Mark of Murder

SIXTEEN

Anita Sheldon was a vapid-looking little blonde with china-blue eyes, and she was very frightened. She hadn't known Frank Nestor very well, she didn't know anything about him really, it'd just been like meeting him for cocktails somewhere, nothing bad, but Bill had got so mad about that Youngman guy that time, there hadn't been anything in it, but Bill-if he got to know about this-He didn't understand, him away off on some job maybe four or five days, and a girl liked a little fun…

Within five minutes Mendoza put her down as a shallow little tramp; and when he heard that she'd been married to Bill for five years he provisionally crossed off Bill, who must have found her out in that time if he wasn't mentally deficient. Bill hadn't got mad enough to shoot any of her other pickups; it wasn't likely he'd shot Nestor. When he learned that Bill had been on his way up to Santa Barbara with a truckload last Tuesday night he crossed him off definitely.

Well, she had met Nestor in his office on two occasions."But not to stay there, of course, we'd go on to some nice restaurant, somewhere like that."

When Mendoza thanked her, told her she could go, she shot off like a scalded cat. Evidently, he thought, Nestor had picked up whatever came handy: and from all he knew of him, that ran true. Ladies' man, not too particular. The ones like Anita Sheldon flattered and caught by his charm-but Ruth Elger had been something else again. Going out with him because she'd had a fight with her husband. Using Nestor. And maybe the first time she'd strayed, and Elger… But would Elger have shot him? Hair-trigger Elger more likely to have beaten him up, maybe?

Mendoza took out the button and looked at it. Well, see what turned up there. He felt harried; he was getting nothing on all this at all, and time was catching up to him-he had the worried feeling that there was something, some relevant fact, right under his nose, if he wasn't too stupid to see it.

He forced himself to sit still, take a couple of deep breaths. He was trying to go at it too fast, do everything at once. Sit and think calmly over the evidence, take it easy.

Nestor's high-society scrapbook was lying on his desk along with a few other things; he picked it up. It occurred to him that possibly, if his guess as to its purpose was the right one, and if Nestor had even once recognized a patient, he might have indicated it in some way. Either in the scrapbook or on that list in Madge Corliss' safety box. Idly he started leafing through the book.

The first item taped to the page was short: Miss Susan Marlowe, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. William Marlowe, spent a delightful Easter weekend cruising aboard the yacht of the J. Haskin Treadwells. No pictures on that. Of course Nestor would have been interested because of his slight connection with Marlowe. He went on looking; the year-in, year-out social affairs, the races, operas, first nights, teas and dinners and lectures. A lot of pictures, but Nestor hadn't scribbled anything in the margins. "?Nada! " said Mendoza, and shut the book.

And the outside phone rang on Sergeant Lake's desk… "It's another one, Lieutenant. Another Slasher job. Just found."

"Hell!" said Mendoza. There was nobody else in the office. "Where?"

"San Pedro and Fifth. Squad car just got there."

"All right. Rout out Bainbridge?

There was quite a crowd around when he got there; a second car had arrived and two uniformed men were rather helplessly trying to move the crowd on. The press had also arrived; he saw the flash bulbs going off, and Wolfe of the Citizen gave him a tight-lipped humorless grin as he pushed into the crowd.

"They do say the population's rising too fast, Lieutenant. This is one way to cure it, I guess. But we always thought you boys were a little smarter."

"Like to change jobs?" said Mendoza curtly. "Let me through, please… What have you got on it so far, boys?”

They hadn't got much. The body-looking much the same as all the other bodies the Slasher had left behind him hadn't any identification on it. It was the body of a middle-aged man, and the only items on him were half of a Greyhound Bus ticket from San Diego to Los Angeles, three single dollar bills and some change, in an otherwise empty wallet, and a Hat pint bottle of scotch, nearly empty. His clothes were old and shabby, and he looked unkempt.

The body had been left where, probably, it had become a body, in the middle of a narrow alley between two buildings. It had been found by a couple of truck drivers backing in there to make deliveries.

Nothing much to be done on the spot. Quite impossible to say whether an item or so among the many dirty, miscellaneous items in the alley had been dropped by the Slasher.

"All right," said Mendoza. "You know the routine."

Lake would be chasing up somebody to come and take pictures. "When the surgeon's seen him and we've got some pictures, let the ambulance boys take him. Drivers' names?… O.K. We'll try to identify him through the bus ticket-I'll take that stuff now."

