Death Sentence by Brian Garfield

Author:Brian Garfield [Garfield, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Thriller
ISBN: 9781419675003
Publisher: Fawcett
Published: 1975-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

22

“AM I FORGIVEN?” He held the phone against the left side of his face and tentatively prodded the scab on his right cheek with a finger.

“Take a lot of Vitamin C,” she said.

“Sam Kreutzer would have prescribed chicken soup.”

“It couldn’t hurt.” Her voice was thin; it was a poor connection. “Are you sure I can’t bring dinner over?”

“No, really, I’d just as soon not spread this cold around—especially to you. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Take care.” She said it tenderly; then the line was dead. For a moment he continued to hold the receiver against his ear, as if to maintain the thread of contact with her.

He had a bit of a head cold but that was only the excuse. He’d broken the date because he didn’t want her to see the scraped streaks on his face. Another day or two and he could pass them off as shaving cuts; until then he didn’t want to be seen by anyone—especially by Irene. She was too close to the inside: she’d know just about anything the police knew, and she was quick enough to put things together if given the evidence.

Even the newspapers were speculating on the blood-stains found in the snow. The police were analyzing them.

If the blood found on the snow fails to match the blood types of the dead assailant and the injured mugging victim, Captain Mastro said, police believe they may be a step closer to identifying the vigilante.

They were jumping to the wrong conclusion, evidently. They thought the vigilante had been cut by the machete. But in any case they were assuming the vigilante was wounded and Paul intended to stay in the apartment until he looked presentable.

Analysis of powder stains on the dead man’s clothing indicates he was shot at pointblank range. Angle of entry of the lethal bullets indicates the shooter was prone at the time of the killing. Had he been knocked down by a blow from the machete? Chicago police aren’t saying. But Lloyd Marks and his blind daughter Joanne had something to say this morning when reporters were granted interviews in Marks’ hospital room. “I hope he wasn’t cut too bad,” Marks told reporters. “Because all I can say is, thank God that man showed up when he did.”

It was a break for him that the New York police had kept the “vigilante” alive there: five killings, attributed to him in the newspapers, had been committed in Manhattan and Brooklyn while Paul was in Chicago. But at some level of authority there were men who knew the truth. If those men in New York decided to be candid with their colleagues in Chicago it was possible that the Chicago police might begin to sift information about any New Yorkers who had moved to Chicago in the past few weeks. If that happened they could hardly fail to scrutinize him closely. They’d interview Spalter and Childress, they’d question the employees of his apartment building, and he had no doubt they’d get around to Irene.

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