The Kissed Corpse (2 page)

I don't know how long we stood there like that. It seemed a dozen eternities to me before Young lowered the glasses. For a moment he appeared to be listening, as though he heard something I couldn't hear. He was outwardly composed, almost stolid, as he picked up the case in steady fingers and fitted the glasses inside. I had seen his eyes, and I didn't look at him again. I made some inane remark which he let pass unnoticed.

He turned away and said, “Thanks for asking me over,” and walked out through the door to his horse.

I walked over to a window and watched him ride down from my borrowed cottage into the shadowy canyon bottom. The sun was veiled with fleecy white clouds, the blue of the Texas sky shining in between. Shadows moved furtively over valley and slopes. The soft breeze and the dead quiet of the canyon had a strange, narcotic effect on my mind.

2

I stuck around for half an hour but didn't get any work done. Half a dozen times I was on the verge of calling Jerry Burke at police headquarters in El Paso and asking him to come out, but I didn't actually have much to go on and I was afraid Jerry would laugh it off if he did come, and give me a good-natured razzing for letting my imagination run away with me.

Besides, there wasn't anything even a man in Jerry's official position could do. You can't arrest a man for looking through a telescope from his own front balcony.

Moreover, I had a strong hunch Leslie Young wouldn't relish intervention in his personal affairs. He had definitely given me the impression of a man able to take care of himself, and I knew he intended to take care of this business in his own way.

It wasn't a nice spot for me any way I looked at it. I sat there at the window looking uneasily from Young's cabin across to the Dwight estate, and tried desperately to excuse myself from all responsibility in the affair.

There was a feeling that something was going to happen. That forces had been set in motion which would inevitably result in tragedy. That if I hadn't come to the damned cabin in the first place … hadn't let those flashes of light arouse my curiosity … hadn't asked Young to bring over his glasses.…

I succeeded in working up a strong conviction that I hadn't had a thing to do with it. That if I hadn't thrown the switch, something else would have set off the spark just the same. That it was more a cumulative result than simple cause and effect.

At any rate, there was potential explosive in McKelligon's Canyon. I couldn't laugh it off, and I didn't even try.

So, I decided to clear out. It was like lighting a fuse and running, but I was past minding that. There was a quiet bungalow waiting for me back in the city where I might be able to forget Young's face as he stalked away.

Nip and Tuck came out of their corner hopefully and sat quietly with Scottish heads cocked while I put pajamas and shaving things back into my suitcase; then followed me out to the car.

I felt released when I was packed and ready to start. As though I were fleeing from something just in time.

That stopped me. No man, I suppose, likes to admit consciously that he is running away from danger. A sense of shame challenged me to stay … or perhaps it was curiosity.

At any rate, I changed my mind abruptly, turned away from the car and went down the road leading into the paved highway following along the floor of the canyon, whistling the pups to heel.

The dwarfed and water-starved trees threw heavy shade along the twisting road which followed the canyon upward. Picnic spots were cleared under groves of cottonwoods where streams trickled down from the peaks of Mt. Franklin.

About a quarter of a mile from my starting point on the highway, a wide concrete drive curved away to the right, climbing a steep slope to a stone archway over a gap in the high wall shutting the Dwight grounds away from the common herd.

I kept on up the highway, glancing over my shoulder now and then at the wall until it was finally left behind; vividly conscious of the owner of the estate, and working up quite a dislike for him.

I've never had any use for the type of man who gets a kick out of nudity
per se
. To my mind, it's a species of childish eroticism peculiar to moronic intellects. Like getting excited about an obscene postcard, or laughing heartily at a vulgarly pointless joke.

My thoughts, however, were mostly of Leslie Young, and after I had walked for a long time, it occurred to me that there might be something I could do to prevent him from getting into serious trouble with Dwight.

I turned back abruptly at a point where the canyon gradually flattened out into a broad valley. The pups seemed pretty well fagged out, but not eager to return. It was downhill and easy going, but they continually lagged back, pausing to sniff the air, then hurrying close behind me.

