Dead Man's Diary & A Taste for Cognac

by Brett Halliday

  “Inside,” the wounded man murmured.

  Shayne got to his feet. Rourke got up beside him and grabbed his arm. “Sweet God, Mike! I don’t know what any of this is about, but it’s some Caesarean.”

  Shayne pulled away from him and stalked toward the fishing lodge. Rourke hurried after him, expostulating, “Hold it, Mike. Don’t try to go in there. Didn’t you hear the guy? Grossman’s inside. Let Gentry and the Sheriff chase him out in the open.”

  Shayne didn’t pay any attention to him. Unarmed, he strode on toward the sprawling stone house, his face set and hard.

  Gentry was spacing his men around to cover all exits. He saw Shayne’s intention and called out gruffly, “Don’t, Mike. No need for anybody to get hurt now. We’ll smoke him out.”

  Shayne continued steadily forward. He mounted the wide stone steps, his heels pounding loud in the sudden stillness, and went on to a sagging screen door. He pulled it open and went in, squinting his eyes in the dim interior.

  There was a stale odor in the room. It was cool and quiet inside the thick rock walls. A wide arched opening led into a big room on the right.

  Shayne went in and saw Myrna Hastings sitting upright in a heavy chair fashioned of twisted mangrove roots. Her legs and arms were tightly bound to the chair and her mouth was sealed with adhesive tape. Her eyes rolled up at him wildly as he strode across the room, taking his knife from his pocket.

  He slashed the cords binding her arms and legs, pulled her upright, and put his left arm around her. “This is going to hurt,” he warned. “Set your mouth as tight as you can.”

  She nodded, and he ripped the adhesive loose in one jerk, then put his other arm around her. She clung to him and cried softly, violent sobs shaking her slight frame.

  Shayne was looking around the room as he held her close. He gave a grunt of satisfaction when he saw a square of water-soaked canvas on the floor with a pile of straw and bottles on top of it. An empty bottle lay on its side and another stood open.

  Shayne said, “Try to walk a little. Use your arms and legs and they’ll limber up.” He began to move her slowly forward.

  She sobbed, “I’m all right. I knew you’d come, Mike.”

  She steadied herself with a hand on his shoulder as he leaned down to pick up the open bottle. He studied the watersoaked label and his eyes glinted. It was Monnet, vintage of 1926, and the bottle was half full. He drew in a long breath of the bouquet, then tilted it to Myrna’s lips.

  “Take a good drink of this,” he told her. “Everything is all right now.”

  She swallowed obediently when the liquor reached her lips. Shayne chuckled and took the bottle away. “It’s my turn now.” He took a long, gurgling drink, then led her over to a dusty rattan couch.

  A flush came to her cheeks. She sat down limply and Shayne got out two cigarettes. He put one between her lips and the other in his mouth, thumbnailed a match and lit both.

  Myrna started violently when Gentry’s voice bellowed at him from outside. “Shayne! What’s happening in there?”

  Shayne called back, “A lady and I are having a drink. Leave us alone.” He laughed down into Myrna’s bewildered face. “We’re surrounded by a posse of detectives and deputy sheriffs,” he explained. “They’re summoning their courage to storm the place.”

  “What happened?” she asked tensely. “All that shooting. They were laying a trap for you, weren’t they? I heard them talking before they went out. They were going to kill you because they thought you’d read the logbook. I told them you hadn’t, but they wouldn’t believe me. I was so frightened when I heard the shooting. I was sure you had walked right into the trap.” She began to tremble violently.

  Shayne patted her hand reassuringly. “I practically never walk into a trap.”

  They heard cautious, shuffling footsteps on the porch outside and Gentry’s voice rumbling, “Mike, where are you?”

  “In here,” Shayne called. He put the bottle to his swollen lips again and took a long drink. He lowered it and grinned as Gentry moved in quietly with drawn gun, followed closely by the mustached sheriff with his rifle cocked and ready.

  “You look,” Shayne chuckled, “like the last two of the Mohicans.”

  Gentry straightened his bulky body and glared across the dim room at Shayne and the girl.

