Mark of Murder - Dell Shannon (21 page)

"I'll bet she was sorry. Suddenly losing a
profitable job. Do you know what cut he gave her?"

Webster shifted uneasily. "I dunno what you
mean. Listen, we're both straight, Madge never--"

"That's fine," said Mendoza. "Then you
won't object to my having your apartment searched, as we searched
Miss Corliss'."

After a moment Webster said, "Why, I got no
objection. I'm clean."

"Let's just see if the warrant's come through
.... Did Miss Corliss ever give you anything to keep for her?"

"No, sir."

"If she did, better tell me now," said
Mendoza.

"No, she never. I don't know what you're getting
at. I told you all I know, can I go now?"

"
No," said Mendoza. "You'll stay right
here until a couple of men have looked through your place." He
looked at his watch; they'd be night-shift men. He took Webster out
to the anteroom. The search warrant was on its way up; Sergeant Lake
was just leaving. Mendoza told Sergeant Farrell, just coming on,
about the warrant, to send out a couple of men.

He went back to his office and called Alison to tell
her he'd be late. Possibly not home at all until God knew when.

"All right, darling, we won't expect you ....
Yes, she's fine, we've been so relieved ever since they called this
morning? Alison laughed. "And, Luis, Máiri's taking all the
credit for it--her solemn novena beginning to work, you know!”

"One good Christian soul to intercede for the
heathen," he said. "Yes. Expect me when you see me,
hermosa
."

Time enough to tell them, if . . .

He put the phone down.
 
It
was a definite headache now. He hadn't wanted much lunch, and come to
think he hadn't had any breakfast. Ought to go out and get something.

Sixty hours, said Dr.
MacFarlane. My God, thought Mendoza in vague surprise, is this still
only Monday? These long, long days, since he'd ripped open that
yellow envelope in the Bermuda hotel room . . .

* * *

It was seven-fifty, and he'd taken two aspirin
Sergeant Farrell had found for him, which hadn't done much for the
headache, when Glasser and Higgins came back from Larry Webster's
apartment. Higgins said, "Sorry, we'd have been here before but
we thought they ought to be checked for prints, just in case.
Webster's are all over most of 'em--they checked Records." He
laid a manila envelope on the desk; he was looking pleased.

Mendoza upended it and a dozen little glass ampoules
rolled out. The kind containing one set dose each, for convenience in
filling a hypodermic syringe. They were all neatly labeled. Morphine.

"
¡Qué bello!
"
said Mendoza. "Where?"

Higgins smiled. "In the middle of a couple of
pounds of sugar in a cannister in the kitchen. A lot of people don't
realize we're halfway bright."

Mendoza said, "Fetch him in.”

Webster came in smiling ingratiatingly. "Now you
found out I'm clean, I never--"

Mendoza crooked a finger at him. "Come here,
friend. Where'd you get these pretty little things? Are you breaking
in on the big time, with dope?"

Webster looked at the ampoules and said despondently,

"Oh hell. Hell and damnation. I never figured
you'd fnd 'em where I hid 'em. But they're not mine. Honest, sir, I
never-- Madge asked me to hold 'em for her. I'm not taking no narco
rap, not even for Madge. I'm leveling with you, they're hers, see-"

Mendoza said resignedly to Higgins, "Go bring
her in, George. Fast. Tell Farrell to get the warrants, Webster and
Corliss--narco possession. And he might send out for a sandwich and
coffee."

"With pleasure," said Higgins, and went
out.

"You can't hold me-- I didn't have anything to
do--it was Madge! I--"

"Sit down, Larry," said Mendoza tiredly.
"You're going nowhere for a while."
 

FOURTEEN

Margaret Corliss didn't come apart as easily as
Webster had, of course. She went on stolidly denying it, calling
Webster a liar, saying they couldn't prove anything. Mendoza kept at
her for some time before the sense of what he was saying seemed to
reach her.

