Mark of Murder - Dell Shannon (3 page)

"Why, Mrs. Nestor? Apparently he wasn't here,
you knew that."

"I knew that, of course. The thought that just
crossed my mind was that he had possibly decided to leave me, or just
gone away somewhere on a little trip, and he might have left a note
here. I didn't know, but it was possible. But when I saw his car in
the parking lot at the side, of course it looked even odder, and then
I saw that the side door had been forced. I didn't like to go in
alone. I thought--well, I don't quite know what I thought, but I
walked up to the drugstore on the corner and called the police."

Hackett looked at her reflectively. That, he thought,
was quite a story. From quite a female. Her dull eyes were
unreadable. Had she still loved him enough to feel jealousy? Had she
got to hating him enough to kill him? A very peculiar ménage that
had been, to say the least. And did that ring quite true, about why
she'd come to the office? Not a very natural thing to do, or was it?
He thought he'd ask her to let the lab give her a cordite test,
though that wasn't always conclusive.

"Were you at home all last evening?" he
asked. "Alone?"

"Oh yes." She gave the address readily:
Kenmore Avenue. "Frank left after dinner, about seven-thirty. I
watched TV a little while, and did some mending, and then I realized
he probably wouldn't be in until late, so I went to bed. That was
about ten-thirty. It wasn't until this morning that I realized he
hadn't come home at all."

Horne, thought Hackett. My God. "Do you have
separate rooms?"

"Oh no, but, you see, I went to sleep."

He looked at her again. It was early to come to any
conclusions; he wasn't sure exactly how he felt about her story. He
said, "May I have your full name, please?"

"Andrea Lilian Nestor. My maiden name was
Wayne."

He thanked her. "I think that's all I'll ask of
you right now, Mrs. Nestor. We'll be in touch with you. I suppose
you'd like to go home. Have you a car, or--"

"Oh no," she said. "I don't drive."

"I'll have a car come and pick you up."

"That's very kind of you," she said,
sounding surprised. "I don't mind the bus. Could you tell me--I
expect you'll want to do an autopsy, but should I make any
arrangements?"

"For the--" That stopped him, the flatly
practical question. He said, "Not until we officially release
the body."

"Oh. I see. Well, thank you. I think," said
Andrea Nestor meditatively, "I'll have him cremated?

Hackett went back to the private office down the
hall. He felt shaken. He asked Marx if the phone had been printed; it
had, and he called in for a car to take Mrs. Nestor home. He thought
now, before he swallowed the obvious break-in and impersonal assault,
he'd take a long hard look at Andrea Nestor and at Frank Nestor's
social life.

And there was that Slasher, roaming around loose.
Four in ten days. God. He wished Luis was home. He said to Palliser,
"Picked up anything?"

"Not much. His files look a little interesting."

"Oh? How?"

"Well, this all looks very much in the money,
doesn't it?" Palliser gestured round the room. "But,
according to his files, he didn't really have many regular patients.
Maybe I'm no judge, but I'd say a setup like this should indicate
quite a large practice--maybe, what, at least eighty, a hundred, more
regular patients. Files on just thirty-six, and only about twenty of
those seem, by the appointment book, to have been coming at all
regularly. He charged six bucks an office visit."

"You don't say," said Hackett.

"All right to take it away?" The ambulance
had arrived; a couple of interns were looking in the door. Bainbridge
had already left.

Hackett glanced down at the body and said absently,
"Yes," and then, "Wait a minute." He squatted
down beside it. The right hand, closed, lay across the chest; he
lifted it, turned it over. There was something clutched between
finger and thumb; with some difficulty he pried loose the dead man's
grip. "Now this I don't believe," he said. "The clue
straight out of Edgar Wallace."

Palliser bent to look, and said he'd be damned.

It was a button. A very ordinary-looking button, very
dark gray or black, with four little holes, and a tiny strand of
thread still caught in one. A button about half an inch in diameter.

