Mark of Murder - Dell Shannon (31 page)

"Knave of clubs?” said Harrington after him,
blankly. Mendoza gunned the Ferrari up Beverly as fast as the law
allowed. By God, he'd have a siren installed in this thing before he
was a week older .... He got onto Wilshire and headed back downtown,
and all the way the jigsaw pieces went on fitting themselves
together, so nice and neat ....

Oh yes. Andrea Nestor. The belt, of course. And the
button. Kenmore Avenue--but a dark stretch along there . . . And--

It was ten--fifty when he came fast into the office
and looked round. Palliser was just coming out of the sergeants'
office with a teletype sheet in his hand.

"We've got in a little more on Tenney. The S.P.
told us he listed his birthplace as Younker, Georgia, and we--"

"
¡No importa!
"
said Mendoza. "I only dropped in to pick up somebody--to keep an
eye on me while we drop on the X who shot Nestor and sent Art over
that cliff. Might as well be you, John.
¡Pues
vamonos ya!
Let's be on our way!" .

Palliser stared at him and dropped the teletype. "You
know--”

"I know all about it," said Mendoza grimly.
"Let's go and take him. And if I will be resigning from this
force, I'd like to leave a fairly clean record, so if I start to lose
my temper, boy, you restrain me .... That Goddamned self-important
stupid bastard! That--"

"Evidence?" said Palliser.

"Oh, there'll be evidence," said Mendoza.
"By God, there will! Has the hospital called?"

"
Not yet."

"Come on--1et's go and take him," said
Mendoza.
 

TWENTY

The impassive manservant blinked up at Mendoza. "I'm
afraid Mr. Marlowe has just finished breakfast, sir, I don't know
whether he'll see you--"

"
Oh, he'll see me!" said Mendoza. He walked
in past the man. "Where is he?"

His tone made the man blink again; a rather sly smile
crept over his mouth. "In the library, sir."

Mendoza led Palliser down to that door and opened it.
Marlowe, in a handsome tailored silk dressing gown, was sitting at
the desk opening his mail. He glanced up, and his expression
darkened. "What do you--"

"I've come for you, Marlowe," said Mendoza.
"I've run across a lot of stupid killers before now, but you're
one of the silliest. I want you on the charge of murdering Francis
Nestor and assauly with intent to murder on Arthur Hackett. Will you
wait for the warrant here or downtown?"

Marlowe went an ugly red. "You must be a
lunatic, sir. I don't know what you're-- That's quite absurd! Why
should I have wanted--Paul! My servant can tell you that I was here
all that evening, and I'm sure you must-- Ah, Paul. Just--"

"I'll do the asking," said Mendoza. "Was
Mr. Marlowe here, from about eight forty-five on, a week ago Tuesday
night?"

The man said, wooden-faced, "He certainly came
in around then, sir. He came to this room and said he didn't want to
be disturbed. I didn't see Mr. Marlowe again that evening, sir."

"Interesting," said Mendoza.

"
But of course you knew I was here, man! Why on
earth--"

"I can tell you the whole story now," said
Mendoza. "And I don't give a damn about Nestor, but for what you
did to Hackett, we're going to get you but good. It's never very
smart to try to kill a cop, Marlowe. First let me ask you if you own
a gun?"

Marlowe said coldly, "You needn't think you'll
get away with such highhanded-- Yes, I own several guns, but--"

The manservant coughed. "There is a small
amateur target-shooting range in the basement, sir, beside the
recreation room. The young gentlemen--"

Marlowe said furiously, "You may go, Paul!"

Mendoza sat down on the arm of a chair. "And
that just about puts the lid on your stupidity, doesn't it? You did
get rid of the gun, and the way you did that wasn't such a bad idea
either, but you never really expected to be connected to the case in
any way. You stupid bastard, don't you realize we can dig all those
slugs out of the sandbags or whatever your target backs up to down
there, and find quite a few to match up to that gun that killed
Nestor?"

