Mermaid on the Rocks

by Brett Halliday

  He strode into the building. The downstairs door only held him up a moment. He took the elevator to Kitty’s floor.

  If Barbara had actually used Brad Tuttle’s key and was waiting in Kitty’s apartment, Shayne knew that she had heard the elevator. He pressed another button to send it on its way, and then he let a minute or two pass to give her time to relax. He went quietly to the door. Standing to one side, out of range of the peephole, he slid a strip of celluloid between the door and the jamb and forced the latch. He turned the doorknob silently and let the door swing open,

  “Barbara,” he said in a quiet tone. “It’s Mike Shayne. I’m alone here, but there’s a carload of cops downstairs. So let’s not do any shooting, is that O.K. with you? It’s a little late for that now.”

  He stepped into the doorway and lit a cigarette. While he was breathing out his first mouthful of smoke, Barbara Lemoyne appeared from the bedroom. She was wearing a low-cut black dress and pearls and her face was pale. Eda Lou’s little automatic was pointed at Shayne’s chest.

  “You’ve interfered in my affairs for the last time.”

  “Frank’s dead,” Shayne told her. “There’s no gold. There never was any gold. You’ve been fooled, all five of you. Your million-buck deal is cooling off fast.”

  Slowly the muzzle of the little automatic came down until it pointed at the floor. “Frank’s dead?”

  Shayne took the gun out of her unresisting fingers and kicked the door shut. Barbara looked up at him, the pupils of her eyes enormous. Her lip fluttered and she began to sag. Shayne slapped her hard. She spun around and caught the door frame. Shayne dropped the gun in his pocket. She whirled and flew at him, trying to get the gun. He caught her in his arms.

  “That’s better,” he said. “Adrenalin always helps. Don’t break up over Frank. Think about your own problems. You’re in serious trouble, and it’s going to get worse unless you answer a few questions. I want truthful answers this time. Get this fact in your head and you’ll see that the time has come to cut your losses. This whole buried treasure thing was Cal’s idea.”

  She still looked dazed, but Shayne was glad to see that her pupils were back to their ordinary size.

  “You’re out of your mind,” she said.

  “Not quite, Barbara. A little fed up, that’s all. Where’s Eda Lou?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Shayne tightened his grip on her arms. “Where is she?”

  “I don’t! I only talked to her on the phone. We’re all meeting at Larue’s for lunch, Kitty and Eda Lou and I.”

  “Kitty went to New York.”

  “I know that. But Eda Lou heard you tell somebody what hotel she’s staying at. She called and told Kitty to come back on the first plane. But I know Kitty. She won’t go to a fancy place like Larue’s straight from the airport. She’ll come here to change.”

  “Listen to me, Barbara. Eda Lou knows you took her gun. She knows you figured out that Hank and Kitty are still working together, and those St. Albans affidavits are phonier than your treasure map. Eda Lou doesn’t want you killing anybody. She knew you’d come here and stay out of her way.”

  “Mike, I honestly don’t know where she is. You’re hurting me.”

  “Think about it! Right here is where the killing stops. If you don’t know how many kinds of trouble I can make for you, you’re dumber than I think. If Eda Lou wanted a quiet conversation with somebody, one of those confidential little chats that sometimes end with a gun going off, where would she go? A car would be fine, but neither she nor Kitty has a car here. She wouldn’t rent one. She wouldn’t go to a hotel.”

  Barbara shook her head. “I can’t even guess!”

  Shayne gave an exclamation of annoyance. “Let’s see if they’ve heard anything new downstairs. Keep thinking.”

  He pulled her to the elevator.

  “Mike, won’t you explain just one of those things you said? We always knew there was a chance there wasn’t any gold. I don’t see—”

  He gave her a look which silenced her. The lines of concentration around his eyes were deeply etched.

  He said suddenly, “Are you the one who told me she takes flowers to the cemetery?”

  “Eda Lou? Mike, let go of my arm. Flowers? Yes. I don’t know how often, but she did once, on his birthday. It surprised me. She’s not at all religious. Long-stem roses. I thought it was touching, in a way. She was furious that I saw her.”

  Shayne gave a bark of relieved laughter. “Touching is right. Long-stem roses? Not the dame I met. Where’s he buried?”