Palliser straightened up. "Are we supposed to
read it that he made a grab at the killer and got this instead of the
gun? Talk about too good to be true--"

"Well, it could happen," said Hackett.
"Just because it looks obvious-- You know as well as I do, it's
usually just what it looks like.”

"
Sure," said Palliser. "So it is. You
want to take his files along?"

"I'll see them later, here." Hackett looked
at his watch, said to the interns. "O.K., he's all yours,"
and looked round the office. Nothing much more to do here right now.
Irrelevantly he thought of Roberto Reyes. Such a good boy. The fine
marks at school. The priest talking about God's will.

In Hackett's book, the ones like the Slasher hadn't
one damn thing to do with God's will.

Right now, he thought, his money would
go--tentatively--on Andrea Nestor, as the X who had taken Frank
Nestor off. Or maybe a jealous husband. Some work to do on it. But
the hell of a lot more to do on the Slasher--as yet so very damned
anonymous.

There was also the train wreck.

He said to Palliser, "Come on, let's go have
lunch. I'll be concentrating on this thing for a while, and we'll let
Bert or somebody take over the routine on that Daylight thing. Agree
with you, probably come up with nothing definite in the end. But this
Slasher--damn it, who made up that one, I wonder?--we'll be working
but damn hard. You haven't seen all the statements--"

"No, I've really just seen the Times. You want
me to take over the routine on that?"

"I don't know yet," said Hackett. "Look,
let's drop by the office and get those statements, go up to
Federico's, OK.? You'd better be briefed, just in case." Yes,
this Nestor business looked like being tricky, but on the other hand
the press was howling about the Slasher--and that was indeed quite a
thing. Four in ten days .... The berserk killer, the lunatic killer,
who killed for little or no reason? Looked like that. And as yet
practically nothing on him.

He wished Luis were here. He might just have one of
his hunches about the Slasher. Which was wishful thinking, because
you didn't get anywhere on one like that with
irrational
hunches. If you got anywhere it was by the patient plodding routine.

That woman. I think I'll have him cremated.

Let Palliser take over the
routine on the Slasher? That I was getting the hell of a lot of
publicity, the sooner they cleared it up the better. If they didn't
yet have City Terrified of Random Slasher, they soon would have, way
the press boys were carrying on ....

* * *

He drank sugarless coffee glumly and watched Palliser
reading the statements.

The first one had been the Skid Row bum, found in a
cheap room in a shabby hotel on Third Street. They didn't even know
his last name; a bartender down on the Row had identified him as "a
guy named Mike," familiar down there, a wino. He'd been savagely
knifed, and the body slashed and mutilated after he was dead. The
desk clerk couldn't give anything but a very vague description of the
man who had rented the room. "They come 'n' go, you know,"
he said nervously. The scrawled signature in the register was almost
illegible; it might be Fred Rankin or Frank Tomkin or in fact
anything you could make of it. The clerk did say he hadn't any
luggage. Naturally, the clerk was pressed, as were the people on that
floor. Nobody was at all helpful; the man just hadn't been noticed,
and he'd taken the room only twelve hours before. Naturally, too, he
hadn't been back.

That was the situation when they found Florence Dahl.
Or rather when the woman in the next room found her and made enough
noise to bring the nearest traffic cop on the run. They knew most of
what there was to know about Florence--she had a string of arrests
and fines for soliciting and resorting--but that wasn't any help in
finding who'd killed her. Florence had gone downhill in twenty years
at the game and was taking any customers she could get. She'd been
living in a sleazy rooming house on Grand Avenue, and a couple of
women, the same types as Florence, who had rooms on the same floor,
had told go them a little. From what they'd heard. Some man Florence
had brought home that night, shouting and swearing something awful
there in her room. Couldn't remember anything specific he'd shouted,
except that one woman insisted he'd kept saying, "Every ham's
gaining on me," which hardly made sense however you interpreted
it. That had been about nine o'clock; only those two women and the
landlady home, besides Florence. It hadn't gone on very long, or
probably in due course the landlady--tolerant though she was--would
at least have gone up and banged on the door. He'd stopped shouting,
and maybe ten minutes later they'd heard the door of Florence's room
slam, and heard him go downstairs and out.

