Mark of Murder - Dell Shannon

Mark of Murder

Dell Shannon
1964

. . . their works are works of iniquity, and
the act of violence is in their hands. Their feet
run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood:
their thoughts are thoughts of
iniquity; wasting
and destruction are in their
paths. The way of
peace they know not . . .
----
Isaiah 59:6-8

ONE

"Such a blessing," said Alison, "to be
able to walk right off, with never a minute's worry. M
á
iri's
such a dear, and so reliable. Isn't it a beautiful day!" She sat
up in her deck chair and conscientiously inhaled several deep breaths
of the sparkling sea air.

Mendoza grunted. "All the same, you're worrying
because there wasn't a card or letter at Norfolk."

"I'm not really," said Alison. "She
probably wasn't sure of catching us, and will write direct to the
hotel in Bermuda."

Mendoza grunted again.

"For goodness' sake, look at the pretty ocean
or--You're supposed to be enjoying yourself, on vacation."

"I know, I know," said Mendoza. He sat up
and looked at the calm blue Atlantic, bright in the sun of early
July, said perfunctorily, "
Qué bello
,"
and leaned back again. "I wish the damn boat would go faster.
Maybe I can get a Times in Bermuda."

"And the first vacation you've had in years,"
Alison went on. "From what I can make out, whenever you have
taken a few days, you've found some excuse to go back and hang around
the office, and never got a proper vacation at all. It's
ridiculous--"

Mendoza turned lazily and looked at her, from her
wind-blown gleaming red head to her frivolous green linen sandals,
which matched her sleeveless linen dress, which in turn displayed her
very satisfactory figure.

"Things come up," he said. "You
finally managed to drag me away,
querida
."

"
Well, you might enjoy it a little more, that's
all," said Alison.

"I am, I am." Mendoza sat up and looked at
a man walking briskly past down the deck. "Well, fancy that,"
he said.

"
What?"

"That fellow looked like Benny Metzer. We had
the word he'd gone to working the liners since we chased him out of
town the last time. I think I'll just--"

"You'll stay right where you are," said
Alison firmly, "and enjoy the nice sea breeze--. I swear you're
more married to your job than you are to me." She looked at him
with her head cocked. "What's wrong, Luis? You did enjoy New
York, and the first night and all. But ever since we've been on this
ship you've been--fidgety. It can't be seasickness, you'd have
succumbed by now."

"Damn it," said Mendoza, "it's
just--three weeks. Out of touch. I wonder whether Art got anywhere on
that body in the hotel. It looked damned anonymous. Damn it, I've
just got the feeling I shouldn't be here, there's something going on
that--”

"
¡Qué disparate!
"
said Alison, and laughed. "And I know why, too. It's not that
you're psychic, it's just that you're firmly convinced the L.A.P.D.
can't operate efficiently without you there in the homicide office at
headquarters. Egotist!"

Unwillingly he grinned. "And maybe you're right.
But --" He stood up; he still felt undressed in the casual gray
slacks and open-necked sports shirt; he felt uncomfortable without
tie or jacket. "I'm going to take a walk," he said. "The
way they feed you on these ships . . ." He didn't much care for
the consciously superior service of the stewards and waiters either,
as too, too British as this cruise liner. And he definitely didn't
like--"Oh, my God," he said, looking up the deck, "I'm
off indeed, here they come again. Those Kitcheners."

Alison giggled. "You've no idea how funny it is,
watching you evade Evadne."

Mendoza said shortly that Kitchener ought to beat
her, and fled up the deck; Alison was left to withstand the
Kitcheners' onslaught. Evadne Kitchener had attached herself and her
paunchy little husband to the Mendozas the first day out; professing
to recognize Mendoza as a certain well-known actor incognito, she--as
Alison put it--arched at him simperingly while her husband told
Alison how vivacious dear Evadne was.

"Your charming husband not with you?" she
called gaily now. "How too disappointing! I do trust he isn't
straying toward that rather vulgar little blonde at your table. I
must say, I thought--"

"He's brooding," said Alison gravely, "on
all the murderers he might be arresting, instead of wasting time like
this."

Evadne gave a little scream of mirth. "You will
keep up your little joke! Calling himself a policeman indeed, when we
both know who the dear man really--but we won't give you away, my
dear. So thrilling--"

Mendoza paced moodily down the deck, ignoring the
bright sun on the beautifully calm sea. He wondered what Art was
getting on that corpse. If anything. And there'd been that deliberate
wrecking of the S.P. Daylight too. Homicide got the train wrecks. The
engineer being quick-witted, it hadn't been a bad one, nobody killed;
but that switch had been thrown deliberately, and they'd have to find
out who had done it. There'd been a couple of prints, but not in
Records.

Well, damn it, Alison was probably quite right. Other
men went off on vacation and the force struggled along without them.
But ever since he'd been on this damn cruise liner he'd had the
irrational feeling, the nervous feeling, that he hadn't any business
to be heading leisurely for Bermuda and the luxury hotel. That he was
needed in the office, that something big was happening and they
needed him. Damn fool, he said to himself now, standing at the rail
and staring back in the general direction of New York. Just,
probably, because he'd never been away from the job this long before,
in all the twenty-two years he'd been on the L.A. force.

He'd enjoyed a week or so of the vacation, and so had
Alison--when she wasn't worrying about the twins, though she wouldn't
admit it. Which was silly too, because that treasure Mrs. MacTaggart
was completely reliable.

