Bodies Are Where You Find Them

by Brett Halliday

“Another drink and you won’t know anything,” Shayne said sharply. “Lay off. Where’s Smith College located?” he jerked out.

  “N’Ham’shire ’r some place.” Rourke stifled a yawn. “One of those swanky girls’ schools in New England.”

  Shayne got up and went across the room to a bookcase, dropped to his knees, and pulled out a volume of an encyclopedic set and thumbed the pages. He came back grinning. “Smith College is in Northampton, Massachusetts. That, my befogged comrade, is the whistle stop played by Beany Baxter’s Band a couple of months ago.”

  “Beany Baxter’s Band? That sax player! The wedding certificate!” Rourke’s legs moved feebly. He put his palms down on the couch as if to thrust himself to a standing position, then fell back into soft comfort.

  “There’s the Whit Marlow tie-up,” Shayne said cheerfully. “He and Helen Devalon were married in April. No wonder he went barging around to ask Arch Bugler what-the-hell. Can’t blame a bridegroom for getting sore about the way she and Arch have been playing around.”

  “But she was on the spot when she came down here,” Rourke said. “She had to keep the marriage a secret until she was twenty-one or lose her father’s estate. To avert suspicion, she acted unmarried.”

  “In a big way,” Shayne agreed with a grimace.

  There was a thoughtful silence between them; then Shayne said, “I ought to have taken that train for New York.”

  Rourke chuckled evilly. “Give your wife a chance to kick up her heels—away from a lug like you. Serves you right.” With his head resting on the upholstered arm of the couch, he looked down his long lean body at his shoes. He wriggled one foot feebly.

  Watching him, Shayne chuckled. “Let Phyl have her fling. She’ll appreciate me more when she comes back.”

  “Oh, yeh?” Rourke grinned disarmingly. His mind appeared clear.

  “She and Marlow probably planned a public wedding later,” Shayne resumed, “without mentioning the one in April under her real name of Devalon.”

  “So that’s why Marlow had the document hidden so carefully. But what does it get us, Mike? He wouldn’t have killed her.”

  “Husbands have killed their wives for less than that.”

  “But he couldn’t blame her so much. She had to pretend she wasn’t married as much for his sake as hers.”

  “But not quite so wholeheartedly,” Shayne pointed out. “She could have announced her engagement to him without forfeiting a fortune. No, we can’t count Marlow out. Sex jealousy and greed motivate ninety-nine per cent of our murders. He had plenty of reason to be jealous.”

  “He didn’t look like a killer to me—the glimpse I had of him in the hotel tonight.”

  “He was a little off par,” Shayne explained. “No man puts his best foot forward when he’s wearing off a Mickey Finn. Bugler fed him a doped drink when he called on him this evening and began laying Bugler out for the way he’s been running around with her.”

  Rourke’s head came up and his eyes wavered toward Shayne. “You get around, don’t you? Suppose Arch knew Helen was married to Marlow?”

  Shayne tugged at his ear lobe. “I wasn’t in on much of the conference. From what I saw and heard, Marlow was getting nasty and Bugler eased him off with private stock before he could make a scene at the inn.”

  Rourke tested his strength once more with his palms flat on the couch, came shakily to a sitting position. He reached for the Scotch bottle and Shayne warned, “You’re hitting the bottle pretty heavy, Tim.”

  Rourke nodded cheerfully. “Why not? You’re not one to deliver a temperance lecture.” He took a sight on the cognac bottle and saw that it was more than half full. “You’re not up to par tonight, Mike.”

  “I have things to do.”

  “Tonight?” Rourke attempted to register astonishment.

  “Certain things,” Shayne explained, “are best accomplished under the cloak of darkness.”

  Rourke squinted at him suspiciously. “I can think of only one sort of thing.”

  “You’ve got a dirty mind,” Shayne accused.

  “Need it to cope with you. Blond or brunette?”

  “I don’t know. Ask me about her legs. They’re stumpy.”

  “Damn it, Mike, it’s after midnight. You’re not going out frailing at this hour?”