"We will prove it, you know. We're already on
the way to proving that most of those names in the appointment book
are fakes, and who else could have put them there and why? On that
bloodstained smock, we're going to find that no legitimate patient
ever bled in his office, and we know it's not his type of blood, but
it is his smock. Why did he want a sterilizer? Why did he want
morphine? And so on and so on. You'd be surprised what evidence the
lab can find when they go looking, and they'l1 be taking those
examination rooms apart. Now we've charged you with something, I can
get an order to open that safe deposit box you've got at the Bank of
America, and I'll bet I'll find some interesting things in it."

That was what got to her. She shrugged and sat back,
accepting it coolly: a gambler who'd lost this throw. "I guess
you will," she said calmly. "You win. I did all I could--it
was reely very awkward, Doctor getting shot like that, you can see it
was. But if you open that box, well, you'll get the evidence all
right. Just how the luck goes. Can I have a cigarette?"

He gave her one. "Now, let's have some straight
answers."

"
I don't know why I should tell you anything."

"
Look," he said. "You'll get a
one-to-three and serve the minimum term, on a first offense. You're
still ahead in a way--I expect you've saved some of your cut. But
whoever killed Nestor, again in a way, put you in this spot, didn't
he? All I want to know--"

She was quite informative, eventually. Once she saw
she couldn't get out of it, she told him what he wanted to know; and
he thought she was telling the truth. Frank Nestor had approached her
much as Mendoza had imagined, seeing her name in the paper in
connection with the beauty shop. He'd said frankly he intended to set
up a mill and needed a woman contact. She'd sized him up and thrown
in with him, and it had turned out a very profitable venture. In one
way, thought Mendoza, those two had been much alike: all business,
taking the main chance.

"Doctor was very clever," she said. "He
had a lot of ever so clever ideas. You know those ads in the personal
columns that say, Any girl in trouble call this number? Well, of
course they're put in by real charities or social workers, like that,
and they don't exactly mean the kind of help Doctor meant." She
smiled. "But he had a lot of cards printed with that on, and my
phone number. I left them all sorts of places, places he picked
out--at the college libraries at U.S.C. and U.C.L.A., and so on, and
in ladies' rooms in all the expensive night clubs and big hotels--"

"Quite the little publicity agent," said
Mendoza, "wasn't he?"

"Oh, I said he was clever. And once you get a
business like that started, you know, the women tell each other--it
gets around. Not that I ever had any experience of it before,"
she added hastily. She wasn't, at this late date, going to connect
herself again to the Sally-Ann business.

"And he was good, too. Never the hint of any
trouble, he was always so careful, everything all sterile, and he
always put them right out with the morphine .... I don't know where
he got that. No, that's level, I reely don't. I know he'd have liked
to use a regular anesthetic, like sodium pentothal or something like
that, but there was no way for him to get hold of it, you see. He was
very careful, about the morphine--he always tested their hearts first
and took their blood pressure. He'd have made a good surgeon. Right
from the first, it all went as smooth as could be .... You'd be
surprised, how many of the girls who called me, who'd meant to go on
and have the baby and put it out for adoption, because they didn't
know where to go, you see--they jumped at it, when they found how
Doctor wanted to help them."

"How did he charge?"

"Well, that was the only trouble there ever
was," admitted Margaret Corliss. "Not all of them could
raise the kind of money he was asking. You see, the--well, call them
patients--he wanted to get, he said from the first, were the ones
with money. Who could pay anything up to five hundred or more. You
know, the college girls with big allowances, or society girls and
women. Like that. And we did get some of those, too. Sometimes he'd
be sorry for a girl and do it for less. The way we worked it was, I'd
meet the girl outside somewhere, like in a park, and size her up,
what she was good for, and make the deal. Then, when she'd raised the
money, we'd make an appointment at my apartment. Doctor'd meet us
there and drive us to the office--it was always at night, and he'd go
round all different ways so she wouldn't be quite sure where she was,
see--and do the job, and then I'd keep the girl overnight. But he was
so careful, there was never any trouble. They never knew a thing
about it, under the dope, and it was just like in a regular hospital,
everything sterile and all. They never knew his name, of course ....
The lowest I ever remember was two hundred, he was sorry for that
girl. He always asked five at least and if we could see it was a
woman with real money he'd get seven-fifty. A couple of times we got
a thousand. Because it was all guaranteed absolutely safe, you see.
Those two were older women, and we figured they were married--maybe
society women of some kind, you know."