Marlowe took a step back, and his mouth tightened. "I
had no reason--"

"You had a couple of very good reasons. You want
to know what I know? I'll tell you," said Mendoza. "A
little over three years ago you found that your youngest daughter
Susan had got herself, as they say, in trouble. You think the hell of
a lot of your line old family name, don't you? Yes, so maybe you
didn't think the young man was good enough for her--inconceivable
that he wouldn't have jumped at marrying this kind of money! Well,
you didn't have any contacts with an abortionist, and anyway you
wanted to be sure of a good safe job. And you thought of Frank
Nestor, the bright young man you'd staked to the chiropractic course.
It's quite a serious training these days, and he'd know enough to do
the job and do it nice and clean. And you didn't think he'd jib much
at it. He didn't, did he? Maybe it wasn't that Easter weekend she was
supposed to be yachting, but maybe it was too. Anyway, he obliged
you--and Susan-for, I think, the cancellation of his debt and the
nice round sum of five
grand .... How am I
doing, Marlowe?"

Marlowe sat down again in the desk chair.
"That's--no, I--"

"We'1l cut this short," said Mendoza
abruptly. "That was that. I don't suppose you knew you'd put
ideas in Nestor's head and he'd set up a profitable little abortion
mill. But he did like the long green, didn't he, and when your
daughter recently got engaged he saw how he might get some more out
of you. For his silence." Mendoza smiled. "Has she, maybe,
caused you a little trouble, Marlowe? The wild type? So you were only
too pleased at the prospect of getting her respectably married? And
in this one case Nestor could have told what he knew. Could have told
the young man--or his parents--how he knew she'd once been in the
market for an abortion, because you had asked him to do it, which of
course he'd righteously refused to do. Not a thing a young man--or
his parents--would like to hear about his fiancée, was it?
Especially a young man named Baxter W. Stevens III. And you saw right
then that if you paid him once--this time--every time Nestor ran a
little short, or was in the mood, he was going to threaten that
again. And, yes, you're very proud of your name and your social
position, aren't you? You'd feel a lot happier if the one outsider
who knew about that was--out of the way.

"
So you agreed to pay, and you set up an
appointment at his office, a week ago last night. But you didn't
bring money--you brought a gun. You shot him, I think, almost as soon
as you got into the office. And just before you fired, when he saw
the gun, he tried to grab your arm. But you didn't know he'd got a
loose button off your sleeve, did you? No. You didn't know that
until--

"You set up the fake burglary by breaking open
the door, stealing the petty cash. And you came home satisfied that
the dumb cops wouldn't look beyond the end of their noses. Oh, just
in case there was any little investigation, you got rid of the
gun--or did you do that hoping some shady character down there would
pick it up and after his next arrest get charged with Nestor on the
strength of the gun? Very possibly. You're only smart up to a point,
Marlowe.

"Then on Friday night--"

"I won't listen to this----this rigmarole,"
said Marlowe rigidly. "Insulting me like this in my own--"

"
You'll listen! On Friday night you played
friend of the family, paid the little call on Andrea Nestor. It was
just bad luck--and not all his, Marlowe!--that you were wearing the
same suit, and that Sergeant Hackett came calling just after you ....
Yes, you were a little surprised yesterday when a man came to paw
through your wardrobe, weren't you? And considerably upset. It was
just chance again that it was your servant's day off and you could
tell the dumb cop, no, you hadn't given away any clothes recently. I
think I'd like to hear what your Paul has to say about that."

"No--" said Marlowe in a high frightened
voice. Mendoza jerked open the door, which wasn't quite shut. As he'd
expected, the manservant was just moving away from it. Mendoza spoke
his name, crooked a finger at him.

"In."

"Yes, sir?" The man looked from him to
Marlowe, bland and inquiring.

"You look after Mr. Marlowe's clothes?"

"Yes, sir, you could say so."

"Has he told you to give away any of his clothes
recently, or have you noticed any missing?"

"
Paul--"

"Why, yes, sir," said the man in a
colorless tone. "The gray summer-weight tweed, sir. He told me
it was getting too shabby, to give it to the salvage people. But as a
matter of fact, sir"--he coughed gently--"as it had quite a
lot of wear in it still, I gave it to my brother-in-law, who is much
the same--er--build as Mr. Marlowe."

