Mark of Murder

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.

It was ten-forty; he ought to go home. He sat on of inertia, reading reports… There'd been men out, covering this crowded downtown area, asking questions wherever rooms were rented, at hotels, at random. They had reported evidence from several places of men with burnscarred faces, and they had turned up three such men, all on Skid Row. Considering the importance of that, all were being held overnight for the Garcia boy to look at in the morning. One little lead looked more promising, even though it had come to nothing. A man with such a scarred face had taken a room at a house on Boardman Street, giving the name of John Tenney. The landlady had thought he was in, but when they looked, he wasn't, and all his few possessions were gone. It was possible he'd overheard the plainclothesman asking questions and slipped out the back door. But of course that didn't say he'd been the Slasher-and it didn't say where he'd gone. Ought to go home, thought Mendoza. He wasn't accomplishing anything here… He heard the phone ring on Farrell's desk, and Farrell's voice. And then, "Lieutenant? Call in from a squad car-another Slasher job, but the woman got away-"

"?Dios! Where?"

"San Pedro, between Emily and Myrtle. It just happened ten minutes ago."

"I'm on my way. Send another car."

When he did get home, at two-thirty Tuesday morning, he was feeling the way Higgins had felt on Friday night. How the hell had they missed him? The men in the first squad car couldn't have been five minutes behind him, and they'd had four other cars there within ten minutes, and men on foot to search that whole area.

Etta Mae Rollen had sobbed, "It was like he come up out of the ground-all of a sudden he was just there, and g-grabbed for me, and I saw his knife-"

Etta Mae had been very damn lucky indeed. She had managed to tear herself away from him, and she had run. A block up she had seen a squad car coming toward her, and run to it screaming. The men had called in for assistance at once and gone back with her to where he'd been, but if he'd appeared out of thin air he'd disappeared that way too.

They weren't doubting it had been the Slasher, because Etta Mae had got a good look at him, and she offered a description before they asked any questions. She'd been coming home from her job as waitress at a coffee shop on Broadway. Just past the corner of San Pedro and Emily streets, where there was a good bright street light, there was a TV store where the lights were left on all night. She'd had a good look at the man with the knife. "He wasn't awful tall but he was mighty strong, only he just had hold of a piece of my coat mostly, and it tore all down the seam-you can see-when I got away from him. Oh, he had a terrible sort of face- I'll never forget it to my dying day!-it was all thin and sneery and he had this great big red scar, all puckered, right across the middle of his face, and his eyes kind of glittered-”

Her coat hadn't been torn, but partly cut with a knife where he'd missed his first stroke. Probably the lab would tell them it had been a partly serrated blade.

`They'd covered all the alleys and back yards, they'd routed out the few night watchmen left in warehouses, to search the premises; they'd really covered that area. And nothing had shown. Where the hell had he gone? At least he hadn't killed again. But if they didn't get him soon…

Mendoza had been tired, earlier this evening. Now he wasn't conscious of tiredness-he'd worked past that point-and he ought to sleep but he knew he wouldn't. He ought to have something to eat, too, but he wasn't conscious of hunger. His mind kept going over and over all this-what they had, on both cases, and on Art. Was the assault on Art linked with either, or had that been the extraneous thing? He didn't know; he couldn't make up his mind.

Canyon Drive, in Hollywood. The Hollywood hills.

Very exclusive, expensive houses up there. Had X been familiar with it, or picked it at random?

He slid the Ferrari into the garage; he went out, pressed the electric-eye button to close the door. Very quietly he let himself into the dark house. But as he went down the hall he saw light there under the nursery door and softly opened it to look in.

"Well, you are late and no lie," said Mrs. MacTaggart.

"What's wrong, Mairi?"

"Nought at all much. I've been up a bit with young Johnny, but they run a wee temperature for nothing at all, times. He's gone off peaceful as you please now, you can see. Just a bit fretful like.” El Senor, self-appointed guardian of the twins, had joined her sleepily and was sitting on the foot of Master John's crib, playing watch cat.

