“I have strict orders, sir, to admit no gentlemen except those in formal attire.”
“I’m here on business—to see Arch Bugler.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I have strict orders.”
Shayne said, “Nuts.” He caught the man’s braided tunic and jerked him aside. The man whistled shrilly as Shayne shouldered the gates open.
Two men appeared from the other side of the wall and got in front of him. One of them exclaimed, “Jeez, it’s the dick from Miami,” and stepped backward. He had a big nose and a chin that fell away to nothing—the man who had trailed Shayne from his apartment hotel earlier in the evening.
The other bouncer was taller than Shayne, his shoulders inches broader. He had a flat face and a square head fastened onto his torso with no neck between. He scowled darkly and growled, “Outside.”
Shayne drove his fist into the middle of the man’s flat face. The force of the blow rocked him back on his heels, smashing a rubbery nose and thick lips that had been smashed before.
The smaller man sucked in his breath sharply and hit Shayne with a blackjack, saying softly, “Grab him, Donk.” Shayne staggered sideways, and the big man stepped in, caught his elbows, and pinioned them behind him.
“Outside,” the chinless man panted, “and keep it quiet, Donk. This is the bozo the boss said not to let in.”
Shayne’s head lolled limply as he was given the bum’s rush through the bronze gates. The blackjack had been swung expertly and should have knocked him out, but the redhead was tough. His legs were not functioning very well and a black cloud obscured a bright moon, but he clamped his teeth hard, doggedly hanging on to consciousness.
“Down to the corner of the wall, Donk,” the smaller man directed in a vicious undertone. “There’s a cab pulling up—They’ll think he’s just a drunk being bounced.” With Donk propelling him from behind, Shayne was rushed along the sidewalk to the north wall of the Bugle Inn property. Half a dozen unoccupied water-front lots separated the wall from the next building. The vacant space was thick with a growth of scrub palmetto.
Donk paused when he reached the end of the wall, and his companion ordered, “Drag him out in the middle of the clearing and we’ll work him over. He dodged me once tonight, but this time he won’t do no dodgin’.”
Strength was flowing into Shayne’s legs and awareness to his brain, but he let his feet drag in the sand until the chinless man ordered, “This is far enough. Nobody’ll notice us from the street. Is he out?”
“Acts like it.” Donk let go of Shayne’s elbows. The detective sprawled forward limply into a matted growth of pin-edged palmettos. “Yep,” Donk said with a faint note of regret, “he’s out cold. You shouldn’t orta hit ’im so hard, Johnny.”
“He’s supposed to be tough. Wouldn’t surprise me none if he was possumin’.” Johnny kicked Shayne in the ribs. Shayne gave no sign that he felt it.
“Turn ’im over,” Johnny ordered, “and I’ll stomp him in the face good. Arch said for us to work on ’im if he tried to crash the gate tonight.”
Donk bent down and got a hold on Shayne’s shoulder to turn him over. Shayne came half erect and drove his head into Donk’s belly with the force of a battering ram.
Donk grunted and stumbled back over a clump of sharp palmettos.
Shayne whirled and lunged at Johnny, ducking a vicious downswing of the blackjack. He drove his forearm against Johnny’s Adam’s apple, which protruded at a point where his chin should have been, and the smaller man went to his knees clawing at his throat.
Shayne grabbed the blackjack from his lax fingers and whirled to meet Donk’s lunge.
The larger man parried a blow with his forearm and laughed happily. He smashed a left to Shayne’s stomach and straightened the detective up with a looping right to the chin when he jackknifed forward. Shayne swayed backward with his feet seemingly rooted in the sand, his angular face turned up to the moon and the stars.
Donk planted himself and put two hundred and forty pounds behind a piledriver right to the detective’s unprotected jaw.
Shayne’s senses swam lazily into a mist of nothingness. The moon and the stars were again blotted out.
Johnny came to his feet still gasping and sputtering. “By God,” he chattered huskily, “it takes you to cool off the toughies, Donk.”
“He wasn’t so tough,” Donk disclaimed modestly. “When I give ’em the ol’ one-two they mostly stay down.”
