Dolls Are Deadly ms-37

by Brett Halliday

“Yes. I barged right into the middle of one. At first I thought it was only a screwy batch of fishermen who had chartered Sylvester’s boat, but after a while the fast, new, dirtied-up engine they’d put in for him and the way they were keeping him drunk all the time began to bother me. And then, when they murdered him-”

  “Too bad,” Grain said. “Why do you think they did it?”

  “Maybe they thought he had brought me in to check on them, or maybe they thought he knew more than he did. Of course, after they tipped their hands by getting tough with him, he probably did know.”

  “So then they figured you knew too, and tried to kill you this afternoon at Madame Swoboda’s.” Grain leaned back and stroked his jaw. “That’s the confusing part of it. It would seem that they get their instructions from her, but is that all she is-a go-between? If so, it’s hard to see why she would be necessary to their enterprise.”

  “She seemed like an unnecessary complication to me too at first.” Shayne snubbed out his cigarette, “But there was cabala-those numbers incorporated in one of her messages.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  The redhead leaned back, reciting from memory, “… for two hours and thirty-six minutes I have traveled through the forty-eight outer worlds… when I lay dying Friday night I spoke your name eight times…”

  Grain’s pen jerked across the paper. “Two hours and thirty-six minutes. That must have thrown you off at first.”

  “It did. I tried to relate it to time instead of a point in space-longitude.”

  “And forty-eight is the latitude of Miami.”

  Shayne nodded bleakly. “Today is Friday, and very soon it will be eight o’clock and Sylvester’s boat-this time without Sylvester-will contact a Cuban boat and receive a gift of another fish with a belly full of dope.”

  “But the Coast Guard will be there to take it from them.” Grain’s eyes glowed. “Let’s try to put together a little more of what we’ll be up against. Those three men were recruited by someone, each for his specialty-”

  “That ‘someone’ still bothers me. I thought it was De Luca at first, but everything points to his noninvolvement. In fact, the more I investigated, the more it became apparent that this was a carefully worked out freelance operation, as much in defiance of the Syndicate as of the law enforcement agencies. Consider how careful the three were to avoid the slightest contact with organized crime down here. They went to scrupulous trouble to provide themselves with sportsmen’s identities on Sylvester’s boat.”

  The vertical lines in Shayne’s forehead deepened. “Madame Swoboda, when I had her in a tight spot, pretended to level with me-and she did, to a point. But she did it in a way to suggest it was a Syndicate operation-which was one of many things which convinced me it was not. In the first place, as an operation in defiance of the Syndicate, her part in it began to make sense. The men on the boat were all criminals of record-but note that they had never been associated with the narcotics racket before. Just one more little item to remove them from suspicion of either the Syndicate or the police.”

  “But that involved a way of getting the pick-up information through spirit messages-”

  “The shrewdest trick of all. They knew they’d be watched by both the police and local Syndicate representatives, and this way they took no risks of tapped phone wires, opened letters or observed meetings. And still one other thing occurs to me.” Shayne’s thumb and forefinger gently massaged his left earlobe. His eyes were speculative.

  Grain waited.

  “Let it ride for the moment,” the redhead said. “It’s only a hunch and it won’t, in any way, affect your operations on the high seas. I’ll know in another three hours if I’m right or wrong.”

  He rose and stood looking down at Grain with a penetrating stare. “Here’s what I suggest as a first step. Talk to Peter Painter at the Beach-he’s too mule-headed to listen to me-and find out if he’s got a police guard on the Santa Clara. If he has, get him to take it off. Make it easy for that boat to go out tonight.”

  “I see.” Grain pushed back his chair.

  “They’ll take a chance on this one last pick-up, I think, figuring to come ashore somewhere far up the coast and then skin out for good, so you’ll have to make your pick-up good. There won’t be another opportunity.”

  “We’ll take care of it. I’d better start making arrangements with the Coast Guard.”

  A slow grin spread over the detective’s lean face.

  “Now what have you got up your sleeve?” Grain asked.