But as he pushed out through the crowd again a hand touched his arm timidly. "Please, you are one of the Polizei, sir? I-I-maybe I know something about this terrible man, sir. I-"

He looked down at her. The careful English was thick with German accent. She was a little plump blonde, a real blonde, about thirty-five; she looked like the illustration on bars of very good Dutch chocolate, pink cheeks and all. She was wearing a mightily starched white apron over a very neat blue house dress. "Please," she said anxiously, "I am Gertrud Flickschuster, sir."

The interested crowd surged nearer, and Mendoza said, "For God's sake, can't you get these ghouls to move on? Mrs.-Flickschuster?-come over here, please. What is it you think you know?"

"I hear the poor man is found, it is another from-by this terrible murderer, so I come. To find a-the word I don't know-Geheimpolizist -to tell. I think I have seen this man. In our delicatessen he comes"-she pointed up the street-"last night."

"You'd better come back to headquarters and make a statement," said Mendoza.

She hesitated. "You will-I may come out again? There is Rudi alone in the shop-"

"Yes, of course." He smiled at her; by the accent, she hadn't been in the theoretically free country long. He put her, starched apron and all, into the Ferrari, drove back to headquarters, and took her up to his office. "Take some notes on this, Jimmy. Now, Mrs. Flickschuster?"

It seemed that the Flickschusters, who had come here four years ago, kept a delicatessen. They stayed open until nine most evenings, and one or the other of them or both were always behind the counter. And just before they closed last night a man had come in and bought a half pound of sausage, a pound carton of potato salad, and a quart of milk. Gertrud had waited on him and remembered him well-"Because he is so ugly, sir, a terrible face. It has the hollow cheeks like a death's head, and this terrible mark on his face- vernarben – die narbe on his face, from the burn, it looks-all red, across the nose. But it is not until Rudi has been reading the newspaper that I have known-it is saying about this man-"

"Yes." And that might be a more interesting and significant little story than it looked at first glance. Mendoza got her signature to a statement, phoned for a car to drive her back to the delicatessen… The Slasher, buying precooked food at night. The man was staying somewhere, damn it, but with the press relaying his now known description to the public, he hadn't rented another room as yet-that they knew. Nobody was likely to rent him one when they'd had a look at him.

Etta Mae Rollen attacked at San Pedro and Emily. The latest unknown corpse near San Pedro and Fifth. Mendoza frowned at a city map: about four blocks apart.

The Slasher holed up somewhere, in hiding? Sense enough to read the papers, know he had to hide? But where, for God's sake, in that rabbit warren of crowded downtown streets? Business of most kinds was thriving-there wouldn't be many empty buildings. And, true enough, the population increasing at such a rate that there wouldn't be many empty houses, either. In that section people lived cheek by jowl, there wasn't much privacy. What hole could a loner like the Slasher have found? Hell. He wondered what, if anything, the Hollenbeck station was getting from that pawnbroker. It would be a help to clear those juveniles out of the way, know definitely they had an alibi for Nestor-if they had. Which would say that their story about the gun was probably gospel truth. He decided it was too soon to call Hollenbeck and ask.

Sergeant Lake came in and said that Nestor woman was here, asking to see him. "You haven't had a chance for lunch at all, shall I tell her to wait or come back?"

"No, that's O.K.-shove her in." He was curious to know what she wanted.

As Madge Corliss put it, a funny kind of woman indeed. He didn't think any disillusionment with Nestor was responsible for her flat emotionlessness. He remembered what Marlowe had said of her and silently agreed: rather a stupid woman.

She came in and sat down in the chair beside his desk. Her mouse-brown hair in its old-fashioned shoulder-length bob hung lank about her face. She had on a printed cotton house dress, bright pink, and a shabby green cardigan over it; white ankle socks with the kind of cuban-heeled black oxfords made for old ladies with fallen arches. She hadn't any make-up on except lipstick, and most of that had worn off.

Nestor's essential character aside, reflected Mendoza, it really wasn't hard to see why he had…

"Yes, Mrs. Nestor?"

"Well, I'd just like to know," she said in her fiat nasal voice, "when I can get into his office. You people have put a seal on the door. The rent'll be due in ten days and of course I don't want to pay another month's rent. And there are some valuable things there I could sell for quite a lot of money. To another doctor."

"Well, I'm afraid I can't tell you anything on that," said Mendoza. "We don't know, it may be we'll want to have another look around there. But I see your position, and we'll try to arrange to free it before the end of the month."

She did not thank him. "It's been a nuisance, I must say," she said. "The bank not giving up that money and so on." The news of Madge Corliss' arrest had made minor headlines this morning, the revelation of Nestor's undercover trade; evidently Mrs. Nestor didn't read newspapers and had no kind friend to tell her about it, for she didn't mention it at all. But with one like that, who could say? She might, if he asked her, say, Oh, that. I'd suspected it all along.

