Mark of Murder - Dell Shannon (30 page)

"Answers to a few questions, Mrs. Elger, if you
don't mind." The room wasn't much neater than when he'd seen it
first, and it hadn't been dusted in some time. She told him
ungraciously to sit down, perched herself on the arm of a chair.

"Well?"

"Do you remember what you and your husband were
doing on Tuesday night a week ago? A week ago yesterday?"

"Heavens, I don't know. I suppose we were here,
if we weren't-- Oh no, the Werthers' party was on Wednesday, wasn't
it?"

"It's not so very long ago," said Mendoza.

"Why on earth you want to know-- Oh. That--that
was the night Frank was shot, wasn't it? For heaven's sake. You can't
be thinking we had--"

"Just try to remember, please."

"Oh well! It was--yes, we went out to dinner--to
the Tail o' the Cock, I think. Tuesday. Oh, I do remember, yes, as a
matter of fact we were arguing all through dinner about that silly
charge-account thing, and all the way home for that matter, and it
wasn't long after we got home that Cliff got really mad and sort of
slammed out--"

"Arguing over a bill you'd run up?" said
Mendoza. "And he left the apartment. When?"

"Heavens, I wasn't watching the clock, about
half past nine, I suppose .... No, I don't know where he went. What
does it matter? I expect to a bar somewhere, he was a little high
when he came home."

"At what time?"

She shrugged petulantly. "About midnight, I
guess. I was in bed."

"Mrs. Elger, has your husband ever owned a gun?"

"A-- Well, of course not," she said. "What
on earth--You simply can't be thinking-- Frank? Good heavens, it was
just----just an episode. Not important."

"What's important or not," said Mendoza,
"depends on who's looking at it. Thanks very much .... "

He sat in the car thinking about that. Cliff Elger in
a temper, and he might be quick to hit out at a man, but probably not
the type to knock a woman around; so, rushing out, in his temper. To
a bar? Or had he, on the way, started brooding over Ruth and Nestor
again? And . . .

Wait a minute. How could he have known Nestor would
be in his office at that hour? Had he known Nestor's home address?
Well, it was in the phone book. He'd have tried there first, wouldn't
he? But he hadn't.

Mendoza was still liking the idea of Cliff Elger for
Nestor, because--admit it--he'd like to think the Nestor thing was
behind the assault on Art, and Elger was the only man they'd run
across so far who could certainly have handled Art without too much
trouble.

All right, he thought. Suddenly he saw another, more
plausible picture. Elger rushing out to a bar. Downing three or four
highballs. Maybe it affected him the way it affected Mendoza; but
whether or no, say he was brooding. And worked up a rage at Nestor.
Maybe she'd been lying about the gun, or maybe he kept one at his
office and she didn't know that, maybe Nestor had had the gun unknown
to Madge Corliss. That sounded more plausible; a man Nestor's size
might well reach for a gun, if he had one, when a gorilla like Elger
came in mad. Yes, say that whatever Nestor's appointment had been, it
was over, and Nestor was maybe just about to leave when Elger burst
in--

Why Nestor's office? How had he known--

Say he was drunk, but--

Hell.

He drove back to the office. The hospital hadn't
called. They had, however, got an ident on that unknown victim of the
Slasher, through the Greyhound Bus office and the San Diego police.
His name was George Snaid, and he'd been picked up for vagrancy in
San Diego and given the usual twenty-four hours to leave town.
Nothing more was known about him. Another of the victims who wouldn't
be missed.

The court order to open Madge Corliss' safe-deposit
box hadn't come through yet. "Damn judges," said Mendoza.
He wanted to see that list.

He sent Lake out for coffee. He sat at his desk chain
smoking nervously. Dwyer, with nothing special to do, was playing
solitaire desultorily, laying out the cards on top of a filing case,
wandering over to stare at the phones on the desk every Eve minutes.
He wasn't much of a cardplayer, and his inept, awkward shuffling of
the deck got on Mendoza's nerves.

"I did think of something," he said
presently. "A little thing. You know how that dame in the room
next to Florence Dahl said the Slasher kept shouting something like
‘Every ham's gaining on me'? It came to me what it was. Every man's
hand against me. Out of the Bible, isn't it?"