  “I’m considering making some arrangements of my own. You wouldn’t object to wiping out the loan-shark racket in Miami at the same time, would you?”

  Grain grinned back. “It’s a little out of my line, but if it wouldn’t hamper the main operation-”

  “Won’t hamper it at all. In fact, I’m thinking of enlisting somebody to do the heaviest part of your work for you. It may well be that all the Coast Guard and the Narcotics Bureau will have to do is stand by and pick up the pieces.”

  “It sounds easy, but I don’t get it.”

  “I’ll give you a hint. There’s a gentleman once involved in narcotics smuggling who has been forced, as a result of pressures put on him by your office, to take recourse to the loan-shark racket.”

  “De Luca?”

  “Right. So what do you think would happen if he received a discreet tip that somebody was muscling into his old racket and would be at such a place at such a time tonight taking on a cargo?”

  “Mayhem!” Grain said. “An absolute massacre.” He walked around the desk and clapped Shayne on the shoulder. “Too bad you can’t be with us to watch the smoke.”

  “It is, but I’ve some voodoo business to clean up tonight. While you’re watching two dope smugglers trying to blast each other’s boats out of the water, I’ll be listening to Madame Swoboda pull voices out of the Great Beyond.”

  15

  Shayne drew up in front of Madame Swoboda’s at quarter to eight and found Tim Rourke batting mosquitoes and waiting for him outside on the damp and sinking flagstones. The same aura of decay hung over the yellow house and the same diffused green glow seeped from beneath the drawn drapes.

  A few tourists straggled up the steps. Shayne motioned Tim to wait and followed them to the door, the cloyingly sweet odor catching his nostrils as he neared it. Among the devotees he saw Percy and Mabel Thain, Dan and Clarissa Milford and the thin, gray woman. The redhead met Dan’s troubled glance until Dan looked lugubriously away, then suddenly Shayne suppressed a start as a petite girl craned her neck from behind a bulky tourist and gave him a gamin grin. She strolled over to him.

  Under his breath Shayne asked, “What in hell are you doing here, Lucy?”

  “I came to protect you. Besides, I always wanted to go to a seance.”

  Shayne snorted and walked back to Rourke. “Lucy’s here, of all things. Sit next to her at the table, Tim, and keep an eye on her, will you?”

  “You’re expecting fireworks, I judge.”

  “Maybe. Anyway, do what I say.”

  “I will. But this is the one hell of a hard way to write a story. I don’t even know why you wanted Swoboda to hold another seance tonight.”

  “For the obvious reason-to keep her on tap for police questioning after the Coast Guard and Steve Grain have cleaned up the Santa Clara affair. Also, there’s the voodoo angle. I thought this might provide an opportunity for the person who is threatening Clarissa Milford to reveal himself.”

  “You know who it is yet?”

  “No, but I’ve sorted some of it out. I’m pretty sure there’s no connection between the threat to Clarissa Milford and the things that happened on Sylvester’s boat. And I know De Luca’s involvement with the Milfords. But the voodoo doll is still as live a threat to Clarissa Milford as it was to Henlein.”

  “A live threat ending in death maybe?”

  “Let’s hope not.” Shayne looked at his watch. “Things ought to be popping pretty soon in the f
orty-eight outer worlds.”

  “By the way,” Rourke said, “my office has a helicopter within telescopic sight of the Santa Clara. We ought to get the feed-back about the time we get out of the seance.”

  “Good. Let’s go in now.”

  On the rickety steps, Rourke asked, “Are you going to tell Dan Milford you’ve pulled De Luca’s heat off him? He looks like death warmed over tonight.”

  Shayne shook his head. “I’m letting it ride until after the seance. I don’t want to risk upsetting the balance. If anybody has anything planned, I want it to go on-as planned.”

  In the narrow hallway a little crowd of people was dammed up in front of the sliding doors to the seance room. Shayne moved close to Clarissa and said, in a guarded voice, “Sit next to me at the table.”

