Halo in Blood by Howard Browne

Author:Howard Browne [Browne, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

There weren’t any customers. I sat down behind the desk and put my heels on the blotter and unfolded the Daily News I had picked up after parking the car. The heavy blue line along the right side of page one. still smelled strongly of printers’ ink.

I found two items on page three that were worth reading all the way through. One told about the inquest, that same morning, on the Marlin murder. Leona Sandmark, being related to a million dollars, came in for a lot of favorable and sympathetic mention. The rest was just words about no one knowing anything about anything, and at the request of the police, proceedings were postponed a few weeks.

On the other side of the same page was a two-column follow-up of the story about the unidentified corpse twelve preachers had buried. There was a small cut of the dead man’s face—the kind of picture taken after death for police files. It was a face of a man who could have been almost any age past forty; a thin, hard-bitten face without much chin; a face that once might have been on the handsome side in a sort of dashing, to-hell-with-you way. The article itself wasn’t much: a few stickfuls of type about “the unusual turn taken by what seemed nothing more than an obscure murder, has the police digging frantically for new information.”

I grunted and turned the page. While I was in the middle of O’Brien’s column, the phone rang sharply. Or maybe it just seemed to ring that way.

I picked up the receiver and said, “Hello.”

“Mr. Pine?” It was a man’s voice, deep and brisk and dry.

“Yeah. Who’s this?”

“I would rather not mention names over the phone. At least, not my name. Let’s say, instead, that I’m the man who paid you five hundred dollars very early this morning.”

That made it D’Allemand. “Okay,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

“How is your head?”

“It’s a little lopsided but I’m still wearing it.”

The receiver made a dry sound that might have been a chuckle. “Are you making any progress, sir?”

“On what?”

“On what I hired you to do.”

“I’ve been looking around here and there,” I said.

“Was Clyne able to tell you anything of value?”

Anger began to turn over in me. I said, “You wouldn’t still have a tail on me by any chance?”

His voice sounded stiff, probably because of my tone. “As you yourself pointed out, Mr. Pine, I do not overlook much. I like to keep informed on matters of importance to me. Does that answer your question?”

My fingers tightened on the receiver until the knuckles shone. I said, “Get that tail off me, you hear? I don’t like tails; they make me nervous and interfere with my work. You paid me to do a job and I’m doing it my way and I don’t want any sidewalk superintendents. Is that clear?”

“I called to tell you, sir, that Clyne won’t be able to do much for you. He is the friend of Marlin’s I mentioned .

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