  “What the devil’s going on. Who’s this and how did she get here?”

  Shayne said, “You met Miss Hastings last night, Will. Why don’t you and Leatherstockings run along down to the cellar and look for Grossman? That’s where Pug said he was.”

  Other men began to file cautiously into the room. Gentry turned to them and growled, “Find the cellar stairs. And take it easy. Grossman isn’t the kind to be taken alive.” He crossed the room heavily. “And you can start talking, Mike. What are you and this girl up to?”

  “What can we do—with so many people prowling around?”

  Gentry snorted, “What kind of a run-around am I getting?”

  Shayne said, “You’re giving it to yourself, whatever it is. I didn’t invite you out here.”

  “No. You thought you were pulling a fast one—covering up for a murderer to get a rake-off on a bunch of smuggled liquor. By God, Shayne, you can’t wiggle out of this one.”

  Shayne drank from the bottle again. “It’s mighty good liquor. Next time you send a stool to cover the switchboard at my hotel don’t use a guy with d-i-c-k written all over him.”

  Gentry swallowed his anger. “I wondered who sent Tim Rourke to me with a tip that there’d be fireworks. You can’t deny you brought along a couple of gunmen to wipe out Grossman and his gang to keep the stuff for yourself. If I hadn’t overheard the call and beat it out here you might have pulled it off.”

  Shayne chuckled and sank down on the couch beside Myrna. “How much of the deal do you know?” he asked Gentry.

  “Plenty. I always suspected Captain Samuels was running stuff for Grossman when he lost his boat in 1930. That’s why Grossman killed him last night. Fighting over division of the liquor that was cached here when Grossman was sent up.”

  “You’re fairly close,” Shayne admitted. “When you find Grossman—”

  “He’ll talk,” Gentry promised.

  “Want to bet on it?” Shayne’s eyes were very bright.

  “I never bet with you. With your damned shenanigans… What’s this girl got to do with it? One of Grossman’s little friends?”

  “She wanted to see a detective in action,” Shayne replied.

  Shayne set the bottle on the floor and sat up straighter when the detective trotted in and reported excitedly, “We’ve searched the cellar and the whole house, Chief. Not another soul here.”

  Gentry began to curse luridly. Shayne stood up and interrupted him. “I don’t think your men knew where to look in the cellar. Let’s take another look.”

  When they reached the cellar stairs, Rourke was coming up with a flashlight in his hand. “No soap,” he reported to Shayne. “Grossman must have made his getaway when we left the house uncovered to see what the shooting was about.”

  “Your fault,” Gentry accused Shayne bitterly. “If we don’t pick him up I’m slapping a charge of obstructing justice on you.”

  Shayne took the flashlight from Rourke. He led the way down into a small dank furnace room with a dirt floor. He flashed the light around, then walked over to a small rectangular area where the ground showed signs of having recently been disturbed. “Try digging here, but don’t blame me if Grossman doesn’t talk when you find him.”

  “There?” Gentry gagged over the word. “You mean he’s dead?”

  “Hell, he had to be dead, Will. Nothing else made any sense.”

  “You mean nothing makes sense,” Gentry said perplexedly.

  Shayne sighed and said, “I’ll draw you a few pictures. One question first, though. Did Guildford make a phone call between the time you checked for Miss Hastings at the Crestwood last night and before you came to my place looking for her?�
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  “Guildford? The lawyer?” Gentry’s voice intoned his bewilderment. “What the hell has he got to do with it?”

  “Did he?” Shayne persisted.

  “Well, yes, I think he did, come to think of it. He called his home from the public booth in the Crestwood after we learned the girl wasn’t it: I suggested that we see you, and he didn’t want his wife to worry if he got home later than she expected.”

  Shayne nodded. “He said he called his wife. But you didn’t go in the booth with him and listen in on his conversation?”

  “Of course not,” Gentry sputtered.