  “Out beyond Miami Springs, in the big new mausoleum. Really—”

  The elevator arrived. They went down in silence and he hurried her across the lobby to the street, where he put her in the back seat of the police car.

  “What happened to you?” she exclaimed, seeing Hank Sims.

  He rubbed his clean-shaven chin. “For you, dear. I’m turning over a new leaf.”

  “Miami Springs,” Shayne told the driver. “There’s a cemetery out there somewhere. She’ll give you directions. Use your siren.”

  He looked out the back window as they began to move. Hilary Quarrels’ Cadillac was still behind them.

  “Any late news, Will?” he said to Gentry.

  “I have the lab report on the water in Shanahan’s carafe. It’s one of those coal-tar derivatives with the long names. Enough to knock off the whole Court of Appeals.”

  “Frank was poisoned?” Barbara said quietly.

  “Hank can tell you who did it,” Shayne said. “He was there with his camera. Clean-shaven, so none of his friends would notice him if they had other things on their minds.”

  “It does look as though I was there to take a picture, don’t it?” Sims said. “But maybe the picture didn’t come out, have you thought of that? I used fast film, but the conditions weren’t too good.”

  Barbara turned to Shayne, but one look at the expression around his mouth told her not to pursue the subject. Narrow gaps kept appearing in the traffic ahead. The police driver widened them with his siren and plunged through, the Cadillac following before the gaps could close. At 22nd Avenue they picked up the expressway. They shot off the entrance ramp and in a moment they were doing ninety.

  “I think I was wrong about one thing, Will,” Shayne said. “Maybe there’s going to turn out to be some buried treasure after all.”

  “Fine,” Gentry said. “A cemetery’s a good place for it—all that digging equipment.”

  They left the expressway after crossing the big bridge over the Miami River, skirted the airport on 36th Street and went north on the Palmetto Expressway.

  “Next exit,” Barbara said.

  The driver slowed. Off to the right Shayne saw Whispering Glades, the huge new cemetery, surely large enough to house all of Southern Florida’s dead for decades to come. They turned in through elaborate wrought-iron gates. The graves were laid out on a right-angle grid, like Miami itself, with streets, terraces and alleys running east and west, avenues, places and courts running north and south. The headstones were set flush with the ground, to be cleared more easily by the wheels of the power mowers.

  The police driver dropped his speed to thirty, out of respect for the surroundings. Shayne snapped his fingers. He speeded up, swung around a slow-moving back-hoe and in a moment halted in front of a great brick mausoleum.

  “What’s this all about, do you know?” Sims asked Barbara.

  “No, and I’ve stopped trying to guess.”

  “Will,” Shayne said. “The rest of you wait here.”

  He and Gentry took the broad steps two at a time. They passed between two tall marble pillars and found themselves in a high central hall with organ music coming at them from concealed outlets. The floor was covered with wall-to-wall carpet. A commitment ceremony was taking place in a chapel at the far end. In spite of the air conditioning, there was a heavy smell of flowers.

  “Mike, would you mind telling me what the hell we’re doing her
e?” Gentry said in a hushed voice.

  “Playing a long shot,” Shayne said briefly.

  An attendant approached, wearing the sober garb and smug look of all members of his profession. Shayne told him they were looking for the final resting place of Calvin Tuttle. The attendant consulted a directory and offered to take them, but Shayne asked for directions and said they would like to find it by themselves.

  The crypts were arranged on three levels, like the stacks of a large library. Shayne and Gentry took an elevator to the middle level. A railed balcony ran around three sides of the hall. They turned into the third aisle. Crypts were stacked on both sides to a height of ten feet. Some had been sold but were not yet in use; these were faced with wood instead of stone, and held in place by four ornamental brass screws. Cal Tuttle’s headstone gave his name and dates, and the inscription, “Amid Turmoil, Peace.”

  “Somebody had a sense of humor,” Shayne said.

  The space above his had been reserved for Barbara; the space above that for Eda Lou.

  “Keep an eye out,” Shayne said. “We don’t want to get picked up for robbing graves.”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Gentry said fervently as Shayne took out a pocket knife, selected a blade with a blunt end and went to work on the screws holding Eda Lou’s wooden headplate in place.

