Burden of Guilt

  Carter Brown

  Burden of Guilt

  Chapter One

  The sun was edging up over the horizon, and the shadows of the leaves, moving in the breeze, dappled the white facade of the house with a vaguely psychedelic pattern. Somewhere a bird was singing and, at this hour of the morning, I figured it had to be out of its tiny feathered mind. I walked up onto the front porch and pushed the doorbell. Muted chimes were still playing when the door was suddenly yanked open wide, and a skinny little guy peered up at me suspiciously through the thick lens of his rimless glasses.

  “Yes?” The word exploded out of him like I had just punched him in the solar plexus.

  “I’m Lieutenant Wheeler, from the sheriff’s office,” I told him.

  “Only a lieutenant!” He sounded bitterly disappointed. “Is that the best they could do?”

  “This is Pine City County,” I snarled, “and here, with a homicide, you get me. If you don’t like the idea, you can always take your corpse someplace else and start over.”

  “I meant no offense,” he said quickly. “But, as I told your desk sergeant when I called in to report the murder, it’s vital that everything be handled with absolute discretion. There must be no publicity, no leaks to the newspapers, and the investigation must be successfully concluded in the minimum of time.” He blinked myopically, then drew himself up to his full height of maybe an inch over five feet. “There are vast issues at stake here, Lieutenant!”

  I stared fixedly over the top of his head for a few seconds, then shrugged. “I don’t see them.”

  “Who?” he asked nervously.

  “The men in the white coats,” I grated. “The ones with the big butterfly nets. My guess is they have to catch up with you soon, even if you are Napoleon.”

  He swallowed hard. “Maybe you’d better come inside and meet Mr.—uh—Smith.”

  I followed him across the wide hallway into the living room, which looked like a miniature Rose Bowl. There was a guy sitting in an armchair facing me, smoking a fat cigar. He was somewhere around fifty; his massive head was completely bald; along with the hooded cold gray eyes, it gave him the look of a Caligula-type Roman emperor. A thick terry-cloth robe was wrapped tight around his heavy torso and thighs, covering him down to his knees. The bare shins, covered with tufts of black hair, lent a weird note to the overall picture.

  “This is Lieutenant Wheeler from the sheriff’s office,” the skinny little guy said. “Lieutenant, this is Mr. Smith.” He lowered his voice to a confidential undertone. “Mr. Smith is incognito.”

  Caligula put his cigar down carefully on the edge of an ashtray, then got to his feet. “I imagine you want to see the body first, Lieutenant.”

  “It’s customary,” I agreed.

  I followed him out to the wide concrete terrace at the back of the house, then around the side of the pool to where the concrete apron merged with a close-shaven lawn. The body of a girl was partially concealed by a flowering shrub, and lay on its side with both legs in a jackknifed position. Except for the tattered remnants of a white silk slip bunched up around her waist, she was naked.

  A veil of long black hair obscured her face, and a nightmare pattern of bruises and welts covered the lower half of her body and upper thighs. I went down on my knees and gently pushed the black hair back so I could see her face. Her eyeballs protruded grotesquely, the blackened tongue was clenched between her teeth, and swollen purple marks made a horizontal line around her neck. I let the merciful veil of black hair fall back across her face like a shroud, then came back up onto my feet again.

  “Strangled to death,” I said unnecessarily.

  “Badly beaten before she was killed, and probably also raped,” Caligula said in an expressionless voice. “I imagine you have a great number of questions to ask, Lieutenant.”

  “And the first is what’s your real name, Mr. Incognito?” I snapped.

  He smiled briefly, “Tyler means well, but he’s just not equipped to handle this kind of a situation, I’m afraid. My name is Gerard Kingsley.” His hooded eyes probed my face for a long moment. “The name means nothing to you?”

  I shrugged. “Should it?”

  “There’s no reason. I was just curious.”