But suddenly now he felt--well, admit it, he thought
ruefully, he felt homesick. For his own office, where he ought to be,
in respectable city clothes, going over the latest cases with Hackett
and his other sergeants, deploying men, making decisions.

There hadn't been much to get hold of, he thought, on
that bloodily slashed corpse in the Third Street hotel room. The
doctor had said, a distinctive knife, but . . .

He wondered how it had turned out. The damn New York
papers didn't print news from anywhere west of the Hudson, unless it
concerned a national catastrophe. They'd be in Bermuda tomorrow.
Maybe Art had found time to write him a few lines. Maybe he could get
an L.A. Times somewhere. Didn't most resorts stock papers from all
over? Of course it was British territory ....

And, my God, there were the Kitcheners and Alison
bearing down on him. Undoubtedly--he could see the words forming on
Evadne's mauve-painted lips--to carry him off for pre-lunch
cocktails. Foreseeing the present impossibility of detaching Alison
without downright rudeness, Mendoza left her to her fate and,
pretending he hadn't seen them, dived down the nearest companionway.
He found himself at the door of one of the plush saloons and dodged
in.

Almost at once he began to feel a little happier.
Various groups, mostly of men, were sitting over cards here; in one
corner he saw the man who looked like Benny Metzer just sitting down
with four other men. He sauntered in that direction. That flat back
to the man's head, and the left shoulder carried higher, and the
lobeless ears . . .

It was Benny, all right. Dressed to kill in expensive
sports clothes. Mendoza stood a little way off and watched with
professional admiration as Benny, chatting genially with his
companions, deftly got the innocent deck off the table and
substituted his own--probably a deck of concave strippers. As another
man cut the cards, Mendoza walked up and slapped Benny on the back.

"Well, fancy running into you, old pal, old
pal!" he said heartily. "Introduce me round, friend, and
invite me to sit in, won't you? I'm just in the mood for a few hands
of draw!"

Benny showed his teeth like a cornered rat,
recognizing him with starting eyes, an arm of the law that ought to
have been thirty-five hundred miles away. "I--why, sure, old
pal," he said between his teeth. "I--gennelmen, like you to
meet--"

A prosperous--looking middle-aged man in too gay
sports clothes said that any friend of Mr. Johnson's was welcome.
Mendoza said that was fine, leaned over Benny's shoulder and as he
added, "Haven't run across this old pal in many a year,"
rescued the honest deck from Benny's specially tailored coattail
pocket. Benny felt it go and wriggled in helpless rage. Mendoza drew
up another chair, sat down at the table, and casually swept the
doctored deck into his left hand. "New deal, gentlemen--first
cut?" He laid the honest deck out, neatly stacked, before his
neighbor, and smiled at Benny. The others looked as if they could
afford to lose a little, and he'd enjoy taking some of Benny's
ill-gotten gains.

It was better than walking the deck, feeling homesick
for the homicide office and his real job. All the same, better tell
the captain--and the Bermuda police--about Benny. Mendoza sighed.
Duty. He never could get worked up about the Bennys, himself. Largely
harmless; and any fool who sat down to play cards with a stranger was
asking for it.

He looked at a
fair-to-middling hand and wondered what was going on right now back
home, at the office.

* * *

Hackett came into the office, set a cardboard carton
on Sergeant Lake's desk, and said, "Get that up to the lab
pronto, will you? God, I wish Luis hadn't gone gallivanting off. He
might have one of his famous hunches on this one.”

Lake looked at him and said, "Don't tell me--"

"That's right," said Hackett. "Looks
like the same boy. That's four in ten days. The press boys've got him
named now, in the afternoon editions. The Slasher. City terrified, et
cetera. It looks like the same knife, on this new one. See what
Bainbridge says, but it looks the same to me."

"I'll be damned," said Lake. "Another
woman?"

Hackett shook his head, looking a little sick.
"Fourteen-year-old Mexican boy. Everybody says, a good boy. On
his way home from a Boy Scout meeting at the Y.M.C.A.”

"Oh, my God," said Lake, "what a
thing. And another one just came in.”

"Oh, damn," said Hackett. By what they had
on this Slasher--damn fool name to hang on him--that was going to be
a tough one, a lot of plodding routine, using a lot of men. "What?"

Lake shuffled papers on his desk. "Call just
came in, from the squad car. I was going to pass it to Palliser, he's
the only one in, but-- Man found dead in his office. A doctor, I
think. Shot. They've just found him. Address over on Wilshire."

Hackett wrote it down. "You sent a doctor and so
on?"

"Just finished that when you came in.
Bainbridge, and Marx and Horder to do the printing, and Scarne."

"O.K." Hackett looked into the communal
sergeants' office, which was occupied solely by Palliser at the
moment. Palliser's desk was littered with papers and he was reading
one, his long dark face looking gloomy. "Take a little break,"
invited Hackett. "Come look at another corpse with me. I may
have to turn it over to you, so you'd better be in from the start."

Palliser didn't object. "We'll never get
anywhere on that train wrecking," he predicted as they walked
toward the elevators. "Even when we've got prints off the
switch."

"
Doesn't look promising? Where've you been
looking, in general?”

"Everywhere there is to look," said
Palliser morosely. "We've collected about a hundred and fifty
prints from possible suspects, but none's matched up and all the
possibles are just that--men fired by the S.P. or some other local
railroad. Nothing really says--"