With a yowl of pain, the blonde dropped the face mask and staggered backward. Martha drew both knees to her chest and pushed the dentist away by placing her feet in his stomach and shoving. He reeled across the room to crash into an instrument table.
Martha bounced from the dental chair and sped past the astonished redhead in the open doorway.
She was thankful that the dental office was on the first floor, because she had to gulp air into her starved lungs while she was running, and she probably would have collapsed if she had been required to race downstairs. Desperation made her good for a short sprint, though. She was outdoors, into her car and had the engine started before there was any sign of pursuit. As she shot away from the curb, she spotted Dr. Waters in the rear-view mirror, just emerging from the building.
Martha headed for police headquarters.
Say It with Flowers
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July 1974.
I had just logged in at eight a.m. when a radio message came in from a squad car that there was a dead body lying on the grass at the foot of Art Hill in Forest Park. The cop who radioed in said it was a homicide. I didn’t ask what made him so sure of that, but when I got out there twenty minutes later, it was obvious.
By then three squad cars were at the scene and an area had been roped off about fifty feet in all directions from the body. Art Hill, so called because the Art Museum sits on top of it, has a lot of trees on both sides of the road at its foot, and the rope had been stretched from tree trunk to tree trunk at waist height to form a rough circle.
Six cops were spaced around the circle to prevent curiosity seekers from ducking under the rope. With nothing but the rope holding back the crowd, it was quite possible all evidence would have been trampled out of existence before I ever got there.
A lot of drivers cut through Forest Park on their way to work mornings. Consequently a lot of cars were halted on each side of the roped-off section of road. A few cars were backing and swinging around to find some other route, but most were parked and their occupants were pressed up against the rope, peering avidly toward the body.
There were no parking places on either side of the road within a half block of the roped-off area. Since they took me off a beat and assigned me to Homicide twenty years ago, I have avoided walking any farther than necessary. I honked my way through the crowd right up to the rope.
Climbing from the car, I went over and showed my badge to a tall, skinny young cop on the other side of the rope. “Sergeant Sod Harris, Homicide,” I said.
“Oh, hi, Sarge,” he said. “Patrolman Mike Hurley. I’m the one who radioed in.”
He lifted the rope so that I could duck under it. I went over to look at the body.
The dead man lay on his back beneath a tall sycamore, on the side of the tree away from the road. He was dressed in neatly-pressed, dark-green gabardine slacks, highly-polished brown shoes and a yellow sport shirt. He was about five ten, with a lean but muscular build.
It was impossible to estimate the victim’s age by his face, because there was not enough left of it. The bloody imprint of a man’s heel on the forehead indicated the massive damage had been done by kicking and stomping on his head.
That wasn’t what had killed him, though. The relatively small amount of blood spattered about from the head wounds indicated his arteries had stopped pumping blood before the kicking began. A half dozen punctures in his stomach and chest, apparently bullet holes, were what had killed him. His shirt front was soaked with blood, probably shed some hours earlier, since it had dried to a dull brown color.
A large spot of dried blood in the gutter, some twenty feet from where the body lay, indicated that the shooting had taken place there. Twin furrows in the grass that looked as though they might have been made by dragging heels, denoted that the body had been dragged behind the tree after the shooting.
The dead man’s hands, neatly folded in the center of his chest, clasped a single dandelion.
Once, the multiple gunshot wounds, the brutal head-kicking after the victim was dead, and the sardonic clasping of the dead hands about a flower, would have been prima-facie evidence of a grudge killing. However, we have developed a new breed of criminal that sometimes brutalizes victims just for kicks. The man could have been killed by an enemy, but he just as well could have been murdered by some mugger who had never seen him before.
I went within only about six feet of the corpse, and I carefully stayed clear of the drag marks in the grass. After a long look, I returned to Patrolman Mike Hurley.
“You spot him, or did somebody report it to your precinct house?” I asked.
“My partner spotted him. George Detting.” He pointed to a middle-aged cop a few yards away. “We were cruising past, me driving, when George suddenly told me to stop. That was a couple of minutes to eight.”
I glanced first one way, then the other at the cars parked on both sides of the roped-off area. “Are those all bystanders’ cars?” I asked.
The young patrolman nodded. “There were no cars parked within sight of here when we found the body.”
That meant the victim had either been walking through the park when attacked, or had been riding with his murderer. The former seemed unlikely, because no one in his right mind would walk through Forest Park at night.
Ducking back under the rope, I went over to my undercover car and radioed in for a lab man. I left instructions for him to bring along an electronic metal detector to search out empty cartridges.
It was nearing nine a.m. when Art Ward showed up with his lab kit and a camera. He had brought along a young assistant named Ken Brady, who was carrying the metal detector.
“Hi, Sod,” Art greeted me. “Pictures first?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Okay.” Turning to his assistant, he said, “Just stand by until I’m finished, Ken.”
Brady stayed just inside the rope while I took Art over to explain what shots I wanted. Art Ward had been taking photographs of bodies almost as long as I’ve been looking at them, but he made a face when he saw this one.
I had him photograph the body from several angles, and take pictures of the dried blood in the gutter and the twin furrows in the grass. Then I indicated the bloody heel-print on the victim’s forehead.
“Can you take a close-up of that so the print is actual size?” I asked.
“I can blow it up to actual size,” he said. “I could blow Art Hill up to actual size, if necessary.”
“The heel-print will be sufficient,” I told him.
He took a couple of close-up shots of the heel-print, then gave me an inquiring look. “Next?”
“That’s enough pictures,” I said. “You can put your assistant to work. What he’s looking for is empty shell casings. If the gun was an automatic, there might be ejected casings lying in the grass.”
Nodding, he called over Ken Brady and started him circling the body with the metal detector in ever widening circles. I knelt next to the corpse and went through the pockets.
In the single pocket of the sport shirt there was nothing. In the side pants pockets there was a key ring with a half dozen keys on it and thirty-two cents in change. In the right hip pocket was a folded white handkerchief. In the left one there was a wallet containing three hundred dollars.
That rather reduced the possibility that it had been a mugger murder. Any mugger calm enough to lay out the corpse with such funereal mockery was hardly likely to have overlooked the loot.
A Missouri driver’s license in the wallet had been issued to a Walter Schroeder of 3512 Russell Boulevard. It gave his age as forty, height as five-feet-ten and weight as 165. Eye color was listed as blue and hair as reddish-brown. Because of facial wounds and dried blood I couldn’t make out the victim’s eye color, but his hair was reddish-brown, and the rest of the description seemed to fit.