Mark of Murder - Dell Shannon (29 page)

"He wouldn't have expected all this," said
Mendoza.

"He didn't know we were out hunting too. His
first night's target practice with the arsenal--yes--but maybe
getting his fire returned has shaken him a little. Damn, I'm out of
condition. Wait a minute. Listen."

There were distant sirens; Palliser couldn't hear
anything else. Then from the corner of San Pedro down there a squad
car came bucketing around the corner fast, and its headlights caught
a man running diagonally across the street. Just one flash, and he
was gone; he'd been nearly at the opposite curb; but they both saw
the guns, one dangling from each hand. The squad car braked loudly,
and Mendoza fired across its hood. "Searchlight, for God's
sake!" he snapped.

The light came on, swung to point where they'd seen
him. Two men scrambled out of the car. A bullet came out of the dark
and hit the top of the light, and they heard a man running.

"One of you follow me--the other call in a Code
Nine," said Mendoza, and plunged across the street. Another shot
plucked at Palliser's sleeve as he ran beside him.

"He's heading back--to his hole," panted
Mendoza. "Bet you--" But these damn dark streets, and they
were only guessing he was ahead of them ....

Then they saw him, for just another half second.
There was a street light at the corner, and they saw him--a darting
thin figure in clothes that flapped loose about him--turn left there,
running awkwardly in great strides. They came round the corner after
him, and skidded to a haIt.

"Where the hell did he go?" gasped the
uniformed man. This silent empty street was fairly well lighted;
along here all the buildings were dark, but they could see the full
block ahead, and no living thing moved on it.

"Damn!" said Mendoza. "into one of
these buildings. The nearest one, for choice. I want men--a lot of
men--we're going through every building on this block--"

A squad car screeched to a stop beside them, with one
man in it. "O.K.," said Mendoza tautly. "You call up
reinforcements--tell them where we are. You two go round to the side
of this place--and be damn careful, no flashlights! John, let's see
what we've got here." He moved to the front of the corner
building. "I think this has got to be it, we weren't thirty feet
behind him--he didn't go far past the corner. What in God's name is
this place?"

It was an old building; and they saw now, in the
yellow light from the old-fashioned street lamps, that this whole
block of buildings was waiting for demolition. In the last few years
a good many of these shabby old streets had come in for renovation;
the city was building itself new city and county buildings, and big
companies were buying up this valuable downtown land to knock down
the derelict old buildings, put up shiny new skyscrapers.

A start had been made on demolishing the buildings
near this corner. A great pile of knocked-apart lumber and twisted
metal lay in a heap alongside the corner building, which had two
wings enclosing a square open entrance. For a second that looked
vaguely familiar to Palliser, but he couldn't place it. A department
store of some kind? But no sign of display windows. The whole place
looked ready to fall down, and up there past the wings it was dark as
the mouth of hell. But Mendoza was walking up toward where the door
would be, quite cool, gun in hand.

"He'll be lying quiet," he muttered,
"hoping we won't realize this is where he's got to be."

There had been a door, probably; it was missing now,
they found by feeling along a rough stucco wall. They went in
shoulder to shoulder--into whatever it was, and Palliser thought, an
extra-wide doorway.

Bare wooden floor. Mendoza wasn't trying to be quiet.
He took a few steps straight ahead and, holding his flashlight at
arm's length away from his body, switched it on briefly.

"
Christ!" said Palliser involuntarily.

It sprang at them out of the darkness, terrifying,
incredible--a dark-skinned giant in a great feather head-dress and
long glittering cloak, double life size.

He heard Mendoza take a breath, and then laugh. "Wall
mural," he said. "Polynesian god of some sort?" His
voice echoed oddly. "Where are we, anyway, John?"
 
Palliser held his own flashlight out and pointed it
to their right. A long wide corridor, thick with dust. There was a
door, closed, at the far end: they could just make out, painted on
it, the mute legend GENT ME .

Nothing stirred: no gun spoke out of the darkness.
Mendoza turned his flashlight ahead, lower. There was a wooden
counter there, like a bar; fittings of some kind had been removed
from it. The light flashed around nervously, here and there, and a
pair of giant hula dancers seemed to undulate at them from another
wall.

"I think--" said Mendoza, and at that
moment the light showed them a face. A face not fifteen feet away--a
face of nightmare. The man was pressed against the wall there, rigid,
looking toward them. Not a big man: a thin man in ragged clothes too
big for him, nondescript clothes. His face was a mask of blind hate
and rage and terror: and splashed across it was the mark--the red
scar mark of death, that in the end had triggered death.

For an instant they all stood there motionless; then
the Slasher made one quick, convulsive movement and vanished out of
the circle of light. Mendoza plunged after him, the flashlight
sweeping a wide arc.

Black as the Earl of Hell's weskit, thought Palliser
ridiculously, hurrying after him. His grandmother used to say that.
Black as . . .

But the flashlight showed a rectangular
blackness--and another--and then they were through the nearest one,
and he understood where they were.

This was a derelict movie theater. That had been the
candy and popcorn stand out there. All the fittings taken
out--carpets and curtains--probably the plumbing--and, here, the
seats.

It was a vast, black, empty great place, with the
floor sloping sharply away under his feet. The two flashlights found
the man again, running diagonally across the uneven floor, stumbling,
turning up toward the archway that had once led to the last left
aisle. Mendoza fired at him and evidently missed.

Then the quarry was out of the light, and the roar of
Mendoza's gun was echoed by anther--a bullet slammed past Palliser's
shoulder, close. He fired blindly.

They were running, up the slanting floor now, and
Mendoza fired again. Dimly Palliser was aware of sirens somewhere in
the distance, and loud excited voices nearer ....