  Over his shoulder I saw Doc Murphy approaching the pool, complete with little black bag. I suggested that Kingsley go back inside the house and I would catch up with him later. The two men passed each other at one side of the pool, and I noticed a faint flicker of surprise on the coroner’s face as he glanced at Kingsley.

  “What is it with you, Al?” Murphy growled when he stopped in front of me, “—digging up a homicide in the middle of the night.”

  “Maybe you haven’t noticed,” I said politely. “It’s another bright day already, with the sun shining and all.”

  “Anytime before nine A.M. is the middle of the night as far as I’m concerned, and—” He stopped talking abruptly because right then he got his first look at the body.

  I smoked a cigarette while he made his examination. That featherbrained bird burst into song again, and the bright sunlight warmed me right through to my bones. It was a good day to be alive, like wotzisname said, and looking at a corpse was a lousy way to kick off the morning. There was a sharp click as Murphy closed up his little black bag, so I turned around toward him again.

  “I don’t like this one at all!” His normally cynical voice was subdued. “She was brutally beaten, then strangled to death, which is all too obvious.”

  “And raped, maybe?”

  “The autopsy will decide that. She’s been dead for at least four hours, maybe five.”

  I checked my watch. “That makes it sometime between one and two this morning?”

  “Like that,” he nodded. “I just hope her killer had a good logical motive.”

  “Why?”

  “You wouldn’t want him to be a maniac, Al,” he said softly. “Maybe already planning on doing the same thing to some other girl tonight.”

  “You’re right.” My stomach lurched queasily at the thought.

  “You know something? For a moment there, I figured that guy who went back inside the house was Gerard Kingsley.” Murphy grinned and shook his head slowly. “It’s an amazing likeness!”

  “Not so amazing,” I told him. “He is Gerard Kingsley—whoever he is.”

  Murphy’s satanic eyebrows quirked in surprise. “You don’t know who he is?” He snapped his fingers. “Of course! I should have remembered you don’t read anything but pornographic books.”

  “And only the ones your wife lends me, too,” I snarled. “So tell me about Kingsley.”

  “He was a lawyer until about six months ago. You don’t remember the Stensen trial in San Francisco?”

  “Vaguely,” I said. “He was a labor-union racketeer who got his come-uppance?”

  “Gerard Kingsley was the lawyer who defended him. The jury found Stensen guilty and the judge threw the book at him, and also made a number of acid remarks about Kingsley’s conduct of the defense. I guess the D.A.’s office couldn’t find enough concrete evidence against Kingsley to warrant going to the grand jury, but his own profession took care of him a month later. He was disbarred on the grounds of unethical conduct, intimidation of witnesses, undue association with known criminals, and—you name it!” Murphy paused for a moment to catch his breath. “It would be real nice to figure that justice triumphed over all, but from what I read about Cordain—the guy who took over from Stensen—he could be even worse!”

  “You fascinate me, Doc,” I told him. “How come you know so much about law and so little about medicine?”

  “It’s all these goddamned autopsies,” he said, without batting an eyelid. “If I could only get my hands on a patient who could answe
r back—scream a little, even—then maybe I’d have a chance to learn something about medicine.”

  “I guess the same goes for me, too,” I admitted. “If I could only find a victim who wasn’t already dead by the time I arrive!”

  “Things is tough all over,” he conceded. “The meat wagon’s out front. You want me to wait until the crime lab boys have come and gone?”

  “I haven’t called them yet,” I said, “and right now I don’t see any point. Either she was strangled right here, or somebody dumped her body afterward. With a real neat backyard like this, nobody would leave a trail of broken twigs or trampled-down undergrowth and—seeing she was strangled—for sure there won’t be a trail of blood!”

  “There are times when you do display an elementary kind of logic that never ceases to amaze me, Al,” he conceded. “So I can remove the body to the morgue, and continue on my merry autopsical way?”

  “Please!” I told him.

  When I got back inside the living room, I saw Kingsley hadn’t wasted his time while he had been waiting. He was now fully dressed, and if he hadn’t paid three hundred bucks for the suit, it had been a steal.