"Did he keep a list of them?"

A little reluctantly she said, "It's in the
safety box. Of course most of them gave wrong names, I suppose"
"Just about as he started practice--both legitimate and
otherwise," said Mendoza, "he claimed to have had a legacy.
Do you know anything about that five thousand bucks?"

She shook her head. "Not reely. He spent a lot
of money fixing up the office, and I did ask him how he could afford
it, because he paid cash. He just laughed--he was always laughing,
Doctor, such a handsome man . . ." She brushed away genuine
tears. "And he said something about casting your bread on the
waters."

"Oh, really. Well, and so who was the
appointment with on Tuesday night?"

"There wasn't one. No, reely there wasn't. I'd
know, I was always there, just like I told you. There wasn't any job
set up for that night. I don't know what he'd be doing at the
office."

"All right. You knew he was stepping out on his
wife--did he use the office to meet women?"

"I wouldn't know," she said primly. "It
was just business between Doctor and me-- I'd heard him say things
about women he went out with, but not to reely know anything about
them, or where he took them or like that. He might have, but I
wouldn't know."

He accepted that. Quite a story, he thought; Nestor
had been an enterprising fellow. Saw where there was money to be had
and went for it the shortest way. And when you looked at it from one
angle, it could be he'd saved a lot of suffering and maybe a few
lives, those women coming to him, instead of some drunken old quack
or dirty midwife.

"
Was there any recent trouble over a patient?
Over the payment, or anything else?"

No, there hadn't been, she said. There had been a
couple of girls lately who'd had difficulty raising the money, and
one of them--this had been about a month ago--had somehow managed to
get it, and came back, but Nestor had refused to do the job because
it was too late, he said--over three months. "You see how good
he was, he said it wouldn't be safe for her. She was awf'ly mad, and
argued with him a long time, but he stuck to it."

Nestor a very canny one, too. Legally speaking, the
abortion of a foetus more than three months old was manslaughter.
Which Nestor had undoubtedly known.

"Well, what do you think happened?" he
asked suddenly. And he'd once thought, maybe it was this woman and
Webster had assaulted Art, if . . . But he was a long way from being
sure about that now. He thought she was leveling, and at a second
look he didn't feel she'd be capable of that. "You hadn't any
quarrel with him--"

"The idea! Of course not, we got along fine,
Doctor was reely a very nice man."

"Did he keep a gun in the office? He didn't.
Well, who do you think shot him?"

She looked a little surprised. "Why, it was the
burglar, wasn't it? Did you think it might be some--some private
reason? Oh, that reely couldn't be. Nobody had any reason to want him
dead. Everybody liked him. He had ever so many friends, he was always
going to parties .... Well, sometimes it'd be with his wife,
sometimes not, I guess, from what he said. Nobody seemed to like her
much, she's a funny kind of woman, the little I've seen of her. But
he was popular .... "

She was helpful, but not to the extent he'd hoped.

Still, it cleared this part of the puzzle out of the
way; and he thought she'd spoken the truth when she denied that
Nestor had had an appointment--a professional appointment--that
Tuesday night.

Meeting a woman in the office, maybe, and her husband
suspecting, following her?

Glasser took Margaret Corliss up to the County Jail
and saw her booked in, with Webster. Mendoza sent a routine note up
to the Narcotics office about them, though the narco charge wasn't
anything really, a formality.