"As long as you're here, Mrs. Nestor, I'd just like to go over it with you again-about Friday night, when Sergeant Hackett came to see you… " He took her all through it again, and she gave him the same answers, disinterested.

He let her go, dispiritedly. His head had begun to ache again. He couldn't see where to go from here-if nothing turned up on that button. But he didn't know yet that those juveniles were in the clear, of course. And if they weren't, where else to look on Art?

It was one forty-eight. It seemed to him that lately, the last few days, time had slowed down somehow so that there were twice as many hours in a day. He wondered what the boys were getting on their searching jobs. Sergeant Lake came and looked at him disapprovingly and told him to go get some lunch.

"Yes," said Mendoza, and dialed the offices of Cliff Elger and Associates. He was told that Mr. Elger was out to lunch with a client. Where? Well, probably Frascati's on the Strip or the one on Wilshire.

Mendoza tried Frascati's on the Strip first, as the nearer place, and spotted his man at once. Elger's great bulk, clad in loud tweed, was perched on a bar stool. He was doing most of the talking, gesturing widely, laughing. The man sitting next to him was much smaller, presenting a thin, narrow-shouldered back and a bald spot.

Mendoza climbed up on the stool at Elger' s other side. Elger was halfway through a martini: probably not his first. The other man, a depressed-looking middle-aged man, was staring silently at a glass of beer.

"-just got to take it in your stride," Elger was saying heartily. "You know? Script writers always change a book around some. What should you care, you've got the money. You worry too much, friend."

The depressed-looking man said in a surprising Oxford accent, "But she wasn't a chorus girl, she was the vicar's daughter. It all seems quite pointless to me, and rather silly."

"Now you just stop worrying, old boy," said Elger.

The bartender came up and Mendoza said, "Straight rye. Mr. Elger!"

Elger swung around, looking surprised. "Oh-it's you," he said.

Mendoza smiled offensively at him. "Business as usual? I thought you'd be keeping a closer eye on your Ruthie. Or have you hired a private eye?"

Instantly Elger's expression darkened. "What the hell d'you mean by that? That bastard Nestor-and I wasn't surprised when I saw the Times this morning! Ruthie told you how it was, she hardly knew the guy, it was just to spite me she-"

"Naive, Mr. Elger!" said Mendoza cynically. "They can sound quite convincing, that sex."

"Damn you-"

Mendoza picked up the shot glass and swallowed half the rye. "Don't sound so upset," he drawled. "Happens in the best of families-"

Elger swung on him and he ducked, alert for it, and caught the man's wrist in both hands. It had been an awkward swing, from a seated position; but if Elger had been on his feet…

He said incisively, "Hold it, Elger! Take it easy. Now what did I really say? Nothing much. You lose your temper that easy very often? Because, if you do, I'm surprised you haven't got stuck with a corpse-or a near corpse-long ago!"

"What the hell,” said Elger sullenly. He shook his arm free of Mendoza's grip. The other man was watching interestedly. "You talking about Ruth-damn cop-"

"To see what little thing might set you off. Look at me!" said Mendoza sharply. "Did you lose your temper last Friday night, Elger? Did you? Because of some little remark Sergeant Hackett made to you? Did-"

"I told you I never heard of that guy!"

"Did you follow him down to the street and attack him there, Elger? And then find you'd nearly killed him? And there he was, right in front of your apartment-and if he came to, he'd talk-or he might just die, so we'd get you for manslaughter if nothing worse-and there's your business and reputation gone. Was it like that?"

"I don't know what the hell you're talking about," said Elger roughly. He threw the rest of his martini down his throat so fast he nearly choked on it.

"So you thought of the clever little plan- If you did that, Elger, by God, I'll get you for it? said Mendoza. In that moment he was nearly persuaded that Elger was his man: Elger so quick to hit out in blind fury, over very little; and the suppressed savagery in his tone, the expression in his eyes, made Elger draw back a little.

The bartender was looking worried. They didn't like disturbances in a high-class place like this. Mendoza finished his rye. "Make no mistake," he said, "if it was you, we'll get you. I'll be seeing you again, Elger." He slapped down a bill and stood up…

And where had that got him? He knew that a very small thing might trigger Elger's temper.

The lab, he thought. They really did work miracles these days, those boys. Would there be any difference in the composition of blacktop-could they tell its age, or degree of wear-something to pin down the locality?

A forlorn hope. He could ask.

He ate a flavorless sandwich at a drugstore and went back to the office. Sergeant Lake was leaning back reading a teletype.

