The Galton Case

Chapter 6

THE DEAD MAN was lying where he had fallen, on a patch of blood-filmed grass, about ten feet from Sable’s front door. The lower part of his white jacket was red-stained. His upturned face was gray and impervious-looking, like the stone faces on tombs. A Sheriffs identification man was taking pictures of him with a tripod camera. He was a white-haired officer with a long inquisitive nose. I waited until he moved his camera to get another angle:

“Mind if I have a look at him?”

“Long as you don’t touch him. I’ll be through here in a minute.”

When he had finished his work, I leaned over the body for a closer look. There was a single deep wound in the abdomen. The right hand had cuts across the palm and inside the curled fingers. The knife that had done the damage, a bloody five-inch switch-blade, lay on the grass in the angle between the torso and the outstretched right arm.

I took hold of the hand: it was still warm and limp: and turned it over. The skin on the tattooed knuckles was torn, probably by teeth.

“He put up quite a struggle,” I said.

The identification officer hunkered down beside me. “Yeah. Be careful with those fingernails. There’s some kind of debris under ‘em, might be human skin. You notice the tattoo marks?”

“I’d have to be blind to miss them.”

“I mean these.” He took the hand away from me, and pointed out four dots arranged in a tiny rectangle between the first and second fingers. “Gang mark. He had it covered up later with a standard tattoo. A lot of old gang members do that. I see them on people we vag.”

“What kind of gang?”

“I don’t know. This is a Sac or Frisco gang. I’m no expert on the northern California insignia. I wonder if Lawyer Sable knew he had an old gang member working for him.”

“We could ask him.”

The front door was standing open. I walked in and found Sable in the front sitting-room. He raised a limp arm, and waved me into a chair:

“Sit down, Archer. I’m sorry about what happened. I can’t imagine what they thought they were pulling.”

“Eager-beavering. Forget it. We got off to a poor start, but the local boys seem to know what they’re doing.”

“I hope so,” he said, not very hopefully.

“What do you know about your late houseman?”

“Not a great deal, I’m afraid. He only worked for me for a few months. I hired him originally to look after my yacht. He lived aboard the yacht until I sold it. Then he moved up here. He had no place to go, and he didn’t ask for much. Peter wasn’t very competent indoors, as you may have noticed. But it’s hard for us to get help out in the country, and he was an obliging soul, so I let him stay on.”

“What sort of a background did he have?”

“I gathered he was pretty much of a floater. He mentioned various jobs he’d held: marine cook, longshoreman, house-painter.”

“How did you hire him? Through an employment agency?”

“No. I picked him up on the dock. I think he’d just come off a fishing-boat, a Monterey seiner. I was polishing brass, varnishing deck, and so on, and he offered to help me for a dollar an hour. He did a good day’s work, so I took him on. He never failed to do a good day’s work.”

A cleft of pain, like a knife-cut, had appeared between Sable’s eyebrows. I guessed that he had been fond of the dead man. I hesitated to ask my next question:

“Would you know if Culligan had a criminal record?”

The cleft in his brow deepened. “Good Lord, no. I trusted him with my boat and my house. What makes you ask such a question?”

“Two things mainly. He had a tattoo mark on his hand, four little black dots at the edge of the blue tattoo. Gangsters and drug addicts wear that kind of mark. Also, this has the look of a gang killing. The man who took my car is almost certainly the killer, and he has the earmarks of a pro.”

Sable looked down at the polished terrazzo as if at any moment it might break up under his feet. “You think Peter Culligan was involved with criminals?”

“Involved is putting it mildly. He’s dead.”

“I realize that,” he said rather shrilly.

“Did he seem nervous lately? Afraid of anything?”

“If he was, I never noticed. He didn’t talk about himself.”

“Did he have any visitors, before this last one?”

“Never. At least, not to my knowledge. He was a solitary person.”

“Could he have been using your place and his job here as a sort of hide-out?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to say.”

An engine started up in front of the house. Sable rose and moved to the glass wall, parting the drapes. I looked out over his shoulder. A black panel truck rolled away from the house and started down the hill.

“Come to think of it,” Sable said, “he certainly kept out of sight. He wouldn’t chauffeur for me, said he’d had bad luck with cars. But he may have wanted to avoid going to town. He never went to town.”

“He’s on his way there now,” I said. “How many people knew he was out here?”

“Just my wife and I. And you, of course. I can’t think offhand of anyone else.”

“Have you had visitors from out of town?”