"I couldn't say," said Mendoza. "Very
likely. Yes, that's probably what it was. I wonder if we could trace
him back at all. Where he started, how he got that way. That landlady
on Boardman Street said he had a Southern accent."

But he wasn't thinking about the Slasher; that was
over and done, and there was other work to do. "Bert?"

"Well?"

"You talked to those old pals of Nestor's who
used to play poker with him. Any of them mention anything about
that?"

"About what?"

"What kind of poker player he was."

"Oh." Dwyer considered, looking at the deck
in his hand. "One fellow--another chiropractor--said he was a
wild gambler. Take any long chance, he said. So he lost oftener than
he won."

"Yes. That kind of poker player," said
Mendoza. "But that wasn't why he lost oftener than he won. That
was because he didn't play enough poker. The man who's playing any
game regularly, day to day, always has an edge over the occasional
player .... Do you have to try to tear the deck in half every time
you shuffle? Look."

He took the cards from Dwyer and shuffled them.
"Gentle and easy, see?"

"I'm not a pro gambler," said Dwyer.

"No." Having the cards, Mendoza kept them;
absently he shuffled, squared the deck neatly, cut it, and turned up
the ace of diamonds. "
Tuerto
,"
he said. "A lucky card."

He shuffled the deck again, squared it and cut, to
show the ace of diamonds again.

"Don't ever ask me to play cards with you,"
said Dwyer. "It's just a trick." Mendoza shuffled again,
using a different method, and began to deal him a poker hand, calling
the cards as he tossed them face down. "King of spades. Deuce of
clubs. Ace of hearts. Four of hearts--"

"Wrong. Three of clubs."

"Hell, I'm out of practice at crooked deals ....
" The cards moved restlessly between his hands. "Did I tell
you about meeting Benny Metzer on that cruise liner? I took twenty
bucks off him--he could have killed me." Mendoza laughed
sharply.

"
One of your pro gambler acquaintances? Do
tell." Dwyer was watching the telephone again.

"That's right, you came up here from Forgery,
didn't you?"

"And a damn dull job that was," said Dwyer
absently.

"Sometimes it can be." Mendoza dealt
himself a straight poker hand and quite by chance drew a full house.
"So it can happen," he muttered.

Think about this thing, damn it. Nestor. If that nice
story he'd built up about Cliff Elger was so, then--when Nestor was
still in his office--his appointment, whatever it was, must have
taken up some time. Not the usual job, because Corliss hadn't known
about it. The spot of genteel blackmail? And, naturally, the
blackmailee arguing, and the sparring back and forth about the price?
Only, really, why bring in Elger, in that case? Blackmail was quite a
reasonable motive for murder.

Only what did the blackmail have to be? Threat of
revealing an abortion. These days, with the relaxed morals . . . And
besides, Nestor couldn't have carried out such a threat without
revealing himself and his part in it, which anybody with common sense
would . . .

All right. All right. Some featherbrained woman, not
seeing that, shooting him in panic? A man had got rid of the .22. So,
the woman confessing to some protective male--father, husband, boy
friend--who had thereupon set up the bogus burglary and got rid of
the gun.

And that would say for pretty sure that the assault
on Art had been the outside thing.

Wouldn't it? Well, for ninety-eight per cent sure.
Art hadn't known about those illicit patients--couldn't have known
who they were, of course. Hard to see how he might have inadvertently
stumbled across . . .

Mendoza shuffled and cut, and turned up the knave of
clubs. He stared at it for a moment, slapped the deck together,
centered it on his desk, and stood up. "Do you know what the
knave of clubs means in cartomancy?"

"I don't even know what cartomancy means,"
said Dwyer.

"Fortunetelling with cards. The knave of clubs,"
said Mendoza, "stands for a bearer of unexpected news. I'm going
out to find him. I probably won't be long."

"Let's just hope it's good news," said
Dwyer after him. This was a will-o'-the-wisp, of course. Just an
idea. But sometimes you grabbed at any small hope there might be,
looking for a lead.