Johnny picked up his blackjack and shoved it in his pocket. “We’ll leave him lay there,” he decided. “When he comes up for air he’ll be all outta the notion of seein’ the boss.”
The two men strolled off leaving Shayne quiescent, face downward in the soft sand.
For a long time Shayne lay still. Presently he stirred to get his face out of the sand. His breathing became stertorous, mingling with the swishing sound of waves flowing gently on the shore. He made two efforts to sit erect before achieving results, then linked his arms around his knees and shuddered with nausea.
His upper lip was cut, and there was the taste of blood in his mouth, gritty sand between his teeth. Nausea convulsed his body, and he retched on the sand. The spasm passed, and his head cleared.
With an effort he lifted himself to a standing position, then made his way unsteadily to the edge of the lapping waves. Bogging in the wet sand, he scooped up handfuls of water and dashed it over his face, poured another handful into his mouth to rinse out the sand.
Stumbling back to the walk, he stepped across it into the sand and passed behind the rows of cars to reach his convertible. Reaching through the window, he secured the bottle of cognac with trembling fingers and collapsed. For a few minutes he sat with his head lolling on his chestbone, then lifted the bottle and drank deeply. A warming glow began in his midribs and spread strengtheningly through his body. He emptied the bottle and stood up.
He still hadn’t seen Arch Bugler.
Stepping onto the sidewalk, he walked at a shambling gait toward the entrance to the Bugle Inn. The doorman watched his approach with narrowed, speculative eyes.
Shayne felt strong, but he feigned weakness. He bumped against the wall, righted himself as he neared the gates.
The doorman said, “Beat it, mister. You know all I got to do is whistle.”
Shayne hit him in the mouth before he could purse his lips to make the signal that would bring Donk and Johnny to his aid, dropping the man to the walk with his threat unfinished.
Pushing the gates open, he strode forward under the brightly striped canopy, looking neither to right nor to left. Three stone steps led into a thickly carpeted entrance hall. A tall man wearing a white mess jacket with a napkin over his arm hurried forward from an archway which led into a large, brilliantly lighted dining-room.
Shayne shook his head at the mess jacket and went to the left where the clink of glasses and boisterous laughter indicated a bar. Men and women in formal attire stopped drinking and laughing to stare at his disheveled wet hair and puffed lips when he entered the cocktail lounge, their eyes traveling down over his rumpled, bloodstained clothes.
Striding up to the bar, Shayne announced, “Just been in accident and need a drink.”
The patrons, their curiosity satisfied at the statement, turned back to the serious business of liquor and sex. A bald-headed bartender jovially inquired after his needs.
“A bottle of Martell cognac and an empty glass.”
“Yes, sir,” the man answered.
Shayne poured liquor into the glass and hunched his shoulders forward, resting both elbows on the bar, caressing the glass between his big hands to warm it. He sipped slowly, his nostrils expanding and twitching as the clean, pungent aroma drifted upward.
There were three bartenders on duty behind the long chromium bar. When the bald-headed man became momentarily disengaged, Shayne said casually, “You do a rushing business here.”
“Pretty good this time of the evening. It’ll slack off about midnight, and we don’t
do much until after dark.”
“Open in the afternoons?”
“From one o’clock on. Not enough to keep one man busy, though.”
“Did you work a shift this afternoon?”
“Yep. We alternate. I go off at twelve.” Some of his wholesome joviality went. He looked at Shayne with a sudden suspicious leer, then glanced up at a clock on the wall.
Shayne saw his quick change of expression and laughed. “Lucky I had my accident convenient to a bar. This must be the place my girl friend told me about. She was here this afternoon. Maybe you remember her—pretty, with a lot of blond hair.”
The bartender shook his head. “Lot’s of those young dames drop in for cocktails. I don’t notice ’em much.” He turned to move away.
Shayne stopped him, his voice peremptory and hard. “You’d remember this girl. She left with a friend of yours—Michael Finn.”
The man turned slowly to stand in front of Shayne. His gaze was veiled and afraid. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think,” said Shayne, “you do.” He finished his drink and frowned into the glass, paying no further attention to the bartender, who remained standing uneasily in front of him.