"Sure?" Mendoza looked down at the flushed sleeping twins. It was very odd, suddenly, the idea that they were his; he could hardly disown it, young Master John with that uncannily identical widow's peak, if he had Alison's hazel-green eyes. He didn't know much about the twins, thought Mendoza suddenly. The little monsters who'd kept them awake at night until they found that treasure, Mrs. MacTaggart. Of course at this age, he supposed, they hadn't developed very distinct personalities maybe. He wasn't around them enough to say, really.

Miss Teresa moved restlessly and one pink thumb found its automatic way to her mouth. Mendoza yawned. He thought vaguely, start any sort of job, you ought to see it's done properly. He ought to know more about them. Try to be around more.

But things came up…

"You are tired to death, man," said Mrs. MacTaggart softly. "Can I not get you something? A nice cup of hot broth now? Or a hot whiskey and lemon maybe?"

"No, thanks, Mairi, I'm fine."

She surveyed him calmly, drawing him out to the hall.

"If a lie could have choked you, that would have done it. We are only waiting on God's will. Go to your bed, man."

He went on down the hall. El Senor had opened the bedroom door to join Mrs. MacTaggart when she'd first gotten up to check on the twins. Mendoza shut it and began to undress. Alison was asleep, but stirred and muttered his name drowsily as he got into bed.

He would not sleep, of course. Another full day tomorrow. Go and see that Anita Sheldon? No, first get the court order to look at the Corliss woman's safe-deposit box. That list. Yes, and what would that tell him? Nothing really. No real lead there; she'd said there hadn't been trouble over a patient. Hell.

Cast your bread upon the waters… How did it go on? Something about, it shall be returned to you in many days. That didn't sound quite right. Scriptures. Prayer. Only there was nothing to pray to

… just the way the hand got dealt round.

He decided quite suddenly that if Art died he'd resign from the force. Even apart from this thing-working overtime at the job, the fascinating job, when it wasn't necessary. Not fair to Alison; not fair to the twins, as time went on.

He lay thinking about that, staring into the darkness. And El Senor, shut out from his mother and sisters, rattled the doorknob impatiently until he tripped the latch, slid in, and landed with a thud on the bed on top of Nefertite, who spat at him sleepily.

Who might get his desk? Mendoza wondered. If? Higgins was the next senior sergeant after Art, but they'd probably bring in somebody from outside-the senior sergeant from Vice or Narcotics. Little shake-up all round. If.

What would he do with himself all day? Learn to live a new kind of life. Play a little. More time with Alison and the twins.

More than half his lifetime, jettisoned. And God, he'd seen friends killed on duty before, but…

He had known he wouldn't sleep, but he slept, heavily; and woke feeling stupid and slow. It was six o'clock. That much sleep anyway. Six o'clock Tuesday morning, and- He got up, shaved and dressed, went out to the living room and called the hospital. The patient's condition was unchanged.

He thought, Friday night. Call it eighty hours. MacFarlane: be feeling much more hopeful if…

He went out to the kitchen. Mrs. MacTaggart was already there, making coffee. Of course, of course. Her damned novena: out to the church first thing for nine days.

"You will stop for breakfast somewhere," she said severely.

"Yes, all right." Suddenly he realized he was ravenous. He did stop, at a Manning's coffee shop on Vermont, and had three eggs, a double order of bacon, and four cups of coffee. When he got to the office he was feeling more like the old Mendoza, the boy with a little reputation on this force.

By the time the lab man came in he'd got quite a bit done. He'd started the machinery going to get that court order on Margaret Corliss' safe-deposit box. He'd looked over the night reports-they'd had four men looking all around that area of the Slasher's latest job, but they'd turned up nothing. He had got the other warrant on Corliss, charging her with complicity in Nestor's abortion trade. He'd talked that over with the D.A.'s office, and the charge on Webster. The D.A.'s office didn't think they'd press an accessory charge on Webster: too vague.

He had called Mrs. Anita Sheldon to ask if she'd be at home this morning; he wanted to talk to her. She had sounded very frightened. "You can't come here! Oh, please-if Bob ever got to know, he'd- And it's his day off, I can't-”

"Would you prefer to come to my office? Say eleven o'clock?"

"Oh dear. Oh, I guess so-if I've got to-there won't be any reporters, will there? I don't know anything to tell you about Frank, really, I didn't know him very well-"

He had called the Elger apartment and got no answer. Called Elger's office and been told Elger was out somewhere with a client.

