Mark of Murder - Dell Shannon Read Free

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."
 
 
    TWO
    "Are you