When Shayne pushed the empty glass and bottle away and stood up, the man reminded him uneasily, “You haven’t paid for your drinks, sir.”
“Tell Arch to mark it up to profit and loss.” He strolled along the bar toward a rear door that said Gentlemen. It opened onto a corridor leading to the back of the building. The first door on the right was also chastely lettered Gentlemen. He went into a lavatory and washed his face and hands with soap, dried them meticulously, and combed his unruly red hair with his fingers. There was an ugly bruise on his left cheek, and both lips were badly swollen, but the cut on his upper lip had stopped bleeding.
A waiter passed him as he stepped into the hallway. He carried a tray with two highballs on it. Shayne watched him stop at a door near the end of the hall. The man knocked, then entered, leaving the door slightly ajar.
Shayne followed him, treading noiselessly on the rich hall runner. The door was marked Private. He heard Arch Bugler’s peculiarly sinister and purring voice, a soft sibilance acquired by the mobster to conceal the naturally harsh and guttural quality of his tone.
“Forget it, Marlow. I should be sore at you for barging in like this, but I don’t blame you for being upset. You can’t trust a skirt nowadays. Too bad you had to make a trip down here to find out how you stand. Put it down the hatch. It’s out of my private stock.”
A thin, shaky voice answered him. “I’m not going to believe it until Helen tells me so herself. There’s something screwy going on.”
Shayne stepped forward quickly as the door started to open inward. He strode nonchalantly down the hall without looking back, turned to the right at the end. An intersecting corridor led to a wide archway opening into a big square room which was deserted except for a couple of workmen busily polishing roulette tables and crap layouts. White cloth covers still were in place over other tables in the rear.
Stopping in the doorway, Shayne scratched a match noisily and put flame to a cigarette. One of the workmen glanced up without interest. Shayne grinned at him and asked, “Getting ready for the grand opening, eh?”
“Yep. That’s about it,” the man replied, and his companion added, winking broadly, “If the election turns out right.”
Shayne nodded and turned away. A deep crease furrowed his brow as he went back to the door marked Private. He turned the knob and went in without knocking.
Arch Bugler stared at him across a wide, flat-topped desk of shining mahogany. He was a squat man with tremendous shoulders and torso. His eyes were almost colorless and appeared opaque, slightly protuberant and unblinking, like the lidless eyes of a reptile. He had swart, heavy features and coarse black hair, and was about thirty years of age. He said, “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Shayne.”
Bugler appeared to be alone in the office, but as Shayne stepped forward he saw a pair of brown Oxfords protruding past the corner of the desk. He moved aside and looked down at the limp body of a young man who lay beside a straight, armless chair. Long fingers were clasped about an empty highball glass.
Bugler watched the detective from lidless eyes without speaking.
Shayne nodded toward the recumbent figure and slid one hip onto the desk. “You must have told the bartender to mix the next one stronger after the girl walked out of here under her own power this afternoon.”
Bugler purred, “You’re going to get your nose dirty, Shamus.”
Shayne nodded, his eyes bleak. “It’s one of my failings. Helen Stallings told me just enough before she passed out this afternoon to get me interested.”
Not a flicker of expression changed the stony coldness of Bugler’s swarthy features. He pressed a button on his desk with a blunt forefinger. “You’ve stayed out of my way a long time, Shayne. Better if you kept on being smart.”
Shayne’s gray eyes glowed hotly. “I’ve never stayed out of any man’s way. I’ve been waiting for you to stick your neck out.”
“And you think I have?”
“I know you have.” Shayne touched the bruise on his cheek and his cut lip. “It was a mistake for you to sick your gorillas on me.”
Bugler’s thick lips parted in an amused smile. “You ran into Donk, huh?”
A rear door came open, and Johnny stepped in, followed by Donk. Johnny stopped short and stared at Shayne, muttering in an awed tone, “Jesus God! There he is again,” and Donk blinked happily, moving forward with big fists swinging at the end of long arms. “If it ain’t my sparring partner. You must love to get bounced around and, God, how I love to bounce you!” His wide, flat face wreathed itself in a grin of sadistic anticipation as he moved closer.
