Mark of Murder - Dell Shannon (2 page)

But it would be nice, thought Hackett, to drop on
that X. That could have been one hell of a train wreck ....Whoever
had thrown that switch, just as the Daylight was past the Sun Valley
intersection, had pretty evidently intended the train--traveling at a
moderate clip there as its next stop wasn't until Glendale--to enter
a short siding and plow into the rear of a chemical factory nearby.
Owing to the quick eye of the engineer, who had spotted the switch
standing wrong before they reached it and thrown on the brakes at
once, the train had managed to stop before the end of the
siding--four cars jack-knifed, the engine derailed, minor injuries.
Not a major wreck, as had been intended.

Somebody who had once worked for a railroad and knew
how to operate a switch . . . And the hell of it was, of course, he'd
been right there on the scene, had to be, because the switch had been
used twenty minutes before for a freight dropping off a few cars
there. The signalman hadn't seen a thing; and in the confusion
afterward . . .

They'd been plodding through the local railroads'
records on past employees, concentrating on the Southern Pacific, but
nothing said he was among those. He might just be somebody who liked
to see train wrecks.

"You might know," said Hackett, "we'd
get handed another one. July, after all. The rate always goes up in
summer." Which, oddly enough, was true of other crimes as well
as homicide.

The new one was at an address on Wilshire, close in
downtown, just the other side of the Harbor Freeway. When they got
there, in Hackett's car, they saw a rather elegant small building,
new-looking, of stucco and synthetic decorative stone. The stucco was
painted gray and the trim white. There was a sign swinging from a
fancy wrought-iron post at the sidewalk: Dr. Francis Nestor, Doctor
of Chiropractic, it announced.

A squad car sat in front of the building, and Hackett
recognized Dr. Bainbridge's old Chevy.

The white door was open; they went in. The waiting
room was well furnished in very modern style: gray carpet, low
turquoise sectional, black plastic chairs, one of those modern
paintings that to Hackett looked like the product of a kindergarten.

A woman sat on the sectional; she looked dazed and a
little frightened. "But it just doesn't seem possible," she
was saying, shaking her head. "Frank, dead. All of a sudden,
like this."

The big uniformed man standing beside her came over
to Hackett, who introduced himself and Palliser. "Glad to have
you here, sir, I'm Bronson--I ought to be getting back on tour.
That's the wife, by the way. See, what happened is, far as I can make
it out, this guy--the chiropractor--had an evening appointment last
night. He should've been in by at least midnight, only he wasn't.
Naturally, I suppose, Mrs. Nestor sat up worrying, but maybe he used
to step out on her once in a while, and she thought--well, anyway, it
wasn't until about an hour ago she decided to do something about it
and came down to his office. Found the front door locked, went round
to the side, and saw that door'd been forced open--lock broken. She
was afraid to go in alone, so she called in and I got chased over.
And there he is, shot--and no gun, so I--"

"Well," said Hackett. "That about it?
Wait a minute and show me that door, will you?" He went over to
the woman. "Mrs. Nestor?"

She looked up at him. "Yes."

"
We're from headquarters. I'll want to ask you a
few questions, but not right now. Will you stay here or would you
rather go home?"

"Oh," she said. "Of course. No, that's
all right, I'll wait. It just doesn't seem possible, that's all. So
sudden."

She was a woman in her early thirties, he judged, and
ordinary-looking: not very attractive, what another woman might call
mousy. Her hair was dun-colored, fluffed out around her thin sallow
face in a too youthful style; she didn't have on much make-up, and
she wore a plain, neat blue cotton dress, no stockings, a pair of
saddle shoes with white ankle socks. Interestingly, she didn't seem
to have been crying.

The patrolman led him out the single door at the rear
of the room, to a short cross hall with several doors.

"Down here, sir." The second outside
entrance was on the right side of the building. The door had been
forced: crudely forced, with something like a tire iron or, of
course, a jemmy. This building sat between two much larger ones; on
this side its nearest neighbor, across a small parking lot, was a
three-story office building. Without much doubt, nobody there at
night. Hackett sighed, said, "O.K., I guess you might as well
get back on tour."