"Here's our boy," he said, handing it over. "Not that it helps us much on catching him."

Mendoza read the teletype standing. It was from the sheriff of El Dorado County up north of Sacramento. The inquiries on any known knifings with the same M.O. as the Slasher's had been out for nearly three days; this was the first response.

What Sheriff Jay Hampton had to tell them was that there'd been two murders in a little place called Georgetown, about three months back. Quite a surprise to Georgetown, which had a population of about eight hundred-Mendoza found on consulting an atlas-and probably hadn't had a murder since the frontier was officially closed in 1890, You could read between the lines of Sheriff Hampton's terse statement. The first victim had been Betty Riley, a local girl well known and liked. Engaged to the son of the town's bank president; her father was one of two doctors in town. A pretty girl, popular and virtuous. She had been to see a girl friend, Martha Glenn, a block away from her own home, on the night of April thirtieth. Had left there about nine o'clock to walk home, and next turned up dead on her own front lawn, at ten-forty. Found by her father as he came home. She had been stabbed and slashed to death, and mutilated afterward. The sheriff had called in the state boys, the B.C.I. from Sacramento, and their crime lab had said that the knife used had a partly serrated edge. Absolutely no clue had turned up; it looked like the random killing of a lunatic. She had not been raped, and evidently hadn't had time to scream.

"?Y pues que?" said Mendoza irritably.

The second victim, found next day in a field outside of town, had been one Giorgiono Cabezza, an itinerant agricuItural laborer who'd just been fired from his job on a local ranch. Here they turned up something more definite. Cabezza had been seen in several bars the night before; he'd been talking about leaving town, finding another job farther south. Toward the end of the evening, around midnight, he'd been seen with another man, a transient just passing through-nobody in town knew him-possibly a hobo. Nobody in Georgetown had ever seen him before, and nobody had heard his name. But the surgeon said Cabezza had been killed about 2 AM., and the transient was the man last seen in his company. They had a good description of him: a man about forty, very thin, hollow-cheeked, middle height, and he had a very noticeable scar from an old burn across the center of his face. No evidence actually pointed to him as the murderer, but he had not been seen anywhere around since, and Georgetown had had no more knifings.

"What the hell does that tell us?" demanded Mendoza. "For God's sake!" He'd been hoping that if the Slasher had killed before, especially in a small town, something more definite might have been got on him. This was just nothing but continnation of what they knew. And he should have known it wouldn't be anything more; if any other force had got anything definite on the man there'd have been flyers sent out.

And the papers yelling their heads off about inefficient police. Mostly. Spare a moment to be grateful to the Times, which had run a thoughtful editorial pointing out all the difficulties of the hunt for the random killer. He put the teletype down and dialed the Hollenbeck station. "Well, I was just about to call you, Lieutenant," said the sergeant he'd talked to before.

"Anything?"

"It seems your Ballistics man gave you a false alarm. Our boys just got back from checking. I looked up the record on that break-in-TV store on Soto Street-and it didn't close until eight-thirty so the break-in was after that. This Behrens, the pawnbroker, naturally didn't know from nothing about those three juveniles, never laid eyes on them, never bought anything off them-but he hadn't expected any check, of course, and there were four transistor radios and a portable TV in his back room, and the owner of the TV store could identify them by the serial numbers. From his place, all right. Well, you said your chiropractor was getting himself shot between eight and midnight. Kind of tight times, when you think-and not very likely the kids would pull two in one night, so close together. They probably broke in that store between nine and nine-thirty, or a bit later. The pawnbroker's not talking, but they say they were in his place about ten-thirty. Well, they'd probably-"

"? Basta ya! " said Mendoza. "I know. Go out on a little spree with the cash from the pawnbroker, with or without girls. Not go looking for another likely place to break in. So the fancy story about finding the gun is probably-definitely-true. Thanks very much."

"Sometimes you get a tough one," said the sergeant sympathetically…

Mendoza stared intently at the desk lighter. So it was back to the private thing. Was it? Not those juveniles, but maybe an older pro? Entirely too coincidental that those juveniles should end up with the gun. No, it had been the private kill, on Nestor.

Well, what about Elger for it? A gun used, and then that canny, cautious plan to get rid of the gun… Not in character?

Andrea Nestor, now…

Some other jealous husband?

Look thoroughly at everybody in Nestor's address book. That Clay had sounded quite level, but there might be… Palliser came in. He said, "I don't know what anybody else may have turned up, but I've drawn blank on your button."

"More good news," said Mendoza. "Sit down and tell me who you've eliminated."