Okay, scratch the Buster. My relationship with Walt Schroeder was that he kept stealing things from me. First he stole my invention, then my job, then a year and a half of my life by having me thrown in prison. Finally, while I was safely out of the way, he stole my wife.”

  “Let’s take things one at a time,” I suggested. “What invention did he steal?”

  “My cutting torch. I used to work in the research department of the Schroeder-Moore Electronics Company. I’m an electrical engineer. I also had a home lab where I tinkered at night. My contract read that anything I developed on company time belonged to Schroeder-Moore. It said nothing about after-hours’ work on my own time. I invented a new type of cutting torch that could slice through steel in half the time the conventional type took. It was conceived entirely in my own lab, without so much as thirty seconds of company time being devoted to it. But Walt took me to court. I couldn’t afford the high-priced kind of legal talent he hired, so I lost. Then he added insult to injury by naming it the Clayton Cutting Torch. It’s one of Schroeder-Moore’s best sellers.”

  “I can understand how that might leave you feeling a bit unkindly,” I conceded. “But I assume from the company name that Schroeder had a partner. What was Moore doing while Schroeder was suing you?”

  Sam Clayton made a dismissing gesture. “Jake Moore had no say in company policy. He handled the manufacturing end, while Walt took care of all business matters. Actually, suit was brought in the name of the company, but all Jake knew about it was what Walt told him. Although he owns half interest, Jake is really just a sort of exalted plant manager.”

  “I see. You mentioned Schroeder also stole your job.”

  “Sure. After he won his case, he fired me.”

  I frowned. “You also mentioned he had you thrown in prison.”

  His face assumed a momentary expression of satisfaction. “I beat the hell out of him.” Then the satisfied expression faded. “They hooked me for assault with intent to kill. I had no intention of killing him, but it seems if you beat a man bad enough, they assume you meant to kill him. And I beat him pretty bad. I drew two years and served eighteen months. While I was away he moved in on Janet.” Janet appeared from the central hallway, now wearing a formfitting summer dress of mini-length with vertical pink-and-white stripes that reminded me of peppermint candy. She had lovely legs, I noted.

  Apparently she had heard at least some of the foregoing conversation, because she said, “Walt was a very persuasive man, Sergeant. He actually convinced me that Sam had been trying to cheat him.” She gave her former husband a reproachful look. “Of course, if Sam hadn’t always been so secretive about his work, I would have known the truth. But he never let me in on what he was doing down in the basement.”

  “How did you eventually learn the truth?” I asked.

  “I gradually came to realize that Walt lied and cheated about everythi
ng,” she said in a rueful voice. “I didn’t learn the truth so much as I just finally realized it. Our marriage was breaking up even before Sam got out of prison, but that brought it to a head. The day Sam showed up here, I took one look at him, fell into his arms and began crying. When I had dried my tears, I phoned a locksmith to come change the locks.”

  Sam Clayton grinned reminiscently. “Walt was kind of flabbergasted when he got home that evening. He didn’t put up much of an argument about moving out, though. Maybe because I was here to back up Janet’s ultimatum.”

  “Mrs. Schroeder told me she changed the locks fifteen days ago. You’ve been out of prison only fifteen days?”

  “Sixteen. It took me a day to get here from Jefferson City.”

  “Can you account for your movements last night?”

  He was in the act of raising the coffee mug to his lips, but he paused and lowered it again. “I’m a pragmatist, Sergeant. I wouldn’t risk prison again just for revenge. Anyway, I already had revenge. I took Janet back away from him. Besides that, I wouldn’t kill the goose who was about to lay a golden egg. Walt was talking about making a financial settlement for my cutting torch.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Why?”

  “Not out of generosity,” Clayton assured me. “He wanted Janet back. She told him she wouldn’t even discuss it until he made a fair settlement with me, but then she would give it serious consideration.”

  I looked at Janet. “Would you have considered going back to him?”

  “No. But he was crazy enough about me so that I think he would have settled with Sam if he thought that gave him a chance to get me back.”

  “I thought he was such a sharp businessman.”

  “Oh, he was,” she agreed. “But he tended to lose his perspective when I was involved. He would assume that because I was always completely honest with him, I wouldn’t cheat him this time.”

  “But you would have?”

  “Of course. It would have been only cheating him back, for what had rightfully been Sam’s and mine all along.”