  The crowd was larger than last night and there was a delay while the secretary with the brown horn-rimmed glasses brought more chairs. When the doors were finally opened Shayne pushed forward into the nearly dark room and, by holding fast to Clarissa Milford and ignoring the rights of others, managed to locate himself at the table directly across from Madame Swoboda. Dan Milford took a chair on the other side of his wife and Percy Thain sat at Shayne’s left.

  As before, Madame Swoboda sat erect in an armless chair, one hand flat on the table on each side of the palely-lit green ball. As before, her eyes were open, fastened unblinkingly on a point ahead, the eerie light shining upward into her face. She wore the same silver gossamer veils trailing from the tiara on her head. Behind her, the unadorned cabinet was closed and the windows draped in funereal black velvet.

  Her showmanship was perfect and her beauty appeared more ethereal now than sensual.

  When everyone was seated and the last whisper of noise had died away, Madame Swoboda spoke in the darkened room.

  “For those new among us… link your own thumbs. Link the little finger of each hand with that of the person beside you. The circle travels, never ending… Wait… wait… wait… The journey is long… We stand in a timeless void… The spirits resolve out of space and nothingness…”

  A rustling went around the table as they found each other’s hands and linked fingers. Then the hushed quiet settled in again.

  He hath done marvelous things… His right hand and His holy arms… Three times she intoned the Ninety-eighth Psalm, her voice weirdly monotonous in the dark.

  After another silence she closed her eyes. Although Shayne knew the performance was trickery, he could not help admiring the conviction with which she did it. Almost visibly her mind seemed to be willing the spirits to speak.

  She shivered and then was quiet. Her face above the weird green light might have been carved from stone.

  Words came from her almost unmoving lips: “I am getting vibrations for someone who has suffered a loss. If the bereaved person is among us, let him listen…”

  Silence again.

  Finally, from high in the room a thin voice came, nearly inaudible at first, but gradually growing louder: “Daddy… Daddy… Daddy…”

  Shayne felt both Clarissa and Percy Thain tighten their fingers on his.

  Percy said, “Jimsey!” in an agonized voice.

  “Do you hear me, Daddy?” The thin spirit voice spoke again.

  “I hear you, Jimsey! I hear you, son! Who killed you?” The words were wrenched forth in almost unbearable anguish.

  The child voice continued: “I am strong enough to tell you now… I was murdered, Daddy. She did it…”

  “Who is she, son?” Thain whispered intensely. In wan and dreary complaint, the voice went on. “She was driving on the back road… She was going fast… She killed me, Daddy, and she deserves to die.” There was a long silence. Then, “Let her admit her guilt now and clear her soul.”

  Abruptly, the green light in front of Madame Swoboda went out.

  In the new and total dark, everyone was completely blind. The circle broke. Chairs scraped as they were pushed back. Bodies bumped into bodies, hands brushed faces, shins knocked against chairs.

  Percy Thain, at Shayne’s left, jerked back and rose from the table, but Shayne still held his finger-grip with Clarissa. For an instant the redhead speculated on the sheer animal terror which pervaded the room, then he put his arms around Clarissa and pulled her with quick force from her chair. Alarmed, she cried out. Shayne clamped his big hand over her face and gripped her firmly as she struggled against him.

  At nearly the same instant at his near right, there was a curious “punging” sound, and then a small clatter.

  He made an exploring sweep with one arm in the darkness behind him, but he was hampered by Clarissa’s closeness. At the end of the long table a match was struck and the tiny flame of a candle grew in the dark.

  Madame Swoboda screamed. Mouth agape, she stood in the flickering light beside the opened door of the cabinet, her eyes fixed on the candle in a catatonic stare.

  It was black.

  A black candle was for death.

  Shayne’s glance slashed around the room. In the candle’s first morbid glow everyone stood as though impaled. To his right, at the place where Clarissa had been sitting, a knife lay on the table. The point of its blade was broken off and embedded near the table edge.

  A black candle was for death… and someone, tonight, had meant death for Clarissa!

  Now they were all looking at the broken knife. Someone screamed again, and someone whimpered. In a moment of unified, breathless horror each viewed the instrument of intended death, and then seemed to shun knowledge of it-as if to admit its existence would be to invite it to fulfill its purpose on him.

