Mark of Murder - Dell Shannon Read Free Page B

he'd been. He kept
a razor and clean shirts there, I think."
    "I see. Well now, why did you begin to get
alarmed, Mrs. Nestor?" You ran into all sorts of things on this
job, but you never got beyond surprise at the behavior of human
people, the ways they lived and the compromises they made with life.
That good-looking corpse in there . . . This woman had been alive
once. Or had she? Probably--she'd never have been very pretty--she'd
been wildly in love with him, and it had broken her when she found
how he felt.
    "Oh well, when I found he hadn't come to the
office I did wonder. He was always prompt about that, because he
really did like money, you see. And when Miss Corliss called and said
he wasn't there--"
    "Miss Corliss."
    "She's his office nurse. She phoned me to ask
why he wasn't there. She hadn't a key to the office, you see, and of
course the front door was locked. Well, of course, as you can
understand, I didn't care to have her know I didn't know where Frank
was. I do hope all this won't have to come out in the papers.” Her
flat, emotionless voice was beginning to raise the hairs on Hackett's
neck. "So I told her he wasn't feeling well and wouldn't be in,
she might as well go home. But it did seem peculiar, because it
wasn't like him. So I came straight here--"
    "Why, Mrs. Nestor? Apparently he wasn't here,
you knew that."
    "I knew that, of course. The thought that just
crossed my mind was that he had possibly decided to leave me, or just
gone away somewhere on a little trip, and he might have left a note
here. I didn't know, but it was possible. But when I saw his car in
the parking lot at the side, of course it looked even odder, and then
I saw that the side door had been forced. I didn't like to go in
alone. I thought--well, I don't quite know what I thought, but I
walked up to the drugstore on the corner and called the police."
    Hackett looked at her reflectively. That, he thought,
was quite a story. From quite a female. Her dull eyes were
unreadable. Had she still loved him enough to feel jealousy? Had she
got to hating him enough to kill him? A very peculiar ménage that
had been, to say the least. And did that ring quite true, about why
she'd come to the office? Not a very natural thing to do, or was it?
He thought he'd ask her to let the lab give her a cordite test,
though that wasn't always conclusive.
    "Were you at home all last evening?" he
asked. "Alone?"
    "Oh yes." She gave the address readily:
Kenmore Avenue. "Frank left after dinner, about seven-thirty. I
watched TV a little while, and did some mending, and then I realized
he probably wouldn't be in until late, so I went to bed. That was
about ten-thirty. It wasn't until this morning that I realized he
hadn't come home at all."
    Horne, thought Hackett. My God. "Do you have
separate rooms?"
    "Oh no, but, you see, I went to sleep."
    He looked at her again. It was early to come to any
conclusions; he wasn't sure exactly how he felt about her story. He
said, "May I have your full name, please?"
    "Andrea Lilian Nestor. My maiden name was
Wayne."
    He thanked her. "I think that's all I'll ask of
you right now, Mrs. Nestor. We'll be in touch with you. I suppose
you'd like to go home. Have you a car, or--"
    "Oh no," she said. "I don't drive."
    "I'll have a car come and pick you up."
    "That's very kind of you," she said,
sounding surprised. "I don't mind the bus. Could you tell me--I
expect you'll want to do an autopsy, but should I make any
arrangements?"
    "For the--" That stopped him, the flatly
practical question. He said, "Not until we officially release
the body."
    "Oh. I see. Well, thank you. I think," said
Andrea Nestor meditatively, "I'll have him cremated?
    Hackett went back to the private office down the
hall. He felt shaken. He asked Marx if the phone had been printed; it
had, and he called in for a car to take Mrs. Nestor home. He thought
now, before he swallowed the obvious break-in and impersonal assault,
he'd take a long hard look at Andrea Nestor