Dusk comes early in the bottom of a canyon, and we left the sunlight behind us by the time we'd covered half the distance back. There was a distinct chill in the air, and a blacker shadow seemed to hover over the silent steep-walled gap just ahead of us as we moved on … fading forward as we moved into it … keeping pace with us.

It was a distinct relief to sight the stone wall surrounding the Dwight estate and realize that it was only a little way to the Young cottage. I was getting jittery, and felt a need to know whether Leslie Young had acted on an impulse and gone after Dwight immediately.

I had just passed the Dwight driveway when I heard hurried steps around the bend beyond. In the solitude and the silence the noise came as a distinct shock, and I stopped with a prickly sensation around the base of my scalp.

Then, I saw the man across the road from me. He was middle-aged and tall, bareheaded, with a high forehead. His face was pale, features thin and ascetic, with pince-nez pinched on the bridge of an arrogant nose. He wore a white sweater and plus-fours, and carried an English walking stick which he thudded on the pavement with every step.

He did not look in my direction, but hurried on, paying no heed to the pups when they started across the road with a friendly greeting. I turned to watch him as he went up the drive into the Dwight estate.

I knew him then. I had seen his picture in the paper several times, but not lately. Rufus Hardiman. One of the higher-ups in our State Department in Washington. A house-guest in the Dwight home.

We went on around the bend, and suddenly the pups dashed ahead as we approached a culvert over a deep gully cutting in from the left. They scampered across the road, yelping with excitement toward a turn-out in a grove of oaks, then came to a halt with neckhairs bristling.

I followed them into the deeper shadow of the oaks. I saw a saddled horse tied to a sapling.

I halted where I was, peering through the shadows at the crumpled body of a man beneath a small oak. I had a sick empty feeling that a murder had been committed and that I might have prevented it. I knew Leslie Young was in a mood for murder when he rode way from my cabin.

A few steps closer I stopped again, staring down unbelievingly at the
corpse of Leslie Young
.

He was the one man in the world I hadn't expected to see lying there.

He was peacefully slumped as if in restful relaxation. Crusted blood stained the short hair above his right ear … and there was the brighter stain of crimson on his lips.

I took one more step which brought me directly over the body. Shaken and unnerved by the unexpectedness of it, I stooped closer to his face. The crimson of his lips was ludicrous. His mouth was naturally thin and tightly drawn in death, but the perfect imprint of a woman's full lips made it into a cupid's bow.

Stranger than this, however, and far more awesome, was a two-barred cross of crimson on his right cheek. A long vertical mark crossed by shorter lines … wide marks, such as might have been made with a child's crayon, or with a woman's carmine lipstick.

The symbol of the double cross, was my dazed thought as I stood up and rushed to the highway, thinking only of getting word to Jerry Burke.

3

I heard the motor of a speeding car as I stood there, and I hurried out to the highway to flag down a couple of city-bound youths in a light coupe.

“It's murder,” I told them. “Stop at the first telephone and call the police. Get Jerry Burke if possible. Tell him it's Asa Baker and I'll stay with the body until he comes.”

They drove away reluctantly, craning their necks in morbid curiosity, trying to see the body.

I walked back into the grove with my eyes wide open this time. There were fresh automobile tracks, showing where a car had recently turned off and parked, backed around and gone back toward El Paso.

The saddled horse was the same one Leslie Young had ridden to see me earlier. He was standing patiently, as though he didn't realize his rider would never mount him again.

I circled back around the body carefully, staying far enough away so as not to mess up any footprints, trying mentally to recreate the murder.

It had happened while I was gone for my walk up the canyon, of course. I looked at my watch and saw it was nearly four o'clock. I'd been gone over three hours.

Young had ridden here from his cottage after I left, met someone in a car, perhaps; been killed while he sat quietly beneath the tree. Death had come unexpectedly—instantaneously, I guessed, noting the peaceful look on his face and the relaxed posture of his body.