  “The date,” said Shayne, “is for two o’clock sharp. She has to slip out after the rest of them go to sleep.”

  Rourke shook his head sadly. He tilted his glass, and a tear ran down his lean cheek into the Scotch. “It’s not right to kid about something like that, Mike. You had me hating your guts once tonight. Don’t pull another stunt like that.”

  Shayne laughed shortly. “This gal’s the kind that has nine lives,” he said lightly. “Throttling wouldn’t kill her.” He got up and paced back and forth, ruffling his coarse red hair. “Thank God my morals are elastic enough to meet an emergency. How is a man to get information out of a frenetic maiden except—”

  “Don’t do it, Mike,” Rourke pleaded. He slopped some whisky over his tie as he emptied his glass. “Let me go in your place. I’m not married. Nobody cares what I do.”

  “You’re drunk,” Shayne said gravely. “You wouldn’t do either of us any good.”

  “Going home,” Rourke said. “Not going to stay and abet adultery.” He swayed to his feet, tested his skinny legs carefully. He started forward and stumbled.

  Shayne caught his arm and held on when Rourke tried drunkenly to fight him off. He guided the reporter’s shambling footsteps into the bedroom and pushed him down into a chair. He knelt down to untie his shoelaces, saying, “You’re not going anywhere tonight. Maybe I’ll bring my date back here and let you chaperon us. But you’ll have to sleep off your jag first.”

  He got Rourke’s shoes off, then pulled off his trousers. He left him lolling in the chair while he went to the bed and turned down the covers, then hauled him up and shoved him down on the mattress.

  Rourke waggled his head from side to side in disapproval, then closed his eyes and breathed heavily in sleep. Shayne drew only the sheet up over him, for the night was warm, and turned away. Rourke was snoring when he went back to the living-room.

  Shayne glanced at his watch. It was one-thirty. He took a hat and a belted trench coat from the closet, left a shaded light burning in the living-room, and went out, snapping the night latch to lock the door behind him.

  He took his time driving across the causeway in Rourke’s sedan. A lot of things bothered him, turning his normally rational thought processes into a kaleidoscopic blur. It was the screwiest case he had ever tried to unravel. Every time he thought he had a lead it branched out into a lot of unanswered questions. He refrained from thinking about what was going to happen when Helen Stallings’s body was found and identified the next morning. That was going to move the deadline forward a few hours. As soon as she was discovered, Stallings would have no reason for further deferring publication of the threatening note which he and Painter accepted as Shayne’s handiwork.

  Shayne knew a lot of other people who were going to accept the same premise if he didn’t have the case solved before Stallings published the note. That was the danger of the sort of reputation he had deliberately allowed to grow up about him. Not only allowed—the popular idea that he would stop at nothing to gain his ends had been encouraged. A legend like that was good for business. It brought him the tough cases that paid big fees. And it was always hanging over his head, like a sword held by a hair, to destroy him if he dared to make a misstep.

  Someone had taken that into account, he reasoned, when the kidnap note was sent to Stallings. He didn’t actually fear the final legal consequences. The election was the thing right now. There was no use kidding himself. An aroused citizenry would revolt and vote Stallings into office if the kidnap-murder charge was brought against him in the headlines.

  There was that creepy feeling of revulsion under his ribs when he thought of how much depended on the impending interview with the Stall
ings maid, Lucile. Thus far she was the only person even remotely connected with the case who showed a tendency to talk freely. He was not sure what he hoped to learn from her, but he had an uneasy feeling that the answer to the entire riddle was, somehow, tied up with the Stallings household.

  His earlier hunch had been strengthened by the discovery that Helen Stallings was secretly married and that her young husband had just arrived in Miami. What had at first appeared to be a purely political setup with a city election dependent upon the outcome was now revealed to have broader ramifications and far different potentialities—a personal complex—more the sort of thing with which he was prepared to cope.

  Nine-tenths of Shayne’s cases had money at the bottom of them; he had come to regard such a will as Helen’s father had left as nothing more than an instrument of murder. Long ago he had learned not to look beyond his nose for a motive when a large sum of money was involved. No wonder he had grown cynical regarding the combination of murder and money. They were inseparable companions.