  “Mike!” Gentry said suddenly from the railing overlooking the central hall.

  Shayne joined him. Tim Rourke, below, was mugging furiously, pointing at the front entrance and mouthing the same word over and over. The attendant who had greeted Shayne and Gentry watched gravely and then stepped out to the middle of the hall to look up at the balcony. Rourke turned abruptly and joined the group of mourners around the coffin in the chapel.

  “I think our long shot came in,” Shayne said.

  “Yeah, they generally do for you.”

  Two women came in the front entrance. Both were blondes, Eda Lou’s improbably white hair more conspicuous than Kitty’s at that distance. The attendant approached with his obsequious murmur. Eda Lou spoke to him and the two women turned toward the elevator.

  “That makes everybody,” Gentry said. “I told you it was a matter of time.”

  “Let’s fade,” Shayne said.

  They walked along the balcony, stopping when they were above the chapel. A single overhead spot bathed the coffin in brilliant light, but the mourners around it, and Shayne and Gentry above, were in semidarkness. A woman’s voice could be heard sobbing.

  “I think I’m finally beginning to get the idea,” Gentry said. “Slow but sure.”

  “It makes sense when you think about it,” Shayne said. “That crypt is better than a safe-deposit box and not so conspicuous. The headplate won’t come off till they put her in.”

  The two women came out of the elevator and turned into the aisle Shayne and Gentry had just left.

  “How much time do we give them?” Gentry asked.

  “She can use some help. When she tightened those screws she really tightened them.”

  Shayne hissed at Rourke and made a rounding-up gesture. He and Gentry went back along the balcony, the thick carpet deadening their footsteps. Both women whirled guiltily when they came into the aisle.

  “We’ve been looking all over,” Shayne said.

  Eda Lou, looking at Shayne malevolently, dropped her hand to her side to conceal the screwdriver. Kitty cried, “Mike! The most fantastic thing has happened! Do you know what she’s been telling me?”

  “Up to a point,” Shayne said. “I don’t think you know Will Gentry, Chief of Miami Police. He’s a sucker for stories about buried treasure. Mrs. Sims, Mrs. Parchman.”

  Eda Lou whirled and threw the screwdriver at him. It flew over the railing to drop almost noiselessly in the central hall.

  “You son of a bitch,” she said. “I should have put something stronger than seconal in that coffee.”

  “Things were already out of hand,” Shayne told her. “You should have taken a couple of sleeping pills yourself and let Shanahan alone. That’s the one we’re going to get you on. You’re going to spend the rest of your life in jail.”

  “You try to put me in jail, buster. You’ll know you’ve been in a fight.”

  “I know that already,” Shayne said wryly.

  He snapped open the screwdriver blade of his knife and went back to work on the screws. The attendant appeared at the entrance of the aisle with the screwdriver Eda Lou had thrown at Shayne.

  “You people have to remember where you are,” he admonished them. “One of you dropped this, and it didn’t miss me by more than a foot.” He gaped. “What are you doing? You can’t open a crypt without an order from the managing director!”

  “Police business,” Gentry said gruffly, showing him his shield. “I’ll see that nothing’s damaged.”

  “I should certainly hope so.”

  Shayne pulled the plate off, unblocking the crypt just as a little group arrived, consisting of Tim Rourke, Quarrels, Barbara, Hank Sims and two detectives.

  “Mr. Quarrels!” the attendant exclaimed. “It’s all right—they’re police officers.”

  Shayne looked at Quarrels questioningly, and the white-haired man nodded.

  “Whispering Glades is one of our subsidiaries.”

  “And I’m sure it’s a gold mine,” Shayne said, “in more ways than one.”

  He thumbed his lighter and held it in front of the crypt’s dark opening. The others crowded around to see what the little flame would reveal.

  “A fiasco!” Rourke said. “There’s nothing there.”

  “Look again,” Shayne told him. “How did you get it that far back,” he asked Eda Lou, “climb in after it?”

  He tugged at a cord running the length of the seven-foot space, and slowly a long cardboard box slid into view.