He went straight out Wilshire, and there wasn't much
traffic this early. It wasn't ten o'clock yet. Just on ten. The
street signs changed to elegant black on white, and he was in Beverly
Hills. He turned left on Beverly Drive and went down four blocks to a
line of  expensive-looking shop fronts. Miraculously he found a
parking slot, and found he had a nickel in change. He yanked the
handle on the parking meter; nothing happened; he shook it hard, and
it condescended to bury the red Violation sign in its insides. He
walked back to the most expensive-looking shop front of all. It
presented a genteel pale fawn facade with tinted glass double doors.
There was no legend on the doors at all; the only designation it
offered to reveal its commercial purposes was a single discreet name
in lower-case giIt letters above the door: herrrington.

Mendoza went in. There was pale fawn carpeting,
nothing so vulgar as a counter; this room, an anteroom to the high
mysteries beyond, was only about fifteen feet square. An exquisite
young man in pale fawn dacron drifted up, identified him, and
murmured, "I'll fetch Mr. Harrington, sir. Do sit down."

Mendoza didn't sit down. He wandered over to one of
the full-length triple mirrors and decided absently that the Italian
silk was too dark a gray. He adjusted his tie. "You again,"
said Harrington abruptly behind him. "Good God, I just made you
two new suits and those evening clothes. You're a vain bastard,
Mendoza."

Mendoza turned around. "You malign me. No, I
don't want anything new. I want some information."

Harrington was a solid, round little man of some
heft, with a bald round head and pudgy little hands. He also had a
pair of very sharp black eyes. He cocked the bald head at Mendoza.
"Oh?"

"Which you probably can't give me," said
Mendoza. He handed over the button, the little ordinary button. "Can
you tell me anything about that? It occurred to me it's in your line.
You're quite a specialist on anything to do with male attire, aren't
you?"

Harrington looked at the button, turning it over in
his fingers.

"I know it's a very ordinary sort of thing,"
said Mendoza apologetically.

"My God, and you a detective!" said
Harrington. "Of course, maybe only a specialist would spot it. I
can tell you this and that about it, of course. To start with, it's
obviously a button from the sleeve of a jacket. Too small to be an
ordinary jacket button. It's--"

"The sleeve of a-- But--"

"No, I know. Those conservative bastards,”
said Harrington with a chuckle. "Grandpa had buttons on his
sleeves, so naturally you go on putting buttons on sleeves. No
scope--no progress. I haven't put any buttons on sleeves since,
lessee, about 1939, but they still do. Most of 'em. I get some of
their stuff in for repair occasionally."

Mendoza was staring at him. "Harrington,"
he said, "did you ever wonder how that fellow in the Bible felt
when his ass started to talk to him? Not that I mean to imply-- Whose
stuff?"

Harrington tapped the button thoughtfully. "There
you are," he said, "something else. Bone. Old-fashioned.
Practically everybody uses plastic these days. Well, I could give a
random guess. Either Rowlandson, or Herrick and King, or possibly
Shattuck. Savile Row, of course."
 
"Of
course," repeated Mendoza gently .... And quite suddenly, in one
single lucid moment, everything fell into place and he saw it unreel
before him like a moving picture. Of course.

"Say something to you?" asked Harrington
interestedly. But Mendoza was raptly placing the pieces of the jigsaw
puzzle where they belonged. "A delightful Easter weekend,"
he said absorbedly. "Oh yes .... have announced the engagement .
. . Five thousand bucks, but he'd be willing to pay high for-- Oh
yes, I see. Smart up to a point. And then--and then--" His eyes
turned cold, and he whispered to himself, "The bastard--just a
cop--to cover it up. And naturally, cops being morons or they
wouldn't be cops, and he--"

"Did I say something?" asked Harrington,
sounding more interested.268

Mendoza focused on him with a little difficulty.
"Harrington," he said earnestly, "you are indeed the
knave of clubs. A bearer of news. I forgive you that tweed
monstrosity you palmed off on me two years back. I forgive you--
Well, never mind. My heartfelt thanks. Give me that thing." He
almost ran out.