He went down to the other end of the hall, past two
open-doored examination rooms, to the scene of activity. This was a
private office; there was a glass-topped walnut desk, a
plastic-upholstered swivel chair behind it, a glass-fronted bookcase,
a couple of other chairs. The floor was marble-patterned vinyl. This
building, and the rooms they had seen, looked like class: Dr. Nestor
had evidently been doing very well indeed with his practice.

"
What does it look like?" he asked. In that
confined space, several men were having difficulty avoiding each
other or disturbing possible evidence as they went about their jobs.
Dr. Bainbridge was squatting over the body.

Scarne was taking flash shots. Marx was printing the
top of the desk, and Horder was printing the flat slab door.
Bainbridge glanced up testily. "I've just got here. You can see
he's been shot. Probably a small caliber, and until I've looked
inside and so on I'll say roughly between-- oh, call it twelve and
sixteen hours."

Hackett looked at his watch. "Putting it between
eight and midnight last night." He bent and looked at the
corpse.

Frank Nestor had been, probably, around thirty--five.
Hackett's first thought was that, even dead, he looked an unlikely
husband for the plain sallow woman out there in the waiting room. You
could see that Nestor had been a very good-looking man, the type you
could call a ladies' man. Not very big, middle size, but he had lean,
handsome, regular features, with a hairline dark mustache and curly
dark hair. And he was dressed to the nines, in beige flannel slacks,
an expensive brown sports jacket, white shirt, and a beige silk tie
with brown horse heads on it; that was neatly confined by a gold tie
clasp set with a piece of carved jade. He was lying on his back
directly in front of the desk, almost parallel to its length. One
arm, the left, was flung out and twisted so that the back of the hand
was uppermost; there was a heavy gold ring set with a black star
sapphire on the little finger. The other arm was across the chest,
and that hand was clenched. He'd been shot once in the forehead, very
neatly. As Bainbridge said, probably a small caliber; there was very
little mess.

Marx looked up and said, "It looks kind of
ordinary, Sergeant. A break-in, and whoever it was didn't expect to
find him here. There's a steel cashbox--the wife says he kept cash in
it anyway--there."

"
I see," said Hackett. The steel box, a
smallish one about eight inches long, had evidently been kept in the
left-hand top drawer of the desk; that drawer stood open, and the box
was lying on its side a couple of feet away from the body. Its lid
was open; a key was still in the lock, suspended from a ring that
held others.

"His car's parked out there in the lot,"
Marx offered further.

That, of course, was just what it looked like: a
simple break-in. The burglar running into Nestor, using his gun.
Riffling the place, using Nestor's keys, and running. Only, equally
of course, you had to look at all the possibilities. It could also
have been set up to look like that.

Nestor the good-looking sporty type. Ladies' man? His
clothes and this office spelled Success, spelled Prosperity. That
unglamorous female in the waiting room didn‘t look like the kind of
woman Nestor would have married. Conceivably, when they came to look,
they'd find that he had indeed stepped out on her. Maybe she'd been
jealous enough to . . . Or maybe somebody's husband had been jealous
enough to . . . You never knew.

"Well," he said. "John, suppose you
have a look through the desk and so on, and I'll ask Mrs. Nestor a
few questions."
 
 

TWO

"Are you feeling well enough to answer a couple
of questions, Mrs. Nestor?" Hackett sat down facing her, got out
his notebook.

"Oh yes," she said obediently. "Of
course it's been quite a shock, coming so suddenly. I can't realize
it yet."

Her eyes were a greeny brown, oddly flat and dull.
But she hadn't, he thought, done any crying. Of course that didn't
say anything: some people didn't cry easily.

"Your husband seems to have been doing very well
here."

She looked around the waiting room. "Oh yes, he
was, I think. People liked him, I suppose. He put up such a good
appearance, and made people like him. He'd always said he knew he'd
be a success at it, he'd wanted to be a doctor--a real medical
doctor, I mean--but of course this was a shorter course and not so
expensive. Not but what it cost quite a bit at that, it's a four-year
course now."

