Mark of Murder llm-7 Page 2

  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 cliche, 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-"

  "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 menage 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 h
ad 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.