None of them had laid eyes on him, of course.

And that was when he started to look more important,
because Dr. Bainbridge and the lab had linked those two murders. On
account of the knife, and the M.O. Florence too had been stabbed,
slashed, and mutilated. "It looks like a very unusual knife,"
said Bainbridge. "From what we can figure out, measuring the
wounds and so on, about half the edge is serrated-like a bread knife,
you know. It's not a standard size--I don't think it's a commercially
made knife, though that's just a guess. The blade's about eleven
inches long, give or take half an inch, and unusually wide--about two
and a half inches."

"Quite a snickersnee," said Palliser now,
reading statements over coffee.

Hackett agreed glumly. In deference to his diet he'd
ordered only a large salad and coffee, and was still hungry.

He tried not to imagine what Angel had had for lunch.
They were still taking statements on Florence when the body of
Theodore Simms was found in an alley on Flower Street, close in to
downtown. All his identification left on him, but his mother said
he'd have had a little over five dollars in his wallet, and that was
missing. Simms had just lost his job as wholesale salesman for a
small local firm--no fault of his, the company had been laying off, 
having hit a slump--and was looking for another. He was Number Three
all right, treated just like the first two--stabbed, slashed, and
mutilated savagely.

Several people vaguely identified him as having been
in a small bar on Flower Street about nine o'clock that night. The
bartender was more definite; he said Simms had had two beers, and
that the man sitting next to him had started talking to him. Said
Simms hadn't done much of the talking, and he hadn't heard anything
of what the other man said himself, but they'd left together. What
had the second man looked like? "Hell, sort of ordinary, I
guess. I was busy, I just noticed out o' the tail of my eye, you
know? About medium height, I guess, not very fat or very thin--hell,
I wouldn't want to guess how old. Only thing I do remember, he had
two straight whiskies and he paid me with a silver dollar and two
dimes."

End of the line on Simms. That alley would be pretty
dark at night.

By then Hackett had reached the conclusion that this
was a bad one, the kind that killed on impulse for no reason, or a
lunatic reason. Fourteen-year-old Roberto Reyes just confirmed that.

Roberto's mother had called in last night, when he
failed to come home after the Boy Scout meeting at the Y.M.C.A.
"Always he is so good, to come straight home, and it is only the
few blocks he has to walk.
¡Dios me libre!
God forbid it, but I think of the accident--he knows to be careful,
but children--"

But they hadn't found Roberto until the middle of
this morning. A couple of kids, taking a short cut through another
alley facing on Second Street, had found Roberto. Number Four.

Eventually, with the priest soothing Mama's hysterics
and the other kids standing around crying, Hackett had got a few
pertinent facts out of Manuel Reyes. The boy was always prompt about
coming home; he wasn't supposed to be out late. The meeting would
have been over about eight o'clock, and the Y.M.C.A. was only four
blocks away from the Reyes home on Witmer Street. Yes, Roberto would
have walked down Second Street on his way home. But he would not have
talked to a stranger, gone anywhere with a stranger .... Well,
perhaps, if some person had asked him for directions, something like
that--he was a very polite boy, he would always want to be helpful.
"
¡Ah, qué atrocidad! ¿Para qué?
That this should happen to us--such a good boy always, such line
marks at school--"

"
Se combrende
,"
Hackett had said gently. "
Lo siento en la
alma.
We'll find whoever did it, Mr. Reyes,
and he'll be punished."

Which would mean a lot to Roberto, wouldn't it? he
thought. And it was something to work, with practically no evidence
on the killer. And no tie-up to any of the victims.