"How long had he been in practice?"

"Oh, only a little over three years."

Hackett, asking these questions he didn't really care
about, to get her talking, was surprised. This office must have cost
something to rent. "How long had he been here, in this office?"

"Oh, he started out here. He had--it was
lucky--a legacy about then, and he said it was better to invest it in
the office, because a good front always impressed people."

"I see. Well, he had an appointment last
evening?"

She nodded. She spoke flatly, emotionlessly. "He'd
do that for people who couldn't get in during the day. I think it was
for eight o'clock."

"Did he tell you what time to expect him home?"

"No."

"It seems you didn't get really worried until
this morning," said Hackett. "Enough to--investigate. I'm
sorry to ask you, Mrs. Nestor, but was that because he had stayed
away overnight--before?”

She looked at him thoughtfully, as if really seeing
him for the first time; her expression didn't change at all. She
dabbed at her pale lips with a wadded-up handkerchief and after a
moment said deliberately, "I expect I'd better tell you why.
It's not very pleasant, but I can see you'd have to know. I only hope
it doesn't all have to come out in the papers. That wouldn't be very
nice." She spoke like a woman of some education; but he thought
that, whatever emotions she'd once had, they'd been driven out of
her, or wasted away, somehow, for some time. "Yes, I'm sorry to
have to say it, but he had stayed away like that before, without
telling me."

"I see. Do you know of any other woman in his
life?"

Hackett felt like apologizing for the cliché, but
how else would you put it?

"I wouldn't know any names," she said. "I
didn't know many of Frank's friends. Not any more. I expect I'd
better say how it was, or you'll think that's awfully queer. You see,
my father had quite a lot of money, and that was why Frank married
me. I didn't realize that until Father died and we found he'd lost
all the money some way--I never understood exactly how. Frank
was--very angry about that. I expect he'd have left me then, but he'd
got used to me. And I kept a nice place for him, a comfortable home,
and good meals and so on. And of course as long as he had a wife no
other woman could catch up to him, if you see what I mean. It was
convenient for him. And then, of course, there was Mr. Marlowe.”

"Who is Mr. Marlowe?”

She dabbed at her lips again. "He was a friend
of my father's. When--before Frank was doing so well, he'd drop
around sometimes and give me little presents--to see we had enough to
eat, at least." No trace of bitterness in her tone. "And he
lent Frank the money for the chiropractic course. Of course Frank
paid him back."

"l see. Your husband didn't keep any regular
routine, about coming home?"

"Oh, you mustn't think we ever quarreled,"
she said. "It was just sort of understood. It wasn't like
that--he was home to dinner most nights, or he'd call if he wasn't
going to be. A few nights a week he'd be out somewhere, and
sometimes--as I say--he wouldn't come home at all, but then he'd
usually go straight to his office, from--wherever he'd been. He kept
a razor and clean shirts there, I think."

"I see. Well now, why did you begin to get
alarmed, Mrs. Nestor?" You ran into all sorts of things on this
job, but you never got beyond surprise at the behavior of human
people, the ways they lived and the compromises they made with life.
That good-looking corpse in there . . . This woman had been alive
once. Or had she? Probably--she'd never have been very pretty--she'd
been wildly in love with him, and it had broken her when she found
how he felt.

"Oh well, when I found he hadn't come to the
office I did wonder. He was always prompt about that, because he
really did like money, you see. And when Miss Corliss called and said
he wasn't there--"

"Miss Corliss."

"She's his office nurse. She phoned me to ask
why he wasn't there. She hadn't a key to the office, you see, and of
course the front door was locked. Well, of course, as you can
understand, I didn't care to have her know I didn't know where Frank
was. I do hope all this won't have to come out in the papers.” Her
flat, emotionless voice was beginning to raise the hairs on Hackett's
neck. "So I told her he wasn't feeling well and wouldn't be in,
she might as well go home. But it did seem peculiar, because it
wasn't like him. So I came straight here--"