The Galton Case by Ross MacDonald Read Free Book Online

blood-filmed grass, about ten feet from Sable’s front door. The lower part of his white jacket was red-stained. His upturned face was gray and impervious-looking, like the stone faces on tombs.
    A Sheriff’s identification man was taking pictures of himwith a tripod camera. He was a white-haired officer with a long inquisitive nose. I waited until he moved his camera to get another angle:
    “Mind if I have a look at him?”
    “Long as you don’t touch him. I’ll be through here in a minute.”
    When he had finished his work, I leaned over the body for a closer look. There was a single deep wound in the abdomen. The right hand had cuts across the palm and inside the curled fingers. The knife that had done the damage, a bloody five-inch switch-blade, lay on the grass in the angle between the torso and the outstretched right arm.
    I took hold of the hand: it was still warm and limp: and turned it over. The skin on the tattooed knuckles was torn, probably by teeth.
    “He put up quite a struggle,” I said.
    The identification officer hunkered down beside me. “Yeah. Be careful with those fingernails. There’s some kind of debris under ‘em, might be human skin. You notice the tattoo marks?”
    “I’d have to be blind to miss them.”
    “I mean these.” He took the hand away from me, and pointed out four dots arranged in a tiny rectangle between the first and second fingers. “Gang mark. He had it covered up later with a standard tattoo. A lot of old gang members do that. I see them on people we vag.”
    “What kind of gang?”
    “I don’t know. This is a Sac or Frisco gang. I’m no expert on the northern California insignia. I wonder if Lawyer Sable knew he had an old gang member working for him.”
    “We could ask him.”
    The front door was standing open. I walked in and found Sable in the front sitting-room. He raised a limp arm, and waved me into a chair:
    “Sit down, Archer. I’m sorry about what happened. I can’t imagine what they thought they were pulling.”
    “Eager-beavering. Forget it. We got off to a poor start, but the local boys seem to know what they’re doing.”
    “I hope so,” he said, not very hopefully.
    “What do you know about your late houseman?”
    “Not a great deal, I’m afraid. He only worked for me for a few months. I hired him originally to look after my yacht. He lived aboard the yacht until I sold it. Then he moved up here. He had no place to go, and he didn’t ask for much. Peter wasn’t very competent indoors, as you may have noticed. But it’s hard for us to get help out in the country, and he was an obliging soul, so I let him stay on.”
    “What sort of a background did he have?”
    “I gathered he was pretty much of a floater. He mentioned various jobs he’d held: marine cook, longshoreman, house-painter.”
    “How did you hire him? Through an employment agency?”
    “No. I picked him up on the dock. I think he’d just come off a fishing-boat, a Monterey seiner. I was polishing brass, varnishing deck, and so on, and he offered to help me for a dollar an hour. He did a good day’s work, so I took him on. He never failed to do a good day’s work.”
    A cleft of pain, like a knife-cut, had appeared between Sable’s eyebrows. I guessed that he had been fond of the dead man. I hesitated to ask my next question:
    “Would you know if Culligan had a criminal record?”
    The cleft in his brow deepened. “Good Lord, no. I trusted him with my boat and my house. What makes you ask such a question?”
    “Two things mainly. He had a tattoo mark on his hand, four little black dots at the edge of the blue tattoo. Gangsters and drug addicts wear that kind of mark. Also, this has the look of a gang killing. The man who took my car is almostcertainly the killer, and he has the earmarks of a pro.”
    Sable looked down at the polished terrazzo as if at any moment it might break up under his feet. “You think Peter Culligan was involved with criminals?”
    “Involved