“Not in the last few months. Alice has been having her ups and downs. It’s one reason I took Peter on out here. We’d lost our housekeeper, and I didn’t like to leave Alice by herself all day.”

“How is Mrs. Sable now?”

“Not so good, I’m afraid.”

“Did she see it happen?”

“I don’t believe so. But she heard the sounds of the struggle, and saw the car drive away. That was when she phoned me. When I got here, she was sitting on the doorstep in a half daze. I don’t know what it will do to her emotional state.”

“Any chance of my talking to her?”

“Not now, please. I’ve already spoken to Dr. Howell, and he told me to give her sedation. The Sheriff has agreed not to question her for the present. There’s a limit to what the human mind can endure.”

Sable might have been talking about himself. His shoulders drooped as he turned from the window. In the harsh sunlight his face was a grainy white, and puffy like boiled rice. In murder cases, there are usually more victims than one.

Sable must have read the look on my face. “This is an unsettling thing to me, too. It can’t conceivably relate to Alice and me. And yet it does, very deeply. Peter was a member of the household. I believe he was quite devoted to us, and he died in our front yard. That really brings it home.”

“What?”

“Timor mortis” he said. “The fear of death.”

“You say Culligan was a member of your household. I take it he slept in.”

“Yes, of course.”

“I’d like to have a look at his room.”

He took me across the court and through a utility room to a back bedroom. The room was furnished with a single bed, a chest of drawers, a chair, and a reading-lamp.

“I’ll just look in on Alice,” Sable said, and left me.

I went through Peter Culligan’s meager effects. The closet contained a pair of Levis, a couple of workshirts, boots, and a cheap blue suit which had been bought at a San Francisco department store. There was a Tanforan pari-mutuel stub in the outside breast pocket of the suit coat. A dirty comb and a safety razor lay on top of the chest of drawers. The drawers were practically empty: a couple of white shirts, a greasy blue tie, a T-shirt and a pair of floral shorts, socks and handkerchiefs, and a cardboard box containing a hundred shells for a .38-caliber automatic. Not quite a hundred: the box wasn’t full. No gun.

Culligan’s suitcase was under the bed. It was a limp old canvas affair, held together with straps, which looked as if it had been kicked around every bus station between Seattle and San Diego. I unstrapped it. The lock was broken, and it fell open. Its contents emitted a whiff of tobacco, sea water, sweat, and the subtler indescribable odor of masculine loneliness.

It contained a gray flannel shirt, a rough blue turtle-neck sweater, and other heavier work clothes. A broad-bladed fisherman’s knife had fish scales still clinging like faded sequins to the cork handle. A crumpled greenish tuxedo jacket was preserved as a memento from some more sophisticated past.

A union card issued in San Francisco in 1941 indicated that Culligan had been a paid-up active member of the defunct Marine Cooks’ Union. And there was a letter, addressed to Mr. Peter Culligan, General Delivery, Reno, Nevada. Culligan hadn’t been a loner all his life. The letter was written on pink notepaper in an unformed hand. It said:

The letter had no return address, but it was postmarked San Mateo, Calif. The date was indecipherable.

I put everything back and closed the suitcase and kicked it under the bed.

I went out into the court. In a room on the other side of it, a woman or an animal was moaning. Sable must have been watching for me. The sound became louder as he opened a sliding glass door, and was shut off as he closed it. He came toward me, his face tinged green by the reflected light from the foliage:

“Find anything significant?”

“He kept shells for an automatic in his drawer. I didn’t come across the automatic.”

“I didn’t know Peter had a gun.”

“Maybe he had, and sold it. Or it’s possible the killer took it away from him.”

“Anything else?”

“I have a tentative lead to his ex-wife, if you want me to explore his background.”

“Why not leave it to the police? Trask is very competent, and an old friend of mine into the bargain. I wouldn’t feel justified in taking you off the Galton case.”

“The Galton case doesn’t seem so very urgent.”

“Possibly not. Still, I think you should stay with it for the present. Was Cassie Hildreth any help?”

“Some. I can’t think of much more to be done around here. I was planning to drive to San Francisco.”

“You can take a plane. I wrote you a check for two hundred dollars, and I’ll give you a hundred in cash.” He handed me the check and the money. “If you need any more, don’t hesitate to call on me.”

“I won’t, but I’m afraid it’s money down the drain.”

Sable shrugged. He had worse problems. The moaning behind the glass door was louder, rising in peaks of sound which pierced my eardrums.