Marlowe said thickly, "You're fired! Get out of
this house--damn you for a--"

The manservant looked at him thoughtfully, blinking,
and faded silently from the room.

"More nice available evidence," said
Mendoza, smiling. "Shall we go on with the story? On Friday
night, at Mrs. Nestor's apartment, Sergeant Hackett spotted that
button missing from your sleeve. And you noticed him staring at your
sleeve, and for the first time realized you'd lost a  button.
And the fact that the sergeant looked interested in that more or less
told you where you'd probably lost it, didn't it? Now, he didn't know
it was anything but a coincidence, it didn't tell him right away that
you were the X who had shot Nestor. But he wanted to ask you
questions about it, and look at the other buttons on that jacket to
see whether they matched. He'd have come to see you about that
later--he let you go then. But you hung around there, waiting, after
you'd ostensibly left, to go back and ask Mrs. Nestor whether the
sergeant had asked any questions about you. Didn't you? And you
didn't keep enough out of sight, and he spotted you when he came out,
so he started questioning you then. Maybe more suspiciously than he
would have before, because why were you hanging around? And you
panicked, didn't you? You knew that that button would be very easy to
trace to you, because of your British tailoring. All we had to do was
look. And this big tough sergeant knew you had a button missing--but
he was the only one of us who did know. And in panic and desperation,
you were idiot enough to attack him."

"I--" said Marlowe. He was shaking and
white. "Please, I don't understand--how you--"

"Ordinarily, of course, you'd have stood no
remote chance of putting him down, far less out. But I can see just
how that happened, too. He didn't know what he had, he didn't know
its importance, and he wouldn't be expecting any physical trouble
from one like you, he was off guard. Shall I tell you how it went? He
was standing in the street, behind his car--maybe thinking he'd
almost finished with you for the time being--and you were on the curb
where you'd both been standing talking. Which brought you about level
with him. You hit out as hard as you could for his jaw, and you hit
hard enough to catch him off balance--maybe he slipped on some oil
left there--and his feet went out from under him and he crashed down
on the trunk of his own car.

"And when you found he was unconscious, a really
desperate notion occurred to you. You'd done one murder. If the
sergeant should, say, be killed in an accident, nobody would ever
know about that missing button. You could get rid of the suit, cover
up.

"Well, you acted at once. Kenmore's very dark
and quiet along there, there wasn't a street light near, only the
little light from the apartment entrance. Nobody had heard or seen.
But a dog-walker or somebody might come along at any minute, and you
hurried. He was a big, heavy man, and dead weight, but they do
say"--Mendoza smiled--"needs must when the Devil drives.
And you look to be in pretty good condition. You pulled him around
and dragged him into the car somehow. The one thing you saw at all
clearly right then, I think, is that you'd have to underline the fact
that he'd driven off in his own car. So you found his keys, and you
drove the Ford up a block or so, to another dark, lonely spot, and
parked it. He was still out--but you didn't know how badly he was
hurt, you had to--immobilize him. You hadn't any rope to do it with,
so you used his belt and yours. And I think you also gagged him, just
in case."

Marlowe was watching him, gray-faced, as if
hypnotized.

"No, you can't do this to me," he muttered
distractedly. "My name--my family-disgraced-- I have influence
with--"

"Nobody influences the cops in this town,"
said Mendoza coldly. "Which you'd know if you knew more about
us. But you don't know much about us, do you? . . .

You tried in a clumsy sort of way to give yourself an
alibi, but you never really thought anybody'd look at you, did you?
You left him there, and you drove home, to set up your crude little
alibi here. We've just seen how easily it went to pieces. When you
were sure the servant was at the back of the house you slipped out,
having left your car parked in the street, and you drove up to the
vicinity of Bronson and Franklin and parked it. I wouldn't put it
beyond you to have left it in a public lot with an attendant! And
then you took a cab back to the vicinity of Kenmore where you'd left
the Ford. We'll find the cab driver without much trouble. And into
the Ford again and up to that steep canyon road--"