When the lab man came in Mendoza was studying the official shots of Nestor's body. They weren't telling him much. He had a little box full of the contents of Nestor's pockets on his desk; he looked at it and picked up the button. That ordinary little button that had been clutched in Nestor's dead fingers. The clue out of the detective story.

"Morning," said the lab man, whose name was Duke.

"Say, I've got a little something, I-"

"Hold it a minute," said Mendoza. "Jimmy! I must be going senile. Jimmy, I want search warrants for the quarters of every male in the Nestor case. Let's see, Webster, Elger, this Bob Sheldon, every legitimate male patient he had, every man listed in his address book, every male he knew. To look at their clothes. Just in case. It's possible X didn't realize he'd lost a button. You never know where you'll hit pay dirt. Damn it, it's a very long chance, but-"

He looked at Duke. "What have you got?" `

Duke laid a pair of shoes on the desk. "We're always damn busy," he said, "but we've been concentrating on Hackett the last couple of days. As you can imagine."

Duke was snub-nosed, freckle-faced, and right now looking pleased with himself. "We've been going over his clothes, for any little thing that might show up. Now it is your job to say what this might mean, but for what it's worth, it looks kind of interesting to me. Not to say suggestive. These are his shoes, I just got to them this morning."

"Yes?" said Mendoza.

They were a pair of black moccasin-type shoes, middling expensive, well worn but polished. Mendoza thought absently, Size 11B.

Duke lifted them and held them toward him heel first. "Look at that. They're not new shoes, but they've been taken care of. Kept polished. But here, on both heels-that is, the back of both shoes above the heels-is this deep scrape. The surface of the leather's entirely gone, violently scraped off-more on the left than on the right one."

"Yes, I see."

"Well, that wasn't done when he went over the cliff in his car, you know. It wasn't done on anything in the car. I've had these under the microscope, and I took scrapings to look at closer. You know what was in those scraped spots? Asphalt. Asphalt and," Duke added dreamily, "crankcase oil, and bird droppings, and decayed leaves. Traces, you know."

Mendoza sat up. "What the hell? Does that say-"

"Me, I'm only a chemist,” said Duke. "You're the detective. But we aren't exactly disinterested in this one, and I saw what Dr. Erwin said about that skull fracture. The back of the skull, more to the left side. I think this does tell us a little something?

"Asphalt--"

"The way I read it," said Duke, "and stop me if I don't make sense, is that he got that first blow outdoors, on the street. Literally on the street-a blacktop street. He got knocked backwards, maybe tripped over something or it was just a very hefty blow-and his feet went out from under him, scraping the street, and he went down hard on something-as Erwin said-broad and hard and flat."

"But not the street itself," said Mendoza slowly, "because there wasn't a trace of anything like that in the wound or on the scalp. Of course he had on a hat, but you didn't find anything like that on it. Nothing extraneous."

"That's right" said Duke. "I just thought I'd pass it on.”

"And isn't it interesting," said Mendoza. "Thanks very much… " He thought about that story he'd built up, on Art. The louts jumping him. The outside thing? Or, if you were bound to link it with another case, had he shown some suspicion, and been followed outside?

The nice neat detective-story plot-Art stumbling across the X in the Nestor case, or the Slasher-he had bought it, but now he wasn't so sure.

Art attacked in the street. A blacktop street. Like how many thousand streets in L. A. County?

What the hell?

And that was when the man from Ballistics came in. A paunchy, elderly fellow named Hansen, who said, "I think we've cleared one up for you, Lieutenant. That chiropractor that got himself shot. We've got the gun."

"?Parece mentira! Don't keep me in suspense-where the hell did you-"

"Well, the Wilcox Street boys sent it down, and I fired a few test slugs, and they looked sort of familiar-I did the tests on that slug out of the chiropractor. It's a Harrington and Richardson Sportsman 999-nice little gun. Nine-shot revolver, retails for about fifty bucks." He laid it on Mendoza's desk.

"And where did the Hollywood boys get it?"

"Attempted break-in at a drugstore, Saturday night," said Hansen. "Three juveniles. They got this off one of them.”

"?Un millen demonios! " said Mendoza exasperatedly. "?Ya se ve! So it was the outside thing on Nestor-just what it looked like. The outside thing-too."