Had he arranged to meet Raymond Dwight here? Or, had he called Dwight and threatened him—come here to meet someone else and been killed by Dwight lurking in ambush?

And, what about Rufus Hardiman? He had been plainly distraught and in a hurry—coming from this direction. I tried to recall exactly what Young had said about Hardiman in my cabin. No actual threat, but he had made it evident that he was deeply moved and angered by the assumption that Dwight was working on a scheme with the diplomat for the return of his expropriated oil property.

And all the time, my thoughts were edging away from the crimson stain on Leslie Young's lips, the curious symbol marked in red on his cheek.

It grew chillier in the lonesome glade, and the shadows deepened. Nip and Tuck were circumspectly back on the edge of the grove and I was damnably alone with the dead man.

A kiss from rouged lips! A woman's hand fumbling in her handbag for lipstick, bending down to trace the mark of the double cross in vivid carmine on the cold cheek of a dead man!

It was ghastly. I paced back and forth, looking anxiously down the winding highway, trying not to wonder what part I had played in the scheme of murder that day, and was at last rewarded by hearing the wail of a rapidly approaching police siren.

I stepped out into the highway and waved frantically as Jerry Burke's official car roared into view, and he brought it to a screeching stop beside me.

Chief of Detectives Jelcoe was in the front seat with Burke. He peered at me irritably with twitching eyelids; grunted an accusing, “Humph,” as though my presence at the scene of murder satisfied a long-standing suspicion.

I looked past Jelcoe at Burke's solidly square face. “It's Leslie Young, Jerry. He's … lying back here.”

A radio patrol car and an ambulance were pulling up behind Burke's roadster. Jelcoe's long legs stepped out past me in the direction I indicated, and I waited for Burke to come around the car.

“Young, eh?” There was a tired, hurt look on Burke's face which I didn't understand at the moment. “You had gotten in touch with him?”

“This noon.” I went by Jerry Burke's side toward Jelcoe, who was standing over the corpse with an air of proprietorship. “I was coming back from a long walk up the canyon when Nip and Tuck scented the body and led me to it,” I went on hastily.

Burke nodded, moving with a surprisingly light stride for so heavy a man. He's a surprising fellow in a lot of ways, even to me, and I've known him off and on since he was foreman on my dad's cattle ranch on the Pecos River and I was just a kid.

He's covered a long and adventurous trail since I first knew him, ranging from a hitch in the U. S. Intelligence Service during the war; through a period with the Texas Rangers; gun-running in Latin America and the Orient; successfully heading his own detective agency in New York—and finally being called back to El Paso to mop up the crime-ridden Border city.

I suppose all of that has contributed to make Jerry Burke the man he is today, but it has seemingly had an inverse effect.

Outwardly, he appears the least adventurous and imaginative of men. The inward spark that has driven him to do the things that other men wishfully dream of doing doesn't show in his face, speech, or actions. In appearance, he looks like a moderately successful broker or merchant. His stubby hair is turning gray, and his body gets a little bulkier each year.

But I followed him around on the MUM case,
^*
and I saw that glint in his eyes while we sat in the Juarez cafe waiting for the killers to show themselves at the end of a heartbreaking manhunt, so I know what's inside of him that makes him tick.

Knowing him as I do, I shouldn't have hung back and watched his face as he stepped forward by Chief Jelcoe's side and looked down at the body. Perhaps I shouldn't have wondered what his reaction would be to the red lips and queer symbol.

I might as well have saved myself the trouble. If Jerry Burke ever allowed himself to have a reaction he wouldn't let it show outwardly. His heavy face was as impassive as though he had just shoved out a stack of blues on a busted straight.

Jelcoe's long nose was quivering but he didn't say anything. In Burke's presence he had a way of respectfully effacing himself that was just the opposite of respectful. He's the only man I ever met who could sneer with becoming modesty.

Uniformed men and the police surgeon were approaching. Burke stepped back to my side to make room, saying pleasantly to Jelcoe:

“Better start your blood-hounds circling while it's still light.”