He rammed into a wall, and swore. He had missed the
archway--he groped for it and came out into unexpected light.

They had parked two squad cars directly in front, and
headed their searchlights up here. It wasn't very bright, but you
could see in here now. Palliser saw.

The man who liked to kill was standing against the
wall there twenty feet away, his terrible face contorted. He still
had both his guns. Mendoza was facing him, ten feet down from
Palliser.

Men were coming, pouring into the lobby excitedly.

The man fired, and missed, and raised the other gun.
Then a shot spat at him from another direction, and he fell back
against the wall and slid down it slowly, and sprawled full length.

"Thanks very much, Bert," said Mendoza.
"That was my last slug. I never claimed to be a marksman."

Dwyer walked up to the body and looked down at it,
gun still in hand. "You can say I told you so if you want,"
he said. "You and your hunches!"
 

NINETEEN

There was quite a bit of clearing up to do; Mendoza
didn't get home until two-thirty again. There were all the reporters
swarming around. And they found the Slasher's secret place and the
rest of his arsenal; they found out who he had probably been, from an
old union card in his wallet. The Railroad Brotherhood. So for a
start they looked for that name, John Tenney, on the list of former
S.P. employees, and there it was--he'd been hired, briefly, as a
trackwalker, some years back.

"In a kind of way, you might feel sorry for him,
if he hadn't . . ." said Palliser, leaving that unfinished. And
Mendoza said, "That damned lush Telfer! Look at all this mess!
Seven people killed----I don't suppose anyone's missing the wino or
Florence, or the other Skid Row type we found this morning, but
there's the boy, and Loretta Lincoln, and Simms--and several more
hurt, including a couple of cops. My God, and if Telfer hadn't been
drunk that night we'd probably have picked the Slasher up inside
twenty-four hours, with a full description."

"It isn't going to trouble Telfer's conscience,"
said Palliser dryly.

"
No, probably not .... "

And when he did get home he couldn't sleep. Had the
assauly on Art been tied up to Nestor? How and why? Had to get at
that thing again in the morning .... Cliff Elger? He still didn't
know where the Elgers had been on Tuesday night when Nestor was shot
....

But, he thought suddenly, coming to complete
wakefulness from an instant's half-sleep, it had to come back to that
appointment in Nestor's office that night. Didn't it? He had told his
wife he had an evening appointment. It might have been a date with a
girl, but--
vide
Anita
Sheldon--they wouldn't stay there. Naturally. So if it had been that,
then he must have been killed very close to the eight o'clock margin
Bainbridge gave them, or he wouldn't still have been in the office.
But if it hadn't been a girl friend . . .

That scrapbook. He'd been thinking, Nestor not above
a little blackmail. Had it been something like that? Have a good look
at that list of patients, when the court order came through .... By
what Bert and the others said, the other women in Nestor's address
book had been casual pickups, not exactly the kind to inspire the
grand passion--to the point of murderous jealousy. But of course you
never did know. People . . .

Art. If that wasn't linked to Nestor, was the outside
thing, where the hell to start looking? Dead end. Hell. Andrea
Nestor?

No. No. A man. They knew that much, because it had
been a man who got rid of that gun. Maybe two people?

Andrea Nestor scarcely a woman to do murder for,
either ....

He drifted off uneasily at last, but woke for good at
six. El Señor was chattering at the birds outside the window.
Mendoza shaved and dressed, went out to the living room and called
the hospital. Established routine now, he thought. Part of these
long, long days .... The nurse's impersonal voice said, "Oh yes,
sir--just a moment, Dr. MacFarlane wants to speak to you personally,
if you'll wait a moment."

"All right," said Mendoza. He waited,
wondering academically how far his pulse rate had shot up.

"Lieutenant? Yes. He's been increasingly
restless," said the doctor. "I think the chances are good
that he'll regain consciousness sometime today. I'd like either you
or someone else who knows him well to-er-stand by for a call, as it
were. You understand."

"Yes, Doctor."

"You'll be called as soon as we know .... Well,
we're still not making any guesses, of course. Wait and see. You'll
have someone standing by?"

"Yes." Much as he would like to be the man,
he couldn't; he had things to do today. "Thanks very much,
Doctor."

"We'll just keep hoping," said MacFarlane
sadly. Even Mrs. MacTaggart wasn't up, this morning. He got out the
Ferrari and stopped for breakfast at the Manning's on Vermont, but he
couldn't get much of it down; he had three cups of coffee and began
to feel slightly more alive.

He got to the office before the night shift was off;
told them the latest news. When Dwyer came in he said, "You're
taking a little holiday, Bert. Stick around in case the hospital
ca1ls." He explained.

"O.K.," said Dwyer, looking grim.

Mendoza looked at the clock irritably; he couldn't
decently arrive at the Elgers' apartment before nine o'clock. He sat
at his desk thinking about that appointment of Nestor's on Tuesday
night.

An appointment with Ruth Elger? And Elger--

So X discovered belatedly that he'd lost a button
and, just in case he'd lost it in Nestor's office, gave away the
jacket if he couldn't replace the button. How were you going to prove
it?

A button. Suddenly, now, Mendoza was wondering
whether that might have been what Art had spotted. If there was a
tie-up. Whether X hadn't noticed the missing button until Art
noticed, and questioned him about it. Whether . . .

Such a very ordinary little button. He got it out and
looked at it. And another thought crossed his mind about it too, as a
faint possibility of a lead--probably very faint. In these days of
mass production. However . . .

All the morning papers had screaming headlines about
the capture of the Slasher.

Nine o'clock found him using the knocker on the
Elgers' apartment door.

Ruth Elger let him in; she wasn't dressed yet, but
looked better this time--no hangover, and make-up.

"Well, for heaven's sake, what do you want?"
she asked rather crossly.