  He didn’t quite see how it worked out this time, but he had a strong hunch that the motive for Helen Stallings’s murder would lie in the human relationship revolving around her rather than in the political struggle between Jim Marsh and Burt Stallings.

  The political angle, he reasoned, was more of an effect than a cause, an accidental by-product of murder rather than the primary purpose.

  Mrs. Stallings and thus, indirectly, Stallings himself would benefit by Helen’s death before her twenty-first birthday, Shayne mused. Still the ironical fact remained that she had already legally forfeited her inheritance by secretly marrying Whit Marlow in defiance of her father’s will. Anyone cognizant of the marriage would have known that the girl’s death was not necessary to cause her fortune to revert to her mother. That was one of the questions which desperately needed an answer. Did Stallings know about the marriage prior to her death?

  Another big question was Arch Bugler’s connection with the situation. His open intimacy with Helen Stallings stunk. Bugler was a known gangster. Did the girl know? They could not have met by mere chance. To Shayne it was inconceivable that a well-bred girl would deliberately choose the mobster for a companion.

  The illusive sheen of a dying moon on Biscayne Bay was like a drug. The air pouring in the open windows was cool and moist. A nostalgic mood crept over him and caught him unawares, sweeping him back to his own youth—to the time when he played a cornet in the college orchestra. For a welcome moment his mind moved in a maze of memories, forgetful of the case at hand, but he could not long escape the mental picture which was haunting him—the dazed eyes and pallid, contorted features of Helen Stallings as he first saw her.

  What was she like normally? She was young and possessed, no doubt, of all the illusions of youth. A saxophone player in uniform could easily represent a knight in armor with the added attraction of sensual, melodic strains from that wailing instrument. A saxophone could express a player’s sentiments without words. Shayne had known college boys who used that method. Had Helen regretted her marriage to a slight, anemic youth and taken refuge in the arms of a mature, strong-armed man years her senior? He recalled that Rourke had said that consorting with mobsters was a fad with youngsters.

  A cloud sailed over the moon and a mist from the sea swam before Shayne’s headlights, snapping him back to reality and a consciousness of his destination. He picked up his thoughts where he had left off.

  Suppose Stallings and Bugler had worked out a plan together to ensnare the girl? The terms of her father’s will made Helen’s marriage before her majority worth a great deal of money to Stallings. Did he arrange with Bugler to rush her off her feet into a hasty marriage for that purpose?

  Still, why would he choose a man like Bugler for that purpose? There were thousands of men more eligible and more prepossessing in Miami.

  He gave the problem up with a baffled shrug and hoped that Lucile’s information would supply at least a key to the puzzle.

  He was approaching the bridge leading to the Stallings estate. His headlights showed the girl wasn’t there as he cut the motor and slid up to the bridge approach. He glanced at his watch and saw that it lacked five minutes of the appointed time. He lit a cigarette and settled back to wait.

  Lucile was not there when he lit his second cigarette. Complete silence enveloped the remote section of the peninsula. Darkness covered the car as he waited for the maid to keep her appointment, for the moon was lost to sight. The heavy cloud on the western horizon obscured it.

  Was he going to be stood up by the girl? It was beginning to look like it. His watch indicated fifteen minutes after two when he threw away his second cigarette and yawned. He had been stood up before but never by a girl who seemed as eager for a date as Lucile.

  He got out of the sedan and stretched, then walked slowly up on the arched bridge, stopped at the top of the span where he could see the upper story of the Stallings mansion.

  Everything was in utter darkness. Beyond was the placid glistening expanse of Biscayne Bay, and far beyond that a few vagrant lights on the mainland.

  An odd sense of unease possessed him. He wasn’t kidding himself when he knew Lucile wanted to come to him when she made the appointment.

  It was two twenty-three. He watched and listened intently, holding his racing thoughts in abeyance. The only sound was the plashing of ripples against the bridge piers beneath him.

