Dell Shannon - Mark of Murder

The patrolman led him out the single door at the rear of the room, to a short cross hall with several doors.

"Down here, sir." The second outside entrance was on the right side of the building. The door had been forced: crudely forced, with something like a tire iron or, of course, a jemmy. This building sat between two much larger ones; on this side its nearest neighbor, across a small parking lot, was a three-story office building. Without much doubt, nobody there at night. Hackett sighed, said, "O.K., I guess you might as well get back on tour."

He went down to the other end of the hall, past two open-doored examination rooms, to the scene of activity. This was a private office; there was a glass-topped walnut desk, a plastic-upholstered swivel chair behind it, a glass-fronted bookcase, a couple of other chairs. The floor was marble-patterned vinyl. This building, and the rooms they had seen, looked like class: Dr. Nestor had evidently been doing very well indeed with his practice.

"What does it look like?" he asked. In that confined space, several men were having difficulty avoiding each other or disturbing possible evidence as they went about their jobs. Dr. Bainbridge was squatting over the body.

Scarne was taking flash shots. Marx was printing the top of the desk, and Horder was printing the flat slab door. Bainbridge glanced up testily. "I've just got here. You can see he's been shot. Probably a small caliber, and until I've looked inside and so on I'll say roughly between- oh, call it twelve and sixteen hours."

Hackett looked at his watch. "Putting it between eight and midnight last night." He bent and looked at the corpse.

Frank Nestor had been, probably, around thirty-five. Hackett's first thought was that, even dead, he looked an unlikely husband for the plain sallow woman out there in the waiting room. You could see that Nestor had been a very good-looking man, the type you could call a ladies' man. Not very big, middle size, but he had lean, handsome, regular features, with a hairline dark mustache and curly dark hair. And he was dressed to the nines, in beige flannel slacks, an expensive brown sports jacket, white shirt, and a beige silk tie with brown horse heads on it; that was neatly confined by a gold tie clasp set with a piece of carved jade. He was lying on his back directly in front of the desk, almost parallel to its length. One arm, the left, was flung out and twisted so that the back of the hand was uppermost; there was a heavy gold ring set with a black star sapphire on the little finger. The other arm was across the chest, and that hand was clenched. He'd been shot once in the forehead, very neatly. As Bainbridge said, probably a small caliber; there was very little mess.

Marx looked up and said, "It looks kind of ordinary, Sergeant. A break-in, and whoever it was didn't expect to find him here. There's a steel cashbox-the wife says he kept cash in it anyway-there."

"I see," said Hackett. The steel box, a smallish one about eight inches long, had evidently been kept in the left-hand top drawer of the desk; that drawer stood open, and the box was lying on its side a couple of feet away from the body. Its lid was open; a key was still in the lock, suspended from a ring that held others.

"His car's parked out there in the lot," Marx offered further.

That, of course, was just what it looked like: a simple break-in. The burglar running into Nestor, using his gun. Riffling the place, using Nestor's keys, and running. Only, equally of course, you had to look at all the possibilities. It could also have been set up to look like that.

Nestor the good-looking sporty type. Ladies' man? His clothes and this office spelled Success, spelled Prosperity. That unglamorous female in the waiting room didn‘t look like the kind of woman Nestor would have married. Conceivably, when they came to look, they'd find that he had indeed stepped out on her. Maybe she'd been jealous enough to… Or maybe somebody's husband had been jealous enough to… You never knew.

"Well," he said. "John, suppose you have a look through the desk and so on, and I'll ask Mrs. Nestor a few questions."

"Are you feeling well enough to answer a couple of questions, Mrs. Nestor?" Hackett sat down facing her, got out his notebook.

"Oh yes," she said obediently. "Of course it's been quite a shock, coming so suddenly. I can't realize it yet."

Her eyes were a greeny brown, oddly flat and dull. But she hadn't, he thought, done any crying. Of course that didn't say anything: some people didn't cry easily.

"Your husband seems to have been doing very well here."

She looked around the waiting room. "Oh yes, he was, I think. People liked him, I suppose. He put up such a good appearance, and made people like him. He'd always said he knew he'd be a success at it, he'd wanted to be a doctor-a real medical doctor, I mean-but of course this was a shorter course and not so expensive. Not but what it cost quite a bit at that, it's a four-year course now."

"How long had he been in practice?"

"Oh, only a little over three years."

Hackett, asking these questions he didn't really care about, to get her talking, was surprised. This office must have cost something to rent. "How long had he been here, in this office?"

"Oh, he started out here. He had-it was lucky-a legacy about then, and he said it was better to invest it in the office, because a good front always impressed people."

"I see. Well, he had an appointment last evening?"

She nodded. She spoke flatly, emotionlessly. "He'd do that for people who couldn't get in during the day. I think it was for eight o'clock."

"Did he tell you what time to expect him home?"

"No."

"It seems you didn't get really worried until this morning," said Hackett. "Enough to-investigate. I'm sorry to ask you, Mrs. Nestor, but was that because he had stayed away overnight-before?”

She looked at him thoughtfully, as if really seeing him for the first time; her expression didn't change at all. She dabbed at her pale lips with a wadded-up handkerchief and after a moment said deliberately, "I expect I'd better tell you why. It's not very pleasant, but I can see you'd have to know. I only hope it doesn't all have to come out in the papers. That wouldn't be very nice." She spoke like a woman of some education; but he thought that, whatever emotions she'd once had, they'd been driven out of her, or wasted away, somehow, for some time. "Yes, I'm sorry to have to say it, but he had stayed away like that before, without telling me."

"I see. Do you know of any other woman in his life?"

Hackett felt like apologizing for the cliche, but how else would you put it?

"I wouldn't know any names," she said. "I didn't know many of Frank's friends. Not any more. I expect I'd better say how it was, or you'll think that's awfully queer. You see, my father had quite a lot of money, and that was why Frank married me. I didn't realize that until Father died and we found he'd lost all the money some way-I never understood exactly how. Frank was-very angry about that. I expect he'd have left me then, but he'd got used to me. And I kept a nice place for him, a comfortable home, and good meals and so on. And of course as long as he had a wife no other woman could catch up to him, if you see what I mean. It was convenient for him. And then, of course, there was Mr. Marlowe.”

"Who is Mr. Marlowe?”

She dabbed at her lips again. "He was a friend of my father's. When-before Frank was doing so well, he'd drop around sometimes and give me little presents-to see we had enough to eat, at least." No trace of bitterness in her tone. "And he lent Frank the money for the chiropractic course. Of course Frank paid him back."

"l see. Your husband didn't keep any regular routine, about coming home?"