  Shayne took his time about lighting a cigarette, then continued: “If you had, you would have heard him calling Pug or Slim at Chunky’s joint and telling them to hang around the Crestwood until Myrna Hastings came in… then grab her. He was covering every angle,” Shayne went on earnestly, “after he discovered that empty hiding-place in the Captain’s bedroom. He knew the Captain knew the location of the liquor cache after Samuels brought in a case and sold it for a hundred bucks to make a payment on the mortgage. And when the poor old guy died while he was torturing him, he must have been frantic for fear he’d never find the stuff.”

  “Are you talking about Mr. Guildford, the attorney?”

  “Yeh.” Shayne’s eyes were bleak. “Leroy P. Guildford, once a junior member of the firm of Leland and Parker. They specialized in criminal practice and defended John Grossman in 1930. He must have known of the existence of the liquor cache all the time, but it wasn’t worth much until the recent liquor shortage, and Captain Samuels wouldn’t play ball with him. After he killed Grossman, Samuels was his only chance to learn where the stuff was hidden.”

  “Are you saying Guildford killed Grossman?”

  “Sure. Or had Pug and Slim do the job for him. He brought Grossman out here last Tuesday, then went to Samuels and told him what had happened and suggested that with Grossman dead they might as well split the liquor.”

  “But Grossman talked to you over the phone just this morning,” Gentry argued.

  Shayne shook his head. “I knew that couldn’t be Grossman. He had to be dead. The only person it could be was Guildford, disguising his voice to lure me out here so he could get rid of the only two people who knew about the logbook and the liquor.”

  “Why,” asked Gentry with forced calm, “did Grossman have to be dead?”

  “Nothing else made sense.” Shayne spread out his big hands. “Captain Samuels knew where the liquor was all the time and he was practically starving and in debt, yet he never touched it. Why? Because he was an honorable man and it didn’t belong to him. Why, then, would he suddenly forget his scruples and sell a case? Because Grossman was dead and it no longer belonged to anybody.”

  Gentry said gruffly, “My head’s going around. Maybe it’s this air down here.”

  Back in the big room upstairs, Shayne knelt beside the bottles and straw. “Do you know where this came from, Myrna?”

  “Certainly. Those men fished it up out of the lagoon this morning, all sewed up in canvas. They talked about it in front of me. I think they planned to kill me, so they didn’t care what I heard.”

  “What did they say about it?” Shayne was shaking the bottles free of their straw casings and lining them up on the floor.

  “It’s all in the bottom of the lagoon. A whole boatload. Just where Captain Samuels and his crew dumped it overboard as he described in his logbook. That’s why the authorities could never find any liquor here when they raided the place, the men said.”

  Shayne got up with a bottle dangling from each knobby hand. He slipped them into the side pockets of his pants as Detective Yancey came hurrying in to tell Gentry excitedly: “We got the whole story from that man before he died. Grossman is dead, Chief. Buried in the cellar. And the real guy is—”

  “I know,” said Gentry wearily. “Get to a telephone and have Guildford rounded up right away.”

  “What are you doing?” Gentry demanded as he turned in time to see Shayne slide a third and fourth bottle into his hip pockets.

  “Making hay while the sun shines,” Shayne said, stooping to get two more bottles from the floor. “With you horning in I won’t have any chance at all at that stuff under the water.” He put two more bottles in his coat pockets and reached for two more, looking wistfully at the remaining bottles on the floor. “This is the only fee I can collect on this case.”

  Myrna Hastings laughed delightedly. “I can carry a few for you.”

  Gentry turned away and said gruffly, “There’d better be a couple of bottles left for evidence when the revenue men get here.” He strode out, and Shayne began stacking bottles in Myrna’s arms.

  “You owe me something,” he told her, “for the turn I got when I went back to my apartment and found the back door unlocked and the place burgled. I thought you were mixed up in it and your feature story was just a blind.”

  She laughed as she swayed slightly under the weight of eight bottles. “I wondered if you’d suspect me after they found the key and I admitted that it was to the back door of your apartment. I’m afraid they thought I was an immoral girl. I hated to have them take the key away from me,” she ended gravely.

  Shayne promised, “I’ll give you another one,” and they staggered out with as many bottles as both could carry.