  It was a florist’s box, long and narrow. Shayne lifted it out. He broke the string, stripping off the thin cardboard, and exposed a wooden box underneath, the same size and shape.

  “You couldn’t carry a brassbound treasure chest into a mausoleum,” he said. “You’d have to keep coming back. With long stem roses you’d only have to make one trip.”

  He set the box on the floor. Eda Lou made a small anguished sound as he raised the hinged lid.

  There were two golden candlesticks on top. He lifted them out. There was a jeweled dagger, a golden chain, a goblet, then something long and angular wrapped in wash-leather. Beneath this layer the box was filled with loose coins, oddly-shaped silver pieces-of-eight, gold doubloons the size of a silver dollar, a cross on one face, a shield on the other. Each coin had been lovingly polished before being put away, and they glowed warmly in the dim light.

  “It’s mine,” Eda Lou said. “Cal gave it to me instead of leaving me a share in the Key.”

  “When?” Shayne asked.

  “Two years before he died, and I have a paper to prove it.”

  “He gave you something else too, didn’t he?”

  He unwrapped the object in the washleather, and took out a long ugly Luger equipped with a silencer.

  chapter 20

  He snapped back the slide.

  “It’s loaded. The safety’s off. I can see the scene, can’t you, Kitty? Soft music. The smell of flowers. Corpses stacked up five deep all around.” He picked up a handful of coins and let them clink one by one back into the box. “It looks a lot more authentic than a check for the same amount. You wouldn’t be able to take your eyes off it. Maybe she’d let you dig your fingers in to see how deep it went. And meanwhile, she’d be unwrapping the Luger.”

  A light shiver passed over Kitty. “What a terrible way to die, with your hands in money.”

  “Mike, be serious!” Rourke said. “There are people all over the place. How would she get rid of the body? Wait a minute. You don’t mean—”

  Shayne stood up and handed the Luger to Gentry. “Why not? Simply unscrew another face plate and slide the body in. It’s true that after a few da
ys—” He looked at the attendant. “Would the air conditioning take care of it? You couldn’t open up every crypt on this level to see who’d done the bad embalming job.”

  “How morbid can you get?” the attendant exclaimed.

  Shayne turned back to Kitty. “What did she say when she called you in New York?”

  “Kitty baby,” Eda Lou warned her. “There are three or four cops here. It’s time we all talk to a lawyer.”

  “I haven’t killed anybody,” Kitty responded. “Speak for yourself.”

  Barbara said, “I don’t suppose you set Ev’s mattress on fire? Oh, no. Certainly not.”

  “Babs!” Eda Lou said sharply. “Don’t you see what Shayne’s trying to do? Shut your flytrap and keep it shut.”

  Shayne continued, watching Barbara, “Eda Lou set that mattress on fire.”

  The old lady gave a laugh like a parrot. “I thought you said I killed Shanahan. Make up your mind.”

  “You killed them both,” Shayne said coldly. “And it’s a bum rap, in a way, because here’s the real killer.” He kicked Tuttle’s headstone. “He’s been pulling the strings all the way. Calvin Charles Tuttle, Amid Turmoil, Peace. If we all keep quiet a minute, maybe we can hear him laughing.”

  He paused, and they actually heard the sound of ironic laughter. It came from Eda Lou.

  “You’ve been smoking the wrong kind of cigarette, Mike. You’re hallucinating.”

  “Am I?” Shayne said. “I don’t think so. This has been a strange set-up. Everybody kept telling me that everybody else treated Cal like a dog, but Cal always forgave them. Like hell he forgave them!” He swung savagely on Barbara. “Did he forgive you for the way you treated him after he got out of jail?”

  “Of course. We had a very warm relationship at the end.”

  Shayne snorted. “And Brad. All Brad did was tip off the cops to save his own neck, and Cal spent the prime of his life in jail. Cal forgave him. Shanahan? When I first heard about Cal’s will I couldn’t make out what Shanahan was doing in it. People like Cal never get too fond of lawyers, who make a living out of crime without running any risks. Then I was told that the minute Cal was locked away, Shanahan hit the sack with Cal’s girl. But Cal forgave him! I don’t know what Cal had against Ev, maybe just having to keep him in drinking money all those years. Have I left out anybody? Kitty.”