  “The coroner recognized me, I think?” he said, the moment I walked into the room.

  “The Stensen trial,” I nodded.

  “It makes things easier in a way, saves time and unnecessary explanations.” He peeled the cellophane wrapper from another fat cigar. “Some answers first might save you a lot of questions, Lieutenant.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I rented this house a week back. There are three of us: myself, my personal assistant, Tyler, whom you have already met, and my wife, Adele. Adele is an early bird who likes to swim first and breakfast later. It was she who found the body. She called me, and I woke Tyler and told him to call the police.”

  “You know who the murdered girl was?”

  “Yes.” He tugged his thick lower lip between his thumb and index finger a couple of times. “I’d like to ask you a favor right here, Lieutenant. If possible, I’d prefer my wife not to know about my association with Shirley Lucas.”

  “That was her name?”

  He nodded. “A professional call girl from San Francisco. After the Stensen trial was finished and I was in big trouble, I sent Adele down to Palm Springs. I didn’t want her mixed up in what I knew was going to be a very unpleasant business. The pressures built and built to the point where I had to find some kind of relief, so I found it with Shirley—at two hundred dollars a night.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “About three weeks ago at her apartment in San Francisco. A kind of good-bye visit. Adele had left a couple of days before to find us a house to rent here in Pine City.”

  “You have any ideas about how she wound up dead on your rented lawn?”

  “Some.” He took time out to light his cigar and the blue smoke wreathed around his bald head like incense. “You didn’t give me any answer yet about that favor I asked.”

  “That’s right,” I agreed.

  “Even as an ex-lawyer, my instincts still tell me to refuse to answer any more questions right here.” He made a small impatient gesture with one hand. “There’s no point in asking a second favor when you haven’t answered the first. What the hell! Somebody’s trying to frame me for murder!”

  “All through talking to yourself?” I grunted.

  “Does the name Hal Cordain mean anything, Lieutenant?”

  “The guy who took Stensen’s place as boss of the labor union?”

  He nodded. “I can’t act as his attorney anymore, but I do act as his adviser.”

  “That’s nice,” I said politely.

  “He’s busy organizing a big industrial plant just outside L.A. There always comes a point in the negotiations where it’s better for both sides to get together and make a deal.”

  It started making a little sense. “A secret deal?” I prompted. “To be made in a secret place where nobody would notice the two parties getting together. Some place like Pine City?”

  “Right. Hal Cordain arrived yesterday morning, and he’s renting an apartment in town. The other party, a guy called Strachan, has a suite at the Starlight Hotel. He’s the executive vice-president of the corporation involved.”

  “You’re suggesting one of them is trying to frame you for murder?”

  “No!” he snarled. “All I’m trying to do is give you an overall picture, Lieutenant. After they put Stensen away for fifteen to twenty years, there were two people bucking for his job: Cordain, and another man called Joe Dana. Cordain had more of the weight that counted, but just because he lost out is no reason to suppose Dana quit trying!”

  “How would it help him to frame you for a murder?”

  “Because enough of the mud would stick to Hal Cordain, that’s why! Strachan will pull out so fast, you won’t even see the dust. Then Dana will howl from the rooftops about how Cordain ruined the whole deal by taking advice from a disbarred lawyer who’s also some kind of a homicidal maniac!”

  “Are you trying to tell me Dana would commit murder to help him become boss of a labor union?” I asked incredulously.

  “You know what kind of a union it is, Lieutenant?” he asked in a cold, ferocious voice. “It’s not a genuine labor union at all. It’s a very carefully organized racket. They find an unorganized plant, put half-a-dozen paid agitators into it to stir up the suckers, then sign them on as members. The next step is to put a list of impossible demands in front of the management, let them sweat it out for a couple of weeks, then finally make a secret deal. In return for an annual rake-off, they’ll guarantee the management will never have any more trouble from their labor force. And if any of the members start to complain about the union something unpleasant happens to them real fast, and the rest of the members get the message. At a conservative estimate, the union boss should put a hundred thousand dollars into his own hip pocket every year.”