  The wry grin went away from his mouth, and his features hardened into a mask of anger. All at once he realized how much he had been counting on the information he hoped to get from the girl. Perhaps she had been caught when she slipped back into the house after leaving him earlier in the evening. Stallings must have seen his car parked there, might have recognized it. The housekeeper would have told him who the visitor was.

  If the girl had been forcibly prevented from meeting him it would be an indication that someone was afraid of what she might divulge.

  It was exactly two-thirty when he crossed the bridge and walked cautiously toward the unlighted house on the island.

  NINE

  SHAYNE STRODE STEADILY along the winding road in the shadow of interlaced fronds. He came to an abrupt stop at a turn in the road that brought the estate into clear view. Every window was dark, and the island stillness was queerly magnified when the sound of his footsteps ceased. The moonlight and shadows played odd tricks on his alert perceptions as he hesitated.

  An eerie atmosphere of desertion enveloped the silent mansion. The night air was humid and heavy with the scent of garden flowers. At the corner of the house he could see the spidery outline of the wrought-iron railing of the outside stairway down which Lucile had come to meet him earlier. The small balcony above was deserted, the French doors leading into the house were closed.

  Shayne grinned at his indecision while he stood there. This was a hell of a time for him to start getting jumpy, just because the entire household was asleep at two-thirty in the morning, and because a girl had failed to keep her date.

  He shrugged off his hesitation and went across the concrete drive to the corner stairway, climbed the stairway firmly, perversely pleased with the faint clang of iron beneath his feet.

  He tried the French doors and found them locked from within. He hesitated once more, scowling at himself for the skulking method he was employing. This was not his way of doing things, but he had to find out what had happened to the maid. A man didn’t have to be a complacent ass to be positive that she would have met him at the bridge unless forces wholly beyond her control had prevented it.

  He turned and went down the stairway, walked around to the front door and leaned on the electric button. He could hear the faint ringing of the bell inside. He kept his finger on the button for more than a minute, and his scowl deepened to one of anger. Stepping back a few feet he shouted, “Hello! What does it take to wake you up?”

  After a brief wait lights glowed behind curtained windows upstairs. The curtains parted, and Burt Stalli
ngs’s resonant voice answered, “Who’s down there?”

  “Mike Shayne.”

  “Shayne? What are you doing here at this time of night?”

  “Come down and open the door.”

  “I have no intention of doing that,” Stallings retorted sharply. Then, with less assurance, “What is it? Have you news of Helen?”

  “I’ve got a lead. But I’m not going to stand here and shout it up to you.”

  “Very well. If it’s so important I suppose I can’t refuse.” Stallings withdrew his head from the window, and the curtains fell back into place. Shayne moved forward and leaned against the threshold.

  The door opened after several minutes. Stallings wore a silk dressing-gown, and his bare feet were encased in leather slippers. His silvery hair was awry and he demanded in an outraged tone, “What is it that won’t wait until morning?”

  “Just this.” Shayne brushed past him into the small anteroom where he had interviewed the housekeeper. He swung about to face Stallings and in clipped accents explained, “I’ve got a hot tip that your stepdaughter Helen is right here in this house.”

  “That’s preposterous.”

  “I’m not so sure of that. Your story of her disappearance could be a phony.”

  “But that’s fantastic. She hasn’t been near the house since noon yesterday.”

  “That’s what you say. Your story and that kidnap note put me on the spot. It could be a gag to put Marsh out of the running and swing votes to you.”

  “But Mr. Painter was with me. He verified my story. Surely you don’t suspect him.”

  “Painter was taking your word for everything. I’m not. I’m going to see for myself.”

  “You’re at liberty to verify my daughter’s absence,” Stallings told him stiffly. He moved past Shayne. “I’ll take you up to her suite.”

  Shayne followed him into a wide hall and up a winding stairway, then to the left along another hall to a door which he opened and gestured for Shayne to enter.

  The detective lounged inside and made a pretense of investigating a luxurious suite consisting of a parlor, master bedroom, bath, and powder room. Stallings stayed back by the outer doorway, his features set in lines of grim disapproval.