  Mabel Thain stood beside her shaken husband, tears starting from her eyes as she stared at Clarissa. Clarissa’s face was like parchment, her expression dazed and disbelieving. Dan Milford bent over her where she had slumped into Shayne’s chair, his eyes wild and desperate.

  Shayne barked, “Don’t move! Everyone stay exactly where you are!”

  He walked to the end of the table, picked up the flickering black candle and carried it back to set it beside the knife.

  “Who lit that candle?” Milford demanded hoarsely.

  “It was a mistake,” Madame Swoboda said. “I couldn’t see which one I took in the dark.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Shayne said. “Someone tried to kill Mrs. Milford with a knife, not a candle.”

  In the uncertain light, the redhead looked at the knife. The handle was bound in gauze; no fingerprints would show. From its shape, he judged it to be a common kitchen knife, the size between paring and carving-not too short a blade to reach the heart, not too large to be easily concealed. The point was broken off two-thirds of the way down. Had it been thrown or thrust?

  Shayne straightened, his hard, appraising glance moving from face to face. Everyone looked shocked and guilty-even Lucy. Mabel Thain was sobbing openly, her arms around Clarissa, her face buried against her sister’s shoulder.

  His glance held on Madame Swoboda. “Where’s the fuse box that controls the lights in this room?”

  “In the basement, on the left beside the stairway.”

  Tremblingly she took another candle from the cabinet and lit it, careful this time to select a pink one. She met Shayne with it halfway around the table. “You can get there through the kitchen.” She had mastered her first fright and uncertainty. Her voice was firm.

  “You show me. I want you to come with me.” Shayne paused at the sliding doors. “I’m putting Mr. Rourke in charge to see that no one leaves.”

  He waited a moment to let the words take effect, then followed Madame Swoboda down a narrow hall. The candle threw guttering shadows about them. They passed a wall telephone and came to the kitchen. On the hall-side an apparently new ornamental grillwork had been fitted into the wall above the kitchen door. Inside the kitchen, Shayne frowned as his gray eyes ranged bleakly around the shadowed room. His knobby hand jerked toward a padlocked cabinet high against the ceiling on the other side of the grillwork.

&n
bsp; “What’s in there?”

  Madame Swoboda hesitated for only a second before she opened a drawer, took out a single key and handed it to him. An open household step-ladder stood in a corner by the stove. Shayne strode over and scraped the short ladder across the cracked linoleum to the kitchen doorway.

  Standing on the second step of the ladder, he unlocked the cabinet door. Inside was what he had expected to find-a tape recorder placed in front of the open grillwork to let sound issue into the hall, and from there into the seance room through another grillwork against the ceiling.

  “The source of your astral voices?” he asked wryly.

  Madame Swoboda nodded, opened her mouth to speak and then seemed to think better of it.

  Shayne stepped off the ladder and ran taut fingers through his wiry hair.

  “It wasn’t the tape I prepared for tonight,” Madame Swoboda said suddenly.

  “Whose tape was it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you trying to make me believe the tape we heard tonight was substituted for the one you prepared, and you don’t know who did it?”

  “Yes. Don’t be too smart for your own good, Shayne. What possible reason would I have for accusing a client of murder? I’m in this to make a living.”

  “Who said it was a client who was accused?”

  She stared, visibly disconcerted. “Why-I don’t know. It seems obvious, though. Someone did try to stab Mrs. Milford.”

  “We’ll come back to that. Where are the stairs to the basement?”

  Holding the candle high, she led the way through a door and down a sagging flight of stairs. A darkness pervaded the air. At the bottom, she stooped and pointed to the fuse box.

  The redhead walked over. On a short wire leading to the fuse box a small, square metal box had been inserted. Dropping some melted wax on a shelf, he made the candle secure and examined the small box. It was a timer set to break the electrical circuit at eight-twelve. A simple mechanism, but dependable. Whoever had put it there knew Madame Swoboda’s promptness in starting the seances. Whoever had put it there wanted the inky darkness upstairs at exactly eight-twelve.