  He pulled out his pocket handkerchief and dabbed at the sweat beading his forehead. “If Cordain ever found out I’d told you that, my life wouldn’t be worth a dime!”

  “You’re not the first person who’s said how a racketeer-run labor union operates,” I said.

  “No.” He kept busy with his pocket handkerchief. “But I’m about the first one who can also prove it!”

  “Where is Dana now?”

  “How the hell would I know?” He shrugged irritably. “Last I heard he was in San Francisco. My guess is he’s too smart to have killed Shirley himself, he would have hired a professional to do the job.”

  “I need some addresses to fit the names,” I told him. “Like where is Cordain’s rented apartment, and where the Lucas girl lived in San Francisco.”

  He gave them to me and I dutifully wrote them down in my little black book, like a good cop should.

  “Shirley shared the apartment with her girlfriend, Wanda Blair,” Kingsley added in a faintly embarrassed voice. “Maybe she can help.”

  If Kingsley didn’t stop being helpful, my mind whimpered, I’d probably wind up spending the rest of my life on this case. For sure, I figured desperately, if I did go to San Francisco I’d find Wanda Blair had left for L.A. the previous day, and Dana—his prime suspect—the day before that. But then Kingsley figured Dana wouldn’t have committed the murder himself, he would have hired a professional gun to do the job, and where in hell would I go looking for him?

  I heard the door open behind me and turned around in time to see a sleek blonde tigress prowl into the room. Her short wavy hair was the color of a fine dry sherry, her eyes were a kind of frosted blue, set above prominent cheekbones, and her full lips were fixed in a hellraking downward curve which said she didn’t give a goddamn for man or beast. Looking at her, I guessed she was the type who could chew up a man and spit him out with hardly a bat of those long eyelashes.

  She was wearing a lime-green bikini that almost wasn’t there, it was so skimpy. Her small high breasts were only just contained in th
e bra top, and I swore I could make out a faint golden pubic smudge through the bikini trunks that outlined her trim hips, thrusting pelvic arch, and the rise of her crotch in starker-than-nude detail. The rest of her was a glowing golden color, but all the same I figured I would have hated to be a Judas goat tied up in some jungle clearing when she came along, even if there were four professional big-game hunters waiting in the trees.

  “Adele!” Kingsley tried real hard to give her a friendly smile, but some kind of an instant facial paralysis prevented it from getting beyond a nervous twitch. “This is Lieutenant Wheeler, from the sheriffs office.”

  “Oh?” The look she gave me said I was ready for the hyenas to do their scavenging job. “I found the body when I went out for my usual early-morning swim in the pool. I can’t tell you anything more than that, Lieutenant.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Kingsley,” I said solemnly. “You’ve been a big help.”

  The downward curve of her mouth became a little more pronounced. “I imagine you can use all the help you can get, Lieutenant.” Then she turned her head slowly and looked at her husband. “You seem to have been talking in here for hours, Gerard! Has the lieutenant asked you the sixty-four-dollar question yet?”

  “Which one is that?” he asked shortly.

  “The one I’m dying to ask you, sweetheart! Where were you until some time after three this morning?”

  “What!” He almost choked on a mouthful of cigar smoke. “Are you crazy? I was back from seeing Hal Cordain before midnight!”

  “I don’t mind you lying to me, lover,” she said in a silky voice. “But don’t you think it’s a little stupid to lie to the lieutenant? Stupid as he looks, he’s sure to find out the truth sooner or later.”

  Kingsley gave me a despairing look. “Don’t listen to her, Lieutenant! This is some kind of a weird game she’s playing, because she figures it’s funny, or something.”

  “I never think the truth is very amusing, darling, more like sordid most of the time. Probably the truth about where you were until all hours of the morning is pretty sordid, too, but I think the lieutenant is entitled to know.”