FIVE
SHAYNE DIDN’T LOOK AT DONK. He warned Arch Bugler with passionate intensity, “You’d better keep this apple off me. I already owe you for one beating and that’ll cost you plenty.”
Donk stopped beside him, his doltish gaze questioning Bugler.
Bugler studied Shayne a moment, then raised a broad hand toward Donk, motioning him back. “Hold it a minute. You and Johnny have messed things up enough by letting him in here.”
“Jeez, boss,” Johnny exploded, “I don’t know how he done it. Donk hit ’im solid, and I never saw a man get up from that before. Honest to Christ, I thought his jaw was busted.”
“You’re not paid to think,” Bugler purred. “I told you to keep him out.”
Shayne laughed shortly. “They tried,” he told Bugler without rancor. He transferred his gaze to the lax body of the young man on the floor. “Looks like you’re receiving an influx of undesirable visitors tonight.”
“Just a punk who couldn’t hold his liquor. Take him out and dump him, Johnny. You stick around, Donk.”
Shayne watched with a saturnine smile twitching his swollen lips while Johnny got hold of the young man and dragged him out the rear door. He dropped his cigarette on the floor and mashed it out with his toe, lit another one. “You knew I’d be dropping around tonight,” he mused. “What were you afraid I’d find if I nosed around?”
Bugler said, “I don’t like my place stunk up with private dicks.”
“It’ll smell worse,” Shayne told him softly, “if you keep any bodies lying around.”
Bugler stiffened. His opaque, lidless eyes bored across the desk at Shayne. He didn’t say anything for thirty seconds. He finally spoke with no perceptible movement of his lips.
“You’d better get out, Shamus.”
Shayne shrugged. He took a slow drag on his cigarette, held the smoke in his lungs for a long time, then let it out of his nostrils. He nodded and got up, went to the door and out without looking back.
Donk was twenty feet behind him when he went into the cocktail bar. He waved to the bald-headed bartender and kept going. Donk followed him to the entrance gates where he stopped and stared after the detective wishfully.
Shayne winced with pain as he got into his car and backed away from the curb. Passing by the entrance gates he leaned out and waved a long arm to Donk, who was still standing there looking unhappy.
He drove south along the ocean drive until he reached a drugstore with a public-telephone sign. He called Timothy Rourke’s home address and, after a long wait, got the reporter on the line. Rourke swore softly when he heard Shayne’s fuzzy enunciation. “You sound like the cat got your tongue.”
“I ran into a fist at Arch Bugler’s,” Shayne explained thickly. “And I picked up a chore for you.”
Rourke’s sigh sounded in Shayne’s ear. “Start checking the hotels for a man named Marlow,” Shayne instructed. “He arrived this afternoon, I imagine, from New York or thereabouts. Call me at my hotel in an hour with the dope.”
“Have you got a line on the corpse?” Rourke asked. “I can’t help wondering where she’ll turn up next.”
“Bodies are where you find them,” said Shayne cheerfully. He hung up and went back to his car, circled east on the peninsula to a private bridge over the inland waterway leading to Burt Stallings’s island estate.
The island was small, containing perhaps an acre of ground, protected by a sea wall of coral rock to prevent the ebbing tides from eating away the edges. The entire area was carefully landscaped to give the careless effect of natural luxuriant growth, and the Stallings mansion was situated in the center, screened from view by lush shrubbery and feathery-fronded palms. A narrow, twisting road led up to an impressive stone frontage with two wings guarding a rear patio.
There were no other automobiles in evidence, but lights glowed through the front window. Shayne parked near the steps on the double concrete driveway which circled around to the narrow road. He went up the steps and tried an ornamental bronze knocker without effect. He then searched for and found an electric button. There was a long interval of silence after he pressed the button.
Leaning against the stone casement, he waited patiently. There was an atmosphere of lassitude in the remoteness of the island, a sense of lethargic detachment which communicated itself to one as soon as the bridge was crossed and the mainland left behind. Moonlight silvered the fronds of graceful coco palms and the stately gray trunks of royal palms towering toward the sky. Fish pools set in the lush green lawn reflected the stars in their still waters, and marble benches gleamed ghostly white.
Bodies Are Where You Find Them Page 5
